Ingrid said: “I’m not going to ask you about your Twist. You’ve told me more than you really need to tell a stranger, already. But if you want to listen I’ll tell you about mine.”

Twisted Throwback

part 14 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.

A little later Uncle Jack and I were on our way. It wasn’t far from Emory to Little Five Points, but traffic was heavy. “Keep an eye out for the salon,” he said as we turned onto Moreland Avenue; “I think it’s on the left.”

I soon saw it, but there was no parking to be had there. “No problem, I know where there’s a parking deck a little way further on.” We drove through the heart of Little Five and another half-mile further south, then turned onto a side-street and into the deck. The sidewalks and the café patios were crowded with people, many of them with body modifications or unusual clothes nobody could get away with in a small town like Trittsville, and several with obvious Twists. From the deck we walked north along Moreland, not in any hurry, looking at the shop windows, the murals, and the people.

“Some of these murals are over a hundred years old,” Uncle Jack told me. “They’ve been touched up over time, of course, the original paint’s weathered away and been replaced, but they used reference photos to keep them as much like the originals as possible. A few of them were originally graffiti, or started out when a mural artist worked some pre-existing graffiti into their painting.”

“I’m getting kind of hungry,” I said. “Do you want to eat something before we go to the salon?”

“Sure.” We stopped at a Korean place with a fenced patio; Uncle Jack spoke with the waitress in Korean, of course, and ordered for us. We ate on the patio, people-watching and not saying much.

“Maybe Mildred would be okay here,” I mused as I saw a woman with shaggy fur walk by. “Instead of in Spiral, I mean. What do you think?”

“I think Mildred would find a few kids like her in the schools here, but your parents would hate it. Spiral is more open-minded than most cities of that size, but it’s not outright countercultural like Little Five Points.”

I thought about that. “If I go to Emory or Georgia State, I could live here, and Mildred could live with me and go to high school here with other Twisted kids.”

“Again, I don’t think your parents would go for it. You can make the offer, if by the time you graduate and go to university they haven’t already decided to move to Spiral. But I wouldn’t mention it to them just yet; no sense getting in an argument about something that may or may not ever be feasible.”

As Uncle Jack was paying for our lunch, I noticed a community bulletin board. That gave me an idea, and I found a slip of paper and wrote a short note:

Jason, your cousin Morgan hasn’t seen you since you Twisted and your parents divorced, and she’d like to see you again.

And I gave a net address I used as a spam trap, and put that on the board. Maybe Jason lived here, or somebody who lived here knew him.

Then we walked the rest of the way to the salon. There were four women at work on four other women’s hair, and three sitting and waiting, reading books or tablets. One of the women cutting hair called out cheerily: “Welcome to Twist and Braid! Sign in on the tablet there,” gesturing toward the counter with the hand that wasn’t holding scissors.

I signed in, and then wrote out another personal ad for Morgan and put in on their bulletin board, and looked for a seat. Uncle Jack was looking at one of the women who was sitting and reading, apparently trying to catch her eye; she had light brown skin and patchy hair of at least four different colors and lengths and textures, black, blonde, and two shades of red. Her blonde hair was a lot longer than her black or red hair, and covered her right eye. I went over and sat near them, and as I did so the woman looked up and said: “Jack!”

“Hi, Ingrid. What are you doing in Atlanta?”

“What are you doing in North America?” She laughed and patted the seat next to her. “Tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing!”

“I’m staying in Trittsville, where my family is from, at least until Thanksgiving. I’ll probably leave the country again before New Year’s...” He scooted over to the seat she’d offered him, and told her a little about his recent travels in east Asia, and then said: “I’m forgetting my manners. Ingrid, this is my niece Emily — she just went through her Twist a little over a week ago. Emily, this is my friend Ingrid; we met on a train in Austria a few years ago.”

“Are you a traveler like Uncle Jack?” I asked.

“Hon, nobody’s a traveler like your uncle Jack. He’s been more places than Mercator ever heard of. But I travel around North America for work, and sometimes around Europe for pleasure. I’m here teaching folks at my company’s Atlanta office how to use some new software we’re rolling out, and stopped by here after I got done with today’s training sessions — this is the second-best place in the country for Twisted hair.”

“You have really cool hair,” I said.

“Yours looks pretty too, hon. Looking to change your style? It looks great how it is.”

I blushed. “It’s, um, kind of complicated. My trick makes my hair look better than it really is. But it doesn’t fool cameras or mirrors. It’s kind of a mess, actually; I need to get them to make it really be how it looks.”

“Ah.” And of course she looked around — there were plenty of mirrors in the place — and saw my reflection, and nodded slowly. “Not just your hair, I guess.”

“No.” I averted my gaze from her and the mirror.

Ingrid and Uncle Jack were both silent for a few moments; I heard the snip-snip of scissors and the quiet chatter of some of the customers with the ladies doing their hair. Then Ingrid said: “I’m not going to ask you about your Twist. You’ve told me more than you really need to tell a stranger, already. But if you want to listen I’ll tell you about mine.”

“...Okay,” I said.

