Twisted Throwback, part 06 of 25

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I heard a guy sitting a row or two behind me say: “Aren’t guys who Twist into girls supposed to get a really nice rack? She’s not much to look at,” and I felt my face burning. Ms. Rutherford heard him, though, and wouldn’t stand for that; she assigned him a three-page paper on the persecution faced by first-generation Twisted, and sent him to the office on top of that.


Twisted Throwback

part 6 of 25

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Twisted universe. It's set about a generation later than "Twisted", "Twisted Pink", etc. A somewhat different version was serialized on the morpheuscabinet2 mailing list in January-April 2014.

Thanks to Morpheus, Maggie Finson, D.A.W., Johanna, and JM for beta-reading earlier drafts. Thanks to Grover, Paps Paw, and others who commented on the earlier serial.



This is what I wrote in my dream journal Friday morning:

“It’s one of those mundane dreams where you get up and eat breakfast and get ready for school, and then you wake up and realize you have to do it all over again. Only in the dream I’m a real girl, physically. And after I shower and get dressed, and go downstairs, Mom says: ‘Emily, are you really going to wear that?’ and I say: ‘What’s wrong with it?’ And we argue about it for a while — I can’t remember now what I was wearing or why Mom didn’t like it — and then I wake up.”

When I went downstairs, and found Mom and Uncle Jack drinking coffee and eating breakfast, I said: “I figured out what my name should be.”

“Oh?” Mom asked.

“Emily.”

“You’re sure? You aren’t going to change your mind like you did about ‘Amy’?”

“I don’t think so. ‘Emily’ feels right.”

“Good. I was worried you’d take several days to make up your mind, and by then the school would have changed all your records to say ‘Amy’ and they’d balk at changing them again so soon... Well, hurry up and get ready, we need to be at the school early.”

So I ate in a hurry and went back upstairs to shower just when Mildred came downstairs. Dad was ready by then, and we all left by seven-thirty.

Mom told the secretary in the school office why we were there, but neither the principal nor assistant principal were in the office yet, and when they came in, they had other things to do right away besides see us. I worked on Thursday’s homework assignments while we waited, and tried ignore the gnawing in my gut. It was well past eight when the secretary showed us in to the assistant principal’s office.

He was younger than Mom or Dad or even Uncle Jack. He smiled at us and said, “How can I help you?”

“My daughter Amy — excuse me, Emily — is returning to school after an absence of several days due to her Twist. We need to speak with you about certain... accommodations for her needs.” I blushed when Mom said my temporary name by mistake; I didn’t like the idea of trying to explain that. The assistant principal looked at his tablet. “What’s her full name?” he asked. “And yours?”

“I am Katherine Harper; my daughter’s legal name is Cyrus Andrew Harper, but we’ll be changing it to Emily — have you thought about a middle name yet, Emily?” she asked me.

“Um, not much.”

“We’ll sort that out later, then. Just put ‘Emily Harper’ for now, if you don’t mind — or do you need the legal name change paperwork before you can do that?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “This hasn’t come up before... Let me see. I gather that your Twist changed you into a girl?”

“Kind of,” I said, blushing again. “It changed my brain, but not the rest of me...”

“We are exploring options for correcting her body to match,” Mom said. “But even though she is, um, anatomically male — she’s dressing as a girl and thinks of herself as a girl, and it would be appropriate for the teachers and the other students to treat her as a girl.”

“I see... You don’t look at all like a boy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Thanks,” I said quietly, blushing harder than ever. That made me feel a lot better. Hearing it from Mom and Mildred was one thing, but from him — well, I wasn’t sure why, but it made me feel a lot more confident that I really looked like a girl.

“What you say makes a certain amount of sense,” he said to Mom, “but... I’m afraid some of the other students, or their parents, might make trouble if the real situation were known. Perhaps it’s best if we simply tell people she became a girl when she Twisted, without going into details...?”

“I don’t think that will work,” I said. “I Twisted right here at school, in the cafeteria, and lots of people saw how I looked just the same afterward, physically.”

