Who said life doesn't come with an owner's manual?

Chapter 12
This Little Piggy...

By Jesse Rabbit
Edited by Erin Halfelven for posting on BigCloset and Sapphire's Place

So I just marched right into her room, stomping - or at least trying to in bare feet on carpet - the whole way, reached past her and grabbed the manual from where it was laying on her workbench, hooked up to like a dozen gizmos and gadgets. I think she was trying to crack grandpa's security. She even had a fake hand on the scanner plate. " I said to Karen as we pedaled towards school the next morning.

"And all the while you were dressed like…" she had to stop talking at that point so she could giggle. Giggling, talking, and breathing all at once is tricky, especially when you're biking uphill.

"Yep, and she couldn't believe it. Her eyes were soooo wide. There was me - her brother! - wearing a powder blue nightie, silk robe, and matching panties, with my hair done up in twin ponytails. I think something must have fried in her evil little pig brain." I wasn't laughing, too much, but I wasn't having any trouble with the hill and was breathing fine, thanks to the Watch.

As soon as we crested the hill, Karen managed to gasp out "Did she say anything?"

I gave a sharp laugh that sounded a little like a bark, "No, she just opened and closed her mouth like a guppy. I looked down at her and said, 'You've been a bad little boy, Michael, taking things that aren't yours! Shame on you.' And I did it all in this really serious tone."

"And then?"

"And then I just stomped back out and back into my room as if nothing strange had happened. As soon as I got in, I changed back into my PJ's and fixed my hair. I hid the girl's stuff behind my dresser. And just in time 'cause my mom came up then with Pig hiding behind her like a four year old. Mom just looked around and then looked down at Pig with that 'You've been lying again' look on her face and dragged the little troll back to her room for a talking to." We both had a good laugh at the idea of Pig getting in trouble, and it wasn't like she could tell Mom the reason I'd been in her room, right?

As we racked our bikes Karen asked, "So what's part two of Elan's cunning revenge plan?"

I tried to act all innocent as I said "Who me?" but couldn't manage it and just cracked up laughing, getting plenty of strange looks from the crowd at large. I was just about to mount a defense of "am not"s against Karen's preordained assault of "Don't give me that innocent look! You're the master of vicious nasty wicked plots!" or something similar, when a shadow loomed over me.

Well, three shadows actually. It was the trio, who looked thrilled to see me, although I did notice that Davis was giving Karen a once over with his eyes. Tyrone though was giving my outfit a critical look and asked "Hey Layne? How come you always wear a boy's uni?"

Jim elbowed Ty and jumped to my defense, "It's not! It's a girls uni, he just means howcum you don't, you know, wear skirts or summit? Ty, you doofus! Ix-nay on issing-pay off the ascot-may!"

While I just stood there trying to squash the urge to flee the scene, Ty slapped Jim upside the head and shook his own, "No, its not. Look at Karen's shirt. The buttons are all on the left, but Elayne's buttons are all on the right, like ours are." And with that all six of the trio's eyes focused on me and I felt my brain beginning to lock down into panic mode. I mentally struggled to find an answer, any answer that made the slightest amount of sense but could feel myself drowning in the mass of panic that was bubbling up from within.

It was Karen who came to my rescue after about a second's pause. "Oh, it's simple. Elayne is registered as a boy 'cause her grandpa is this nutball who thinks she's his grandson and her parents just play along cause the old coot is like way rich and really screwy."

I opened my mouth to protest this blatantly and ridiculously untrue story, sure that my voice would be joined by the trio's in outrage. And I was right, but they weren't outraged for the right reason.

Jim was like "Whoa! Bummer. How do you ditch gym?"

Davis was like "Awsum! But the dude must be blind cause you are one fly chica."

Ty was like, "That truly sucks. You have my sympathies. Is your grandfather on any medication?"

Well, it's nice to know that at least one of the Trio has a brain, of any kind, no? And then the warning bell rang and we had to dash off to homeroom.

