Part One – Doll Play
“Gimme my doll,” the high-pitched whining voice pierced the quiet of the summer afternoon.

Terry Seager struggled to his feet to chase Laketta Randolph as she dodged between two houses, far too fast for the boy to catch her. As he lumbered after his fleet-footed friend, he could hear Sharon Campbell giggling behind him.

“You’ll never catch her, Terry,” Sharon called after him.

As he moved between the houses, he saw Laketta’s back disappear, and so he stopped, recognizing the futility of his effort.

He knew Laketta was just teasing him and would return with the doll, so he returned to join Sharon, who was still sitting Indian-style on the grass in the front of the Campbell home, an aging bungalow among other similar homes in a diverse neighborhood of the city. He sat down next to her, already breathing hard, even though his run had been a brief one. There were three dolls on the grass in front of Sharon, along with a selection of doll clothes.

“My sister will kill me if her doll gets ruined or 'Ketta will hide it,” the boy said.

“She’ll be back, Terry. She's just teasing you. It’s just that you were making such a fuss about keeping your Barbie in that prom dress. Laketta wanted to put the bikini on your doll,” Sharon said. “You shoulda let her.”

“I was afraid she’d tear the dress,” the boy said.

*****
The three children – all twelve years old and about to begin seventh grade when school began again in September – were constant friends during the long summer days. Terry knew it was a strange threesome, him being the only boy, and other boys in the neighborhood occasionally teased him for “playing with the girls.” For the most part, however, he was ignored by the boys, who were either beginning the gang-stage of their young lives or headed to play baseball or shoot baskets at the nearby school grounds.

Terry was frightened to join the gangs and he was too inept at sports to care about joining in the games that required more agility or strength than he could offer. Laketta and Sharon had enjoyed playing with Terry, who usually was cheerful and liked to clown around when he was with them. All three of them were from families in which there was no man in the house; their mothers all had day jobs and now that the three of them were twelve they were left pretty much on their own. Thus far, that had not been a problem, since they amused each other easily and, for the most part, innocently.

He didn’t mind playing with dolls, and usually borrowed his sister’s Barbie doll when the girls suggested that have a “doll day.” At first his sister Tanya, who was a year younger, wouldn’t let him borrow the doll; the fact was, however, that she hadn’t played with the doll for over a year, having become more of a tomboy.

After he continued pleading with her to borrow the doll so that he could join his friends, she finally gave in, telling him, “OK, little girl, you can play with it.”

“I’m not a little girl,” he yelled back at her.

“You are too.”

“I am not,” he said, his anger getting the best of him. He rushed at her, but she was too quick for him, and dodged to one side, tripping him so that he fell down on the floor. She pounced onto him, and even though she weighed less than he did she was able to pin him to the ground. He struggled unsuccessfully to push her off and he lay panting, already out of breath. Finally, she got up.

“I’m sorry, Terry. I shouldn’t have said those things,” his sister said. She handed the doll over to him.

The truth was that the two children loved each other; like all siblings they might have these spats, but Terry had really been more like a mother to his younger sister, making her meals and watching over her in their mother’s daily absences for work. In fact, he had slowly taken over most of the house-cleaning and clothes laundering, chores that he found strangely satisfying. His mother, of course, was thankful for his help, but she also told him that he should try to get Tanya to do her share.

“If you’d ask her, Terry, I think she’d do more around the house and then you could be outside playing ball or being with the other boys,” his mother said.

“That’s OK, mom. I like doing this and besides Tanya’s always outside and she’s always so busy that I hate to ask for her help,” he said.

“You’re such a sweetie, darling, but really she should do her share,” his mother said.

“OK, mom, I’ll ask her then,” he said, realizing that he probably wouldn’t push Tanya too hard to help out. The summer had become boring enough for him with his only friends being Laketta and Sharon, and they were often doing girl things together. Three mornings a week they were at a craft workshop at the recreation center and they told him it was only for girls. With only one video game friend as a boy to chum with, Terry found the household chores to be a great distraction.

Terry’s only constant boy friend was tall and awkward Albert Swendson. Like Terry, Albie (as he was called) was awful at sports; the two met at a picnic staged by the company for which both of their mothers worked. Their mothers were friends and the two boys met at the picnic where they found they both loved to play video games. They were discussing each one’s favorite game when one of the parents started shooing up the children for a volleyball game.

“Do you wanna play, Terry,” Albie had asked.

“Ah, I don’t know,” Terry replied.

Albie must have sensed Terry’s reluctance and said, “I don’t either.”

“That’s cool,” Terry replied, feeling relieved that he wouldn’t have to humiliate himself on the volleyball court.

