Taller - Ch 2

The moving van had been parked in the driveway of the house next door for a whole day, 25 days ago, exactly. The next day, Lori and her mother knocked on their new neighbors’ front door with Lori holding the house-warming gift of a plate of brownies that her mother had baked.

The vaguely exotic woman who answered the door eyed them suspiciously at first.

“Hello,” Lori’s mother said. “I’m June, and this is my daughter, Lori. We’re your new neighbors. I wanted to stop by to introduce ourselves and welcome you to the neighborhood.”

The new neighbor woman smiled and said, “Of course. How lovely to meet you. I’m Judith. Please, do come in. Excuse the boxes. We are still unpacking.”

They entered the house, and Judith led them to her kitchen.

“George,” she called down the hall. “Come down and meet the neighbors.”

“Just a moment,” a boy called back.

A minute later, a teen about Lori’s age walked into the kitchen to join them. George and Lori had an awkward moment of eye contact as their mothers started up a conversation about gardening.

“Hey,” George said, hesitantly. “Want to see something interesting?”

Lori had the sense that George might be trying to show off to get her attention. Not that she minded. He was not bad looking and moved with the relaxed poise of a cat.

“Sure,” Lori said. “Let’s see it.”

He led her upstairs to a bedroom filled with boxes, some opened and half emptied, others still taped shut. She could see that he had been decorating his shelves with antique-looking books and oddly-shaped crystals.

“Check this out,” George said, picking up an apple-sized crystal and handing it to her.

“What is it?” Lori asked, holding it up to her eye to look through it toward the light from the window. The clear gem refracted the room in a confusing rainbow kaleidoscope.

“It’s an old family heirloom,” he explained. “I know it sounds weird, but it reacts to your thoughts and emotions.”

Lori smirked, lowering it from her eye. “Really?”

“Try it,” he said. “Hold it in your hands, close your eyes, and think of something that makes you happy.”

“OK,” Lori said, humoring him. “Just don’t try anything while I’ve got my eyes shut.”

“Never,” he said, smiling.

She gripped the crystal in her hands, shut her eyes, and imagined the beach they had vacationed at this summer, the warm sand and cool water.

“There,” George said. “Look at the crystal.”

Lori opened her eyes and found that the crystal she was holding was no longer clear but a vibrant orange.

“What?” she said. “Did you swap crystals while I had my eyes closed.”

George shook his head. “You were holding it the whole time. It reacted to your happiness by turning orange.”

“Wow,” she said, not really believing it but having a hard time figuring out a better explanation for why she was now holding an orange crystal. “So, does it do anything else?”

“It can,” he said, “but doing other things with it can be… complicated.”

“Does it grant wishes?” Lori asked, jokingly.

“It might,” George replied. “Give it a try.”

“What do I wish for?”

“Whatever you want most in the world.” He smiled.

Lori thought for a moment about what she always wished for and glanced at George, wondering how tall he was. He seemed taller than average to her, but that was probably due to her being so comparatively short. If only she were a bit taller herself…

“I wish…” Lori said, gazing into the orange crystal. “I wish I would grow taller.”

The crystal seemed to flash at her, like a bright light had just been shone into it for a moment. She shut her eyes and blinked, trying to remove the afterimage the flash had left on her retina. When her vision cleared, she looked back at George to find that he seemed just as tall compared to her as before. She was honestly surprised by how disappointed that made her feel.

“I guess it doesn’t grant wishes,” she said, handing it back to him. Only when she had let it go did she realize that the crystal had gone clear again when she had looked away.

“Hey, you two,” called George’s mother from downstairs. “You aren’t up to any funny business up there. Are you?”

Lori felt her face warm up and looked to see George blush. He set the crystal back on the shelf where it had been.

“We’d better go back down,” Lori said, “before they start imagining things.”

“Right,” he said and walked through the doorway to lead her back downstairs.

The two of them did not say anything else to each other besides “bye” when Lori and her mother left.