He looked at me again, obviously doubting that I hadn’t changed physically. I didn’t volunteer the information about my trick. “You’re that boy?” He tapped and scrolled through something on his tablet, probably my record in the student database, and said: “Hmm. I see. Well, we can explain further if it becomes necessary, but let’s start out by saying simply that you are now a girl and that everyone is to treat you as such.”

“Thanks.”

“Except... wait. I think that will work for the restrooms, but for the locker room and shower... I can’t see how you could use either the boys‘ room or the girls’ room without serious problems. I’ll have to meet with your P.E. teacher and perhaps the other coaches and see if we can work something out. You can just skip P.E. and go to study hall until we get that worked out.”

“Is there maybe a private teachers' bathroom Emily could use?” Mom asked.

“Probably, but I’ll have to talk to them and find out. I just started here a few months ago and I don’t know everything about the school yet. Now, about your other classes, and the restrooms... I’ll give you a note to show to teachers and staff, and I’ll send a memo around. Just a few moments.” He typed for a little while in silence, and then went down the hall to get something from the printer, and gave it to me.

“There you go. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Um, tell my teachers I might need a little extra time to make up the work I missed the last few days? And to reschedule any tests I missed?”

“It’s there in the note.”

Mom said: “Emily has... certain compulsions due to her Twist. We are still discovering their nuances; so far they all seem to be related to her dress and appearance, all about making her appear feminine — but there could be other aspects we haven’t figured out yet. Just keep that in mind.”

“I’ll mention that in the memo. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Mom and I looked at each other. “I don’t think so,” Mom said.

“I’d better get going,” I said, “it’s almost time for first period.”

On our way out, Mom hugged me in front of the secretary and a couple of troublemakers who’d already been sent to the office this early in the morning and were cooling their heels waiting for the principal to chew them out. That didn’t embarrass me like it would have a few days ago. Girls can get away with that.

It was late enough that I went straight to my first period class, skipping homeroom, and hung out in the hall for two or three minutes until the bell rang and the kids who had homeroom with Ms. Chen surged out past me toward their first-period classes. I stayed out of their way, and stepped into the room as soon as most of them were gone.

Ms. Chen looked up at me. “Hello,” she said. “Are you new, looking for your first-period class? I wasn’t told I had a new student — I’m Ms. Chen. Physics.”

“Hi, Ms. Chen,” I said. “I’m Emily Harper — before my Twist I went by Cyrus.”

“Oh!” she said. “Of course. I’d heard you Twisted, but not that particular detail... Now I can see the resemblance. Sit in your usual place, please.”

I showed her the note from the assistant principal. “He said he was going to send my teachers a more detailed memo when he had time,” I added.

Other students were already trickling in as I went to my seat. Ms. Chen didn’t bother to explain about my Twist before she started her lecture, and I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. Several people were looking at me, not to say staring at me, probably trying to figure out who I was. Then Vic, who sat to my left and who had come in at the last possible moment so I didn’t have time to talk to him before class, suddenly gasped and looked away. Ms. Chen glared at him and went on without a pause. Then Vic started writing an unusual amount on his tablet — he usually recorded audio of the lectures rather than taking a lot of notes — and I saw a message alert in the corner of my screen. I looked at it briefly.

cyrus? your a girl now?! your message said you didn’t change!

I didn’t reply just then, but went back to my lecture notes and gave Vic an apologetic glance, nodding at Ms. Chen. The moment class was over, I turned to Vic and said: “Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier — but it kind of snuck up on me, and then I figured y’all’d think it was pretty weird and it might be better if I told y’all in person.”

Might think it was weird? It’s the weirdest Twist of anybody in town! And it’s even weirder, in a way, that you still look like you, just you as a girl... What’s it like?”

“I’ll tell you a little more while we walk,” I said, getting up and heading for the door, ignoring the people who were hanging around listening to us.

“So did it make you change gradually into a girl over a couple of days?” he asked. “I never heard of a Twist working like that — in the movies they’re always instantaneous, and I remember you telling me that part was accurate even when you were complaining about all the bad science in Twist League.”

