“There’s someone I’m close to who’s Twisted, but my family doesn’t want anything to do with him,” Morgan said, and hurried on: “Not like you’re thinking. He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my cousin. I haven’t seen him since his parents got divorced, which was right after his Twist, and because of it.”

---

Twisted Throwback

part 9 of 25

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Twisted universe. It's set about a generation later than "Twisted", "Twisted Pink", etc. A somewhat different version was serialized on the morpheuscabinet2 mailing list in January-April 2014.

Thanks to Morpheus, Maggie Finson, D.A.W., Johanna, and JM for beta-reading earlier drafts. Thanks to Grover, Paps Paw, and others who commented on the earlier serial.

---

---

Mom drove Mildred to school Monday; Mildred looked like she was going to her execution. I caught the bus not long after they left, and when I got to school, sat in my usual place next to Lionel in homeroom. We had Mr. Bao for homeroom, so he already knew about my Twist; and I think most if not all of the kids had already seen me or heard about me Friday. I could hear a few people talking about me, but there wasn’t as much overt staring and pointing there’d been in some classes Friday.

“How’ve you been?” I asked Lionel. “Sorry I’ve been so busy — I hope I can come over some afternoon this week.”

“Pretty well, I guess,” he said. “Nothing as interesting going on as what’s been happening with you. Vic came over Saturday and we started a game of Phantoms of Phobos; so far we’re just figuring out what’s going on...”

Before my Twist, I would have been either listening with interest, or crying “'Ware spoilers!” and asking him to be a little vaguer until I’d had a chance to play it. Now, I found my attention wandering, remembering my attempts to get better control of my trick, and Sarah and Renee’s advice about interacting with other girls socially, and especially my Modern History term paper; how was I going to structure it? I wasn’t satisfied with the draft opening paragraphs I’d written a few days before; I wanted to start in media res with Ms. Pendergrass’s inauguration as governor, or the beginning of her presidential campaign, or the day she was outed as trans by a reporter during her campaign for state senate — I wasn’t sure which, but not with her childhood as I’d done in that unsatisfactory draft... Then I realized Lionel had asked me a question, and I had to ask him to repeat it.

“So what about tonight?” he asked.

“Tonight?” I asked stupidly.

“Do you reckon you could come over and play tonight?”

I was about to say yes, more out of a desire to hang out with Lionel and Vic than a desire to play Phantoms of Phobos, but then I remembered my promise to Sarah, and I said: “I can’t — I told Sarah I’d come over to her house to study. Maybe tomorrow or Thursday night.” Wednesday we had church.

“You had dinner with her Friday, and you’re already going over to her house tonight? You’re moving fast.”

“We’re not dating,” I said, blushing a little. “She didn’t say exactly who, but some other girls will be there, I think Olive or Morgan and maybe some others. And Morgan and my cousin Renee were with us Friday.”

The bell rang then and we hurried off to our first period classes. Vic was barely on time for Physics, and we didn’t have a chance to talk before class, but after class, he walked with me to Calculus and we talked a little about this and that; I told him about our shopping trip to Rome, and he wanted to know what books I’d bought. I was a little embarrassed to tell him I’d bought only nonfiction; I let him infer what he liked from the fact that I only listed a few of the books I’d bought and then said I had to get to class.

Morgan waved at me when I walked in to Calculus, and it was only then that I realized we shared that class. I knew I’d seen her around school before, but I’d never really noticed her until Sarah introduced us. I didn’t have time to do more than say hello, though, because I’d stood in the hall talking to Vic until it was nearly time for class.

After class, Morgan came up to me as we were heading for the door, and said: “I wanted to apologize for the way I was acting Friday night... It’s just kind of weird, a kind of weird I’m not used to, and I shouldn’t have let it freak me out as much as that, but...”

“It’s okay,” I said, pushing aside the memory of sitting crying in the toilet while Morgan and Sarah argued outside. “People react instinctively when they’re surprised and shocked... I can’t blame you for it. When I first saw my sister after her Twist, or my cousin Kerry, I couldn’t help staring at them.”

“Thanks... You look good today, by the way. Are you doing something different with your makeup?”

“I wasn’t wearing makeup on Friday,” I said. “Mom and Mildred showed me how, Saturday. What you actually see, though... I don’t know. That’s mostly subconscious.”