***

“That boy,” Lori said, sitting up in bed. “That weird crystal. I made a wish. Is that what did this to me?”

She gazed down at her feet poking out from the covers and sheets at the end of the bed. No doubt she did “grow taller” just as she had wished. Unfortunately, the growth had just never stopped.

“Maybe he can stop this,” she said, “or even undo it.” Feeling a plan forming, she swung her feet around to the side of the bed and stood up. The ceiling was looming dangerously close, and she dreaded the possibility that her head might be touching it soon if her growth continued. However, there was a shred of hope now. At least, she had a possible explanation for why this was happening, maybe even a way to reverse it. She considered waiting until the morning, but decided she could not wait.

***

On most days, the only time Lori saw the neighbor boy was when he was leaving for school just before she headed to her bus stop, so it made sense to try to catch him at night. However, at this hour, she would most likely be waking him and his mother up, which she would rather avoid doing. This was urgent, though, so she threw on a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and some undersized sandals. Then, she stepped outside into the cool air and strode over to the house next door. After a moment of hesitation at their front door, wondering if she were being silly to assume that the crystal had anything to do with this, she went ahead and knocked.

George’s mother answered the door in her pajamas a minute later and gazed up at Lori in shock. “Oh my,” she said. “What has happened to you?”

“I think George might know.”

The woman sighed and nodded. “George!” she called to him. “Get downstairs now. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

Seconds later, George appeared in the hallway behind her and came to a sudden halt when he saw Lori stooping to see him through the doorway.

“Oh!” was his immediate response.

***

Upstairs a short while later, George apologized profusely and then tried to explain things to Lori. “Magic runs in my family,” he said, as Lori took a seat on his bed. “It’s our special talent, kind of a gift.”

Even seated, she found that she was still taller than him. How odd to think that he had seemed so tall the first time they had met. “So,” she said. “You’re wizards? Witches?”

“Something like that,” he said. “I go to a special private school for people with magic powers. It’s all pretty secret, of course.”

Lori nodded. Before she had started growing, she would have been far more incredulous, but after the strangeness of the past few weeks, she believed him immediately.

“I can’t wait to tell my friends about this. It’ll blow their minds.”

“Whoa,” George said. “I said it was secret. You’ve got to promise me you won’t tell anyone about us.”

“Really?” Lori replied, disappointed.

“It’s easier if people don’t know we exist. Otherwise, we’d be targeted by a lot of bad people.”

Lori nodded. “I understand,” she said. “I promise to keep your secret. Still, it’s going to be awkward explaining why I’m suddenly back to my normal height.”

“Don’t worry,” George said. “I’m going to put a glamor on you. It’s kind of a disguise spell. As long as people don’t think too much about it, they won’t notice that you’ve changed. Like, they’ll forget about how you used to look and believe how you look at that moment is how you’ve always looked.”

“Okay,” Lori said. “That should make it easier to get everything back to normal. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You can get me back to normal, right?” she asked, hopefully.

He furrowed his brow and asked, “Do you want the honest truth?”

Lori took a deep breath and nodded.

“I’m not sure how I did this to you in the first place,” he admitted. “I certainly didn’t mean for this to happen to you.”

“Great,” Lori said. “Maybe we should get your mom to help.”

He shook his head and explained, “She would say, ‘no.’ She knows it’s not a good idea to mix magic from two casters. There can be unexpected side effects. If I did this to you, then it’s best if I fix it myself.”

Lori sighed. “So, what do you have in mind, then?”

“Well,” he said, “I could just cast a spell to change you the opposite way, make you two feet shorter.”

“Would that also stop me from growing more?”

George shrugged. “Maybe. Like I said, I’m not sure how this happened in the first place. Anything we do now is going to be… experimental.”

Lori considered the possibility that things could get worse somehow, but compared to what she was dealing with now, how much worse could things be? “Fine,” she said. “Let’s try something. If you can make me shorter at all, that would be great.”

“Alright,” he said, grabbing a crystal from his shelf. “Let me get things set up.”

