----------=BigCloset Retro Classic!=---------- Admin Note: This story is one of the rarer forms of tg fiction we have on the site involving species transformation, or half transformations and have come across really strong and hold their own despite the technique. I hope those of you who do not normally read this type of tg story would give this one a try. You will be pleasantly surprised. ~Sephrena.

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  Admin Note: Originally published on BigCloset TopShelf on Monday 06-18-2012 at 10:22:37 pm, this retro classic was pulled out of the closet, and re-presented for our newer readers. ~Sephrena  

For most of the drive, Uncle Mike didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. The wrecks had all been cleared from the roads, but the closer we got to Atlanta, it seemed like there’d been so many of them that they hadn’t had time to haul them all away — we saw lots of wrecked cars in the ditches on both sides of the highway and in the median, and once we got into the denser-populated areas there were big piles of wreckage, where you could hardly tell where one squished car left off and another began. I wondered how many of the people who’d been in those cars at the moment of the change had survived, and of them, how many would ever recover from their injuries.

Somewhere around Norcross I said I needed to use the bathroom. Uncle Mike stopped at a gas station and we both went in. We used the men’s room — I felt vaguely guilty about that, but I was too embarrassed to use the ladies' room, and we both still looked male, as long as we had clothes on. I was about to ask Uncle Mike which he thought we should use, but he went into the men’s room and I followed him quietly.

There was only one stall; he let me go first. I peed, trying not to look at myself any more than necessary, and went out. Uncle Mike went into the stall while I was washing my hands; after I dried them I went out and looked at the magazines. Or I was going to look at the magazines; the other customer looking at the magazine rack caught my attention first, and I stared at him for several seconds before I remembered that wasn’t polite and made myself look away. He had black fur and long, sharp claws; he looked more like a big cat than a wolf, but more like an ape than either. I wondered if my Dad looked like that now, and I was trying to work up the nerve to ask him where he’d been last Saturday when it all changed, when Uncle Mike came out of the restroom.

“See anything you want?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

From there it wasn’t far to home; we were well ahead of rush hour, and Uncle Mike said the traffic on I-285 was lighter than usual even for early afternoon. Thirty or forty minutes later we were pulling into my driveway, and I suddenly got really nervous — I’d been a little nervous all day, but as Uncle Mike turned off the engine it suddenly hit me all at once, and my heart was pounding just as hard as when I realized, last Saturday, what had happened to me.

Uncle Mike started to get out of the car, and then looked at me and said: “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

We sat there in the parked car for a while, and then I opened my door and we both got out. I trailed behind Uncle Mike on the way to the door; he rang the bell.

By the time I caught up with Uncle Mike, my Dad was already opening the door. I drew in a deep breath when I saw him. He wasn’t much like the guy I’d seen at the gas station, though they both had fur and claws. Dad’s fur was more yellowy-tan, what you call “tawny” if you see a cat that color, and he had a longer snout — not as long as a dog or wolf’s snout, but enough to make his face barely recognizable. He was just wearing shorts, and I could see how his knees bent the wrong way.

“Jeffrey!” he said, and grabbed me in a big hug, like he hadn’t done since I was little — I mean, he hugged me often enough, but it was years since he picked me up and whirled me around like that. He put me down and said to Uncle Mike, “Come on in.”

We did, and there was Mom, lying on her side on the living room sofa. She was wearing a loose T-shirt, and covered with a big blanket from the waist down.

“Jeffrey!” she said, “come here and give me a hug.”

I did. From the waist up, she looked a lot more human than Dad. But when I leaned over and hugged her I couldn’t help feeling how flat her chest was, and remembering the centaurs I’d seen on CNN, and thinking about what she looked like under the blanket. I stood up and looked at her again. She still looked like herself, her face was hardly changed, but she was so skinny — almost like a famine victim, with all the mass she could spare rearranged to make the lower torso and hind legs. And when she smiled, you could see, if you were paying attention, that she had herbivore teeth.

“Darlene’s still having some trouble walking,” Dad said to Uncle Mike. “Have a seat.” We all sat around in the other chairs; I sat in the smaller easy chair, next to Mom.

“How are you feeling, sis?” Uncle Mike asked Mom.

“Better,” she said. “I’ve got a little more energy, and I’m a little steadier on my feet, but I’m still hungry all the time. I’m putting on weight, but I still look like I’m anorexic.” She had a big salad bowl on the table beside her, and she picked it up and started eating again while we talked.

“There’s not many calories in that,” Uncle Mike said.

“I know,” she said, “but I can’t eat a lot of things now. Not meat, or dairy products, or a lot of processed foods, apparently. I get queasy just looking at meat, and the others I look at and know I couldn’t digest them. Pavel bought me some organic bread, and that’s fine, but I can’t eat a lot of store-bought breads, or nachos or potato chips... I need to start making my own bread. What about you and Jeffrey?”

“We’re still eating the same things,” he said. I thought my appetite was slightly less than before, but not a lot less, not enough to be sure it wasn’t just from stress and not part of the changes to my biology.

“You’re just eating meat now, Pavel?” Uncle Mike asked.

“Yes,” Dad said. “Cooked or raw, either way’s fine. But I can’t eat in the same room with Darlene, of course.”

“Tell me again how it happened,” I said. “It was so staticky when we could finally reach you on the phone —”

“All right,” Dad said. “So we went out to lunch last Saturday — we were going to have our romantic Valentine’s Day dinner in the evening, we had reservations, but then the hospital called and wanted Darlene to fill in for someone on the evening shift. I said go ahead, we could have dinner at lunchtime; the restaurant wouldn’t be as crowded and we might not need a reservation. And we didn’t. We’d been seated and had our appetizers served when it happened.”

When it happened. Uncle Mike and I had been using that phrase, and so had some of the other people we’d talked to in Athens. It was easier than saying exactly what had happened, and of course everyone knew anyway.

“I felt queasy for a moment,” Mom said, “and then numb — I couldn’t feel my body at all, and I fell out of my chair, but I couldn’t feel myself hit the floor. I was numb for several seconds, and I heard people screaming — then just as I was starting to worry enough to scream myself, I could feel my body again, and it felt strange. I tried to sit up, but it was awkward — my arms were skinny and weak, and my legs weren’t much stronger, and there were too many of them. But I didn’t realize that at first, I just knew I felt strange.”

“I went numb for a few moments too,” Dad said, “only not as long as your mother. It didn’t last long enough for me to fall out of my chair. But I saw her fall over, and I was near panicking, seeing her like that and unable to move. I sort of saw other people at other tables changing, out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t focus on it or consciously think about it until later, I was so worried about her. Then I could move, and I got up to go help her. Only I didn’t realize how my legs had changed, the knees working the other way around, and I fell flat on my face.”

“He was fine, really,” Mom reassured us; “he learned to walk on those legs in just a few minutes. I still haven’t got the hang of these, and they’re still weak. He crawled over to me, and I’m afraid I didn’t recognize him —”

“No reason you should,” Dad said.

“I screamed and tried to back away, but I was too weak to move. He reached out to me, and I slapped his hand away — and I realized then how skinny my arms were. And he seemed to notice his hand, too.”

“Yeah,” Dad said, “I hadn’t realized what had happened to me — when I saw my hand I looked at my other hand, and then felt my face, and I said, ‘Darlene, it’s me, Pavel.’ And I was just taking it in, how Darlene had changed — she was wearing a long dress, but it couldn’t cover much of her new hind legs. She was better off than the people wearing pants in that half of the restaurant; they were mostly naked from the waist down.”

The zigzaggy boundary between what we later called the Marietta centaurs change-region and the Smyrna wolves change-region ran right down the middle of that restaurant, and right through the table my Mom and Dad were sitting at. The people on one side, most of the customers and whatever waiters were serving them, turned into centaurs like Mom, and the people on the other side, the other customers and most of the waiters and all the kitchen staff, were suddenly like Dad — fur, claws, a carnivore’s long teeth and short digestive tract.

Why, we didn’t know and still don’t.

They told us how they got home — it took hours, first with Dad being unsteady on his feet, and then with so many car wrecks blocking the roads, every centaur driver and most of the wolves having lost control of their cars. Dad got one of the waiters to help him carry Mom out to the car and help her get into the back seat; she was too weak and wobbly to walk, and she couldn’t fit into the front seat anymore. Still, they were better off than the families who were all centaurs; their arms were mostly too weak to handle a steering wheel even if their car was spacious enough for their new body shape to fit in the driver’s seat. They tried to call me and Uncle Mike, as we tried to call them a little later, but the phone networks were jammed with everybody who’d survived the changes trying to call everybody they knew at once.

They ate at home — that was when they first realized how their teeth and digestions had changed. They turned on the news, and found out stuff like that was happening everywhere, and they kept trying to call people they knew, me and Uncle Mike twice as often as anyone else, but it was days before we got to talk, and then on a bad, staticky line. (Uncle Mike lost his Internet connection a few hours after the change and didn’t get it back for several days.) Dad went to work (he’s a paramedic) after he got Mom situated on the sofa with plenty of things to eat in arm’s reach; she couldn’t go in to work like that.

“What about y’all?” Mom asked us. Uncle Mike and I looked at each other — I’m not sure about him but I was too embarrassed to talk at first. Uncle Mike had already told them basically what happened, on the phone, but still...

---

For us in Athens, that queasy feeling Mom had mentioned was worse, and the numbness she said affected her whole body hit us — the men, anyway — just in one spot. I didn’t even realize what had happened to me until — wait, let me start with the moment it happened.

I’d gone to spend the weekend with Uncle Mike at his apartment in Athens so Mom and Dad could have a quiet Valentine’s Day weekend together. Uncle Mike and I had slept late that Saturday morning. He got up earlier than me, but not very early, and fixed pancakes. I’d just eaten five or six pancakes, and we’d talked about what we might do before the concert we were going to that night; after breakfast we sat down and played video games for a while. Uncle Mike has a great collection of old video game systems; their graphics are terrible, but some of them have better gameplay than you’d expect, and even the ones that just aren’t as good as modern games are interesting to play once in a while. A little after noon Uncle Mike said he was going to the bathroom, and left me alone in the living room. I was going through his Intellivision and Atari 2600 cartridges, looking for a one-player game I hadn’t played before, when I suddenly felt nauseous; and before I could run to the bathroom or kitchen, or even turn my face away from Uncle Mike’s antique game systems, I threw up my five or six pancakes all over them. I got a lot of vomit on my clothes and my arms and the carpet, but what I was panicking about, enough to not notice the weird feeling in my crotch, was that I’d probably ruined those irreplaceable games. I started frantically trying to clean it up — I ran into the kitchen and got a couple of towels, soaked one and wrung it out, then went back to the living room and kept trying to clean the vomit off the game systems and cartridges. I figured I could clean myself up later.

I was so engrossed with that task that I didn’t consciously realize that Uncle Mike was taking a long time in the bathroom. Then I heard the shower running.

A few minutes later, Uncle Mike came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist — that was unusual, he usually took his change of clothes into the bathroom with him, at least when I was staying with him. And even weirder, he didn’t go straight to his room to get dressed; he came into the living room, and saw me cleaning up the vomit.

“You got sick too?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then hurried to say, “I think I’ve got all the sick off the cartridges and the consoles, I haven’t tested the Intellivision yet but the Atari still seems to work fine —”

“Never mind,” he said, and that worried me. “Go clean yourself up — I’ll take care of the rest of this.”

So I went and washed my hands, then got a change of clothes from my suitcase and went to the bathroom. I turned on the shower and started taking off my vomit-soaked clothes — and that’s when I realized my dick was gone.

I sat on the edge of the tub, numb with shock, for a while. I poked around down there a little bit, but not much. I’d never seen a girl naked, and the pictures of naked women I’d seen mostly didn’t show their crotch close up, so I thought what I had there was normal for a girl, and it scared me. I wondered if I was fixing to start growing breasts, too, and I felt around my chest, but it didn’t feel any different. I finally showered and got dressed.

When I came out of the bathroom, Uncle Mike had gotten dressed and finished cleaning the game consoles and was working on the carpet. He had the TV on, but when I came out he turned the sound off. He looked up at me and said, “Did it happen to you too?”

“Do you mean...” I couldn’t make myself say it.

“Let me tell you what happened to me, and you tell me if the same kind of thing happened to you.” I could tell he was trying really hard to speak calmly, but his voice trembled a little anyway. “I was standing at the toilet, peeing, when I suddenly felt sick, and almost threw up — not quite, though. At the same time I lost feeling in my penis, but with the hand I was aiming with I felt it pull back inside my pants. I couldn’t stop peeing, something was wrong with my sphincter muscle, and I soaked my underwear and pants.

“I sat down on the edge of the tub and pulled them off, and then I realized it was gone — penis and testicles both. I have something that looks kind of like a girl’s vulva, but not exactly. I showered and came out and saw you’d been sick, and then I figured it might have happened to you too, if you got nauseated at the same moment I did.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess so. Only I didn’t realize it was gone until I took off my clothes to shower. I guess I was too busy cleaning up the mess to notice how my crotch felt different.”

“Listen to this,” he said, and he turned on the sound on the TV.

It was CNN, and they were talking about how weird changes were happening to people all over the world. I’m not going to go into detail about that, you know it as well as I do, but after a few minutes Uncle Mike turned the sound down and said, “Let’s try to get some local news.” He got out his laptop and tried to connect to some local Athens news sites and blogs. A lot of them were down, but on one of them there was a post from five minutes ago, the blogger saying the same thing that happened to us had happened to him and some guys who were hanging out with him. Their girlfriends reported feeling sick at the same time as the men’s penises vanished, but didn’t feel any different afterward. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that we found out how much women were affected by the Athens change.

Athens didn’t have anywhere near as many car wrecks as a lot of other places, so it seemed safe enough to go out, but we found out, when we went downtown, that the Sound Tribe Sector Nine concert Uncle Mike had gotten us tickets for had been canceled.

We were hearing worrying things about Marietta, the car accidents were worse there than most other places, and we were worried about my Mom and Dad, but every time we tried to call them we got busy signals or worse. We did manage to exchange IM messages with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave in Huntsville, Alabama, just before Uncle Mike’s Internet connection went out — Aunt Karen is my Mom’s and Uncle Mike’s older sister. They didn’t feel the queasiness or numbness we’d had at the moment of the changes, or any noticeable physical changes at all — but they had bad headaches for several minutes, and when they cleared up, they could hear each other’s thoughts. Not just each other’s, but anybody else who was close enough.

A few days later we found out that their telepathy only worked with other people who’d been in Huntsville at the moment of the changes; they couldn’t hear people of the other new human species that were all around them. I remembered that fact, and made use of it.

When we finally got Mom and Dad on the phone, they told us to stay in Athens for a while longer, until the wrecks were cleared from the roads. Cobb County schools were still closed, anyway. When they announced they were going to start school again the second Monday after the event, Uncle Mike talked to Mom again and said he’d bring me home that Friday, to give me a couple of days to visit with them before I had to go back to school.

By then, things were almost back to normal in Athens — as normal as they could ever be. We kept telling each other we were lucky, that most other places in the U.S. and western Europe had a lot worse fatalities and injuries from accidents at the moment of the changes. But we also knew we’d been castrated, and our efforts to talk around it and ignore it just made it worse.

I found out — I expect others did too, but we didn’t talk about it — that there was no point in masturbating with our new equipment. You could poke around down there all you wanted, and it wasn’t any more interesting than picking your nose. I wondered if women were affected the same way, and guessed probably so; but the local news just said they’d lost their wombs and ovaries and stuff.

Uncle Mike and I played a lot of video games, and went for walks around downtown and various parks. We talked to some of the people we met, people Uncle Mike knew — about the weather or the music scene or anything except the changes. As days passed, we saw more people who’d been away from Athens that Saturday and had come back since then, but none who’d been in Marietta or Smyrna.

---

When we got done telling Mom and Dad about what had happened — not everything I’ve just told you, but a suitably edited version — Dad said he was getting hungry, and asked if we were too; we said yes. He went into the kitchen to start cooking.

When he was out of earshot, Mom said: “So, I’m not sure I understand... You’re girls now? You look just the same.”

“No,” Uncle Mike said, and I added: “Even the girls in Athens aren’t girls anymore.”

“Everybody of both sexes lost all their reproductive organs,” Uncle Mike said. “We look kind of like girls, undressed, but we aren’t.”

“Have you seen a doctor since the changes?”

“No, but lots of people have, and the results are pretty consistent. The hospitals and doctors told people not to come in unless they had some sickness or injury unrelated to the changes, they were so overwhelmed.”

“Well, we’ll get our doctor to look at Jeffrey next clinic visit. I want to know for sure.”

“Can I ask you to do something for me, Mom?” I said.

“What is it, honey?”

“Don’t tell anybody I was in Athens.”

“What?”

Uncle Mike looked at me curiously.

“I want to tell people at school I was in Huntsville with Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave,” I went on. “They still look like regular people, and so do I, as long as I’ve got pants on. And their telepathy only works with people who were in Huntsville on Valentine’s Day, so unless I run into somebody from Huntsville, I can pull it off.”

“Why?” she asked. But Uncle Mike understood:

“He doesn’t want the kids at school to know he’s been — that he’s lost — I don’t blame him. Lying’s usually not a good idea, but I’d consider going along with him on this, Darlene.”

“And you didn’t understand at first — it would be worse with the kids at school, Mom. Maybe with the principal and teachers, too — they might make me use the girls' restroom and locker room, and that would make it even worse.”

“And think about this,” Uncle Mike added; “probably most of the kids at his school were at home, here in this school district, that day; most of the rest were probably nearby, in the same region as Pavel, or one of the other neighboring regions. I don’t know how these physical changes are going to affect the cliques and social groupings in high schools, but I’d be surprised if a lot of the kids who were a long way from their school district, like Jeffrey, don’t end up somewhat isolated and excluded anyway just because they’re the only kid of their kind in the school. If they think he’s changed into a girl, too — don’t make it any worse, Darlene.”

“Let’s talk to your father about it,” she said. “I don’t like the idea — I don’t think it’s going to work, you can’t fool that many people for very long.”

---

Uncle Mike and I ate at the kitchen table with Dad. Dad ate nothing but steak; Uncle Mike and I shared some of the steak, and Dad had baked a couple of potatoes for us. We told Dad about my plan.

“I understand,” he said, “and if you want to tell your friends you were in Huntsville instead of Athens, I won’t contradict you. But if the school officials, or the state or Federal government, ask us where you were and what happened to you, I’m not going to lie to them — we could get in serious trouble for lying on a census or tax form or whatever. I might refuse to answer, though. We’ll see.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Uncle Mike was going to go home after supper, but Mom and Dad didn’t want him on the road after dark, and he agreed to spend the night. Next morning, after he left for Athens, I told Mom and Dad I wanted to go over and see Will.

“All right,” Mom said; “maybe you’d better call first.”

I did. Will’s mom answered the phone.

“Hi,” I said, “it’s Jeffrey. Is Will home? Does it suit for me to come over?”

“Jeffrey! Yes, sure, come over any time today.”

So I walked over to Will’s house, just down the street. I rang the doorbell, and Will’s mom answered it.

She was walking better than Mom, though a little unsteady, and she wasn’t nearly as skinny as Mom — of course she’d been a little overweight, though not really fat, before she turned into a centaur. She wore a big skirt that covered her whole lower torso and came down to her knees on both pairs of legs, and she had two different kinds of slippers, both of them too big for her, on her front and back feet. Her chest was as flat as a little girl’s, which seemed stranger in a way than her being a centaur.

