“It’s okay most of the time,” I said. “Times like this, I can forget what’s wrong with me and just enjoy being a girl out shopping with her friends. My friends accept me for who I am, and strangers can’t tell what’s wrong with me.”

Twisted Throwback

part 21 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.

Sunday, I messaged Morgan right after church, while Mom and Dad were still talking to various people. She messaged right back a few seconds later, saying: “We’re waiting for you in the parking lot.”

I told Mom and Dad, and went out to meet them. Morgan’s car was easy to spot with Morgan standing next to it and waving at me.

“Let’s go,” she said as I approached and got in the back seat (Sarah was in the front passenger seat), “we’ll pick up Olive at her church and be on the road.”

Five minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the Catholic church over near Terrell Park, and Olive, who was standing just outside the doors with a group of other people, waved to us and came over to get in next to me. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi. — So what’s our plan?” I asked Morgan.

“Medea’s already on her way. It’ll take her longer to get to Chattanooga from Knoxville than it will us. We’ll meet her for lunch — she recommended this Thai-Ethiopian fusion place — and then do some shopping.”

“Sounds good.”

“So how was your date with Rob Friday?” Olive asked me.

“It went pretty well,” I said. “I found out I still like documentaries... better than before, actually. Rob complained that the documentary didn’t have a big romantic scene to give him an excuse to kiss me, but he still kissed me right after the movie was over.”

“Do you think you’ll go out with him again?” Morgan asked.

“No,” I said. “I — Rob’s a nice guy, but I can’t see myself being with him long-term. And I want to give Vic a chance... I don’t think he’ll let on how strongly he feels about me as long as he thinks I’m with Rob.”

“I hope that works out,” Sarah said.

Olive told us about her date with Karl Saturday evening — it sounded like they were getting pretty serious — and we chatted about other things for a while; I told them about our trip to Atlanta Saturday, and what Dr. Underwood had said. We were driving through the Chattahoochee National Forest much of the way, the same route Mom and Dad usually took when we went to Chattanooga; it was always beautiful and often shady, with dense tall trees growing close to the highway.

We got into Chattanooga after about an hour, and found the Thai-Ethiopian fusion restaurant Medea had recommended.

“Stern, party of six,” Morgan said to the waitress. “There’s another couple of people joining us soon.” She checked her messages when we were seated, and called Medea, who said she was almost there.

“Who else is coming with her?” I asked.

“Her girlfriend — I can’t remember her name.”

Twenty minutes later, a couple of college-age girls walked in, looked around and talked to the waiter who approached them; he led them to our table. Morgan jumped up and went to meet them; I remained sitting and waved to them. She and Medea had exchanged photos, and she’d shown us Medea’s picture while we were waiting and ordering appetizers; so I knew Medea was the taller white girl, who was hugging Morgan... the black girl must be her girlfriend.

Sarah, Olive and I watched and listened as Morgan, Medea and her girlfriend sat down; Morgan and Medea were talking a mile a minute about everything that had happened in the nine years since they’d seen each other and memories of things they used to do when they were kids. It was sweet to see them reunited, and I was so happy I’d managed to get them back together. I learned more about Morgan’s past in the next five or ten minutes than I’d learned in the three weeks I’d known her. And I noticed that even the people at nearby tables were watching and listening and smiling at Morgan and Medea. When our waitress came back with our appetizers, she set them down and got caught up listening to Morgan and Medea reminiscing about how Morgan’s dad hadn’t set up the base of the Christmas tree properly one year, and it suddenly fell over while Morgan and Jason were playing in the next room, and they got blamed for it...

Then suddenly Medea looked at the waitress and glanced at the people at nearby tables, and a horrified look passed over her face for a moment. She thanked the waitress and said she’d like a glass of water, and asked her girlfriend, “Tavondra, what would you like?”

“Thai iced tea,” Tavondra said. “And — let me look at the menu.”

None of us had glanced at or, I realized later, even thought of the menu since Medea and Tavondra arrived.

Our waitress left and the people at the other tables lost interest in us. Then Medea said in a low voice, “I’m so sorry... I’m doing a lot better these days, but I just got so excited I lost control.”

“Oh! You were using your trick?” Morgan asked.

“Not deliberately. It happens when I’m excited or really interested in something, sometimes.”

“I like it,” Tavondra said.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“When I’m interested in something, focused on it... so is everyone else around me.”

“Oh.”

“The professors love her,” Tavondra said; “she’s a good student, and when she finds a lecture fascinating, so does everyone else. But once in a while she gets distracted, and forgets to turn off her trick, and everyone else gets distracted by the same thing.”

“Anyway... me and Morgan have been monopolizing your attention long enough. We should introduce everybody. Hi, I’m Medea McCrae, Morgan’s cousin, and this is my girlfriend Tavondra Lasseter.”