“It’s kind of complicated,” I said, and sighed. “And yeah, ignore what you saw in Twist League. Nobody has as many tricks as Dr. Magnificent, and nobody stays conscious through a major physical Twist like Colossex, and —”

“Dude, stay on topic. What about your Twist?”

I started telling him about it as we went down the hall toward my Calculus class, but I hadn’t gotten very far when we got there. “I’ll tell you about it at lunch,” I said. “See you then?”

“Sure,” he said, and looked at me for a long moment before hurrying off to his next class.

I barely had time to show Ms. Reynolds the note before the bell rang; she nodded and said she’d seen the assistant principal’s memo about me, and when class started, she made me stand up and told everyone who I was and (approximately) how I’d Twisted. I heard people nearby whispering about me and tried to ignore them; Ms. Reynolds reprimanded a couple of the louder ones.

Ms. Rutherford introduced the new me before starting her lecture in Modern History, same as Ms. Reynolds. I heard a guy sitting a row or two behind me say: “Aren’t guys who Twist into girls supposed to get a really nice rack? She’s not much to look at,” and I felt my face burning. Ms. Rutherford heard him, though, and wouldn’t stand for that; she assigned him a three-page paper on the persecution faced by first-generation Twisted, and sent him to the office on top of that.

After class, I told her I’d picked a subject for my term paper. She nodded and said, “That’s good. I can see why you’d be interested in Governor Pendergrass, with your Twist affecting you the way it did.”

“Actually, it was the other way around,” I said, and immediately regretted revealing so much. There were a couple of other people hanging around waiting to talk to Ms. Rutherford too, and they were listening.

“How do you mean?” she asked.

“I, um... I think reading about Governor Pendergrass to prepare for the term paper was the reason I Twisted the way I did.”

Her brow furrowed. “That’s right, your Twist tends to be influenced by what you’re doing at the time, right?”

“And it tends to happen when you’re learning something new. So a fair number of us Twist at school, or in extracurricular classes like kung fu, or whatever. Anyway. So I’m doing my paper on Governor Pendergrass, and I’ve read a bunch of old news articles about her and several interviews. I haven’t been able to find an actual biography. So that’s okay, then?”

“Yes, it’s a perfectly good topic. Let me know if you want any further research suggestions, ah... Emily.”


After talking to Ms. Rutherford, I needed to use the restroom. I was nervous when I went into the girls' room, with its big mirror, but nobody said anything; there weren’t many girls there and none happened to be looking in the mirror when I dashed past it and into a stall. After I’d done my business, I felt even more nervous while washing my hands, hating the way my face looked in the mirror, and hoping nobody else would notice. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got out.

I was one of the last ones in line for lunch. When I got my tray, I looked around for Sarah; I’d promised Vic I’d talk to him during lunch, but I really needed to talk to Sarah if I could.

I found her sitting with Olive Sanchez and some other girls at a table near the big windows looking onto the soccer field. “Hi, Sarah,” I said. “Can we talk for a minute?”

She looked at me and seemed to recognize me. “Hi, Cyrus... oh, sorry. Olive told me you were going by, um —”

“Emily,” Olive and I said simultaneously.

“Right. Um. Yeah, sit down.” She looked nervous and uncomfortable, but not any more than I felt. I put my tray down in an empty space cat-a-corner from her and sat down.

“So,” she said, “I guess... what we had planned for tonight, that’s off.”

“I guess. I mean, I still —”

“Don’t say it,” she said. “I mean, I understand if you’re still into girls, that would make sense, but I’m not.”

“I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean, I’m not even sure yet if — never mind. But if we could still get together and just talk, I’d like that. I don’t — I don’t know many girls just to talk to, except family. And I have a feeling things are going to be weird with my guy friends now.”

“You think they might be... interested in you?”

I thought about the way Vic had looked at me, and said: “Maybe. Or just so weirded out by it that we can’t talk about stuff like we used to.”

She looked at me for a moment more and said: “Yeah. You seem like a nice... person, and even though you’re not my type anymore, I’d like to get to know you better. I’m not sure we should, um, go out tonight, though — people might get the wrong idea. Why not just hang out at lunch and stuff?”