“Hi, Jeffrey,” she said. “Come on in.”

“Hi, Mrs. Benson,” I said. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

I’d exchanged emails with Will while I was staying at Uncle Mike’s, and learned that Will and his mom were at home at the moment of the changes, but his dad was out running some errands. He apparently lost control of his car when the changes happened — along with everybody else on the road in that area — and was killed in an eleven-car pileup.

“Thank you, Jeffrey.” She gave me a hug. “I still can’t get used to it. In a way it’s good that I had all this to get used to as well,” gesturing at her extra pair of legs, “it took my mind off losing him, a little bit... Just a little bit, but maybe it made it easier.” She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, then said: “Will’s upstairs in his room — can you wait a moment?”

“Sure,” I said, following her into the kitchen. She got a big bowl out of the cabinet, opened the refrigerator, and put a head of lettuce and a couple of cucumbers in the bowl. “Could you please take this up to Will?”

“All right.”

I went up the stairs and down the hall to Will’s room. The hall door was open. Will was lying in bed reading; he had an empty bowl on the bed next to him.

“Hey,” I said. “Your mom sent some more food.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m getting hungry.”

He was even skinnier than my Mom. He was wearing a T-shirt, and covered up with a blanket from the waist down. I sat down on the bed next to him and handed him the bowl; he tore off some lettuce leaves and ate them before he said anything more.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said.

He closed his eyes for a moment, chewed and swallowed, then said: “Thanks.” He didn’t say anything else, just took another bite of lettuce, then picked up a knife off his bedside table and started slicing one of the cucumbers. “Want some?”

“Sure,” I said, and took some of the cucumber slices.

Finally, after he’d eaten enough to take the edge off his hunger, he said: “So... what’s it like?”

I shifted uneasily. “You mean, what happened to me in Athens?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to —”

“Before I tell you, I want to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the only person besides my parents, around here, who knows I was in Athens this weekend. Promise not to tell anybody.”

“Okay... But people will look at you and know you weren’t anywhere around here. I mean, almost everybody in Georgia, except around Athens, looks totally weird now — mostly not as weird as me and Mom, but —”

“Yeah, I know. I’m going to tell people I was staying with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave instead, in Huntsville, Alabama. They still look human — sorry.”

“No problem.”

“Anyway, they didn’t get any physical changes out there. They’re telepathic —”

“Cool! But how are you going to fake that?”

“I don’t have to, as long as I don’t run into anyone from there. Their telepathy only works with each other, not with other kinds of people — people in other change-regions.”

“Okay, that might work.”

“I don’t guess anybody from our school was in Huntsville on Valentine’s Day. The middle of February’s not the most popular time for going to the Space Museum.”

“But if somebody was there, and they can’t talk with you telepathically they’ll know you’re lying about where you were, right?”

“Yeah, it’s a risk. But think about what people are going to act like if I tell them I was in Athens, and what really happened to me.”

“Good point. All right, I won’t tell anybody.”

So I told him about what had happened to me, in more detail than I’d given him in my email; a little more than I’d told Mom or Dad, even. But not everything.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s harsh, man.”

“I shouldn’t complain,” I said; “I mean, I just lost my dick, but you lost your dad — and lots and lots of people died, or got hurt so bad they’re never going to get better. How are you for walking, since the change?” I guessed not well, since he’d stayed in bed the whole time I’d been there.

“I can walk now — I couldn’t at first, just didn’t have enough muscles on my legs, not until I’d eaten a lot over the first few days. But I’m still pretty unsteady and I get tired fast. Actually — I need to go to the bathroom. Could you help me stand up, let me lean on you?”

“Sure,” I said, and stood up. He threw off the blanket and slowly swung all his legs off the side of the bed. He was wearing a pair of shorts over his hind legs, and socks on all his feet, but nothing on his front legs or lower torso. I put out my arm, and he leaned on me as he stood up, wobbling a lot.

I guess if you’ve never been to Atlanta, you might never have seen a Marietta centaur. There are four-legged people called centaurs in other places — I’ve met a couple — and I’ve heard that in eastern Europe somewhere they’ve got people who look almost like the old mythological centaurs, with hooves instead of feet, and all hairy from the waist down. Ours aren’t like that; all their individual parts look human, but there’s too many of them and they’re put together oddly, by pre-divergence standards. Their legs are skinnier and their feet are smaller than an old-style human of the same height, and their lower, horizontal torso is a little longer than their upper, vertical torso, but otherwise just like an old-style human’s. The main difference is that a female centaur’s breasts, or a male centaur’s vestigial nipples, are under the lower torso instead of on the upper chest like in old paintings of female centaurs. If you think about it, or if you’ve ever seen a female Marietta centaur nursing her baby, it makes a lot more sense. If they were way up there, how would the baby reach them without his mom having to lean way over and probably hurt her back? Anyway, I didn’t know all that at this point; my Mom had scarcely gotten up off the sofa, when I was in the room, since I came home, and Mrs. Benson was wearing a long skirt, like I said. But this seemed like a good time to tell you.

Will’s shorts were really loose on him, his legs and butt were so skinny, and they fell off him halfway down the hall — I didn’t realize at first, I was just ahead of him with his arm on my shoulder, and only saw he was naked when we got into the bathroom and he said, “Okay, I’m good from here. You can wait outside.” So I turned around and left, half-closing my eyes in embarrassment at his scrawny hindquarters. I picked up the shorts and underwear from the floor and tossed them into the bathroom, not looking, and then closed the door behind me.

I waited in the hall, figuring he might want help getting back to his bedroom too, until I heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. He opened the door, and I saw his legs wobbling, as he steadied himself with one hand on the sink and another on the door. “Help me,” he said.

I let him lean on my shoulder again and we walked back up the hall to his bedroom. I wondered how he’d gotten his shorts back on, or wiped his butt if he needed to — his arms didn’t look long enough to reach. I finally worked up the nerve to ask.

“Not easily,” he said. “But my lower torso is kind of flexible, so I can bend and reach it. — What about you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I guess you have to pee like a girl now, and wipe afterward and stuff...?”

“Yeah,” I said, blushing. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” He was silent for a few minutes, and then said: “Want to play a game?”

So we played Champions of Marduk on his Playstation for a while. He wasn’t playing his best, because every time there was a slight lull in the action he’d take a hand off the controller and eat a piece of lettuce or cucumber, and several times he got caught off guard that way. And maybe lying on his side, seeing the screen sideways, was affecting him too. After an hour or so we took a break.

“So, school’s starting back Monday,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wonder what it’ll be like. I don’t know how many of us are still alive, how many kids got killed in car wrecks or plane crashes or whatever, and I don’t know how many of us were right around here and how many were in other places.”

“I don’t know either,” I said. “I’m guessing it’ll be mostly centaurs like you, with some who were in one of the nearby regions, wolves like my Dad and otters like my grandparents... Have you heard from anybody else?”

“I heard from Arnie that Kim’s dead,” Will said. “She was in a car accident, like my Dad, with her whole family... Arnie’s a centaur too. I haven’t seen him, but we’ve talked on IM.”

Arnie and Kim had been dating since near the beginning of the school year. “Oh, no. I hope it was quick... How did Arnie sound when you talked to him?”

“Pretty torn up. He wouldn’t say much, just that she and her parents and sister all died in a wreck.”

We were quiet for a while after that.

Something else occurred to me. “What are you going to wear to school? It looks like your old clothes don’t fit you...?”

He scowled. “We got mail from the school board with changes to the dress code... They said if we’re having trouble getting pants tailored for centaur bodies, it’s okay for boys to wear skirts. I’m going to have to do that, Mom’s been working on altering some pants to fit me, but making skirts is a lot faster and she’s made five or six skirts and only one pair — a quartet, really — of nice pants for wearing to church.”

“Huh,” I said. “I guess it’ll feel weird at first, but probably everybody else will have to do the same, so it’s not like anybody’s going to pick on you.”

“Except maybe some rich kids who can afford to have plenty of tailor-made clothes.”

“Yeah, maybe. You could call it a kilt, I guess.”

Mrs. Benson invited me to stay for lunch, and after calling to check with Mom and Dad, I accepted. Will leaned on my arm with one hand and held the stair rail with the other as we went down the stairs. This time his pants didn’t fall off, thank God.

Mrs. Benson asked after my family, and I told her the truth about Mom and Dad, and the briefest possible lie about myself. I was worried she was going to ask a lot of questions about what it felt like to be telepathic, but she focused on my parents instead.

“How are they taking it?” she asked. “Being so different, I mean...”

“Okay, I guess,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ve been home for less than a day, but they seem to be working it out fine. Dad eats in the kitchen, and Mom eats in the living room, so she doesn’t have to see him eat meat —” I hastily changed the subject when I saw how even talking about that was making Will and Mrs. Benson look queasy, but I wondered how the school lunchroom was going to handle that, with a mix of herbivore, carnivore and omnivore students — and who knows what else; maybe there would be some kids who needed to eat grass or carrion or something?

“What about you?” she asked. “Is this okay?”

“This is delicious,” I said, which was mostly true. She’d made a pretty good vegetable soup; I would have liked it better without the carrots and celery, but I made myself eat them anyway. She felt bad enough about her husband getting killed without me hurting her feelings over her cooking, too.

“And at home...?”

“I ate supper with Dad yesterday,” I said, stopping myself just in time from saying, “with Dad and Uncle Mike.” I continued after another spoonful of soup: “And I ate breakfast with Mom this morning... We’ll work out some kind of schedule like that, I guess.”

After lunch, Mrs. Benson said: “Why don’t you boys go play outside for a while? It’s not too cold.”

Will looked reluctant, but he said: “Sure. Jeffrey, can you help me get dressed?”

We went upstairs, Will leaning on my arm again. “Okay,” he said. “Can you open the window and see how cold it is out there?”

I did, just for a moment. It had warmed up since I walked over there a few hours earlier, but I didn’t think he’d want to go out there in shorts or even a skirt. I’d never worn a skirt, but I thought they looked drafty.

“I thought so,” he said. “Help me with this.” He was pulling two pairs of jeans out of a drawer.

It took several minutes to get the jeans on. To make them stay on, we had to use his Dad’s suspenders, and we had to roll up the cuffs, especially on the front pair, because they wouldn’t go up as high on him as they used to. That still left a good part of his belly in front, and most of his lower torso, uncovered. He put on another long-sleeved shirt — also one of his Dad’s, I thought — and that covered his belly and a little bit of his lower torso.

“Wrap a blanket around my middle,” he said, “and let’s see if we can make it stay with a belt or some suspenders.”

After a couple of tries, I did just that. By now he was looking even more wobbly, and he laid down as soon as I was done.

“Let’s rest a minute before we go out.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, just a little tired. I’m getting stronger every day, but not very fast.”

We were quiet for a few moments, and then I tried to cheer him up by talking about some other places where people were worse off — Nashville, for instance, where they’d all gone blind. We got to talking about other places and weird changes we’d heard about, and forgot we were supposed to be going outside, until Will’s mom yelled at us.

“Coming,” Will called back, and got out of bed.

We went downstairs and out the back door. Will has a cool backyard, hilly, with a lot of trees; it goes back maybe five or six hundred feet to the neighbor’s fence. We went far enough to be barely in sight of the house, and Will leaned against a tree.

“Man,” he said, “I don’t know if I’m going to be ready by Monday. All that walking from one classroom to another...”

“Most of the other kids will be in the same boat, I guess, along with a lot of teachers. They’ll have to work something out — give you more time between classes, or rearrange your schedules so you don’t have so far to go between one class and the next, or something.”

We walked around in the little patch of woods for a little while, and tossed a ball back and forth, stopping and resting a lot. Not long after we went back inside, I went home.

Dad snuggled in next to Mom on the sofa; she put aside the skirt she was working on and they hugged and kissed, but I thought I saw a little bit of hesitation, and it hurt. I knew too many kids at school whose parents were divorced, or looked like they might get a divorce any time now, and I was happy to think that my parents looked like the sticking-together kind. But when I saw her hesitate a little before letting him hug her and kiss her, it worried me. Could they still stay together after changing in such drastic and different ways? And if not, what would happen to me?

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 2 of 7

---

Mom was still lying on the sofa — I wasn’t sure if she’d been there all day, ever since I left. I sat down beside her and told her about my visit with Will, hoping it might encourage her to get up and walk around more. She smiled — she saw right through my attempt to manipulate her, but it seemed to work anyway, because she said:

“You’re a good friend to Will. Can I lean on your shoulder for a while, too?”

So I stood next to her, and she slowly stood up, putting one hand on the arm of the sofa and the other on my shoulder. The blanket slid off her, and I gave a loud “eep!” and shut my eyes; she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

She laughed. “You won’t be much help walking if you don’t watch where we’re going.”

“Mom! I can’t...”

“I don’t have anything you don’t have, now... okay, a couple of things, but it doesn’t matter now. I need your help; your Dad’s at work, and it’s just us — I won’t say us girls, but, well. I think you know what I mean.”

“Do you need me to help you rig a blanket so it won’t fall off you?” I opened my eyes again, and tried to keep my eyes on her face.

“Not just yet. For now, just help me get to the bathroom. I could probably do it on my own, but I’ll feel more comfortable with your help — I’ve fallen down several times, going to the bathroom by myself when your Dad wasn’t here...”

So I helped her get down the hall to the bathroom. I was going to leave her there, but she said: “Stay. I need to talk to you about something, and now’s a good time...”

I wondered what it could possibly be that couldn’t wait five minutes. I reluctantly stayed there with her, wondering if she might need more help than Will did, and dreading the necessity, but not wanting to let her down.

She sat down on the toilet with her hind legs and butt, but her front legs and upper torso were still standing up straight — it was weird. From where I stood by the sink I could see that her breasts were now on her underbelly, about a quarter of the way forward from her privates; they were a lot smaller than before. She had nothing between her front legs, not even hair.

It turned out that she wanted to ask me if Uncle Mike had told me how a girl was supposed to wipe after peeing. I turned beet-red, and said no, — he’d said we weren’t really girls, and what we had wasn’t really like what girls had... So she explained, and demonstrated, and I saw what Will meant about being so flexible. Then after she washed her hands, she wanted me to show her what I meant about not being really like a girl. I figured I might as well, or she’d keep on at me about it until I gave in.

She knelt with both pairs of knees, and inspected my crotch, while I looked at the ceiling and prayed that this would be over soon. Then she grabbed my arm and the doorknob and pulled herself up, and said: “Well, no, it’s not really the same. But it’s similar enough that I think what I said still applies. Be sure you remember it.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling up my pants. “Can you please get some clothes on? I can help if you want...” I explained how we’d gotten Will bundled up to go outside, and how Mrs. Benson had made herself some oversize skirts to cover her lower torso and legs.

“That sounds good,” she said. “I should have been working on something like that. Maybe I can make something out of a sheet or blanket, but first I need to eat something. Are you hungry?”

By then I was, so she laid down on the sofa again and I went to the kitchen to fix us something. I opened a couple of cans of vegetable soup into a pyrex dish, added some water and spices, and started heating it in the microwave.

Mom had been snacking on salad all day, but it didn’t stop her from eating her share of the soup. I was worried about her, and Will, and all the other centaurs — how many of them were starving because they didn’t have anybody to fetch or cook for them and they were too weak to walk? How long would it take them to build up their leg muscles enough to walk steady? They ought to have better stamina than us bipeds, once they were finished, but it seemed to be taking a long time.

“Have you been out of the house since the change?” I finally asked her.

“Not really,” she said. “Not for very long. For the first several days I just couldn’t walk, and I’m still not very strong or steady... and it’s been cold enough that I didn’t want to go out if I didn’t have to.”

“I bet we can work something out,” I said, “with blankets and sweat pants and stuff.”

So she directed me where to find her fabric scissors, and needles and thread, and showed me how to use them — she hadn’t used them in a long time, she said, and wasn’t very good at it. Still, by the time she was too tired to work on it any more, we had pieces of a skirt cut out of a couple of sheets and had sewn several of them together. It didn’t come out quite right at first, and we started working on hemming it to the right length all around so it would come just to her ankles and she wouldn’t trip over it.

After she went to bed, I turned on my computer and started my IM client to see who I knew who was online. Mostly it was friends from a long way off, people I’d met through art or gaming forums and knew only online. In between some chat with them, I unlocked the encrypted filesystem on my external hard drive and looked at my collection of naked pictures.

It was pretty much what I’d feared: they weren’t particularly interesting to me anymore. Most of them, anyway. I said “naked pictures” instead of “porn” because not all of them were porn; a lot of them were what grown-ups call real art. Guys in the Renaissance painted a lot of naked people, and I’m pretty sure you have to look in a really small town to find people who call that porn. Anyway, some of them still looked interesting, but not in the same way, and some of them were just boring or disgusting. They were the same ones that were disgusting but fascinating before, mostly, the ones that were just porn with no pretension to being art. I deleted them, and experimented with looking at some of the paintings of naked people, and then at some other stuff, not on the encrypted part of the drive, pictures of tigers and wolves and squid. The naked people were still more interesting than the animals, but not a lot more, and I found I was looking at their faces a lot more than their breasts and crotches. They weren’t any more interesting than pictures by the same artists of people with clothes on. And they weren’t exciting, however pretty — I didn’t seem to have anything to get excited with. Nothing to get hard, obviously, but what I had didn’t seem to get wet either.

Oddly enough, in some of the pictures of animals I found my attention drawn to the backgrounds, the flowers and trees and stuff. I wasn’t sure why. I searched on Google Images for landscape paintings, and a lot of what I found was boring, or just interesting enough to look at once, but some of them were really fascinating, and I saved local copies of them.

Dad still wasn’t home from work when I went to bed.

---

Sunday morning, though, he was up earlier than me, and woke me up at nine-thirty or so to remind me to get ready for church. I did.

“Mom, are you coming with us?” I asked her, after I’d gotten out of the shower and dressed. She was lying on the sofa, covered with a blanket, again.

“I don’t think this thing is quite ready,” she said, fingering the unfinished skirt. “You can help me finish it this afternoon, and maybe I can go to evening service with y’all.”

There were fewer people at church than usual. And there were plenty who weren’t going anywhere again, or not anytime soon; when the pastor (who was now a Smyrna wolf like Dad) prayed for people in the hospital, and the families of people who’d died recently, it was a much longer list than usual.

Some of the centaurs I saw were wearing homemade skirts kind of like the one Mom and I were making; a few had skirts that looked professionally made, and some of the men were wearing two pairs of pants held up with suspenders and the space between them covered with makeshift materials, the way Will and I had bundled him up. Our church was inside the centaur region, but with so many dead or in the hospital, and so many of the rest unable to walk or drive yet, I think most of the people who showed up were Smyrna wolves or Allatoona otters or Kennesaw chameleons. I hadn’t seen any of them before, though I’d heard about them; they were bald and their skin changed color to match what they were standing or sitting on.

The pastor preached about how we needed to help people in need, particularly the centaurs who couldn’t walk or drive yet, and other people who were injured in car wrecks on Valentine’s Day, and so forth. After the service there were a couple of people at a table in the vestibule recruiting volunteers to visit people at home and help them out.

Dad stopped to talk to someone, and I walked over to the table where a couple of Smyrna wolves, a man and a woman, were talking to a couple of people. Once I got close and heard their voices I recognized them as Mr. and Mrs. Barnes — Mrs. Barnes used to be my Sunday school teacher, when I was in fourth and fifth grades. I waited until the other people they were talking to left, and said:

“I can’t drive yet, but if one of the other volunteers can give me a ride to people’s houses, I could help them out with stuff around the house.”

