After a bit of silence, Jack said, "Anyway, they're great people. I arranged for you to stay with them while we're shooting. I think you'll find it more convenient, and it will be a hell of a lot easier for you to stay in character."

He stopped in front of an old house on a street lined with old houses, and shut off the engine. My hands were folded in my lap and I was looking down, mulling over what Jack had said. I asked him, "In character means wearing a skirt?"

---

 
2. Today It Gets Real
 

Everybody's had that dream: you know, the one where you're being chased, but for some reason your legs don't work... you can't run, or you run and run but you don't get anywhere. And then there's the dream where you're far from home and you're naked, or wearing your pajamas...

But how about this one: Have you ever had the dream where you're far from home, and you're wearing a dress — and not just a dress, but a wedding dress — and even though it's a wedding dress it's impossibly short... You look down, expecting your legs to be clad in beautiful white embroidered stockings... or even naked legs and bare feet, but instead discover that your legs are liberally smeared with white buttercream frosting. Stuck in the frosting are chunks of light yellow wedding cake and blue and red cake decorations. You're a mess, but you can't stop to clean yourself because someone is chasing you... you can hear them, and it isn't one person — it sounds like an angry mob. They're yelling and screaming, and dogs are barking. It's terrifying! You run and run. You're out of breath but you can't stop... and the frosting on your legs is slowing you down.

In the dream you see an alley that looks like the perfect place to hide. So you dash in there and press your back into a doorway. Finally you can try to catch your breath! Your breasts are heaving under the beaded bodice of the lovely white wedding dress... and you think that maybe you got away...

... until you happen to look at the ground and what do you see? A trail of footprints — your footprints — the perfect image of your pretty bare feet in cake frosting, as if Hansel and Gretel had a pastry bag instead of pocketfuls of crumbs...

And just then, one of the dogs, a big German Shepherd, appears at the head of the alley and looks straight at you. The big dog locks his eyes on yours, and you freeze.

In the dream, you can't move. All you can do is watch as he slowly moves his big-muscled body toward you. You realize for the first time what the word animal means — four legs, solid muscle, speed, power, danger... You wait, unable to draw a breath. His tongue hangs from his open mouth, and he is panting... You feel his hot breath on your thigh...

... then he dips his head and runs that big, long tongue of his up the length of your leg. He's licking the frosting off your legs in long, broad strokes, and you don't dare move a muscle. In fact, you just stop breathing entirely...

... and that's where you wake up.

You've had that dream, haven't you? No? No? No! Of course you haven't! I know you haven't. But I have. I've had that dream for three nights running.

When Jack told me, "If you really want to be the flying-kick man, you have to be my cakeboxing girl," it made sense. I mean, it made sense then. I guess you had to be there, but at the time it seemed to make perfect sense to me.

It still made sense the next day, when I signed the contracts. I was surprised by how many papers I had to sign. Jack told me, "Don't worry, it's boilerplate. It's all vanilla. Trust me, I know these docs. You can just sign 'em. It's gonna take forever if you read them, and you won't understand them anyway."

I trusted Jack, and I felt he was sincere, but one of the few things my father told me — something that I never forgot: "Never sign anything you haven't read." This was the first time I ever signed a contract, so I read every single word. Jack was clearly irritated, but I did it anyway. He kept trying to rush me, but I took my time and read it all.

That was Friday. I felt pretty good about the whole business until Monday morning.

I met Jack at his office. "Hey there, Lewis, how ya doing? Had breakfast yet? Can I get you anything?" I declined, but he poured himself a cup of coffee and helped himself to a glazed donut. "Today it gets real," he told me, as he munched on the donut. "I mean, it was real already: we've got the money, the crew is lined up for next Monday, but today we have to work on you: your look, your moves... we gotta see if the camera likes you. I'm sure you'll be fine; I have a good eye for that, but we need to do some test shots." He went on chatting until he finished his donut.

