Author's note: I'm really sorry about the delay! I've had a stressful couple of months.I thought I'd be different for this chapter – I've written it entirely in first-person from Mike's PoV. Oh, and I lied in the last chapter #scolds self# - the next chapter is actually the last where I have scripted dialogue prepared for me. After that, I'm on my own…eep.

14

If you've never had the misfortune to be split into a million tiny pieces and hurled from one end of a room to be processed into a TV at the other end, I can tell you it's not a pleasant experience. If you thought I hated Wonka in the previous few hours of my life, boy, that was nothing to what I was feeling at that moment. I swear, if I'd had a gun I would have taken aim at him and fired. I wouldn't have missed, because I had a really clear view of the entire room. Literally. The entire room. What with my eyes being pixelated and spread around the place.
Y'know when people talk about their exciting-life-changing-yet-somehow-really-boring experience, and they say "time stood still"? Well…time stood still.
Honestly.
OK, maybe it didn't "stand still", but it was so fucking slow, it may as well have stopped altogether. It felt like I was in the air for about 7 months, though it couldn't have been more than two or three minutes – enough time for my dad to rejoin the group that had huddled round the TV set (and from the looks of it, get kinda pissed off at Wonka) at any rate.
Anyway, I'm jumping ahead a little; I'll get back to the television bit later.

So, I'm in the air for what feels like 7 months, which obviously gives me time to properly think. Now, I know I should have been thinking about important stuff (my situation and how I'll get out of it, how the other unfortunate tour members are doing, Claire, et cetera) but there's a tiny little portion of my brain that's thoughts are making themselves heard above all others, and that thought is: "MONSTER TRUCKS!"
No joke.
For a month (6 to 7 seconds?) that's all I could think about.
But then the sensible part of my brain came to the rescue. The downside of this is that the sensible part tends to ask too many questions in quick succession. This time was no different.
Are you ever going to get your feet back on the ground again? (Yeah, my brain speaks to me in third person – one of the many curses of being a child prodigy is that I can be a little too philosophical at times.) Did you stop to think about the consequences? Why didn't you realise you would get shrunk? Will you think of some way to reverse the action? If you don't, what will you do? What will Claire think? What will Daniel think? How will your parents feel? How will Wonka feel? What if Scruffy wins the special prize? Could you cope if someone actually beat you? What the hell are you going to do?
And, frankly, I couldn't answer a single one of these questions.
That scared me.
I'm usually never stuck for an answer, because I always have good old logic to fall back on. But where had there ever been an ounce of logic in that factory? Nowhere! Absolutely nowhere! I mean, a chocolate waterfall? Humans turning into blueberries? Killer squirrels? None of it makes any sense and yet, somehow, they happened. To say I was frightened at that point is a gross understatement. It wasn't so much that I was probably about to be horribly mutilated, it was more that I wasn't right. Yup, you heard. Mike Teavee was wrong about something. And something major. Something potentially life-altering. Why? Why did it have to be then that I listened to my heart instead of my head? My heart's never right!

Oh, God.
Sudden thought.
Songs.
They'd all had one. The Blob, Possessed Junior, Satantic Kid. A part of me hoped my own song – assuming I was getting one – was going on right then to avoid the humiliation, but another part of me wanted to hear what those creepy Oompa-Loompas thought of me.

By now I was, like, half-way across the room. Well, most of me was. Some bits were slightly ahead, the rest was a little behind, but most of me was roughly half-way across the room. And it was roughly half-way across the room that I started to feel MEGA depressed. I'm talking suicidal. I'm not the most patient boy in the world, as you have probably gathered, and making me go through what-felt-like-7-months of floating through nothingness didn't help my impatience. Plus I kept thinking about what would happen to me and what I could do about it and if I'd ever be normal again. I mean, I go around calling people freaks all the time, but let's face it: shrinking to a tenth of your original height could very well, possibly, maybe be considered a little freakish. I'd be damn lucky to keep the one friend I already have, let alone make new ones. And my love-life would be even worse (which is quite an achievement considering it was non-existent as it was).
Maybe I would now stand a chance with Possessed Jr; at least we'd both be physically mutated. But, shallow as it may sound, I really didn't want to go out with a human blueberry. Still don't. Satanic Kid had pretty much written herself off with her actions and her personality and her greed and her dad… The only redeeming girl who had ever shown an interest in me was…Claire. A subject I had avoided for long enough. The dance was soon – only three weeks after I got out of the factory – and I still didn't have a date to take. Claire's brutal rejection rang clear in my ears (which were quite a distance behind my feet– a fact I tried to ignore). I suddenly realised: she had found someone else. I'd always known that, I just hadn't really known that. It hit me like a brick wall. And being hit by a brick wall while you're floating several feet above ground is unsettling, to say the least.
I became disorientated. So many clashing thoughts were clouding my brain. I really wanted to throw up, but in my current condition it wasn't possible.
I was getting close to the TV set now. Any minute now I'd be back on solid ground.
I'd be in one piece.
I'd be shrunk.
I'd be kicked off the tour.
I'd be out of the factory.

I'd be struggling not to cry.