“We’ll be glad to have you, Jeffrey,” Mrs. Barnes said. “What’s your schedule like? Do you have any after-school activities on certain days?”

“No,” I said, “nothing scheduled.”

“Or maybe your father can give you a ride?” she asked. I turned to look and saw he was coming toward us.

“Are you volunteering?” he asked. “Good for you, son.”

“If you think it’s okay,” I said. “I know Mom needs a lot of help too, but maybe not so much that I can’t go out and help other people too?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I haven’t seen Darlene,” Mrs. Barnes asked. “Is she...?”

“She’s better,” Dad said. “Not bedridden anymore, but she can’t walk very far at a time — she just started walking a few days ago.” He didn’t say anything about her not having decent clothes for her new form yet.

“She said she might try to come to the evening service,” I said.

“I hope she can,” Mrs. Barnes said.

We talked about when I could help out with their ministry, and then Dad and I left. We stopped for groceries on the way home, and bought lots of vegetables and salad fixings, and lots of meat, mostly ground beef and chicken, but also a couple of steaks.

We found Mom on the sofa, working on hemming her skirt.

“I can help with that, if you want, after we bring all the groceries in,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said, “but at this point it would be hard for both of us to work on it at once... Why don’t you fix some lunch while I keep working on this?”

“Okay.”

Dad and I brought the groceries in and changed clothes, and then we both started cooking — Dad cooked some ground beef, and I stir-fried some vegetables for me and Mom.

“Can you save me some of that?” I asked Dad.

“Sure,” he said. “How much?”

I put a little ground beef on a plate and put it in the refrigerator for later — I couldn’t eat it in front of Mom — and then put a couple of plates of stir-fry on a tray and took them into the living room. Mom looked up from her work and smiled.

“Thank you, Jeffrey.”

We ate, and I told her about talking to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes about going to help bedridden and homebound people. “But I don’t want to go off and leave you alone, if you need help here,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t need you here all the time, and in a few weeks, or maybe just a few days, I won’t need much help at all.”

After lunch she worked on the skirt some more, and asked me to bring her some of other sheets so she could pick out ones to make into more skirts. After that, I started cutting out pieces for another skirt. When I was done, I went to my room and got out my drawing pad and pastels.

“Do you mind if I draw you, like this?” I asked her.

“I look like a scarecrow,” she said.

“It’s just a sketch,” I said. “I’ll do another version later, after you’ve filled out again.”

“All right,” she said, “but don’t show it to anybody unless I say it’s okay.”

So I did several quick sketches of her, propped up sideways on the sofa and putting the finishing touches on that skirt, and then started working on a better version, still a little sketchy. I wondered if I could ask Will to pose for me in just his shorts, sometime — probably after he was strong enough to stand up for a while.

I hadn’t brought my art supplies with me to Uncle Mike’s apartment, thinking I was just going to be in Athens for a couple of days and would be too busy visiting with him and going to the concert and stuff to draw; when the visit wound up stretching out for a week, I borrowed some pencils and printer paper from him and did a little sketching, but I was really glad to be home and have access to my good paper and pastels.

Dad had been sitting at the kitchen table, reading, while he finished his lunch and for a good while afterward. He went around the long way to the bathroom, I later realized, so he could brush his teeth and use mouthwash before talking to Mom — he didn’t want meat on his breath when he kissed her. He snuggled in next to Mom on the sofa; she put aside the skirt and they hugged and kissed, but I thought I saw a little bit of hesitation, and it hurt. I mean, when you’re little you’re embarrassed to see your parents kissing, it’s “mushy stuff,” and when you’re older you’re embarrassed for a completely different reason, because it’s weird to think about people that old having sex — but however much they embarrassed me sometimes, I had sense enough to be glad, too. I knew too many kids at school whose parents were divorced, or looked like they might get a divorce any time now, and I was happy to think that my parents looked like the sticking-together kind.

But when I saw her hesitate a little before letting him hug her and kiss her, it worried me. Could they still stay together after changing in such drastic and different ways? And if not, what would happen to me?

I was just about to start a sketch of Dad when he said: “Do you feel like going to the evening service, honey?”

“I think so,” she said. “I’ll have to lean on you or Jeffrey a lot. First let me model this thing, and you tell me if it looks decent enough to wear to church.”

She pulled off the blanket and stood up, bracing herself on his arm. As the day before, she was just wearing the T-shirt and socks. “Help me get it on, Jeffrey?”

I went and picked up the skirt, figured out where the hole was for it to go over her head, and put it over her head while she held on to Dad’s arm. I messed up, and it wound up covering Dad’s head and shoulders as well as Mom’s upper torso and half of her lower torso; only Mom’s head stuck out of the top, barely. It was an easy mistake to make, there was a lot of material in that thing.

They laughed, and started fiddling with it to get it off Dad’s head and over the parts of Mom it was supposed to cover. A minute or so later, we got it situated, and I thought it looked pretty okay — the seams were a little rough in spots, it was obviously amateur work, but the hemline was fairly even, and it came about halfway down her calves, which was what she’d been aiming for.

“That should be fine,” Dad said. “I think we’re going to have to modify our expectations of dress, what with all the changes — I can barely stand to wear a suit anymore, and when warmer weather gets here, I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it at all. Certainly that’s fit to wear to church, or to work when you’re ready to go back.”

Mom walked into their bedroom, leaning on Dad’s arm, and studied herself in the full-length mirror. I didn’t follow them; I went and changed clothes for evening church. I sat down to read for a few minutes until Mom and Dad were ready for church, but Dad knocked on my door sooner than I was expecting.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I helped your mother into the tub,” he said, “but she said she wants you to help her get out and dry off — I said I would do it, but she didn’t want me to get my fur wet, it would take too long to dry it again before church. I’m sorry you’ve already gotten dressed.”

So I changed into casual clothes again and went to help Mom. That was seriously embarrassing, but not as bad as watching her demonstrate how to wipe after peeing, and in the next few days I had to help her in the bathroom several times; eventually I got used to it.

Mom laid down in the back seat on the way to church; when we got there it took both me and Dad to help her out of there, and she complained that her legs were cramped.

“We’ll get a bigger car as soon as we can,” Dad said. “Maybe even an SUV or van, if we can’t get anything smaller that you can fit comfortably into.”

Evening church was pretty uneventful; lots of people were glad to see Mom, and after the service she and several other centaur ladies sat around talking about clothes, how to make them and who you could hire to make them, for a while before we left. I hung out with some guys my age, none I was as close friends with as Will, while we were waiting for our parents to get done talking; they asked me where I’d been, of course, and I told them my cover story about being in Huntsville with Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave. I felt bad about lying in church, but not for very long.

---

The next day I got up early for school, and fixed breakfast for me and Mom. Dad was still in bed; he didn’t need to be at work until afternoon and he’d be working late.

“Is there anything else you need me to do before I go?” I asked Mom before I went out to the bus stop.

“No, this is fine,” she said. I’d made her a large salad to snack on after breakfast, and she was ensconced under her blanket on the sofa again, with the materials for her next skirt within arm’s reach on the ottoman and the end table. “Really, it’s been wonderful to have your help the last couple of days, but I was doing mostly okay by myself when your Dad was at work and you were in Athens — I can get to the kitchen and bathroom by myself, leaning on the walls and furniture, if I go slow and careful.”

“I love you, Mom. See you this afternoon.” We hugged, and I went out the door.

The bus was driven by a man I didn’t recognize; he sat oddly on the edge of his seat, with a long tail sticking out of a hole in his pants, and he had webbed fingers. The bus had fewer kids on it than usual, but since most of the ones there were centaurs, and they took up twice as much room as the bipeds like me, it actually seemed more crowded. Will got on the bus just after me, wearing a skirt; I’d been saving a seat for him, but I realized too late that of course he couldn’t fit there next to me, he’d need a whole seat to himself like the other centaurs. He found an empty seat, which fortunately was also across from another empty seat; I moved back there and sat across from him.

“How are you doing?” I asked. I’d noticed he was leaning on the mailbox while he waited for the bus.

“Tired and cold,” he said. “This thing’s drafty. I’m wearing long johns under it, but they don’t cover everything.”

“Sorry,” I said. I changed the subject, and we talked about games until the bus got crowded, and I gave up my seat to a centaur girl who looked like she needed it more. It was standing room only by the time we reached the school, even though I think there were only two-thirds as many kids on the bus as usual.

I parted from Will just after we got off, as he had a different homeroom; I’d have a couple of classes with him later in the day. Mrs. Jessup, my homeroom teacher, turned out to be a Kennesaw chameleon. Most of the time, her skin was the color of the blackboard, but as she moved around, it would sometimes turn pale like the wall, or light brown like the wood of her desk.

I sat next to Arnie. He was bundled up like Will had been when we went out in the yard Saturday, with two pairs of baggy pants and a blanket wrapped around his lower torso, held in place with a couple of belts.

“Dude,” he said to me, “how’d you get off so easy? Where were you?”

I told him the lie about being in Huntsville.

“Man, that’s creepy awesome. What number am I thinking of?”

“It doesn’t work on centaurs,” I said, “or anybody else except people who were there in Huntsville when things changed. I figure our brains changed so they’d broadcast and pick up coherent signals of some kind — they’re still trying to figure out how it works, but they say there’s increased electrical activity in our brains.”

“So you’re smarter too?”

“No, we just think louder. But nobody else can hear us, and we can’t hear other people because they aren’t thinking loud enough.”

“Hmm. You think you might move out there after you graduate?”

“Maybe. I’m not ready to make plans that far ahead.”

Mrs. Jessup called the roll right about then. Only three-fourths of the people whose names she called answered, and I noticed she left off several names of people who weren’t there. When she was done with the roll she said:

“I have some bad news.” She paused, and looked at the papers on her desk, and said: “You know there were a lot of accidents the Saturday before last. A lot of good people died. Some of them were your classmates.”

She was quiet again, maybe nerving herself to go on. Amy Donaldson started crying, and that set off several others — not all of them girls. Mrs. Jessup sniffled and went on:

“There are others who were hurt badly that day and are still in the hospital, or recovering from their injuries at home or in a rehabilitation center. The school has had information from students' families about some of them; others we don’t know about — they may be missing, or their families may know what happened to them but haven’t informed the school. If you know anything about the students whose names I called who aren’t here today, let me know. As for those whose names I didn’t call... Tony Gustafson, Ken Sanders, Connie Velasquez, and Tina Wilson were all seriously injured, and aren’t yet ready to return to school, but are expected to fully recover. Penny Fanshaw and Doug Urquhart are still in the hospital in critical condition. Lyle Henderson, Kim Linder, and Arvind Patel are all dead.”

Except for Kim, I hadn’t heard about what happened to any of them; I was pretty shaken up, but not as bad as some, who’d been closer friends with the kids who’d died. Arnie was crying, and trying not to show it. “Sorry, man,” I said quietly. “She was cool. She didn’t deserve that.” I don’t think that was the right thing to say, because it made him cry harder, so he couldn’t even try to hide it anymore.

Mrs. Jessup let people cry for a minute or two without saying anything more. Finally she said: “I wish I could leave you alone to grieve over your friends, but I’m afraid we have several administrative tasks before you go to your first period classes. I can see at a glance that many of you are what the news is calling Marietta centaurs, or Smyrna wolves, or Kennesaw chameleons like myself — but others I’m not sure about. When I call your name, please tell me briefly — not everything that’s changed for you, though we might need to know that later on, but just whether your diet has changed — if you’re purely herbivorous, like the centaurs, or carnivorous, like the wolves, for instance — and whether you need any special physical or academic accommodation because of your changes. Um...” She looked at her roll again, and said: “Lindsey Babcock?”

“I brought my own lunch,” she said. “The cafeteria doesn’t have to fix anything special for me.” If she wasn’t sitting in her usual spot, I might not have recognized her; her face wasn’t as radically changed as the wolves', but her eyes were bigger and farther apart, and her mouth and jaw were shaped differently — larger, more rounded.

“All right,” Mrs. Jessup said, “but I still need to know...”

“I eat bugs,” she said in a small voice.

“Ah,” Mrs. Jessup said, and gave a stern glance to a couple of guys who’d started snickering. “Insectivore. Noted. The cafeteria can accommodate you with a day or two’s warning, I think, if you don’t want to have to bring your own lunch every day. Anything else we need to know?”

“I don’t think so.”

She went down the roll, calling on each of us who hadn’t been in or near the school district on Valentine’s Day. When she called, “Jeffrey Sergeyev?”, I just said:

“No, ma’am. I still eat the same things.”

And she went on. When she was done, she said: “Your second period teachers will go over this as well, but note that if you’re herbivorous, you should sit as near as you can to the south end of the cafeteria, and if you’re carnivorous, or if you’re omnivorous and you want meat with your lunch, you should sit toward the north end of the cafeteria. If you’re biologically omnivorous, but vegetarian, try to sit in the middle.”

Amy raised her hand, and asked which was the south end.

“The one with the large windows,” Mrs. Jessup said.

Soon after that the bell rang and we left for our first period classes. I walked with Arnie, as we were both going to Ms. Tang’s algebra class.

“If you really can hear us thinking, and you didn’t tell her, you’re going to be in big trouble for cheating on tests and stuff,” he said.

“Dude, look up ‘Huntsville telepaths’ on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me.”

---

If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“I don’t like this,” Mom said. “I don’t see how you can keep it up, and the longer you manage to pretend, the more people are going to be hurt and offended when they find out you lied to them.”

I was starting to worry that she might be right, but I wasn’t going to back out unless she and Dad forced my hand by telling people.

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 3 of 7

---

Arnie was moving easier than a lot of the other centaurs — like Mrs. Benson, he’d been a little overweight before the changes, so he wasn’t so skinny and had more muscles on his legs. Most of the centaurs were slow and wobbly, like Mom and Will; some of them were using canes or walkers. The centaurs took up more space than before, especially the ones with canes or walkers, and here and there I saw someone walking on all fours; so even though a lot of kids were dead or in the hospital, the halls were more crowded than usual. A couple of times, on our way to class, I saw one of the centaurs fall down, either just because they were weak and wobbly or because somebody bumped into them. I was going to try to help, but other people closer to them helped them up before I got near.

I’m not going to tell you about everything that happened that day; even with all the weirdness of seeing people I knew changed in so many ways, 90% of it was just another school day. Ms. Tang went straight into the next algebra lesson as though we hadn’t been out of school for a week, and really I can’t say she was wrong — I mean, math is the same whether you’ve got two legs or four, whether you eat vegetables or meat or both. Some of the other teachers talked briefly about the changes, and how sorry we were about the people who were hurt or killed, and then went into lessons that weren’t much different than they would have been if they hadn’t been delayed for a week.

I sat near Will during Mr. Meredith’s American History class, but didn’t get a chance to talk to him before class — he hobbled in at the last second, and some of the other centaurs came in late. That was happening a lot, actually; at the beginning of second period the assistant principal went on the intercom and announced that students with “mobility issues” — meaning mostly the centaurs, although I saw a few bipeds in wheelchairs or on crutches, too — could be up to five minutes late to class with no penalty. Will and I walked to lunch together, him steadying himself on my shoulder; I decided to go through the herbivore/vegetarian line with him and sit with him. Arnie joined us when he saw where we were.

Lunch was a disaster. Seating the centaurs at the far end of the cafeteria from the carnivores and omnivores and whatever dubious meat the cafeteria was serving them that day was not enough; there wasn’t enough room to put empty spaces between them, and a lot of them got sick to their stomachs from seeing carnivores go by with lunch trays or seeing them eat meat at the next table. Several actually threw up, including Will. Fortunately, he didn’t get any vomit on my clothes, though I had to clean my backpack after Arnie and I helped him get to the bathroom and clean up. They were both in bad shape, famished from not being able to snack during morning classes, but too sick to eat any lunch. There was another intercom announcement a few minutes later, saying those who couldn’t stand the smell of meat could go to study hall for now and come back to eat later.

Arnie and Will went to study hall from the bathroom, and I went back to the cafeteria to finish eating. I was worried about Arnie and Will, but also looking forward to the next period. Ms. Killian was my favorite teacher, even though biology (which she taught) wasn’t my best subject — it wouldn’t have been in my top three favorite subjects, if she hadn’t been teaching it. I was hoping she’d have something interesting to say about all the changes, and she didn’t disappoint me.

“I think the unit on plant reproduction can wait a few days,” she said. She was a centaur, and steadier on her feet than I would have expected; she wasn’t noticeably overweight before her change, so I was expecting she’d be still be underweight for her new form. “I’m sure you’ve all been thinking about the changes you and everyone else have been through. There’s a lot we don’t know about them yet — most importantly, why and how they happened — but there’s a lot we do know, too. This stuff is more important for your daily lives than the anatomy of plants — to be honest, more important for most of you than half or two-thirds of the syllabus. And it’s a good chance to talk about how scientists work, since the things we’ll be talking about are new discoveries, a lot of them still tentative and controversial. We’ll focus on the changes for the next week or two, and probably return to the subject several times in the course of the year as new discoveries are announced.

“To begin with, can someone offer a brief description of what happened on February fourteenth? Not just what happened here, I mean, but in general.”

Several people raised their hands, including me. Ms. Killian called on a black girl a couple of rows in front of me, who didn’t have any obvious changes. “Latisha?”

“Everybody in the world changed somehow,” the girl said, “and people in the same area changed the same way, but people in different places changed in a lot of different ways. And people who were sick or injured before got better while they were changing.”

“That’s accurate as far as it goes,” Ms. Killian said. “What else? George?”

I knew George Ryder a little bit, though I wasn’t close friends with him; he’d become a Smyrna wolf. “It seems like most people got nauseated for a few seconds, and then went numb all over, while the changes were happening.”

“Most people, as far as we have reports, yes. Jeffrey? Anything to add?”

“Not everybody had the nausea or the numbness,” I said. “In places where there weren’t any physical changes, just mental changes, we had headaches instead.”

“Interesting,” Ms. Killian said, and for a moment I wondered if that meant she hadn’t heard much about places like Huntsville where the changes were mental, or neurological, or whatever. “That’s a good point. As far as we have reports, every human being in the world was affected in one way or another, but there are a few places — relatively few; there may be hundreds of them scattered around the world — where the changes were more subtle, affecting only the brain and not the rest of the body. Jeffrey, do you mind telling us some more about that?”

I squirmed uncomfortably, but I’d set myself up for this, and had to go through with it. I told them what Aunt Karen had said about her telepathy in her emails and IM messages, as though it had happened to me. Fortunately, I hadn’t run out of material when Ms. Killian cut me off. “Thank you. That’s enough for now,” she said. “You might do an extra credit report on that — not just from your own experiences, but whatever you can learn from online research and interviewing people in Huntsville. Talk to me about it after class if you’re interested. Does anyone else have anything general to add before we start talking about specific changes?”

Several people who’d had their hands up earlier had lowered them, and Latisha had raised her hand again. Ms. Killian called on Kirsten Tanger, who’d become a centaur. She’d been really pretty before, and I’d had kind of a crush on her; it was strange to see her with hollow cheeks, bony arms, and a flat chest, and I wondered if she’d be pretty again when she gained some more weight.

“Kirsten?”

“It was too weird to be natural, and too all at once to be something like terrorists releasing a plague germ. So it had to be a miracle.”

Ms. Killian gave a barely perceptible sigh, and I felt sorry for her, having to put up with students like Kirsten. She said simply, “Let’s finish gathering all the facts we have about the changes before we start forming hypotheses about why they happened. Anyone else? Latisha?”

“People who had just one part of their body affected didn’t get numb all over,” she said. “But we had worse nausea than the people who changed all over, I think.”