He brushed the flakes of sugar off his fingers and said, "But first, we have some paperwork." To make a long story short, he wanted me to sign the same pile of contracts I'd signed on Friday all over again — this time with a different name.

"Isn't that illegal?" I asked.

"No," he said, and a big smile appeared on his face. He pulled a single sheet of paper from a folder and laid it in front of me. "This makes it perfectly legal."

The sheet listed the contracts I'd signed Friday, but it said "This affirms that in the documents listed below, signed on [today's date], that Lois Larkspur is an alias for Lewis Kesterly, and used exclusively by him, blah blah blah blah blah, strictly for legitimate professional purposes and has not been used, is not now being used, and will not be used or allowed to be used for the purpose or furtherance of fraud, tax evasion, or any other illegal act."

I stared at that sheet for a long time. Jack sat quietly waiting. At long last I sighed and said, "I wish I could ask a lawyer about this."

"Sure," Jack said. "I'll call one for you if you like. But I can tell you that a lawyer drew that up, and consequently there's nothing wrong with it. All it does is say what it says."

"Lois Larkspur?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's you. Do you like it? Sorry I didn't get a chance to ask you first, but I had to move fast, and I had a lot of the paperwork ready on this name."

I frowned. "You had it ready? Why did you have it ready?"

Jack hesitated, as if he'd been caught... in what? A lie? No, but there was something embarrassing him.

"Emm, ah..., okay, this was going to be the name... the name, ah... that my... my ex was going to use, back when she was going to be the Cakeboxer. Her real name is kind of complicated, so..."

"Will she mind if I'm using it?"

"No," Jack said, deflating a little. "She won't give a fuh... she won't care. It was never her name. She never used it."

Despite my misgivings, I signed the sheet. Jack's assistant Denise immediately notarized it. She took her seal out of a small velvet-lined box, and with it she embossed the sheet. I thought that was pretty cool. Then I signed the pile of contracts all over again, but this time as "Lois Larkspur." I messed up the signature on three of the documents, but Denise didn't bat an eye. She just printed the pages again and put them in front of me. After I was done, she flipped through the entire stack to check that they'd all been signed correctly. She pulled out one "Lois Larkspur" that looked different from the others (I didn't have time to practice!). She printed that sheet out and had me sign it again, and then she checked them all a second time.

The whole time, Denise only said a handful of short sentences, like, "Sign this one here" or "You need to sign this one over again." Her detachment made a strange situation even stranger, but soon it was over and Jack came back in, rubbing his hands and smiling.
 

---

 

Anyway... that was when it started getting hazy. By "hazy" I mean sketchy, weird... I started having doubts about the whole thing.

After all, what could I do after being a cakeboxing girl? What sort of stepping stone was that? After putting on a skirt and kicking cakes apart, where could I go? What good could that possibly lead to? It seemed more like something I'd need to forget and deny, and hope no one ever found out.

I didn't have much time to dwell on my uneasy feelings. As soon as Denise was done checking my signatures, Jack hustled me out of the office and into his car. "I'm taking you to meet Jane and Marcus. They're in the business."

"What business?" I asked. I was thinking Monkey business.

Jack's eyes actually twinkled. "Show business. What other business is there?" He laughed a short bark of a laugh. "You'll love them. Just don't mention Hamlet or Shakespeare or anything remotely connected to Hamlet or Shakespeare."

"Why not?"

"Because Marcus will get right up in your face and unload To be and not to be..., Now is the winter of our discontent..., Is this a dagger I see before me?— he's got 'em all loaded, primed, and ready to go." Jack caught my blank look, and explained, "Shakespeare soliloquies." He shook his head. "Great if you're in the mood... but if you're not, and you've got a crazy, bug-eyed man, right in front of you, demanding your attention..." his voice trailed off.

After a bit of silence, Jack said, "Anyway, they're great people. I arranged for you to stay with them while we're shooting. I think you'll find it more convenient, and it will be a hell of a lot easier for you to stay in character."

