A Wish Too Far

Chapter 4
Breaking and Entering

Chapter Description: Liam needs to 'borrow' some clothes from the neighbour's place.

Liam spent the next few minutes on the verge of tears, uncertain what to do and fearing he was still getting younger by the second. Why had Lucy done this to him?! What had he ever done to deserve this? He felt so much anger at the little girl that he had to remind himself that was all she was. She was a silly little kid and she hadn’t known any better. If she could just understand how badly she was hurting him by doing this she would take it all back, he was sure of it. Then it hit him, he didn’t need Ben to bring him to Lucy after all. Ben had said it himself, Lucy went to the school in this neighbourhood. He could go and find her himself.

Glancing over at the clock Liam saw that it was 10AM. He knew he didn’t have time to wait for school to get out, he needed to find Lucy now. That meant he needed to get dressed and walk to the school. There was no way he’d be able to drive there without attracting all sorts of attention. If only he’d caught this thing before he slipped below puberty. At fourteen or fifteen he might have gotten away with it, but now he just looked like a kid himself.

Liam slipped back to his closet and looked for something to wear. Immediately he realised he had a new problem. The first T-shirt he pulled on was comically long on him, to the point of hanging to his thighs. Trying on shorts was even worse. Sure kids often wore silly baggy clothes, but not this baggy. He didn’t have any belts that would hold them up either. Just holding them up to his waist with his hands made him aware of how heavy they felt now. His scrawny arms weren’t up to the task. Liam let the shorts drop to the floor, pooling around his feet.

“Shit!” he muttered.

This was a real conundrum for Liam. He couldn’t very well walk to the primary school in nothing but an oversized T-shirt. Not to mention having to walk there shoeless, as his size 13 sneakers certainly didn’t fit on his reduced feet anymore. If anything he needed a size 6 or 7 now. Then a solution clicked in his head, his neighbours. The family next door had a kid about twelve or thirteen, or at least Liam had seen him regularly wearing an intermediate school uniform which would indicate he was around that age. He couldn’t recall just how big the boy was though. Of course he’d seemed little to Liam in the past, but that was when he was six feet tall. Would the kid’s clothes fit his new body? There was only one way to find out.

Wearing nothing but the oversized t-shirt Liam scurried downstairs into his kitchen. There a sliding door led out to the small patch of grass that passed for a backyard in this city. Like most houses in the city his was built behind two others, separated from the street by a lengthy narrow driveway which all three houses shared. At one time there had been a single house with a sizable yard of course, but as the population grew the owners subdivided their lot. Everyone had done it and it created a lot of houses that offered much peace and quiet in their private locations well back from main streets. Of course it also made it a nightmare to find someone’s house unless you had very detailed directions.

Today Liam was quite glad for the privacy of his house and the neighbour’s for what he was about to do. He’d never broken into a house before, not even when he locked himself out. He wasn’t sure if they had a house alarm either, he could only hope and pray that they didn’t. It was a warm and sunny day, already the sticky humidity was in the air and the powerful southern sun beat down upon him as he tip-toed through the grass. Like all houses, his was surrounded by high fences to provide maximum privacy. Now it was the first challenge he faced in achieving his goal.

Liam checked that his glasses were well in place before making his move. He’d wrapped the bridge in masses of cello tape to make it fit better on his nose. They were askew but seemed to be staying in place now. That assured, Liam took a running start at the dark brown wooden plank fence. His feet pounded across the grass, picking up a couple stinging prickles along the way. He winced painfully but didn’t let that slow him, he needed speed. Left foot, right foot, and jump! Liam leapt in the air just short of the fence, arms extended up. He crashed into the wooden wall with a terrific bang, his knees smashing the wood and scraping painfully against it. But his hands just caught the top of the fence!

Yesterday he could have peeked over the fence simply by standing on his tippy-toes. Now he was hanging from it, the ground seeming a long way down as he thrashed his legs and held on for all he was worth with those puny weakling’s arms. His bare toes slipped up and down the wood, catching splinters on the way. Finally he found a small toe-hold and he pushed himself up as he pulled as well and he managed to swing an arm over the fence. He gave one great heave and swung a leg over as well, very nearly catching his dangling unprotected assets.

Swinging his left leg over the top as well Liam cleared the fence and dropped into the neighbour’s yard with a thud. He immediately sat on his bottom, feeling cool tickly grass strangely brushing across his bum, and grabbed his feet to yank the painful prickles from his tender soles. Most families and schools sprayed their grass with the herbicide that killed Onehunga weed and eliminated its many invisible prickles. Even regularly barefoot kids with the toughest soles winced when they trod on the damned weed. Unfortunately as an adult who kept his shoes on and didn’t very well play in the grass anyway Liam had never thought to spray his yard. Now he was paying the price. It was as though he’d run straight over a thorn bush, with the added problem that these prickles stayed in you until yanked out.

Grunting and wincing as he yanked each prickle free Liam finally relieved himself of that problem. He looked over the rest of his diminished body. His knees were cut and bleeding, bruised and purple where there wasn’t blood. His hands were covered in abrasions and he hadn’t been able to pull the sharp wooden splinters from the tips of his big toes. All in all that hadn’t gone well, but at least he was on the other side and nobody had seen him.

