Impractical Magic II

I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before. Zed can’t talk, but he can still write! I hate how stupid I am sometimes. Once Zed and I realized this, I started to try and get some ideas out of him for Trevor, who has gotten maybe a tenth of an inch taller in the past 2 weeks. At this rate, he won’t get back to his normal height until he’s almost forty-three years old. I don’t care how “young” some people can feel at forty three, being stuck so small for twenty six years is not a way to spend your life. He won’t even hit five feet until he’s forty and keep in mind, he’s not just short, he’s small. At 20, he’ll have the stunning physique of a 4’5” fourth grader. Even at thirty, he’ll still only look like a seventh grader. He’s not going to be able to get a job, because no one will believe him when he says how old he is. He’s not going to be able to have a family unless he’s lucky enough to find someone with an Oprah opposites attract type physique that doesn’t mind that he’s the emotional equivalent of a five-year-old on acid going through menopause. He’s pretty much screwed for any semblance of a normal life. I haven’t told Trevor about all of this, of course, and I probably won’t if he keeps going at this rate. He’s been (if possible) even more emotional lately. This is, I’m sure, due in some part to the fact that he’s living in a mason jar in my purse (except when it’s safe to have him out), but I think it might also be because they don’t make his medications in his size. If we tried to, first of all, get the pills from his house, we’d get in trouble, let alone getting the right dosage for an inch high, emotionally unstable teenager. Trevor’s mother has long since put out a missing person’s report on him, though I think that she has convinced herself that Trevor ran off with his gay uncle to help him find a partner, and she has thankfully not investigated further or told the police of her suspicions. I really feel sorry for her, but what am I supposed to do about it? Tell her that her son is an inch high and living in my purse? They’d put me away and put Trevor in a lab to study. That wouldn’t be a good end for either of us. At least Zed and I know what happened to him and can try to find a reverse spell for it. If he’s stuck in a lab, he’ll never be able to get out.
That reminds me. Zed and I have been “talking” a lot and have finally decided that whatever after-effects of a counterspell might occur, they were worth it if Trevor could at least go back to something like a normal life. I’m thinking that since we were trying to make Trevor stronger in the first place, we should try a spell of the same fashion to try and “weaken” him. If there are any effects that are worse than what we’re dealing with now, then we’ll just do the original spell again and start all over. We decided that since I’m not busy doing both Kali’s homework and mine this weekend (it’s the weekend after finals, so all of our teachers went easy) that we’d do it now. I forgot, incidentally, to tell you about Kali at this point. She has finally made it to fourth grade now, so she at least knows basic things and remembers what she’d learned up until then so she can understand and respond like a “normal” person when I ask her something. She still isn’t ready to go back to school yet, though, so I’m still stuck doing her homework. She can at least live at home now. I pay her an allowance every week to pretend to her parents that she’s seventeen. She has great fun doing it. She says it makes her feel ‘grown up’. Go figure, a seventeen year old needs to pretend to be seventeen to feel grown up. You’d think that the c-cup and periods at age nine would help, but I guess not. I really miss being able to talk to her as an equal, not as I would to my youngest sister. I guess I can’t really ask for much for me, though. I have to try and fix this mess. Still.
Anyway, back to this weekend at, once again, my house, this time in my room so no one will get suspicious about the miniature Trevor I’m going to be spinning around in circles with. Zed and I came up with a new incantation and think that I should just do everything backwards. Instead of grabbing Trevor’s feet, I’m going to be holding his hands and instead of going clockwise (which hadn’t seemed to matter in the first one, but might this time), I would go counterclockwise in 6 and a half circles. We told Trevor that we were going to try and do a reverse, just because we thought he should know. He’s been even more like a small child in the past few days, like being taken care of and being so small has actually regressed him. We got a meek little squeak of an “Okay Rory.” from him and that was it. I decided to get this over with as quickly as possible. As annoying as he had been before this had happened, I wanted Trevor back. I missed having my friends.
“Okay, Trevor, I need you to hold onto my fingers so I can spin you around for a minute, okay Sweetie?” Oh, geez, we really needed to get this over with. That’s probably why Trevor was acting so much like a kid; the mother in me was treating him like one.
