----------=BigCloset Retro Classic!=---------- Admin Note: This story is one of the rarer forms of tg fiction we have on the site involving species transformation, or half transformations and have come across really strong and hold their own despite the technique. I hope those of you who do not normally read this type of tg story would give this one a try. You will be pleasantly surprised. ~Sephrena.

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  Admin Note: Originally published on BigCloset TopShelf on Monday 06-18-2012 at 10:22:37 pm, this retro classic was pulled out of the closet, and re-presented for our newer readers. ~Sephrena  

For most of the drive, Uncle Mike didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. The wrecks had all been cleared from the roads, but the closer we got to Atlanta, it seemed like there’d been so many of them that they hadn’t had time to haul them all away — we saw lots of wrecked cars in the ditches on both sides of the highway and in the median, and once we got into the denser-populated areas there were big piles of wreckage, where you could hardly tell where one squished car left off and another began. I wondered how many of the people who’d been in those cars at the moment of the change had survived, and of them, how many would ever recover from their injuries.

Somewhere around Norcross I said I needed to use the bathroom. Uncle Mike stopped at a gas station and we both went in. We used the men’s room — I felt vaguely guilty about that, but I was too embarrassed to use the ladies' room, and we both still looked male, as long as we had clothes on. I was about to ask Uncle Mike which he thought we should use, but he went into the men’s room and I followed him quietly.

There was only one stall; he let me go first. I peed, trying not to look at myself any more than necessary, and went out. Uncle Mike went into the stall while I was washing my hands; after I dried them I went out and looked at the magazines. Or I was going to look at the magazines; the other customer looking at the magazine rack caught my attention first, and I stared at him for several seconds before I remembered that wasn’t polite and made myself look away. He had black fur and long, sharp claws; he looked more like a big cat than a wolf, but more like an ape than either. I wondered if my Dad looked like that now, and I was trying to work up the nerve to ask him where he’d been last Saturday when it all changed, when Uncle Mike came out of the restroom.

“See anything you want?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

From there it wasn’t far to home; we were well ahead of rush hour, and Uncle Mike said the traffic on I-285 was lighter than usual even for early afternoon. Thirty or forty minutes later we were pulling into my driveway, and I suddenly got really nervous — I’d been a little nervous all day, but as Uncle Mike turned off the engine it suddenly hit me all at once, and my heart was pounding just as hard as when I realized, last Saturday, what had happened to me.

Uncle Mike started to get out of the car, and then looked at me and said: “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

We sat there in the parked car for a while, and then I opened my door and we both got out. I trailed behind Uncle Mike on the way to the door; he rang the bell.

By the time I caught up with Uncle Mike, my Dad was already opening the door. I drew in a deep breath when I saw him. He wasn’t much like the guy I’d seen at the gas station, though they both had fur and claws. Dad’s fur was more yellowy-tan, what you call “tawny” if you see a cat that color, and he had a longer snout — not as long as a dog or wolf’s snout, but enough to make his face barely recognizable. He was just wearing shorts, and I could see how his knees bent the wrong way.

“Jeffrey!” he said, and grabbed me in a big hug, like he hadn’t done since I was little — I mean, he hugged me often enough, but it was years since he picked me up and whirled me around like that. He put me down and said to Uncle Mike, “Come on in.”

We did, and there was Mom, lying on her side on the living room sofa. She was wearing a loose T-shirt, and covered with a big blanket from the waist down.

“Jeffrey!” she said, “come here and give me a hug.”

I did. From the waist up, she looked a lot more human than Dad. But when I leaned over and hugged her I couldn’t help feeling how flat her chest was, and remembering the centaurs I’d seen on CNN, and thinking about what she looked like under the blanket. I stood up and looked at her again. She still looked like herself, her face was hardly changed, but she was so skinny — almost like a famine victim, with all the mass she could spare rearranged to make the lower torso and hind legs. And when she smiled, you could see, if you were paying attention, that she had herbivore teeth.