“Right,” Ms. Killian said. “There seem to be three broad categories of change, and it looks like we have examples of all three right here. We ‘centaurs’ are an example of the first — our whole body changed; even the parts that look superficially similar, our upper torso and head, have some changes to their internal organs. We, and apparently all the others with full-body changes, lost all feeling for as long as the changes took — about eight or ten seconds in our case.

“Some others — Latisha, you can do an extra credit report on your change-region if you want, but for now I’ll give an example I’ve read about: people in some areas of Washington, D.C. had major changes to the structures of their hands and feet, but the rest of their bodies were mostly unaffected — except, presumably, some neurological changes to enable them to control their changed hand and feet. They lost feeling in their hands and feet for a couple of seconds, while the changes were happening, but didn’t experience nausea — I suspect the nausea was an effect of changes to internal organs.

“And others, like Jeffrey, seem to have changes only in their brains, and had headaches during the changes. — Yes, Anna?”

“We must have had changes in our brains, too, or we wouldn’t be able to control our hind legs.” Anna was another centaur; I didn’t know her last name, barely knew her at all. “I mean, a lot of us can’t walk very well yet, but if our brains hadn’t changed we wouldn’t be able to walk at all. So why didn’t we get headaches too?”

“That’s a good question,” Ms. Killian said. “Some scientists think it’s because when we lost feeling all over, that masked not only the pain we would have felt from our skeleton and musculature restructuring, but also the headache that the rewiring of our brains might have caused. But we don’t really know yet.

“There’s another important factor that no one’s mentioned yet — something that’s the same for everyone, no matter how they changed. Anyone?”

No one said anything for a few seconds, then George Ryder raised his hand, and she called on him.

“Conservation of mass,” he said. “We all weighed the same afterwards. That’s why most of the centaurs are so skinny.”

“Exactly,” Ms. Killian said. “That suggests, to me at least, that whoever or whatever caused these changes was limited by the laws of physics, even if we don’t understand how or why.” She looked hard at Kirsten as she said that, and I made the connection; if it were a miracle, God could have created new matter for the centaurs' expanded bodies. He wouldn’t have to just rearrange what was already there.

“Does anyone have any other observations to offer about different types of changes? Can you think of another way of classifying the different changes besides the one I mentioned...?”

I’m not going to repeat everything she said; as for the factual stuff, you can look it up if you don’t already know it. I think that’s enough to give you the idea of what it felt like, when it was all new and nobody knew for sure what was happening. But to understand everything that followed, you need to know that not only was Ms. Killian my favorite teacher even before the changes, but biology was by far my most interesting class for the rest of that school year.

I stayed for a few minutes after class to ask Ms. Killian what she meant about the extra credit report; so did Latisha and a couple of other students who’d become something other than centaurs or wolves. She gave us pointers for finding more or less reliable stuff online about the change-regions we’d been in on Valentine’s Day and what we’d become, but said that there were so many new human species — over six hundred in the United States, twenty-one in Georgia — that a lot of them, especially the lower-population ones, hadn’t been studied much yet except by local doctors. “Try to interview three or more people,” she said, “at least two of them not related to you, and at least one of them a medical professional or scientist. You’ve got until the end of the year, but the sooner you get it done, the more likely I’ll be able to let you do a presentation on it.”

I was wondering where Latisha had been on Valentine’s Day, and I had a strong suspicion from what she’d said in class, but I didn’t feel like asking her right out, and she didn’t say — mostly we were just listening to Ms. Killian and asking her questions, like how many pages did she want, and what did she mean about print sources from before the change, and so forth. One of the others, Tyrone Anderson, said that he’d been in Bainbridge, down in south Georgia, visiting family, and he’d become an insectivore. I realized that he had the same eyes and jaw as Lindsey Babcock, and figured she’d been somewhere in south Georgia too, though not necessarily in Bainbridge — in rural areas the change-regions sometimes sprawled over thousands of square miles. The other was a girl named Tandy Shannon, who had a tail like our new bus driver, and webbed fingers; she didn’t say anything about where she’d been or what other changes she might have that weren’t obvious.

I suggested that we form a study group to meet and talk about how to do the research for these projects, and Ms. Killian said that was a good idea. So we exchanged phone numbers, email addresses and IM names; we didn’t have time to do more before we had to get to our next classes.

---

I was not looking forward to my next class; it was P.E., and I’d been dreading it all day, worrying about how I could shower and change afterward without anybody seeing what I was missing. As long as I could do that, I could carry on pretending to be a Huntsville telepath indefinitely; if not, my secret would be out, and I’d have to own up to Arnie and Ms. Killian and everybody else that I’d lied to them.

The hoax wouldn’t have been possible at all — I wouldn’t have even tried to pretend — if our school had open communal showers. Fortunately, it had separate shower stalls. But there would be danger of slipping up, every afternoon for the rest of the school year, and every year until I graduated.

Most of the kids at my school had become centaurs, as I think I’ve already told you; in my P.E. class the proportion was even higher. And the principal had decided to let the centaur kids skip P.E. until they’d put on some more weight. So there were only five kids in the class, three boys and two girls; of the other boys, one was a Smyrna wolf and one had something like tentacles where his arms used to be. I’d seen a few kids like him in the halls, but hadn’t had any in my classes so far.

Our P.E. teacher, Coach Ormond (who’d become a Kennesaw chameleon), started the class by talking about how he thought the changes would affect sports. I didn’t care particularly about sports, and hadn’t thought about the way the changes would affect them; he said he expected it would be the end of nationwide or worldwide competitions, since it might be impossible to ensure that opposing teams of different species were fairly matched. And he expected that local sports leagues in most places, including around here, would have to be completely reorganized, but that team sports would continue on the local level. So that was interesting in a way, but I kind of zoned out about halfway through that, since he went on about it for quite a while. When I started paying attention again, he was talking about doctors figuring out how some new neospecies' muscles were structured differently, and how we’d have to figure out new kinds of exercise for people of those neospecies to work out with. Again, interesting in the abstract, but it didn’t affect me.

Finally he put those of us with more boring changes (from his perspective) to running laps around the track, while he worked one-on-one with the kids whose muscles and skeletons had changed a lot to figure out what kinds of exercises would work for them. I paced myself, jogging just fast enough that he wouldn’t yell at me and slow enough that I could last as long as he’d want us to keep running.

With only two other guys in the locker room and showers, it wasn’t as hard as I’d feared to shower and change without them seeing me. I dawdled until both of them were in the shower, then got in myself, closed the curtain, took off my underwear and hung it over the curtain rod, and showered fast. Then I dried off in the shower stall and put on my clean underwear before I got out.

That wouldn’t be possible once the centaurs got strong enough for P.E.. The locker room would be crowded and everyone would be in a hurry; I wouldn’t be able to get away with occupying a shower stall someone else was waiting for while I dried off and got partly dressed. I could figure that out when the time came, though.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I saw Will again when he got on the bus. He sat down across from me, looking exhausted.

“Bad day?” I asked.

“My legs are killing me,” he said. “And I’m starving. They’ve got to let us start snacking between classes, or better yet during class, or there’s going to be a revolt.”

“A lot of the teachers are centaurs too — they must understand...”

“Yeah, but the principal’s a wolf and the assistant principal is I don’t know what. I haven’t seen either of them, but somebody said he’s got a tail?”

“Well, at least you got to skip P.E.”

“Just walking around the halls between classes tired me out as much as the worst P.E. class I’ve ever had.” He looked suddenly thoughtful, and asked me: “So... how was P.E.?”

“Not too bad,” I said. “Tell you later.” There were too many other kids on the bus by then, and I couldn’t really whisper across the aisle.

Mom wanted to know how school had been, of course. I told her most of what I’ve told you — about the problems the centaurs had with lunch, and how I got through P.E. without flashing my new junk or lack thereof.

“I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t see how you can keep it up, and the longer you manage to pretend, the more people are going to be hurt and offended when they find out you lied to them.”

I was starting to worry that she might be right, but I wasn’t going to back out unless she and Dad forced my hand by telling people.

“Are you going to tell on me?”

“No,” she said with a sigh. “You’re old enough to learn from your own mistakes — in some areas,” she added hastily, seeing my look of wild surmise. “And your father seems to think it’s a good idea, for some reason.”

“He understands,” I said. “He can imagine what it would have been like for him, being in my position.”

“And I can’t?”

“The girls in Athens don’t look any different.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go fix something to eat.”

“You’re cooking?” I asked, pleasantly surprised. She got up off the sofa, holding my arm, and we went into the kitchen.

“I’m getting stronger,” she said. “I’ll want to sit down again in a few minutes, but I can stand by the counter and stove as long as it takes to get something started.”

I helped Mom cook supper. She sat in one of the kitchen chairs to rest after a few minutes — it still looked strange, even after seeing a hundred centaur kids sitting like that in class, the way she sat down with her hind legs and kind of leaned back on them with her front parts.

“I need to talk to Aunt Karen,” I said, after we’d gotten the potatoes and carrots chopped and put them in the stewpot. I told her about the extra credit report I was going to do for biology.

“Oh, Jeffrey,” Mom said, “I’m worried about this. It’s not enough you’re lying to your friends, but your teachers as well — and in a report? You could get expelled for cheating. That’s it, I can’t let you do this —”

“Mom, hold on,” I said. “I’m not going to say in the report that I’m a telepath. That’s, like, not being scientifically objective. I’ve got to interview at least three telepaths — Aunt Karen can be one, and I can ask her to get me in touch with a couple of other people there in Huntsville that can answer my questions by email. Ms. Killian said anybody could do an extra credit report on any new species they want, as long as it’s not a local one.”

“Maybe it’s all right,” she said doubtfully. “I’ll talk to your father about it some more.”

---

After supper, I went to my room and turned on my monitor. I had an email from Tyrone — he’d cc’d the girls too — asking us what day of the week suited us best and proposing Tuesdays. I replied, saying that any day but Wednesday suited me, and sent Aunt Karen an email asking her if I could interview her for my project, and if she could help me find other people in Huntsville to interview.

I started the IM client and sent quick “are you online?” messages to Tyrone, Latisha and Tandy. None of them replied right away, so I worked on American History homework for a while, and then started working on a list of questions for Aunt Karen and my other interviewees. I switched windows when the IM client plinked to say I had a message. It was from Latisha.

obsidian14: yeah i’m here

obsidian14: saw tyrone’s mail, tuesday’s okay. i’ve got band practice on mondays and thursdays.

I replied.

scribbler371: then it’s tuesday unless that doesn’t work for tandy? not sure where we could meet. at school maybe, but i’d need to get a ride home from someone — my mom can’t drive and my dad’s usually at work that time of day.

obsidian14: i’ll ask my mom if she can give you a ride home when she picks me up

scribbler371: thanx

scribbler371: btw, you didn’t say where you were val-day?

obsidian14: oh i guess not

obsidian14: i was in hartwell. my whole family was at my grandma’s house for her birthday.

Hartwell? I started to ask her where that was and what happened to people there, but decided to Google it instead of wasting her time.

The Wikipedia article on Hartwell, Georgia told me that it was the county seat of Hart County, that it bordered Lake Hartwell (which was named for the town, not vice versa), that it had a population of 4,188 people at the last census, and...

...that except for a narrow strip along the shores of Lake Hartwell, it was located within the Athens-Danielsville-Hartwell change-region.

I clicked the link to the article on that change-region, but I already knew what I’d find. Before the page loaded, the IM client plinked and I switched windows.

obsidian14: ...we kind of lost our reproductive systems

obsidian14: i’m kind of not sure about this project, actually

I thought hard. Should I tell her? In retrospect, it seems obvious that I should have. But I barely knew Latisha — I’d barely been aware of her before today. I didn’t know if I could trust her to keep my secret.

scribbler371: that’s harsh

scribbler371: i kind of figured it was a limited physical change, from what you said in class

obsidian14: yeah. girls and women don’t look any different on the outside. i feel sorry for the guys though. my dad and my brothers have been really depressed.

scribbler371: i would be too

obsidian14: but you see what i mean. if i’m not going to do a half-ass job of this report, i need to interview both guys and girls. but interviewing guys about this stuff would be so embarrassing. but i need the extra credit.

scribbler371: you could tell ms killian you want to do a report on some other neospecies?

obsidian14: maybe we could swap? you give me your aunt’s email in huntsville and i give you my cousin’s email in hartwell?

scribbler371: um, maybe.

I really did not want to do a report on the “Athens neuters,” to use the more polite of the several proposed names mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

scribbler371: there are lots of others you could write about.

obsidian14: nowhere else i have contacts, really. ms. killian said anywhere outside of metro atlanta, but all my friends and relatives are either here or in hartwell.

obsidian14: that’s where my family is from and it’s the end of us because none of us are ever going to have kids

scribbler371: sorry.

scribbler371: i’ve got to go. ttyl.

I closed the IM client, even though I didn’t really have anything else urgent to do. I didn’t like to keep lying to her, and I couldn’t trust her with the truth yet. I sat there staring at the Wikipedia article on the Athens neuters for a while, not really reading it, and then I got out the small art pad I carried around at school. I looked at some of the sketches I’d done in class of kids of the rarer neospecies, and drew a larger version of the guy in P.E. with tentacle arms, and then a sketch of Tyrone’s face... and then, not really thinking about why, a sketch of Latisha.

---

Tuesday morning during homeroom, Mrs. Jessup announced that we were going to have major schedule changes.

“We’re going to start splitting the lunch hours by diet instead of grade level,” she said. “The herbivores will eat at third period, and everyone else at fourth period. And changing class schedules for all the ninth and tenth-grade meat-eaters and all the eleventh and twelfth-grade herbivores is going to cause cascading changes in almost everyone’s schedules. I’ve got revised schedules for some of you here...” She started handing papers out. “If we don’t have your new schedule yet, and you’re a carnivore or omnivore — or insectivore — you can skip your fourth-period class to go to lunch at that time, and go to study hall at third period. The office says they’ll have revised schedules for everyone by the end of the week.

“But... if you’re not getting an A in your fourth-period class, and you can stand eating a vegetarian lunch for a few days, I suggest you stay with your current schedule until you’re assigned a new one. If you want to do that, let me know and I’ll let the office know.”

I raised my hand; I’d much rather have a vegetarian lunch with Arnie and Will than skip Ms. Killian’s biology class in favor of study hall.

In my next couple of classes, I noticed that several students were missing and others had taken their places — people who’d had new schedules assigned already. I sat with Arnie and Will at lunch; it was really crowded, since centaurs were way more than half of the students, and all of them were in the cafeteria at once. There were a lot of arguments and a few fights between seniors or juniors and sophomores or freshmen over where they’d get to sit — they all had their usual places staked out at different times, and now they were in the same place at the same time. Will, Arnie and I managed to steer clear of the fights and squeeze into a spot that nobody was fighting over.

I was one of very few non-centaurs present. Of the others, I wasn’t sure how many were herbivores, how many were vegetarians, and how many were just eating vegetarian today so they wouldn’t have to skip their fourth-period class; there weren’t many of us, I suspected. Arnie had worn a skirt to school today; it was a rougher makeshift than the ones my Mom and I had been making, and a lot worse than the one Will was wearing. Mrs. Benson was good at making clothes. I looked around and thought I saw more centaurs in skirts than yesterday, and fewer bundled up in multiple pairs of pants and some makeshift to cover their lower torso.

“See,” Will said to Arnie, “nothing to worry about. It’s so much easier to deal with that everyone’s going to be wearing skirts by the time hot weather comes around.”

“It still feels a little weird,” Arnie said, “and it was cold waiting for the bus, but it was a lot easier to get ready this morning than yesterday or Sunday.”

“You’ll get used to it pretty soon, I guess,” I said. “Has anybody picked on you for wearing skirts?”

“No,” Will said. “I heard about this, though — a couple of sophomore wolves were picking on a freshman centaur who was wearing a skirt, and several sophomore centaurs ganged up on them and made them take it back. It’s weird, they were the fat kids everyone picked on before, and now they’re the buffest kids in the school. Have you seen Tara Saunders?” he asked.

“Not since the change — I sort of know who you’re talking about, but I don’t have any classes with her.” She’d been extremely overweight, and had a bad case of acne too, if I remembered right.

“Yeah, I’ve got history with her fifth period,” Arnie said. “She’s pretty hot now.”

That made me feel weird and left out, and I didn’t say much for a while as Will and Arnie talked about which girls were looking the best since the changes. I noticed that they were only talking about centaurs — that could have been coincidence, since centaurs were the majority of kids at our school, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t. I couldn’t imagine being attracted to any of the centaur girls, even the ones who’d been really overweight before and now looked a lot healthier than most. But that wasn’t all; I hadn’t been attracted to anyone that way, even the ones who looked mostly or entirely human. After a while I tuned out Will and Arnie’s conversation, took out my sketchpad, and drew quick portraits of some of the centaurs at the next table — I could see them better than the ones I was sitting right next to.

In biology, Ms. Killian talked for a little while about the general patterns of the changes — the range of populations and areas among the change-regions, and how people swimming in lakes or rivers or oceans got aquatic adaptations while people swimming in chlorinated pools changed along with the people on dry land around them, and so forth. You probably know most of that, I guess. Did you know that the lowest-population change-region was Antarctica? I thought so.

After a few minutes of that, she started talking specifics about centaur biology — she showed us an anatomical chart of how their skeletons and internal organs were arranged, and I wondered how anyone had managed to find out so much so fast. She told us, soon enough; she always liked to talk about the specific scientists who discovered the things we were learning about, and she told us about a pathologist at Northside Hospital who’d done autopsies on centaurs who’d died in accidents on Valentine’s Day, and written a paper on centaur anatomy. That started several of us crying over the people we’d lost that day, and when Ms. Killian saw that, she apologized and took a break from the lesson for a few minutes.

Since this was a fourth-period class, a fair number of people were missing — all the wolves and other carnivores, and more than half the omnivores. Tyrone and Tandy were both missing, whether just skipping biology in favor of lunch or whether they’d gotten their new schedules assigned already I didn’t know. There were just two other non-centaurs besides me and Latisha.

I copied the anatomical diagram from the projector screen into my sketchpad, not sure how much of that would be on the test but wanting to make my drawings of centaurs more accurate. She couldn’t expect us to memorize the new anatomy of all the new neospecies in Atlanta, surely? But probably most of them didn’t have as radical a rearrangement of their internal organs and skeletons as the centaurs had. And we lived in a majority-centaur area even if we weren’t centaurs ourselves, so it made sense to learn a lot about them.

After class, I talked to Latisha briefly.

“Have you seen Tyrone or Tandy?” I asked.

“I have Algebra with Tyrone,” she said. “I haven’t seen Tandy.”

“So we still don’t know when we’re meeting. I can’t stay after school today, anyway, I’d need to make arrangements for a ride home. We can try for next Tuesday.”

“Have you thought about swapping assignments?” she asked me.

“Um,” I said. I wanted to tell her why I didn’t want to, why it would be just as awkward for me as it would for her — but I still wasn’t sure I could trust her to keep the secret, and even if I could, I wouldn’t tell her there where other people might overhear. “I haven’t thought about it much, but I’d kind of rather not. Maybe it would be easier if you interviewed people you don’t know? Don’t interview your family, but just ask them to get you in touch with other people to interview?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Yeah, that would be easier.”

“I’ve got some stuff you might can use, if you don’t already know about it,” I said. “There’s a doctor in Athens who’s been blogging about what he’s learned about their anatomy, and some other sites, regular people writing about their experiences and stuff. Bloggers like attention, you could interview them.”