“Okie dokie, Rory.” Trevor replied with at least a little more oomph than the last time, though no less childishness.
I started chanting the new spell and turning slowly around, so I wouldn’t end up flinging Trevor against a wall or something.
“Worg llahs htgnerts sih spots eh as, og lliw pmirhs eht dnuor dna dnuor!” I said as quietly as I could. I counted out the turns as I spun, “One half, six, five, four, three, two, one.” As I said the last word, I closed my eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to see what had happened to Trevor after this one, but of course, I had to, especially since Zed was urging me to look. I opened my eyes and couldn’t believe what I saw.
Trevor looked fine at first, (I think that he may just have fallen asleep. Either that or spinning him at his small size had given him a concussion) but there was something wrong. Then I realized what it was. His hands and feet were gone! I stooped over his unconscious form and looked at him more carefully. Now that I’d had a closer look, I realized that his hands and feet weren’t gone, they were still the same size as they had been before we’d done the counterspell. I don’t know how we managed this one, but I’m sure glad that Trevor wasn’t awake right then. I almost hoped for a concussion, although then we’d have to take him to a doctor and explain why he suddenly had semi-microscopic extremities. If Trevor did have a concussion, thought, then there was a chance that he’d have forgotten what we’d done and maybe it would have knocked his brain out of toddler mode. That might be a little too much to hope for, but it would be very helpful.
I looked down at Trevor and decided that we had to move him somewhere. He couldn’t just sleep on the floor, so I turned to Zed and asked him to help me get him onto my bed. Zed rolled his eyes and then nodded. He knew that we might need to restrain him when he woke up so that one, he wouldn’t try and walk and end up squashing his own feet and two, so that he’d be in a safe place if we had to leave. If need be we could lock him in my room so none of my family members would stumble across him. If I know Trevor, even with basically no feet or hands he’d try to get out and go home, especially if he was still somehow affected mentally.
We moved Trevor and then invited Kali in after warning her that she wouldn’t like what she saw. She came in and immediately started talking a mile a minute like any other nine-year-old.
“Like, oh my God, guys, what happened to Trevor?” She asked. She’s literally still stuck in the nineties. “I’m, like, so totally serious here. What did you do, Aurora? Try and make it so he wouldn’t be able to get away from you?”
“No you little brat, we tried to get him back to normal! Do you really think that I want all of my friends to be too young or stupid to talk to me, or to not be able to talk to me at all? You’re, like, so totally in twelfth grade. Do you realize that? I know you think that you’re nine or whatever, but you are seventeen years old and about to graduate high school! Do you think that I want to be doing your homework along with my own, explaining to our teachers why you start giggling uncontrollably when they start talking about something like Homo erectus or Dick Van Dyke? NO! I didn’t want any of this! Do you remember that, Kali? Do you remember how this whole thing started? And how much I didn’t want to do it? You get to go around all day and sit while I take your notes and do your homework so that if you ever do get back to being the person I knew you won’t have to take your senior year over again and what do I get? Nothing.
“You remember going to school in Pennsylvania and going with Gramma to Pittsburgh, but you don’t remember me. You don’t remember going to the mall in the summer without any money and just trying on clothes all day. You don’t remember staying up all night at my house before the Lord of the Rings movie marathon and falling asleep while everyone else watched the movies. You don’t remember being anything more than a little girl who is stuck in her past. You don’t even realize that you are living in your past. I can’t take this anymore Kali! I want my best friend back the way she was, and I want Trevor back the way he was, and I want to be able to talk to Zed again. So no, I didn’t do this on purpose. I did this to try and fix a mistake made by someone else a long time ago.”
“I don’t care. I’m going home.” She started to storm out, but then she caught a glimpse of how dark it was outside. “Um, Zed? Could you maybe, like, walk me home? It’s really dark and I’m afraid I might get kidnapped or something by one of those city people that my grandma always talks about.” Zed looked a little skeptical, as if he thought Kali might be lying or something, but then he remembered that she was nine and gave a nod of assent. They left the room and I looked back to Trevor. Now I really didn’t know what to do. Even if she was just a kid, I still felt better when Kali was around, just because having her around reminded me of when she’d been herself. I hope so much that she’ll get back to normal soon, because I don’t think I can take this for much longer.
