Surely, you think, she must be bluffing. But you called her bluff once, and that’s how you ended up where you are now: A guy in girl clothes with a slim, curvy, girly body.
So the proposal is tempting. Very tempting. You could get to be alone, in her room, with no one to bother you.
But there's obvious dangers, too. "You know you’ll have to deal with my parents, right?" you remind the guy who looks like you.
"Your dad seems cool," he replies. "Or are you just scared to deal with my parents?"
"And about school? We got that tomorrow. You gonna deal with my friends, my classes? Trust me to deal with yours?"
"Okay, that's a point." He rubs his chin. "So I'll pick you up in the morning, and we'll switch back before school."
"Deal!" you say before you can change your mind. "Then we can get together after school and, um, work on the next spell."
"Sounds like a date." His eyes glint with mischief. "But be sure to bring your mask along!"
Her words give you a hard thrill.
—
"Hi Dad!" you exclaim with a gasp as you step into Natalie's family's living room, where her father is reading the newspaper. "Hi Mom!" you shout at her mother, who smiles at you from behind the half-wall that separates the kitchen from the rest of the house. You feel yourself freeze all over as they look up. What'll they say, you wonder in a panic, when they spot that I'm not their daughter?
On tottering legs you step into the living room, intent on just getting to the safety of Natalie's bedroom. But her father stops you with a word. "Shoes?"
"What?"
He points to your feet. "Your shoes."
You look down. What about them?
Luckily, you catch sight of the shoe rack next to the door, where Natalie made a point earlier of changing into slippers.
"S-sorry, Dad. I forgot."
"Dinner’s ready," Clarisse calls as you're fumbling off Natalie's Converses. "It’s chicken casserole."
Shit! "Maybe later?" you reply. "I ate out with Will."
Her father raises his eyebrows. "I thought you said you’d be with Gillian."
"Uh ... yeah. And we ran into Will at Panera, and Genny met us there too, and—"
"But you 'ate with Will Prescott'."
"That’s so sweet," her mother says.
"Well, I was eating with the others too!"
"Who brought you home?" her dad asks.
"Uh ... Will."
Her parents exchange a glance, and her father's expression is grave when he turns back to you. "This one works fast too, doesn't he?"
"What do you mean?"
"Remind him that you come with a speed limit. Twenty-five in a school zone. And also remind him," he adds as he returns to his paper, "that I know his father."
You gulp. "Okay. Um ..."
"Yes?"
You take a deep breath, because if he reacts like this when you just happen to eat dinner with Will Prescott, what is he going to say when you tell him— "Will's gonna pick me up tomorrow and take me to school."
Mr. Dawkins lowers the paper to give you a long, direct stare. "I thought he went to Westside."
"Well, he does, but— Um. He offered to take me in tomorrow."
This time her parents don't even look at each other. But after a long pause, when her dad finally says, "Natalie—", her mother jumps in. "We'll talk about it later," she says.
You nod, and practically run from the room.
—
The walls of her bedroom, you find, when you (gladly!) fall into it, are decorated with posters of assorted anime series, and her bookshelf is filled with neatly arranged rows of comics and trade paperback omnibuses of manga series in strict order. You haven’t read comics for quite some time, and you’ve never found manga interesting, so you check out what she likes.
Her interests run the gamut. Comics are your typical superhero fare—Marvel, DC, some other names you don’t know—and some mystery graphic novels. The trade paperbacks you’re less familiar with, but most are in their original language, with some notebooks that seem to have translation notes in her handwriting.
You've been carrying her purse with you all this time, but you haven't looked in it yet. So you dump its contents out on her bed. Another set of keys, compact, make-up case, two hairbrushes and a comb; another make-up case, two mangas and a Western trade paperback; a stuffed toy that looks like a Pokemon or some shit like that; and the sketchbook you copied the sigils into.
Her phone also falls out. You're tempted to open it up and dig into her social media, but you resist. Instead, you turn to her work desk, hoping that she's finished her homework so you don't have to do it for her.
No luck: she still has algebra and biology to finish. You set gamely to work, but find that you can't imitate her handwriting.