Though the two boys lived more than a mile apart and attended different schools, they began meeting to play video games at least once a month, often driven on Saturdays to one or the other’s homes by their mothers.

*****
The fact was that in the last two years, Terry’s body had changed greatly, from that of a slender, light-framed boy to a soft somewhat chubby boy, a feat accomplished by a gain of 25 pounds through his fondness for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies and ice cream and a lack of exercise. At his last visit to the doctor, he had been told he should watch his weight to avoid being obese, and that bothered him so much that he vowed he’d try to lose weight. So far he hadn’t begun to even try.

He hated looking at himself in the mirror, realizing that he’d see what purported to be a boy with a soft, flabby body. When he looked at himself one hot, muggy morning as he was mopping up the bathroom, he saw a girl looking back at him. She had long dirty blonde hair that flowed down past his shoulders and framed a round, soft face with full lips; the girl wore a perspiration-soaked tee-shirt that was plastered to her budding little breasts and rounded tummy.

Terry halted his work and looked more closely at the flush-faced image in the mirror. He flicked his hair away from his face, imitating a movement he’d seen Sharon often perform with her hair. The image smiled back at him and Terry put his hand on his hips in a coquettish manner, thrusting his chest forward so that his breasts stood out prominently with their nipples showing in the contours of the cotton tee-shirt.

“Hi there girl,” he said to the image in the mirror, moving into a series of girlish poses.

The girl smiled back, adding a flirty wave.

“You have such a pretty face, girl, but you should lose all that fat,” Terry said to the mirror.
With that he cupped both of his breasts, easily creating a cleavage that was obvious through the tight-fitting tee-shirt.

“What’s your name, pretty girl?” he said to the girl in the mirror.

“Theresa, but my friends call me Terri,” the girl said back.

Terry giggled in a high-pitched girlish voice. It was easily his natural voice since his voice hadn’t changed, unlike most of the boys in his class. In fact, in the 6th grade chorus he still sang with the sopranos, the only boy amidst the girls in the section.

“Terri, you are a lovely girl. Would you like to go to the dance Saturday night,” the boy asked the girl in the mirror.

“Oh yes, I’d be honored,” the image said back.

As Terry chatted with the image in the mirror, he discovered his small penis was hardening and growing longer. Not fully realizing what was occurring, he pressed the tiny member between his pudgy thighs in the hopes of suppressing it. But it only became harder and he found himself getting light-headed and a bit spacey.

As this was occurring he imagined himself as a girl, a soft, fleshy girl with real breasts. Soon the pain from his crotch became unbearable and suddenly he felt a rush of warm, sticky liquid gush out of his penis, staining his brief and the shorts he wore. Totally exhausted from the exercise, he sat down on the commode and breathed heavily. When he got his breath back, he felt ashamed; he finally realized this is what the other boys meant when they talked about “jacking off.” It was his first time, and as disorienting as it was, he found he liked it.

The girly image he saw in the mirror haunted him the rest of the day, even to the point that he mused about venturing into his mother’s room to find a bra and perhaps something to wear that would make him look like a girl. Yet, the idea of dressing into female clothes at first appalled him; wouldn’t doing so make him a pervert? He wasn’t quite sure what a pervert was, but he knew from the talk among other boys it was something to do with sex and doing weird and forbidden stuff. He wondered if he'd be such a pervert if he wore clothes of the opposite sex. Besides, while he knew his little sister Tanya was outside playing with friends and would likely be gone all afternoon he couldn’t count on it.

Hoping to get the idea of dressing like a girl out of his head, Terry decided to get to work doing the laundry, hoping the activity would cleanse his mind.

His mother had taught him how to handwash her lingerie, including her bras. To do so, he used the bathroom sink and he was about to dip one of her bras into the soapy water when he looked carefully at it. He examined the label, as she taught him to do to assure that he was using the appropriate washing process, and noticed for the first time its size: 34 B. His mother, who was a slightly framed woman, had modest breasts and he guessed that B meant the size of the cups.

Why not try it on? He held it up and looked at it and saw two clips that obviously were meant to hook it together.

He took off his shirt, exposing his soft, fleshy body and held the bra up before himself, trying to figure out how it went on. The two clips must hook in the back, he thought, and positioned the bra across his chest, trying to hook the two ends together behind his back. He struggled to get the two to meet and hook together, but failed. Finally, he brought it around and hooked the two ends up, and slid the bra back, bringing the cups in his front. One by one, he lifted each of his breasts into the cup. Each one easily filled the cup and he adjusted the bra upward slightly, creating the image of a real girl, complete with a crack between the two breasts and the showing of soft flesh oozing out of the top of each cup.

He posed himself in front of the mirror again, mimicking feminine gestures.

