Maybe it was bound to turn out this way. Probably it was all Joe Purdell's fault. At any rate, the whole business seems to have started that afternoon on the school bus, with him slapping you on the back of the head.
"Ow! Quit it, asshole," you'd shouted. But he'd just smirked when you'd turned around to glare at him. As well he might. He's a corn-fed, beef-stuffed, farm-bred behemoth: six-feet-and-four-inches of fat and muscle, most of it between his ears. Ugly, too, but he's strong and he's on the football team, so the girls flutter around him.
His friend Kenny sniggered. "Whyncha kick his ass?" he'd said.
"Not worth the trouble," Joe had sneered.
"I wasn't talking to you, dipshit," Kenny had retorted. He'd held your eye, and jerked his head toward Joe. "Why don't you kick his ass, Barron?"
You'd stared back evenly. "I would, but I don't want to make him look bad in front of his boyfriends."
Kenny's eyes froze. "What was that, smartmouth?"
From another seat Ivan Budnik guffawed. "You heard him. He called you a homo, bro. What are you gonna do about it?"
It was too late to back down, so you'd decided you might as well escalate matters. "I called you a homo too, Budnik. Boyfriendzzzz. 'Cept you're so ugly, Igor, I doubt even a queen like Purdell could get it up long enough to give you a good fuck."
When it was all over, you'd reflected that Budnik might have kept his temper if only you hadn't used that nickname he hates so much. As it was, only your very quick reflexes saved your face from being smashed open by the meaty fist Budnik threw your way without warning.
Then there had been a lot of cursing and shouting, and screaming from the girls when the driver slammed the bus to a stop and came charging down the aisle. By that time you were on the floor near the back, and quietly used the emergency exit to slip off the bus. It was only half a kilometer across some open fields to your house, and you'd actually felt pretty good as you trudged along. There might be hell to pay tomorrow, but you'd be on your feet then instead of trapped in a bus seat, and your martial arts training could probably see you through the worst of it.
It was an unseasonably warm day for early March, but it had been unseasonably warm all week long. The weather was so nice you'd soon stopped keeping an eye out for cow shit and just let your mind drift lazily along. You knew these fields well—they belonged to the nearby agricultural college, but no one had ever stopped you from crossing them—and your curiosity was mildly piqued to see some new machinery near a spot your path would take you. It appeared to be a couple of trucks with some pumps on the back, clanking quietly away. You'd watched them with some slight curiosity as you approached, but they seemed to have been quietly abandoned, to work without supervision, and you'd soon lost interest.
You weren't sure why Budnik and his friends seemed to have it in for you. It's not like you were a real rival for any of them, in any arena. On the one hand, you were tall enough and strong enough and athletic enough that you couldn't be classified with weak prey like the guys who played chess every afternoon in the library. At the same time, you weren't tall enough for the basketball team or fast enough for the soccer team or big enough for the football team, so you weren't a rival on the field. You had had a few girlfriends in your time, but they had girls of their own, so you doubted there was any romantic jealousy.
"No, I think it is sexual jealousy," your friend Quincy had said one day when you'd broached the subject with him. (He was receptive to complaints about Budnik and his crowd; "Queenie," they liked to call him.) "You're pretty good looking, and with your shirt off ..." He'd suddenly stopped short, and turned very red. "Anyway, I bet there's a lot of girls they like who've talked about how cute you are," he'd said in a hurry.
You'd ignored his discomfiture, and just glanced at yourself in the bedroom mirror: short, messy brown hair; sky blue eyes; well-defined lips and chin. Yeah, you were good looking. As for the "shirtless" remark ... Yes, you were nicely toned, though not absurdly buffed. Actually, you'd often wondered what you'd look like if you did some serious weight training, just as you'd wondered what you'd look like with a goatee, or with longer, shoulder-length hair. But it hardly seemed worth worrying about. It would take a long time to get results like those, and if you didn't like them you'd either be stuck with them or have to get rid of them and return to scratch. Not for the first time, you'd reflected on the sad fact that you can't "hack" and alter your physical appearance like you can in some of your games—
The thought of your games waiting for you at home had cheered you up, and pulled your thoughts away from Budnik and on the fight on the bus. Yeah, maybe you'd start up a new game of Call of Duty 5. You were tired of your old character, and you'd started thinking about how to design a new one. You'd snickered at the thought that maybe for the new game you'd play a girl, and then actually gotten excited by the thought. Yeah, a new character would be good ... it would be fun designing a new one ... you might not even get to the game itself before supper ... you wished the choices in the game were a little more fine-grained, so that you could tweak things exactly as you wished. Your heart was pumping away with excitement and anticipation as you went, and your feet felt very light on the ground—
And then suddenly there was no ground for your feet to lightly touch.
