There’s a commotion and the door bursts open and a whole crowd of green skinned giants come barging into the room, all talking in their thunderous voices.

Seffy stands and steps between the crowd and I.

The leader of the crowd is a giantess with long indigo hair.

“Is it here? Is it here?”

“What?” Seffy narrows her eyes at her.

“The human,” says the other giantess.

Seffy folds her arms. “Call him ‘he,’ do not call him ‘it.’”

The indigo haired giantess has spied me. “Ooh! So cute!”

She steps forward, but Seffy grabs her arm. “Let him have his personal space, Xylar. He’s completely new to giant land. Everything is still overwhelming for him. How would you like a crowd of colossuses twelve times your height crowding around you?”

“What’s your name, little one,” says Xylar, smiling right at me. She has amber eyes.

“Jett!” I reply. But the clamouring of the other giants completely drowns out my voice.

“The rest of you stay back and let the little man have his personal space,” says Xylar.

Seffy nods in agreement and Xylar leans close to me.

Oh gosh, Xylar stinks. Imagine human body odour magnified a thousand times and you can imagine the acrid smells coming off Xylar’s green skin in waves! To her credit, Seffy smells as sweet as a human girl.

Both giantesses are gazing at me. Seffy has linked her arm with Xylar’s as if to restrain her. “I’m Jett,” I tell Xylar.

“Oh, oh, you can talk. You have such a tiny voice!” Xylar’s grinning at me. Her teeth are unnervingly sharp.

“My old neighbour might have had a human as a pet once,” one of the other giantesses yells. “That’s illegal now of course.”

There’s a giant boy at the back of the crowd. “Why doesn’t he have to share the dorm room like the rest of us?” he demands in his booming voice.

“Jett is staying with me and I can’t go in your dorm!” says Seffy.

“I’m sorry you can’t be in our dorm, Sef,” says Xylar.

“We’ll both see you at breakfast,” says Seffy. “I really hope they’ve got the specially made highchair ready.”

Xylar chats at me and asks me questions. I try to be polite and informative but the crowd of giants are very loud and it’s making it hard to think – so is the stink of their combined body odour. Xylar wants me to tell her about the King.

“We do have a King, but he doesn’t have any power,” I tell her.

“Well our King makes the rules and he orders peaceful relations between Glagxug and the human world,” says Xylar. “Prime Minister Cacus did not agree, so he was sacked.”

“Good thing too,” says Seffy.

“Do a dance for us, little one!” demands a giantess in the crowd.

Seffy glares at the girl. “He’s not your pet. And he’s had a long journey. If you’ll all excuse us please, Jett needs to get to bed.”

“Quite right!” Xylar claps her hands together. “Come on everyone, Seffy’s putting little Jett to bed.

The crowd of giants file out.

“I want a human…” whines one of the giantesses as she leaves.

“Whew!” Seffy plumps down on her bed. “They’re all excited to see you.”

“I don’t know how I’m ever going to fit in, Seffy!”

“You will feel better about living here in time. It’s about getting used to it and finding out new things. That will help. I’ve read loads about your world and I’d like to go, but I think I’m too big. You call us “giants,” right? And not the Xusian people?” Seffy gives a small smile and brushes her long red hair away from her green skin. “There are those who call humans ‘teenies.’ The size thing is all relative. It’s what you’re used to.”

“What kind of stuff do you read about humans?”

“Well for one thing, Mum and Dad gave me the whole Famous Five series to read, cos once they were worried I wasn’t reading enough.” She holds up a gigantic Enid Blyton book that’s as big as me. “I can read to you if you want?”

It would be bad manners to refuse, and not a great idea to upset a sixty foot girl.

Lying in my bed outside the bungalow (Seffy can easily lift off the roof and remove anything at any time), I listen to her read in her husky voice. I’m glad she’s speaking softly.

When I’m nearly asleep, she cradles me in her arms and her huge, green face fills my vision, like a smiley green full moon. She sings a lullaby:

“Go to sleep, my perfect tiny boy,

This land is strange and vast,

But filled with wonder and joy…”

Is she making the words up as she goes along?

I drift off to sleep.

When I wake up, the sun is shining in through a gap in the curtains. When were we supposed to go to assembly? I look at Seffy’s bed. She’s fast asleep with her mouth wide open and I can hear the rhythmic sound of her breathing. Her red hair is spread all over the pillow and the book is lying open across her chest.

“Seffy!”

I call as loudly as I can, but can she hear me? My voice must be pretty faint to a giantess.

“Seffy!”

