A House Divided, part 4 of 7

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“I can’t,” Arnie said. “Keith and Tara Saunders invited me to a party at their house. I asked if you could come, but they said it’s centaurs only,” he went on, looking vaguely embarrassed.

“Have fun,” I said. I felt weird about that, and wondered if things like that were going to happen often, and if so, if this was the beginning of the end of our friendship.


A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 4 of 7


Next morning during homeroom, Mrs. Jessup handed out more revised schedules, including mine and Arnie’s. I still had a couple of the same classes, including first period Algebra, but most of my schedule was completely different. I was happy to see I still had Ms. Killian for biology, though at second period rather than fourth. I’d have fourth period lunch. She also gave us new bus schedules; they were working on adding new bus routes so the buses wouldn’t be so crowded with the centaurs taking up more room.

Arnie and I compared schedules. “I’m not going to see much of you at school anymore,” I said. “We should get together this weekend.”

“Maybe I can get my brother to give me a ride to Will’s house, and you could walk over there?” His brother, a senior at our school, had been out with his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day and they’d both become Smyrna wolves. I wasn’t sure if either of his parents could drive; they were both centaurs.

“Sure. Talk to Will about it.” I wasn’t sure whether Will had his new schedule, or if so, when and if I’d see him.

With the school allowing the centaurs five minutes extra to get to class, and a lot of kids getting lost trying to find their new classrooms, most teachers were postponing the start of their lessons by five minutes or even ten. I was pleasantly surprised to see Latisha walk into my algebra class only a minute late.

“I don’t have assigned seating,” Ms. Tang said to her and the other new people. “Sit anywhere that’s not already taken.” Latisha sat next to me.

“I emailed a couple of those bloggers you told me about,” she whispered. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Ms. Tang had started reviewing the previous day’s lesson as soon as the bell rang, so Latisha and I didn’t have much chance to talk then, but she didn’t get into new material until all the stragglers had arrived. After class, Latisha and I compared our new schedules. We both still had Ms. Killian for biology, but at different times of day; we also had P.E. together, third period, with Coach Renfrew.

“Do you know anything about him?” I asked her.

“My brother had him a couple of years ago,” she said. “He’s okay, it sounds like.”

I had another pleasant surprise when Will came in to Ms. Killian’s second period biology. We compared schedules before class, and saw that we’d have the same number of classes together, just different ones. Ms. Killian welcomed the new students, and reviewed what she’d talked about the day before, then continued her lesson on centaur anatomy.

I went on to P.E. from there, and had a nasty shock. The class was already full. Apparently, they’d taken advantage of the necessity for a massive rescheduling to organize the P.E. classes by neospecies. So there’d apparently be several classes that were all centaurs, and one or two that were all wolves, and one with all the ninth graders of miscellaneous other neospecies; there were more than thirty of us. There were a few kids I’d had other classes with, either here or in middle school, but most I’d never met.

The locker room was crowded, with almost twenty guys. Before class, when we were changing into gym clothes, I didn’t have a problem; I just changed my outer clothes and kept the same underwear on. Most of us did. I worried that my underwear’s failure to bulge where it should might draw unwanted attention, and thought about ways to fix that tomorrow, but that day it wasn’t an issue; most of the guys were strangers to each other as well as to me, and there were several guys who were the only representative at our school, or at least in our grade, of some exotic neospecies; they drew all the attention.

I didn’t have any chance to talk to Latisha; Coach Renfrew (who had a tail and webbed fingers like Tandy Shannon) split us up into four volleyball teams for two parallel games, and we were not only on different teams but in different games. I did manage to talk to Tyrone briefly, and he absentmindedly agreed that next Tuesday would be a good time to meet after school — then he went back to chatting with Lindsey Babcock, who was also on our team.

After class, I couldn’t get away with dawdling in the shower drying off and getting my underwear on behind the curtain. But I didn’t let that stop me; I put my clean underwear on the moment I turned off the shower, then got out and dried off the rest of me before I put my other clothes on over the damp underwear. That would have drawn attention if there weren’t so many more exotic things to look at, or studiously avoid looking at. There was the guy who’d been in my previous P.E. class, with tentacle arms, and another guy of the same species, who was less modest (or more of a showoff) than the guy I already sort of knew — let’s just say that wasn’t the only part of his body that was long and multijointed. There was one guy who had two of them. There were guys with tails and scales and claws and even wings.

