Gina poured out some orange juice for herself only to find the carton empty. She shook it with disgust, as if that would dislodge any hidden remains, then shouted out the kitchen, âAshley! Weâre out of juice!â
âWhat?â Ashleyâs faint voice shouted back from her room. Gina slammed the empty carton into recycling and opened the fridge again.
âDonât just put empty cartons back in the fridge, you asshole!â It was a futile scolding, but one she was obligated to give. For the principle of the matter.
The fridge was woefully devoid of drinks. Well, except for a small glass bottle labeled âAshleyâs,â which meant it was off limits, but really you could argue that Ashley owed her a drink and therefore, by proxy, this was hers. Grabbing the bottle and tearing off the saran wrap on the top (Ashley must have thrown away the cap without even finishing it), Gina chugged the dark blue liquid and started washing the bottle before recycling it.
As she washed it, the bottle kept threatening to slip out of her hands, forcing her to shift her grip constantly. Gina frowned, carefully swirling the water inside. The bottle hadnât felt particularly slick or anything and she wasnât even using soap, but she could still feel the glass sliding against her skin. Staring at it, it almost looked like it was expanding. Which was weird, right? Wasnât it metal that expanded in hot water? And she wasnât even using hot water anyways â
Ginaâs elbows suddenly hit the sink counter and she dropped the bottle and stepped back. And saw that there was something horribly wrong about everything.
Her sleeves drooped, swinging around as she recoiled; her jeans were piling at her feet; under them, she could feel her socks sag and flop when she stumbled, almost stepping straight out of them. Her surroundings werenât any more comforting, looking as oversized as her clothes. And getting more oversized as she watched. The sink was approaching chest height, passing it even, and there wasnât any sign of it slowing.
Gina screamed.
Ashley pounded into the kitchen, skidding to a stop at the entrance and looking much too tall herself, making Gina scream again and skitter backwards, step on her own pants, and fall straight on her butt, her shirt ballooning over her.
Ashley, looking panicked, said, âYou drank my potion?!â
âPotion?!â Gina echoed as she pulled her shirt off her head. Her breath caught for a moment as Ashley hastily stepped over her to check the fridge. She tried standing up, juggling her baggy clothes in her hands, though this only served to send her spiraling into further hysteria as she stood just in time to see the sink counter rise past her eyeline. âWhatâs happening? Oh god, am I dying?! Help me!â
Ashley glanced down at her, chewing her lip. âOkay so donât freak out,â she said, looking twice as big as she should have been. Gina pressed her back against a cabinet door and tried not to whimper as she caught the handle passing by her head from the corner of her eye. âSo. Um. Remember when I said I was going to school for pharmacology? That wasnât, like, a complete lie or anything, but, wellâŚI mean, like if you really think about it, witchcraft is like a type of pharmacology. Yeah? Yeah.â She paused. âAnyways, Iâm going to school for witchcraft.â
âWitches arenât a thing!â Gina shouted desperately. Her witch roommate, whose (okay, fine, she canât deny it) shrinking potion she had inadvertently drank, crossed her arms at her from above. Gina self-consciously clutched her shirt to herself. The back of her collar dipped down her back despite her efforts. âPlease, I need help!â
âYou need help,â Ashley muttered, running a hand through her hair as she strode back to her room. Gina yelped as the giant leg in front of her whooshed by and landed (relatively) eight feet away. âI donât have the homework I need to turn in.â
âHomework?!â Gina chased after Ashley as best as she could. Her shirt was now too much of a burden, crumpled around her like a small camping tent, and she tripped over a crease and rolled right out of her collar, fully nude. Despite her current frantic situation, the sheer embarrassment overturned her priorities enough for her to hesitate and consider how to get her shirt to cover her again, before she remembered that she didnât have the time and sprinted to Ashleyâs room instead.
Ashley had already made it inside her room and was clanging about. âYeah, I didnât make extras because I didnât think that someone would drink my homework! Do you know how long these â well, no, you donât, but they take an hour to brew!â
It took a minute to cross a distance that Ashley had covered in seconds. Gina paused to lean against Ashleyâs doorway. At least she had the consideration (or the absentmindedness) to leave it open. âBut you canât leave me like this! Iâm shrinking! What if it doesnât stop?!â
Ashley waved a hand dismissively without looking at her. âDonât be dramatic, youâve stopped already. It only shrinks you by a factor of four.â
Gina looked around. âOh.â Still, she easily regained her bluster. âBut I have to get to work! You need to make, I dunno, a growth potion?â
âNo,â said Ashley, turning around and pointing a wooden spoon down at her. Even if she wasnât currently able to kick her across a room, the look in her eyes would have been enough to make Gina retreat a few steps. Confronted by both, she retreated six. âI need to remake the shrink potion so I can turn it in to a professor that already hates me.â Seeing Ginaâs shivering form, Ashleyâs expression softened. âLook. Itâs fine. Just call in sick for a â â
âDonât witches have spells? Just get a wand or something and,â Gina ended her sentence with an incomprehensible gesture.
