Philomena could tell from the sounds that the boys had gotten into the shower stall together. She laughed quietly, picturing it and knowing they couldn't hear her through the wall with the water running.

The funniest thing was that they believed she had something to do with their losing their balls when she had no idea how that had happened. She'd heard a lot about them in the week after they had both asked her for a date, her girlfriends at school had dished a lot of dirt, some of it sticky enough to be true -- or as good as true and that was what counted, after all.

Janice had said that Dick collected Magical Girl Manga and Anime from Japan, some straight and some kinky, or hentai, as it was called. Some of those stories had boys turning into girls and the girls were always cute little airheads, tiny gigglers with those high-pitched anime girl voices. A lot of them involved girls getting captured and tied up, too, or threatened by things with tentacles. Space aliens, magical curses, weird half-animal transformations, nothing was too strange for some Japanese pervert to put into a comic book or cartoon.

Hmm, thought Phil. She pulled a long t-shirt dress off a hangar and slipped it on. It had a picture of Betty Boop winking on the chest. Phil liked Betty Boop. She liked all sorts of sexy and sassy female icons, like Betty. Tinkerbell, Kim Possible, Marilyn Monroe, to name a few but her current heroine was Sara Jessica Parker who she wanted to be just like, except with a better nose.

Britney, another girl at school, had a story, too -- that Willie collected photoshopped pictures of girls with enormous breasts and also manga, comics and videos about girls growing breasts so big they wouldn't fit in the overhead storage bins and needed their own airline tickets. She said her brother had seen part of the collection and had to lie down with a cold pack on his eyes when he got home. Her brother was a dork who probably got weak just thinking about girls panties, let alone seeing pictures of naked girls with huge boobs.

Phil had never imagined that comics about girls growing huge breasts existed. Who would draw them? And why? Boys were just weird. Somehow, big breasts created some kind of power over males. Marilyn and Tink had large breasts, Kim had none, really, Sarah and Betty had modest ones. Phil looked down at herself, still thinking, alone in the walk-through closet. Her own breasts certainly put her in the large category for her age group. Well, all right then. She arched her back and suppressed another giggle.

To think those two oddballs had the nerve to ask her for a date, both on the same day. Had they planned it? Some kind of dork-leading-the-dork conspiracy? "Eww," she said, making her boiled-broccoli-and-tuna-casserole face. If she had really known a spell to cause them to lose their balls, she would certainly have used it.

Of course, there were other boys more deserving of such a revenge. Dick and Willie were just annoying geeks; her school had some real assholes. She wouldn't have wasted real magic on losers like the two in her shower. She smiled at a thought. Maybe their balls just shrank away to nothing from reading too much of their favorite literatures.

No doubt about it, boys like Willie and Dick were too weird for her to hope to understand. And without their balls, they must submit to her will; it was like balls for boys equalled breasts for girls. Sort of. How had they happened to lose those emblems of their masculinity, anyway?

She shrugged, not really caring how it had happened. But as a consequence, the two boys believed her to be a real witch with real magic powers. And they'd do anything she told them to do.

She left the closet then to go back to her room, afraid they might hear her giggling if they turned the water off. She had an idea for the perfect joke to play on them but she needed to do some preparation.

The first thing to do, she decided, was to get rid of their clothes. She took the liner out of the trashcan under her desk and stuffed it full with the clothing the boys had left on the bed. Dick's careful stack and Willie's haphazard pile both went into the plastic bag, minus her own clothing which she extracted and tossed into a drawer.

She took the sack full of boy clothes downstairs to hide in the butler's pantry between the dining room and kitchen in a big enameled, sheet metal container She had to stuff the bag in, even though the vegetable bin was empty.

Her aunts sometimes found the oddest things to go with the house; the bin had a painted script label that read, "Potatoes and Roots for the Table." That was odd but not odder than the two odd-no-balls she had collected in her bathroom. She laughed again. The boys still had their roots but their potatoes had gone missing.

She snickered and chortled and giggled for more than a minute. Maybe you needed to be there, but she thought it was funny, still laughing as she headed back upstairs to her own room.

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