I needed to pee before my next class, and I went by the girls' room on the way. Morgan followed me in. There was only one stall free, and she let me have it, watching my reflection as I went; to her credit she kept her face impassive, and didn’t say anything about it until later. When I came out of the stall, I didn’t see her, and nobody else seemed to notice a discrepancy between my two appearances while I was washing my hands.

After Modern History, Olive walked with me to lunch. “Sarah told me about your night out Friday,” she said.

“Oh? How was your date with, um —”

“Karl Nguyen. It went pretty well — that was our second date, and we kissed a couple of times during the movie, and again when he took me home. I think we’ll go out again. But I wanted to ask you — Sarah told me something about your situation, about your Twist, and it wasn’t entirely clear, but reading between the lines — are you a transsexual?”

“Yeah,” I said after a pause. “That’s it. The Twist just changed my brain, it left the rest of my body alone.” I looked at her apprehensively; was she going to freak out as bad as Morgan, or worse? But no, she was nodding.

“I thought that might be it. So how soon do they think they can get your body fixed?”

“They don’t know yet.” We walked into the cafeteria and got in line as we talked; I told her about how doctors normally corrected transsexuals' bodies prenatally these days, so they were rusty on how to fix a teenager or adult. w

“That explains it,” she said. “I was wondering why we didn’t hear much about transsexuals in history more recent than President Cho. I kind of thought it was because it wasn’t a big deal anymore and the books didn’t need to mention the fact somebody was born a different sex any more than that they had measles when they were a kid. Like they go on for paragraphs about how it was important that Booker T. Washington or President Obama were black, but when they come to Thucydides West they don’t even mention it.”

“No, there just aren’t any around anymore. Except some old people, and me.”

We kept talking as we served our trays and left the serving area, and the next thing I knew we were at the table where Sarah and Morgan were saving seats for us.

“Hi,” Sarah said.

“Uh, hi,” I said. I was enjoying talking to Olive, and I wanted to talk to Sarah again, but I’d planned to sit with Vic and Lionel at lunch; I’d hung out with the girls for several hours Friday, and was going to be with them again this afternoon, while I hadn’t had much time with Vic or Lionel since before my Twist. Before I could think of a polite way to say I was going off to sit with someone else, Morgan said:

“Your reflection looks better today. I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, but... it’s a lot better.”

“Thanks,” I said, pleased. Olive sat down with her tray and asked:

“Her reflection?”

“My trick,” I started to explain, and sat down. “It makes me look more like a girl. A very limited illusion, not a very powerful trick, but useful for someone in my situation.” I’d been taught that if I Twisted and got a trick, I should be sure to downplay how powerful it was. That wasn’t hard in my case, but it would be important for Mildred. It was part of the same strategy that started when some brilliant mind of Grandpa’s generation thought of calling the powers we got from tapping into the Darrington Field “tricks,” to make them sound frivolous and therefore harmless. It didn’t counterbalance the bad publicity we’d been permanently saddled with when the term “Twisted” caught on, but it helped offset it a little.

“And it doesn’t work in mirrors,” Morgan said, and Sarah explained to Olive how they’d given me advice about making my reflection look more feminine, and I told them how Mom and Mildred had helped me with that over the weekend, and about our shopping trip; soon we were talking about clothes, and our meeting that afternoon at Sarah’s house, and before I knew it lunch was almost over.

“Ah, Emily?” I turned and looked, and there was Vic, looking uncertain.

“Hi, Vic,” I said. “Have a seat.” Some of the girls sitting near us had already left for their next class, and there was room next to me. Vic didn’t sit down, though; he looked at the clock and said, “I can’t talk long — I need to get to class,” and moments later Sarah, Olive, and Morgan were exclaiming over the time and rushing to bus their trays. I got up and trailed after them, walking with Vic.

“Sorry — I was going to sit with you and Lionel, but I got into a conversation with Olive waiting in line, and then...”

“It’s okay. I guess there are things you can talk about with them that you might not be comfortable talking about with us...”

“Or that you might not be comfortable hearing me talk about.”

“But don’t be a stranger, okay? We’re still your friends — it’s kind of weird seeing you like this, I won’t pretend it’s not, but we’re not going to drop you.”

“I care about you too,” I said. “I’ll probably come over to Lionel’s house tomorrow afternoon, if some family thing doesn’t interfere. Or if not then, sometime this week for sure.”

“That’s cool.”