Her roommate frowned. âYou arenât listening â â
âAshley!â
At first, when a dark look crossed Ashleyâs face, Gina was afraid that she was just going to ignore her. But then Ashley sighed and stomped over to her, which was terrifying, but in a relieving sort of way.
With a hand on her doorknob, Ashley glared down, muttered a phrase that Gina couldnât decipher, and pointed at her. Immediately, Gina grew back to normal at a dizzying rate, the sudden burst of friction burning her feet a little. After anxiously measuring herself against the doorframe, Gina turned to Ashley to thank her, only for Ashley to slam the door in her face.
âThanks,â she said anyways, before collecting her clothes from the kitchen and running out the door.
It took four hours for Gina to stop thinking about the morningâs events, and that was mostly because of lunch break. Food had a way of refreshing the mind. Thinking about it, she hadnât managed to eat a proper breakfast before the, uh, accident, but now that she was full, her mood improved significantly. Of course, there was a lot to unpack about everything she had just learned. And she would probably have to talk with Ashley about the wholeâŚwitch thing. And hopefully Ashley wouldnât have to kill her to keep magic a secret or something. But all of that could wait until work was over. She hadnât made much progress in the coding errors she was supposed to fix today what with all those distracting thoughts and needed to make up for lost time.
Gina cracked her knuckles and got typing. She made it for half an hour before getting distracted again, though this time it was with her typos. For whatever reason, she was starting to fumble. A lot. She could excuse a mistype once in a while, but at this point it seemed every key she pressed she was accidentally pressing another one. Her fingers felt clumsy and swollen against the keys, and was it getting hard to breathe?
Gina pushed herself away from her desk with a sinking feeling. Now that she was looking up from her work, she noticed that her head was inching up over her cubicleâs walls.
âSomething the matter?â Simon asked her from the next cubicle. âYou need to go somewhere? If itâs an emergency, I can tell Daniel for you.â
He thinks Iâm standing up, Gina realized. As she unwedged herself from her chair, she said, âYeah, thanks,â and half-jogged to the womenâs room, slouching the entire way.
Nobody was in there, which was great, though Gina wasnât happy about how easily she was able to tell, considering she could basically see right into the stalls. Sitting against the door, she managed to slide her phone out of her pocket. She could hear the seams of her shirt straining against her expanding form as she made the call.
âHaving problems?â Ashley said casually as soon as she answered.
âAshley, thereâs something â you already know whatâs happening, donât you.â
âYou really shouldâve listened to me.â
âOkay, yes, excuse me for freaking out and making bad decisions the first time I experience getting shrunk by my roommate!â Gina hissed. Or tried to. It really was more like a wheeze. Her collar was really choking her.
âHey, donât pin that on me. You got shrunk by a potion. That you drank on your own.â
âYou made the potion! Ow, fuck!â
âWhatâs wrong?â
âA button just fucking shot itself in my eye. Hang on,â Gina said. Cupping her increasingly smaller phone in one hand, she carefully aimed her pinky and tapped it. âOkay, itâs getting hard to hold this to my ear, so youâre on speakerphone. Look, can you just tell me why this is happening?â
âWhat? You havenât figured it out?â
âWhy would I be able to figure it out?!â Gina gasped as, almost simultaneously, all her clothes gave up around her, a symphony of rips that represented the destruction of about eighty dollars. At least she could breathe easily again. âI donât know if you realize this, but magic rules arenât obvious to me!â
âThe potion wore off, dummy.â
âHuh?â Gina cringed as she started feeling the cool floor tiles on her butt.
Ashley sighed. âPotion effects are temporary because we digest them. Thatâs why I told you it was fine, because youâd grow back anyways. Itâs like drinking alcohol. You get sober eventually.â
That did make a lot of sense.
âOkay. Got it. Now I know,â Gina said, slouching lower as her head approached the ceiling. Her legs were still able to fit in the space between the stalls and the sinks, but that was changing very quickly. She hugged her knees to her chest, careful to keep her postage stamp of a phone in the center of her palm. âCan you please come over and help me? I donât want to outgrow the room!â
âDonât be dramatic. When you drank the potion, you lost...what, four and a half feet? Youâre just getting that back now. So youâre gonna be ten feet six at the most.â
âThatâs not too bad,â she said, nervously hitching a leg over the toilets. âBut Iâm definitely bigger than that. I canât even fit my hand through the door.â
âOh.â The phone went silent. âThatâs not a good sign.â
âYeah, no kidding!â
âI donât know how that could happen, thatâs definitely more than double what you lost,â Ashley mumbled to herself, not listening. Gina sighed and let her talk, shifting onto her side. She morosely picked at the tiny scraps of fabric stuck to her body and flicked them off. âHow can you be growing that much just from a potion wearing off? All thatâs supposed to happen is the effects being reversed, essentially â unlessâŚâ
âWhat?â Gina said sullenly.