“I’d like that too, only — I promised I’d talk to Vic and Lionel during lunch. I need to go see them in just a minute. Can we do something tonight, or this weekend, please? Maybe not just the two of us, I see how people might get ideas from that, but maybe with your other friends — if they’re okay with that. Or with my sister or one of my girl cousins, maybe?”

Sarah looked at Olive and said: “Do you want to meet us at Delhi Deli tonight? Six o’clock? That’s where we were, um, going on our date.”

“I’d like to,” Olive said, “but I’ve got a date with Karl Nguyen.”

Another girl I’d seen somewhere but didn’t know spoke up: “I’ll come chaperon,” she said to Sarah. To me she said: “I’ll be honest with you — Emily, right? I’m not quite sure about you yet. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, treat you like one of us until you start acting weird and boylike.”

“Please cut me some slack,” I said. “I mean, I feel like a girl now, but I’m not sure the Twist broke all my old boy-habits at once. Some girl-things are coming natural to me, but other things I’ll have to learn the hard way.”

“Deal. I’m Morgan, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you.” Turning to Sarah, I said: “See you tonight? I’ve got to go talk to Vic and Lionel...”

“Six o’clock,” she said, and smiled. “Good luck.”

I picked up my tray — I’d hardly eaten any of it yet — and went over to the table where Lionel, Vic and I usually sat.

“There you are,” Vic said. “I was wondering if you’d stood us up.”

Lionel was staring at me. “Dude, what happened? You looked normal when I saw you last! And you didn’t say anything about it in your message!”

“I know,” I said. “It kind of snuck up on me. When I messaged you I hadn’t figured out what was happening to me yet, and then when I did, I figured I’d want to tell you in person.”

“So tell! Vic told me something but it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“It’s complicated...” I collected my thoughts and started to explain. Lionel and Vic interrupted with a lot of questions, and I was nervous enough to not be thinking clearly, so I told things out of order and had to backtrack a lot. In all, it was about half an hour later that I said, “So that’s pretty much how it happened.”

Lionel and Vic were silent for a few moments, and then Lionel said: “Dude, if it’s just your trick making you look like a girl, why not turn it off?”

“I’d look silly in this blouse and skirt if I looked like a boy,” I said. “And I can’t consciously control it yet, anyway.”

“But why —”

“Dude, he wants to be a girl. It’s his Twist, he can’t help it,” Vic said. I winced at the “he”, but I was grateful enough that I didn’t correct him right away.

“Sorry, Cyrus,” Lionel said, and corrected himself: “Sorry, Emily. I didn’t mean to — it’s just so weird, it’s hard to wrap my head around it. I guess it’s even weirder for you, huh?”

“Kind of, but not the way you probably think,” I said. “It feels weird and wrong when people call me ‘Cyrus’. Or ‘he’. And it felt weird when I was wearing boy clothes, but now that I’m wearing girl clothes that feels normal. And — there are other things that feel weird too, but I don’t want to talk about them here.” I glanced around; it didn’t look like anybody was deliberately listening to us, but several people were sitting near enough to hear us.

“I don’t get it,” Lionel said. “But I’ll try.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I can ask.”

I ate in silence for a few bites, and then asked them: “So, what’d I miss while I was out?”

“Not much,” Lionel said, but he went on to talk for several minutes about a prank that a couple of freshmen had played on Rory Chan, probably the most arrogant guy on the soccer team. I tried not to spray food all over him when I laughed; somehow I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be ladylike.

Lunch was nearly over when Renee came over. “Cyrus! I heard — well, I’m not sure I should believe what I heard. But it looks like you figured out what you want to look like, anyway. And you did a really good job of it, unless —”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was bugging me all day Wednesday and all Thursday morning, and then, at the Twist clinic, it suddenly all made sense. I’ll fill you in on the details later. My trick is helping me look right, but it doesn’t seem to work by itself, I kind of have to help it.”

“How do you mean...?”