Morgan introduced the rest of us; when Medea heard my name, she said: “Oh, you’re the one who got us in touch with each other. Thanks so much!”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re Twisted like Medea, then?” Tavondra asked me.

“Well, not exactly the same, but similar.”

“Sure, no two Twists are alike. I’ve never met or heard of anyone whose Twist was exactly like mine, or Medea’s either.”

“Oh...” I thought that might be an invitation to ask how she was Twisted, but I hesitated, not wanting to pry. I decided to offer information instead. “I don’t know if she told you — mine is just a mental Twist, and a trick, so far. I have a girl brain but still the same body otherwise, and I’m using my trick to make it look like I have the right figure for these clothes, and all. But I’m supposed to start getting hormones soon.”

“Medea told me some of that,” she said. “Do you have a compulsion to act and dress like a girl, or are you a transsexual?”

“Some of both — I’m trans, but I have a compulsion to wear girl’s clothes, especially skirts and dresses. I’m not comfortable wearing jeans for more than a few hours, and I can’t stand to wear boy clothes.”

Medea said, “That’s a pretty common compulsion for girls like us. I didn’t get that myself, but it seems like about half the girls on the forum have some kind of clothing compulsion — some stronger than others. Did you see that message from the other new girl, um, Rachel I think her name was —”

“Yeah, I actually met her yesterday. She’s not happy about the way people are treating her, the way guys assume she’s easy because her compulsions are making her wear tight clothes.”

“She lives near you, then? That’s good, that you can meet up and help each other. Are your compulsions causing you trouble, too?”

“No, not really. I can stand to wear pants for a few hours, while I’m walking in the woods or doing chores, if they’re girly enough. And I like wearing skirts and dresses... Rachel doesn’t seem to like wearing tight girly clothes, but she can’t stand to wear anything else.”

“I hope she’ll get used to it eventually... I didn’t like my compulsions at first, but they sort of grew on me. And Tavondra —” She looked at her, and said: “Do you want to tell this part, sweetie?”

Tavondra smiled and said: “I didn’t change much physically when I Twisted, except that my acne cleared up all at once —”

“Don’t let her tell you that,” Medea said; “I’ve seen pictures of her before her Twist, and she was kind of cute before, but after it she was hot. Still is.”

Tavondra swatted at her and went on: “Anyway. My mind changed — at first they thought I’d gotten smarter, and maybe I did, slightly, but I only did better at school for the first few weeks after my Twist. After that I just got bored with school — I’d read all the way to the end of the textbooks long before the end of the year, and I couldn’t make myself go back and study that stuff again when it came time for tests. Once I’d learned it once, it was just boring, old news, even though I forgot details over time like anybody else. I was reading two or three books a week at first, plus watching a lot of nature and historical programs on TV, and after a while I started reading faster and was going through six or eight books a week. But never reading anything twice, and never sticking with one subject for long either. After a while I figured out what my compulsion was: I had to learn something new every day. Preferably several times a day.

“So I got mostly A’s and a couple of B’s the semester after I Twisted, and then my grades dropped the next semester because I wasn’t studying anything relevant to my actual classes anymore, and my memory of what I’d studied several months ago wasn’t great. And then Medea moved to town, and I suddenly started doing better in the classes I shared with her — I found myself paying attention to the lecture instead of reading something unrelated while the teacher talked about stuff I’d read months ago. I didn’t know why at first — I didn’t know Medea was Twisted or what her trick was; nobody told us.

“Then after Medea had been around a while, somebody told her I was Twisted. It wasn’t any secret. And she introduced herself to me, and we told each other about stuff, and we got to be friends — but she didn’t tell me she used to be a boy until later.”

“My mom told me not to tell anybody,” Medea said; “she said the whole point of moving and starting at a new school was so nobody’d know and nobody’d freak out about me. The first few months after my Twist, back at my old school, were pretty awful. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody at my new school I was even Twisted, but I figured I could trust Tavondra, and I needed somebody to talk to about stuff. Mom’s Twist was so mild she didn’t really understand what I was going through, and Grandma was more helpful, but I felt like I needed a friend my own age I could talk to about it.”

“What did you tell her at first?” I asked.

“I told her about my compulsions and my trick,” she said. “And after a while longer — um, this was true but kind of misleading — I said I wasn’t a lesbian before my Twist.”

“He sure wasn’t,” Tavondra said. “We were both pretty shy, and we were just friends for the better part of a year before we admitted we were falling in love... At first, I admit it was kind of selfish on my part: I could actually study when I was around Medea, with her trick canceling out my compulsion. But we got to be closer friends, and then something more, and then, when we started getting serious, she finally told me all about her Twist.” She looked at Medea, who said:

“So, the summer I was thirteen I went to camp. I’d been twice before, and if I hadn’t Twisted and then moved away, I probably would have kept going for several more years. I don’t know how many of you have been to camp, or what kind of camps you went to, but at this camp I used to go to it was traditional to put on skits — every cabin had to put on at least one, and some of the kids who were good at it chose to do extra ones.