So I got lucky, nobody noticing or commenting on my excess of modesty. But I knew that couldn’t last.

Will looked like he was in better shape than Monday or Tuesday, when I saw him on the bus that afternoon. I talked to him about maybe getting together with Arnie that Saturday, and he said he’d ask his Mom if it suited for us to come over.

When I got home, Mom was up and puttering around in the kitchen, not lying on the sofa, which made me feel a lot better about her. I put my backpack down and hugged her.

“The Barneses said they could give us a ride to church,” she said. “How much homework do you have?”

“Not too much,” I said. “I can do most of it during supper, and the rest after church.”

So I just focused on the stuff I had to turn in Thursday, and didn’t have time to check email or IM, or work on the project for Ms. Killian. The Barneses pulled into our driveway and honked their horn while I was washing up after supper. Mom rested her hand on my shoulder as we walked out to their car, but didn’t lean on me as hard as she’d been doing.

It was a job to get Mom into their back seat, and then I somehow had to squeeze in next to her — they had bucket seats in front. I was surprised to see Mr. Barnes wearing only sandals and shorts, and Mrs. Barnes wearing only that plus a halter top. I guessed they’d gotten fed up with wearing formal clothes over their fur, but I wondered if the other folks at church would like it. I wasn’t about to complain, but I knew a lot of the older folks at our church were sticklers for formal dress even on Wednesday nights, and this was more informal than anything anybody had ever dared to wear to church. Mom was wearing the nicest of the three skirts she’d been working on, with a blouse that was too big for her now; I was wearing my usual Wednesday night church clothes, the same as Sunday clothes except without a jacket or tie.

Mrs. Barnes asked me if I could help out with visiting homebound people the next day after school, and I said sure. She and Mr. Barnes talked about it for a couple of minutes, and they said Mrs. Barnes could pick me up direct from school, and give me a ride home after we made rounds of a few people’s houses.

“Is that okay, Mom?”

“Sure,” she said. “Your father will be at home tomorrow, and if you want to help out with the homebound ministry Friday or Saturday as well, I’ll probably be okay — I’m getting a lot stronger.”

Dad worked twelve-hour shifts, normally three or four days on and then three or four days off. With so many other paramedics turned into centaurs, or killed or injured on Valentine’s day, or both, he had shorter breaks than usual, but he’d still have tomorrow off before working another three days.

Mr. and Mrs. Barnes weren’t the only wolves who’d come to church that night wearing less than they used to, but there weren’t many like them; I overheard some of the centaurs and chameleons and others, mostly older folks, gossiping about how indecent it was.


Thursday, Latisha and I both got to Algebra early enough to chat for a couple of minutes before class.

“One of the bloggers I emailed already wrote me back,” she said. “I’m working on a list of questions for him. Can I go over them with you before I send them to him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Can you email them to me when you get home tonight? I’ll be late getting home, but I’ll look at them when I can.” I told her about going round to visit homebound centaurs with Mrs. Barnes.

“That’s cool,” she said. “Here, if you want to look at them now and give them back when you see me at P.E.?” She handed me a sheet of notebook paper. I didn’t have time to look at it or say anything about it before the bell rang and Ms. Tang started reviewing yesterday’s lesson.

Algebra is not my strongest subject, to say the least, and I couldn’t afford to look at Latisha’s paper during Ms. Tang’s lesson. And in biology, I’d barely had time to sit down and start deciphering Latisha’s handwriting before Ms. Killian started her lesson on how Kennesaw chameleons‘ skin apparently worked differently from real chameleons’, so I didn’t have any intelligent comments to offer when I tried to give her back the paper just before P.E.

“Sorry,” I said. “Email me later?”

“You can keep it until tomorrow,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable. I didn’t want to tell her I could barely read her handwriting, but I’d have to, if I hadn’t figured out what she’d written by tomorrow.

