Chapter 6

I allowed myself that day to mope then I had to get down to business. I had a lot more setting up to do and I had to choose my new look. My four-week clock only really started from when I had started working on changing myself. That had to take priority.

I needed to change myself so thoroughly that no one would even think to guess that my new body was me. I would also have to either stop treating people or, at least, make sure they weren't aware that I was treating them. The truth was that I knew if someone was suffering I would struggle to do nothing just to keep myself safe. No more playing the piano and I would have to try speaking less so my accent or my level of English Language wasn't as obvious. I definitely would avoid talking in Russian or Italian. Spanish was fairly common, so I could get away with that one.

My normal height was a ridiculous four feet four inches, but I had stretched my body out by building the height of my intervertebral discs and other soft tissues so when Jack measured me for my new ID I was four feet six inches. The average height for a twelve-year-old boy was about five feet.

To work out what I was going to do, I had to think what they would never suspect me of doing and try and make myself not stand out. My height meant that I could never be an average twelve-year-old. I was going to have to pretend that I was an eight-year-old. I also wasn't sure if I could change my height beyond adding or subtracting a couple of inches. If that was the case I would end up at about five feet, if the doctors were right. Five feet for a boy would stand out and both Jack and my former owners probably knew everything about my height problems. That course was clearly too dangerous.

The logical answer was to pretend to be a girl. Five feet high was small for a girl but common enough that it wouldn't stand out. Until then I would have to pretend to be an eight-year-old girl. To be honest, I was scared of the idea. I had no experience being a girl, but I knew all the anatomical differences. My knowledge was very patchy. I knew as much as or maybe more anatomy than your average doctor, but I had no underlying explanations. I didn't even know how everything functioned. I knew what it looked like and where it was supposed to be, but that was it.

Girls seemed like a different species so deciding to become one of them was very frightening. It was the logical choice for a number of reasons. I could reduce my height to four foot two inches and that wouldn't be off the charts for an eight-year-old girl. Everyone knew I was sensitive about my height so the idea that I would reduce it willingly was unthinkable. I had also shown no desire to dress up as a girl or even play with girl stuff. I was pretty sure that none of my mannerisms came off as feminine. Changing someone from male to female would require a lot of work and focus. I had never done anything that extensive before and although I didn't doubt that I could do it, I didn't think any of my enemies would predict me even trying. I did know that there were all different types of girls, from girly-girls to tom-boys. Provided I had the right equipment, and physical looks, no one would accuse me of being a boy. Maybe boyish behaviour, but that was acceptable for a girl. Strangely, if it was the other way around it could have gotten me in trouble. A boy with girlish behaviours is for some reason unacceptable. I never understood that.

Everyone had kept me ignorant for a reason. If I knew something was impossible, I either wouldn't attempt it or wouldn't believe it would work, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. In my case, I knew what organs were necessary, what skeletal changes and what outward appearances needed to be to become female, so I could imagine them and believe that my system would work. I had never done so much on one person before. I made a list to make sure I attended to all the aspects every day.

I worked on my hands and feet to make them smaller and my internal elements to reduce my height. My pelvis and hips I altered to a female configuration. I didn't have to make too many changes there as an eight-year-old hasn't been through puberty. I removed my hair from everywhere. It was gutting to will my pubic hair away since I had so much appreciated it appearing originally. It was a sign that puberty was coming. It wasn't appropriate for an eight-year-old though, so it had to go.

I made my face more feminine, changing the shape of my jaw, my cheekbones, my eye shape and colour and my nose. My lips became fuller and my eyebrows finer. I chose a medium brown hair colour and imagined it down past my shoulders. I slowly tightened my voice box, testing it out each morning until I thought it belonged to an eight-year-old girl.

Then I worked on the internal organs by imagining two healthy ovaries leading to fallopian tubes, a uterus followed by a vagina. I pictured my bladder moving and my prostate dissolving then I followed that imagery to its external configuration where my urethra now came out below my penis, my penis shrank to become my clitoris with my foreskin becoming the clitoral hood and my external vision of my vagina joined my internal one. My testicles disappeared and the skin changed to make up my lips. Having spent a month treating a girl to re-create her hymen, I knew exactly what everything should look like.

I did one more thing that I had never done before. I stared into the mirror and told myself that I was an eight-year-old girl until I felt it was true and then repeated that each day.

