Tony St. Martin and his girlfriend Claire Heath rode along, unnoticed on the running board outside the passenger's door of a rusted out VW Beetle. The seven inch high teenagers smiled at each other as the wind blew threw their hair. Even in circumstances like this, shrunken from their normal size by psycho Emma Chase, they could still find enjoyment in just being in each other's presence. Tony turned away from Claire and looked forward to see where their unknowing taxi was going and where they might get off. Claire smiled at the one in a million rear end in white ballet tights and the V shaped torso that tapered to an almost improbably narrow waist. She sighed and gave him a pat on the buns to which he didn't even react. She even liked that. He had seemed so much the reserved, intellectual type when she'd first met him. Then she thought of their making love and smiled softly and gave him another pat on his white tighted buns. He turned around and gave her the same smile. As dire as the situation was, they could still see it as an adventure in each other's company.
The VW lurched hesitantly through the streets. It was heading toward the north side of town. This was roughly what Tony was hoping for, a ride at least most of the way to the high school. But after another minute, the Beetle stopped at a light at a busy intersection. Tony waved to Claire. "Let's go!". They let go of the rotting sheet metal and jumped off the idling car onto the pavement 6 inches below, a leap of almost their heights. They sprinted across the shoulder to the granite curb and stopped there to look around. They could just see over the edge onto the sidewalk. Two skaters in droopy pants and oversized shirts were gliding toward them. Tony and Claire both ducked down and she leaned against him at the granite face, waiting for the skaters to pass. While they did, a car stopped beside them and through an open window, a little girl in a safety seat saw Tony and Claire and shouted and pointed. "Mom! A tiny ballet boy and girl! A tiny . . M-Mom!" The car sped off and Tony and Claire shared a smile.
Spying no one coming on the sidewalk, they climbed up and jogged along up there, both of them constantly looking around. They made an easy 100 yards in the afternoon sun, running along cracked pavement and between unchecked weeds that swayed gently in the breeze over their heads like softwood trees. A wayward beagle came around the corner up ahead Tony ran faster to a point a few steps ahead. There, among some thread and a thimble, discarded items from a sewing kit, was a needle. It was rusted and the point didn't seem very sharp to the eyes of 7 inch high human beings it would serve well as a spear. Tony grabbed it by the eye and swung it back and forth like an oversized, for him, rapier. But the beagle crossed the street for no apparent reason. Still, Tony felt like a swashbuckling privateer. He pulled Claire along and they passed over another hundred yards of sidewalk. No one passed their way, but from their vantage point, they saw all sorts of refuse that they wouldn't have noticed otherwise, coins, discarded condom wrappers and candy wrappers all enmeshed in the goldenrod and ragweed growing up through the sidewalk.
Despite his humiliatingly small size, Tony jogged along confidently, leading Claire by one hand and stopping at a puddle in the grass at the edge of a park. Tony insisted on trying it first.
"Not bad. Not bad at all" he pronounced its purity after a handful and he brought two more to Claire before kneeling and having several gulps himself.
"So tell me what the plan is" said Claire from the shaded base of a 6 foot high arbor vitae as a robin perched nearby eyed these two tiny humans curiously and kids threw frisbees and flew kites in the football field sized lawn of the park.
"Well, I would guess that Emma the psycho feels that the laptop is even more secure at school than at home. Lots of potential witnesses to see miniaturized enemies. Locked lockers and maybe we don't even know which one is hers"
"Do we?"
"Sure. Third one from the end opposite that bald spanish teacher's room"
She slapped him at the side of his narrow, muscular hips. "You do put that photographic memory to better use than that, don't you?"
"What better use is there now than returning to full size? I just remember seeing her there practically snarling at me for no reason"
For a good half hour, they just watched from the hedge in their ballet tights and top. Tony took the opportunity to piss, laboriously pulling up his quilted velvet top and unrolling the belt at the top of his tights, allowing him to remove the belt and finally pull down his tights and the front of his dance belt and relieve himself. Claire watched all of it with an unblinking eye. When it came her turn, Tony turned away. Finished, Claire tapped him on the shoulder from behind.
"Hey, I noticed you pulled your tights all the way up again as if you're about to go on stage"
Tony shrugged. "I may as well wear 'em right. While I've got this stuff on I'm a ballet dancer, right?"