“You know a lot about it,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“I’ve got an uncle who lives in Athens,” I said, “so I already knew a little about it. And I looked some stuff up after you told me last night. My Google-fu is strong.”

That wasn’t totally a lie. I’d followed some links from the Wikipedia article on Athens neuters, and discovered this doctor’s blog that way. But most of the links I was planning to email Latisha were ones I’d found days ago — a couple as early as Valentine’s Day.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your uncle before?”

I didn’t have a good answer to that. I made something up.

“I wasn’t sure Athens and Hartwell were the same change-region until I looked it up,” I said. “I’ve got to get to P.E., let’s talk later.”

P.E. was no worse and no better than the day before; there were four more people in the class, three girls and a guy, all Smyrna wolves, and the guy with tentacle arms was gone — presumably he’d gotten his new schedule. I could still take my time drying off behind the shower curtain before getting my underwear on, with nobody yelling at me to get out and let him in.

I kept thinking about Latisha and what we’d said to each other, during P.E. and Biology and on the bus ride home. As soon as I’d said hi to Mom, I went and checked my email and IM. Latisha wasn’t online, but there was an email from Tandy saying she’d gotten her new schedule and had Mr. Logan for biology at third period now. I emailed Tyrone and Latisha suggesting that we meet next Tuesday in the library after school; then I sent Latisha an “are you there?” IM, and sat at the computer working on homework and waiting for her to reply until Mom stuck her head in and asked if I was all right.

“Doing homework,” I said. “Sorry, do you need help with supper or something?”

“No, we’re having leftovers from last night. If you’re in the middle of homework go ahead, but you could come and heat up some stew any time you’re hungry.”

“Sure,” I said. I ate supper with Mom, distractedly answered her questions about my day at school, and went back to my room as soon as I’d put my bowl in the dishwasher.

There was an IM from Latisha.

obsidian14: i’m here

obsidian14: you said you’ve got links for my project?

scribbler371: yeah just a minute

I went through my bookmarks, copied several links into the IM window, and sent them.

obsidian14: wow that’s a lot of stuff

scribbler371: you’re welcome

obsidian14: were you really in huntsville?

I stared at the screen for almost a minute before I typed,

scribbler371: promise not to tell please?

scribbler371: i’m sorry i lied but you can understand why i think

obsidian14: okay i won’t tell

scribbler371: i was in athens with my other uncle. i really do have an aunt and uncle in huntsville, that’s how i know so much about the telepaths.

obsidian14: can i interview you for my project? :)

scribbler371: maybe on condition of anonymity

obsidian14: you don’t have to, i was just thinking it might be less weird and embarrassing than interviewing my brother or cousin

scribbler371: you have to interview at least two people you’re not related to, why not three or four? like i said those bloggers would probably love the attention

obsidian14: okay. thanks again.

obsidian14: i understand why you’d lie about that. my brother was kind of depressed all last week, but the last couple of days since school started he’s mad at everybody and won’t talk about why. it’s obvious anyway.

scribbler371: guys at school picking on him?

obsidian14: i’m sure that’s it

scribbler371: is he younger than you or older?

obsidian14: older. both of them. leroy is in college, at morehouse, but he came to grandma’s house with us for her bday. lyndon is a senior at HGHS.

If Lyndon was a senior at our school, I’d probably seen him sometime; but I didn’t know him or recognize his name.

scribbler371: that’s what i was afraid would happen to me.

obsidian14: mom says dad should talk to him about it but dad’s almost as depressed as lyndon

scribbler371: sorry. my parents seem to be sort of okay about their changes, but i’m worried because they’re different species. mom’s a centaur and dad’s a wolf.

obsidian14: oh

obsidian14: so they can’t eat in the same room anymore

scribbler371: right

obsidian14: are they still, you know.

scribbler371: i don’t know. i don’t think so.

obsidian14: neither are mine :(

“I can’t,” Arnie said. “Keith and Tara Saunders invited me to a party at their house. I asked if you could come, but they said it’s centaurs only,” he went on, looking vaguely embarrassed.

“Have fun,” I said. I felt weird about that, and wondered if things like that were going to happen often, and if so, if this was the beginning of the end of our friendship.

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 4 of 7

---

Next morning during homeroom, Mrs. Jessup handed out more revised schedules, including mine and Arnie’s. I still had a couple of the same classes, including first period Algebra, but most of my schedule was completely different. I was happy to see I still had Ms. Killian for biology, though at second period rather than fourth. I’d have fourth period lunch. She also gave us new bus schedules; they were working on adding new bus routes so the buses wouldn’t be so crowded with the centaurs taking up more room.

Arnie and I compared schedules. “I’m not going to see much of you at school anymore,” I said. “We should get together this weekend.”

“Maybe I can get my brother to give me a ride to Will’s house, and you could walk over there?” His brother, a senior at our school, had been out with his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day and they’d both become Smyrna wolves. I wasn’t sure if either of his parents could drive; they were both centaurs.

“Sure. Talk to Will about it.” I wasn’t sure whether Will had his new schedule, or if so, when and if I’d see him.

With the school allowing the centaurs five minutes extra to get to class, and a lot of kids getting lost trying to find their new classrooms, most teachers were postponing the start of their lessons by five minutes or even ten. I was pleasantly surprised to see Latisha walk into my algebra class only a minute late.

“I don’t have assigned seating,” Ms. Tang said to her and the other new people. “Sit anywhere that’s not already taken.” Latisha sat next to me.

“I emailed a couple of those bloggers you told me about,” she whispered. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Ms. Tang had started reviewing the previous day’s lesson as soon as the bell rang, so Latisha and I didn’t have much chance to talk then, but she didn’t get into new material until all the stragglers had arrived. After class, Latisha and I compared our new schedules. We both still had Ms. Killian for biology, but at different times of day; we also had P.E. together, third period, with Coach Renfrew.

“Do you know anything about him?” I asked her.

“My brother had him a couple of years ago,” she said. “He’s okay, it sounds like.”

I had another pleasant surprise when Will came in to Ms. Killian’s second period biology. We compared schedules before class, and saw that we’d have the same number of classes together, just different ones. Ms. Killian welcomed the new students, and reviewed what she’d talked about the day before, then continued her lesson on centaur anatomy.

I went on to P.E. from there, and had a nasty shock. The class was already full. Apparently, they’d taken advantage of the necessity for a massive rescheduling to organize the P.E. classes by neospecies. So there’d apparently be several classes that were all centaurs, and one or two that were all wolves, and one with all the ninth graders of miscellaneous other neospecies; there were more than thirty of us. There were a few kids I’d had other classes with, either here or in middle school, but most I’d never met.

The locker room was crowded, with almost twenty guys. Before class, when we were changing into gym clothes, I didn’t have a problem; I just changed my outer clothes and kept the same underwear on. Most of us did. I worried that my underwear’s failure to bulge where it should might draw unwanted attention, and thought about ways to fix that tomorrow, but that day it wasn’t an issue; most of the guys were strangers to each other as well as to me, and there were several guys who were the only representative at our school, or at least in our grade, of some exotic neospecies; they drew all the attention.

I didn’t have any chance to talk to Latisha; Coach Renfrew (who had a tail and webbed fingers like Tandy Shannon) split us up into four volleyball teams for two parallel games, and we were not only on different teams but in different games. I did manage to talk to Tyrone briefly, and he absentmindedly agreed that next Tuesday would be a good time to meet after school — then he went back to chatting with Lindsey Babcock, who was also on our team.

After class, I couldn’t get away with dawdling in the shower drying off and getting my underwear on behind the curtain. But I didn’t let that stop me; I put my clean underwear on the moment I turned off the shower, then got out and dried off the rest of me before I put my other clothes on over the damp underwear. That would have drawn attention if there weren’t so many more exotic things to look at, or studiously avoid looking at. There was the guy who’d been in my previous P.E. class, with tentacle arms, and another guy of the same species, who was less modest (or more of a showoff) than the guy I already sort of knew — let’s just say that wasn’t the only part of his body that was long and multijointed. There was one guy who had two of them. There were guys with tails and scales and claws and even wings.

So I got lucky, nobody noticing or commenting on my excess of modesty. But I knew that couldn’t last.

Will looked like he was in better shape than Monday or Tuesday, when I saw him on the bus that afternoon. I talked to him about maybe getting together with Arnie that Saturday, and he said he’d ask his Mom if it suited for us to come over.

When I got home, Mom was up and puttering around in the kitchen, not lying on the sofa, which made me feel a lot better about her. I put my backpack down and hugged her.

“The Barneses said they could give us a ride to church,” she said. “How much homework do you have?”

“Not too much,” I said. “I can do most of it during supper, and the rest after church.”

So I just focused on the stuff I had to turn in Thursday, and didn’t have time to check email or IM, or work on the project for Ms. Killian. The Barneses pulled into our driveway and honked their horn while I was washing up after supper. Mom rested her hand on my shoulder as we walked out to their car, but didn’t lean on me as hard as she’d been doing.

It was a job to get Mom into their back seat, and then I somehow had to squeeze in next to her — they had bucket seats in front. I was surprised to see Mr. Barnes wearing only sandals and shorts, and Mrs. Barnes wearing only that plus a halter top. I guessed they’d gotten fed up with wearing formal clothes over their fur, but I wondered if the other folks at church would like it. I wasn’t about to complain, but I knew a lot of the older folks at our church were sticklers for formal dress even on Wednesday nights, and this was more informal than anything anybody had ever dared to wear to church. Mom was wearing the nicest of the three skirts she’d been working on, with a blouse that was too big for her now; I was wearing my usual Wednesday night church clothes, the same as Sunday clothes except without a jacket or tie.

Mrs. Barnes asked me if I could help out with visiting homebound people the next day after school, and I said sure. She and Mr. Barnes talked about it for a couple of minutes, and they said Mrs. Barnes could pick me up direct from school, and give me a ride home after we made rounds of a few people’s houses.

“Is that okay, Mom?”

“Sure,” she said. “Your father will be at home tomorrow, and if you want to help out with the homebound ministry Friday or Saturday as well, I’ll probably be okay — I’m getting a lot stronger.”

Dad worked twelve-hour shifts, normally three or four days on and then three or four days off. With so many other paramedics turned into centaurs, or killed or injured on Valentine’s day, or both, he had shorter breaks than usual, but he’d still have tomorrow off before working another three days.

Mr. and Mrs. Barnes weren’t the only wolves who’d come to church that night wearing less than they used to, but there weren’t many like them; I overheard some of the centaurs and chameleons and others, mostly older folks, gossiping about how indecent it was.

---

Thursday, Latisha and I both got to Algebra early enough to chat for a couple of minutes before class.

“One of the bloggers I emailed already wrote me back,” she said. “I’m working on a list of questions for him. Can I go over them with you before I send them to him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Can you email them to me when you get home tonight? I’ll be late getting home, but I’ll look at them when I can.” I told her about going round to visit homebound centaurs with Mrs. Barnes.

“That’s cool,” she said. “Here, if you want to look at them now and give them back when you see me at P.E.?” She handed me a sheet of notebook paper. I didn’t have time to look at it or say anything about it before the bell rang and Ms. Tang started reviewing yesterday’s lesson.

Algebra is not my strongest subject, to say the least, and I couldn’t afford to look at Latisha’s paper during Ms. Tang’s lesson. And in biology, I’d barely had time to sit down and start deciphering Latisha’s handwriting before Ms. Killian started her lesson on how Kennesaw chameleons‘ skin apparently worked differently from real chameleons’, so I didn’t have any intelligent comments to offer when I tried to give her back the paper just before P.E.

“Sorry,” I said. “Email me later?”

“You can keep it until tomorrow,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable. I didn’t want to tell her I could barely read her handwriting, but I’d have to, if I hadn’t figured out what she’d written by tomorrow.

We went to our separate locker rooms to change. Coach Renfrew had us playing volleyball again, but rearranged the teams. He’d separated the two insectivores, Tyrone and Lindsey — maybe to keep them from flirting, or maybe just to make the teams more even, I’m not sure — and now Latisha was playing opposite me.

I’d stuck a pair of socks inside my underwear this morning, and when I’d undressed and was standing around in my underwear waiting for a free shower, I worried that the bulge they created was implausibly big, or weirdly shaped, and somebody would figure out I was faking it. But if anybody noticed, they didn’t say anything. When I got into the shower and pulled off my underwear, I then had the problem of what to do with the socks. I hung the sweaty underwear over the curtain rod, but set the socks on the little soap tray, where they got soaked. Afterward, I wrapped the socks up in the dirty underwear to hide them. I wouldn’t have anything to stick in my clean underwear; I’d need to bring extra socks tomorrow.

I tried something different; I wrapped one towel around my waist before I got out of the shower stall, and dried off the rest of me with an extra towel I’d brought while I walked back to my locker. I sat on the bench with my legs close together — maybe suspiciously close, I worried, too late — and pulled my clean underwear on under the towel before unwrapping it and putting the rest of my clean clothes on.

Despite minor problems, that procedure seemed to work pretty well, and I stuck to it for a while. It was better than wearing damp underwear until I got home from school, like Wednesday, worrying that they’d soak through and make it look like I’d peed in my pants. (They weren’t quite that damp, fortunately.)

I saw Will during American History, and told him I’d be leaving after school with Mrs. Barnes instead of riding the bus. She picked me up right on time, wearing shorts and a halter top as she’d done last night. It was cold enough out that I’d worn a flannel shirt and a jacket, but I guessed her fur kept her warm enough she didn’t need anything else, and she was wearing the shorts and halter only out of modesty.

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“We’re visiting Mrs. Paulsen first,” she said. Mrs. Paulsen was a widow lady at our church, not quite as old as my grandparents; I hadn’t seen her since I came home from Uncle Mike’s place.

She’d become a centaur, of course, and she was still having a lot of trouble walking. We sat and visited with her for a few minutes — she was lying on her sofa, like my Mom did so often these days — and then Mrs. Barnes put me to work cleaning the kitchen while she helped Mrs. Paulsen take a bath, and then had me clean the bathroom while she took Mrs. Paulsen for a short walk, supporting her like I’d done for Will and Mom. We’d brought her some groceries too, which Mrs. Barnes had bought before picking me up at school.

Next, we visited Mr. and Mrs. Riley. They were centaurs too, just a few years older than my parents. Mrs. Riley had been a little overweight, and her legs had enough muscles on them that she was already walking, but Mr. Riley had been skinny as a rail to begin with, and he’d been walking down the stairs at the moment of the change. He’d broken his right arm and both his forelegs, and they were in casts. He said he’d been in the hospital for a couple of days, but they’d sent him home because they were crowded with people hurt even worse than him.

Mrs. Riley was better off than him, but her legs were weak enough that she got tired quickly, and she hadn’t been able to do much around the house. I bathed Mr. Riley while Mrs. Barnes did some housework, then I helped her with it and we visited for a little longer before we left.

After that, Mrs. Barnes took me home. “How often do you think you can help us?” she asked as she pulled into my neighborhood.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can probably do twice a week and still get all my homework and stuff done. Maybe more during Spring break, and less when I’m studying for finals.” I didn’t think we’d be going on a family trip during Spring break, with Mom still recovering her mobility and missing lots of work.

I’d read most of the assigned reading in the car, but I had some other homework to do. When I came in, Dad was in the kitchen fixing supper, and Mom was lying on the sofa, reading; she’d already eaten supper, and was snacking on salad again.

I ate supper with Dad, and worked on homework while I ate, after talking to him a little about school and helping Mrs. Barnes with the homebound ministry. After supper I checked my email and IM, and saw that Aunt Karen had replied to my email about interviewing her and other Huntsville telepaths. I reviewed the list of questions I’d been working on, changed a few things, and sent it to her, asking her to reply to the questions and forward them to other people who might be willing to answer.

Then I remembered the paper Latisha had given me, and I took it out and looked at it. By the time I went to bed, I’d managed to decipher her handwriting well enough to read about a third of it, but the rest stumped me. I made a few notes on the questions, then started studying for Friday’s quiz in American History.

---

Friday morning during homeroom, a few more people got their new schedules; I think everybody had them by then. The morning announcements included a notice that centaurs would be allowed to snack during class, but not during quizzes or tests; apparently there’d been a lot of complaints not only from students but from irate parents.

I had a little time before Algebra to talk with Latisha about the interview questions she’d given me, but I didn’t really feel comfortable talking about them where other people might overhear.

“I read some of it last night after I finished my other homework,” I told her, “but I haven’t had time to think about it a lot. Can we talk about it tonight?”

“Or at lunch,” she said.

“Sure.”

In Biology, Ms. Killian talked for about half an hour about some of the other neospecies in the Atlanta area; toward the end of the class she reviewed what she’d said earlier in the week, about the general patterns of the changes and about centaur anatomy, and said we’d have a quiz on that stuff next Monday.

My P.E. class had even more students in it than before, as the last few people got their new schedules assigned; there were almost forty of us who didn’t fit into the all-centaur or all-wolf P.E. classes. Coach Renfrew divided those of us who were still pretty much humanoid into a couple of teams and had us play dodgeball while he worked one-on-one with some of the kids of the stranger neospecies — there were some who walked on all fours, for instance, and the guys with tentacle arms, and so forth. As luck had it, I was on the opposite team from Latisha and Tyrone; my team lost.

As before, I took the quickest shower I could and kept one towel wrapped around my waist while I dried off the rest of me with another. I was careful, when I sat down on the bench by my locker, not to have my legs too close together — or too far apart. And I slipped a clean rolled-up pair of socks into my clean underwear before pulling them on, without anybody noticing. I was starting to think I could keep doing this indefinitely.

At lunch, I looked around for Latisha, and I saw her sitting and talking with a couple of wolf girls. I was nervous about sitting down next to them, but I had to at least give her back the list of interview questions she’d loaned me, so I nerved myself and went over to them.

“Hi, Jeffrey,” Latisha said. “Keisha, Wanda, this is Jeffrey — we’re working on a project for Ms. Killian’s biology class.”

“Hi,” I said, and sat down next to Latisha, across from one of the wolf girls — I wasn’t sure which was Keisha and which was Wanda. They seemed to think Latisha had introduced them adequately and didn’t clarify.

“Did you have time to read that thing I gave you?” Latisha asked.

“Um,” I said. I had read as much of it as I could, and I had some ideas about rephrasing some of the questions — assuming I’d deciphered them correctly — but I didn’t want to talk about them in front of a couple of girls I didn’t know. Talking about them with a girl I’d known only for a few days would be embarrassing enough under ideal circumstances. “See, I looked at it after I finished my homework last night, but there were parts of it where I couldn’t read your handwriting. Maybe you could type it up and email it to me?” I took the paper out of my backpack and took a bite of whatever I had on my tray — it must have been meat because the carnivores weren’t complaining too loudly, but I don’t know what kind.

“There were only some parts you couldn’t read?” Keisha (or Wanda) said, and giggled.

“You’re doing better than me if you can read anything she wrote,” Wanda (or Keisha) added.

“Hush,” Latisha said. “Okay, I’ll type it up tonight. What about the parts you could read?”

I took another bite and tried to think of something both useful and non-embarrassing to say about it. “Maybe it’s already there in the parts I couldn’t read,” I said, “but what about ask if they happened to be looking at a clock or watch when the changes happened, and if they know how long the changes took, or how long the queasy feeling lasted?”

“That’s a good idea,” she said, and wrote something down.

“And, um, did the queasy feeling start before the obvious physical changes, or afterward, or at the same time?”

“I think it was at the same time,” she said, “but I’ll ask.”

