The Ogden Pruett Challenge

Chapter 4
Meet The Guys

Chapter Description: Four teenage boys, despite their misgivings, take the Ogden Pruett Challenge!

Less than a week later, Brasno High Juniors Trent Zimmerman, Bear Simmons, Charlie Baker, and James Hadaka were gathered in the driveway of Charlie's house. Trent, Charlie, and Bear were shooting hoops; James was sitting on the garden wall with his laptop, scrolling.

"Hey guys," he grinned wickedly. "Another picture of the swim team!"

The guys broke off their game to peek over James' shoulder at yet another photo of the irate and embarrassed jocks shrunk to pint size and treading water in the Junior High swimming pool that had been posted to the Internet. 

"Girls got a LOT of pictures on their phones," Bear chuckled. A large, beefy lad with curly red hair, he liked to think of himself as a gentle giant. The Freshmen he liked to haze might have disagreed with the 'gentle' part. 

"Well, can you blame them?" Trent laughed. A stylish young man with a neatly trimmed brownish blonde flattop, he was one of the school's top jocks, though he went in for basketball and football more than swimming. "Lookit the little squirts!"

"Yeah!" Charlie giggled. "How often does something like THAT happen?" Charlie, a moon-faced boy with straight blond hair, hoped the others didn't realize he was enjoying the pictures much more and on a deeper level than they were. He also hoped they never found out he spent hours looking at them on his own phone.

"Poor guys," James snickered. A Fifth generation Japanese-American, he followed the stereotype of being into science and technology, not because of his heritage but because he hoped someday to make a lot of money at it. "They must be DYING of embarrassment!"

"At least it's not another Tiktok!" Charlie blurted. "Those high-pitched baby voices are SO bad..."

Bear felt something pulling at him. He looked down to see Taffy, the old lady next door's little yappy dog, tugging on his pant leg. He kicked the dog away and sent it yelping back to its own yard. 

"Yeah. Weird thing, though," Bear checked his pant cuff to make sure it was undamaged. "Those posts are really taking off."

"It's weird. The swim team's getting national attention," Trent added, dribbling the ball. "Attendance at their swim-meets is through the roof! They're famous now! I hear a couple of the guys are even doing talk shows!"

"Talk shows?" Charlie gasped. "No WAY!"

"They've even been invited to tour the set of that DAN CUPID show!"

"Wow!" Charlie was consumed with envy. That was his new favorite show, in a large part due to the handsome Ogden Pruett. His little sister's bedroom was filled with magazine pinups of the handsome star and Ogden sometimes leafed through her teen magazine collection when no one was looking.

"And all the girls are in love with Bud Dillon now..."

"Bud DILLON? THAT little shrimp?"

"Yeah," Trent grimaced. "I don't know why, but ever since they saw him shrunk and starkers, they're crazy for him!"

Charlie knew why. He'd seen the pictures. And Bud was gorgeous, even at that size.

"Man!" Bear rubbed the back of his neck. "Sounds like being shrunk really pays off!"

"Uh-huh," Trent pondered. "What are those stupid pills? MIniniscril or something? I wonder where you get them."

 "You can pick 'em up at the drug store for a couple bucks!" Reaching into the pocket of his jeans, James produced a small bottle of the bright pink pills. "I was thinking of giving them a try... Purely for experimental reasons of course..."

"Yeah, right!" Bear smirked. "You wouldn't have the nerve!"

"Wow," Charlie repeated, gazing at the bottle with a mixture of longing and trepidation. "All that stuff, just from one little pill."

"There's this thing now... They call it the Ogden Pruett Challenge..." Trent looked at the others. Then he smiled. "Any of you got the guts?"

"The bare guts?" James waggled his eyebrows. 

Charlie's blood froze. He looked from one friend to another, his mouth going dry.

Bear plucked a pill from the bottle and grinned at the others. "I will if you will."

Trent took a pill too, clutching it between his fingers. "So, how 'bout it, guys?"

James grabbed a pill as well. "Are you kidding? I bought the bottle!"

They all turned to Charlie, who turned bright red. After a moment's hesitation, he took a pill as well.

James screwed the cap back on the bottle and replaced it in his pocket. They all stood in the driveway in a circle, holding their pills. 

"Okay, on three. One... Two... Two and a half..."

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Not long afterward, Charlie's eleven year old sister Val came out the front door.

"Charlie! Charlie, Mom wants to..." She looked around. She knew her big brother and his friends were out there, but she didn't see any sign of them. 

At least not at first.

Hurrying down the driveway, she discovered four empty piles of clothes heaped on the blacktop. The boys' basketball sat nearby.

"Guys?"

She heard a quiet rustling in the hedge a few feet away. Leaning down and looking closely, she finally spotted four anxious little faces peering at her nervously amidst the leaves. 

Val gaped for a moment. Then a smile crept across her face.