We went to our separate locker rooms to change. Coach Renfrew had us playing volleyball again, but rearranged the teams. He’d separated the two insectivores, Tyrone and Lindsey — maybe to keep them from flirting, or maybe just to make the teams more even, I’m not sure — and now Latisha was playing opposite me.

I’d stuck a pair of socks inside my underwear this morning, and when I’d undressed and was standing around in my underwear waiting for a free shower, I worried that the bulge they created was implausibly big, or weirdly shaped, and somebody would figure out I was faking it. But if anybody noticed, they didn’t say anything. When I got into the shower and pulled off my underwear, I then had the problem of what to do with the socks. I hung the sweaty underwear over the curtain rod, but set the socks on the little soap tray, where they got soaked. Afterward, I wrapped the socks up in the dirty underwear to hide them. I wouldn’t have anything to stick in my clean underwear; I’d need to bring extra socks tomorrow.

I tried something different; I wrapped one towel around my waist before I got out of the shower stall, and dried off the rest of me with an extra towel I’d brought while I walked back to my locker. I sat on the bench with my legs close together — maybe suspiciously close, I worried, too late — and pulled my clean underwear on under the towel before unwrapping it and putting the rest of my clean clothes on.

Despite minor problems, that procedure seemed to work pretty well, and I stuck to it for a while. It was better than wearing damp underwear until I got home from school, like Wednesday, worrying that they’d soak through and make it look like I’d peed in my pants. (They weren’t quite that damp, fortunately.)

I saw Will during American History, and told him I’d be leaving after school with Mrs. Barnes instead of riding the bus. She picked me up right on time, wearing shorts and a halter top as she’d done last night. It was cold enough out that I’d worn a flannel shirt and a jacket, but I guessed her fur kept her warm enough she didn’t need anything else, and she was wearing the shorts and halter only out of modesty.

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“We’re visiting Mrs. Paulsen first,” she said. Mrs. Paulsen was a widow lady at our church, not quite as old as my grandparents; I hadn’t seen her since I came home from Uncle Mike’s place.

She’d become a centaur, of course, and she was still having a lot of trouble walking. We sat and visited with her for a few minutes — she was lying on her sofa, like my Mom did so often these days — and then Mrs. Barnes put me to work cleaning the kitchen while she helped Mrs. Paulsen take a bath, and then had me clean the bathroom while she took Mrs. Paulsen for a short walk, supporting her like I’d done for Will and Mom. We’d brought her some groceries too, which Mrs. Barnes had bought before picking me up at school.

Next, we visited Mr. and Mrs. Riley. They were centaurs too, just a few years older than my parents. Mrs. Riley had been a little overweight, and her legs had enough muscles on them that she was already walking, but Mr. Riley had been skinny as a rail to begin with, and he’d been walking down the stairs at the moment of the change. He’d broken his right arm and both his forelegs, and they were in casts. He said he’d been in the hospital for a couple of days, but they’d sent him home because they were crowded with people hurt even worse than him.

Mrs. Riley was better off than him, but her legs were weak enough that she got tired quickly, and she hadn’t been able to do much around the house. I bathed Mr. Riley while Mrs. Barnes did some housework, then I helped her with it and we visited for a little longer before we left.

After that, Mrs. Barnes took me home. “How often do you think you can help us?” she asked as she pulled into my neighborhood.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can probably do twice a week and still get all my homework and stuff done. Maybe more during Spring break, and less when I’m studying for finals.” I didn’t think we’d be going on a family trip during Spring break, with Mom still recovering her mobility and missing lots of work.

I’d read most of the assigned reading in the car, but I had some other homework to do. When I came in, Dad was in the kitchen fixing supper, and Mom was lying on the sofa, reading; she’d already eaten supper, and was snacking on salad again.

I ate supper with Dad, and worked on homework while I ate, after talking to him a little about school and helping Mrs. Barnes with the homebound ministry. After supper I checked my email and IM, and saw that Aunt Karen had replied to my email about interviewing her and other Huntsville telepaths. I reviewed the list of questions I’d been working on, changed a few things, and sent it to her, asking her to reply to the questions and forward them to other people who might be willing to answer.