“Darlene’s still having some trouble walking,” Dad said to Uncle Mike. “Have a seat.” We all sat around in the other chairs; I sat in the smaller easy chair, next to Mom.

“How are you feeling, sis?” Uncle Mike asked Mom.

“Better,” she said. “I’ve got a little more energy, and I’m a little steadier on my feet, but I’m still hungry all the time. I’m putting on weight, but I still look like I’m anorexic.” She had a big salad bowl on the table beside her, and she picked it up and started eating again while we talked.

“There’s not many calories in that,” Uncle Mike said.

“I know,” she said, “but I can’t eat a lot of things now. Not meat, or dairy products, or a lot of processed foods, apparently. I get queasy just looking at meat, and the others I look at and know I couldn’t digest them. Pavel bought me some organic bread, and that’s fine, but I can’t eat a lot of store-bought breads, or nachos or potato chips... I need to start making my own bread. What about you and Jeffrey?”

“We’re still eating the same things,” he said. I thought my appetite was slightly less than before, but not a lot less, not enough to be sure it wasn’t just from stress and not part of the changes to my biology.

“You’re just eating meat now, Pavel?” Uncle Mike asked.

“Yes,” Dad said. “Cooked or raw, either way’s fine. But I can’t eat in the same room with Darlene, of course.”

“Tell me again how it happened,” I said. “It was so staticky when we could finally reach you on the phone —”

“All right,” Dad said. “So we went out to lunch last Saturday — we were going to have our romantic Valentine’s Day dinner in the evening, we had reservations, but then the hospital called and wanted Darlene to fill in for someone on the evening shift. I said go ahead, we could have dinner at lunchtime; the restaurant wouldn’t be as crowded and we might not need a reservation. And we didn’t. We’d been seated and had our appetizers served when it happened.”

When it happened. Uncle Mike and I had been using that phrase, and so had some of the other people we’d talked to in Athens. It was easier than saying exactly what had happened, and of course everyone knew anyway.

“I felt queasy for a moment,” Mom said, “and then numb — I couldn’t feel my body at all, and I fell out of my chair, but I couldn’t feel myself hit the floor. I was numb for several seconds, and I heard people screaming — then just as I was starting to worry enough to scream myself, I could feel my body again, and it felt strange. I tried to sit up, but it was awkward — my arms were skinny and weak, and my legs weren’t much stronger, and there were too many of them. But I didn’t realize that at first, I just knew I felt strange.”

“I went numb for a few moments too,” Dad said, “only not as long as your mother. It didn’t last long enough for me to fall out of my chair. But I saw her fall over, and I was near panicking, seeing her like that and unable to move. I sort of saw other people at other tables changing, out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t focus on it or consciously think about it until later, I was so worried about her. Then I could move, and I got up to go help her. Only I didn’t realize how my legs had changed, the knees working the other way around, and I fell flat on my face.”

“He was fine, really,” Mom reassured us; “he learned to walk on those legs in just a few minutes. I still haven’t got the hang of these, and they’re still weak. He crawled over to me, and I’m afraid I didn’t recognize him —”

“No reason you should,” Dad said.

“I screamed and tried to back away, but I was too weak to move. He reached out to me, and I slapped his hand away — and I realized then how skinny my arms were. And he seemed to notice his hand, too.”

“Yeah,” Dad said, “I hadn’t realized what had happened to me — when I saw my hand I looked at my other hand, and then felt my face, and I said, ‘Darlene, it’s me, Pavel.’ And I was just taking it in, how Darlene had changed — she was wearing a long dress, but it couldn’t cover much of her new hind legs. She was better off than the people wearing pants in that half of the restaurant; they were mostly naked from the waist down.”

The zigzaggy boundary between what we later called the Marietta centaurs change-region and the Smyrna wolves change-region ran right down the middle of that restaurant, and right through the table my Mom and Dad were sitting at. The people on one side, most of the customers and whatever waiters were serving them, turned into centaurs like Mom, and the people on the other side, the other customers and most of the waiters and all the kitchen staff, were suddenly like Dad — fur, claws, a carnivore’s long teeth and short digestive tract.

