“It’s not that little!” I protested.
Garibaldi shrugged. “I saw one on a nature show. It was a lot bigger. Have you tried killing it?”
“I didn’t think that was a good idea, seeing as it used to be my penis. I’d rather not kill my penis. ”

~~~~~~~~~~

Agnes had called Shaquonda to the office, but I had some other things to do there so I didn’t see a good reason stick around her immediate vicinity. She kinda creeped me out.
I stopped by the nurse’s office just in case she had something helpful to say.
“Nurse Garibaldi ?” I ventured. The lady was sitting at her desk watching a telenovela on a small black and white tv. A brunette was talking to a blond, who was wearing a wedding dress. The blond was looking expectantly.

“Necesitas que saber algo antes que casarse a Manuel,” The brunette said, circling around menacingly. “á‰l y yo tuvimos un bébé.” The camera focused in on the brunette’s angry face. “Y él lo matá³! “
“Ooh that’s cold,” I said.
Nurse Garibaldi nodded. “I knew something was off about that creep.” She seemed to
realize I was there then. “Can I help you with something?”
“Ah, yes. I’m, uh, Ashley Patterson. Rebecca talked with you about me on the phone?”
“The girl with the period?” Garibaldi looked confused.
“Yes, well there was some confusion. What’s really going on is…well…what do you know about curses?”
“I was set to become Miss Louisiana.” Garibaldi said sourly. “Now look at me. Yes, I know a few things about curses.”
Whoever cursed Garibaldi had to have done a number on her. She looked like she had orc ancestry or something. I kept this to myself though. “Hmm…yes, well this girl cursed me and-”
“Who is she? I’ll wring her evil little neck!”
I held my hands up. “I don’t want to resort to violence or anything, at least, not yet. I just want to know if there’s anything I should do about it, you know, medically.”
“I suppose, you could try taking hormones, but I don’t think that will work.”
“Hormones? How would hormones help?” Just then the bell for next period rang. I misjudged the time I guess.
“It depends on how strong the curse is. It could be that it already did its work. If that’s the case than we can fix some of it. Can’t do anything about the voice and some of the bone structure might be off but you’re young, it isn’t that terrible.”
I blinked. “Um I’m not getting something here. Could you elaborate?”
“We may not be able to turn you back into a girl, but we can get pretty close.”
“Oh! No, I’m a guy, or at least I was. Not sure where I fall now.”
“I’m so sorry! It’s just your name is Ashley and Rebecca said…So what was the curse then?”
“My penis was turned into a snake.”
“Well, that’s one I haven’t heard before.” She stood up. “May I see?”
I looked to the door. Garibaldi walked over to it and locked it. “No one’s going to come in. You don’t have to show me if you don’t want to, but if I’m going to help, I need to see.”
She seemed a little over eager, which made me hesitant, but she was a nurse and if I was going to get answers there was only one way to go. I took down my pants.
“I thought you said you weren’t a girl.”
I grimaced and pulled on the snake. At first it resisted and then it tried to coil around my hand, though it wasn’t quite long enough. Feeling the muscles as it pulled against my hand and crotch felt…weird. “I was hoping you could tell me if this was poisonous or not.”
Garibaldi’s eyes were wide. “I don’t think so. It looks like a green python, though just a little one.”
“It’s not that little!” I protested.
Garibaldi shrugged. “I saw one on a nature show. It was a lot bigger. Have you tried killing it?”
“I didn’t think that was a good idea, seeing as it used to be my penis. I’d rather not kill my penis. Besides this only happened like fifteen minutes ago.” It felt a lot longer though.
“If you could lay down? I need to see how much has changed.” Garibaldi indicated a hospital bed with paper on it. I did as she asked. The snake tightened around my hand, but I kept holding it.
“Hmmm.” Garibaldi said, and then she prodded the area above my crotch. “I assume you had testicles before this?”
I nodded. I swallowed, “Yes.”
“You don’t now. I thought maybe they might have just ascended, but I can’t feel them. No sign of a vaginal opening, but that may come later.”
“You think I’m turning into a girl?”
Garibaldi grimaced, “I don’t know what is going to happen. I’ve seen sex changing curses before, but what this looks like to me is someone very powerful who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Curses come purely out of the imagination, but reality always tries to assert itself, tries to iron out contradictions. If you play your cards right, you might even be able to go back to how you were, but, Ashley, I should warn you, curses usually only go one way. ”
I got up and let go of the snake, which quickly went back between my legs, then I pulled up my pants.
“How come I’ve never heard of this before now?”