Then I remembered the paper Latisha had given me, and I took it out and looked at it. By the time I went to bed, I’d managed to decipher her handwriting well enough to read about a third of it, but the rest stumped me. I made a few notes on the questions, then started studying for Friday’s quiz in American History.


Friday morning during homeroom, a few more people got their new schedules; I think everybody had them by then. The morning announcements included a notice that centaurs would be allowed to snack during class, but not during quizzes or tests; apparently there’d been a lot of complaints not only from students but from irate parents.

I had a little time before Algebra to talk with Latisha about the interview questions she’d given me, but I didn’t really feel comfortable talking about them where other people might overhear.

“I read some of it last night after I finished my other homework,” I told her, “but I haven’t had time to think about it a lot. Can we talk about it tonight?”

“Or at lunch,” she said.

“Sure.”

In Biology, Ms. Killian talked for about half an hour about some of the other neospecies in the Atlanta area; toward the end of the class she reviewed what she’d said earlier in the week, about the general patterns of the changes and about centaur anatomy, and said we’d have a quiz on that stuff next Monday.

My P.E. class had even more students in it than before, as the last few people got their new schedules assigned; there were almost forty of us who didn’t fit into the all-centaur or all-wolf P.E. classes. Coach Renfrew divided those of us who were still pretty much humanoid into a couple of teams and had us play dodgeball while he worked one-on-one with some of the kids of the stranger neospecies — there were some who walked on all fours, for instance, and the guys with tentacle arms, and so forth. As luck had it, I was on the opposite team from Latisha and Tyrone; my team lost.

As before, I took the quickest shower I could and kept one towel wrapped around my waist while I dried off the rest of me with another. I was careful, when I sat down on the bench by my locker, not to have my legs too close together — or too far apart. And I slipped a clean rolled-up pair of socks into my clean underwear before pulling them on, without anybody noticing. I was starting to think I could keep doing this indefinitely.

At lunch, I looked around for Latisha, and I saw her sitting and talking with a couple of wolf girls. I was nervous about sitting down next to them, but I had to at least give her back the list of interview questions she’d loaned me, so I nerved myself and went over to them.

“Hi, Jeffrey,” Latisha said. “Keisha, Wanda, this is Jeffrey — we’re working on a project for Ms. Killian’s biology class.”

“Hi,” I said, and sat down next to Latisha, across from one of the wolf girls — I wasn’t sure which was Keisha and which was Wanda. They seemed to think Latisha had introduced them adequately and didn’t clarify.

“Did you have time to read that thing I gave you?” Latisha asked.

“Um,” I said. I had read as much of it as I could, and I had some ideas about rephrasing some of the questions — assuming I’d deciphered them correctly — but I didn’t want to talk about them in front of a couple of girls I didn’t know. Talking about them with a girl I’d known only for a few days would be embarrassing enough under ideal circumstances. “See, I looked at it after I finished my homework last night, but there were parts of it where I couldn’t read your handwriting. Maybe you could type it up and email it to me?” I took the paper out of my backpack and took a bite of whatever I had on my tray — it must have been meat because the carnivores weren’t complaining too loudly, but I don’t know what kind.

“There were only some parts you couldn’t read?” Keisha (or Wanda) said, and giggled.

“You’re doing better than me if you can read anything she wrote,” Wanda (or Keisha) added.

“Hush,” Latisha said. “Okay, I’ll type it up tonight. What about the parts you could read?”

I took another bite and tried to think of something both useful and non-embarrassing to say about it. “Maybe it’s already there in the parts I couldn’t read,” I said, “but what about ask if they happened to be looking at a clock or watch when the changes happened, and if they know how long the changes took, or how long the queasy feeling lasted?”

“That’s a good idea,” she said, and wrote something down.

“And, um, did the queasy feeling start before the obvious physical changes, or afterward, or at the same time?”

“I think it was at the same time,” she said, “but I’ll ask.”

From what Uncle Mike said, I thought she was right. I’d been too distracted to notice, myself. But it would be more scientific to ask a bunch of guys about it.

“What happened to you?” Keisha (or Wanda) asked me. “You look old-fashioned, like Latisha.”

