The brightly-colored athletic shoe of Yuan Gu’s own design had some words written in stylized calligraphic Chinese letters. For the majority of her Asian market sales, it did not need to be explained. If she were in a sales presentation to an American audience she would probably have said it was virtually untranslatable to English, and meant something between vivacity and immortality. Might have been a cheesy pitch to some, but the etching was top notch and the design was modern, and it seemed to help sell the mythos behind an upstart athletic firm that wanted a seat at the world’s table with Nike and Adidas. A firm that was trying out an inverted business relationship between the world’s two largest economies. This time highly visible Chinese entrepreneurs were trying to mastermind the fashion connections, sponsorships, and marketing angle (albeit backed by a stronghold of US investors who liked the odds of eating Nike’s lunch in China) and a number of nameless American workers furnishing the production processes and quality (even if the American production was only a token small batch compared to the vast factory being built in Vietnam, and largely were there to help sell Americans on the brand).

Yuan was leaving the high school after her detour to visit Nancy. With some satisfaction at the latest funding round, the entrepreneur was allowing herself a quiet night without any business plans. She wanted to see her sister Wendy, share a bottle of wine, and have a little break from the city. Stepping behind the wheel of her Benz, Yuan was gratified, and still surprised, that a teenage boy from this small upstate high school was offering himself to her as a shrinkee gratis. Maybe this was the sign that she had truly made it.

Down in her right shoe, the kneading of her tough sole felt to Brett like he was being pulled across a conveyor belt of rough construction paper while a stinky weighted blanket laid atop him. Below him a slightly mushy sole moist with the sweat of an active woman who liked to walk fast and had probably done plenty of running today. But at least she was now driving her car and was no longer walking on his body, so the pressure was lessened.

    AUTOMATED MESSAGE - This is the ShrinkProtect app. It has been detected that you were shrunk. If you have authorized this, press Y and your 6-digit PIN. If you have not, press N. If no message is received within 10 minutes, escalation measures will be taken.

Hmm, the automated message had taken longer than usual to get sent, Brett noticed. Maybe she had to reboot the server?

Brett thought carefully about how he should respond. Normally he had responded very quickly to these messages, remembering that Ms. Issakinen had told him that she was monitoring this activity and would inform the authorities manually if she couldn’t raise him. She had said so with great seriousness. It was a service he strongly appreciated, and he didn’t want to embarrass her by calling in the cavalry for something he had begrudgingly consented to already. Was it worth calling the cops – would he have any recourse? Was he not legitimately constrained under the terms of his contract?

He tried to think back to what Principal Lee-Reilly had said. So many threats had been hurled at him in her office. That she could have him punished by correctional officers, that she could have anyone punish him as long as it was in the presence of a certified person or by one of the named people in the certification process – he remembered all that, but could not remember if this kind of situation was against his contract and he feared the consequences of a false alarm. Yet it seemed to be patently unfair. There was no training involved here, just his person being whored out to whoever his mom felt like. So he dawdled in responding. Perhaps four or five minutes went by as he stewed in Yuan’s sweaty shoe, starting to feel very sorry for himself.

The next text that came in was not automated.

“Hey Brett, it’s Loren. Don’t scare me dude. You OK? You’re shrinking again on the same day? You’ve been shrunk for over 11 hours today.”

Loren. He swooned at the words she wrote and wished that the sweat pouring down on him was the divine essence of that wonderful creature. He felt betrayed by his own lack of confidence when a moment ago his mind clearly identified her as Ms. Issakinen and failed to solidly assert that they had a special relationship at this point. She was Loren to him and always ought to be. She wasn’t just protecting him as a responsible teacher would, she was caring for him in a way that nobody else currently did. But what a pathetic position he was in right now. He started the day eating chewed-up bacon, and had little else but water and foot gunk since then. He couldn’t muster any energy for a pleasant conversation while he was being tugged around by the Chinese entrepreneur’s toes.

Impatiently Loren followed up with another of her clumsy attempts at humor. “Or did you hack my app? Probably wouldn’t be hard if you really tried, as I am still working on identifying spurious sources of audio and GPS data and it’s still pretty crude. Anyway. Don’t pretend that you’ve got anything better to do on a Saturday night than answer me, I know you better than that. 😊”

Finally forced into an unanticipated grin at this last message, he tapped back. “Hi Loren Im with a ‘guest’ of my mom right now. It’s Wendy Gu’s sister Yuan.”