"Well, why aren't you, anyway. Mark's great at it and you've got the same body, right?"
"Yeah, but, I was tricked into loving it before, by Emma when she made me and Jack gay. It just seems sort of suspicious to me now. But yeah, Mark'll end up as a star for some world famous ballet company. He's terrific at it"
"Sure he is" she laughed and reached around him and grabbed his buns with both hands. "He's got these"
With the license of reciprocity, Tony kissed her and fondled her luscious little rear then her perky little breasts beneath her pink top. It was several minutes before they could separate and another few before they could do much more than stand there trying to collect their thoughts.
"Um, we should probably cross the park to make enough progress to get to the high school while the night classes are still going on and the doors opening all the time. We've probably got just enought time to cross the park and go through those side streets to get there"
It worked pretty much like that with one exception. They were making great time getting across the open lawn of the park when a box kite they'd watched zigzagging whimsically across the sky above them suddenly dove from the darkening heavens right for them. Tony pushed Claire to the ground and knelt over her to absorb any impact with his 7 inch tall body and protect hers. The kite's dive started to relent, but not quickly enough for it to avoid grazing the ground before shooting upward again. And when it did shoot upward, it carried a stunned Tony with it.
"What the hell!?!"
There was an empty hook at the bottom of the box kite. A couple of its streamers had come off. The hook dragged along the ground at the bottom of the kite's dive and then the edge of it went under the bottom edge of Tony's quilted velvet top till it came out his collar. He was hooked and yanked up into the air with the kite.
At 7 inches tall, Tony didn't have much mass at all and the wind had picked up. His weight scarcely slowed the kite at all as it tacked to and fro across the sky.
"Tony! Tony!" Claire shouted after him and tried to chase the kite from the ground but its movements were too quick and too unpredictable for her to track it. She could barely see Tony's little body a hundred feet away. He was just a tiny whitish addendum to the red and gold of the kite's panels and streamers. Claire glanced at the boys flying the kite but they didn't even notice her boyfriend being carried along against his will.
But after a few minutes of terrifying zigzagging across the skies, being jerked around more violently than the worst amusement park ride, and feeling like a leaf in a storm, the kite dove to the field below. Like a parachutist coming down, Tony literally hit the ground running and got ahead of the temporarily stalled kite and its hook so that the hook pulled out the back of his quilted velvet top just before the kite shot back up into the air. Tony sprinted away from the spot and over to the edge of the field where he saw Claire. They hugged and kissed and ran off. Their passage through the couple side streets was easy. There were a couple sophomore boys hanging around there, boys who Tony knew disliked him and might do anything if they found him in his present condition but they were playing basketball and didn't notice Tony and Claire run along the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
Entry into the school was also easy. A man and woman were leaving one of the less used entrances and talking about the just finished lecture. They never noticed two diminutive teenagers in ballet clothes sneak right past their ankles. Just as Tony and Claire made their way inside, some of the hallway lights dimmed. Tony pulled Claire along to run beside him down the hall to where Emma Chase's locker was. Tony looked down the hall to make sure there was no one around. Their high school had put in new lockers with a lattice pattern of holes running in a stripe up the middle of each locker. The rumor was that it was to make it easier for drug sniffing dogs to inspect the lockers. Tony went to the second one from the end and started to climb up to the bottom of it, just 5 inches off the ground.
"Hey" Claire whispered "I thought you said hers is the third one in"
"It is. This is Ty Clines's locker and he's been suspended till next week. We can sleep here and go over to hers when we need to"
Claire shrugged. Good idea. They set up camp of sorts in Ty's locker. He was a black kid on the basketball team, extremely athletic, basically the same body as Tony's only 6'4" tall. They pushed the tallest of his books up against the lattice work. Combined with his long jacket still hanging from a hook high above them, they were almost completely invisible from the hallway. They found a freshly washed jock of Ty's and suspended it from the corner of the book and an exposed screw to make a hammock. They slept there, Claire half on top of him.