“Did you used to go to school with her in Hartville?” Wanda (or Keisha) asked.

“It’s Hartwell,” Latisha said, and I said hastily:

“No, I’ve lived in Marietta my whole life. I didn’t meet Latisha until we started working on this project.”

“But you weren’t in Marietta on Valentine’s Day,” Keisha (or Wanda) pointed out.

I told them about Huntsville, and of course they had questions about what telepathy felt like, which I answered as best I could from what I’d heard from Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave. I steered the conversation back to our project, and asked Latisha if she had any ideas about what I should ask my interview subjects.

“Well,” she said, “there’s what you said — did they notice the times, how long the headache lasted and how long it was before they started hearing other people’s thoughts.”

“And can they keep other people from hearing what they’re thinking?” Keisha (or Wanda) asked.

I wrote those questions down.

That evening, Latisha and I talked again by IM.

obsidian14: i just emailed you my list of questions

scribbler371: thanx. i’ll look at it. here, i’ll email you my list

Ten or fifteen minutes later,

scribbler371: sorry i was so vague at lunch. it’s weird and embarrassing talking about this stuff at all, and i really didn’t want to talk about it in front of your friends.

obsidian14: it’s ok. could you really not read my handwriting or was that just an excuse not to talk about it in front of keisha and wanda?

scribbler371: both, kind of. it was kind of hard to read your handwriting but even the parts i understood i didn’t want to talk about just then.

obsidian14: what about now?

scribbler371: so. you could be, i don’t know, more clinical?

obsidian14: like how?

scribbler371: like instead of asking “did you throw up when the changes happened” you could ask “did you vomit” or even “did you experience nausea” etc.

obsidian14: that would be more scientific i guess

scribbler371: yeah. and probably less embarrassing for you and them both.

obsidian14: what about you?

scribbler371: what do you mean?

obsidian14: did you experience nausea when the changes happened?

scribbler371: i threw up five pancakes all over my uncle’s thirty year old atari 2600.

obsidian14: that sounds bad.

scribbler371: could have been worse. no permanent damage. most of the vomit went on the carpet. what about you?

obsidian14: yeah. we were eating lunch when it happened. most of us threw up.

scribbler371: how long before you figured out what happened?

obsidian14: us girls, not until we watched the local tv news talk about it. dad and my uncles and brothers and guy cousins knew what happened to them right away but they didn’t talk about in front of us girls.

scribbler371: huh. i guess that makes sense

obsidian14: did you feel what happened or not figure it out till you looked?

scribbler371: i was busy being sick. felt weird but didn’t know what happened until i went to change out of my vomity clothes.

obsidian14: that’s weird. that you could change so much and not feel it happening.

scribbler371: you too, though, right?

obsidian14: only with me it was all inside

scribbler371: well, i guess the numb feeling made it hard to figure out exactly what was wrong

obsidian14: probably

scribbler371: interview enough guys, you’ll find one who was peeing when it happened

obsidian14: eww, gross. i am not thanking you for that image.

scribbler371: sorry :(

obsidian14: where is the brain bleach?

scribbler371: they sell big industrial size bottles of it at sam’s club. you’ll need lots by the time you finish this project.

obsidian14: yeah. sure you don’t want to swap?

scribbler371: it would be just as embarrassing for me as for you

I didn’t really think, then, about why I could so easily talk about such weird, embarrassing things with a girl I’d known for barely a week, which I couldn’t bear to talk about with my parents or friends I’d known for years. Even with Uncle Mike, I hadn’t talked any more plainly about this stuff than I was talking about it with Latisha. We talked for a while longer about questions for both her interview subjects and mine, and said good night; then I sent another email to Aunt Karen with a few additional questions Latisha and I had come up with.


Saturday, I walked over to Will’s house just after breakfast. Will and I played Champions of Marduk for a while, until Arnie’s brother dropped him off. Will and Arnie had both gotten stronger in the last week — their legs were still skinnier than mine, but not as rail-thin as they’d been when I first saw them after I came home, and their arms were filling out too. We hung out for a few hour playing video games, and then went for a walk down to the creek that runs behind the houses at the end of Will’s street. They sat on a fallen log and I sat on a big rock, and we talked about everything and nothing for an hour or so, and I drew several sketches of them and the trees and the creek. I liked the view a lot, and several times in the next month I walked down there, by myself more often than with Will, and did a bunch of sketches, then my first real landscape painting.

