Underage
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Everybody knew about Grace. My sister first created her when I was just 13. I wanted to get into a movie rated 16 and above and she suggested that we go together as 16 year old girls. I could never pass as a 16 year old boy, that was for sure. I had to pay for her as well, but even at that age I was earning money from some of the websites I was creating. I went to the movie as her sister Grace.

The reality is that young girls can pass themselves off as older women quite easily. It is just a question of the right clothes, makeup and hairstyle, but also how you carry yourself. Just ignore the guy on the door. Hand him your fake ID, and if he talks to you just glance at him. You are not trying to convince him – you are of legal age. If he cannot see that, he is an idiot.

A 13 year old guy could never pass for a young man. With help, and the right attitude, I could pass for a woman. Even a 20 year old woman, if I wore heels to give me height.

I had made fake IDs for myself and my sister, and a few of her friends, so we had the paperwork. I had the computer skills and access to printing and laminating. But no one will accept an ID if you are obviously underage, no matter how good a job I have done on the IDs. But with the right presentation, we could not only go to bars, but also get guys to buy us drinks.

The answer is to work on appearing attractive but do not overdo it. Young girls trying to pass as older women often pile on the makeup and pad the bust. The thing that looks mature is how you behave, not so much how you look. You need to appear calm and indifferent. When going up to a bar, for instance, my sister and I would talk between ourselves quite loudly, about complex issues that we were engaged in at work, even though both of us were at school. We made sure that the bartender could hear us, and we would wait for him to ask us what we wanted. That was the signal that he had fallen for it. Never engage in conversation with the doorman or the barman. There is always the chance of making a revealing mistake.

I had the added problem of behaving as a woman, not just a mature one. That meant twice the chance of being caught out. But it was just part of the persona I needed to pass as somebody else. I had the boy at school mode, and the mature woman on the town mode. Switch one on, switch the other off. By the time I was 16 and my sister 18, we were really good at pretending to be two women in their twenties. Nobody could pick us as underage.

Everybody knew about Grace among my friends at school, but nobody had ever met her. I was just Grady Lynch, a regular guy. Grace moved in different circles. I would sometimes spin tales about her exploits with my school friends. They were all envious of what I could do, and the places that I could go as an adult.

I guess if you looked closely you might see that my eyebrows were a little shaped and my hair was a little long, but I had worked on that and would back-brush my eyebrows in the morning and use gel on my hair to keep it in a masculine style – an increasingly long rat-tail. So, during the day I was just a regular guy. At least for a while, I could be one.

I started to get a bit worried well before I turned 16, when I first started to notice pimples and whiskers on my face. I was not worried for myself, but for Grace. Pimples are a young person’s thing, and whiskers? Well, if you are used to living the high life in disguise as a woman, an immature beard is the end of it all. So, I had to look for something to fix it. I tried creams for the pimples and plucking out hairs, but as my sister said, that is like damming the tide with a wall of sand. Male puberty was coming on, and coming on fast. She suggested that I needed to control it with drugs.

This might sound drastic, but she was able to get some pills and they worked. The intention was that it would just delay puberty for a while. Looking back, it seems like thinking about delaying puberty until 18 was unbelievably stupid, but I was having so much fun living in the adult world and I did not want it to stop.

Looking back, I was close to becoming an alcoholic. My sister and I and a couple of her friends, had become incorrigible party girls. We were drinking too much because almost all of our drinks were free. We only spent money on looking good.

Our parents exercised almost no control over us. They were probably caught up in their own problems. But now I shudder when I think just how lax they were. We would come home from school and dress up, and the go out and not come home until very late, even on weeknights.

Things hit the fan a bit when my father started to notice that I was no longer looking like a boy. He noticed that my legs were shaved and that my face was not just smooth, but soft and feminine. I was on a top skin care regime. And my hair was way too long. He accused me of being a fag. I hurt me, so I just blurted out: “I am transgender Dad, get over it.”

I was not transgender, but it was in the news at the time, so my parents were as familiar as I was, with what it was. They surprised me by both being suddenly sympathetic and they never nagged me about my appearance again. So sympathetic in fact, that for my 17th birthday they offered to pay for me to have breast implants. Of course, I did not want them, but my sister said that if I did, I would be able to go to the summer carnival with her and be an adult. At Carnival you have to be able to wear a bikini.

Initially it seemed crazy that I would decide to accept the offer and have my body altered. I had always thought that what I had been doing was just cool stuff that my male friends never had the guts to try. But the truth of it was that after I had been to all the age restricted movies, shows and bars and told them about them, I found that I was associating with them less and less. The people I now called friends were all of my sister’s friends who I mixed with evenings and weekends. All of them were urging me to stay with the group and get the implants.

That meant telling the school that I was transgendered too. How else could I explain having breasts? It would be an easy thing to do, to convince them. After all, I looked transgender, if that is possible. I mean that I was not muscular, my face was smooth and soft, and my hair was longish and silky-looking. Even without feminizing hormones, the hormones that I was taking to cancel out male puberty, were effectively making me look more girl than boy.

I checked to see whether the implants were reversible, and when I was assured that they were I decided to accept the gift. I spent the rest of the spring growing my hair out by taking vitamins. I wanted to look good for the summer carnival. That is included going blonde. I went in for the breast implants, and I probably picked at least one size too big. Maybe two sizes too big. I did not need all that breast.

After the swelling and discoloration had gone, my sister and I went shopping for bras and bikini tops. I still had a package down below, so I wore shorts, but the bikini tops were very revealing.

Now that my hair is long enough, I like to wear it in a high bun. Even when my hair was shorter I tried to get it long enough to put up with a fake bun on top. I think this look is mature. Younger girls like to wear their hair down, but if you want to look older, wear it up.

So, I guess that you can see that I had gone way too far by this point. There was no going back now.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2018