Why, we didn’t know and still don’t.

They told us how they got home — it took hours, first with Dad being unsteady on his feet, and then with so many car wrecks blocking the roads, every centaur driver and most of the wolves having lost control of their cars. Dad got one of the waiters to help him carry Mom out to the car and help her get into the back seat; she was too weak and wobbly to walk, and she couldn’t fit into the front seat anymore. Still, they were better off than the families who were all centaurs; their arms were mostly too weak to handle a steering wheel even if their car was spacious enough for their new body shape to fit in the driver’s seat. They tried to call me and Uncle Mike, as we tried to call them a little later, but the phone networks were jammed with everybody who’d survived the changes trying to call everybody they knew at once.

They ate at home — that was when they first realized how their teeth and digestions had changed. They turned on the news, and found out stuff like that was happening everywhere, and they kept trying to call people they knew, me and Uncle Mike twice as often as anyone else, but it was days before we got to talk, and then on a bad, staticky line. (Uncle Mike lost his Internet connection a few hours after the change and didn’t get it back for several days.) Dad went to work (he’s a paramedic) after he got Mom situated on the sofa with plenty of things to eat in arm’s reach; she couldn’t go in to work like that.

“What about y’all?” Mom asked us. Uncle Mike and I looked at each other — I’m not sure about him but I was too embarrassed to talk at first. Uncle Mike had already told them basically what happened, on the phone, but still...

---

For us in Athens, that queasy feeling Mom had mentioned was worse, and the numbness she said affected her whole body hit us — the men, anyway — just in one spot. I didn’t even realize what had happened to me until — wait, let me start with the moment it happened.

I’d gone to spend the weekend with Uncle Mike at his apartment in Athens so Mom and Dad could have a quiet Valentine’s Day weekend together. Uncle Mike and I had slept late that Saturday morning. He got up earlier than me, but not very early, and fixed pancakes. I’d just eaten five or six pancakes, and we’d talked about what we might do before the concert we were going to that night; after breakfast we sat down and played video games for a while. Uncle Mike has a great collection of old video game systems; their graphics are terrible, but some of them have better gameplay than you’d expect, and even the ones that just aren’t as good as modern games are interesting to play once in a while. A little after noon Uncle Mike said he was going to the bathroom, and left me alone in the living room. I was going through his Intellivision and Atari 2600 cartridges, looking for a one-player game I hadn’t played before, when I suddenly felt nauseous; and before I could run to the bathroom or kitchen, or even turn my face away from Uncle Mike’s antique game systems, I threw up my five or six pancakes all over them. I got a lot of vomit on my clothes and my arms and the carpet, but what I was panicking about, enough to not notice the weird feeling in my crotch, was that I’d probably ruined those irreplaceable games. I started frantically trying to clean it up — I ran into the kitchen and got a couple of towels, soaked one and wrung it out, then went back to the living room and kept trying to clean the vomit off the game systems and cartridges. I figured I could clean myself up later.

I was so engrossed with that task that I didn’t consciously realize that Uncle Mike was taking a long time in the bathroom. Then I heard the shower running.

A few minutes later, Uncle Mike came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist — that was unusual, he usually took his change of clothes into the bathroom with him, at least when I was staying with him. And even weirder, he didn’t go straight to his room to get dressed; he came into the living room, and saw me cleaning up the vomit.

“You got sick too?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then hurried to say, “I think I’ve got all the sick off the cartridges and the consoles, I haven’t tested the Intellivision yet but the Atari still seems to work fine —”

“Never mind,” he said, and that worried me. “Go clean yourself up — I’ll take care of the rest of this.”

So I went and washed my hands, then got a change of clothes from my suitcase and went to the bathroom. I turned on the shower and started taking off my vomit-soaked clothes — and that’s when I realized my dick was gone.