“It was the third week, and my cabin had already done our obligatory skit, and some of us were talking about doing an extra one. One of the guys in our cabin, Scott, was pretty good at magic — card tricks, pulling coins out of people’s ears, things like that. He had a dozen or so tricks he could do without any special equipment, and this year he’d brought stuff for doing more complicated tricks — boxes with false bottoms, things like that. He was getting ready to do a small magic show as a solo thing, and this other guy, Colin, suggested we make it part of an actual skit — a kind of meta story about this magician and his assistants. Me and Colin would be the assistants, dressed up as girls, and on the surface it would be just a magic show, but Colin had it planned out how we’d gradually show that there’s this love triangle going on where one of the assistants, Colin’s character, had the hots for the magician, and the other assistant, my character, had the hots for Colin’s character, and Scott’s character had the hots for my character and they’re all oblivious about how the person they’re lusting after doesn’t return the favor... And it would have been really cool if I hadn’t ruined it by Twisting about two minutes into the skit, while Scott was pulling a frog out of my fake cleavage.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’d never have dared to play a girl in a skit. But — you didn’t know your mom was Twisted, right?”

“Not a clue. And I got pretty lucky, considering — I could easily have come out of that with a compulsion to wear fishnet stockings and a top hat and not much in between, or boobs as big as the fake ones I was wearing.” She was bigger than any of us high school girls, but not as big as Rachel, or a lot of other Twisted women — even some normal women her height have breasts bigger than hers.

“But I did have some compulsions that are probably related to the magic show we were doing, and Tavondra thinks my trick comes out of that too — a magician’s assistant’s job is to distract people from what the magician’s doing, and part of that is by subtly influencing the audience to look at what she’s looking at, and not at the magician’s hands.

“Whenever I see that someone has a secret — and I’m pretty good at spotting that — I feel like I have to help them keep it. I do whatever I can to distract other people’s attention from the person who’s trying to hide something, whether I consciously agree with their reasons for hiding things or not. Usually my trick is enough by itself to keep people from noticing, but I didn’t have conscious control over my trick in the first couple of years, and sometimes I’d need to take more overt action.” She glanced at Tavondra.

“I can’t count how many times she got in trouble at school for that,” Tavondra said. “One time we were coming out of the restroom where a couple of older girls were smoking, and a teacher was just fixing to go in. And Medea faked having a seizure, and fell over onto the teacher jerking her arms around, and lay on the floor with her eyes rolled back and her tongue lolling out until the girls we’d seen smoking had come out of the restroom. She nearly got suspended over it.”

“But the worst was just a couple of years ago, our sophomore year in college,” Medea said. “I found out a girl in our dorm was cheating on her boyfriend, and after that, I found I had to keep covering for her — lying to him and his friends about where I’d seen her and who she was with, and so forth. The only reason I can tell you about it now is that of course he found out eventually, in spite of all our efforts, and it’s not a secret anymore.”

“No, the worst was when you and Al Timmons carried on that pretend flirtation to keep his parents from figuring out he was gay, and I thought you were cheating on me until Al told me what was going on.”

“I’m sorry,” Medea said. “That was a lot worse for you... but the thing with Clarissa went on for months with me not being able to tell anybody, and with Al, you found out after just a couple of days. And I could feel good about helping Al, but I felt horrible about being forced to help Clarissa...”

“I know,” Tavondra said, and clasped her hand. “It wasn’t your fault. Remember that.”

I wondered then if Medea was covering for somebody even now. Who, though? Tavondra? Some random diners at another table whose conversation we might have overheard if she hadn’t been speaking quite as loud?

“But enough about us,” Medea said. “Sarah — right? And Olive? We’ve barely been introduced — tell us about yourselves.”

She drew Sarah and Olive out about their history and interests (and the slightly embarrassing fact that I’d asked Sarah out the day before I Twisted) as the waitress came back and took our orders, and then brought our food, and as we settled in to eat. By then the conversation was more of a free-for-all, as we were all starting to feel like we knew each other and could talk about almost anything.

We finished eating and paid for our lunch, and were just getting up to go when I heard a crash and clatter over toward the back of the section of the dining room we were in. But before I could look and see what it was, Medea suddenly said: “Look! What’s that?” and pointed in the opposite direction. I turned to look, and completely forgot about the crash for a few minutes.

I was vaguely aware of everyone else in the restaurant also turning and looking — at nothing in particular, it turned out later, but for some reason the little potted rubber tree over by the entrance lobby looked absolutely fascinating. I wandered over toward it, and so did Morgan and the rest, and several other diners and waiters and waitresses. Before much of a crowd could gather, though, we all sort of lost interest — and those of us who knew about Medea’s trick turned to look at her, while the other diners and staff just looked puzzled and went back to what they were doing.