“When I was thirteen, I developed a case of Alopecia universalis. That’s where your immune system goes haywire and attacks your hair follicles; all the hair on your body falls out. It’s pretty mild as immune disorders go, not life-threatening, and it’s pretty rare; between those two factors hardly anybody had ever put much research money into curing or preventing it. But it was embarrassing enough for a kid who’s having trouble fitting in already. At thirteen I didn’t have a lot of body hair yet, but I was proud of the little bit I had.

“Once my parents found out there was nothing we could do about it, medically, they decided they’d buy me the best wigs they could afford. We lived in a small town in Kentucky; we drove into Louisville one day to shop for wigs. Given my age, I’d need have to have them custom-made, but I tried on a bunch of them there in the shop, some near the same color and texture of my original hair, but a lot of others too, just for fun, imagining what I’d be like with hair like that. And when I’d about made up my mind to have them the same length and a little lighter than my original hair, I started being silly and putting on two wigs at once. I think it was one like this,” brushing her long blonde hair away from her eye and tucking it behind her ear, “and one like this,” touching her tight curls of black hair.

“And then my Twist happened. When I woke up, I had more hair on my head than I knew what to do with, though I still didn’t have any anywhere else. That wasn’t what concerned me most, though. The manager of the wig shop had found a blanket somewhere to cover me with, after my Twist destroyed my clothes, but it fell off me when I sat up, and as soon as I brushed this hair out of my eyes, I kind of went into shock at the other stuff I’d lost, and gained.

“My Dad was there, with the manager of the shop; they tried to calm me down, but I was in too much of a panic; once I’d seen my new breasts, I grabbed the blanket and covered up again, not just my chest but my face too, and huddled in a corner hyperventilating for I don’t know how long. My dad was talking, but I wasn’t following what he was saying. The next thing I knew I heard my mom’s voice, saying she had something for me to wear.

“Once she’d seen how I’d changed, she took charge — I found this out later — and borrowed a tape measure from the shop manager, measured my new body while I was still unconscious, and then left my dad with me while she went around to a couple of stores and bought me some new underwear and clothes. When she got back, she managed to calm me down and get me to put some clothes on — she’d gotten me sweaters and jeans, things that weren’t too girly, but weren’t so loose and shapeless I could pretend I hadn’t changed either.”

“Did you get used to it?” I asked. The moment the words were out of my mouth, I thought it was a silly question, given where she was, and how long her hair was, and the clothes she was wearing now, a green blouse with puffy short sleeves and a long flower-patterned skirt.

“Yeah, hon, and it didn’t take long. I stopped feeling weird when I looked in the mirror by the end of the first week, and I started experimenting with girlier clothes and jewelry a little after that. It took me a while longer to get used to being treated like a girl; having guys look at my chest instead of my eyes when they talk to me, or hold the door open for me... things like that. But all that felt normal after a few months or a year. What about you?”

“I’m — not like other Twisted who change gender,” I said, looking away again. “It didn’t change my body. Just my brain. I have a girl brain, and dressing as a girl and acting like a girl feels right, but seeing myself in the mirror is horribly wrong.”

“Oh, that must be rough. Can’t the doctors do anything for you?”

“Yeah, I’m seeing a doctor who used to treat people for gender dysphoria, back before they started fixing it prenatally. He says they can probably start hormone replacement therapy soon, and maybe surgery not long after that... or it might be over a year. Or longer if he has trouble finding a surgeon who’ll do it.”

“Are you talking to any other Twisted about this? People like us, I mean?”

“No... there aren’t any others in Trittsville. I’ve met one or two in Spiral, when I was out there visiting kinfolks, but I don’t know them well.”

“Here,” she said, picking up her tablet and tapping through to the web, “take a look at this. It’s a forum for gender-changed Twisted — I wish it had been there when I first Twisted. I help moderate it now, and try to help out young people who are going through something like what I went through.”

I got out my tablet and she sent over the address for the forum. It looked tolerably busy, with a dozen or more posts in the last week. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”

Just then one of the stylists called Ingrid, and she got up and went to the empty chair. I spent a few minutes reading the recent posts in the forum she’d shown me, and started drafting a post about my own situation, but didn’t send it right away; I went back to working on my term paper.

Then another of the stylists finished with her current customer, and called my name. I left my tablet and purse with Uncle Jack and went over to the chair she’d indicated.

“Hi, I’m Jenny. What do you want me to do for you today?”

“Hi, Jenny. I’m Emily. Um — take a look at my reflection in the mirror...”

She did, and boggled for a moment. “Okay... so your Twist makes you look different straight on or in a mirror?”

“Yeah. The mirror shows what I really look like; I’d like you to make my real hair,” pointing to my reflection, “look as much like this,” pointing to my hair, “as you can.”

“Hmm,” she said, running her fingers through my hair and glancing back and forth from me to my reflection. “That’s a tall order — your hair looks longer than it is. But I can style it like this, anyway.”

“Just do what you can.”

It was a fairly long process, at least compared to getting my hair cut when I was a boy, and probably compared to similar hair-styling jobs on women with hair as short as mine. She started by leaning me back and shampooing my hair, then rinsed and went to work on it, going pretty slowly, it seemed to me, and constantly glancing back and forth between me and my reflection.