***

During lunch, I dragged Karen off to the library so we could look at the manual together and so I could give my ID to Miss Pertry who looked thrilled to see me and gave me a fond hug. She asked if everything was okay and I nodded and told her that I'd just been having some family problems and that my grandfather's funeral had been just a few weeks ago. I didn't tell her that Karen and I alone knew that the old lunatic was actually quite alive and in hiding at that very moment. She consoled me and asked if I wanted some chocolate chip cookies that her daughter had made in her cooking class the day before. Karen and I politely took one each and smiled as we ate the ghastly things. We complimented Miss Pertry on how good a cook little Alyza - who goes to Crestview and is in the third grade - was and, as quickly as we could without being rude, hustled over to the drinking fountain to wash away the half burned crumbs of what tasted like play dough mixed with lumps of coal.

After we had cleaned our mouths out, we found a secluded table and I plopped the manual down and let it scan my palm. It dinged and said "Elan Owen recognized. Two life signs detected within 5 meters. Proceed?" and then two buttons formed on the screen. I pressed the yes button and the table of contents appeared.

The manual had chapters on every single one of the dozens of menu options, tech specs on all the evil little electronic tricks the thing could do, and ways to customize each of them using the manual as an interface. It was far too much to go into, and most of it was kinda boring so we just skipped that part and went looking for the good stuff.

It was the last chapter that caught our eye. It was titled, innocently enough, "Other Functions" and we opened it with a growing sense of anticipation. The menu inside had these five entries: Conversion Engine, Life Support, Panic Modes, Customization, and Upgrades.

Figuring that the beginning was a perfectly valid place to start, we immediately selected the Upgrades option instead. The screen filled with twenty-two lines of text and numbers. It took me a moment to realize what they were. They were the birth dates of my entire family, or at least my Mother's side of it. And they were in order, but without names. The first was on the nineteenth of that month and belonged to my twelve-year-old cousin, Sabine Winter, Clone/Daughter of my Aunt Tricia. Aunt Tricia's a geneticist and just as mad as the rest of us, so don't ask. From there, it listed each and every one of Grandpa Horace's children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and everyone who had married any of them.

"What the…?" I whispered, confused as heck.

"You said it, sister." Karen whispered back.

After about a minute, I just reached out and tapped the first entry, Sabine's. The whole screen cleared and grandpa's face appeared, in 2-D this time.

"Hello, Elan. Glad to see you've gotten this far. Now since my records show you skipped reading most of the text I'll not confuse you too much. Simply put, your Watch can learn some pretty nifty things..."

Karen looked at me at that and mouthed "Nifty?"

I shrugged as grandpa's recording continued uninterrupted. "...from the gifts I've lined up for the rest of the family. Of course I could tell you what they are, but I figure it will be loads more fun for you to find out on your own, so I'll just tell you how it works. You've got to get your Watch in contact with their gift and keep it there for five seconds. And the Watch has to be in record mode. Now their presents won't all be Watches, and some of them will be able to learn from your Watch. It's up to you to figure out what the presents are and decide if you want to let others learn from your Watch. No two gifts are exactly alike and each will teach your Watch to do something unique. Have fun." And with that the image faded away and the dates returned.

Karen laughed "We have to ask if my Watch can learn from yours. This is gonna be cool!" I had to agree.

"So what kinda upgrades do you figure?" I asked. "Like more memory, better video card kinda upgrades, or like the ability to turn blue, grow to five meters in height, and have armor plating burst out of my skin kinda upgrades?"

Karen giggled, "Or the kinda upgrade that gives you a real personality?" and then she ducked under the table so that I missed her when I tried to hit her.

So I kicked her instead, and said "Ho-ho! Aren't we the little smart ass?"

To which she said something rude, and then I said something rude back and the we started poking each other and saying "Stoppit" and sticking our tongues out at each other until a girl in the stacks hissed at us to be quiet. As soon as she had turned her back, we both stuck our tongues out at her and giggled quietly as we shushed each other.