I dumped my tray and silverware, and Vic and I hurried off in opposite directions to class.

About five minutes into Mandarin, while Mr. Bao was going over the measure words again (measure words were my bane, and the less advanced students were hopelessly lost), I heard a couple of girls whispering about me, how I wasn’t a real girl and they were sorry for the girls who had P.E. with me. I wasn’t sure if they knew my body was still male, or were just annoyed that I used to be a boy before my Twist. Mr. Bao didn’t seem to hear exactly what they’d said either, or pretended he didn’t; he walked toward them and said (in Mandarin, of course): “Girls, I perceive that you have important news. Please repeat it more loudly, in Mandarin, so that everyone may share it.”

I turned around to look at them, as did almost everyone. One of the girls, whose name I couldn’t recall, stammered something ungrammatical and barely coherent about how it was a private matter; the other, Tracy Esmond, said in reasonably good Mandarin (about as good as mine, nowhere near as good as Uncle Jack’s): “She was asking me about the use of ‘céng’; she did not hear your earlier explanation clearly.”

I thought for a moment about whether I should expose her lie; it wouldn’t do any good unless someone else who’d heard them backed me up, and looking around at the people sitting near them, I didn’t think anybody would stick their neck out for me... But I was wrong. Rob Dyer, a guy I’d known since middle school though I’d never been close friends with him, spoke up and said: “On the contrary, they were expressing their jealousy and frustration that though Emily has been a girl only since her recent Twist, she looks prettier than they and wears more elegant clothes.” He said “Twist” in English; Mr. Bao hadn’t taught us the Mandarin word for “Twist.”

“Is this so?” Mr. Bao asked, looking around at the kids who were sitting near enough to have heard them.

“I did not hear all they said,” I put in, “but I did hear them speaking in disparagement of me.” I smiled gratefully at Rob.

Mr. Bao looked from one to another of us for a few moments, perhaps waiting to see if any more witnesses would speak up. Then he said: “Miss Esmond, Miss Inman, each of you is to write an essay of three hundred characters on ‘Respect for one’s fellow students.’ Use at least five of this week’s vocabulary words in an appropriate context. It is due on Friday.”

He returned to the front and resumed the lesson on measure words, and there wasn’t any gossip about me or anybody else in his class for a good long while.

After class, I waited for Rob Dyer, and said to him: “Thanks for telling Mr. Bao about what Tracy was saying... if it had been just me, he might believe me but he couldn’t punish them without another witness.”

He smiled at me again, and I felt a tingling along my left side. “I didn’t want to repeat all the mean things they said — just the part that made you look good and them look bad.”

“Thanks,” I said again, and headed off for Literature, which went pretty routinely. After that I went to P.E., but Coach Guardini told me they hadn’t gotten things sorted out yet, so I went to study hall for the last period instead. I checked my messages before I settled in to doing homework, and saw one from Mom:

The Twist clinic secretary called me to tell me Dr. Oldstadt has referred you to another psychologist, Dr. Underwood. I talked to Dr. Underwood’s secretary and made an appointment with you for Thursday afternoon — that’s in Stone Mountain. And I told them you’d figured out your trick, and they want you to come in for more testing, so you’ve got an appointment with the Twist clinic the same day. Not sure if it will be your father or me or Uncle Jack who takes you to those appointments. I’m going to pick you up after school tomorrow and take you to the courthouse to file your name change. Have you thought of a middle name yet? What about ‘Ursula’?

‘Ursula’ would be okay as a middle name, I decided, and it would make Grandpa and Grandma Newell happy. I replied, telling her so, and reminding her I was going over to study at Sarah’s house after school.

After the last bell rang, I went looking for the number fourteen bus, as Sarah had told me, and showed the driver the note Mom had given me. Sarah was already sitting near the back with Olive; I sat in the empty seat across from them.

“Morgan’s going to join us later,” Sarah said; “she’s going home to do some stuff first.”

With the noise of other conversations around us, and the noise of the bus itself, we didn’t try to talk about anything very serious until after we got to Sarah’s house. Sarah unlocked the door and let us in, and offered us snacks and drinks; a few minutes later we were sitting around her bedroom, which was fairly large, with our tablets on our laps and bowls of nachos and dip on Sarah’s desk.

“We usually work on Modern History,” she explained, “which I need help with and Olive is pretty good at, and Algebra II, which Olive needs help with and I’m okay at. Morgan’s way better at algebra, but she needs help with history too, and she helps us with Literature and Biology when we need it.”