From what Uncle Mike said, I thought she was right. I’d been too distracted to notice, myself. But it would be more scientific to ask a bunch of guys about it.

“What happened to you?” Keisha (or Wanda) asked me. “You look old-fashioned, like Latisha.”

“Did you used to go to school with her in Hartville?” Wanda (or Keisha) asked.

“It’s Hartwell,” Latisha said, and I said hastily:

“No, I’ve lived in Marietta my whole life. I didn’t meet Latisha until we started working on this project.”

“But you weren’t in Marietta on Valentine’s Day,” Keisha (or Wanda) pointed out.

I told them about Huntsville, and of course they had questions about what telepathy felt like, which I answered as best I could from what I’d heard from Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave. I steered the conversation back to our project, and asked Latisha if she had any ideas about what I should ask my interview subjects.

“Well,” she said, “there’s what you said — did they notice the times, how long the headache lasted and how long it was before they started hearing other people’s thoughts.”

“And can they keep other people from hearing what they’re thinking?” Keisha (or Wanda) asked.

I wrote those questions down.

That evening, Latisha and I talked again by IM.

obsidian14: i just emailed you my list of questions

scribbler371: thanx. i’ll look at it. here, i’ll email you my list

Ten or fifteen minutes later,

scribbler371: sorry i was so vague at lunch. it’s weird and embarrassing talking about this stuff at all, and i really didn’t want to talk about it in front of your friends.

obsidian14: it’s ok. could you really not read my handwriting or was that just an excuse not to talk about it in front of keisha and wanda?

scribbler371: both, kind of. it was kind of hard to read your handwriting but even the parts i understood i didn’t want to talk about just then.

obsidian14: what about now?

scribbler371: so. you could be, i don’t know, more clinical?

obsidian14: like how?

scribbler371: like instead of asking “did you throw up when the changes happened” you could ask “did you vomit” or even “did you experience nausea” etc.

obsidian14: that would be more scientific i guess

scribbler371: yeah. and probably less embarrassing for you and them both.

obsidian14: what about you?

scribbler371: what do you mean?

obsidian14: did you experience nausea when the changes happened?

scribbler371: i threw up five pancakes all over my uncle’s thirty year old atari 2600.

obsidian14: that sounds bad.

scribbler371: could have been worse. no permanent damage. most of the vomit went on the carpet. what about you?

obsidian14: yeah. we were eating lunch when it happened. most of us threw up.

scribbler371: how long before you figured out what happened?

obsidian14: us girls, not until we watched the local tv news talk about it. dad and my uncles and brothers and guy cousins knew what happened to them right away but they didn’t talk about in front of us girls.

scribbler371: huh. i guess that makes sense

obsidian14: did you feel what happened or not figure it out till you looked?

scribbler371: i was busy being sick. felt weird but didn’t know what happened until i went to change out of my vomity clothes.

obsidian14: that’s weird. that you could change so much and not feel it happening.

scribbler371: you too, though, right?

obsidian14: only with me it was all inside

scribbler371: well, i guess the numb feeling made it hard to figure out exactly what was wrong

obsidian14: probably

scribbler371: interview enough guys, you’ll find one who was peeing when it happened

obsidian14: eww, gross. i am not thanking you for that image.

scribbler371: sorry :(

obsidian14: where is the brain bleach?

scribbler371: they sell big industrial size bottles of it at sam’s club. you’ll need lots by the time you finish this project.

obsidian14: yeah. sure you don’t want to swap?

scribbler371: it would be just as embarrassing for me as for you

I didn’t really think, then, about why I could so easily talk about such weird, embarrassing things with a girl I’d known for barely a week, which I couldn’t bear to talk about with my parents or friends I’d known for years. Even with Uncle Mike, I hadn’t talked any more plainly about this stuff than I was talking about it with Latisha. We talked for a while longer about questions for both her interview subjects and mine, and said good night; then I sent another email to Aunt Karen with a few additional questions Latisha and I had come up with.

---

Saturday, I walked over to Will’s house just after breakfast. Will and I played Champions of Marduk for a while, until Arnie’s brother dropped him off. Will and Arnie had both gotten stronger in the last week — their legs were still skinnier than mine, but not as rail-thin as they’d been when I first saw them after I came home, and their arms were filling out too. We hung out for a few hour playing video games, and then went for a walk down to the creek that runs behind the houses at the end of Will’s street. They sat on a fallen log and I sat on a big rock, and we talked about everything and nothing for an hour or so, and I drew several sketches of them and the trees and the creek. I liked the view a lot, and several times in the next month I walked down there, by myself more often than with Will, and did a bunch of sketches, then my first real landscape painting.

Things settled into a pattern for a while. I ate lunch with Latisha and Tyrone more often than not; Latisha’s wolf friends joined us fairly often, as did Lindsey Babcock — she and Tyrone were becoming pretty tight, being the only Valdosta frogs in our grade and maybe the only ones in our school. I learned to tell Keisha and Wanda apart, and I learned to not get sick watching Tyrone and Lindsey slurp up maggots and beetles with their long tongues. I met Latisha’s brother Lyndon once, when he passed by our table and Latisha said hi to him and introduced him; he didn’t want to sit with us freshmen, though, and he didn’t say much.

Latisha, Tyrone and I met in the library after school the next Tuesday, and I got a ride home from Tyrone’s mom; but after that we didn’t meet after school again, since we had plenty of chances to trade pointers on interviewing and other research during lunch.

Mom, Will, and the other centaurs kept putting on weight and getting steadier on their feet. Within another couple of weeks, most of them could stand up longer and walk further without resting than me. Mom went back to work in early March; we still didn’t have a car she could drive, but Cobb County had beefed up its lame public transportation system with new routes and more frequent buses in response to public outcry from the centaurs, so she could take the bus to work now. There was even talk about getting MARTA to extend a rail line from Atlanta to Marietta, but that would take a few years.

I kept helping with the homebound ministry twice a week after school. Dad’s work schedule got less hectic after a while, and when he started having several days off in a row again, he would pick me up after school some days and we’d go visit two or three people in the hospital or at home. We did their grocery shopping for them and helped out around the house.

I was getting worried about Mom and Dad. It used to be, when I got home from school on days when neither of them had to work, I’d often find them together — both of them working in the garden in good weather, or both of them sitting in the living room, one reading aloud to the other, or both of them working on cleaning the same room. I hardly ever saw them doing things together now, and I didn’t see them hugging or kissing very often.

One day I came home expecting to see both of them; Dad was gone somewhere, and Mom had been crying, though she tried not to let on. She vaguely said Dad had to go run some errands.

When Dad came home a few hours later, he asked me if I wanted some chicken wings, and I said I’d eaten supper with Mom and wasn’t hungry. He nodded and put away the stuff he’d brought home in the refrigerator, then went into the living room. Mom said she was tired and was going to bed, and left the room almost as soon as Dad came in.

---

When I got up to go to school the next morning, the door to the guest bedroom was closed. The door to Mom and Dad’s bedroom was open, but no one was in there; I found Mom in the kitchen fixing breakfast. She didn’t say anything about what had happened the day before, and I couldn’t ask.

Aunt Karen had forwarded both my lists of questions to a bunch of local friends, and fourteen people responded to them, including her doctor. I had plenty of material to work with for my project. Latisha had sent her questions to several bloggers in Athens and other parts of that change-region, and one of them had posted her questions on his blog, asking his readers to answer them in the comments; she had a lot of irrelevant and unpleasant stuff to wade through there, but she wasn’t hurting for material, either. Tyrone hadn’t found so many people to interview, but he had enough to satisfy Ms. Killian’s requirements — he’d interviewed his dad, and Lindsey, and his aunt’s doctor in Bainbridge. Latisha and Tyrone both had trouble finding enough printed or online sources Ms. Killian thought were reliable enough to use — the first four or five online sources they showed her, she said weren’t scientific enough to count. It was easier to find scientific studies on the Huntsville telepaths; they were one of at least five new telepathic species worldwide, but the only one in the U.S., and the focus of a lot more interest from scientists outside their region than the Valdosta frogs or Athens neuters. Some of the papers I found were way over my head, and some were in academic journals that neither our high school library nor our county library had subscriptions to; I had to ask our librarian to request copies of them from university libraries.

On the biological front, there were new developments to worry me. When I realized that my pubic hair was falling out, as was my little smidgen of chest hair, I gradually worked up the nerve to ask Latisha if it was happening to her, or the people she was interviewing.

obsidian14: yeah. women and men both.

scribbler371: it’s like we’re turning into little kids?

obsidian14: we’re not getting shorter though

scribbler371: i guess

obsidian14: other stuff’s changing though

scribbler371: what?

obsidian14: i’m not going to tell you if you haven’t noticed

scribbler371: what? why?

After a long silence, she replied:

obsidian14: ok. my boobs are getting smaller. mom’s too

scribbler371: oh

obsidian14: when i realized, i started hiding it. i’m sort of glad you didn’t notice. maybe nobody else will either.

scribbler371: have you asked the people you interviewed about this stuff too?

obsidian14: no. i need to do that soon. been thinking about how to word the questions, and looking at blogs and stuff to see if anybody else is talking about it.

Other people were going through gradual changes too, subtler than the drastic changes on Valentine’s Day and in many cases not noticed until they were far advanced. The centaurs were putting on muscle and fat, of course, building up to the right mass for their new shape, and there were others like them; others, like most of the winged people in various places, were more gradually losing weight, until four or five months after the changes they were light enough for their wings to support them... But you know about that already. As for me and Latisha and the others like us, my voice was getting gradually higher, partially reversing the change it had gone through a year or two earlier, and hers was getting gradually deeper — though thankfully without the embarrassing abrupt mid-sentence tone changes I’d suffered, along with most boys, when I started going through puberty. It was happening so gradually that nobody who saw and talked to us every day noticed it; it wasn’t until I talked to Aunt Karen on the phone for the first time in a couple of weeks that she remarked on it, and I realized what was happening. I worried that these changes would blow my cover as a Huntsville telepath, whenever people at school noticed them and realized they didn’t match the purely neurological changes that I’d claimed. But it turned out that that worry was misplaced; my voice had barely changed enough to notice by the time — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

More and more of the centaurs who’d been injured on Valentine’s Day, or were just too weak to go to school, came back, and the centaur majority got even larger. The cafeteria, which was already full at third period, could no longer hold all the centaurs (and a few other herbivores); they moved the carnivores and omnivores' lunch into the auditorium, and let the upper-grade herbivores have the cafeteria at fourth period. Fewer people’s schedules were changed this time, but it was still annoying.

And as the centaurs got their strength back, and became an even larger majority, the lines between social groups at school were redrawn. Competitive sports had been suspended indefinitely after the changes; the football and basketball teams and cheerleaders weren’t the kernel around which all the less prestigious cliques orbited at one distance or another, and it wasn’t clear yet who was going to be the new archetype of coolness. One thing was clear; a lot of the old cliques were breaking up and re-forming along species lines. The Smyrna wolves, who had been briefly dominant just after school started back, were losing their dominance to the centaurs as they got stronger and more confident. And the Kennesaw chameleons, to say nothing of the smaller minorities, learned to keep their heads down and stay out of the way of the centaur-wolf dominance battles.

Arnie was still messed up about losing Kim; but as he gradually recovered from the initial grief, he realized he had his pick of girls. He’d always been better at talking with girls than Will or me, and the changes apparently left him looking better to centaur girls than most of the other guys our age, at least in the critical first couple of weeks back at school when most of the former jocks were looking unhealthily skinny and some of them were too weak to walk without a cane or walker, or at all.

One Friday morning around the middle of March, I saw Arnie in homeroom as usual, and I asked him if he was coming over to Will’s house the next day.

“I can’t,” he said. “Keith and Tara Saunders invited me to a party at their house.” Keith was Tara’s older brother, in tenth or eleventh grade, also a centaur; though he hadn’t been as overweight as his sister before, I’d overheard centaur girls whispering about how hot he looked since the changes.

“All right,” I said. “Some other time.”

“I asked if you could come, but they said it’s centaurs only,” he went on, looking vaguely embarrassed.

“Have fun,” I said. I felt weird about that, and wondered if things like that were going to happen often, and if so, if this was the beginning of the end of our friendship. It felt like it shouldn’t be; even if we were different species now, we still liked the same kinds of games and movies. But I wasn’t sure.

“I know there would be problems with you using the girls’ bathrooms or showers,” Dad said, “but — after today, there might be just as bad problems showering with the other boys.”

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 5 of 7

---

I was still thinking about that during Algebra and Biology and P.E.   I talked to Will briefly before Biology, and he said he was going to the Saunders’ party with Arnie. That worried me, distracting me so much that I didn’t hear at first when Ms. Killian called on me to ask me what distinguished the corolla from the calyx. (She’d taught about the new discoveries being made about the Valentine’s Day changes for almost three weeks, but she finally had to get back to the unit on plant reproduction.)

I was still angsting about it during P.E.  I told Tyrone and Latisha about it, and they commiserated with me, which made me feel a little better, but we didn’t have much time to talk before Coach Renfrew divided us into teams to play a new game he’d been working on; it was a modified version of volleyball, with particular positions on each team for people with particular body-forms and abilities — the two guys with tentacles were in the same position on different teams, for instance. He kept tweaking the rules often enough that I never did figure them out.

I was still worrying about it when we went to shower after the game. I’d just pulled my towels off the curtain rod and wrapped one around my waist, then pulled the shower curtain open, and started to step out —

The next thing I knew, I was laying on my back, my head in the shower stall and my feet sticking out, and several guys were standing around me talking.

“We need to get his head elevated,” one of them said.

“We shouldn’t move him; what if he broke something?”

“Elevating the head a little should be okay.”

“Has somebody already gone to get help?”

“Hey, Jeffrey, are you okay?”

“How do you feel?”

“Why is it nobody’s saying what we’re all thinking?”

“Yeah, does it seem odd to anybody else that Jeffrey’s a girl?”

I was feeling too dizzy to stand up, and too stunned to do anything else, but at that point I realized the towel around my waist had come loose when I fell. I feebly tried to cover my crotch — closing the barn door after the horses are gone, my grandpa would say.

Tyrone cut through the arguments and knelt beside me, lifting my head slightly and slipping a rolled-up towel under it. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“Dizzy,” I said.

“Don’t try to move,” he said. “Somebody should be here soon.”

Coach Renfrew barged in about then, asking what the hell was going on, and when he saw me, he yelled at the other guys to get out of the way, and knelt beside me.

“What happened?” He kept his face and voice calm, but his tail was twitching like mad.

“He slipped and fell coming out of the shower,” Tyrone said. “He says he’s dizzy.”

“I’m starting to feel a little better,” I said, which was true in a way, but even as my dizziness and confusion faded, I was panicking about my secret being out. I tried to sit up, and Coach Renfrew put a hand on my chest.

“Don’t try to move,” he said. “One of you boys run to the nurse’s office. The rest of you, get some clothes on before she gets here. And get me some more towels.” He took the towel that had slipped loose from my waist and covered my middle with it, then took some other towels the boys handed him, wrapped some around my legs and covered my chest and arms with another.

I was thinking frantically about what to say. What could I say? The coach had seen, all the guys in the locker room had seen — the school nurse was going to see in a couple of minutes...

“Could somebody get my clothes?” I asked. “Before the nurse gets here?”

“I don’t think you’d better move,” the coach said. “I’ll get you some more towels if you’re cold.”

“A little,” I said. He didn’t leave my side, but barked orders at some guys who were nearly finished getting dressed; they gathered more towels and brought them. I could hear them whispering as they approached, and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could guess. Coach Renfrew took the towels and spread them over me, covering everything but my head.

“I’m not going to ask you —” he said in a low voice, and then looked around at the guys who’d brought the towels — Tyrone and a Kennesaw chameleon named Jack, whom I didn’t know well. “What are you looking at? Finish getting dressed and get to your next class. Except — Tyrone, wait for the nurse just outside the gym and direct her when she gets here.”

He said that pretty loud, and the rest of the guys still in the room, those who hadn’t already left, took the hint. When they were all out of earshot, Coach Renfrew continued quietly:

“I’m not going to ask you about your condition — where you were during the changes. Not until your head’s been looked after. But we need to talk about it later.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want everybody to know.”

“Later,” he said. About that time the school nurse came in, flanked by Tyrone and another guy I didn’t know well, an Allatoona otter.

“I’m Nan Turner, the school nurse,” she said, kneeling beside me. “How do you feel?” She was a Smyrna wolf, with darker fur than most. I’d never met her before the changes or since, not having had any injury or sickness since I’d started high school.

“Still a little dizzy,” I said. “Not as bad as right after I fell. And my butt and back are sore, but I don’t think I broke anything.”

“Let me take a look,” she said, and started removing the towels.

“Tyrone, Sam, thanks for your help. You can go to lunch now,” Coach Renfrew said. They left.

Ms. Turner gasped when she removed the towels covering my crotch. “That’s normal,” I said in a small voice. “Been like that since Valentine’s Day.” Not exactly, because I’d lost the last of my pubic hair less than a week ago, but you know what I mean.

She examined me and poked me in various places, asking if I could feel anything — I could feel everywhere she touched, and nothing she poked at was horribly painful, so she decided I didn’t have a spinal injury or major broken bones. She asked me if I thought I could sit up, and I said yes.

She and Coach Renfrew supported my arms as I did so, then tentatively let go; I didn’t fall back or start screaming in pain.

“How do you feel now?” she asked.

“Still sore, but the dizziness is about gone.”

“Sit there for a minute or so more before you try to stand up.”

I did, covering my crotch again with a towel. None of us said anything for a few seconds, and then the nurse said:

“What were you doing in the boys’ showers?”

I stammered. Coach Renfrew came to my rescue, sort of:

“Jeffrey’s change was such as to be covered by normal clothing. I suppose he didn’t see any need to tell us about it.”

“So you’ve kept your sex change secret this whole time?”

“It’s not a sex change,” I said. “I — I’m not a girl, whatever it looks like. Making me use the girls’ showers would be wrong.”

“Oh,” she said, as though she’d figured it out. “So your penis is retracted most of the time...?”

I thought, for one crazy instant, of saying yes. But I didn’t know any specific place where people had that change and nothing else, not like I knew the Huntsville telepaths; and I was probably going to the hospital or at least the school clinic, where they’d soon figure out the truth if I didn’t tell them.

“No, I don’t have one. But I don’t have girl parts either — no womb or ovaries or whatever. Obviously no breasts either. I was in Athens; everybody lost all their reproductive organs.”

“Hm,” she said. “Well, let’s decide about that later, when you’re well enough to return to P.E.   Can you try to stand up now?”

I could, and did; they supported my arms, but once I got standing I didn’t need the help. “I’d like to get dressed now,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Take your time. We’ll go to the clinic when you’re done.”

They walked on either side of me as I went over to my locker and sat down on the bench. I opened the locker and started getting dressed, then stood up to pull my pants on — and suddenly felt dizzy again; I grabbed the locker to steady myself, and Coach Renfrew took my other arm.

“Let’s get you to the clinic,” he said.

He and Ms. Turner escorted me to the clinic, where she had me lay down on a cot. “I’m fixing to call your parents or guardians,” she said. “What’s your full name?”

“Jeffrey Sergeyev.”

She looked me up on the computer, and then read out my home phone number, asking if that was the right emergency contact number.

“Yeah,” I said. “Mom’s at work, but Dad’s off today. If you can’t get him at home, I can give you his cell phone number.”

She didn’t, and I did; he didn’t answer his cell phone either. She left him another message.

---

She was in and out of the room checking on me for a while. She asked me if I was an omnivore, and I said yes, and a few minutes later someone me brought a tray from the cafeteria.