“Ungh, what happened?” Trevor sat up, trying to hold his head. It was horrible. He kept trying to put his hand up to his forehead, but it was (for obvious reasons) not working. After he’d realized that his hand wasn’t just asleep, but that it wasn’t there, he started to scream. Loudly.
“Oh God! What happened? Was I in a car accident or something? How did this happen? Oh God!” He looked around, taking in his surroundings. I could see it in his eyes as soon as he remembered where he was that I was going to be blamed for this. I started to explain before he could say anything else.
“Trevor, now stop. It’s okay, it’s just that spell we did. Just stay calm and I’ll explain everything to you, okay? What’s the last thing you remember before waking up just now?”
“Um, we were at the mall and Kali was getting some clothes. Why? Have I been out that long?”
“Okay. I see that I have a lot of explaining to do. Let’s just start from the top. First of all, it’s November.”
“November? How long have I been asleep? Was I in a coma or something?” I was glad to see that Trevor was at least (I think) back to his original mental capacity. If he was interrupting me and asking questions, he was at least less meek, let alone the fact that he knew what a coma was. An hour ago, I would have expected to maybe get a few of the ABC’s before he got too shy to continue. This was definitely a step in the right direction to getting him back to normal.
“No, you’ve been functioning, and by that I mean awake and responding, not necessarily anything else, for this whole time. I think that you may have a concussion. That’s probably why you’re having trouble remembering any of the stuff that I’m going to tell you. Understand?”
“Yes. Why do you keep treating me like I won’t understand you or something? As far as I know, I went to sleep yesterday and it was August and I had two hands. To me, nothing has changed but that. Judging by your apparent amazement at me being able to form a coherent sentence, I can conclude that something happened. I’m seriously trying not to panic right now, and I don’t panic, so please, just get to the point and stop treating me like I won’t understand it.”
“Fine.” I said with way too much excitement at his being able to talk than I’m sure he wanted to see me express at that point. “First, do you remember your memory spell? The one you were working on last summer?”
“Yeah, I just finished it yesterday. Or the day before I can last remember, whenever that was.”
“Okay. Well, probably a few days after you finished it, you tried it on Zed.”
“Really? Did it work?”
“No. At least not yet. You got rid of his speech centers and then tried to restore them with the spell. He still can’t say more than one sentence an hour. Keep in mind that it’s been three months.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Anyway, after Zed seemed to be getting better, we tried to test it on Kali. As you’ve probably figured out by the fact that she isn’t here, it hasn’t worked yet on her either.”
“What did I do to her? Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s fine physically, and she is getting better.”
“If she’s fine physically, then what happened to her mentally? I didn’t turn her into a dog or a Christian or something did I?”
“No, you just set her back a little.”
“What?”
“You sent her back to her childhood. I guess the theory was that some Alzheimer’s patients live in the past, so you put her in hers and tried to bring her back. She’s still only in fourth grade. This is at least an improvement on the original, though. When you first got done with her, she thought she was four and a half.”
“Oh.” Trevor looked to be deep in thought for a minute or two. He tried, out of habit, to lean on his hands, but that didn’t work so well. When he spoke again, I could tell that the scientist in him had taken over and he had once again forgotten his (hopefully temporary) handicap in the interest of studying his “mistakes.”
“So, she still looks the same, right? She doesn’t look as young as she thinks she is?”
“Yeah, that was fortunate at least. When she’s at home, her parents don’t notice and when we’re out, people just think she’s a little slow. It would have been really bad if she’d looked as young too. Can you imagine what her parents would have done?” Trevor grimaced and then laughed nervously.
“Her father probably would have chased us away and then, when he realized that it was actually her, ‘raised her right.’ I shudder to think of a Kali raised by her father and stepmother. That would be horrible. Not to mention, we’d be thirteen years older than her.”
“Uh huh. That’s why I was glad you’d just screwed up her head. Now she’s just growing up again, about a year a week now that it’s sped up and gotten pretty regular.”