***

“So…” Lori said, trying to make small talk as she waited for him to finish his preparations. “Does this kind of thing happen often to people like you?” She shifted her big feet out of the way to keep from tripping him as he walked to his desk.

“I have a friend who got turned into a pig by accident,” George said as he checked an illustration in a dusty old tome. “At least, he said it was an accident. I think that his ex-girlfriend might have been getting a little revenge on him.”

“Is he okay now?”

“He had a problem with overeating for a little while, but he’s almost back down to his normal weight again.”

Lori chuckled, feeling a bit less unfortunate. Then, looking down at her spindly fingers, she asked, “Am I going to be okay?”

“Yes,” he said, sounding surprisingly confident.

“How do you know?” She gazed into his eyes, searching for confirmation that he was sincere.

“Because I’m not going to stop trying to help you until you’re okay again.”

Lori tried to hide her smile.

George finished his preparations, which mainly involved the subtle repositioning of a few crystals on his floor. He held his hands up facing the crystals for a moment, and the central crystal turned a vivid shade of purple. “There,” he said, lifting the purple crystal up from his floor. “It’s ready.”

Lori looked at it, curiously. “What do we do with it?”

“You hold onto it,” he said, handing it over to her. “I’ll release the spell when you are ready.”

She held up the crystal and nodded. “Go ahead.”

George shut his eyes and held up his hands facing the crystal again. Lori felt a strong tingle in her hands where her skin made contact with the gem, as if it were buzzing with electricity. That buzz flowed through her hands and up her arms and spread throughout the rest of her body. The energy diffused enough that the sensation faded away completely.

Lori waited for some sign that she was shrinking. However, even after several breathless seconds, she could not detect any change. “Nothing happened,” she said, trying to conceal the disappointment in her voice.

George lifted the now clear crystal from her hands and examined it. “That should have worked,” he said. “You felt it doing something, right?”

She nodded. “There was a tingle all through me.”

George frowned. “I don’t get it,” he said. Then, his face brightened up. “Hold on. I think I understand.”

“Yes?”

“You said that you’ve only been growing when you sleep?”

Lori nodded.

“Then, the spell will probably only take effect when you sleep tonight,” he conjectured. “You ought to wake up tomorrow back at your normal height.”

“Really?” she asked. “You sure?”

He shrugged. “If you don’t, then come see me tomorrow. We’ll try something else.”

Lori nodded again. Then, she stood up, and George took a step back, seemingly intimidated by her height. “Could I get your phone number?” she asked him. “So, I can text you with the results?” she quickly explained.

They exchanged numbers, and he led her to the door to let her out.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be shorter tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” Lori said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

She walked back to her house and returned to her bed. Despite how tired she felt, it was taking a while for her to fall asleep. She had that kind of Christmas Eve excitement that made it hard to rest. She could not wait for the morning, and the anticipation kept her awake. Eventually, she managed to sleep by fantasizing about what it would feel like to be a normal height again.

***

Lori’s alarm woke her up, and for the first time in days, her feet did not feel cold. They were still under the covers instead of poking out from the end of the bed. That was a good sign.

She reached over to shut off her alarm, but her hand came up short. Her phone seemed much further away than expected. Still only half awake, she was able to figure out that her arms would not be as long as last night if she had become shorter. Although a momentary frustration, a reduced reach was a good sign that the magic had worked. A bit more leaning and she managed to reach the phone at last and swiped the alarm off. After relaxing back onto her bed, she took a moment to appreciate how comfortable it was to be resting on furniture that fit her. Excited to see her body back to normal, she reached over to turn on her bedside lamp. Again, she was surprised when her hand failed to reach it. She sighed in frustration, getting on her knees and leaning further over to turn the lamp on.

The sudden illumination made her squint. She sat back on the bed while her eyes slowly adjusted to the light. As her vision returned, she noticed that everything seemed bigger, much bigger than she would have expected if she were back to her normal size. Had she forgotten how big the world seemed when she was five feet tall or was something wrong?