I sat on the edge of the tub, numb with shock, for a while. I poked around down there a little bit, but not much. I’d never seen a girl naked, and the pictures of naked women I’d seen mostly didn’t show their crotch close up, so I thought what I had there was normal for a girl, and it scared me. I wondered if I was fixing to start growing breasts, too, and I felt around my chest, but it didn’t feel any different. I finally showered and got dressed.

When I came out of the bathroom, Uncle Mike had gotten dressed and finished cleaning the game consoles and was working on the carpet. He had the TV on, but when I came out he turned the sound off. He looked up at me and said, “Did it happen to you too?”

“Do you mean...” I couldn’t make myself say it.

“Let me tell you what happened to me, and you tell me if the same kind of thing happened to you.” I could tell he was trying really hard to speak calmly, but his voice trembled a little anyway. “I was standing at the toilet, peeing, when I suddenly felt sick, and almost threw up — not quite, though. At the same time I lost feeling in my penis, but with the hand I was aiming with I felt it pull back inside my pants. I couldn’t stop peeing, something was wrong with my sphincter muscle, and I soaked my underwear and pants.

“I sat down on the edge of the tub and pulled them off, and then I realized it was gone — penis and testicles both. I have something that looks kind of like a girl’s vulva, but not exactly. I showered and came out and saw you’d been sick, and then I figured it might have happened to you too, if you got nauseated at the same moment I did.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess so. Only I didn’t realize it was gone until I took off my clothes to shower. I guess I was too busy cleaning up the mess to notice how my crotch felt different.”

“Listen to this,” he said, and he turned on the sound on the TV.

It was CNN, and they were talking about how weird changes were happening to people all over the world. I’m not going to go into detail about that, you know it as well as I do, but after a few minutes Uncle Mike turned the sound down and said, “Let’s try to get some local news.” He got out his laptop and tried to connect to some local Athens news sites and blogs. A lot of them were down, but on one of them there was a post from five minutes ago, the blogger saying the same thing that happened to us had happened to him and some guys who were hanging out with him. Their girlfriends reported feeling sick at the same time as the men’s penises vanished, but didn’t feel any different afterward. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that we found out how much women were affected by the Athens change.

Athens didn’t have anywhere near as many car wrecks as a lot of other places, so it seemed safe enough to go out, but we found out, when we went downtown, that the Sound Tribe Sector Nine concert Uncle Mike had gotten us tickets for had been canceled.

We were hearing worrying things about Marietta, the car accidents were worse there than most other places, and we were worried about my Mom and Dad, but every time we tried to call them we got busy signals or worse. We did manage to exchange IM messages with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave in Huntsville, Alabama, just before Uncle Mike’s Internet connection went out — Aunt Karen is my Mom’s and Uncle Mike’s older sister. They didn’t feel the queasiness or numbness we’d had at the moment of the changes, or any noticeable physical changes at all — but they had bad headaches for several minutes, and when they cleared up, they could hear each other’s thoughts. Not just each other’s, but anybody else who was close enough.

A few days later we found out that their telepathy only worked with other people who’d been in Huntsville at the moment of the changes; they couldn’t hear people of the other new human species that were all around them. I remembered that fact, and made use of it.

When we finally got Mom and Dad on the phone, they told us to stay in Athens for a while longer, until the wrecks were cleared from the roads. Cobb County schools were still closed, anyway. When they announced they were going to start school again the second Monday after the event, Uncle Mike talked to Mom again and said he’d bring me home that Friday, to give me a couple of days to visit with them before I had to go back to school.

By then, things were almost back to normal in Athens — as normal as they could ever be. We kept telling each other we were lucky, that most other places in the U.S. and western Europe had a lot worse fatalities and injuries from accidents at the moment of the changes. But we also knew we’d been castrated, and our efforts to talk around it and ignore it just made it worse.

I found out — I expect others did too, but we didn’t talk about it — that there was no point in masturbating with our new equipment. You could poke around down there all you wanted, and it wasn’t any more interesting than picking your nose. I wondered if women were affected the same way, and guessed probably so; but the local news just said they’d lost their wombs and ovaries and stuff.