Things settled into a pattern for a while. I ate lunch with Latisha and Tyrone more often than not; Latisha’s wolf friends joined us fairly often, as did Lindsey Babcock — she and Tyrone were becoming pretty tight, being the only Valdosta frogs in our grade and maybe the only ones in our school. I learned to tell Keisha and Wanda apart, and I learned to not get sick watching Tyrone and Lindsey slurp up maggots and beetles with their long tongues. I met Latisha’s brother Lyndon once, when he passed by our table and Latisha said hi to him and introduced him; he didn’t want to sit with us freshmen, though, and he didn’t say much.

Latisha, Tyrone and I met in the library after school the next Tuesday, and I got a ride home from Tyrone’s mom; but after that we didn’t meet after school again, since we had plenty of chances to trade pointers on interviewing and other research during lunch.

Mom, Will, and the other centaurs kept putting on weight and getting steadier on their feet. Within another couple of weeks, most of them could stand up longer and walk further without resting than me. Mom went back to work in early March; we still didn’t have a car she could drive, but Cobb County had beefed up its lame public transportation system with new routes and more frequent buses in response to public outcry from the centaurs, so she could take the bus to work now. There was even talk about getting MARTA to extend a rail line from Atlanta to Marietta, but that would take a few years.

I kept helping with the homebound ministry twice a week after school. Dad’s work schedule got less hectic after a while, and when he started having several days off in a row again, he would pick me up after school some days and we’d go visit two or three people in the hospital or at home. We did their grocery shopping for them and helped out around the house.

I was getting worried about Mom and Dad. It used to be, when I got home from school on days when neither of them had to work, I’d often find them together — both of them working in the garden in good weather, or both of them sitting in the living room, one reading aloud to the other, or both of them working on cleaning the same room. I hardly ever saw them doing things together now, and I didn’t see them hugging or kissing very often.

One day I came home expecting to see both of them; Dad was gone somewhere, and Mom had been crying, though she tried not to let on. She vaguely said Dad had to go run some errands.

When Dad came home a few hours later, he asked me if I wanted some chicken wings, and I said I’d eaten supper with Mom and wasn’t hungry. He nodded and put away the stuff he’d brought home in the refrigerator, then went into the living room. Mom said she was tired and was going to bed, and left the room almost as soon as Dad came in.


When I got up to go to school the next morning, the door to the guest bedroom was closed. The door to Mom and Dad’s bedroom was open, but no one was in there; I found Mom in the kitchen fixing breakfast. She didn’t say anything about what had happened the day before, and I couldn’t ask.

Aunt Karen had forwarded both my lists of questions to a bunch of local friends, and fourteen people responded to them, including her doctor. I had plenty of material to work with for my project. Latisha had sent her questions to several bloggers in Athens and other parts of that change-region, and one of them had posted her questions on his blog, asking his readers to answer them in the comments; she had a lot of irrelevant and unpleasant stuff to wade through there, but she wasn’t hurting for material, either. Tyrone hadn’t found so many people to interview, but he had enough to satisfy Ms. Killian’s requirements — he’d interviewed his dad, and Lindsey, and his aunt’s doctor in Bainbridge. Latisha and Tyrone both had trouble finding enough printed or online sources Ms. Killian thought were reliable enough to use — the first four or five online sources they showed her, she said weren’t scientific enough to count. It was easier to find scientific studies on the Huntsville telepaths; they were one of at least five new telepathic species worldwide, but the only one in the U.S., and the focus of a lot more interest from scientists outside their region than the Valdosta frogs or Athens neuters. Some of the papers I found were way over my head, and some were in academic journals that neither our high school library nor our county library had subscriptions to; I had to ask our librarian to request copies of them from university libraries.