“It’s kind of like your Mom’s trick, but less versatile — at least I don’t have a lot of control of it yet, and I’m kind of afraid to mess with it because I like the default way it’s working without my thinking about it. By the way, I’m going by ‘Emily’ now.”

She took that in. “Oh... I see. Good for you. I guess we’ll see each other sometime this weekend — Mom was talking about something at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, do you know what it is?”

“No, I haven’t heard. But — um, would you like to meet me and some friends at Delhi Deli tonight? Six o’clock? Just girls.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Sarah Kendall — she’s a senior, I have a couple of classes with her in the afternoon, and a friend of hers, Morgan something.”

“Sure they won’t mind a junior tagging along?”

“Sarah won’t. I can’t promise about Morgan — it’s actually because of her that I’m asking you to come. I don’t know her at all and I kind of want somebody there who’s on my side if Morgan takes a dislike to me and tries, I don’t know... to push me away from Sarah.”

“I’ll ask Mom and Dad if they’ll give me a ride —”

“If they say it’s okay, I’ll pick you up. Dad said I could borrow the car tonight.”

I finished up my lunch without talking, and walked to my next class, Mandarin. I showed Mr. Bao the note — he nodded without reading it and said he’d seen the memo — and he introduced me to the class in Mandarin. So the slower students were a bit puzzled by who I was, at first, until their neighbors translated for them.

I had a brief chance to talk to Sarah again before Literature, and told her about inviting Renee to join us, and asked if that was okay.

“Sure,” she said. “How old did you say she was?”

“Ten months younger than me... you’ll probably recognize her when you see her.”

“Cool. See you tonight.”

After Literature I would have had P.E., if I weren’t excused from it. I went to the gym anyway and showed Coach Guardini my note. Apparently he’d been too busy all day to check his messages, because he looked at me in surprise, read the note carefully, and said, looking uncomfortable, “Well. Miss Harper, go on to study hall, then, and I suppose we’ll work out something for you by the middle of next week. — Maybe as early as Monday; be sure to bring your new gym clothes just in case.”

So I went to study hall, and did all my Physics homework and half of my Calculus homework, and then went to the restroom before going out to the bus. There were several other girls in there, one washing her hands and another fixing her makeup and another chatting with the other two. I was torn, wanting both to listen to their conversation and maybe try to join in — would that be okay? I should ask Sarah about the etiquette of that. But I didn’t want them to notice the discrepancy between my direct appearance and my reflection, so I hurried into the nearest stall as though my bladder were twice as full as it actually was. I wasn’t quite fast enough; the girl doing her makeup startled suddenly as I walked behind her, staring at my reflection for a moment and then turning to look at me as I disappeared into the stall. What she saw seemed to satisfy her, though, because she didn’t remark on the anomaly to her friends, as far as I heard.

I stayed in the stall a lot longer than necessary, almost long enough to risk missing the bus. Nobody was around when I went out to wash my hands.

When I got home, Uncle Jack was sitting in one of the easy chairs, working on his tablet. “How was school, Emily?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” I said. “A little embarrassing, with teachers explaining to everybody who I was all day, but — actually seeing my friends and telling them what happened to me wasn’t as bad as I was afraid of. And a couple of kids made smart remarks about me, but the teachers wouldn’t let them get away with it.”

“Good,” he said. “I worried about you.”

“What are you working on?”

“A new job one of my regular clients sent me yesterday — a fifty-page owner’s manual for a new cleaning bot.”

“What are you translating from?”

“Indonesian. I was just there last year, so it didn’t take long to refresh my memory on it, but I’m having to look up a lot of technical terms... Oh, and your grandma messaged, saying she’s having everybody over for dinner Sunday afternoon.”

I sat down on the sofa and finished my Calculus homework. I was just starting the reading for Mandarin when Mildred came home on the middle school bus. She was in tears; when I saw her come through the door and heard her sob, I tossed aside my tablet, jumped up and ran over to hug her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked after I’d held her for a few seconds. Uncle Jack had gotten up and was standing near us.

“This snaky body of mine,” she said between sobs. “Everybody hates me.”

