THE SIZE SORORITY WITCHES

EPISODE 1

CHAPTER 1:

Michael Fallon woke in a strange bed with a pounding headache. He looked around the room and tried to remember how he got there. It was a dorm room, possibly, and low-angle early morning sunlight streamed through the window. The last thing he remembered was being at the Green Lion last night. That wasn’t quite the last thing, but the images that did come to him came in flashes too bright for him to look at. Each little snapshot made his stomach flip-flop. Scenes of excessive drinking, spilling drinks, smoking when he wasn’t a smoker, of saying ignorant things, of embarrassing himself . . . There was a girl, a pretty, blonde-haired girl, and she seemed to like his style, arrogant as he may have seemed at first. Sometimes when he drank he came off angry; sometimes when he was angry he could be quite funny.

He sat up in the foreign bed, moving to put his feet on the floor. He hesitated, realizing now that he was completely naked. His penis shriveled, and balls scrunched to a tight bunch, he rested a hand to cover them and looked around. He was alone. His feet went to the floor, and he lay his forearms over his knees and hung his head. A throbbing ache worked its way up the muscles of his back, lashing through his neck, making his temples throb.

When he got the will, he lifted his head and regarded the room again. A girl’s room. That was a good sign. Maybe. He looked around, saw the things that girls decorated their rooms with. Though he didn’t think this was a dorm room. It seemed like a room in a house—not one he recognized from campus, more like a 200-year-old building that you’d find in the village. Maybe a frat house, maybe a sorority (hopefully), maybe a private apartment. Like he went home with that middle-aged bartender from The Speakeasy on the main street who was always winking at the college boys.

Next to him on the bedside table the screen of an iPad lit up. He shimmied himself along the edge of the mattress, saw the text that had come in. It read:

Emma: it looks like a button mushroom omg

Before the screen faded, he read above that:

Emma: his pubes are longer than his dick

That made him frown.

He stood, shakily, hips creaking from lack of movement and sleeping uncomfortably. One by one he found his items of clothing, all except one sock. Put on his underwear, his pants, his shirt and sweater. The screen of the iPad lit up again and he walked to it, reading:

Grace: you see why the condom wouldn’t stay on

Now he entered the hall, closing the door quietly behind him, stepped along the Oriental rug runner that lined the parquet floor. There was the sound of a hairdryer somewhere, a girl laughing loudly behind a closed door, two girls talking from the floor below.

He approached a set of stairs ahead of him. He was thinking now this really was a sorority. Sororities on campus were unmonitored by the university, not really welcome—Greek life being something that was meant to be off-campus. It left them somewhat ungoverned, and even the sororities got a little too wild sometimes. As he approached the top of the stairs a door opened behind him, and he turned to see a young Asian girl come out of the room, see him, smirk, then turn away. She wore a long T-shirt and sweatpants, bare feet in fuzzy slippers. He went down the stairs, and emerged in the foyer, looking to make a beeline out the front door.

A sultry voice to his right, said, “There he is,” slow and confident, demanding his attention.

He turned to see a beautiful blonde girl sitting at a dining room table by herself. The girl from last night. Grace? She sat in a dining room chair with arms, another chair pulled so she could rest her bare feet on it. She wore a long cotton nightshirt. In her hands was an iPhone, and she held it while her two thumbs tapped away messages to her friends. Slowly he entered the dining room, and she finished what she was saying with her thumbs, sent that off, lay the phone face down in her lap, saying, “Morning, Mike.”

“Oh,” he said, “You know me. That’s good.”

She said, “You don’t know me?”

“Do I?” he said.

“How insulting,” she said, her phone buzzing in her lap. She turned it to read the screen and smiled, then the phone went back down and she said, “I usually leave a good impression.”

“Did we . . .?”

“Fuck?”

“Yeah.”

She said, “No. We tried. You couldn’t keep a condom on; it kept slipping off. You seem like a nice guy, but I have to be safe.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, scratching the back of his head and looking sheepishly around the messy room. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem, tiger.”

“Did I . . . do anything else?”

“Else?”

“You know, did I . . .?”

“Go down on me?”

“Did I?”

“That’s where you fell asleep,” she said, laughing.

“Oh, man,” he sighed and put both his hands over his face and rubbed his eyes. “God, I’m so embarrassing.”

She said, “That’s how I fell asleep, too.”

“We both had too much to drink.”

“We did.”

“Well, I suppose I should get going,” he said. “Unless you want to—”

“I don’t think either of us is any shape for that, Mike. I think our time is done.”

“Two ships passing in the night,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“Well then, to what could have been,” he said with charm and tipping an imaginary hat to her. She smiled again wider, and this time it encouraged a breathy little laugh.

Always leave them smiling. Always leave them wanting more. He made his way back to the hall, opened the heavy old wooden doors that led up from a garden divided by a narrow path that took him to the main street sidewalk. On the right-hand side was a small white sign with two wooden posts in the grass. Mounted on the white wood was a brass plaque that read Omega Kappa Epsilon.