So that's when you give up and pick up her phone. It unlocks with face recognition, so that's easy to defeat, but you can't get into any of her passcode-protected social media. Her contacts and messages, though ...
Natalie doesn’t have a lot of phone numbers in her contacts, but she's got more than you carry in yours. Her Mom and Dad; Gillian; that girl Genevieve; you; a bunch of girls, including the "Lisa Rickover" she mentioned back when you first met her; and some guys. Most of the texts are from Genevieve and a girl named Mandy, but you don't know them so you concentrate on Gillian's texts.
You notice a lot of the recent one are about you, but they don't shed much light on what she thinks of you, so you scroll back to check the older ones. These are very cryptic because they lack context, but you do notice that Natalie uses the sad emoji a lot whenever Braydon's name comes up.
—
It's getting late when there's a knock at the door. It's Natalie's mom. Her message is short and delivered with a smile, but there's steel behind it. "Will can pick you up in the morning, since you've already arranged it," she tells you. "But find somebody else to give you a ride home."
"I will."
"And Westside's on the other side of town. Don't encourage him to give you any more rides to and from school."
"Okay."
Her smile widens, and she kisses you on the forehead. Then, as turns, she says, "Don't use up all the hot water in your shower tonight."
Shower? you think in a panic. Would Natalie want me taking a shower while I'm looking like her?
But her mom seems to expect you to, so ...
Natalie is no Cindy Vredenburg or Chelsea Cooper, but it arouses you to touch her supple freckled skin as the warm water trickles over your body. Her boobs are small, yes, but you can still get a good grip with your small hands, and they’re soft and firm, like two giant marshmallows made of memory foam. Your fingers slip once again into her bushy undersides, and you feel a hotness rushing to your head.
You turn off the shower and after wrapping yourself in a towel you dash into your room.
You toss the towel away after drying yourself off, and peep into her vanity mirror while searching for her sleepwear. You never imagined you’d like freckles so much.
After changing into PJs, which you haven’t used since you were a kid and don’t particularly like, you get into bed. You're too wakeful for sleep, though, so you grab her sketchbook and flip through it. It's almost used up—the sigils you copied are only a few pages from the back—and the rest isn't taken up so much with sketches as with loosely drawn comic strips. The contents are pretty mundane—school girls and boys hanging out and talking—but most of the names in the speech and thought balloons match the names in her contact list. And eventually you recognize two of the faces that appear over and over: Gillian and Braydon.
They are both drawn in a cartoony style, but you're struck by how unattractively Braydon is sketched, with a scheming leer perpetually on his face, and wearing black robes and a headpiece wrought of twisted iron. He's also often drawn like he's casting charms over Gillian, even in the middle of mundane conversations, and Gillian is quite often drawn with spirals for eyes and sparkling stars around her head, as though she's been bewitched. Maybe even mind-controlled, for in a couple of panels she repeats the word Braydon whispers in her ear to the girl who is Natalie's avatar.
But the real rush comes when you flip a page and find a cluster of stand-alone sketches of a new guy. With his sloppy ball cap and stiff blonde hair, his lanky build and his oversize shirt and cargo shorts, there's no mistaking who it's supposed to be. Little notes dot the page around the sketches: "Spontaneous." "Mysterious." "Level-headed." "Caring." Is it your own reaction, or the glands of the body you are wearing, that they make you want to swoon?
—
The clock on your truck dashboard reads eight-something when you groggily wake. You rub your eyes and look around. You are in the Eastman High School parking lot.
Natalie was running late when she picked you up, and she asked you to drive while she pulled off the mask she was wearing. She was still conked out when you arrived at Eastman and parked in a far corner, and you had to wake her so she could change into the extra clothes you'd brought her. When she was done with that, you then undressed, laid out flat in your truck, and let her pull the mask from your face.
But now you're awake and back in your own skin. You just have to get dressed and back to Westside by—
You do a double-take at the clock. It reads 8:25—thirty minutes after you laid down to remove the mask! Classes have already started, and it will take you half hour to get across town!
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