Standing up Liam was careful to avoid the pile of prickles he’d just left in the grass. Still he winced and limped as he trod carefully across the grass, worried the neighbours may not have treated their lawn either. As he clambered onto their back deck Liam looked suspiciously around at the surrounding houses. Roofs jutted out nearby on all sides but since none of the houses had a second floor there were no windows from which to see the yard he was in. He had perfect privacy.

First he tried the sliding door, but it was locked. Next he tried the knob of the door beside it, but that too wouldn’t budge. He’d expected as much, but had to try. Climbing off the porch Liam made his way along the narrow paved footpath that separated the house from the fence. Little sunlight made it into this lane shaded by the roofs of two houses. A wheelie bin for recycling was parked against the side of the house and in the cover of the shadow Liam clambered atop it and reached for the side window. He pulled and... success! The window opened easily. Wasting no time, Liam slipped through the open window and dropped onto a bed, closing it behind him quickly.

As he looked around the room Liam couldn’t help but smile at his luck. It was clearly a boy’s bedroom. The bed was unmade and covered in crumbs of cookies and potato chips. Clothes were scattered helter-skelter across the light blue carpet, which was itself quite worn from years of kids playing on hands and knees on it. Posters of some rock band were plastered on the walls, giving the room a teenaged feel. But model airplanes sat on the bureau and what was clearly a night-light was plugged into the wall, marking this as the room of a boy transitioning from childhood to adolescence.

Liam ignored the shirts and underwear scattered on the floor, heading instead for the overflowing closet. He hoped there might be some clean clothes there. There was no shortage of outfits there, but most were alike, clearly the boy had a certain style he stuck to. Aside from the rugby jersey and matching shorts and a few school uniform shirts everything was pretty much the same. There were plain t-shirts of various colours, a couple with ironic messages plastered across the front. The shorts showed the boy was changing from the baggy board shorts popular with primary school boys to the tighter shorter shorts of teenagers.

It didn’t take long for him to discover what he’d been afraid of all along, this kid was now bigger than him. The first shirt he tried hung much too large on him. He had to go to the back of the rung to find a smaller shirt, probably discarded by the boy but not thrown out yet, which fit him better. The only problem was it has clearly belonged to the kid when he was a bit less mature. It was covered in cartoons which he didn’t recognise. Liam considered putting on a school uniform polo but decided against it, he felt silly and little enough already without adding a school uniform to it. Next he pulled on a pair of shorts, the only ones that fit him. They were jean shorts, rolled up at the cuffs. They were meant to be tight on the wearer, the rolled cuffs just at the knees or an inch above, the height of teen cool. On Liam though they fell well below his knees and were quite baggy, making him look like a kid pretending to be a teenager.

The only upside to the baggy shorts was that they stayed on his waist and held up the oversized briefs he’d found. It was particularly humiliating for Liam to realise that his package was now smaller than the little intermediate school boy next door. Even as he thought about that he felt another tingle run through his crotch. Pulling back the waist of his new shorts Liam saw that the rest of his pubic hair had disappeared, leaving him like a little boy down there. It made him want to cry yet again, but he refused to give into the urge, he wasn’t going to let himself act like a little kid, even if he looked like one.

There were no shoes to be seen in the room, which meant they all had to be down by the front door. Liam slipped the door to the bedroom open a crack and peered into the corridor. There didn’t appear to be anyone home, the house was dark. He opened the door a crack wider and slipped out of the room slipping towards the front of the house on tip-toes. He made it to the front door without seeing or hearing anyone. Sure enough a pile of shoes sat by the door. Most belonged to a woman, several to the father but only one pair seemed to belong to the kid. It was a pair of black leather school shoes, with grey knee-socks tucked inside them. The kid was probably wearing the roman sandals of his summer uniform today.

Liam saw he had little choice but to give the ugly scuffed shoes a try. As soon as he slipped his feet inside though, he knew these wouldn’t do. Never mind how ridiculous he’d look in big clunky school uniform shoes and jean shorts, they were far too big for him. The kid seemed to be a size ten. He’d be tripping all over himself in these. Pulling his feet free he realised he’d have to try walking it barefoot. He didn’t relish the idea at all since that would make him look like even more of a kid. Not to mention the pain of it for his injured feet.... Liam paused mid-thought as he noticed something strange, his feet didn’t hurt anymore. He grabbed one foot and examined the sole. The splinters were gone; the red angry dots where the prickles went in had disappeared. And what was more; his soles seemed a shade thicker, ever so slightly tougher. Releasing his foot Liam pulled the shorts up, revealing his knees to be unblemished, the angry cuts and bruises gone without a trace.

There was no more time to be wasted looking for shoes. The process was continuing, maybe even speeding up. Liam climbed out the window the way he’d come in. Looking to the back yard he knew he couldn’t go through climbing that fence again. Instead he’d just have to walk out down the driveway and then hurry along the street to the primary school. He needed to get there fast. If he could just arrive at lunch he might be able to find Lucy playing somewhere on the grounds. That was his only hope.