He stopped in front of an old house on a street lined with old houses, and shut off the engine. My hands were folded in my lap and I was looking down, mulling over what Jack had said. I asked him, "In character means wearing a skirt?"

"Yeah," Jack confirmed. "Jane and Marcus are going to get you all dolled up, and work on your mannerisms, your walk, your voice... you know, things like that. We're going to start shooting a week from today, and you need to be passable by then."

"Jack," I said, and my voice twisted into a croak, "I don't think I can look like a girl. I don't want to make a fool of myself... especially in front of a camera, on TV."

Jack took a deep breath. He turned and looked at me with a serious face. He ran his eyes over me, down the length of my body, then back up again, scanning me up and down my body and settled on my face. He tilted his head and said, "I never said you'd be beautiful. I just said you need to be passable. Don't worry! We'll make you look good."
 

---

 

Jane and Marcus really were nice people, just as Jack had said. The only thing was that they were a bit... stagey. Marcus moved around the room with his head up and his chest high, as if he were performing to a matinee crowd. When he spoke, I always felt he was delivering lines. Jane was the more natural of the two, but she was constantly dropping names (of celebrities I'd never heard of) or referring to plays with outlandish names. The pair of them would break into song at almost any provocation — which was fine, except that they would direct their song at me, making (and holding!) eye contact all the way through to the end.

After Jack introduced me, he left. The moment the door closed behind him, Jane and Marcus, wasting no time, and dove right into my makeover.

They took pictures of me as I was then, as Lewis. They took all sorts of measurements, and Marcus jotted it all down in a small notebook.

Then they tried, the pair of them tried, to squeeze me into a corset. At first it was only weird. Then it became uncomfortable. As they made it tighter... and tighter, it began to hurt. At last, after Marcus gave one desperate tug, I actually screamed. Jane immediately loosened it and took it off me, saying, "Too much too soon," and settled for a stretchy garment that squeezed me, but in a way that seemed a lot more rational, particularly after the corset.

Next they tried different sizes of breast forms on me. I ended up being a 34C, which I found pretty unwieldy, although both Jane and Marcus agreed it gave me the best proportions.

"Your butt is kind of big for a guy," Jane commented (much to my embarrassment), "but it saves us from having to add anything down there."

Next came some tight white underwear to keep me all tucked in below. Over that, a pair of panties that made me blush just to look at, let alone wear. It was all covered by a girl's kilt and a black t-shirt. The kilt's tartan was very pale, closer to orange than to pink. They gave me a pair of white wedge sneakers that had three-inch heels and four straps across the front. If they weren't made of white canvas, you'd think they were ankle boots.

Jane washed my hair and styled it, then she did a quick pass with some light makeup.

Marcus popped his head in the door to ask, "Ready?"

Jane looked at my nails and hesitated. Then she looked at my face and picked up a few strands of my hair. She sighed and said, "There's a lot left to do, but this will have to be enough for now."

I looked at myself in the mirror, and Jack's word passable came to mind. "What's left to do?" I asked. "I think I look alright."

Jane twisted her lips in disagreement, then said, "If nobody looks too close or too long, I guess, but you're in serious need of a haircut, and we ought to color your hair. Your eyebrows are too bushy and we need to put some thought into what you need on your face. AND you're lucky that you aren't too hairy on your legs and arms, but we'll need to do some waxing."

"I guess that is a lot, then," I offered.

"And I've forgotten to mention your nails, which are horrible, and your teeth, which need whitening."

Marcus stepped into the room and picked up the theme: "...to say nothing of your posture, your facial expressions, the way you move, and the way you talk."

"Wow," I said, taken aback. "Is there anything good about me?"

"Yes, darling," Marcus said, patting my hand, "You're here."
 

---

 

It turned out that they'd hurried through the makeover so they could take me out to lunch. The idea was to throw me, ready or not, as much into life as possible.