“At least that’s good.” He said.
Trevor and I went on for a while, talking about what Zed and Kali had done in the midst of their respective mishaps and then, when I’d gotten to a point when I couldn’t avoid saying something about Trevor’s condition(s) when I was talking about the other two, he seemed to read my mind and asked just the question I'd been dreading.
“So, where did I come into all of this? I know from some of the stories you’ve told me that I was around and fine until a few weeks ago, so what happened?”
“I was wondering when you’d ask that. The thing is, before I start, that you are very persuasive when it comes to getting me to do things I don’t really want to do. You’re the same way with Kali. That’s what started this whole thing in the first place is you convincing us all that doing these little experiments would further science and help people. You wanted all of this, so please don’t be mad at me for going along with you.”
“It’s okay, Ror, I won’t.” He leaned over and gave me a little hug. “I just want to know what happened. Maybe if you tell me, something will jog my memory and I’ll remember everything. I won’t be mad. I know myself, and even if I don’t remember exactly what happened, I know what I must have said to get you to do this. I love you, Ror, and even if I get mad, it won’t be for long because I know that you’d never try to do something to me unless you were coerced by me.”
“You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that Trevor.”
“What, that I’m your friend or that I won’t blame you?” He said with a bit of a chuckle.
“Neither. I’m glad that you’re calling me ‘Ror’ again. For a while it was, well, it wasn’t Ror.”
“Please explain.” He said, clearly wanting to hear more. Trevor had called me Ror since we were little. It had been a big thing, especially when we’d been really young, to have somebody call me by my ‘imaginary’ name. He only even used that fully when he was really mad at me or really scared. He also knew that being called ‘Rory’ was definitely not what I’d intended when I’d chosen the name. It had completely unnerved me to be called that by him. Being referred to as Ror again when he woke up was my first real sign that he’d be okay, that he was at least my friend again, even if he was disabled for a while. His mind, I knew, was fully returned when he called me Ror.
“Did you hear me? What did I call you if it wasn’t Ror?”
“You called me,” I hesitated a bit. He knew what ‘Rory’ meant too, “Rory.” Trevor gasped.
“Oh, God, what happened?"
“Well, while we were waiting for Kali and Zed to get better, you had me try a totally different spell on you. I don’t know if you remember working on it at all, but it was the one that’s supposed to make a person stronger. We tried it and it ends up that it shrinks you.”
“Shrinks you? What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said, it shrinks you. You ended up being like an inch tall and after two weeks you’d only grown another tenth of an inch.”
“So how did I go from shrunken to calling you Rory?”
“I think that might have had something to do with the fact that one, you didn’t have any of your medication, and two, you were living in a mason jar with only me taking care of you.”
“You had me in a mason jar? Did you at least poke holes in the top? Maybe I called you Rory because I was running out of oxygen!”
“Hey! You said you wouldn’t be mad!”
“You’re right. Maybe I should just shut up and let you tell the story of a helpless me in a mason jar with no air!”
“Do you want to know or not?”
“Sorry. I do. Want to hear it, I mean. I’ll just shut up and complain later. I know that I probably forced you to do this, so I’ll try not to get mad. I don’t know what’s wrong, but everything seems like such a big deal, even though I know that somehow you got me out and it shouldn’t be. I don’t like this being ‘emotional’ stuff. No wonder you guys invented Midol.”
“Just calm down and listen. If you count to five, it’ll help a little. It always works for me. Anyway, you started acting like a little kid, even worse than Kali was at that point, and I think you kind of saw me as your mom. I think that the ‘mommy’ thing turned into ‘Rory’ and you just kind of imprinted me, like a baby bird does when it hatches. Even when you were first shrunken you started crying at the smallest thing. You started freaking out and yelling about how your cat could use you for a mint or something. Or how you’d get squished. That was a big one. I think that you just kind of over-loaded and reverted back to being little when there was always someone bigger to take care of you. You don’t know how much it scared me when you called me that. You were the last one to leave me alone and untouched by some kind of demented spell and when you called me Rory, I thought I was alone for good.”
“Wow, Ror, I didn’t know I meant that much.”
“Yeah, neither did I.”