The response came back from lightning-quick fingers. “Wow. Well, I’m sure you’ll be okay if Wendy’s there, but why did you agree to that?”

Brett thought for a moment. He was too distracted by Yuan’s toes to actually explain this whole situation, and with her statement on his safety he wasn’t sure if she was actually going to back him up if he asked to be rescued.

“Long story. Can I tell you tomorrow?”

“I will make sure that you do. Now I need to go. Don’t message me on this app since I can only answer it when logged in from the server. Text me at my regular number for faster response, mmkay?”

“Sorry Loren. Talk to you soon.”

The heat increased. He felt some new source of warmth emanating from the outside. Yuan must have turned on the car’s heater and pointed it into the footwell. Given that it was a warm, windless June evening, he again wondered how this could be for her comfort, or if it was calculated to make him more miserable.

As Yuan pulled into her sister’s driveway, Brett’s shoe prison had gotten increasingly inhospitable. Her foot perspired all around him, as though he were sinking into seawater but never quite drowned in it. With the temperature change away from the heated footwell and into the evening air, the sweat started to congeal and he found it increasingly sticky and viscous.

How was he intended to “absorb” this? Why hadn’t she worn socks?

In the living room of Wendy Gu’s house, there was animated conversation and greetings. Brett heard the familiar voice of Wendy, preparing some food in the kitchen. Some grousing by a sarcastic teenager, who must have been Yuan’s son. Fortunately for Brett’s understanding, they sometimes lapsed into English when talking with him.

The enormous size 9 foot finally stopped with its aimless kneading and gripped Brett’s body with its ripe, moist, meaty digits. An incoming rush of cold air as Yuan peeled her shoe off, exposing the boy to the open air. As her toes parted he fell onto a thick rug and looked up at his surroundings.

The beautiful, fierce eyes of Yuan looked at him expectantly. Behind her, an unbelieving 15-year-old stood agape at the figure before them.

He looked to the right and saw the more familiar face of Wendy sitting in an adjacent chair, grinning with a tinge of polite, secondhand embarrassment for this situation. Seeing them side by side the filial proximity was noticeable, although Yuan was clearly the athlete; Wendy had a doughier, less chiseled figure and a rounder face. She crossed her legs and lifted one off the floor, tapping her flat with the sole of her foot rhythmically.

Finally, Yuan cleared her throat and spoke in English. “Brett thanks so much for your work. Show my son how you honor with your sacrifice to women of your family.” The language was eloquent but rough as she wanted to use words that were venturing somewhat from her normal English scripts in sales and marketing. He looked down and saw her long, milky-white toes with abundant patches of reddened skin wriggling on the floor, still glistening from their treatment in the shoes. Her unpainted nails showed no particular care or attention, her feet themselves were calloused and had a foul smell. She reclined on a sofa much longer than her body, and placed him up on the cushions in front of one of her feet while the other foot remained on standby.

Her unbroken gaze became less cheerful and more hardened until he started to make his way forward. She, a virtual stranger, expected him to clean it from end to end with his tongue. As he reached her foot, she bit her lip and nodded expectantly.

He started with the tip of her little toe and prepared to work inward to the gap between her toes. The flavor was acrid and sour, the texture gummy. He was cleaning off a layer of smutz that had been on her foot as well as whatever was in her shoe itself. At this stage he knew the drill pretty well, but she had such a strong foot odor that he had to ration his motions and take extra time. It was comparable to the student athletes he had served earlier in the day, but without the strange hormonal response of being around girls familiar to, and long lusted-after by him. At the foot of Yuan, the seconds of silence as he walked to and began licking her foot seemed to hang on for eternity. Here was a stranger, though attractive and so far restrained, whose bounds of caprice and self-indulgence were unknown. It fueled adrenaline and fear.

“Eww!” protested Yuan’s son.

Yuan said huffily, “You’ll join him right, Henry? I have another foot too. I know your grades are good this year, I wish you still would be a good diligent son.”

Henry was having none of it and fought back in Mandarin. Wendy laughed awkwardly as if to diffuse the situation peaceably, but Yuan simply shook her head and responded in English as though she needed Brett to understand.

“English now Henry, Brett doesn’t know your words.”

He fumbled slightly. This boy knew English from school in China, but he never used it to emote anything. “That isn’t right of you to do it to me or to him. But at least he volunteered! I didn’t and I never will. You can afford to pay a Chinese man to do this, so why me or why him?”