On the biological front, there were new developments to worry me. When I realized that my pubic hair was falling out, as was my little smidgen of chest hair, I gradually worked up the nerve to ask Latisha if it was happening to her, or the people she was interviewing.

obsidian14: yeah. women and men both.

scribbler371: it’s like we’re turning into little kids?

obsidian14: we’re not getting shorter though

scribbler371: i guess

obsidian14: other stuff’s changing though

scribbler371: what?

obsidian14: i’m not going to tell you if you haven’t noticed

scribbler371: what? why?

After a long silence, she replied:

obsidian14: ok. my boobs are getting smaller. mom’s too

scribbler371: oh

obsidian14: when i realized, i started hiding it. i’m sort of glad you didn’t notice. maybe nobody else will either.

scribbler371: have you asked the people you interviewed about this stuff too?

obsidian14: no. i need to do that soon. been thinking about how to word the questions, and looking at blogs and stuff to see if anybody else is talking about it.

Other people were going through gradual changes too, subtler than the drastic changes on Valentine’s Day and in many cases not noticed until they were far advanced. The centaurs were putting on muscle and fat, of course, building up to the right mass for their new shape, and there were others like them; others, like most of the winged people in various places, were more gradually losing weight, until four or five months after the changes they were light enough for their wings to support them... But you know about that already. As for me and Latisha and the others like us, my voice was getting gradually higher, partially reversing the change it had gone through a year or two earlier, and hers was getting gradually deeper — though thankfully without the embarrassing abrupt mid-sentence tone changes I’d suffered, along with most boys, when I started going through puberty. It was happening so gradually that nobody who saw and talked to us every day noticed it; it wasn’t until I talked to Aunt Karen on the phone for the first time in a couple of weeks that she remarked on it, and I realized what was happening. I worried that these changes would blow my cover as a Huntsville telepath, whenever people at school noticed them and realized they didn’t match the purely neurological changes that I’d claimed. But it turned out that that worry was misplaced; my voice had barely changed enough to notice by the time — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

More and more of the centaurs who’d been injured on Valentine’s Day, or were just too weak to go to school, came back, and the centaur majority got even larger. The cafeteria, which was already full at third period, could no longer hold all the centaurs (and a few other herbivores); they moved the carnivores and omnivores' lunch into the auditorium, and let the upper-grade herbivores have the cafeteria at fourth period. Fewer people’s schedules were changed this time, but it was still annoying.

And as the centaurs got their strength back, and became an even larger majority, the lines between social groups at school were redrawn. Competitive sports had been suspended indefinitely after the changes; the football and basketball teams and cheerleaders weren’t the kernel around which all the less prestigious cliques orbited at one distance or another, and it wasn’t clear yet who was going to be the new archetype of coolness. One thing was clear; a lot of the old cliques were breaking up and re-forming along species lines. The Smyrna wolves, who had been briefly dominant just after school started back, were losing their dominance to the centaurs as they got stronger and more confident. And the Kennesaw chameleons, to say nothing of the smaller minorities, learned to keep their heads down and stay out of the way of the centaur-wolf dominance battles.

Arnie was still messed up about losing Kim; but as he gradually recovered from the initial grief, he realized he had his pick of girls. He’d always been better at talking with girls than Will or me, and the changes apparently left him looking better to centaur girls than most of the other guys our age, at least in the critical first couple of weeks back at school when most of the former jocks were looking unhealthily skinny and some of them were too weak to walk without a cane or walker, or at all.

One Friday morning around the middle of March, I saw Arnie in homeroom as usual, and I asked him if he was coming over to Will’s house the next day.

“I can’t,” he said. “Keith and Tara Saunders invited me to a party at their house.” Keith was Tara’s older brother, in tenth or eleventh grade, also a centaur; though he hadn’t been as overweight as his sister before, I’d overheard centaur girls whispering about how hot he looked since the changes.

“All right,” I said. “Some other time.”

“I asked if you could come, but they said it’s centaurs only,” he went on, looking vaguely embarrassed.

“Have fun,” I said. I felt weird about that, and wondered if things like that were going to happen often, and if so, if this was the beginning of the end of our friendship. It felt like it shouldn’t be; even if we were different species now, we still liked the same kinds of games and movies. But I wasn’t sure.