“What a pretty girl you are,” he said aloud, speaking into the mirror in his high girlish voice.

His reverie was soon ended when he realized he was still a boy, not a girl. A boy should be hard, strong and muscular, and his body surely had none of these traits. He took the bra off, sobered by his own pathetic physical weakness. He put his two arms up in a fruitless attempt to form a muscle in his bicep; try as he might nothing happened and the arms remained flat with soft flesh hanging from the bottom of his arms.

A few days later his pathetic maleness became clear when, during a bit of clowning around, Sharon challenged him to an arm wrestle. Thinking that because he was a boy he would easily pin her; while she was as tall as he was, she was also a girl still showing her adolescent baby fat so he felt that he would easily win the competition. Instead, he found his arm being pinned down to the picnic table where the sat within just a few seconds.

“Oh I’m sorry, Terry,” Sharon said immediately. “You were probably not ready.”

“Do you want to try again?” asked LaKetta, who had been watching the competition with interest.

“No, that’s OK. I guess you girls are just pretty strong,” he said.

He was grateful then to Sharon for quickly changing the subject and suggesting they get back to dressing their dolls and doing some play-acting with them. He loved the scenarios the three set up since they usually featured three fictional girls, much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. LaKetta played Buffy, Sharon took Dawn’s part, usually leaving Terry to play Willow, the nerdy girl with a brain. LaKetta usually set up the scene, leaving the other two to work out a solution; sometimes, she took the role of being the vampire and the three children would get into mock fights, usually ending in giggles as they rolled around on the floor.

When they got back to the house, LaKetta decided she’d be the vampire, and after setting the scene, Sharon and Terry confronted the vampire and after trying to make each other “vaporize,” they ended up in a wrestling match with Sharon and Terry tackling a pinning LaKetta to the floor. In triumph Terry straddled over LaKetta while Sharon pinned the girl’s legs.

As he hovered over her, breathing heavily and sweating so that his tee-shirt was plastered to his skin, he noticed LaKetta staring at his chest.

“You have breasts like a girl,” she said.

“I do not,” he replied firmly, even though he knew she was right.

“They’re bigger than my breasts or Sharon’s,” she insisted.

Terry felt humiliated and released his hold on LaKetta and the three children got up off the floor; they stood and looked at each other for a minute without comment.

“I’ll get us some lemonade from the fridge,” Sharon said finally. “Let’s sit out on the porch and cool down.”

After they were seated on the plastic chairs on the back porch, sipping the lemonade, both Sharon and LaKetta said they were sorry for what they said. “You’re our bestest friend, Terry,” Sharon said;

LaKetta nodded in agreement.

“I know that, but I guess I should just lose some of this fat,” Terry said.

“You’re not too fat, Terry,” Sharon responded.

“I should still lose weight. I know that.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, but Terry, you’re just like another girlfriend to us,” LaKetta said.

“We love playing with you, Terry,” echoed Sharon.

“Yeah, and I mean this as a compliment, you really are girl in many ways and you do have the prettiest face,” LaKetta added.

Terry felt he should argue with the girls and say he was a boy through and through, but said nothing. He began to blush instead; for some strange reason, he liked the idea of being a girl.

“You’re just teasing me,” Terry finally said putting a feminine lilt to his already high voice. With that, he flung his hands up in a girlish manner and flicked his long hair with a dainty flourish.

“Look at that. You’re a girl already,” LaKetta giggled.

Playing along with them, Terry rose from his chair and walked about the porch in an exaggerated girlish way, even thrusting his chest out to emphasize that he had breasts.

“We should dress you up as a girl sometime, Terry,” Sharon said. “Then we could go down to the Hangout as three girlfriends.” The Hangout was – as the name suggested – an ice cream and snack place that had become a hangout for teens.

“No way,” he said, the idea both embarrassing him and intriguing him. “I’m a boy, remember.”

He stopped his cavorting and sat back down in the chair.

“My sister’s got clothes that will fit you,” Sharon said, referring to her older sister, Camilla, who was away at college and was a bit chunky in physique.

“No.”

“I don’t think we should do that to him, Sharon,” LaKetta said. “What if somebody realized our girlfriend was a boy?”

Sharon nodded her head in agreement.

Nothing more was said about the idea, but the prospect of being a girl probed at Terry’s mind as he walked home that evening for dinner.

*****
Terry actually was not grossly overweight. His basic bone structure was that of a slender person and any extra weight would show as softness, unless of course the person exercised heavily to put on muscle mass. He knew he should begin working out and seeking ways to create a more muscular body, but he truly did not like the boredom that came with repeated physical actions that created a more toned body.

He had failed so often in playing with other boys and providing any athletic competition that they usually ignored him or made fun of him.

