The summer sun blazed through the open window, casting lazy stripes of light across my bed. I yawned, stretching my arms—or at least, I tried to. Something felt off. My limbs didn’t reach as far as they should. The ceiling loomed impossibly high, I blinked, heart thudding, and scrambled to the edge of my pillow. That’s when I saw it: my bedroom, but monstrously huge. My desk was a skyscraper. My sneakers, discarded by the bed, were as big as boats. I wasn’t just disoriented—I was tiny, no bigger than a mouse.
Panic clawed at my chest. I was Ben, the 15-year-old middle kid in a house full of giants. My dad, a towering muscle-bound guy in his mid-40s, was the anchor of our family, the one I’d always looked up to since Mom left. My older brother, Nate,17 and lean like a track star, was the golden child, always stealing the spotlight. Then there was Max, the wild 12-year-old gremlin who got away with everything because he was the baby. And me? I was the ghost in the middle, forgotten half the time, slipping through the cracks of their attention.
Now, shrunk to the size of a bottle cap, I was literally invisible. The house hummed with morning chaos—Dad’s booming laugh downstairs, Nate's music blasting, Max probably breaking something. They had no idea I was stuck up here, a speck on my own bed. I had to get their attention before I got stepped on or worse. The summer before sophomore year was supposed to be my chance to stand out, to make Dad see me as more than the quiet kid who didn’t cause trouble. But now? I was fighting just to be seen at all.
I took a deep breath, my tiny voice barely a squeak, and started crawling toward the edge of the bed. The mattress was a vast desert, each step a marathon. Somewhere below, my family was living their normal lives, oblivious. I wasn’t just small—I was insignificant. But I wasn’t giving up. Not yet. Dad always said we had to fight for what mattered. Well, this was my fight. I had to make them notice me, no matter how small I was.
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