"You're not going to learn anything sitting in a room with Janey and me," Marcus explained. "You've got to go out and make a complete ass of yourself. It's the only way to learn."

"I don't want to make a complete ass of myself!" I protested.

"Oh!" Marcus replied. "Then you're in the wrong line of work. Perhaps you should run for Congress instead."

Frowning, I gave me my most offended look. Marcus waved it off. "We don't have time to argue," he said. "I'm telling you now: you have to expect to make mistakes. Hopefully you will make your biggest mistakes this week instead of next week. But do you want to know something? Ordinary people, people who aren't actors, they make mistakes too. They get mortally embarrassed, too. But no one has ever died of embarrassment. You have to learn to carry on even when you're blushing the most glowing neon red. Remember, an actor needs three things: sincerity, humility, and a beautiful heart."

"How can I be sincere when I'm pretending to be something I'm not?"

"Sincere is the way you treat people. You have to mean what you say. When you tell people your name is Lois Larkspur, you have to own it. It's your name, and you want to share it. You're not telling people you're Lois so you can screw with them or cheat them."

"And what the heck is a beautiful heart?"

Marcus smiled. "In your case, I mean a heart like a Disney princess."
 

---

 

I spent the rest of the day interacting with people, all of them strangers. Marcus or Jane would choose a person, give me a "motivation" and send me off.

"Just think of it as improvisational theater," Jane told me.
 

---

 

What they did that day, and the rest of that week, was to throw me into life... in a skirt. They had me asking directions. They made me ask people what time it was. They sent me into stores to ask for items the stores were sure not to have. They sent me into restaurants to get and hold a table for ten during the lunch rush (and of course, there was no party of ten, there was only me!). They sent me into a shoe store where I had to try on literally two dozen shoes, look around for fifteen minutes more, then leave without buying a thing.

It was torture... but it was fun, too.

Sometimes they'd put a recorder in my purse. Sometimes they'd go in ahead of me and observe. Afterward, they'd debrief and critique me, and after three days, I began to get it: I began to separate myself from what I was doing. It was all an act, so I didn't need to feel embarrassed, and if I did, I had to make my embarrassment a part of the act.

At the same time, Jane and Marcus helped me start to get a real feeling for Lois Larkspur.

"Lois Larkspur isn't just a name," Marcus told me. "She's a person. A living, breathing girl."

"Who is she?"

"Yes!" Marcus declared. "Who is she?" He stared at me, as if waiting for my answer. I sat silent, in confused silence, until his look got more insistent. At that, I shrugged and shook my head, lifting up my empty hands to show I had no answer.

"Not good enough!" Marcus insisted. "Who is she?"

"I don't know who she is!" I shouted.

"She's you!" he retorted. Then he looked at my fake breasts and smiled. "She's you with some... improvements. Some additions." He grabbed a wooden chair, turned it around backwards, and sat down in front of me. "Lois Larkspur," he said quietly, holding his hands as if cradling... something. "Lois Larkspur," he repeated, "must be something concrete. She must be real. As real as you are. Are you a real person? You must make her just as real."

"How do I do that?"

"You build her. You build Lois out of pieces of you, out of the life you'd have if you'd been born a girl."

Janey called it building a character: working out, feeling out, who Lois is and what it means to be her. Marcus called it growing into the part, and I liked the process.

Everything was going great until Friday. On Friday morning, they sort of gave me the day off. They let me have the morning to myself: no assignments, no motivations. Just me and the world. I was free to wander, to explore, to enjoy myself. "You can do whatever you like," Marcus said, "but whatever you do, stop and reflect at times... take a mental photograph. Sit by yourself in the library if that's what you want to do, but see that it's you, Lois, in a skirt, with naked legs, and a pair of wobbling tits hanging off you." Jane socked him in the arm, but agreed, saying, "He's right, even if he says it badly."

"I understand," I told her, smiling.