Uncle Mike and I played a lot of video games, and went for walks around downtown and various parks. We talked to some of the people we met, people Uncle Mike knew — about the weather or the music scene or anything except the changes. As days passed, we saw more people who’d been away from Athens that Saturday and had come back since then, but none who’d been in Marietta or Smyrna.

---

When we got done telling Mom and Dad about what had happened — not everything I’ve just told you, but a suitably edited version — Dad said he was getting hungry, and asked if we were too; we said yes. He went into the kitchen to start cooking.

When he was out of earshot, Mom said: “So, I’m not sure I understand... You’re girls now? You look just the same.”

“No,” Uncle Mike said, and I added: “Even the girls in Athens aren’t girls anymore.”

“Everybody of both sexes lost all their reproductive organs,” Uncle Mike said. “We look kind of like girls, undressed, but we aren’t.”

“Have you seen a doctor since the changes?”

“No, but lots of people have, and the results are pretty consistent. The hospitals and doctors told people not to come in unless they had some sickness or injury unrelated to the changes, they were so overwhelmed.”

“Well, we’ll get our doctor to look at Jeffrey next clinic visit. I want to know for sure.”

“Can I ask you to do something for me, Mom?” I said.

“What is it, honey?”

“Don’t tell anybody I was in Athens.”

“What?”

Uncle Mike looked at me curiously.

“I want to tell people at school I was in Huntsville with Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave,” I went on. “They still look like regular people, and so do I, as long as I’ve got pants on. And their telepathy only works with people who were in Huntsville on Valentine’s Day, so unless I run into somebody from Huntsville, I can pull it off.”

“Why?” she asked. But Uncle Mike understood:

“He doesn’t want the kids at school to know he’s been — that he’s lost — I don’t blame him. Lying’s usually not a good idea, but I’d consider going along with him on this, Darlene.”

“And you didn’t understand at first — it would be worse with the kids at school, Mom. Maybe with the principal and teachers, too — they might make me use the girls' restroom and locker room, and that would make it even worse.”

“And think about this,” Uncle Mike added; “probably most of the kids at his school were at home, here in this school district, that day; most of the rest were probably nearby, in the same region as Pavel, or one of the other neighboring regions. I don’t know how these physical changes are going to affect the cliques and social groupings in high schools, but I’d be surprised if a lot of the kids who were a long way from their school district, like Jeffrey, don’t end up somewhat isolated and excluded anyway just because they’re the only kid of their kind in the school. If they think he’s changed into a girl, too — don’t make it any worse, Darlene.”

“Let’s talk to your father about it,” she said. “I don’t like the idea — I don’t think it’s going to work, you can’t fool that many people for very long.”

---

Uncle Mike and I ate at the kitchen table with Dad. Dad ate nothing but steak; Uncle Mike and I shared some of the steak, and Dad had baked a couple of potatoes for us. We told Dad about my plan.

“I understand,” he said, “and if you want to tell your friends you were in Huntsville instead of Athens, I won’t contradict you. But if the school officials, or the state or Federal government, ask us where you were and what happened to you, I’m not going to lie to them — we could get in serious trouble for lying on a census or tax form or whatever. I might refuse to answer, though. We’ll see.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Uncle Mike was going to go home after supper, but Mom and Dad didn’t want him on the road after dark, and he agreed to spend the night. Next morning, after he left for Athens, I told Mom and Dad I wanted to go over and see Will.

“All right,” Mom said; “maybe you’d better call first.”

I did. Will’s mom answered the phone.

“Hi,” I said, “it’s Jeffrey. Is Will home? Does it suit for me to come over?”

“Jeffrey! Yes, sure, come over any time today.”

So I walked over to Will’s house, just down the street. I rang the doorbell, and Will’s mom answered it.

She was walking better than Mom, though a little unsteady, and she wasn’t nearly as skinny as Mom — of course she’d been a little overweight, though not really fat, before she turned into a centaur. She wore a big skirt that covered her whole lower torso and came down to her knees on both pairs of legs, and she had two different kinds of slippers, both of them too big for her, on her front and back feet. Her chest was as flat as a little girl’s, which seemed stranger in a way than her being a centaur.