Garibaldi shrugged. “Reality asserts itself. Being ugly is completely normal, so people just assumed I was born that way. Eventually my childhood pictures started changing. People just say I don’t remember it right. The only people that believe me now are people who’ve been cursed. Same thing could happen to you. If you were born without sexual organs, it would be strange, but not impossible. And there would be nothing wrong with you having a pet snake. You have to be careful around people who don’t believe in magic, they can be very convincing, and if you start believing them, it’s all over.”
“What am I going to tell my parents?”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t tell them anything. “
Well, that seemed to be a valid tactic.

“Ashley, one other thing, the people who are the most susceptible to curses are also the ones who are the most able to give them to people. Be careful. Accidental curses are more common than you might think.”
I nodded. “Could I get a pass? I’m late for my next class.”
“Sure.” Garibaldi said and she retrieved a pad of passes and a pen. I tried not to think of the many uses such a pad might have as she wrote down my name. She handed the pass to me and unlocked the door for me. I said thanks and was about to leave, but I paused. I normally try to be honest as much as possible. I won’t directly insult someone, but if they ask my opinion I give it to them straight, even if it’s not what they want to hear, and I don’t generally give compliments where they aren’t deserved. Still I felt like lying just this one time. “Nurse, Garibaldi?”
“Yes?”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
“Thank you, dear,” she smiled, “and please, call me Karen.” And damned if she didn’t look prettier just then.
~~~~~~~~~~
I checked briefly, but Shaquonda had obviously not turned up. I didn’t really blame her. Especially if she had met Agnes.
I had no idea where Shaquonda was, I was already late for second period and my backpack was still in History class, unless one of my helpful fellow classmates had purloined it. The whole snake curse thing was apparently not fatal, albeit potentially life changing. That made it important but not urgent. Getting my backpack was significantly less important, but more urgent, and getting to math class was decidedly not very important, but very urgent. So…what should I do? My time management skills were abandoning me!
I didn’t want to have to disturb a class while retrieving my backpack. Teachers tended to have sticks up their asses about that, so it would be probably better to wait for the next period break. And if I went to math class I would probably need my math book, which was in my locker. And in my locker was the voodoo doll which had caused all the problems in the first place, and I might be able to learn something from it. So to my locker I went.
The voodoo doll was still there. I had to wonder: how had Shaquonda put it there? Did she spy on me while I was opening the combination lock? That would mean she would have to be in a nearby locker, but then which one? Or maybe she could pick it somehow? But she would still have to know which locker was mine. What kind of connections did she have?
The lockers were each four feet tall, one row stacked on another. Mine was a bottom locker, which meant there were five people who could possibly see the combination I put in. I did try to keep it hidden, but admittedly most of the time I opened my locker I was more concerned about getting it open than making sure other people couldn’t open it.
I wasn’t exactly chummy with my locker neighbors. I didn’t even know who owned the locker to the left of mine. We all had home room together, that was how the lockers were assigned. And I was pretty sure it was done alphabetically by last name, so all the lockers around mine were probably owned by kids with last names that started with letters close to P in the alphabet. If I were a police detective and could bring people in for questioning all that would be a great help .
But I wasn’t.
So I needed to think some more. Whoever spied on my combination, probably was nosey in general, otherwise they would have needed an extra day to catch my combination before putting in the doll. And they would have to have some connection to Shaquonda. They were friends with her maybe? That meant it probably was a girl doing the spying, or Shaquonda’s boyfriend. Shaquonda was a year ahead me though, didn’t seem likely that she’d have an underclassman boyfriend. So probably a girl. But probably not Shaquonda’s best friend or anything for the same reason. A Shaquonda groupie then. But the only one that left was…
Shavaughn O’Malley, the cheerleader.
Fuck. No way was I getting any information from her. I could envision her conversation with Shaquonda right now:
Shaquonda: …he just kept insulting you cheerleaders, using this girly voice of his.

Shavaughn: That bastard! What we do is important. If we don’t show our underwear and make vaguely sexually provocative poses with our pom poms, no one would come to the games!
‘quonda: I know, I know. And then his friend was all like, hey cut it out, cheerleaders aren’t so bad, and he just kept on going!
Me: That’s not what happened!
‘quonda: to Me Shut up. You weren’t present at this conversation. Continues telling story So then I got fed up and told him to stop, and you know what he told me?
‘vaughn: What?
‘quonda: He told me to take a look at his trouser snake!
‘vaughn: He didn’t!
‘quonda: He did. That’s when I threw him down the bleachers. Bastard got off scot free while I have detention.
‘vaughn: You ought to do something mean to him. Maybe stick something in his locker. His is right next to mine. I even know his combination if you want it.
‘quonda: Why do you know his combination?
‘vaughn: I was beaten as a child?
‘quonda: What does that have to do with anything?
‘vaughn: I think this conversation has lost any semblance of realism.
