“So it’s okay if I hurt him?”
I hadn’t seen her before, but if the look on her face wasn’t enough, the question told me everything I needed to know.
“Of course!” Alyssa answered with a smile. She worked the desk five nights a week. “But if he stops moving he has to go back in the tube right away. The fees are steep if they break.”
The dark-haired girl watched me, catching me staring while I pressed up against the plastic wall of my little container. “Mhmm. Got it.”
I knew the routine. The beep of the student ID scanner. The blast of heat and light in my tube. The sickening motion of being casually plucked up from the shelf and passed across the counter.
“Are you scared?” She used this menacing voice after dumping me out on her bed. I wasn’t but it would be easier if I pretended.
“Let’s see how you scream.” When she snapped my legs one after another, I definitely did scream. She twisted my arms off and laughed while I bled on her fingers.
She was vicious, but she wasn’t particularly creative. I’d experienced far worse. Things started to fade to black rather quickly, all things considered. I woke up back in my tube, aching while the nanites finished knitting my limbs back together.
Alyssa only noticed me on her way out. “Tough one tonight, huh, little guy?” She tapped my tube with her fingernail a couple times before she shut off the lights.
There were three others in tubes just like mine. We could communicate if I was loud enough, but it wasn’t worth the effort. I realized in the first few months that that flash was supposed to sanitize my mind as well as my body. They never remembered a thing after they were checked out, and hearing the same questions a hundred times over made my existence that much more unbearable.
“Like living stress dolls.” That’s how they’d described us to the campus tours. We were good for the girls’ mental health, and as long as they turned us back in, zero questions were asked.
Many were just curious--they poked and prodded a little and asked me things. Several used me for sex, shoving me where they wanted, grinding against me, using my body as a tool to get them off and dumping me back into my tube a sloppy mess.
I called Victoria “Goddess” while I licked her shoes. Lydia found new ways to torture me every week--She set me on fire, crushed my pelvis and legs flat, and filled me with more needles than I could count. Karen tied me up and took pictures, grinning as I dangled from a string, wriggling like a worm with my arms and legs tightly bound together with a hair tie.
Callie just wanted to talk. I was her tiny living diary; she’d take me back to her room and I’d sit on her desk while she told me about how hard it was to make friends, about the boys she was scared to talk to and the pressure of picking a major.
She was quiet and nervous, but she didn’t have to be with me. I was tiny and inconsequential. Sometimes I sat with her while she did her homework. Other nights she laid me on her chest while she stretched out in bed.
I looked forward to being chosen. Even the ones who tortured me, who used me as their fucktoy and tossed me aside--anything was better than sitting in my tube.
I envied the others. They had no idea what was going on. In their minds, the longest they’d ever been trapped here was a day or two at most. In the first few weeks I’d tried to bash my brains out on the side of the tube, but it always fixed me too quickly.
The only things that gave me purpose and context were these giant girls. Mostly Alyssa, just watching her lean back in an office chair and play on her phone, but almost every night all four of us were signed out at least once.
Spring break almost broke me. I talked to the others, screaming so they could hear me. I gave them all names. I told them jokes they didn’t understand. I told them stories about the girls that they’d forget the first time they saw one.
When Alyssa finally came back and asked if we’d missed her, I laughed. When Callie showed up ten minutes later, I squealed with glee.
I had to find a way out, and she was the closest thing to someone I could trust. She was probably the only girl I’d met who talked with me enough to notice the strained expression on my face.
“Is… is something wrong?” It really was a foreign concept. What could be wrong with me if my life supposedly started twenty minutes ago? She set me down on her bed.
“Callie.” I said her name and her eyes nearly burst from her head. “Will you help me?”
She took a hasty seat on the floor. Her huge blue eyes came right up next to me, loose blonde strands of her hair nearly brushing my face. “How do you know my name?”
For all the tortures and misery I’d experienced, this might have been the first time I was truly nervous. “I remember. I remember everything that’s happened to me.”
She took a sharp breath through her nose that threw me off balance while her brow furrowed with confusion. “But—but they’re supposed to reset you, right? You can’t remember anything!”
It was cute how worried she was. The most she’d done is gush about boys she and confess that she sometimes hated her mom. She had no idea what I’d been through.
“Callie, it’s okay. Nobody knows, but I’m talking to you because you’re the sweetest girl in the building.”
She was still freaked out, but moving more towards calm and confused. I continued. I needed her on my side.
“I’m pretty sure they’ve all taken turns with me, but I’m always so happy to see you when you’re at the desk. I like helping you and hearing about your days. You’re the best thing in my life, Callie.”