Her eyelids flutter and she stares up blearily and then looks round at me and smiles. “Morning, my tiny sweetie pie.”

“When were we supposed to go to assembly?”

Stolen story; please report.

“After breakfast.” She sits up. “We’d better get going.”

After I’ve had a bath and Seffy has done whatever it is she does for a wash, I dress in that school uniform and she puts me in the baby sling that’s tied around her. She holds a bottle in front of her so I can see it. It’s like a huge baby bottle, although it looks small in her big green hand.

“If you’re thirsty, I’ve filled this with Xublottle. My favourite drink. This was the only bottle I could find which you could drink out of. Just tell me when you need a drink.”

I hope I like Xublottle, whatever that is.

Seffy walks down the carved blue stone staircase and into a massive hall filled with giants. The hall must be a mile long and a mile wide! There’s the rumble of giant voices and the thunderous sound of giant furniture moving and scraping the stone floor.

Seffy makes towards a table where Xylar and some other giants and giantesses who visited last night are now sitting.

Seffy waves at them. “Good morning everyone, good morning.”

Some of them whoop when they see me.

“Now where’s Jett’s special high chair?”

“What are you talking about?” asks Xylar.

“Oh!” Seffy sounds annoyed. “They haven’t provided one. And they haven’t made a little plate for him either. Great. Never mind. Jett, darling… you’re going to have to share my breakfast.”

One of the giants is smirking behind his hand.

Seffy sits down and puts me on the table, facing her. She smiles at me as I look up at her. She’s cutting pieces of her food up very small.

The giant who was smirking holds out a massive toothpick about two feet long (but he holds it between his green thumb and forefinger. “Seffy, try feeding him with this toothpick. Your cutlery is too big.”

Seffy smiles. “Thank you, Bugsy.” She scoops a piece of her scarlet scrambled egg onto the end of the toothpick. “Here Jett, try some scrambled dragon egg?”

I try bits of Seffy’s food in turn. The scrambled dragon egg is sharp, but not unpalatable. I ask to try one of Steffy’s chips so she picks it up in her green thumb and index finger and holds it out so I can nibble it. It does taste like the chips back home.

“I’m thirsty,” I say.

Seffy holds out the bottle she showed me earlier and I suck on it. The Xublottle tastes of vanilla and cream with a faint trace of raspberry on the edge of the flavour. It’s fizzy.

It’s a real shame I can’t even drink anything here without her help, but her choice of drink isn’t bad.

“You can’t play sports, Jett,” says Bugsy, his loud voice reverberating in my ears. He sounds like he’s accusing me of something.

“Jett has his own personal PE program to make sure he gets exercise,” says Seffy. “Of course he can’t play sports with you guys.”

“Yeah, don’t be silly Bugsy,” says Xylar.

First I’ve heard about this ‘personal PE program’ of mine. I feel a bit apprehensive.

After breakfast, Seffy does not join the crowd filing out of the hall, but goes in the opposite direction.

“Are we going to assembly,” I ask.

“Not yet, darling. We’re going to find out what happened to your highchair and your breakfast. There’s been a breakdown in communications somewhere.”

She shoves aside a huge double door and we enter a giant kitchen where there’s lots of clattering and clashing and clouds of steam. There’s a massive serpent a hundred foot long hanging suspended from the ceiling. It has massive blank eyes and teeth that any elephant would be proud to call tusks.

“What is that?” I point up and the leviathan suspended above us.

“Catch of the day,” says Seffy. “Will be on the menu tonight.”

There’s another green giantess emerging from the clouds of steam. She looks older and plumper than any I’ve seen so far.

“Hey, Glumclatch – why wasn’t Jett’s highchair and breakfast ready?” asks Seffy.

“Sorry, dearie. We didn’t know we had to get breakfast ready for a human,” says Glumclatch the kitchen giantess.

“Well Jett is a student and he’s eating meals with the rest of us,” says Seffy.

“We’ll have it put right in time for lunch,” says Glumclatch.

I get the impression we’re running late for assembly. There’s a green giantess standing outside the entrance to the assembly hall. She’s wearing a yellow sash in addition to her blue uniform. She scowls at us. “You’re late, Missy,” she tells Seffy.

“I – sorry.”

The giantess points for Seffy to go up the stairs and she climbs the massive carved steps, each six feet high, until we reach a gallery that’s about a hundred and fifty feet above the stone floor of the hall. The place is packed with giants. The gallery has a row of giants already seated, except for one empty chair at the end of the row.

“Whew, just made it,” says Seffy. “You can come out of the sling now… sit on my lap… there.”