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always cliques

doesnt seem to matter how people change, the need to group themselves together remain, and it will be interesting to see over time how drastic the separation becomes

DogSig.png

A House Divided, part 4 of 7

Wondering how long till there are rigid countries of a sub species that will try to dominate others

    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine

Re-drawing political lines

I shouldn't be surprised if some of that happens sooner or later. But given that the largest-population change-regions are between a million and two million people, I doubt that any nation which consists entirely of one neospecies and expels all others from its borders would be big enough or powerful enough to dominate larger, more heterogeneous countries.

Probably in the U.S., the redistricting after the next census will partly take change-region boundaries into account, much as existing redistricting laws take race and ethnicity into account to make sure minorities are represented in the state legislatures and Congress. You wouldn't want to have your home change-region divided up with parts of it in four or five congressional districts, so there's slim change of someone of your neospecies getting elected to Congress, especially if your change-region is one of the lower-population ones to begin with. But given that there are, for instance, 19 change-regions in Georgia, which elects 13 congressmen and two senators, there are necessarily going to be some neospecies unrepresented at any given time. I don't have figures at the top of my head for other states, but I suspect it will be similar in all but the least populous states. (There are more than 630 neospecies in the U.S., and only 535 members of Congress.)

And for that matter, if people vote strongly along neospecies lines in the next election, I suspect the next congress will have the greatest turnover and the most losses by incumbents in history, since most of the members of congress would have been outside their district, in one of the Washington DC or Virginia or Maryland change-regions, at the moment of the changes.

Small homogeneous countries

Looking at the Wikipedia article List of countries by population, it seems there are almost 100 "countries" that might end up being contained within a single change-region (less than 2 million population), and around 60 that probably would be entirely within one change-region. (But some of the "countries" on the list are territories like the U.S. Virgin Islands, not sovereign countries.) A very few of those are economically powerful out of proportion to their population, but even they couldn't dominate larger, more heterogeneous countries. I could see some of those countries where only two or three neospecies are represented in significant numbers, and where one neospecies outnumbers all others put together, instituting some kind of apartheid or restriction of political rights for minorities. It would be a lot harder in a larger, more heterogeneous country where the diverse majority could probably stop any attempt by a single neospecies at a coup.

Countries where there's already a huge power imbalance between the capital city vs. the countryside and the smaller cities could be an interesting case, if the capital city ends up being mostly one large change-region while the rest of the country is divided into many smaller ones.

Still, if they keep doing

Still, if they keep doing this seperation thing, it'll spell major trouble for the economy and humanity (if you can still call it that) as a whole. How are people supposed to keep their lifestandart if they're incapable of working together?
This calls for a total reform of the constitution, to minimize the negative effects of the changes.

Thank you for writing this captivating story,
Beyogi

Separation

Let's hope that most grownups will be more sensible about this than the teenagers at Jeffrey's school. The fact that there is no majority anymore, except on the most local level, will probably keep the discrimination and exclusion from being as bad as it has been in some times and places where a large ethnic majority oppressed one or more minorities. The centaurs at Jeffrey's school can refused to invite bipeds to their parties, but their parents know that they can't have their little fraction of Cobb County and Fulton County secede from the union and exclude all imports and exports; they have to get along with people of other neospecies to survive.

Some decline in living standards is likely because many neospecies (e.g., the Marietta centaurs) require specially made or customized clothes, cars, tools, furniture or whatever, and they're such a small market that overhead costs of mass-producing clothing etc. can't be spread out over as many individual sales. And the cost of fixing the infrastructure damage done by the accidents on the day of the changes must be pretty high, not to mention the economic impact of businesses losing critical employees or directors who were killed or disabled by such accidents. That probably adds up to a serious recession or even a depression. I should have addressed that more in these stories; when and if I write others in this setting, especially if they're set later on in the timeline, I should give those issues more attention. I do mention the centaurs' dependence on handmade clothes in the short run, and some other infrastructure changes, in this story; but I probably should have done more.

Thank you

Thank you for writing a new story in this very interesting universe.
epain