I had eaten about half of it when the nurse came in, saying my Dad had called her back and was on his way to the school to pick me up. Hearing that, since I wasn’t extremely hungry, I quit eating the school lunch, figuring I’d eat something better when I got home. I worked on algebra homework until Dad arrived.

I heard him talking with the nurse in the outer office before I saw him. At first I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but then I heard him raise his voice, and could make out something like, “— later, I want to see him now.” A moment after that the nurse showed him in.

“How are you feeling, Jeffrey?”

“Better,” I said. “My butt and back are still sore.”

“He doesn’t have any broken bones,” the nurse said. “Just bruises, as far as I can tell — but I’m afraid he may have a concussion. He’s not confused, but he’s had some intermittent dizziness.”

“Should I take him to the emergency room now, or schedule an appointment with our doctor for next week?”

“I would recommend taking him to the emergency room today. If his symptoms were any worse I would have called for an ambulance first, and called you second.”

“All right. We’ll talk about the other business next week.”

I was putting my algebra book and stuff into my backpack while they were talking. I waited until Dad and I were out of the building before I asked him, “What was the other business you said you’d talk to her about later?”

He sighed. “The coach and several of the boys in the locker room saw you today, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she thinks you should be using the girls’ showers and bathrooms and so forth.”

“I can’t!” I said, panicking. But the idea of going back to the boys’ showers again, after they all knew — that wasn’t much better.

Dad was thinking the same thing. “I know there would be problems with you using the girls’ bathrooms or showers,” he said, “but — after today, there might be just as bad problems showering with the other boys.”

I was so glad he’d said “with the other boys” and not just “with the boys.” We walked the rest of the way to the car and got in without saying anything.

“I know,” I said finally. “Fifteen or twenty guys saw my — saw me naked. They’ll tell all their friends about it today, and their friends will tell their friends, and by the middle of next week everybody in school will know — something.” I suddenly realized that the story would get distorted into ten different rumors by the time the last person at school heard it; in some of them I would be an actual girl, with breasts and all, and in some I’d have a retractable penis like a lizard, and in most of them my name would get lost, it would just be “some freshman” or even “some guy.”

But certainly the guys I had P.E. with knew enough to be creeped out about showering with me, or worse, keen on showering with me, hoping for another glimpse of my crotch sooner or later...

“I think you should try to tell the truth to as many of your friends and acquaintances as you can before they hear the rumors. If we’re still at the hospital when school lets out, I’ll let you use my cellphone to call Will and Arnie and whoever else you want.”

“Will already knows,” I said. “But I’ll try to call Arnie.”

There were a bunch of other people waiting in the emergency room. Dad called Mom’s cell phone while we were waiting, but got her voice mail. A few minutes after we got there, a nurse asked me a few questions about what had happened to me and how I felt, and Dad gave her some paperwork the nurse at school had given him; then it was hours before I saw an actual doctor. I called Arnie’s house as soon as he might possibly have gotten home; he wasn’t there yet, so I asked his mom to have him call me as soon as he got home.

Then I dug through my backpack, found my biology notebook, where I’d written down Tyrone’s and Latisha’s contact information, and called Latisha. Someone I didn’t recognize answered; I couldn’t be sure if it was a man or a woman.

“May I speak to Latisha?” I said. “It’s Jeffrey, from her biology class — we’re working on a project...”

“She just got home; I’ll go fetch her,” the voice said. Then, in the background, a muted shout: “Tish! Phone!”

Moments later she said: “Hello?”

“Latisha, it’s Jeffrey. Did you hear...?”

“Yeah. Are you okay?”

“I think so. I’m still waiting to see a doctor, but I guess they figure I don’t look too bad or they would have examined me sooner. Do you know what people are saying about me?”

“When we were coming out of the lockers to go to lunch, we met some of the guys, and they were talking about you. I asked them what happened — they said you fell and hit your head, and, um — they said you — they saw your privates.”

“Did you tell them anything?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Well, please do, next time you hear people talking about that. I figure at this point the truth is better than most of the guesses people are going to come up with.”

“Oh... Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. I should have seen it coming. Not falling and hitting my head, exactly, but I was stupid to think I could keep showering with other guys for four years of high school and not let anybody see me naked for a single second...”

“You’re not stupid,” she said fiercely.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got to call some other people. I’ll talk to you again after I see the doctor.”

I called Will’s house; he answered the phone.

“Dude, what happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

I told him. “Who did you hear about it from?”

“Todd Mendoza has P.E. with you and fifth period algebra with me. He said you slipped and fell in the shower, and they were taking you to the hospital, and that everybody saw your junk, and you looked like a baby girl down there.”

“That’s pretty much it, except they took me to the school clinic and let my Dad take me to the hospital.”

“So what did the doctors say?”

“They haven’t seen me yet. I’ll let you know when I find out something.”

I was about to call Tyrone when a nurse called my name. Dad and I got up and followed her down a crowded hallway to a little room with just a curtain, no actual door. She gave me a hospital gown to change into and asked if I wanted help.

“We can manage,” Dad said. She walked out and closed the curtain. I undressed and put on the gown.

I’m not sure, but I think that was the first time Dad had seen my new crotch. He didn’t say anything about it; he was busy looking at my back and butt, which he said had several large bruises. He tied up the gown in back and helped me onto the stretcher — if I didn’t have so many sore places I could have done it by myself. I wasn’t feeling dizzy anymore.

A few minutes later the nurse came back, and checked my blood pressure and temperature and so forth, and asked me more questions. Then she left and said a doctor would see me soon.

A while later, the doctor came in. He was a Kennesaw chameleon, younger than Dad. He’d just started asking me questions — some of the same questions the nurses had asked me, and some new ones — when Dad’s cellphone rang. He gave Dad a severe look and said, “You’re not supposed to use those in here.”

“Sorry,” Dad said, and turned it off.

The doctor asked me a bunch more questions, and looked at the back of my head, and the bruises on my back and butt. “Hmm,” he said. “Your chart says you’re male...?”

“Does that have anything to do with the bruises or the possible concussion?” I asked.

“Maybe not,” he said. “Where were you on Valentine’s Day? In Athens?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Is this the first time you’ve seen a doctor since then?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Well, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with your injuries today, but you should go see your primary care physician soon, to follow up on these injuries and to, ah, examine your new equipment.”

After that, he tested my senses and reflexes, and said if I had a concussion it was a very mild one. He told me some things to watch out for and said to take it easy for a few days and go to the emergency room again if I started getting dizzy or confused. He also gave me a prescription for some pain medicine.

As we left the emergency room, Dad turned his cell phone on again. “I’m going to try your mother again.”

He called, and got her voicemail, and left another message.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s go find her.”

So we walked around the halls of the hospital, from the emergency room lobby through an unmarked door to a long twisty hallway that let out into the main hospital lobby, and then up an elevator to the third floor, where we went down some more hallways until we got to the unit where Mom usually worked.

“Is Darlene around?” Dad asked the receptionist.

“Yes,” she said. “Let me call her,” and she picked up a phone and dialed. “Darlene,” she said, “you’ve got company at the nurses’ station.”

That was one of the hospital’s own internal cell phones, not Mom’s personal cell. A few minutes later Mom came down the hall.

“Pavel? Jeffrey? What are you doing here?”

“We just got done in the emergency room,” Dad said. “Have you got your cell phone turned on?”

“I, um, I think I left it at home this morning,” Mom said. “Emergency room? Who...?”

“Dad picked me up at school and took me there,” I said. “I slipped and fell in the shower, but the doctor said I probably didn’t have a concussion, just a lot of bruises.”

“Oh!” she said. “I’m glad you’re all right,” and she hugged me, carefully so as not to squeeze where I was bruised. Then she said: “You fell in the shower?”

“Just as I was getting out,” I said.

“Did anyone see...?”

“Everyone saw. All the guys in my P.E. class, plus the coach and the school nurse.”

“I didn’t think you could keep it hidden for long,” she said. “But — I don’t want to say ‘I told you so.’ I’ll always love you, whether you do the smart thing or the right thing or neither.” She hugged me again, and said: “I’ve got to get back to work — I’ve already had my lunch break. Let’s talk more when I get home tonight.”

Dad and Mom hugged too, but not very hard, and they didn’t kiss. We said goodbye and left.

As we walked out toward the parking deck, Dad handed me his cell phone. “I think that was Arnie calling back when the doctor asked me to turn my cell phone off,” he said. He handed me the phone and I called Arnie.

“Hello?” his mom said.

“It’s Jeffrey. Is Arnie at home?”

“Just a moment...” We’d reached Dad’s car; we got in and he drove out of the parking deck.

Then: “Dude, what the — where are you?”

“On my way home from the hospital. The doctor said I probably don’t have a concussion, or maybe just a mild one — I haven’t had any dizziness since we left the school —”

“What happened to you? I heard a couple of different guys talking about it, one was in your P.E. class and another heard from somebody who was — they said —” He paused, and I figured his mom was probably nearby, listening in.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry — I should have told you earlier. I wasn’t in Huntsville, like I said —”

“I figured that. I looked up the Huntsville telepaths, and there was nothing about them having, um —”

“A pseudo-vagina, is what the doctors in Athens are calling it.”

“Damn.” Then, quieter, probably with the phone away from his mouth: “Sorry, Mom.” And to me again: “You were in Athens? You’ve got an uncle there, right?”

“Yeah, I was spending the weekend with him. Same thing happened to him and all the other guys in Athens, and the girls lost their wombs and stuff. You can see why I didn’t want anybody to know.”

“Yeah, but you could have told me!”

“I’m sorry. I should have trusted you. But — I don’t know, it just seemed simpler not to tell anybody who didn’t already know.”

“Well, that business today was the worst possible way you could tell people.”

“I know.”

“Dude, how did you keep anybody from seeing before now? Even with the separate shower stalls... How long did you think you could keep it hidden?”

“It was stupid, I know,” I said. “Don’t keep rubbing it in, okay?”

“All right. Listen, I’m glad you didn’t get hurt too bad. And I’m mad at you for lying to me. I don’t know what to think.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Can you please let it go?”

“All right,” he said. “Let’s talk later. We’re going out for my Dad’s birthday tonight, and I’ve got that party tomorrow, so I’ve got a lot of homework and not much time to do it in.”

---

After I hung up, Dad asked me if I wanted to stop to eat on the way home. I said yes.

We picked up my pain medicine at the pharmacy, and I took a dose right away; then we went to the Steak and Shake for supper. After we placed our orders, I called Latisha and Will back and told them what the doctor had said. Dad and I didn’t talk much more until after we’d eaten most of our food.

“Have you thought any more about what you want to do?” he said. “I mean, about the bathrooms and showers at school... If the school administration wants you to use the girls’ rooms — the nurse could be exceeding her authority, so maybe nothing will come of that, but if it does, you know your mother and I will back you up if you want to fight it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t know yet. It would be creepy and embarrassing either way. It might depend on how the guys, and the girls, in my P.E. class treat me when I see them again... but that might depend on which of them I’m changing with before class.”

“Have you —” he started to say, and then, looking around: “Let’s talk more later.”

In the car on the way home, he said: “Jeffrey... have you felt any sexual attraction since your change? For anybody, of either sex?”

I felt hot, and suspected I was probably blushing bright red enough to stop traffic. “No,” I said. “Not really. I still have a, I guess you’d call it a sense of beauty. I can tell pretty from ugly, and beautiful from pretty. But it’s not any more acute, or more visceral, looking at people than at animals or trees or abstract art.”

“Well,” he said, “think about how that affects your decision. I think you would be justified either way.”

“I guess.”

When we got home, I went to my room and did homework and school reading until I was too tired to focus on it. I kept my IM client open, but nobody I knew well came online. I went to bed, lying on my stomach because of all the bruises on my back, and fell asleep pretty early, before Mom came home from work.

When I got up, Mom was already up, cooking whole-wheat pancakes. She’d been experimenting and talking to other centaurs at work and at church about stuff they could eat, and had figured out a recipe that tasted a little weird at first, but was tasty enough to suit me as well, at least with a lot of butter and syrup.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Pretty okay,” I said, “just sore.”

“You can take some of the pain medicine if you want. No more dizziness?”

“Yeah, I guess I will. No, I haven’t been dizzy since we left the hospital.”

“Good. I’ll make an appointment for you Monday with Dr. Borenstein. We should have done that sooner, really, as soon as you came home from Athens...”

Oh, no. Well, I guess it had to be done eventually.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s Dad?” I got out plates and silverware.

“He’s running some errands,” she said. “He should be back in an hour or two.”

We sat down to eat, and once we’d taken the edge off our hunger, she said: “Your father told me what the nurse said. About —”

“She wants me to use the girls’ locker room and bathrooms. Yeah. Dad said not to worry about it until somebody with more authority than her says so.”

“Not to worry about it, sure, but you should think about it. Do you think you should, now that your secret’s out?”

“No. Losing my penis didn’t make me a girl.”

“But the boys might think of you as a girl... I don’t know. We’ll support you, whatever you decide.”

I frowned. She’d said “the boys,” where Dad had said “the other boys.” Did that mean she really thought me as a girl now? Or was it just a slip of the tongue? She had been casual enough about me seeing her naked, the first few days when she needed help in the bathroom a lot, as though we were the same sex... I didn’t ask her what she meant; I was afraid of what she’d say.

“I’ve got a lot of homework to finish,” I said when I finished eating. I went to my room, but I didn’t start working on homework right away. I looked at my IM client. Nobody local I knew was online, but I chatted with a couple of guys I knew from DeviantART for a while, and scanned and uploaded a few of my best recent drawings, before I settled down to read some excruciatingly dull stuff by Ernest Hemingway for American Literature.

I didn’t leave the house that day, barely left my room except for meals. I was getting tired easily, my body using a lot of energy to heal from those bruises I guess, and I took a nap after lunch. Dad still wasn’t back from his errands when Mom and I ate lunch, and Mom didn’t seem very concerned about it. She asked me again if I’d decided about showering with the boys or the girls when I went back to school, and I said I was still thinking about it.

Later that evening Latisha was online, and we chatted for a little while.

obsidian14: feeling any better?

scribbler371: still really sore. no more dizziness thank god.

obsidian14: good. i guess.

scribbler371: did i tell you what the nurse said?

obsidian14: no. didn’t you see a doctor too?

scribbler371: yeah, at the hospital. i mean the school nurse, ms. turner. she said i should use the girls’ showers and bathrooms.

obsidian14: oh. that’s going to be weird. it sort of makes sense, but not really.

scribbler371: i’m glad you think it doesn’t make sense. anyway, i’m going to fight it and my parents say they’ll back me up.

obsidian14: good luck

scribbler371: hey, what about your brother? does everybody know about him?

obsidian14: yeah... that’s weird. he hasn’t talked much since we went back to school, he never talks as much as me, but it still seems weird i haven’t heard him say anything about p.e.

scribbler371: do you know if they’re making him use the girls’ showers and bathrooms and stuff?

obsidian14: no. i assumed not, because i thought i would have heard if they had, but i don’t really know. i don’t see him much at school and he doesn’t talk much at home. stays in his room most of the time, the last month or so.

Our school’s classrooms were arranged so that junior and seniors generally had their classes at the far end of the building from the freshmen and sophomores.

obsidian14: i’ll go ask him

scribbler371: wait. if he hasn’t said anything about it he might have a good reason...

But she didn’t reply for over fifteen minutes. I’d gone back to doing algebra homework when the IM client plinked again.

obsidian14: they did! he’s been showering with the girls and using the girls bathrooms for three weeks and didn’t say anything about it! i asked him if he protested and he said no, what would be the point?

scribbler371: man

obsidian14: i told you he’d been depressed, i didn’t realize how bad. before the changes he would have fought about that, like you’re doing.

scribbler371: what did the girls say about it?

obsidian14: i couldn’t get a clear answer out of him. i think they didn’t like it at first but they got used to it, or the teachers told them to shut up about it, or something. so many weird things are going on after the changes that a sort-of guy showering with the girls maybe isn’t weird enough to fuss about.

scribbler371: well, i’m going to make a fuss about it.

---

Sunday, we went only to morning church, and only to the worship service, not Sunday School. Several of the kids my age had apparently heard about me from friends at school; I could see them staring at me all through the service, though only a couple of them talked to me after the service while Mom and Dad were chatting with friends.

“Hey,” Abraham Mitter said, “I heard some guys at school talking about you — they were saying weird things, like you changed into a girl on Valentine’s Day, and I said no way, I know Jeffrey from church, but —”

“It’s not true, but I know why people are saying it,” I said. “Did they say anything about me falling and hitting my head?”

“No... what does that have to do with...?”

“I slipped and fell in the shower after P.E.   Several guys saw my crotch while I was knocked out for a few seconds, which I’d managed to keep them from seeing since V-Day; I look sort of like a girl, but I’m not really.”

“Were you in Athens?” Tom Porter asked. “I thought you said you were in Huntsville...”

“Yeah, I kind of lied about that.” Tom nodded understandingly; Abraham looked shocked.

“Why would you lie about it?”

“Dude, think about it. Have you ever lied to keep people from finding out something embarrassing? If not, go ahead and throw stones at me.” I turned around and walked over to where Dad was talking to Mr. Barnes.

Mr. Barnes said I should probably take a few days off from helping with the homebound ministry, to recover from my injuries. I said I was already a lot better, but I’d probably better rest after school for two or three days anyway, and maybe I could help out again toward the end of the week.

That afternoon, after lunch, I called Will’s house and asked his mom if it suited for me to come over. Mom heard me and asked if I felt recovered enough to go over there; she suggested I invite Will to come see me instead. I felt a lot less sore than I did Saturday, but I humored Mom and did as she suggested.

Will arrived about twenty minutes later. He chatted with my Mom for a minute, and then we went to my room.

“Dude, I’m sorry,” he said. “People were talking about you at the Saunders’ party — nobody’d seen you, but it seemed like everybody knew somebody who had.”

“Did you tell them about me like I asked?”

“Yeah, some people listened when I told them I knew you and what really happened. But they weren’t very interested in hearing about how you just had bruises and no concussion, they wanted to know about your junk. Sorry.”

“It was all centaurs, right?”

“Yeah. Keith and Tara wanted to dance, and they didn’t want any two-legs around making fun of us while we were figuring out what dance steps work for us now.”

“I guess that makes sense.” It was logical, but it didn’t make me feel any less left out. Of course, as bad as I was hurt I wouldn’t have enjoyed a party much anyway, but still.

He told me about the party, but it was an awkward subject; he asked me again how I was feeling, and I told him the bruises were better and I still hadn’t had any more concussion symptoms. Then we started playing Labyrinth of Knossos and were much more comfortable with each other as long as the game lasted.

“Sir,” I said, trying to stay calm and respectful, “could you please ask Ms. Turner not to refer to me with female pronouns?”

“Well,” he said, “we have to use some pronoun or other. Perhaps one of the English teachers can recommend a good gender-neutral pronoun.”

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 6 of 7

---

Monday was as bad as I’d feared, or worse. Dad was sleeping late before going to work in the afternoon; Mom had the day off. She hesitated about letting me go back to school so soon, but I said I felt fine, my bruises were mostly better. That was an exaggeration; it still hurt a little to sit normally — but I figured the sooner I went back to school, the sooner I could start correcting the rumors about me before they had too much time to spread and mutate.

“I’ll call Dr. Borenstein’s office to make an appointment as soon as they open,” she said just before I went out to catch the bus. “If she can squeeze you in today, I’ll call the school and tell them to pull you out of class and I’ll come pick you up.”