“Am I back to normal?” Lori asked. Listening to her own voice and finding it sounding surprisingly squeaky and babyish.

Something was wrong. She held up her hands to find that her spindly fingers had shrunk shockingly short and stubby, leaving her hands looking oddly pudgy.

“Oh no,” she said. Something had definitely gone wrong. She pulled the sheets and blankets aside to get a good look at her body, and gasped to see how absurdly short and squat it now appeared. If she had felt stretched out before, then she felt squashed now. Her stubby little feet were not even two feet away, and the legs leading to them were amazingly thick, as were her arms. “Oh no,” she repeated. “Oh no.”

She was afraid to move, not sure how well she could control such a little body. Not only had she been many feet taller than this yesterday, but she had not been this short in at least a decade. Moving with deliberate care, she slid over to the edge of the bed and swung her feet over the side, letting her legs dangle far above the floor. Then, she carefully slid off the bed onto the carpet. Standing now, she found her balance a bit wobbly on her tiny feet, but she was able to steady herself with an arm on her bed, which was now chest high to her.

“I’m… tiny,” she said. Her best estimation put her at three feet tall now. She groaned in frustration. “I just wanted to be normal,” she moaned, feeling as if she were the victim of a cruel joke. “Why did this happen? What went wrong?”

Lori picked up her phone to call George and promptly dropped the phone on the carpet. Her fingers had become too stubby to hold the phone in one hand. She picked it up and, with both hands, carefully thumbed in her password. Then, she dialed his phone number and waited as it rang.

“Good morning,” George answered. “How are you doing, Lori? Did it work? Are you back to normal?”

“You shrank me!” she said.

“That’s what you wanted,” he replied. “Wasn’t it?”

“I’m too short now! You made me three feet tall!”

“Three feet? What?” he asked, confused. “That shouldn’t have happened. I was very deliberate about the height I was removing from you.”

“Well, something went wrong. What am I going to do?”

“Come over now,” he said, his voice taking on a serious tone. “I’ll do what I can to get you sorted out.”

“Okay,” Lori said. “It might take a few minutes. I’m not sure how fast I can walk now.”

“I’ll wait for you,” George said. “Don’t worry.”

Lori hung up and set down her phone, with a heavy sigh. She briefly considered picking up the phone again to call her mother for help, but Lori decided that she could handle this on her own. No need to make her come home from work so soon after getting there.

Lori looked up at her seemingly enormous room and then at the door that seemed so much further away this morning.

“Let’s get cleaned up,” she told herself, encouragingly.

Then, she took one step, lost her balance, and fell face first onto the floor.

“Oof,” she said, climbing up the bed to get back on her tiny feet. “Need to take it slow until I get used to this height.” She immediately forgave herself for feeling like a clumsy toddler, though. After all, anyone would struggle with walking after losing four feet of height overnight.

Taking one deliberate step after another, she started to get the rhythm of walking at this height. It was more of a penguin waddle than a walk, but she felt less unsteady doing it. Unfortunately, it was an achingly slow way to move. I must have taken her almost a minute to travel from her bed to her door.

Opening the door was a challenge in itself as her arms were now just barely long enough to touch the top of her head. With the door knob at the same height, she had to stretch a little to reach it. Then, it was a struggle to grip the knob in her little hand and turn it. Finally, she managed to escape her bedroom.

After another long walk to the bathroom, she encountered a new problem.

“How do I reach the sink?” She asked herself. “No, how DID I reach the sink when I used to be this height?”

She walked over to the bathroom closet and found the stool that had been gathering dust in there since she had entered junior high. She positioned it in front of the sink, climbed up on it, and got a look at her face in the mirror.

If her head had looked extra long yesterday, now it looked flattened like a pumpkin. “Oh no,” she said, resting her little hands on her rounded cheeks. “I look like an elephant sat on my head.”