“Let’s go,” Medea said. “Maybe I can explain later.”

We were outside before Tavondra said: “She can’t always tell you why she does that. Her compulsion is to protect people with secrets — and sometimes just people who don’t want people looking at them... I have a hunch she was distracting us from something that would have been embarrassing if we’d noticed it. Maybe somebody dropped something or tripped and fell, and she distracted us until they’d picked themselves up or cleaned up their mess?”

“Maybe that was it,” Medea said. “Let’s go shopping.”

Medea rode in Morgan’s car, so they could continue catching up on all their missed years, while Sarah and I rode with Tavondra in her car. We met up again at the mall, and spent several hours visiting two shoe stores, a lingerie store, a jewelry store, and three general clothing stores; we split up and rejoined several times, and not all of us visited every store, but that was our total for the day. I was flush with the money from my Twist stipend, and spent more than anyone else; when we went out to Morgan’s car at the end of the day, I put two pairs of shoes, a new nightgown, several new skirts, blouses and dresses, and a silver necklace in the trunk.

At one point, I was looking through racks of dresses with Medea and Morgan while Tavondra, Sarah and Olive were somewhere else. Morgan held up a blue dress with spaghetti straps and Medea said: “That would look great on you.”

“I’ll go see if it fits,” Morgan said, and took that and another dress she’d been looking at to the dressing room. Medea and I were alone.

“So... how are you doing, really?” she asked.

“...Pretty okay, I guess? I was feeling frustrated when I wrote that first forum post, about maybe not getting hormones for months yet, but yesterday my psychologist said he’d go ahead and ask my endocrinologist to start them, so that’s good.”

“You’re not too uncomfortable? I mean, if I’d gotten this body without the mind to go with it —”

“It’s okay most of the time,” I said. “Times like this, I can forget what’s wrong with me and just enjoy being a girl out shopping with her friends. My friends accept me for who I am, and strangers can’t tell what’s wrong with me. It’s worst when I have to shower or go to the bathroom.”

She shook her head. “I remember how weirded out I was the first time I had to pee with this new equipment... and how embarrassed I was the next morning, showering with girls. The counselors moved me to a girls' cabin the day I Twisted, and I stayed one night and morning there before my parents came and brought me home. If I still felt that way every time... I can’t imagine how bad it would be. But by the afternoon of the next day I was feeling pretty comfortable with my body. It was the way other people were treating me that was weird and annoying.”

“I like the way people are treating me, mostly. There are a few mean kids at school, but not as many as I was afraid of, and my family and friends are awesome.”

“That’s good,” she said. “I wish... Mom’s family has been great, but my dad and his family — except for Morgan, now — don’t want anything to do with me.”

“I’m sorry... If you want to come visit Morgan in Trittsville but you can’t stay with her, maybe you could stay in our guest room instead of a hotel. I’ll have to check with my parents to be sure, but I think they’ll be okay with it.”

“Thanks.”

Morgan came out of the dressing room in the blue dress then, looking fantastic. We told her so, and she went back in to try on the other dress. I took a couple of things I’d been looking at and went to try them on, and didn’t talk a lot more with Medea about our Twists that afternoon.

When Morgan dropped me off at home, it was nearer nine than eight. Dad and Uncle Jack helped me haul in my loot from Morgan’s trunk, and I said hi to Mom and talked with them for a couple of minutes before I went up to Mildred’s room. I found her at her computer.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I had a pretty good day,” she said. “Irene came over.”

“She did? Great!”

“Yeah, it was pretty cool. Too cool to go outside much, but we hung out and watched movies and stuff. It was the best time we’ve had together since my Twist... I just wish Natalie could have come.”

I sat on the bed near her swivel-chair and patted her knee. “Maybe Natalie will get over that eventually,” I said. “People sometimes outgrow phobias like that.”

“Maybe.” She wasn’t holding her breath. “And Bobby messaged me, and we chatted for a while after Irene went home... How was your shopping trip?”

“It was fantastic. But the best part was meeting Morgan’s cousin and her girlfriend — they’re both Twisted, and Morgan’s cousin Medea is kind of like me or Rachel. Or Richard — whatever name she decides to use.” I told her about Medea and Tavondra, and she said:

“Man, I wish I had somebody like Medea around. Or had her trick. I guess I could use my trick to distract people so they don’t stare at me, but I don’t think it would work very well.”

“Maybe not.”

I showed her a few of the things I’d bought, and she opined that I should wear my new black dress on my next date with Rob. I almost told her that I was fixing to break up with him; I should have told her already... but it was getting late, and it was a school night, at least for me. I didn’t have time for that long conversation just now. I thanked her for the advice and got ready for bed.

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