"Well, well," she grinned. "Hiya, big brother!"

"What are you laughing at?" Charlie's voice was now higher and weirdly distant-sounding, as if he were standing at the bottom of a well. "It's not funny, damn it!"

The wee, round face of her brother scowled up at her, reddening. She could see his bony  white shoulders and flashes of skin as he shifted about trying to cover himself. He'd not only shrunk, he'd physically regressed to just under her age. And she could see the other three boys as well, once aloof and dismissive of her, now tiny and doing their not quite adequate best to conceal their prepubescent nakedness. Jostling amidst the leaves and twigs, they bumped against one another and fought for position. Occasionally, one bare hip would brush against another and they'd quickly move away, uncomfortable with the unintended intimacy. 

 "What are you looking at?" James shouted defensively,  folding his scrawny arms over his bare chest. "We took some pills and shrank, that's all! Haven't you ever seen a guy shrink himself before?" 

"Not in person, no!" She regarded the piles of clothing dotting the driveway. "Did you think your clothes would shrink with you, like in the cartoons?"

The boys grimaced. 

"You said Charlie's mom wanted something," Trent huffed, trying to sound in charge. Of course, since he was a stark naked six inch tall ten year old boy talking to a full-sized, fully dressed eleven year old girl, he wasn't quite successful at it. "What was it?"

"She wanted to know if you guys were staying for dinner," Val responded. She'd always had a slight crush on Trent; he was really cute. Now he was even cuter,  and about her age.  She giggled watching his navel peek out from behind the leaves.  "I'll tell her to fix up a couple of bottles!" 

"Ha, ha!" Trent sulked. 

"I'll bet she'll want to wash these too," Val said, going over to the clothes. Reaching into one pile, she pulled out a pair of powder blue boxer shorts. 

"Hey!" Bear shouted in a strangled peep. "Put those back!"

Val snickered looking down at the diminished boy, once musclebound and intimidating, now pink and pudgy, his quarterback build regressed back into preadolescent baby fat. His freckles had come back; they covered his anxious little face and his hunched little shoulders. 

"What's the matter?" She teased. "Feeling a draft?"

Their angry faces silently and inadvertently showed they did. They watched miserably from the bushes as Val collected all their clothes and took them inside. 

Once she was gone, James broke the silence. "Guys, let's... let's just forget the whole thing."

"Are you kidding?" Trent answered. "No WAY! I'm not wussing out! And neither are you guys! Don't you wanna be cool?"

"I am cool," James responded. "In fact, part of me is freezing!" He leaned back to look at Trent's derriere. "And it looks like yours is too!"

Charlie seized the opportunity to get a good look at Trent's pale, pert bubble butt. True, it had shrunken down to that of a small boy but it was still pretty cute. And since Charlie had also shrunken down to a small boy, he reasoned it wasn't all that pervy. One reason he'd chosen to go along with the whole scheme was so he could see his friends in the nude without it getting too weird or embarrassing. Clearly, it had already gotten way too weird and embarrassing. And he also was having misgivings. Unlike James, though, he lacked the nerve to speak up about it.

Trent, however, was determined. "We are NOT giving up! We're gonna tough this out no matter what! We'll show we're no quitters!"

"Yeah!" Bear shouted. "We'll show 'em!" The round, pink and red mite shook his baby fists in the air. "Bring it on! We can take it!"

As if on cue, they heard a strange, vaguely familiar sound. After a second or so, they recognized it as Taffy, the neighbor's yappy little dog who liked to snap at their pant-legs. As the dog ran around the fence wall and into their yard, however, the four boys realized things were extremely different.

Before, Taffy had been a tiny, snapping little nuisance. Now they were tiny and little and the dog was the size of a wooly mammoth to them. It charged across the yard at them, its pearly teeth flashing.

"Oh gosh..."

With no other choice, the four denuded and diminutive lads fled the bushes and ran frantically across the yard, dog nipping ferociously at their, uh, heels.

"YEEP!"

"YIPE!"

"YIKES!"

"YEOW!"

Too panicked to bother with modesty, the boys streaked completely naked across the yard, squeaking at the top of their tiny lungs. 

"HEEEEEEELLLLLPPPP!"

"YOWCH!" 

They weren't wearing pants but Taffy had found another target to snap at, one just a little higher up on their anatomy.

"WHOOP! DARN IT, YOU STUPID DOG! YIPE! GET OUTTA HERE! WHOO!"

Val emerged from the house and stood on the porch laughing hysterically and filming with her phone as her once big, now much smaller brother and his three big shot friends, now reduced to pink, pint-sized preadolescent squirts,  ran back and forth completely exposed and squealing.

"DO SOMETHING, YOU... YEEP!"

"AH, C'MON! WOW!"

"DAMN IT, CALL OFF THIS DAMN DOG OR WE... YIPE!"

"PL-PLEASE?"

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