“Hi, Jeffrey,” she said. “Come on in.”

“Hi, Mrs. Benson,” I said. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

I’d exchanged emails with Will while I was staying at Uncle Mike’s, and learned that Will and his mom were at home at the moment of the changes, but his dad was out running some errands. He apparently lost control of his car when the changes happened — along with everybody else on the road in that area — and was killed in an eleven-car pileup.

“Thank you, Jeffrey.” She gave me a hug. “I still can’t get used to it. In a way it’s good that I had all this to get used to as well,” gesturing at her extra pair of legs, “it took my mind off losing him, a little bit... Just a little bit, but maybe it made it easier.” She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, then said: “Will’s upstairs in his room — can you wait a moment?”

“Sure,” I said, following her into the kitchen. She got a big bowl out of the cabinet, opened the refrigerator, and put a head of lettuce and a couple of cucumbers in the bowl. “Could you please take this up to Will?”

“All right.”

I went up the stairs and down the hall to Will’s room. The hall door was open. Will was lying in bed reading; he had an empty bowl on the bed next to him.

“Hey,” I said. “Your mom sent some more food.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m getting hungry.”

He was even skinnier than my Mom. He was wearing a T-shirt, and covered up with a blanket from the waist down. I sat down on the bed next to him and handed him the bowl; he tore off some lettuce leaves and ate them before he said anything more.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said.

He closed his eyes for a moment, chewed and swallowed, then said: “Thanks.” He didn’t say anything else, just took another bite of lettuce, then picked up a knife off his bedside table and started slicing one of the cucumbers. “Want some?”

“Sure,” I said, and took some of the cucumber slices.

Finally, after he’d eaten enough to take the edge off his hunger, he said: “So... what’s it like?”

I shifted uneasily. “You mean, what happened to me in Athens?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to —”

“Before I tell you, I want to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the only person besides my parents, around here, who knows I was in Athens this weekend. Promise not to tell anybody.”

“Okay... But people will look at you and know you weren’t anywhere around here. I mean, almost everybody in Georgia, except around Athens, looks totally weird now — mostly not as weird as me and Mom, but —”

“Yeah, I know. I’m going to tell people I was staying with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave instead, in Huntsville, Alabama. They still look human — sorry.”

“No problem.”

“Anyway, they didn’t get any physical changes out there. They’re telepathic —”

“Cool! But how are you going to fake that?”

“I don’t have to, as long as I don’t run into anyone from there. Their telepathy only works with each other, not with other kinds of people — people in other change-regions.”

“Okay, that might work.”

“I don’t guess anybody from our school was in Huntsville on Valentine’s Day. The middle of February’s not the most popular time for going to the Space Museum.”

“But if somebody was there, and they can’t talk with you telepathically they’ll know you’re lying about where you were, right?”

“Yeah, it’s a risk. But think about what people are going to act like if I tell them I was in Athens, and what really happened to me.”

“Good point. All right, I won’t tell anybody.”

So I told him about what had happened to me, in more detail than I’d given him in my email; a little more than I’d told Mom or Dad, even. But not everything.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s harsh, man.”

“I shouldn’t complain,” I said; “I mean, I just lost my dick, but you lost your dad — and lots and lots of people died, or got hurt so bad they’re never going to get better. How are you for walking, since the change?” I guessed not well, since he’d stayed in bed the whole time I’d been there.

“I can walk now — I couldn’t at first, just didn’t have enough muscles on my legs, not until I’d eaten a lot over the first few days. But I’m still pretty unsteady and I get tired fast. Actually — I need to go to the bathroom. Could you help me stand up, let me lean on you?”

“Sure,” I said, and stood up. He threw off the blanket and slowly swung all his legs off the side of the bed. He was wearing a pair of shorts over his hind legs, and socks on all his feet, but nothing on his front legs or lower torso. I put out my arm, and he leaned on me as he stood up, wobbling a lot.