We sat in silence for a while, just kind of liking being close to each other. When one of us finally spoke again, it was because Trevor had realized that he was at least bigger now and wanted to know the rest of the story.
“So, I get all of the stuff with the shrinking and the regression and everything, but how did I get back to this size? And what happened to my hands?’
“And feet. You’re feet are like that too.”
“Great,” he said, pulling my blanket away from his ankles with the stumps of his arms and looking down to where his feet should have been, and were to some extent. “So now I can’t walk and I can’t do anything. Perfect.”
“Yeah, I don’t know how that happened yet. Maybe you’ll have some ideas when you hear about it. See, when we did the counterspell, we just did the reverse of what we did the first time. I picked you up by your hands instead of your feet, you were facing down over up, I spun the other direction, and I even said the incantation backwards.”
“Hang on, you said the incantation backwards? Completely backwards, or just the words in reverse order?”
“Completely. Instead of ‘Round and round the shrimp will go, as he stops his strength shall grow,’ I said ‘Worg llahs htgnerts sih spots eh as, og lliw pmirhs eht dnuor dna dnuor.’”
“That’s where you screwed up, then. Did you say everything exactly as you just told me?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice that instead of ‘sa’ the second time, you still said ‘as’?”
“No, I didn’t. Did I? God, I’m so sorry. If I’m the one that screwed up, this,” I pointed at his arms and legs, “is all my fault. God, Trevor, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Now that we know what’s wrong we can fix it.”
“That’s exactly what I told Zed before I tried to fix it the first time.”
“And you guys almost did it. We just need to go slow and try again. I think that we should just start with getting back to where you were before it got screwed up. You need to do the spell that shrank me again, except that instead of as, say sa. That should put me back to where I was and then you can do the other one again and make sure it’s all right.”
“But what happens if it doesn’t work again? And you know that you’ll probably go back to being a toddler again. I don’t know if I can do this alone. Maybe we should just leave this alone for a while and try to figure out a way to just get your hands and feet back to normal.”
“No. Ror, I know that I probably won’t be there for you when I’m small again, if the same happens as you say did last time, but if you can last for a little while longer and do the spell correctly, then I should be back and completely normal in the next hour. I know it’ll be hard, Ror, but when it’s all done, I’ll be fine and I can try and help you with Kali and Zed. You just need to do this one thing and then it’ll be okay. All right?”
“Yeah. But Trevor, if you don’t get back for a while, I want you to know that I love you and I’ll do all that I can to get you back. Just try and stay seventeen while you’re small. Maybe if you consciously do it, now that we know what’ll happen, you can stay at least a little more coherent than you were the first time.”
“That’s what I was thinking. If I specifically try to stay ‘older’ then I should be able to. Magic is strong, but I think that may just have been because I was like that for so long.”
“Okay. I can do this. We can do this. Just, let me know, okay? When you’re small, let me know that you’re all right.”
“How?”
“Call me Ror.”
"Okay. Ror?"
"Yeah?"
"I don’t feel so good." With that, Trevor fainted into my lap. I was glad he hadn't been able to stand up, because I wouldn't have been able to catch him that quickly if he had been. He definitely had a concussion. This spell was going to be especially dangerous for him now. The brain swelling from the first time spinning him when he was small would probably get a lot worse when I had to do it again. I could either wait for him to get a little more stable before I shrank him again or I could shrink him and let him get better while he was smaller. Either way, I didn't like my options. I decided to just get it over with and shrink him. I did the spell again exactly as he'd told me to and he seemed to be back to normal in his proportions. He had all the right parts in all the right places and all the right sizes. That, at least, was a good thing. When he woke up again, I told him what I'd done.
"I didn't know if you were going to wake up any time soon when you fainted, so I just did the spell the way you'd told me to before you did. It seems to have worked. Do you feel any different?"