Not everyone,” Uncle Jack said, and at the same time I said “Not me!” And a moment later I added: “Remember Bobby?”

“Okay, not everyone,” she said. “But everyone in Trittsville who’s not related to me.”

“Tell us about it,” Uncle Jack said. “Were kids making fun of you at school?”

“And on the bus. And even one of the teachers —”

Uncle Jack swore, and I hugged Mildred tighter. “We’ll have her fired before lunchtime Monday,” he said. “Just tell me the details so I can go to the principal and the school board.”

“It wasn’t anything you could point to and prove,” Mildred said. “It was the way he looked at me, and how he didn’t punish the kids who were making fun of me, except one kid who was so loud he couldn’t pretend he didn’t hear him.”

“Come on, sit down,” I said, and tugged gently on her wrist.

“I want to go up to my room and lay down,” she said.

“Okay. Do you mind if I sit with you? I won’t say anything if you want me to be quiet...”

“Okay.” She went upstairs and I followed her after grabbing my tablet.

She didn’t turn on the lights, she just pulled off her shoes and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over her head. I sat in the chair by her desk and watched her for a little bit, then went back to doing homework.

Renee called me a little later. “Mom says I can go,” she said.

“Good. I’ll pick you up about five forty-five.”

“Who was that?” Mildred asked, pulling the covers off her head.

“Renee and I are going to meet some girls from school. Sarah Kendall and Morgan — um, I’m not sure what her last name is. At Delhi Deli.”

“Have fun. Oh — isn’t Sarah Kendall the girl you were going on a date with?”

“Yeah,” I said, glad she couldn’t see my blush in the dark. Or could she? Her eyes were a purplish-blue now, and a little bigger than before; she hadn’t said anything about being able to see infrared, but it might have seemed a minor thing one could overlook, besides being cold-blooded and carnivorous and, well. Not a mammal anymore, which is a bad thing for a girl in eighth grade to be when she was already self-conscious because her friends were developing faster than her. “I talked with her, and we kind of turned it into a girls' night out thingy. I said I understood if she didn’t want it to be a date, and didn’t want people to think it was a date, so we invited Morgan and Renee.”

After a silence Mildred said: “So... do you still like her that way? Or do you like boys now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling hot all over.

“Didn’t Dr. Oldstadt figure that out with his psychological tests? He told me I was still straight.”

“We... didn’t get into that. I’m not sure why.” But then I thought about it, and said: “Well... he did say some stuff and maybe he thought the implications were obvious, but I had so much new stuff to think about that I didn’t notice them right away.”

“What?”

I tried to remember the details. “He said... when I was looking at pictures of various people, I didn’t spend much time looking at the girls in swimsuits and stuff, I spent more time looking at the women in elaborate dresses, and I seemed to pay more attention to their clothes than their bodies.”

“Ah. Yeah, so he didn’t need to say anything more, did he?”

“Maybe not.”

We heard distant conversation from downstairs; I went to see and found Mom and Uncle Jack bringing groceries in from the car. I pitched in, and Dad came home while we were working on that.

“Where’s Mildred?” Mom asked while we were putting things away.

“In bed,” I said. “She had a bad day at school — she came home crying, Mom.”

“I’ll go talk to her,” she said, and went upstairs. Uncle Jack, Dad and I finished putting away the groceries.

“How was your day, Emily?” Dad asked. “I trust that it was, if not easy, at least less difficult than your sister’s day.”

“It was nowhere near as bad as that,” I said. “Only one person made fun of me, and the teacher cracked down hard on it. And if some of my friends didn’t understand about my Twist right away, at least they didn’t reject me and say they didn’t want to talk to me again. Oh, and I still need to borrow the car tonight.”

“Ah, yes... you informed me on Monday that you had a date for tonight. I gather, then, that the young lady is still romantically interested in you following your Twist? You are very fortunate.”

I blushed. “Um, yeah, I’m pretty lucky, but not that way. And I’m not sure she was ‘romantically interested in me’ before, she just agreed to one date... but anyway, we talked, and she didn’t want to go on a date, but she invited me to hang out and talk with her and some other girls. Renee’s going to join us; Aunt Rhoda said she could come.”