“Why couldn’t I have been born a girl?” he began asking himself. More and more often recently he found he liked the idea of thinking of himself as being named Theresa or Terri with an “i” rather than Terrence or Terry with a “y”.

He couldn’t get LaKetta’s comment out of his thoughts; she clearly said: “you have the prettiest face.”

She was right, he realized that night as he brushed his teeth and prepared for bed. He looked closely into the mirror and imagined he was a girl; he pictured his full lips red with lipstick and his eyes highlighted with liner. He brushed his long blondish hair with a brush his mother had bought for him when he refused to get his hair cut.

He took his tee-shirt off and looked at his body, bringing his arms down to his sides, and pressing them against the sides of his chest, easily creating a cleavage that accentuated his breasts.

“Hi, Theresa,” he said to the pretty girl in the mirror. He smiled and he knew that Theresa was a very happy girl.

*****

“What can I get for you girls?” the lady inside the ice cream truck said. The three had ventured to the neighborhood park, where they knew the truck would be stationed.

“We’re not all gir . . . “ LaKetta began.

Terry poked her in the ribs, interrupting her sentence that was to reveal that he was a boy. The boy gave her a short shake of his head, and she took the hint and said quickly, “I want butter pecan. One scoop.”

“And you young lady?” she turned to Terry.

“Strawberry, double,” Terry said knowing he shouldn’t be having any ice cream at all if he ever hoped to lose weight. Yet, he wanted not one but two scoops of the fat-creating treat.

“Butter pecan, single,” said Sharon.

Sharon and LaKetta began laughing as the three walked from the ice cream truck licking their cones,

Terry working fast to lick the melting pile of ice cream. They headed to a nearby park bench, where they jammed together, Terry in the middle.

“What’s so funny?” Terry asked, feeling the two girls squeeze tightly against him.

“She thought you were a girl, Terry,” Sharon said.

“Why didn’t you want me to set her straight?” LaKetta said.

“I don’t know,” Terry said, his face growing flushed. “She doesn’t need to know. Do I really look like a girl?”

“Not really, Terry. She must have bad eyesight,” Sharon said, hoping she was making the boy feel better.

“Besides even if you do look like a girl, Terry, we both like you,” LaKetta said.

Terry smiled and then turned his attention to his melting cone; the day was so hot and the cone began dripping more heavily, dropping a splotch of pink ice cream on his tee-shirt, just on top of his left breast that protruded from under his tee-shirt.

LaKetta saw the splotch. “Let me wipe that off, Terry,” she said, taking a napkin and rubbing it over the tee shirt, her hand feeling the contour of his soft mound of flesh.

“Don’t,” Terry pleaded, even though he found the massaging of his breast to be exciting. He felt his nipples harden as she rubbed.

“All right, but I was just trying to help,” the girl said.

The three finished their cones and then began to walk home, talking about the coming school year. Both the girls were eager to start in the new school, but Terry felt threatened. He was frightened as to how the students in the large school would take to him; would they think he was a girl, too? Would he be bullied and beat up? He knew he wasn’t strong enough to stand up for himself.

“Girls always seem to have so much fun,” he said as they prattled on.

“I’ve seen boys having fun, too,” LaKetta argued.

“I guess so, but I just don’t seem to fit into them.”

“You fit in with us,” Sharon said.

“Just one of the girls, aren’t you?” LaKetta giggled.

Terry realized he must be blushing and without thinking he blurted out “I guess I shoulda been born a girl.”

“Then we’d be real girlfriends together,” the darker girl said.

“Let’s give you a girl’s name,” Sharon said.

“That’s easy. She’s already got a girl’s name. All she has to do is to spell her name with an ‘I’.”

“Terri with an ‘I,’” repeated Sharon. “What’s the full name of a girl named Terri?”

“Theresa,” Terry said quickly.

“You’ve already thought about this, I bet, Terri,” LaKetta said.

“Do you wanna dress up like a girl today, Terri?” Sharon asked.

“No, why would I want to do that?” he said.

“I think you’d like to be a girl. Half the time you’re taken for one as it is,” Sharon said.

“And you got breasts like a fourteen-year-old girl already, and you just turned twelve,” LaKetta said.

“Yeah, and your things are bigger than any girl in our class, too,” Sharon said.

“I bet we could make you a pretty girl,” LaKetta said, smiling.

Sharon said that we could go to her house; no one was at home and the girls could dress Terry up in her sister Camille’s clothes.

“No, I’m a boy,” Terry said. He realized he hadn’t stated his denial strongly enough, likely because he secretly wondered if he could really be dressed up to look like a real girl. A pretty one as LaKetta promised!

“Come on, Terri,” Sharon pleaded.