Yuan smiled. She looked back at Henry with the triumph of a cat who had caught a prize bird and wanted seconds.

“If you don’t join him fine. Brett is a very good young man and he do it all. I let you go out now. But I won’t forget lack of respect, never.”

Far above, the two sisters caught up on many missed months. Each had a glass of fruity wine in hand. The last fundraising meeting that Yuan had set up had netted $22 million for her company. The economy was strong enough to support her startup’s dreams.

The job still sprawled ahead of Brett. He already felt like the job was unending. When he had finished with her toe jam proper, she had tilted her feet up to present the soles. They were still reddened and had that gummy, congealed sweat texture slicking up their rough, battered surface. And the smell was incredibly strong.

“Soles now Brett. You do good.” Yuan said quietly above, breaking the Chinese conversation.

Wendy was getting increasingly skeptical about the situation. Brett had been going strong with no interaction for the best par of an hour of conversation and she’d almost lost track of his presence, but this command stuck out for its presumptuousness and lack of questioning about his feelings, which bothered Wendy as a teacher who knew the boy. Still, as the younger sister Wendy was somewhat in awe of her older sister and her world-class successes, she had a half-conscious hesitance to confront her.

“How did you meet Brett again?”

“Oh, you know, I met with Nancy and the girls at the field. Nancy wanted me to meet some of the girls, give little speech, see who had won state contests that year and who was really good. She told me, her son – right here- he is my big fan haha. He wanted so much to get to serve me, she said.”

Wendy just raised an eyebrow. “Do you know Nancy and her son don’t get along well? She may have said more for him than he would have said for himself.”

“Well, he told me himself. He say he clean my feet like the best athletic shrinkees. He has done so much better than I thought.”

“Yuan…. He is not an athletic guy. He is a normal kid, more of a nerd actually. That sounds a bit suspicious.”

Yuan scoffed dismissively. “He is doing it! And no threatening him in any way. If he wanted to stop now, I let him stop. Do you hear Brett? All you would do is disappoint me, no big deal.” She smiled exultantly, confident that he was entirely comfortable with the job he was doing. She craved the vindication that his enthusiastic continuation would give her.

Hearing these words, with a glob of this conceited Chinese woman’s sweaty foot funk clogging his throat and permeating his taste buds, Brett was craving a respite. He seized upon the challenge, accepted it, and stopped, taking a few steps away from her foot and then laying down on the sofa cushion and catching his breath.

Seeing this, the smile on Yuan’s face faded and twisted into a bitter, seething rage. She gestured to him to continue, and then shook her head as it was clear he would not.

“Nancy lied, what a bitch!” the embarrassed Yuan exploded.

“Well, Yuan, maybe it was just a miscommunication, maybe she didn’t tell you that the certification involved punishment that he didn’t really want to-“

“Why do all you teachers stick together, Wendy? She is a bitch and she sent me to punish her own son because she’s too weak to do it herself. Look at this weak boy, he can’t even do the work he said he would do. He lied too!” The last words wounded Brett, who was trying his hardest but desperately needed some rest, some proper hydration, and some real food after having done this with the track team earlier today.

Wendy tightly bit her lips in discomfort. She was getting flashbacks to the violent anger of her older sister when they were little girls. But with Yuan this time in her own house, there was little she could do to flee the situation. She started to dig in. Wendy had no choice but to stick up for him and defy her sister, and she prepared for the old ritual, decades ago, of getting beaten by Yuan. But she feared more for Brett’s safety.

“Maybe she did. Nancy can be difficult, Yuan. But you don’t have to take it out on Brett. If he doesn’t want to be here, he should be allowed to go home. You told me he was at the gym with the girls today, he has had a long day.”

The elder Gu sister laughed in disbelief. “Long day? Why are you all so soft here? Do you even remember life as girls in China? Do you know how long my days are for my business?”

Wendy sighed. “I know you work hard. I know you don’t have to come see me and my school. I’m sorry for your displeasure. Please just let me take Brett home.”

“Why do we need to go now? His mom didn’t want him back tonight.”

Wendy sighed. “I’m afraid you are going to hurt him, Yuan. You have a serious temper.”

Yuan stood vigorously and cursed in Chinese at her sister. “You so ridiculous! I won’t hurt this boy, I’ take him back myself! I don’t need this from you!”

Unable to bear it, Wendy exploded back. “Yes, you DO need it! You were never able to stay calm without me! You used to beat me all the time. I tell you now, you will not hurt Brett or you will be sorry! Forget all the money and the power you have now!”

