The Panic Before Part 2: A Jaci and Dottie Story: Dottie tries to help.

Dottie got out of bed and practically floated to her closet.

Today, she was allowed to wear her “magic” dress, a Barbie Charm School dress, and she took it off its hanger, hugged it, and swung it around humming. Then she carefully laid it out on her bed and skipped over to her dresser.

She rummaged through her underwear drawer, until she found the prettiest panties she owned, and threw them onto the bed on top of the dress. Then she found a cami to wear over her training bra, and a pair of nylons, and put those four items on top of the dress and went back to her closet.

She slipped out of her nightie and the panties she wore under it, and put them in a clothes hamper, and grabbed a robe to wear to the bathroom.

It was a beautiful kimono style robe, royal purple in color, and she relished the feeling of the silk on her skin for a moment before running to the bathroom to have a shower and get as pretty as she could.

Once clean, powdered, bathroomed, and dressed, she joined her sister on the short walk to school, once again marveling in the magic of the dress - how it seemed to lighten her weight to the point where she felt like she barely touched the pavement as she walked.

She got to school, and relished the ohs and ahs from the other girls, and spent most of her non-class time giggling with Jenn, which would have seemed impossible not long before.

She remembered how she met Jen when the latter girl was throwing tampons at Dottie’s sister Jaci, which resulted in Dottie jumping the girl and trying her level best to pound her.

A visit to the principal’s office thereafter was when the relationship changed, as Jen had said, “See that's what annoys me most about you. You are not even trying and are such the perfect girl. You are so lucky that you will be able to one day give birth and you want to throw that all away. I would kill to be able to have babies."

Dottie had been beyond shocked at the girl’s statement, as she had sometimes felt the same way about her sister, but then she remembered what had cured her of any jealousy of Jaci.

“You’re jealous of Jaci? You’d want to be her? Would you still want to be her if you knew what her parents had done to her, trying to make her into a boy? Would you still want to be her if you sat by her bedside and listened as she screamed and cried and begged for mercy and said she’d be a good boy if only they would stop? Would you want to be her if you saw her completely unable to wear pants, because they bring on flashbacks so bad she shakes? Would you still want to be her then?”

Dottie then took a shaking breath and finished, “And you think you’re the only girl who cant have babies? I cant. I cant cause I was born with boy bits and no matter what, even if they make me look like a girl on the outside, I wont ever have a womb. And sometimes, that hurts so much I cant even describe it. So there.”

Eventually the principal had made the three girls work together on a project where they had to make a presentation on the other’s lives, and Dorothy and Jenn bonded and became good friends, and even Jaci forgave Jenn as well.

Now, Dottie had to say goodbye to her friend and go to the charm school class, and it was on the way here that her own happiness fog lifted enough to realize how much trouble her sister was in.

Jaci had been grouchy all day, snapping growling like a bear woken too early, but Dottie had just put that to a post-period kind of mood, but now as she walked to the class she wondered if it wasnt something more serious.

By the time the charm school classes were over, Dottie no longer had any doubts, and struggled with what to do - Jaci’s flashbacks could be horrible things, and she felt terribly helpless to help her sister through them.

Not that Dottie didnt know a thing or two about flashbacks herself, and it wasnt long ago that it had taken both Jaci and their Tante Drea to calm her to the point she could sleep as she had been triggered by the realization that she might in fact like boys.

She shuddered at the memory, but shoved it aside in her concern for her sister grew after they had gotten home.

And then she heard a scream from Jaci’s room, and rushed in to find Jaci had piled everything she owned including the charm school dress into a pile, and sat naked on her bed screaming as she held onto a pair of boy’s jeans much too small for her.

Dottie was panicked. She called out for Tante, but was afraid to leave her sister in such distress, and tried to talk to her.

“Jaci, its me, its Dottie. Its gonna be all right.”

“Goway.”

“Cant. Love you too much. Please let me help.”

“You cant help. Nobody can help. I’m a freak!”

“If you’re a freak so am I.”

Dottie began to strip herself to her underwear, to drive the point home and maybe shock her sister back to reality.

“See? I’m a boy who wears girl’s stuff. I’m a freak too.”

Just then Drea came into the room, saw the two girls in a state of undress, but realized questions would have to wait as the pain in Jaci’s eyes was too large a concern to worry about much else.

She grabbed Jaci and held her as tight as she could, and Dottie hugged her from the other side, and they held the crying girl until at last her tears stopped.

Much later, in Tante’s bed in their nighties, Dottie used the example of her fear of boys to get her sister to open up as to what triggered this attack - a fear that since her birth family had rejected her, the family she made with Dottie and Tante would also end with them rejecting her, a fear that seemed to have grown stronger the closer to Christmas it got.

Dottie cried at the thought of ever rejecting her sister, and Tante held her tight, and Jaci’s fears subsided, at least for the moment.

Drea was wise enough to know that only time would show little Jaci that her new family would stay together, that together, they could face anything, from Jaci and Dottie’s past, to whatever life threw at them in the years to come, and the bonds they forged with each other would only grow stronger through each crisis they overcame.

But for tonight, she was just glad this crisis was over with, and she went to sleep feeling the heartbeats of two little girls on either side.