* * * * *
Wherever you were, it was cold and black and thick, and even your thoughts seemed slow and smothered. Muzzily, you'd wondered where you'd got to, and how you'd got there; and it was only after you'd realized that you couldn't feel air and hadn't felt air for quite a long time that you'd begun to panic. You'd tried taking a breath, but nothing had happened, and the horrible thought "I'm going to suffocate" formed in your head. It had been followed by the even more horrible thought "I've already suffocated, and now I'm dead," and for some time you could only stare into inky blackness with a feeling of stark horror
But the strange thing is, a person can contemplate the "fact" of his or her own death for only so long before getting bored. You have such a short attention span that it actually wasn't long before you'd muttered "Fuck this" and decided to try finding a way out of whatever you'd gotten yourself into. It was hard work, but you'd fought your way through what felt like sludge, and then felt yourself breaking through what felt like a surface, and with a sense of vast relief you'd pulled yourself onto long, bristly grass.
The sun was much closer to the horizon—it was very late afternoon by this point—and in the slanting light you'd seen you were about fifty yards from the trucks you'd glimpsed earlier. You looked around, and saw that you must have fallen into some kind of pit of quicksand. But the stuff was black, like tar, and thick, and when you'd reached out to touch it, you'd seen that your own hands and arms—and everything else, it looked like—was completely coated in the stuff. With a silent groan, you'd heaved yourself to your feet and set off again for your house.
"What the hell happened to you?" Helen had said as you'd walked up to the front door. Your sister had been in the front yard, digging in the flower beds, and stared at you in shock.
"I don't want to talk about it," you'd grumbled.
"Mom'll kill you if you track that shit inside the house."
"Mom'll kill you if she hears you cussing like a whore," you'd retorted. Helen was two years older than you, but still lived at home, and your mother insisted on certain standards.
"Well, stay there and I'll get the garden hose," she replied. Mutely, you'd stopped and stood patiently, like a whipped dog, as she unreeled the hose and fiddled with the nozzle and turned the faucet on. A jet of water shot into your mouth, and you'd forgotten your early caution and blistered the early evening air with several Anglo-Saxon obscenities; Helen had ignored you and just kept spraying you with water. Then she'd lowered the nozzle and frowned. "It's not coming off."
"Then I'll just scrub it off in the shower," you'd said, and brushed past her.
"You'll clog the drain," she'd said, and reached out to grab you. "Ouch! Shit!" she'd exclaimed, and pulled her hand back.
"What's wrong?"
"That stuff!" She peered at you. "Doesn't it hurt?" You shrugged and shook your head. "Well, it stings and burns when I touch it!"
"So don't touch it. Just leave me the fuck alone." And with that, you'd passed into the house.
In fact, the stuff didn't come off in the shower, no matter how you pulled and scrubbed at it. But it did change color and texture. It started off black and sludgy, but then turned an off-white color, and eventually took on a fleshy tone; it also thickened and hardened, becoming rubbery, before softening and taking on fleshy feeling. Beneath this "skin" you could feel something like bones and tendons and even a tracery of veins. You were puzzled, and even a little alarmed by this, and wondered if the stuff had seeped like poison through your skin. But that alarm was as nothing when you'd glanced down and seen your masculine pectorals suddenly begin to droop and form into globe-like breasts.
You'd gasped and grabbed them, out of a sudden and maybe not irrational fear that they were about to fall off, and were startled by how soft and sensitive they were. Gently you'd cradled them, and gently you'd felt the nipples harden as you'd delicately touched them. You'd stood like that in a daze for some time, until your own stroking and the hot running water set off a vibration lower down. It didn't feel like an erection, though, which is what you would have expected to happen. So it was with a sense of dread that you'd slowly let your right hand slide down a soft stomach to a patch of tightly curled pubic hair—and to the slit between your legs.
At that point you'd carefully shut off the water and pulled back the shower curtain and stepped from the tub and looked in the mirror. It was Helen's face that stared back at you.
You'd swallowed and made sure the door was locked, and then you'd pulled down a towel and very carefully dried yourself off. There was no doubt that you were now your sister's twin. It wasn't just the large breasts and the pussy and the hips. It was the mole on your left forearm and the light blue eyes and the long brown hair (still damp and tousled). You'd lightly touched your new lips and your throat and murmured "Oh my God," and recognized her voice coming out of your mouth.
There were voices coming from downstairs by this point, and footsteps on the stairs, and Davey, your eight-year-old brother, bawled out that it was time for supper. You'd grunted something in what you'd hoped was a deep, masculine voice, and when he was gone you'd snuck into Helen's bedroom. You wanted clothes, and since you now had her body it seemed only logical that you should grab some of her things. You were digging quietly through her closet, trying to figure out if you should take a frock or a skirt and blouse or shorts and a t-shirt, when with a gasp you'd felt something ripple over your torso. You'd looked down, and found that you were now wearing one of her blue dresses.
A check in the mirror confirmed it wasn't your imagination. And a glance told you that that very dress was still hanging in her closet. You'd looked back in the mirror and concentrated with a frown, and watched as the dress turned red. You concentrated again: the dress seemed to split and to flow, turning into a halter top and a pair of cutoffs.
Your nostrils had flared as you gazed excitedly at yourself. This. Was. Cool.
And you'd felt even better after you'd returned to your own room and found that, with a little more concentration, you could turn yourself back into Max Barron.
* * * * *
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