“Huh... you’re looking different now. I mean, straight on. It’s like you and your reflection are converging, at least your hair is.”

That made sense, as much as anything about my trick did. And a while after that she said: “There. They look pretty much the same to me, now. Take a look.” And she swiveled the chair around — she’d been working on the hair in back — and I saw my reflection, and I just about cried for joy. My nose and my chin and especially my Adam’s apple were all still wrong, but my hair looked better than I thought it possibly could until it grew out a lot longer.

“Thank you,” I said. “Can you tell me how to take care of it so it stays looking like that as long as possible?”

She did, and I listened carefully. A minute later I got Uncle Jack’s attention — Ingrid had finished getting her hair done a little while earlier, and was sitting talking with him again — and he came and paid for the hair styling. Then he said: “I know we just ate, but Ingrid hasn’t yet. We’re going to join her for supper.”

“Sure,” I said. They’d already decided on a restaurant, a nice sit-down place around the corner on Euclid Avenue; we walked down there and waited a few minutes for a table. They’d been talking about their recent travels when I rejoined them, and they kept talking about that as we walked, but then Ingrid told me some stories about her first few weeks and months as a girl, and I opened up a little more and told her about some of the things I’d been going through.

She shook her head when I told her about Lionel and Vic. “Yeah, dealing with your old friends can be weird after any kind of Twist, but especially a gender change. Your whole social dynamic is different, almost everyone relates to you differently. One of my closest friends started treating me like I was made of glass, he didn’t feel comfortable horsing around and cutting up like we used to... and another started hitting on me in the most blatant possible way, asking if he could see my breasts or touch them. I’m not sure which was worse. It sounds like your friends are better than that — of course it helps that you’re all more mature than we were when I went through my Twist.”

“Yeah, none of them have been that bad. Lionel doesn’t seem to really get that I’m a girl now, he’s trying to pretend like nothing’s changed, and Vic — he’s trying to treat me like a girl without being too formal or distant, I guess. He doesn’t always get it right, but he’s trying.”

“And we were both lucky our friends didn’t just drop us when we Twisted. That’s happened to a lot of people I know online, and a couple I know personally. One of the moderators of the group I told you about actually got run out of town by a mob; her whole family had to leave for Spiral in the dead of night after their house was vandalized and she was beaten up by the police.”

I was shaken. The worst we feared for Mildred, the worst that Paul or Kerry had suffered from small-minded neighbors and classmates, was nowhere near that bad.

“Man, that’s horrible! Where was that?”

She frowned. “I can’t remember. She told me once, I think, but I’ve forgotten... some small town that escaped the Antarctic Flu and had no Twisted until she came along. She was adopted and nobody knew one or both of her parents were Twisted until she changed.”

Uncle Jack put in, “Trittsville had more Antarctic Flu victims than some towns our size. And a lot of their descendants have stayed there, unlike a lot of Twisted from small towns who moved away to big cities or Spiral. We’ve had a few kinfolks who moved to Spiral because they thought they’d stand out less there, but most of the ones who still look human — and don’t mind staying in one place — still live there.”

“Maybe I’ll come for a visit sometime, next time we’re both in Georgia,” Ingrid said. “I’d like to stay longer, but I’ve got a flight to catch tomorrow morning and I promised my niece I’d watch her play Pocahontas in the school Thanksgiving pageant Saturday.”

Uncle Jack asked after her family, and she told us about what her sister and brother-in-law and nieces had been up to in the couple of years since she’d last seen Uncle Jack. While they were talking, I glanced at my tablet and saw a couple of new messages, one from Mom and one from Vic.

Mom said:

How are your appointments going? What time are you going to be home?

I wrote back:

Still in Little Five, eating supper. Home in 3 hours maybe?

Vic said:

Want to hang out tomorrow after school? Terrell Park, my house, yours?

I didn’t reply right away, figuring I could do that in the car on the way home; I tried to focus on what Ingrid and Uncle Jack were saying. I was thinking mainly about Rob, and whether I should turn him down as Mom and Dr. Underwood advised. Hanging out with Vic and maybe Lionel would be... less stressful, certainly. Not necessarily more fun.

Ingrid and Uncle Jack kept talking long after Ingrid finished her meal and Uncle Jack and I finished our appetizers, and I had the impression that if he hadn’t been saddled with me, he would have spent the night at Ingrid’s hotel. Of course, if he hadn’t been chauffeuring me around today, he wouldn’t have run into Ingrid at all. Finally, sometime after eight, Uncle Jack said we had to leave; he and Ingrid promised to keep in touch, and Uncle Jack said he’d come to Chicago to see her after Thanksgiving. When we got back to the car, I called Mom and told her we were finally on our way home, and then chewed over the message to Vic for a while, before replying:

Got something tentative planned for tomorrow night — if it falls through, I’ll hang with you. If not, we can do something Saturday or Sunday.

Dad was sitting in the living room reading when we got home; Mom and Mildred had gone to bed. Dad insisted that I go to bed right away, but I think he and Uncle Jack stayed up talking for some time.

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