In the morning, first teachers then kids started filtering in, gradually the background noise level rose and Tony and Claire got out of their supporter pouch hammock and watched movements around them through tiny gaps. Finally, just minutes before the morning late bell, Emma hurried in and dropped a heavily laden backpack into her locker and removed a few books. Her facial expression was a bizarre combination of anger and revelry. Tony and Claire looked at each other and had the same thoughts of fear for their friends. As soon as the bell for first class sounded, kids had gone to their first class and the hallway was quiet again, Tony peeked out of the lattice openings of Ty's locker. There was no one around. He jumped down and then jumped back up and pulled himself into Emma Chase's locker.
"It's here!" he shouted to Claire upon seeing the laptop inside the backpack. He unzipped the bag. He wanted to turn the computer on right there, but it wouldn't start. It would have to be laying flat before it would boot up. Tony explained the bad news to Claire, poking his head out the lattice opening of Emma's locker while Claire had her head outside of Ty's.
"So . . it's not possible?"
"No. It's just going to be harder. I've got to get all her other stuff out of the bag. Then I've got to get her lock off this locker. Then we need to pull together and get this laptop across the hallway to that conference room and change ourselves back."
Claire was skeptical but nodded. From her lookout position in Ty's locker, for some time, she could hear Tony straining his tiny ass against the weight of Emma's books. Around the end of second period he'd finished. Around the same time, Emma returned to her locker. Claire's heart pounded. She said a prayer that psycho Emma didn't discover her shrunken boyfriend in her locker. But Emma came and went in just a few seconds. When the hallway was quiet, Claire poked her head out. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, just had to climb out from under the books she dropped on me" replied Tony. With that, he started making his way up the lattice metal front of the locker. At last he was just above the combination lock. He climbed out of the locker enough to sit on the lattice work. It looked like 40 feet high to Tony. He wrapped his three and a half inch long arms around the dial of the lock and pressed his ear to the back of it. Slowly he turned the dial till he heard something click inside. He reversed the direction that he turned the dial and again proceeded till he heard a similar click. He turned the dial back in the first direction and heard a final click. He tugged with all his might and felt the lock give. He stepped completely outside the locker and stood on the lock with both his ballet slippered feet. He jumped up and down and finally the lock gave way. With great effort he pulled the lock out of the latch. He swung it away and caught the u-shaped arm in the lattice work. From his position up there, he worked the latch and with a metal clang the door fell open. Claire jumped out of the adjacent locker and, along with Tony, grabbed the course black tag at the top of the yellow backpack. With a thud the bag and laptop within hit the hallway floor. They looked around and saw no one. Then, they grabbed the tag and pulled with all their might dragging the bag across the slick, frequently waxed floor and into the room across the hall.
It was an empty conference room with a cheap, fake wood table and plastic seated chairs. They pulled the bag out of sight from the hallway and peeled the bag away from over the laptop. Together they worked the opening latch and Tony practically dove across the keyboard to press the 'on' button.
"You first" said Tony and as soon as the computer was finished booting he pulled out the emitter and pointed it at Claire standing next to the laptop. She smirked at the sight of Tony on all fours over the machine's touchpad, working the keyboard not with fingers but by pressing an entire hand to each key. Finally, Claire felt the familiar electric wave pass through her. Her body didn't feel different in any way but she rocketed upward till Tony was down at her ankle.
She picked him up and gave him a kiss with lips that could have kissed half his body. Claire picked him, the computer and emitter up and put them down on the table.
"Now her!" declared Tony. First he scanned the 50 feet surrounding them. "Perfect. She's in the class above us"
"No! Really?"
"Yup. And she's about to forget she ever . . even . . heard the word chronivac" said Tony as he deftly navigated menus and changed her profile, typing with a hand on each key.
"There. Done."
Claire picked up her little boyfriend hugging his body to her face.
"Hmm. Maybe this isn't so bad" he chuckled.
Claire kissed him and thanked him for his unfailing concern and protection but begged out of seeing him transform himself. She desperately needed to go to the bathroom and didn't mind that she would go there dressed as a ballerina.
But when she came back, expecting to see 6'1" tall Tony, she didn't even see 7" tall Tony. She didn't see Tony at all. The laptop showed his profile, but it seemed he'd scarcely begun to modify it. She looked out into the hallway and saw nothing and no one.
"Wh-where are you, Tony?"