I’m seated on her lap and able to look up at her face which I can’t do in the sling. She smiles down at me.

There’s a green giant in the chair beside us. He has weird, pock marked features.

“Wassat?” he points at me.

“He is a new boy, and his name is Jett,” says Seffy tersely. “Don’t point and say ‘wassat.’”

“He don’, he don’,” the giant is gesturing at me.

“He what? He what?” Seffy widens her eyes at the strange giant, managing to look quite threatening. He falls silent.

Zusie the headmistress starts making a speech to the assembly about the prosperity of Glagxug and loyalty to the King. It’s a dull speech. I lean against Seffy. This has got to be more comfortable than sitting on the stone seats. She gently strokes my hair with the tip of one finger.

“And finally there are human students about to join our ranks,” says Zuzie. She’s talking about me! Hope she doesn’t point me out to the whole assembly.

“Make them feel welcome,” says Aethel who is now standing beside the Head.

“Yes. Be decent everyone,” murmurs Seffy.

First period of the day is Maths. I don’t appear to have been given any special seating, so I sit on Seffy’s desk. She has a wad of giant tissues for me to sit on like a cushion and has produced a set of human sized books. The teacher is a very heavy looking older giantess. She drones on and writes a jumble of letters and numbers on the chalkboard. Then she directs our attention to pages of the textbook with sample problems and asks different giants and giantesses to solve them. Seffy looks worried, but she doesn’t get called on and neither do I. I’m glad, because I don’t want to be getting more attention.

Next period is history. The teacher is an older giant with a white beard and pebbly glasses. The topic is “First Human Contact.”

“Open your books at page six,” says the teacher.

There’s a story on the page about a boy called Jack who somehow found the land of the giants and robbed a giant there through trickery.

“In human society, extremely fanciful myths have arisen around this event,” says the teacher. “But no one believed Jack was telling the truth about the existence of giants.”

Seffy is suppressing a laugh, crinkling her shiny green nose. I wonder what’s funny. I wouldn’t have thought any giant would like the Jack and the Beanstalk story. And it turns out it actually had some sort of a basis in fact.

“Another example of early contact was when a human explorer named Gulliver was a guest for a period of time at our royal court,” says the teacher. “But the humans did not believe his story either.”

This is weird. Like I’m living in a world where the strangest stories are real.

The day slips by. At lunch I now get to sit in a highchair with my own tray of human sized food and cutlery, so I don’t need Seffy to cut my food for me anymore. I feel a tiny bit more independent, but I’m not really independent, because I wouldn’t dare walk the corridors on my own. Any number of careless giants might just treat on me if I did.

“Is this the massive serpent thing we saw in the kitchen?” I ask, pointing at the meat.

“Yes, darling,” says Seffy. “It’s a deepcoiler! They’re the terrors of the great lakes.”

“They give nasty bites,” says Xylar.

“But it’s easy to catch them with new technology,” says one of the giant guys. “Not like a hundred years ago when everyone was terrified of them. The hunters have become the hunted.”

That afternoon it’s time for my physical education program. Seffy produces a rather ugly beige tracksuit for me to get changed into and we go out onto a vast field of orange grass. The grass has been cut very short here, but it’ll come up to my knees, I’m sure of it.

The coach is a giant with a hard face who scowls a lot.

“Get off the field, girl,” he tells Seffy when she places me on the grass. “This session does not concern you. You’ll be in the way. There will be no mollycoddling here.”

Seffy folds her arms. “I’ll sit on the bench and watch everything carefully.”

She’s glaring at the coach. I suppose she doesn’t like being bossed around. She walks over to the bench, still casting angry glances at him and then plumps herself down and glares across the field. She can glare!

“Fifty press-ups, little guy!” barks the coach.

After I’ve done fifty press-ups I’m nearly exhausted.

“Now fifty sit-ups and make it snappy,” barks the coach.

Seffy comes striding over to us. “This is too much, he’s only little.”

“Get off the field!” The coach barks the words at her, flecks of spit flying from his cavernous mouth.

But he seems to have forgotten the sit-ups. He holds up a leather ball in his thumb and index finger. “Go after the ball, little one.”

Seffy has sat herself on the bench again and I’m conscious of her green face and her glowering at the coach.

The coach chucks the ball and I run after it quite a distance. It doesn’t go as fast as I thought it would and now I’ve reached it…

But now I hear something. A strange clattering noise. There’s an abomination coming towards me, a rippling segmented armoured body as thick as a tree trunk and hard and black as obsidian, with countless legs and massive pincers clashing together. It’s coming straight for me!