I guess if you’ve never been to Atlanta, you might never have seen a Marietta centaur. There are four-legged people called centaurs in other places — I’ve met a couple — and I’ve heard that in eastern Europe somewhere they’ve got people who look almost like the old mythological centaurs, with hooves instead of feet, and all hairy from the waist down. Ours aren’t like that; all their individual parts look human, but there’s too many of them and they’re put together oddly, by pre-divergence standards. Their legs are skinnier and their feet are smaller than an old-style human of the same height, and their lower, horizontal torso is a little longer than their upper, vertical torso, but otherwise just like an old-style human’s. The main difference is that a female centaur’s breasts, or a male centaur’s vestigial nipples, are under the lower torso instead of on the upper chest like in old paintings of female centaurs. If you think about it, or if you’ve ever seen a female Marietta centaur nursing her baby, it makes a lot more sense. If they were way up there, how would the baby reach them without his mom having to lean way over and probably hurt her back? Anyway, I didn’t know all that at this point; my Mom had scarcely gotten up off the sofa, when I was in the room, since I came home, and Mrs. Benson was wearing a long skirt, like I said. But this seemed like a good time to tell you.

Will’s shorts were really loose on him, his legs and butt were so skinny, and they fell off him halfway down the hall — I didn’t realize at first, I was just ahead of him with his arm on my shoulder, and only saw he was naked when we got into the bathroom and he said, “Okay, I’m good from here. You can wait outside.” So I turned around and left, half-closing my eyes in embarrassment at his scrawny hindquarters. I picked up the shorts and underwear from the floor and tossed them into the bathroom, not looking, and then closed the door behind me.

I waited in the hall, figuring he might want help getting back to his bedroom too, until I heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. He opened the door, and I saw his legs wobbling, as he steadied himself with one hand on the sink and another on the door. “Help me,” he said.

I let him lean on my shoulder again and we walked back up the hall to his bedroom. I wondered how he’d gotten his shorts back on, or wiped his butt if he needed to — his arms didn’t look long enough to reach. I finally worked up the nerve to ask.

“Not easily,” he said. “But my lower torso is kind of flexible, so I can bend and reach it. — What about you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I guess you have to pee like a girl now, and wipe afterward and stuff...?”

“Yeah,” I said, blushing. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” He was silent for a few minutes, and then said: “Want to play a game?”

So we played Champions of Marduk on his Playstation for a while. He wasn’t playing his best, because every time there was a slight lull in the action he’d take a hand off the controller and eat a piece of lettuce or cucumber, and several times he got caught off guard that way. And maybe lying on his side, seeing the screen sideways, was affecting him too. After an hour or so we took a break.

“So, school’s starting back Monday,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wonder what it’ll be like. I don’t know how many of us are still alive, how many kids got killed in car wrecks or plane crashes or whatever, and I don’t know how many of us were right around here and how many were in other places.”

“I don’t know either,” I said. “I’m guessing it’ll be mostly centaurs like you, with some who were in one of the nearby regions, wolves like my Dad and otters like my grandparents... Have you heard from anybody else?”

“I heard from Arnie that Kim’s dead,” Will said. “She was in a car accident, like my Dad, with her whole family... Arnie’s a centaur too. I haven’t seen him, but we’ve talked on IM.”

Arnie and Kim had been dating since near the beginning of the school year. “Oh, no. I hope it was quick... How did Arnie sound when you talked to him?”

“Pretty torn up. He wouldn’t say much, just that she and her parents and sister all died in a wreck.”

We were quiet for a while after that.

Something else occurred to me. “What are you going to wear to school? It looks like your old clothes don’t fit you...?”

He scowled. “We got mail from the school board with changes to the dress code... They said if we’re having trouble getting pants tailored for centaur bodies, it’s okay for boys to wear skirts. I’m going to have to do that, Mom’s been working on altering some pants to fit me, but making skirts is a lot faster and she’s made five or six skirts and only one pair — a quartet, really — of nice pants for wearing to church.”