Wendy waited for a slap or a punch. It had come a hundred times before. One upon a time, it had never failed to arrive. The last time it had come from a teenage Yuan and it had hurt Wendy greatly, leaving her with a swollen face and gasping for breath on the floor.

This time, the blow didn’t come.

The two stood in eye contact for a few moments. Yuan’s eyes bulged as she bottled her anger, and her features softened as she looked down, gritted her teeth, and did what it took to regain composure. Using the techniques that she had had to learn to survive in the business world, the transformation happened with astonishing abruptness.

“I am sorry for my outburst.”

After a pause, the elder sister added “I am taking Brett home now. You car is blocked by my car. I call Nancy and tell her I come now. Then I go back to my hotel.”

The next few moments were a whirlwind for Brett. Yuan stormed away to her Benz. Wendy picked him up off the couch cushion, apologized, and set him down in the kitchen sink to give him a quick bath. He hungrily ate a scrap of chicken placed in front of him and was allowed to relieve himself into a bottle cap with his teacher’s back turned.

“Brett I am so sorry for my sister’s anger. She isn’t always like this. I won’t let her take you anywhere unless she really calms down. But I don’t think I should drive yet, I drank too much wine. Just sit tight for now.”

Brett, unable to reply so that she would hear, just gave the biggest thumb’s up that he could. He made a mental note to thank Mrs. Gu later, as he had come very close to breaking under the strain of the day and her attentiveness had saved him.

Out in the driveway, Yuan was calling the cell number that she had for Nancy Henderson, which was a fairly old entry. Either the coach wouldn’t answer or the number was no longer correct. Sighing with exasperation, Yuan looked through recent numbers and found a phone number from an Amber whom she had met today. The promising athlete who was Nancy’s star of the team, who wanted mentorship, who had the gall to use “Amazing” as her nickname – maybe this girl would have Nancy’s number and that would be that.

“Hello?”

“Hi Amber it’s Yuan Gu.”

“Oh Mrs Gu! Th-thanks for calling back so soon. Um, how is it going?” The girl was a bit nervous as she was still star-struck by meeting a recent Olympic champion and burgeoning entrepreneur.

“Good Amber. I just need to reach Coach Nancy. I have her son Brett with me. He is still shrinkee.”

“Oh right! Well, I have Coach’s number, but she had to leave this afternoon. Some other trouble with Don. He’s her older son.”

“Oh I see. Hmm, can I get into the school? He would have a house key in his bag, right?”

“Hmmmmm probably… yes I think he had his bag in the gym locker room. I’m pretty close to the high school now. And as of this week I’ve got a car too hah! How about I go swing by and get his clothes and then meet up with you? I could take Brett home if you wanted.”

Yuan was pleased at the serendipity of this phone call. “That would be great Amber, thank you for taking care of this. I’m at my sister’s place, the address is 345 Gold Terrace. I might have to leave before you make it back here.”

“3-4-5 Gold as in the color? No worries Mrs. Gu. It was a great pleasure to meet you today. Don’t worry about Brett, I’ll take care of him.”

Half an hour later, after Yuan left her sister tersely and headed back to her hotel, after Brett satisfied his appetite and laid down peacefully on a napkin, Wendy suddenly let his nemesis Amber into the house.

No way, Brett thought. What was happening? He saw with horror Amber exchange pleasantries with the teacher, feign interest and curiosity in the shrunken boy, and bring him so close that he could smell her peach lip balm and count the pores on her freckled face. She cooed and doted on shrunken Brett as though putting on an elaborate act to convince Mrs. Gu to let Brett leave with her. Why was it working?

Wendy was either naïve or had somehow persuaded herself that this was all okay. She finally explained what was going on.

“Brett, I tried calling your mom a lot of times, but I couldn’t reach her, and she has the shrink control. Amber is going to take you home, isn’t that nice of her? I’ll send you along in this little box.”

He tried jumping, waving his arms and screaming, but in his shrunken state he was unheard and his calls unheeded. Carefully, Wendy picked him up and put him in a hard-plastic lunchbox, one compartment of which had some napkins for padding. She closed the door partway, allowing some oxygen and light to infiltrate his new quarters. He saw the world through the slit of the box as he was lifted out, taken out the door and, and dropped roughly onto the seat of Amber’s car. The words he next heard came from the Amazing Amber, and were dripping with disdain.

“We meet again, loser.”