“Be careful, Emily. I trust you will uphold the honor of your family. Please return by ten-thirty.”

“I will, Dad.” And I hugged him, and said: “Um, the keys?”

A few minutes later I was on the way to Aunt Rhoda’s house. When I pulled up in the driveway, Renee wasn’t on the porch, and she didn’t come out after I’d sat there a few seconds, so I got out and went up to the door.

“My, you do look different,” Aunt Rhoda said. “Come on in.”

“We told them we’d be there at six,” I said. “I can’t stay long. Hi, Renee.” She’d been sitting on the sofa, doing something on her tablet; she grabbed her purse and came to the door when I came in.

“Renee told me about you when I got home... I’d heard a little from Mother,” (my grandma), “but your parents haven’t told me anything.”

“We’ve been kind of busy,” I said. “I’m sure they’re planning to tell you, but —”

“And Renee said your trick is like mine?”

“You’re looking at it now. I can make myself look like a girl. I don’t know how I’m doing it, and I don’t know how to turn it on and off — not that I ever want to turn it off. But it seems to be always on when other people are around, at least.”

“We’ll talk more when we get home, Mom,” Renee said.

“Have fun, be safe, and be back by ten.” Aunt Rhoda stood on the porch watching as we drove away.



I'd like to keep posting chapters twice a week when the comments are numerous, and once a week when they're sparse. But I can't guarantee I'll post anything at all in the next couple of weeks; I'll be away from home and I'm not 100% sure I'll have reliable Internet access. If I do have the chance, and I get seven or more unique comments in the next few days, I'll post the next chapter on Monday, otherwise next Thursday.


If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes Smashwords Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey Smashwords Amazon
A Notional Treason Smashwords Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories Smashwords Amazon
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Comments

good story

i like your writing style whatever will happen next?
thanx ed


ed

tris

I am enjoying this story. I have enjoyed Morph's universe and you definitely have gripped it very well. I look forward to seeing where you take this and both characters, Their ability to adapt. How people and family react to them. I look forward to your next chapter.

SDom

Men should be Men and the rest should be as feminine as they can be

You would think that with the

You would think that with the Twist being a well-known thing that can or could affect anyone at any time, the other kids in Mildred's school, plus her teachers, would be much more sympathetic towards her rather than belittling and making snide and mean comments/taunts towards her.
I am enjoying this story very much, and do look forward to each chapter as they appear. Janice Lynn

The nature of the Twist

Per Morpheus's stories, it can't "affect anyone at any time." It only affects people whose mother or father or both are Twisted (or had the Antarctic Flu, but that was four generations ago now). In Trittsville, that's mostly Mildred's extended family and a handful of other Twisted who aren't related to them -- two or three dozen people in a town of 25 or 30,000 people.

Also, Mildred's Twist is much more extreme than most. I think out of a couple of dozen major and minor Twisted characters in Morpheus's stories, only a few have Twists as inhuman-looking as hers (the dog-morph in "Twisted", the guy with metallic skin in "Twisted Pink", arguably Lori from "A Twisted Tail"; maybe I'm forgetting some).

Also, eighth graders are mean. The teachers have no excuse, that's true.

I, too, am enjoying the

I, too, am enjoying the story. Where you were going was obvious, to the reader at least. Now that she has discovered herself, I don't know where you plan on going with the story.

Can totally relate to avoiding mirrors =(

I avoid mirrors like that in real life, for a different but related reason: if I see myself without turning my mind off, I will start crying.

I'm curious what Emily's feelings about herself are. Even if I could pass like that to others, I would still feel incredibly gender dysphoric from not being able to pass to myself.

I feel so bad for Mildred!

Yes, eighth graders can be very mean. There are no excuses for the teachers though! I'm guessing she didn't use her trick on any of them, which in the long run is probably a go thing. I like "Emily", think it's a good choice! I hope the "girls" night out turns out well. Tris dear, still enjoying this one hon! Loving Hugs Talia