"No, but I don't th-think I really would have last time either. The m-mm-madman doesn’t realize that he's mad. Keep an eye on me and t-t-tell me right away if you notice any change in my behavior. Even if I don't seem to acknowledge it, somewhere I'll n-n-know what you're saying." He stumbled a little on my hand. "I still get d-dizzy from that concuth, sorry, concuthion. I can't even say it right. This is all very frustrating for me. The lisp comes and goesth. See? I don't like it. It's like I know what I want to say, but it doeth, it doesn't come out right. You were right not to try the sthpell again when I was thtill unconsciouth. Who knowth what damage it’d do to my brain if we try it again too soon. I think I need to sit down." And he did. His legs just kind of collapsed and he didn't say anything else. I took the opportunity to set him down on my bed and go get some stuff for his mason jar. After the outburst the first time I'd told him about it, Trevor had had no problem with the living in his jar. He agreed that it was the safest place for him at his size and didn't complain. Now that he can help, the jar is starting to look like a decent place to live. His furniture (a couch and a bed) is made of cotton balls that are attached with wax to the bottom of the jar so they can't move when the jar gets jostled. We took markers and made everything really bright and cheery, which I think really helped in his not reverting again. I also think the colors give his brain a little needed stimulation, which seems to be speeding up his recovery. When he first woke up, the lisp had been present constantly. He was very easily confused too. Trevor, our resident math, science, and computer geek got confused when I explained to Kali what multiplication was. The 5 times 5 is the same as 5+5+5+5+5 thing didn't fly very well. I was kind of worried at that point, but he's gotten better since then. I think that he'll be able to get started learning what he needs to pass Pre-Calculus pretty soon. That was as good a sign as any that he was getting better.
I came back over to my bed with a small piece of fabric for Trevor's bed, and saw that he'd passed out again. This was another thing remaining from the concussion. The fainting spells and blackouts that had plagued him from the beginning were still just as frequent and lasted just as long. Sometimes he would seem just fine but when I'd mention something that had happened during that time later in the day, he would have no idea what I was talking about. It would be like he'd never been there. We figured that it was just another part of the concussion. I asked him about it when he woke up.
“I don't know what hhhappenss.” he slurred. His speech is still really bad. “I just don't remember what happened in a certain space of time. It'll be morning then it'll all of a sudden be nighttime and I can’t remember any of the time in between. I suppose it's like when you fall asleep and it feels like you just shut your eyes for a minute but you've slept for hours. It's like when I faint except that I don't wake up, I just blink and it's hours later, plus, you say that I seem totally fine the whole time. I suppose it's just more memory loss. Go figure, the one of the three of us in the group that got spells cast on them and the one that didn't get the memory spell cast actually needs it. Now that's what I c-ca-call, ugh, that stupid ssstutter's coming back.”
“What you call irony?”
“Yeah. I hate the speech part of this. I didn’t uuuused to slur and stutter and have a lisp all in th-the same thententhe. You see what I mean? I thound like a druunk with a speech impeddiment. Either that or Sylvester the Cat. And whoever thought it was clever to put an 'eth' in lithp was just cruel.”
“I notice that too. It’s not as bad, though. When you first woke up after I shrank you again, I could barely understand you with all of the slurring. Can you say ‘concussion’ correctly yet?”
“I think ssso. I’ll at l-l-least try it. This ought to be funny. Concuthion. Nope. Let me t-t-try that again. Con-cuth. No. Concuth. Uh unh. Concussion. There, now I’ll n-n-never be able to say it right again, w-watch. Concuthion. See, t-t-told you."
"So, you're not really up to trying the spell again then are you?"
"Nope, not really."
"Okay, then. Listen, I've gotta leave for a little while to get some stuff. Are you going to be all right here by yourself?"
"Yeah, I think so. As long as you lock the door when you leave. If your mom and sister get home early then I don't want to be caught off guard. Is there any particular reason I'm not going with you this time?"
"No, not really. I'm just going to be gone for a while and after last time, I think that I should kind of let you take care of yourself for a while. Not to be mean or anything. Just so you don't get like you were again. I carried you around all the time in my purse and I think that that kind of contributed to the way you acted."
"That took you way too long to explain. Yes or no would have sufficed. See ya later, Ror."
"Sorry. Okay, see ya."
I left and locked the door behind me.
* * *

Thanks for reading. Yes there is more on the way. Please R&R and let me know if you have any ideas for what comes next.

-JessicaElaine