“I’m taking Calculus; I can help you with algebra. And I think I’m better at history since my Twist, or at least more interested in it, but it’s too early to show a big difference in how much I actually know, except in the period I’ve been studying hard the last week or so. Are either of you taking Mandarin?”

Neither of them were. Sarah had gotten her language requirements out of the way by taking Spanish her freshman and sophomore years, and Olive was taking Arabic. So we worked on algebra until Morgan got there, and for a while afterward, and then history. Mr. Kendrick’s history class, which Morgan and Sarah were in, wasn’t quite as far along as Ms. Rutherford’s class, but we quizzed each other on events and people all through the mid twenty-first century. Once we’d covered everything that was likely to come up in lectures or quizzes for the next week or so, we started chatting about other things, and wandered downstairs to get something more to eat.

Sarah’s mom came home while we were scrounging pretzels and dried fruit, and Olive was telling us about her date with Karl Nguyen. “Hi, honey,” she said to Sarah. “Who’s this?”

“This is Emily Harper. Emily, this is my mom.”

“Harper,” she mused. “I went to school with Wendy Harper, and Vernon Harper — are you kin to either of them?”

“Wendy is my aunt,” I said. “Vernon’s my dad’s first cousin.”

“Oh... I haven’t heard anything of Wendy in years, since her parents took her out of school after her Twist.”

“We go see her pretty often. I last saw her, um, three weeks ago?” Dad, Mom, Mildred and I had gone to Milledgeville and spent a few hours with her. She was in a straitjacket, to keep her from hurting herself, but she could talk sense on any number of topics. Only you had to nerve yourself against her asking you once in a while to bring her a knife next time you came, so she could cut off her remaining big toe, or if you wouldn’t mind sticking a few needles through her left cheek — just if you happened to have any needles on you, of course, she didn’t want to be a bother — in the same tone of voice she used to ask you to put a little more salt on her mashed potatoes or to move her king’s bishop to queen three.

“How was she?”

“Pretty well, I guess. She beat me and my sister at chess, playing both of us at once.”

“Yeah, Wendy was always smart, even before her Twist. Will you girls be staying for supper?”

Olive said she could; Morgan said she’d better get home soon. I said I should probably go as well — Mom and Dad might have said I could stay for supper if I’d asked, but I didn’t want to impose on Ms. Kendall the first time I met her. And I was a little nervous about the topic of my Twist coming up in conversation with her. “I guess I’ll call Mom and Dad and tell them I’m ready.”

“Or I could give you a ride home,” Morgan suggested.

“Would you? Thanks!”

A few minutes later, Morgan and I went out and got into a hovercar a few years newer than Uncle Jack’s car, but still older than me or Morgan. “Is this yours, or are you borrowing it from your mom or dad?” I asked.

“It’s not much, but it’s mine,” she said with a look of satisfaction as she cranked it up. “I bought it just before school started, after working weekends all last year and two jobs during the summer.”

“Cool,” I said. “I worked bagging groceries during the summer, but my parents don’t want me working during the school year.”

“That kind of makes sense. My grades are good, but they might be better if I wasn’t working...”

We didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Then Morgan said: “I wanted to apologize again for the way I was acting Friday. It’s... it’s not just the way your Twist made you, I mean — it’s me, not you. But it’s not the way you’re a girl in your head and a boy everywhere else, it’s — I’m just not sure how to relate to Twisted. I have — my family has a complicated history with them.”

“We’re just people like anybody else,” I said, feeling tense. She’d said she wanted to apologize, but then she immediately started making excuses, and I was afraid she was going to say something worse in a minute. “We just... go through changes at puberty, like anybody, but all in a minute or two instead of spread out over years.”

“Yeah. I know that, theoretically, it’s just... I never met anyone who’s Twisted — already Twisted, I mean — until we moved to Trittsville, and since then I haven’t really hung out with any except you.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said with a weak smile. I suddenly realized I hadn’t actually told Morgan where I lived, and I was about to speak up when she started talking fast, nervously — I was almost scared to interrupt, but I kept an eye on the road to see where she was taking us. We were driving around the safe, residential parts of Trittsville, and closer to my house than we were when we left Sarah’s, but not getting there by any direct route.