***

On Monday when he returned to classes, there was a series of odd and yet similar events. In Government and Policy 1, at Davis Hall in the morning 9 AM, first thing, during class, two girls sitting below him in the lecture hall, about eight rows ahead of him, kept turning to regard him. He did not know them. One would look, nudge the other, the other would look. Then they seem to consult something between them, possibly a phone. They returned their gaze again. Whatever it was, it seemed amusing to them. After Government and Policy, a similar thing happened. This time it was in the Serenity Gardens, where he stopped to have a coffee before socioeconomics.

It was a sunny day and he chose to enjoy the coffee outside, and he sat on a concrete planter. Across the walk, four girls had gathered on a wooden bench. One seemed to take note of him, tap the other, and again they regarded a device. Something was confirmed, and they engaged in mirthful banter concealed behind their hands.

At lunch he caught a girl smirking and looking at him sideways. In the afternoon, walking from Civics to U.S. History, two girls coming from the opposite direction registered him, one shoulder-nudging the other. They averted their eyes as they passed, then burst out in giggles. Then, coming home, he swore he was being followed by a big group of maybe five or six girls, and he was sure that what they were laughing about was him, even occasionally making out a loud cat call. That wouldn’t have bothered him if it weren’t for the earlier similar events. Something was up. A sick and pervasive dread worked through him, as the events of Sunday morning took shape in his head, waking in that girl’s room at the OKE mansion in the village. A nightmarish visage of that girl telling all her friends about his small penis size shimmered before him.

Now he was in his dorm room, third floor of Wicklow Hall, on the western side, the sky beyond the windows turning a bright cherry-pink color, orange and intense at the horizon as the sun went down. He couldn’t concentrate on his homework, overwhelmed by the thought people were making fun of him because of what he had between his legs. That was the worst case scenario, and most likely not true. But his endowment had been a curse all through high school. It had been something that he worried about. Eschewed sports so that he wouldn’t end up in locker rooms, and even for quite a while put off intimate relationships with girls, afraid of what they might think. Or say. Eventually he did though, only engaging usually in sex when he trusted someone. But since coming to college, this last year he had slept with three girls, almost with four, and frankly he had been enjoying the freedom. Felt like he had shrugged off a lot of what had been holding him down when he was younger. Now here it was, unconfirmed of course, but that old familiar fear was slinking back into his life. Even if it was just only in his head, he could feel its weight begin to settle on his shoulders once more. His roommate Alex was off with his girlfriend, and he was alone. A knock came to his dorm room door, and he swiveled in his chair.

“Yeah?”

From the hall: “Mike, it’s me. Mei.”

Mei Li, just about his best friend in the world. Elementary and all through high school, and now they were in college together. Mei was Chinese, born in China, both her parents from Beijing. She was slight and shy, and in many ways much like him, but the feminine version.

“Come on in, Mei,” he said, planting his heels on his dorm room floor and swiveling in his chair to the left and to the right.

Mei came in, MacBook clutched to her chest, wearing khaki pants and loafers and a college sweatshirt with the big NHU logo in the center. “Hey,” she said, kind of high and whispering, maybe a little sheepish.

“What’s up?”

“Just coming to see how you were doing, Mike.”

“I’m doing okay. What about you?”

“Busy,” Mei said and took a seat on the edge of his bed, laying the laptop across her thighs, hands rested on top. “Busy,” she said again. “Very busy. You know me.” She gave that cute little Mei smile and shrugged her shoulders.

They talked for a little while about the classes they had together, notes they had taken, things that each other may have missed, sharing a laugh or two at something that Professor Miller had said. Mei talked about her younger sister, back in Meadowgrove, in her first year at their Alma Mater, Meadowgrove High, and updated him on how some of their favorite teachers were doing. The whole while she spoke, he felt like there was something Mei wanted to broach. Hesitation between subject changes, like a chance for a new topic but a reluctance to bring up the one that she came to his dorm room for. It began to worm his way into his mind that it was about the girls that were laughing at him today. When he couldn’t take it any longer, and the conversation had lulled, he made the first move, broaching this unspoken subject.

“Hey, Mei?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you… Did you come here to say something specific?”

“I don’t… I don’t know,” she said, and her gaze drifted down and to the right, looking at nothing on his clean dorm room floor.

“You can tell me,” he said. “Mei, you can tell me. It’s been weird today.”

Mei said, “Did someone say something?”

“No,” he said. “What would they say? Say what?”

She said, “I think somebody did something really bad to you.”

His heartbeat quickened, and his fingers went numb. “What did they do?” Tension had squeezed his voice.

Mei said, “You could probably get them expelled. I think they did something very bad.”

“What did they do, Mei?”

“Someone . . . took a picture of you. But, like, it could be anybody. They say it’s you. Or . . . I mean, they say it’s your, uh, penis.”