I checked the time - kooky thing to do with a Watch, huh? - and found that we had less than ten minutes left before lunch was over, so we got back to checking out the other four menus. Conversion Engine was simple, it just gave the details I had already learned plus it told me how to check on how much boy-credit I had built up. It had this little info-blurb that said if I didn't use my panic time on a girl day it got added to my tab, which was cool. It also had a switch that would let me set boy days to auto cancel, which wasn't. Life Support had lots of technical stuff about how the watch kept me safe and healed me and all the things I'd already discovered or been told about. The only new thing it had to tell was that it wasn't very effective if I was being electrocuted while it tried to heal me, which is a good thing to know I guess. The Panic Modes section was all old hat, absolutely nothing new there aside from the fact that the watch could trigger Panic Mode on it's own if I was badly injured or my vital signs became too unstable, like say, if I was being electrocuted while the Watch was trying to heal me. It also told me how to program a voice command to panic mode, so I did. My word was Polyvinyl Chloride Resin which I figured I was unlikely to say very often. Karen had suggested "Michelle is a sweetheart" but I doubted I could bring myself to say that even if my life was in danger.

The Customization menu - on the other hand - had so many interesting things that it was hard to pick just where to start. The controls were grouped into four categories: Skin, Hair, Eyes, and Piercings. The Skin group told me how to customize my tan, give myself freckles or moles, and even had a tattoo control that would allow me to design and apply my own tattoos, painlessly. The Hair control was exactly the same as the Stylemaster, except it worked much faster and allowed me to control hair anywhere on my body. Karen said that I should give myself a long white beard and call myself "Merlayne" So I hit her. The Eyes allowed me to change the color of my eyes, but that was it, and I liked mine the color they are, so that wasn't very interesting. Lastly, the Piercing controls were really cool, but some of the settings were really creepy. Why would anyone want the webbing on their hands pierced. And some of them weren't even that nice. Yerg!

Karen was already making plans to reformat me into - as she put it - "Elayne v2.1" when the bell rang and we had to get to class.

***

I'm not so amazed now, but that day I was simply stunned that nobody seemed to notice that I was a girl. I mean, I did get some looks that might have been trying to figure out what was different, and about twenty people told me that the haircut looked good, and three sixers called me ma'am, but no-one who knew me seemed to notice I was a girl. No one. Hunter Darby, the school moron and chief bully, did call me a sissy and punch me in the arm as we passed between classes, but he did that to anyone smaller than him, which was everyone except Davis and Tyrone, and he out massed either of them, and this kid Aaron Matthews, who has a weight problem. So, that was no big deal.

Just FYI, Hunter has been out of sorts since the end of last school year since when he's been having problems with every piece of electronics equipment he tries to use. It's like he is being haunted by a techno-poltergeist, but I don't know anything about that, heh, heh, heh.  Not a thing.

Now I'd like to claim that I didn't mess with the manual again until after school and that I paid attention in all of my classes, but I'd be lying through my teeth, or at least through my pixels, if I said that. I spent all of study hall reading the technical part, which was okay 'cause it's study hall. Then in choir Miss Roston noticed almost immediately that my voice was higher and shifted me into the supra-soprano section. Then in Lit I completely ignored the lecture so I could give myself a light full body tan, remove what little body hair I had, give myself a small scattering of freckles, changed my hair style to the androgynous but stylish one that Karen had designed for me, and brightened my highlights, just for fun cause I didn't know what highlights were. And then in Poly-Civ I spent the hour designing a huge blue and gold dragon tattoo that would cover my entire back, one of my thighs, one of my arms, and much of my torso. It was breathing fire and holding a sword in one claw and an orb in the other. My mother would freak if she saw it, but it looked so cool. I also designed a little one, of a blue mask butterfly, which I actually put on my ankle where no-one could see.