They dropped me off in the downtown area of a nearby city — a place where I was unlikely to run into anyone I knew. For safety's sake, I had my cell phone — in case I got into trouble, but I didn't think I'd need it.

I roamed and rambled, my heels clicking on the sidewalk, my skirt moving slightly in the breeze. I got a cup of coffee and a croissant and ate it on a bench. I chatted with a nice old man. I window shopped, and eventually I stopped in front of an odd little store. It was a novelty shop, a magic shop, a place where they sold idiotic practical jokes and magic tricks that didn't work. Their window display was dated and dusty and the window itself needed cleaning. They obviously hadn't touched the display for ages. At first, I had no idea why I'd stopped. I just stood there, staring at the bizarre items: the finger prisons, the decks of marked playing cards, the big magic rings, the wands that turn to flowers, and all the other crazy standards that don't fool anyone... They even had one of those silly buzzers that you wind up and put in your palm when you shake hands. I stood staring at it, wondering whether it ever startled even one single person, or made a person laugh... or even whether it did anything at all...

... until I realized why it caught my eye.

The whole dusty collection, all the goofy nonsense in that ancient window display reminded me of something. Well, not something... someone. One of my oldest friends is a guy named Ronson. Ronson is a great guy, he really is, but is an enormous pain in the neck. Ronson is addicted, fatally addicted, to practical jokes. They are always irritating and never funny, and often they are very very inconvenient. Once, at a friend's party, he covered all the toilets in clear plastic wrap. A couple of people pee'd on themselves or the walls, and left the party early and embarrassed. Another time he shut off the electricity in a friend's house and left a fake letter, supposedly from the electric company, saying that they were working in the street. These friends put up with cold water, no lights or TV, etc., for three whole days, until they called the electric company for an update.

Honestly, the only person who thinks that Ronson is funny is Ronson himself.

And then, not a half hour later, in one of life's weird little coincidences, who should call me, but Ronson himself?

"Hey, buddy," he said. "How're you doing?"

"I'm good," I said. "What are you up to?"

"Oh, nothing. I wanted to see what you're up to. Tell me, what are you wearing?"

I froze. I jerked my head up and looked all around me, my eyes darting everywhere, checking every corner, every window and doorway, every angle. Was he there? Could he see me? If he was, I couldn't spy him. "Why do ask?" I replied, in a guarded tone.

"Are you wearing anything... pink?" he asked.

I looked down at myself. I was wearing that kilt again, but as I said, it was more orange than pink. "Uh... no," I replied. "Why do you ask? Why would I be wearing pink?"

"Hey, I was hoping to run into you last week after you did your laundry. I shoved a red sock into one of the legs of your karate outfit. Did you find it? Or did you go pink?"

Did I go pink? I saw red. "You goddam son of a dog!" I shouted. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Hey, hey," he laughed. "No harm done, right? It's just a joke! No animals were harmed in the making of this prank. I just wish I could have been there when you pulled your lovely pink laundry out of the washer." He erupted in laughter. My jaw tightened in anger.

"Anyway, don't be mad," he continued. "I figured I was doing you a favor. I thought that pink would look good on you. I thought it might even get you going in another direction, if you catch my meaning—"

I abruptly hung up and turned off my phone. I was steaming! I could feel my face burning with anger. So that damn red sock wasn't an accident! It was that stupid Ronson and his stupid pranks. He knew when I'd be doing my laundry — I'm very regular in my habits. And he knew I'd be stuck with my pink karate uniform... and no time to get another.

I stopped in front of another shop window. This window was clean and dark, like a black mirror. I could see my reflection quite clearly: my short kilt, my big round breasts, my girlish haircut, the makeup, arched eyebrows, the nails...

"Ronson always tries to make me look like an idiot," I fumed, and then I stopped. I stared at my reflection and whispered, "Oh, no. Oh, no!" Was all of this Cakeboxer nonsense one of Ronson's pranks?

© 2012 by Kaleigh Way