“There’s someone I’m close to who’s Twisted, but my family doesn’t want anything to do with him,” Morgan said, and hurried on: “Not like you’re thinking. He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my cousin. I haven’t seen him since his parents got divorced, which was right after his Twist, and because of it.”

“One of them couldn’t handle him being Twisted?” I asked. “That must have been awful.”

“It wasn’t the Twist by itself, I think, it was what it meant. Uncle Ed wasn’t Twisted, and neither was Aunt Rose. So when Uncle Ed found out Jason was Twisted... he knew Jason wasn’t his son.”

“Oh. That’s really awful.”

“Yeah. He left them right after he found out, and filed for divorce, and never had anything to do with them anymore. And my dad didn’t want anything to do with the woman who’d betrayed his brother, and it didn’t matter that I was never going to see my favorite cousin again.”

“Couldn’t you message him?”

“I was eight years old when it happened. Net access restricted down to the ground, no messaging anybody except Mom and Dad and Grandma. A few years later, when they weren’t supervising me so much, I tried to look him up and message him, but I couldn’t find him... it’s like he disappeared not long after his Twist.”

“You looked for him under, um, your Aunt Rose’s maiden name?”

“Of course.” She gave me a withering look, and I said:

“Sorry. Of course you’d think of that... By the way, I don’t think I mentioned before, but I live at 61 Honeysuckle Lane.”

“Oh! Sorry. Thanks.” She turned left at the next intersection and right at the next, and I was relieved to see we were going the right way.

I thought a little more about what she’d said, and asked: “What was his Twist like?”

“I don’t know. Nobody would talk about it — when it happened, all my parents told me was that Uncle Ed and Aunt Rose were getting divorced. And I was just old enough, and had enough friends at school with divorced parents, that I knew to ask when Jason would be staying with Uncle Ed, on the weekends or in the summer? And they said never, and I started crying... It was years before I found out about Jason being Twisted and his parents divorcing because of it. I overheard a bit here and a bit there and put it all together.” Her shoulders were tense, both hands so tight on the wheel her knuckles were white.

“I’m sorry. That’s horrible. My family is so — so together, I have a hard time imagining what it’s like to have your family break up over something like that. I mean — I don’t want to judge your uncle, but it seems weird he would just divorce her in a heartbeat because he found out about an affair she had ten or fifteen years ago. Was she still seeing the guy?”

“I don’t know — nobody told me about this, remember? I just know the bits I overheard the adults talking about. But I’m guessing they were already having some kind of problems, and finding out about the affair, and Jason not really being his son, was just the final straw.”

Something occurred to me, and I said: “I guess you tried just looking for your aunt’s name, too, right?”

“Yeah, no recent hits for her either. I’m guessing she remarried, and has a different name.”

“And... just maybe Jason has a different name now, too.”

“Why...?”

“Like me.”

She gaped silently for a moment. “But if he’s a girl now... his new name could be anything!”

“Yeah. Sorry, I’m not really being helpful, am I?”

“You’re listening. That’s better than my parents.”

“He’s probably not a girl, there could be other reasons you can’t find him. Probably his mom remarried, like you thought, and he has his new dad’s surname.”

“Probably.”

“I wonder, though... if he got a weird-looking Twist, maybe he and his mom moved to Spiral. I could ask my cousins who live there if they know him. It’s a long shot, but...”

“Would you? Thanks!”

“I’ll need to know a little more... what’s your aunt’s maiden name? How old was he when he Twisted — what year was that?”

She told me, and later that night I messaged Kerry:

Hi, it’s Emily, formerly known as Cyrus. Sorry I haven’t messaged since my Twist, things have been insanely busy here. I’m guessing you heard about it, though, from Todd or somebody. Anyway, I need to ask you a favor. A friend of mine (she’s not Twisted) lost contact with a cousin of hers who is Twisted, after his parents got divorced and her uncle quit having anything to do with his ex-wife and son. She’s having trouble finding him on the net, and I thought there was a slim chance he might live in Spiral, or that somebody there knows him even if not.

I gave her the facts about Jason that Morgan had told me. A couple of days later she messaged me:

That’s not a lot to go on, but I’ll ask around. Don’t get your hopes up, though. You might know every Twisted in Trittsville, but I don’t know a hundredth of the Twisted in Spiral. And Spiral might have more Twisted than any other city, but it’s still only about one in ten Twisted in the U.S. who lives here.

---

---

If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon