“What’s this about?” was the first thing my dad said coming into the office. My heart sank in my chest seeing his face; he did not want to be here.

“Jared has been disrupting class multiple times,” Principal Olstein explained. “Telling obscene stories to his friends. His teachers have explained multiple times that there are topics not appropriate for the classroom. But he is eager to tell the story anyway.”

“A story, huh? What kind of story?” my dad pressed, a hand slipping subconsciously to his hip.

“It’s about the Jessica Attacks,” the Principal said with a sort of scary finality. 

I thought that when he said that, my dad would get it. He’d sort of smile and be relieved that this was nothing serious. But by the looks of it he got really, really mad. 

“Really?” He put a hand behind my back. It landed on the back of the chair I was sitting on, but I felt it in my stomach. “Care to explain, Jared?”

I swallowed a lump in my throat: was this a trick question? Would I just get in trouble again for saying the story?

“Uh… but…” I nervously started to plead, but I was quickly stopped.

“It’s alright, Jared,” the Principal was assuring me. “You can tell him. I think this is something he will need to properly understand if it’s going to get fixed.”

Using the corners of my eyes, I tried to get a read on what my dad was thinking. The furrowed brow, slight scowl, and eyes locked dead-on gave me the idea that I might be better off not knowing for sure.

“Well, uh… okay...”

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I was talking to Devon and Richard at lunch. Y’know, like I usually do, I’m sure you see me with them at that table all the time… but anyway, we were talking. I don’t remember exactly how they brought it up, but I think Devon said something like,

‘Hey, see that cheerleader over there? The blonde one up against the wall?’

He was talking about Linsey, I think. So we looked over to her for a little bit and said yea, and he was talking about how pretty she was. He really wants to ask her out one day but I don’t know if it’s ever going to work out that way… but really what he said is,

‘Look at the size of her boobs,’

*************************************************************************************************************

“Now, that’s hardly appropriate,” the Principal interjected uncomfortably.

“Well, it was something like that, anyway, it may not have been exactly right,” I hastily corrected, to make him feel at least a little better about it.

“It’s alright, it’s alright, just keep going,” my dad urged from behind.

*************************************************************************************************************

I guess we did talk about that for a little bit. But it was nothing bad, we were just saying that she looks nice and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve talked to her a few times and she’s pretty cool, so I wouldn’t want to do anything that would make her upset or anything. 

Richard was the one that made it a competition. He’s just like that all the time.

‘I’ve seen bigger,’ he said. He was telling us about this girl that his stepdad knows who comes to visit sometimes, and how pretty she was. But she was way older so there was no trying to date her, or anything. There was a picture of her on Richard’s phone and she wears way too much makeup anyway.

Then Devon quickly started talking about a girl he saw in one of his brother’s magazines. I won’t talk too much about her because you probably know what I’m talking about and I don’t want to get in any more trouble.

But they started looking at me and saying things like, ‘Oh, I bet Jared’s never seen any good boobs’ and ‘You like tiny boobs, Jared?’. I didn’t ask for them to talk about boobs or anything, either, okay? But they wouldn’t stop until I told them something, so I told them something.

I told them that I had seen bigger boobs, I saw the biggest boobs ever, and I saw them way up close.

It was kind of a long time ago but we were being filed out of school for an early recess and there was a huge woman a few blocks away. The giant one, Jessica, right? I told them that she was walking by, which she was, and when she noticed me she stopped hurting people and crouched down to talk to me. 

If you really want me to repeat all the details, I will. I told them that she got down so close to the ground that they squeezed together. They were all squashed and still like a hundred feet high. I told them that… well, this part isn’t true, but I told them that she let me touch them.

Okay, I told them a lot of things that didn’t actually happen. I just felt like they needed to think that it actually happened. They thought I was so cool. And it was only half way a lie. I never saw her hurt anyone. I’m pretty sure no one at school did. I don’t think I scared anyone, and that’s the reason they say not to talk about her. 

Dad, you know it happened, right?

*************************************************************************************************************

“It happened,” he admitted. “And you were extremely lucky that you made it out in one piece.”

“Dad, it wasn’t a mistake or something, she talked to me! She chose not to hurt me.”

“You couldn’t have known she would make that choice. No one could have. I would never blame you for it, you just didn’t know any better. But now you should.”

“We were just talking about her.” I kept waiting for the moment where he finally understood, but it looked like he was in one of those moods where you can never change your mind.

“You shouldn’t be, Jared. It’s no different than any other bad thing that happens on the news. You’ve learned about a few disasters already. You know not to talk about them like that. What’s different about this one?”

“There’s a girl in this one,” was my simple answer. “A girl that talked to me and nobody else.”

“So you see the problem,” the Principal sighed, the only noise in the room after my retort.

“You said he was disrupting class,” my dad brought up as if I wasn’t even there. “I’m guessing this lunch story isn’t the first time he’s talked about it?”

“The particular incident that brought you here today was in Mrs. Rochelle’s English class. She overheard him bragging about the encounter to some of the other students.”

My dad gave me a stink eye and I panicked. I hated it when he gave me that look. It made me feel trapped. It always made me feel like nothing I could say would fix things once his eye looked that way. So I just said what I thought.

“What’s it matter if people hear me talking about it? It’s not like she can come hurt people again.”

“Mrs. Rochelle lost her mother to the attacks!” the Principal blurted. I had never heard him sound angry until that moment, nevermind directed at me. The heat of his voice filled my cheeks and I noticed I was starting to cry.

“I… well, I… I didn’t know that…”

“You can’t know how these things affect everyone, Jared,” my dad said in his typical ‘gotcha’ voice. “That’s why you shouldn’t talk about them as if they don’t matter.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as earnestly as my cracking voice allowed. “I won’t do it again.” My dad just exhaled from his nose.

“Is this going to affect his grade? Or his graduation, or anything?”

“No,” the Principal said, giving us both some relief. “All I ask is that you and him have a conversation about this and come to a compromise. I can help get you in touch with some traumatic stress specialists if you deem that necessary.”

“I don’t think it will be. But thank you, really. Come on, Jared.”

I stood up from the chair and took one last glance at the Professor. The anger didn’t seem to stick around on his face for long, but he didn’t look happy either. He gave me a brief nod that I was too stuck in my head to react to. I didn’t even feel like I was moving until the door to the office closed behind me.

“It’s alright, Jared,” my dad said quietly. We were still walking but he answered the question I hadn’t even asked him. “I know it’s a lot. It’s not as if it’s your fault, or that you could have stopped it. You just need to let people move on.”

“So… you aren’t mad at me?”

“I’m a little mad at you, but not that much. I think this was punishment enough. But…” he stopped in his path and leaned on one of the lockers so we were more face to face. “From now on no more bragging about this stuff. I know you remember the stuff I did about Jessica but it wasn’t anything special. You don’t need to try to convince people that it is.”

“But…”

“No buts. Jessica was giant, but she was just a giant person. There’s nothing special about having talked to her or seen her or whatever. There are some people that you won’t be able to convince and that’s fine. Just… move on, okay?”

“I just think she wasn’t lying when she told me those things,” I sputtered out. “I think it was all just a big mistake.”

“Maybe it was. But that doesn’t make it right. She did far more harm than good.”

“You were the one who said she saved the town! From the bombs, remember?”

“Hey!” my dad said, leaning in quickly, his voice quickly taking a turn for the worse. “Don’t say things like that out loud!” he growled in my ear. “No one saved anyone. Things just… worked out.”

“But if she didn’t do what she did, then…” I let my voice trail off to signify what I meant.

My dad sighed and backed away. He continued walking to the main door, me silently following by his side.

“Then yes,” he said after a few moments. “It would have been bad. But it only got to that point in the first place because she attacked. You see how it’s different? How it’s not really about a hero here?”

“But she tried,” I said. I meant for that to be my last point, but it hooked dad harder than I thought it would.

“I know she tried, but… ugh, it’s just not something you should try to figure out. She had really, really, really dumb reasons for doing what she did. She was sorry, yes, you are right. But it was too little too late. Even if she stayed, and we got used to her, where would she live? What would she do all day? It was going to end that way from the start.”
I thought about that for a little bit, and felt pretty bad. Dad was right. We couldn’t make giant houses or giant dinners or giant bathrooms.

The rest of the walk was super quiet. I was kind of freaking out a little bit… I had messed up super bad. What was I gonna tell Devon and Richard tomorrow? Should I apologize to Mrs. Rochelle? Or would that just make things worse?

Once we got outside, and I could see dad’s headlights flash out from the parking lot, we stopped again for a second.

“Let’s make a deal, Jared.”

“Uh… okay…”

“I think you’ll like it. How about we tell mom this meeting was about a misunderstanding… like some punk tried to blame you for something they got caught for… and in exchange, I’ll stop at Dairy Queen on the way home. Deal?”

I smiled and wiped at my damp face. 

“Deal.”

*************************************************************************************************************

Why Giants are Back, and Why it’s Worrying

By Lynn Perfelt

I don’t have to remind any of you what happened in the New York area in the month of April 2014. Jessica Tammy’s immense growth was a terrifying and humbling exercise against the strength of mankind. All of us, and all of our creations, monuments, and achievements, seemed to be invalidated by this one giant woman.

It was nothing short of a tragedy, and one of the worst our nation and our world has ever had to come to terms with. To tell the truth, I was never really satisfied with the blanket ban on the depiction of giant characters in the media as the only response. I had expected assurance policies, defensive protocols, laws, bills, anything that could stop this from happening again. 

I was sure that the appearance of a human being so titanic that she could rival buildings in height would have raised questions with our officials. That people far smarter than I had already worked out what made her that way, and were working together with lawmakers to put it to an end.

And, I thought for all this time that I was not in the minority for thinking this way. Unfortunately, with the recent uplifting of the ban, it seems I most certainly am.

As I said, I’m not offended by these ‘giant characters’, and in some ways I am rather glad that the ban is no more. Now more than ever they are a great creative tool for dealing with the feeling of helplessness. They are an anchor for us to lament and accept perceived weakness. And, poor Nintendo will no longer have to consider shelving their iconic Super Mushroom, or worse, relegating Princess Peach back to a story element rather than a playable character.

Even still, given that this was all we had learned from Jessica’s attacks, it is disheartening to see even that taken away. 

In my experience over the past few years I’ve noticed that many people seem unwilling to relate the Jessica incident to something like the September 11 Attacks or Pearl Harbor. Perhaps it’s because those attacks seem so much more human that we properly vilify them. Some even have the misconception that the tolls of the Jessica incident were not numerous enough to make a comparison. Ultimately, however, Jessica was a human, and we have no reason to believe she was not acting on her own will. She was, then, a terrorist.

I’m not insensitive to other’s feelings and can understand the disconnect between ordinary people and Jessica. At an estimated six hundred feet tall, an appetite for people, and a hauntingly primal lack of clothing, she was in no way like us.

The problem is that making that distinction is dangerous. Do we really have the capacity to draw that line? Should we? If mechanisms exist to make something like Jessica a reality, there’s no telling what other supernatural powers or abilities might come out of society. And if we make these abilities a cause for punishment, we severely limit our potential for innovation in individual potential. The American superhero dream could die.

My call is not to legalize being a giant, it is to put that aside and judge the individual. There’s reason to believe that the incident would not have happened if the giant was someone else. The size was not the deciding factor in the crimes, it was the girl herself.

What we need are limitations.

I have a sinking feeling that all of this is simply passing by us because the governments hope that one day we will simply forget this ever happened. Never again would we question just why Jessica Tammy was a giant for those few weeks. I will always be the first to doubt conspiracy theories, but the silence is damning.

I’m sure there are people who have or would like to forget about Jessica. I don’t blame them necessarily. But I won’t be forgetting any time soon. I’ll continue to remember until someone assumes responsibility and tells us what happened. There’s no point in trying to keep it a secret any longer; rather, we should hear out what it was that turned Jessica huge, and we should get confirmation of new limits placed upon that method or infrastructure.

However, as I write this, giant women are not only back, they are becoming a trend. Movies, TV shows, and video games have glorified the figure of a giantess, and it is working. The film ‘Carnal Hunger’ stars Alice Greczyn as a titaness in what can only be described as a shameless ‘same but not the same’ adaptation of Jessica’s attacks. And it’s made a profit.

So people haven’t forgotten then, instead, they’ve glorified it. It’s a fanatical appeal now. I’ve found this to be a trend; go on any Internet forum and you’ll surely find jokes and widely shared images that make light of September 11. We still don’t really think of Jessica as real yet.

My worry and reason for writing this is that if something solid and concrete is not done about the attacks in the past, something similar will happen again. If we have really learned nothing, I shudder to think of what might happen in a repeat incident, where a giant who wishes to cause harm has learned from Jessica’s mistakes.

So I urge you to contact your local representatives and let them know that Jessica was real, and the damage she inflicted still exists. It would be poetic for them to be punished by the problem they continue to ignore, but we all fall together.