She laughed and smiled, looking away and shaking her head. “I can’t believe I’m getting hit on by a mini.”
My heart hammered in my chest and I grinned from ear to ear. I’d shared my secret. I was weightless and giddy and free, having a real conversation with a normal, wonderful girl.
“You’re the one I trust, Callie.” She looked back at me and lost some of her smile. “I don’t think I can take much more.”
“What exactly are you asking me to do?” She was concerned again. Not too unusual. She seemed like she always worried.
“Would you keep me?” She blinked, shocked by the suggestion. “Please, I could be yours. I could be your actual friend.”
She took a deep breath, and it seemed like her smile was a little forced. “I mean, I like you and I think you’d be a good friend, I really do. I can’t do that, though. I just don’t think I can.”
My mouth instantly went dry. “Please, Callie! If you knew what they did—they use me, they treat me like a toy, like a thing… I’ve been broken and pieced back together so many times I don’t even know what I’m made of anymore.”
She was listening. Her head lowered a bit and I could feel the concern in her eyes. She was such a good girl. She cared--she was going to save me after all.
“But that’s not even the worst. It’s the time in between. Hours, days of sitting in my tube, just staring in silence. No activity, no sleep, nothing at all but the minutes crawling by. I just exist, forever well-rested and nourished by that horrid machine, waiting for the next giant girl to take me out to play.”
I started sobbing halfway through. I didn’t know I could do that. I didn’t know my eyes made tears. She nodded slowly and watched me in silence.
“If you don’t want me, it’s okay.” I was shaking as I spoke. I couldn’t control my voice. “Just put me in the hallway and give me a chance. Anything is better than this. Anything, please!”
“Okay.” I was crumpled on her blanket when the word stopped me cold. I looked up, panting as her expressionless face totally filled my vision.
“It’s okay.” She was trying to calm me down. She cared about me--someone actually cared about me. “I’m going to take care of this, okay?”
Her cupped hand lifted to the edge of the bed, and I stared at it for a long moment before I understood. By the time I was crawling across her fingers, I was laughing to myself. “Thank you!” I said it louder each time, and I bowed down to kiss her palm. She giggled quietly as I kissed her again and again.
Her other hand moved towards me. “Alright, now stay quiet, okay?”
I nodded enthusiastically while she covered me, holding me in shadowy darkness between her two cupped hands. I bounced along with her hasty footsteps, and grinned as my sweet giantess carried me towards freedom.
“You have to know, I swear to god, he was like this when I got him.”
My blood froze in my veins. What was she doing? I pushed at her fingers, straining and squirming. Where was she taking me?
“Hey, hold on.”
I knew that voice. I knew every voice, every girl in the building, but that bored, uninterested tone was the one I heard daily. Alyssa.
Callie’s hand lifted away from me and I watched Alyssa set her phone down and begrudgingly get up out of her chair. “What’s going on?”
“He says he remembers everything. He’s talking about getting away? And he wants me to help him but I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything to him.” She was hasty and nervous. I thought about jumping.
“Will you just take him back? Please, I can’t pay any fines and I want to transfer in the fall.”
“Shit, he’s been a defect all this time?” Alyssa’s manicured nails were on me unbelievably fast. She dragged me up out of Callie’s hand and squinted at me between her fingers.
“I’m sorry.” Callie apologized in earnest, but I couldn’t tell if it was for Alyssa or for me.
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” I watched the little flash in another one of the tubes before Alyssa handed one of my fellow prisoners over to Callie and sent her on her way, and then we were alone.
“Now, I’m pretty sure I just have to send an email first…” she plopped back down in her chair and dumped me onto her desk.
“Don’t you go anywhere.” She picked up her coffee cup and slammed it down around me, Warm, sticky droplets rained over me, and I was left with the sweet smells, darkness, and panic while I listened to her tap at her keyboard.
Only a couple minutes must have passed before I was back in the light and in Alyssa’s grasp. She leaned over and placed me on the floor, and I stared while she carefully leaned her phone against the wall in front of me.
“Your expiration’s in May anyhow, but Lydia’s going to be pissed she stayed in Cancun.” I didn’t understand her words. The phone’s camera was running. I watched myself on its screen, Alyssa’s legs stretching up behind me.
Her sneaker lifted from the floor and I watched it moving towards me on the display. She took it slowly, and I wondered who the recording was for.
Her shoe covered me and I couldn’t help but smile. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but it was the next best thing.
It was a way out.