She moved the stool to the toilet and climbed up on it to relieve herself. It was odd to feel her legs dangling from the seat, not able to reach the floor. She finished up, and then had to move the stool back to the sink to wash her hands.

Every simple thing she had to do had become a tedious chore. While yesterday, she had been too big to fit things properly, she was still able to reach everything she needed. Now, the world seemed to be scaled to fit giants compared to her. Nothing was easily in reach. Everything required extra steps to figure out a way to use it. For example, she had her shampoo on a high shelf in the shower. It was out of her diminished reach, so she had to find a brush and use that to knock it down. Then, it was a challenge to grab her towel and dry off. Eventually, she finished up the ordeal of cleaning herself.

After that, she waddled back to her bedroom and had to pick something to wear before heading next door. She grabbed some underwear, which still fit her fine, and her shortest shorts. Her t-shirt hung down past her knees, but it made for a good dress. She pulled out her oldest pair of sandals from her closet, which were still too big for her tiny feet. Then, she felt ready to head out into the world.

***

Although Lori knew to expect the walk to be more difficult than it had been before, the journey to the front door of the neighboring house was much longer than she had expected. First of all, she had to survive the descent down the stairs. Each step was almost half as high as her legs, meaning she had no way to walk normally down them. She had to cling to the railing as she lowered herself down the stairs, one at a time. By the time she reached the ground floor, she was already exhausted. Next, she had to find another stool to reach the deadbolt in the front door. After a search, she located one, used it to unlock the door, and managed to overcome the challenge of leaving her house. Traversing the front lawn was slow but relatively easy.

Lori could not reach the doorbell to George’s front door, so she knocked her little knuckles on the door as loudly as she could. After a brief wait, the door swung open, and she was greeted by the sight of a giant-looking teen boy gaping at her in shock.

“Wow,” he said. “I thought you might be exaggerating when you said you were that small.”

“I only wish I was,” she replied.

He stepped back to let her enter and watched her struggle with the step up into the house, seemingly uncertain if he should try to help or not. She got inside on her own and waddled forward enough to let him shut the door.

“Do you mind if we do the magic stuff downstairs this time?” she asked. “I don’t think I can make it up another staircase right now.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll go grab my things.” He ran off and she heard his heavy footsteps ascend the stairs and rush to his room.

Lori entered his living room, pulled a throw pillow from the couch, and sat on it like a beanbag chair, letting out a big sigh, being able to rest at last.

***

“I still don’t know why this happened,” George said as he finished examining Lori with various crystals and other random magical jewelry.

Lori replied, “You’ve got to have some idea at least, right?”

“Well,” he said, setting down some bronze microscope-looking thing and staring out the window for a moment. “I don’t think the problem was the spell I cast yesterday. I can’t detect anything wrong with what it did. It performed as it was supposed to.”

“Then,” she said, gesturing to her short body. “Why?”

“The problem has to be with the original spell that made you grow in the first place. I still don’t understand how I cast that on you. If I can figure that out, then I’ll know how to fix you. However, until I can make sense of that first spell, I don’t want to try anything else.”

“What?” she said. “You can’t just cast another spell to make me taller?”

He shook his head. “I might only make things worse if I’m not careful. Only after I understand what is happening to you will I be able to help you.”

Lori sighed, looking down at her diminutive body. “How long is that going to take?”

George stood up and said, “I’ll do some research in my school’s library. There’s bound to be something in there that can explain this.”

Lori got to her little feet and asked, “What am I supposed to do until then?”

“Just go about your day normally,” he said. “The glamor spell should mean most people will be unaware of how you’ve changed.”

Lori checked the cuckoo clock in the hall. Through some miracle, she still had just enough time to make it to the bus stop before the bus arrived. She would not have her bag with her, but she doubted she could even lift it now.

“Alright,” she said, waddling to the door. “Let me know as soon as you have it all figured out. Okay?”

“I will,” he assured her as he opened the door to let her out.

They said their goodbyes and Lori shuffled along as fast as she could to the corner, making it there with just a minute to spare.

To be continued...