Although I had a long list of things to focus on, that still didn't take up my whole day. I wanted to make sure that I stayed healthy so I carefully explored my surrounding area until I was familiar with it and then started a jogging routine to add to my morning yoga. The jogging I did in the evening as it warmed me up nicely before I went to bed.

To try and keep my possessions safe I put a net over my tent and then tied branches and leaves to do my best to make it blend in. I was never sure how effective it was since I always knew where my tent was. Hopefully, it would never be tested.

Food wasn't a problem since I had plenty of MRE's. I thought it was wonderful that I could have hot food without even making a fire. The taste was OK. My diet had been carefully controlled for three years so I was used to having little choice regarding my food options. I struggled to finish them, but then they were designed as a complete meal for an adult man.

My biggest difficulty was keeping myself clean and washing my clothes. Sarah had provided some detergent and this travel wash bag which was sealable and had ridges in it. It had a set of instructions and you could use it to wash your clothes, but I never felt it properly got anything clean. For myself I mainly used these bio-degradable wet wipes and then once a week I would brace myself and upend a two-litre bottle of cold water over my naked body, soap myself up and then use two more two-litre bottles to rinse. Then I scrubbed myself with a towel. Not pleasant.

Sarah knew I would get bored so she had supplied a kindle with books preloaded. It also came with a solar recharging unit and a mobile phone that could also be charged. The phone was something Sarah called a burner phone. It had about thirty dollars of credit on it. If it was ever used to call someone who might want to trace the call, I needed to throw the phone away. Otherwise, it was mainly there for emergencies. I also had about two thousand dollars in used bills. She had offered me more but we were stretching what I could claim to have either been given or stolen as it was.

The four weeks passed and slowly I had less and less things to concentrate on as they completed their transformation. I had a weird mix of emotions as my body approached my imagined image. A part of me was horrified especially as my manhood disappeared, part of me was satisfied and a small part of me was saying 'what do you expect? You are an eight-year-old girl'. I pushed through any negative feelings that I had, knowing that this was my best chance of freedom and a full life. Of course, I couldn't know whether my internal restructuring was successful. Clearly, outwardly, I now looked like a girl, I just had to rely on my past success where organs were made healthy after twenty-eight days to encourage my belief that my internal changes were both successful and complete after four weeks.

I decided that the day everything was complete would become my official birthday, so I turned eight on October the third. Then I had to think of a name. David definitely didn't work and Doc which had been my unofficial name for the last three years couldn't be used either.

I decided that I needed a real girly name. Something that had no connotations with any male name. I debated between Lilly, Rose and Ruby. Rose an inner voice decided, so I went with that. If I was asked, my name was Rose.

Now that my new identity was complete I needed to move on to the next part of my plan, only I didn't really have one. If I wanted to approach someone I had three choices. I could wait for the service station to be quiet and introduce myself to the server, I could approach a family when they stopped to refuel or I could approach the one person who had parked his car in the dead-end every Sunday and danced in the woods.

In my mind, I had labelled him Billy from Billy Elliot although I wasn't quite sure if I should give him a female name. He turned up in male clothing but changed in his car into a dress. He would spend time doing his makeup in the car mirror and putting on a wig and brushing it out. Lastly, he would put on a pair of high heels and start walking. Initially, I was frightened that he was going to find my hideaway, but he never travelled that far from his car. After walking for a bit, his face would light up and he would start dancing. There was no music that I could hear, but there was a freedom to his movements that just spoke of joy. Sometimes he fell over which wasn't surprising for someone wearing heels in a forest. That didn't seem to phase him. He would laugh and continue until tired and then just walk again. After the dancing, his walk had a more feminine cadence to it, like he had shaken off his masculinity.

Two to three hours later, Billy's shoulders would slump and he would return to the car and reverse the transformation. The smile of before a distant memory as sadness seemed to soak into the whole scene. I caught myself with tears in my eyes sometimes, although I didn't know what was wrong.

The next Sunday he was back again. The same scenario repeated itself each time. Logically, I knew my best chance of a sympathetic audience was from a family, preferably one with small kids of their own. But. There was something about Billy's sadness that drew me in. I wanted to know why he/she was so sad. I wanted to fix it so I could bask in the joy without that horrible ending. So I waited another week.