That almost turned out to be a disaster though, cause it tingled like crazy as it formed and it spasmed so hard that I almost kicked Charlyenne Harris, the girl who sits in front of me, in the butt. Instead I jerked it sideways and just banged my shin into one of the legs of the desk, which hurt like hell. I sent grandpa a very annoyed missive about that, let me tell ya.

***

When the final bell rang, I was just about to grab Karen and drag her off somewhere so I could show her what I'd come up with when the Watch blinged and announced that I had an appointment. For a minute, I couldn't remember what it was but then memories of the day before came rushing back, along with a deep blush, and I remembered. I had to go get my cheerleader uniform. "Yippee?"

I told Karen what was going on and she insisted that she was coming with me.

"You'll be soooooo cute! Do you get pompoms? Are you going to do your hair up in pigtails? On Spirit Days are you going to come to school in your uniform?"

I stoically ignored her and stopped a passing kid who was carrying a Spanish text book to ask him where Miss Vasquez's room was.

Miss Vasquez, it turns out, was a short Spanish woman, with iron-gray hair, of about seventy. Her bearing and manner had that strange combination of iron-clad no-nonsense and grandmotherly compassion that you find in some of the best teachers. She was all business though, and began talking rapidly as soon as I entered the room, "Elayne Grace? These are Tabitha Moorehead and Agnes Watson, the Cheer Captain and her second. School policy requires they be here for your fitting to ensure nothing untoward occurs. Your friend can sit over there or wait outside." She pressed a button on her desk, the door latched and locked itself and a sliding plate of metal covered the window. "Please get undressed, Miss Grace. There are no recording devices or other forms of surveillance."

You'd think that after all the times in health class that I'd be used to being naked in front of people by now, wouldn't you? Well normally, I wouldn't have had a problem, but this was going to be my first time as a girl, and let me tell you, I felt those four pairs of eyes burning into my skin like lasers. Even Karen's eyes seemed too hot. I stood there for several moments, breathing slowly and trying to suppress the urge to spontaneously wig out, or worse yet back out of the whole thing, which would have meant breaking my word. I mean, I still wasn't sure this as the best idea in the world. In fact, I think that at that moment I was pretty much assumed that it was the worst idea in the world, possibly in the whole history of space-time in fact. But I'd given my word, and really, what could it hurt?

So, I did it. I took off my clothes, even my socks and my pendant. Let me tell you, my skin was so red you would have had trouble picking me out from a bunch of strawberries.

"The watch, too, Miss Grace."

I blinked, I'd forgotten about that. "Umm, it doesn't come off, Miss Vasquez."

She humphed and sighed "Well, if you weren't a mascot, I'd insist, but since you wont be doing any routines with the squad I don't suspect that it matters. Anyway, please go stand in the fitter. And Miss Grace?"

"Yes, Miss Vasquez?"

"Make sure that tattoo isn't visible when you are in uniform."

"Yes, Miss Vasquez. And it's only a temp." And with that I stood in the fitter and fifteen minutes later Miss Vasquez gave me a complete cheerleader's uniform: panties, sports bra, pleated skirt, fitted top with Joey the Echidna's head between the C and the M, and bloomers which are like over-panties. And all in the school's Maroon and Gold.

I tried them on, and - of course - they fit like a custom-tailored glove. Miss Vasuqez nodded and said I did the uniform proud. Tabitha and Agnes both said I looked so cute and Karen had to stifle an attack of the giggles. I felt like a marigold.

Miss Vasquez said that she'd get me my spare uniforms and cold weather gear by next Monday or Tuesday and asked if I wanted her to send my parents the bill or if I wanted to take it home myself. I opted for the safer route and took it myself. Then she gave me a keycard that would get me into the cheerleaders' locker room and Sports Heaven and shooed us out the door. Tabitha and Agnes both gave me a hug and welcomed me to the team, well kinda, and said that they would see me on Saturday. Unfortunately, they both ran off before I could say, "Saturday?"

I wondered what was Saturday, but neither Karen nor I had the faintest idea.