“Huh,” I said. “I guess it’ll feel weird at first, but probably everybody else will have to do the same, so it’s not like anybody’s going to pick on you.”

“Except maybe some rich kids who can afford to have plenty of tailor-made clothes.”

“Yeah, maybe. You could call it a kilt, I guess.”

Mrs. Benson invited me to stay for lunch, and after calling to check with Mom and Dad, I accepted. Will leaned on my arm with one hand and held the stair rail with the other as we went down the stairs. This time his pants didn’t fall off, thank God.

Mrs. Benson asked after my family, and I told her the truth about Mom and Dad, and the briefest possible lie about myself. I was worried she was going to ask a lot of questions about what it felt like to be telepathic, but she focused on my parents instead.

“How are they taking it?” she asked. “Being so different, I mean...”

“Okay, I guess,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ve been home for less than a day, but they seem to be working it out fine. Dad eats in the kitchen, and Mom eats in the living room, so she doesn’t have to see him eat meat —” I hastily changed the subject when I saw how even talking about that was making Will and Mrs. Benson look queasy, but I wondered how the school lunchroom was going to handle that, with a mix of herbivore, carnivore and omnivore students — and who knows what else; maybe there would be some kids who needed to eat grass or carrion or something?

“What about you?” she asked. “Is this okay?”

“This is delicious,” I said, which was mostly true. She’d made a pretty good vegetable soup; I would have liked it better without the carrots and celery, but I made myself eat them anyway. She felt bad enough about her husband getting killed without me hurting her feelings over her cooking, too.

“And at home...?”

“I ate supper with Dad yesterday,” I said, stopping myself just in time from saying, “with Dad and Uncle Mike.” I continued after another spoonful of soup: “And I ate breakfast with Mom this morning... We’ll work out some kind of schedule like that, I guess.”

After lunch, Mrs. Benson said: “Why don’t you boys go play outside for a while? It’s not too cold.”

Will looked reluctant, but he said: “Sure. Jeffrey, can you help me get dressed?”

We went upstairs, Will leaning on my arm again. “Okay,” he said. “Can you open the window and see how cold it is out there?”

I did, just for a moment. It had warmed up since I walked over there a few hours earlier, but I didn’t think he’d want to go out there in shorts or even a skirt. I’d never worn a skirt, but I thought they looked drafty.

“I thought so,” he said. “Help me with this.” He was pulling two pairs of jeans out of a drawer.

It took several minutes to get the jeans on. To make them stay on, we had to use his Dad’s suspenders, and we had to roll up the cuffs, especially on the front pair, because they wouldn’t go up as high on him as they used to. That still left a good part of his belly in front, and most of his lower torso, uncovered. He put on another long-sleeved shirt — also one of his Dad’s, I thought — and that covered his belly and a little bit of his lower torso.

“Wrap a blanket around my middle,” he said, “and let’s see if we can make it stay with a belt or some suspenders.”

After a couple of tries, I did just that. By now he was looking even more wobbly, and he laid down as soon as I was done.

“Let’s rest a minute before we go out.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, just a little tired. I’m getting stronger every day, but not very fast.”

We were quiet for a few moments, and then I tried to cheer him up by talking about some other places where people were worse off — Nashville, for instance, where they’d all gone blind. We got to talking about other places and weird changes we’d heard about, and forgot we were supposed to be going outside, until Will’s mom yelled at us.

“Coming,” Will called back, and got out of bed.

We went downstairs and out the back door. Will has a cool backyard, hilly, with a lot of trees; it goes back maybe five or six hundred feet to the neighbor’s fence. We went far enough to be barely in sight of the house, and Will leaned against a tree.

“Man,” he said, “I don’t know if I’m going to be ready by Monday. All that walking from one classroom to another...”

“Most of the other kids will be in the same boat, I guess, along with a lot of teachers. They’ll have to work something out — give you more time between classes, or rearrange your schedules so you don’t have so far to go between one class and the next, or something.”

We walked around in the little patch of woods for a little while, and tossed a ball back and forth, stopping and resting a lot. Not long after we went back inside, I went home.