â...the effect of the potion was reducing a personâs size by a factor of four...normally, for you, that meant losing the four and a half feet, but then you had me use a spell to make you six feet again before the potionâs effect wore off!â There were vague sounds of clattering, as if Ashley was throwing several things into a bag and running outside. âOf course digesting it isnât just undoing what itâs done! Itâs reversing what itâs done! Itâs just that usually means the same thing because nobodyâs been stupid enough to undo a potionâs effect with a spell! So of course when a potion that shrinks you by a factor of four wears off, you grow by a factor of four!â
âIâm gonna be twenty-four feet tall?!â Gina shrieked, sitting up, only to hit her head on the ceiling, causing plaster to dust her face. Her foot kicked out reflexively as she suffered a coughing fit and knocked a stall door off its hinges. When she finally managed to clear her throat, her phone was missing from her hand. âOh god,â she moaned, trying to scan her body for a place that her phone could have bounced off to, hopefully unbroken. She thought she heard some sort of buzzing noise somewhere around the folds of her belly, but then it abruptly stopped. At least it looked like she was done growing. And Ashley sounded like she was coming. Though it was ambiguous whether she was coming to actually help.
Half an hour later, there was a knock. âItâs me,â Ashleyâs voice called out, and Gina dutifully tried to shift herself and unblock the door. âI mean, I donât think anybodyâs written a paper on this,â she babbled as she squeezed in, gesturing wildly as she crawled over Ginaâs arm. âThis could â well, I wouldnât say revolutionize anything, but this opens up like a whole field of study at the very least! I donât think anybodyâs done anything with abusing, like, the temporary-ness of effects with permanent -- â
âAshley.â
âYes, yes, okay.â Ashley waved a hand at her in irritation, muttering a different phrase that was similarly indecipherable, and Gina almost cracked her head on the floor when the wall retreated from her back.
Once again, the spell worked faster than the potion, though this wasnât as fast as growing had been. Probably because she had a lot more ground to cover than back then. She sat up, happy to not have to duck, found her phone when it tumbled between her legs, remembered that she was absolutely naked, and curled up to conceal herself, blushing.
Ashley laughed. âYou didnât seem that bothered when your tit was bigger than my eye.â
âShut up,â Gina snapped, turning towards her. âThatâs â um.â
Ashley smirked down at her, which was natural since she was still sitting down. But Gina was pretty sure that she shouldnât be smirking that far down at her. Gina jumped to her feet, finding herself only standing as tall as Ashleyâs chest and dwindling even more. She was shedding plaster dust during her descent, but most of it was still sticking to her skin and a lot of it was decidedly no longer dust, more like pebbles. There was a stray piece of toilet paper that must have gotten caught on her when she was boxed up in the bathroom that was now curling around her leg, engulfing it.
âAshley,â she said, mouth dry, âI think you overshot it.â
âNah, you still got a bit to go.â Looking satisfied with the trajectory of her work, Ashley started collecting the shreds of Ginaâs clothes near the door and tossing them in a plastic bag that Gina only now noticed she was carrying. âOtherwise, you canât fit in my purse.â
âYouâre kidnapping me!?â
Ashley laughed and crouched down next to her. âItâs not kidnapping if Iâm taking you home. I mean, your other option is to go out with no clothes -- â
âThis is better,â Gina said, battling the toilet paper off. She watched the tiles under her grow to the size of cobblestones. âUh. But, arenât I getting too smallâŚ?â
âHey, I donât think Iâd be able to hide you if youâre over a foot tall.â Ashleyâs hands scooped up Gina from under her shoulders and she yelped, kicking instinctively. Not that her feet could reach anything. Ashley didnât even seem to notice, seamlessly shifting her grip on Gina to one hand as she turned on a sink with the other. It was disorienting to find herself go from being the size of an arm to being the size of a phone in one second, almost as disorienting as suddenly being thrust under a torrent of water and then rolled up in a hand towel before being dumped into a bag. âAnyways, be quiet. We wouldnât want anybody to search my bag because you made a weird noise.â
Well, thought Gina as she swung in Ashleyâs purse, at least it looks like she wonât have to kill me to keep magic a secret.