Shavaughn’s locker was at two o’clock from mine. She would sneer down at me from it while she talked to a girlfriend on her cellphone about what That Slut did at So-and-So’s party. I wanted to meet That Slut. She seemed like an interesting person.

There was something sticking out of her locker. A corner of a bright orange piece of paper, sticking out of the bottom crack. I pulled on it and it revealed itself to be a neon orange index card On the top in silver ink, were the words “Siobhan, tryouts are over, but if you really want to join the team, we practice every day after school. Just come by and if Coach likes you, he might take you on. —Shaq “
I chuckled at first. Shaquonda couldn’t even spell Shavaughn’s name right! Except…I had never seen Shavaughn spell her name. So…shit. But really in what universe was Shavaughn spelled Siobhan? There wasn’t a sh- or a v anywhere in Siobhan. Making up sounds for letters was just mean. And so was a girl calling herself Shaq. The images of Shaquille O’Neil in drag just would not leave my skull.
It took me a minute or two to get over my initial irritation after reading the note. I put it in my pocket, got my pre-calculus book, and headed for the class. The idea of pre-calculus amused me. Like the school administration was saying “Are you sure you want to learn Calculus? I mean you may have thought algebra was hard, but you don’t even know how hard it can get.” I wasn’t really that good at math, but then, from my perspective, I’d rather get a bad grade in a hard course than a good grade in an easy one. Besides, I tended to do the bare minimum I needed to pass a course; so if I took an easier course I would have slacked off and got a bad grade anyway. It wasn’t until I gave Mr. Manley my pass and sat down at my desk (the one that someone had carved “fuck you” into over a swastika) , that I realized that now I knew where Shaquonda would be today.
Also, reminded that I was effectively sitting on a snake that was attached to my crotch, I wondered why I wasn’t more uncomfortable. The snake squirmed a little, just enough for me to know that it had grown and its head was now nestled snugly in my butt cheeks, but it did not seem overly perturbed by this. Good, because I would had a hard time maintaining my exterior of calm if the snake were to bite my ass.
“Where were you?” Bobby whispered at me.
“Long story,” I whispered back. “Tell you later.” How much later and which story I would tell I kept to myself.

“Now that you’re here, Ashley, maybe you could tell us how to find the vertex of a parabola from its quadratic equation.”
“Uh, sure.” He had called me Ashley, which is about my only excuse for answering in my girl voice that I can think of. It caused a great deal of gibbering amid the class. I cleared my throat and continued with my normal male voice. “First you have to put the equation into standard form, you know, Y=a(x-h)^2+k? and then (h,k) is the coordinates of your vertex.”
“Alright, so how would you put the equation on the board into standard form?”
I looked at the equation, and tried to imagine the numbers and variables rearranging themselves into the right positions. But they kept running into each other and complaining. I was able to get y by itself on one side of the equal sign, and I was pretty sure that the a term was one third, but everything else was a hopeless mess. “I, um…”
“Could someone help her out?” Mr. Manley asked.
“Well it’s like you were just saying, Mr. Manley, you have to complete the square…”
I don’t even know who responded or what they said after that. All I was aware of was that Mr. Manley referred to me as a “her”. What could I do about this? It was probably just a slip up. My name’s Ashley, rumors are flying around, things got stuck in his subconscious and he said “her” without realizing it. But what if it was the curse? What if reality was trying to exert itself by making everyone think I was a girl? A girl with a pet snake would be a lot more normal than an androgynous person with a pet snake. So I should correct him right? But there was no real way to do that now, while class was going on. I could talk to him after class, maybe, but …
I was in a daze the rest of class, trying to figure it out. When the bell rang, I decided to go to the bathroom again. The men’s room. No one bothered me this time. I looked at myself in the mirror. I still had my short, spiky brown hair, my dark eyebrows. I still had my adam’s apple, but was it maybe a little less prominent? I checked to see that no one was looking and I lifted my shirt. No breasts or anything like that, but did I seem a little scrawnier? So far nothing that couldn’t be explained by my mind playing tricks. But something was still off. No one had come in yet, so I tried one more thing. I pulled my hood up over my head so that the shadows of the hood would blend with my hair. I blinked. With the appearance of long hair I looked like a girl. Not an attractive girl by any means, and a girl with a distinct Adam’s apple, but while I couldn’t quite figure out what had happened to my facial features, they had somehow taken a turn for the feminine.

I pulled my hood down and did the deep texas voice. Only it came out more like Granny Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies. I cleared my throat and tried again, panicking. This time I was able to do it, but I got into a coughing fit afterward that caused tears to come to my eyes. “This isn’t good.” I said, and it came out in my girl voice, “This isn’t…”I tried again going for deeper, but it didn’t work. “This…fuck.” I looked in the mirror again. My Adam’s apple was gone.