“I’d rather have a whole day at school,” I said; “I want to talk to people, tell them I’m not actually a girl whatever they might have heard, stuff like that.”

“Don’t push yourself too hard. Remember how tired you got Saturday... They’d better excuse you from P.E., but if your regular classes are wearing you out too much, have them call me and I’ll pick you up.”

“Bye,” I said.

As soon as I walked into homeroom, Mrs. Jessup said: “Jeffrey? Are you feeling all right?”

“Lots better,” I said. I could feel everybody staring at me.

“Ms. Turner sent me a note saying you might be out sick, but if you did show up, to send you to her clinic first thing.”

“I’m really okay,” I said, but I went to the clinic. So I didn’t have a chance to talk to anybody in homeroom, and I wouldn’t see Arnie again that day unless we happened to run into each other in the halls. I hoped he’d contradict any false rumors about me he heard, as I’d asked him to, but I wasn’t sure.

The nurse, Ms. Turner, looked surprised to see me.

“Did your father take you to the emergency room Friday afternoon as I recommended?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was like you thought, lots of bruises but no broken bones or concussion. Thanks for taking care of me,” I made myself add, though I was starting to dislike her.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “I can excuse you from P.E. for as long as necessary... do you have any paperwork from the emergency room or your doctor?”

“Um, no. I can ask my Mom or Dad for it and bring it in tomorrow.”

“Thank you. I’ll send Coach Renfrew a note — let’s say you’ll be out of P.E. through Wednesday at least, and longer if your doctor says you need to.”

“Okay. Thanks.” I turned to go, hoping I could talk to Arnie and other people in homeroom for a few minutes before first period.

“Wait,” she said, “there’s something else. In view of your change, I think it’s appropriate that you use the girls‘ locker rooms and showers when you return to P.E., and the girls’ bathrooms at other times.”

I hesitated, trying to find the most polite way to say “No way in hell,” and came up with, “I don’t think that would be appropriate, ma’am, and my parents agree.”

“Do you have a note from them to that effect?”

“No. I can get one tomorrow if you want.”

She pursed her lips, maybe wondering how far to push it. “I’ve spoken with the principal,” she said, “and he agrees with me. There’s precedent — we have another boy, former boy I should say, who was in the same change-region as yourself — she’s a senior, and the principal and her P.E. teacher ruled that she should use the girls' locker rooms and bathrooms.”

That was probably Latisha’s brother. “That’s interesting,” I said carefully. “Did the girls put up a fight about having a guy shower with them, or letting him in their bathroom...?”

“Briefly,” she said. “The girls in her P.E. class saw the need as soon as she changed clothes in front of them; I spoke with some other girls myself.”

“Have you been talking to people about me that way?”

“Only the principal, Coach Renfrew, and your other teachers.”

“Good. Because you don’t have as many people to apologize to when you go back and tell them I’m not actually a girl.”

Her eyes widened for a moment, then she bared her teeth, and said: “Come with me.” I followed her, reluctantly, to the principal’s office.

“Come in,” the principal said absently, and looked up at us from the paperwork on his desk. He was a Smyrna wolf, and after seeing my Dad and the wolves at church wearing less and less formal clothes as more time passed since the changes, it was surprising to see him in a suit, though it was probably of a looser cut than the ones he used to wear before he grew fur.

“Nan,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“This is the boy I mentioned to you Friday afternoon. Jeffrey Sergeyev. He’s an Athens neuter, but he was keeping the fact concealed until last Friday.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Yes, we have a couple of other Athens neuters among the student body. One was a girl, so there were no particular issues affecting her interaction with other students, but her older brother...” He turned from us to his computer and tapped several keys, probably switching windows to a student database, I figured.

“Hmm,” he said. “Coach Watson and some of the other students in his P.E. class fussed about having him shower with the boys, and we decided he should shower with the girls. And use the girls' bathrooms, too, — more for consistency than anything else.”

“Exactly. I told Jeffrey that was the policy, but she doesn’t accept it and says her parents disagree as well.”

There she was, not only saying I should use the girls' bathrooms but calling me “she” and “her”. Somehow, illogically, that made me madder than anything else.

“Sir,” I said, trying to stay calm and respectful, “could you please ask Ms. Turner not to refer to me with female pronouns?”

“Well,” he said, “we have to use some pronoun or other. Perhaps one of the English teachers can recommend a good gender-neutral pronoun.”

“I still identify as male, sir, although I’ve lost my male parts. I certainly haven’t gained any female parts, so there’s no reason to consider me a girl.”

“She has a vagina,” Ms. Turner put in. “That makes it inappropriate for her to shower with the boys. She urinates sitting down; it makes more sense for her to use the girls' restrooms where there are more toilets.”

“A pseudo-vagina, the doctors in Athens say. It’s not a vagina because it doesn’t connect to a womb, which I don’t have, and there are other differences too.” I was blushing bright enough as it was without going into details about those differences.

“It’s a vulva, anyway,” Ms. Turner corrected herself, scowling at being caught in a mistake. “It’s the external anatomy that’s relevant in this situation; in a case of Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, for instance, when someone has male genes and female external anatomy, they’re always considered female for purposes of using showers and restrooms even though they have no womb or ovaries.”

“Yes, exactly,” the principal said. “Jeffrey, I’m sorry, but this is school policy and I don’t see a good reason to make an exception. If your parents have an issue with it, I welcome a dialogue with them.”

“I don’t look like a girl at all, except with my pants down,” I added desperately. “If I walk into a girls' restroom they’ll scream and yell at me to get out, before I have a chance to duck into a stall or explain or anything.”

“We had some incidents like that with the other student I mentioned, but they were transitory,” he said. “Once the other girls learn your situation, they’ll be sympathetic and understanding — most of them, and the ones that don’t will hear from me personally about it. I guarantee that. That is all.”

I was so angry and frustrated that I didn’t think of asking the principal, or Ms. Turner, for a note to explain why I was late to Algebra. I explained to Ms. Tang after class, and she just nodded. “I had a note from Ms. Turner saying she wanted to examine you before first period, and you might be late to class, if you weren’t absent entirely due to your injuries. I’m glad you’re well enough to return to school.” She didn’t say anything about me being supposedly a girl, and I was glad.

Latisha had waited in the hall for me while I was talking to Ms. Tang. I walked with her as far as Ms. Killian’s biology class.

“The nurse wanted to see you again before school?” she asked.

“Yeah. Supposedly to examine me, but she didn’t actually look at my bruises again — she just laid down the law about me using the girls' restrooms and showers.”

“Sorry. My parents just found out about the school making Lyndon use the girls' showers and bathrooms, and Dad said he should have put up a fight about it, but Lyndon said there’s no point now. I guess he might be right, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fight it.”

“I did, and the nurse dragged me into the principal’s office and then he told me the same thing. They said Lyndon was a precedent, and also talked about somebody a few years ago, I’m not sure who, with some disease that makes you have a boy’s genes and girl’s body? Anyway, we argued about it and I lost.”

We parted when I got to Biology and Latisha continued on to her second-period American Literature class. I had a minute to talk to Will before class started, but we didn’t say much; I didn’t have time to tell him about the business with the nurse and the principal. It was hard to concentrate on the lesson, as interesting as Ms. Killian always made it, when I could feel people staring at me and hear them whispering about me. Ms. Killian interrupted and reprimanded a couple of people, but the staring continued.

After class, Ms. Killian asked me to stay for a little while.

“Ms. Turner sent me a note,” Ms. Killian said quietly when everyone else had gone. “She said you might be out of school a few days, from your injuries last Friday.”

“They weren’t as bad as we thought,” I said. “I’m still sore, but I can walk around and stuff.”

“She also said you were an Athens neuter.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry I lied to you about that. I didn’t tell anyone; it wasn’t just you.”

“How can I trust you? You’re doing this project on the Huntsville telepaths, and you lied about your relationship to them —”

“Not in the paper itself, ma’am. I just talk about what the people I interviewed said, and what the scientists studying the telepaths are saying. There’s nothing in it about what happened to me.”

“Hmm. Tell me about your study group — how is that going? Latisha is researching the Athens neuters; are you helping her more than just suggesting ideas for research?”

“No, ma’am. I just pointed her to some things to read, and reviewed her list of interview questions, and suggested some people she might interview. She did a lot of the same things for me and Tyrone.”

“Well... I’ll be looking at both your reports very carefully. I’m disappointed in you, Jeffrey. Don’t disappoint me again.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I won’t. Is that all?”

“You may go.”

The second bell for third period had rung by the time I left, and the halls were mostly deserted as I walked toward study hall. I needed to pee, and nobody was around to care which restroom I used; I did my business the boys' room, maybe for the last time.

At lunch, I got my tray and went to sit in my usual place; Tyrone and Lindsey were there, but not Latisha.

A minute or two later, Latisha came over, dragging her brother Lyndon by the hand.

“You two should talk,” she said. “I told Lyndon how you’re not giving in to them.”

“Is it doing any good?” he asked. He and Latisha sat down.

“Not yet,” I said. “But my parents said they’d support me — I’ll bring a note from them tomorrow, and one of them will probably go talk to the principal when they’ve got a day off work.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Good luck with that.”

“Why didn’t you fight over it?”

“There didn’t seem to be any point. I mean, I knew the girls would act weird about me showering with them, but how was that different from how the guys were treating me?”

“Um. I don’t know. I kept it secret until last Friday, from everyone but a couple of friends. And since it got out... I haven’t seen most of the guys I have P.E. with. In my other classes, people are just staring at me and whispering about me so far, nobody’s made fun of me out loud yet...”

The staring and whispering was going on even now; kids further up and down the table from us seemed to be listening with great interest to our conversation.

“Give it time,” he said, and laughed, a sharp cynical bark. “We’re not guys anymore, there’s no use pretending.”

“But we sure aren’t girls,” I argued.

“No, but everyone’s going to treat us as one or the other. Nobody knows what to do with us otherwise. Probably things are different in Hartwell and Athens, but around here they want to put you in the pink box or the blue box, and once they’ve seen you naked they can’t imagine putting you in the the blue box anymore.”

He got up and left us. Latisha told me that was the most he’d said in her hearing about it since they went back to school. We talked a little more during lunch, but I was so uncomfortable feeling all the eyes on me and seeing people stare at me that I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. Keisha and Wanda came by with their trays while Lyndon and I were talking, but they glanced at each other and kept walking, sitting down somewhere else with some other wolf girls. Tyrone and Lindsey didn’t talk much; only when we were done, Tyrone said: “Keep your chin up, man,” as he got up to take his and Lindsey’s trays back to the kitchen, and Lindsey gave me a shy smile.

It was the same for the next couple of classes; people stared at me and whispered, and one or two of them asked me questions about what happened to me, but not many. I told the truth to anybody that asked, but I couldn’t work up the nerve to break into people’s whispered conversations and tell them they were full of shit.

Between fifth and sixth periods I needed to pee. I decided to press my luck, and went into the boys' room near my American History classroom. I was opening the door of a stall when a Smyrna wolf who’d been standing at one of the urinals zipped up and turned around. It was a sophomore, I think, nobody I knew.

“Hey!” he said, looking at me. I ignored him and started into the stall. He grabbed me by the shoulder, right on one of the bruised places, and I yelped.

“What are you doing in here, cunt?” he said. “I heard about you. You’re really a girl.”

Another couple of Smyrna wolves, both taller than me, were at the sink; one turned to look at us and the other looked at us in the mirror while he washed his hands.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Let me go.”

“So why’s a girl coming into the men’s room?” he said. “You want some of this...?” He was still holding me by the shoulder; with his other hand he started to undo his zipper.

“Leave him alone, Carl,” one of the guys at the sink said. “Long as he does his business in the stall, it don’t matter what he’s got or don’t got.”

“'Sides, she’s not pretty enough for you, is she?” said the other, fastidiously drying his hands and looking at us in the mirror rather than directly. “All hairless and flat-chested. I heard she’s hairless down there, too. Ugh!”

The guy who’d been holding me by the shoulder pushed me away. “Get out,” he said, and growled.

Instead of leaving the restroom, I ducked into the stall, slammed the door and locked it. I didn’t drop my pants yet, though; I crossed my legs and held it as long as I could, hearing the wolves arguing and laughing, wondering if the big guy would try to climb over or crawl under the wall. The voices finally faded as they left the room, and I could finally relieve my bladder.

I was late to American History; Mr. Meredith might have excused me if I’d said I’d run into some bullies — I knew he was serious about that kind of thing — but I’d have had to tell him I’d been in the boys' room against the principal’s orders. I decided to keep quiet about it.

I told Will some of it on the bus on the way home; he commiserated with me but seemed kind of distracted. The jouncing of the bus made my bruises hurt worse, and by the time I got home I was ready to lie down on my stomach for a while. Mom wanted to know how my day went, though.

“The school nurse wants a copy of the paperwork from the hospital,” I said, figuring I’d start small. “And I need a note from you or Dad about using the boys' restrooms and showers and stuff.”

“I can do that.”

“It might also help if you go to the school and talk to the principal. He sounded like he’d made up his mind and wasn’t going to pay any attention to a polite note, but he might listen if you threaten to go to the school board with it or something.”

“Oh...? Did you talk to him, or just hear what he’d said?”

“The nurse wanted to see me as soon as I got to school. Then she took me to see the principal, and he told me it was school policy for guys like me to use the girls' restrooms and showers, and he wouldn’t listen to anything I said, but he said you were welcome to come talk to him.”

“Guys like you... Are there other boys at your school who were in Athens that day?”

“One other guy, a senior. I’ve met him a couple of times, but I don’t really know him.”

“Do you know if he and his parents objected to this policy?”

“He didn’t put up a fight over it, or even tell his parents, apparently, until a couple of days ago.”

“Really? How do you know that? I thought you said you didn’t know him...”

“I know his sister; she’s in my biology study group.”

So then Mom wanted to know about Latisha, how well did I know her and when I’d met her — she could tell she wasn’t a casual acquaintance or she wouldn’t have told me that about her brother.

“Are you interested in her?” she asked me.

“Well... not like that. We’re friends, we’re the only Athens neuters in our grade, but she’s not, like, my girlfriend. That wouldn’t make sense.”

“How did she feel when she found out you’d been lying to her?”

“I wasn’t — not for very long. I told her just a few days after school started back.”

“Hmm. So she’s a closer friend than some of the guys you’ve known for years, it sounds like — you didn’t tell them until you had to, did you?”

“Just Will.” I didn’t remind her that Will had already known I was going to spend that weekend in Athens.

“Well, I’m glad you’re making new friends in spite of all this trouble. How are other people treating you?”

I told her some about people staring at me and whispering, but I downplayed it, and I didn’t say anything about the bullies in the restroom.

“They’ll gossip about it for a few days, I expect, and then they’ll move on to some other scandal. Be patient. I’ll go talk to the principal tomorrow, probably, just before I pick you up for your appointment with Dr. Borenstein.”

“When’s that?”

“Tomorrow at two.”

---

Tuesday, I went to study hall after Biology. I was summoned from there to the office; Mom was waiting for me in the outer office.

“I’ve signed you out,” she said; “we’re running late for your doctor’s appointment. Let’s go.”

“Did you talk to the principal?” I asked as we left. “Oh — how are we getting there?” Mom was as strong as she was going to get, but we still didn’t have a car whose driver’s seat she could fit into.

“On the bus.” One of the new county bus routes stopped right by the school, but we had to change buses in downtown Marietta before we got to Dr. Borenstein’s office.

“I talked to the principal,” she continued as we got to the bus stop. I sat on the bench; Mom continued standing. “He... I think he made some good points.”

“Mom! You said you were going to stand up for me!”

“I know, honey, but — it wouldn’t be honest to just go to him and tell him I insisted on you using the boys' locker room and bathrooms, without listening to what he had to say.”

“What did you decide?”

“Nothing final. I said you felt uncomfortable using the girls‘ showers or bathrooms, and he said it was more important whether the boys or girls would be more uncomfortable having you shower with them. There’s going to be some awkwardness either way, we can’t avoid that. And — I said you were biologically no more a girl than you are a boy, now, so there was no reason the school should make you use the girls’ rooms, they should let you use whichever you’re more comfortable with. I thought that would give you more flexibility, if you change your mind later —”

“I won’t.” The bus pulled up in front of us, and we got on.

“Well, it seemed like a good idea to keep your options open. After a while you might decide the boys are too hostile to you showering with them and you want to take your chances with the girls.”

“It’s not going to be easy, I guess, but I need to stick to my guns, or people won’t take me seriously.” I thought about the bully in the bathroom yesterday, and whether that was going to get more common or less; I had no idea.

“Anyway. He agreed that I was right about the basic biology of it, but disagreed that it was relevant — he said your external anatomy is all the school cares about, and that’s basically feminine, even if you can’t have children. He said they didn’t inquire into whether other staff or students were fertile, just — um — what plumbing they have.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said yesterday.”

“So he didn’t give way, and I didn’t have anything more to say, but I didn’t want to give up, so I repeated myself a couple of times, and he repeated himself a couple of times, and then I saw what time it was and said I needed to take you to the doctor.”

“Okay... Thanks for trying.” I didn’t say much else for a while. I wondered if I would have been better off having Dad argue with the principal instead; maybe so, but it would have meant waiting several days, maybe until after I’d already gone back to P.E., before Dad would have another day off and could go meet the principal. Dad still thought of me as a boy, and fully agreed with me that I ought to be using the boys' showers and bathrooms, while Mom — I wasn’t sure. I suspected she thought I was wrong but was humoring me anyway, that she thought of me as a girl who hadn’t figured out she was a girl yet. Or maybe she was just more realistic about what it meant for me to be a neuter, neither the one nor the other — that would make sense of her saying I should keep my options open.

When we got to the clinic, I told Dr. Borenstein’s nurse, Mindy (a centaur), about falling in the shower Friday, and what the doctor at the emergency room had said. Mom gave her a copy of the discharge paperwork from the emergency room, and said: “Jeffrey needs a full physical, too. He hasn’t been to the doctor since Valentine’s Day.”

“Where were you then?” Mindy asked me.

“Athens,” I said.

“Athens, Georgia?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll let Dr. Borenstein know.” She finished checking my vital signs and left us alone for a while.

“Jeffrey,” Mom said when we’d been sitting there quiet for a minute or two, before I could focus again on the section of my algebra textbook I was trying to wrap my brain around, “Dr. Borenstein is going to need to examine your new parts.”

“Oh... yeah. I guess so.”

“Do you want me to stay in the room for that, or leave?”

I wasn’t sure. “Um... what’s it like?”

“I’m not sure it will be the same for you, exactly, but...” She explained what was involved in a pelvic exam, for an old-style human woman, and I blushed red enough to give Joe McCarthy a heart attack. I dithered for another minute or two about whether it would be more embarrassing to have her with me, or more scary to go through it alone, and finally asked her to stay.

Dr. Borenstein turned out to be an Allatoona otter. She walked in looking at the papers from the hospital, and she asked me some questions about the accident, and how I’d been feeling since then; but also about all sorts of other things — everything she would ask about every time I came to see her — and about the Athens change. Then she finally started examining me.

As it turned out, the (pseudo-)vaginal exam was both worse and better than I expected. Worse, because Dr. Borenstein was constantly muttering under her breath about how odd and fascinating my nethers were. Better, because I don’t think it lasted as long as it would have if I’d had everything she would have needed to examine if I’d had it. The pseudo-vagina was just a shallow cavity that didn’t connect to a womb, and it didn’t have the complex structure she expected a girl’s parts to have. And I’m not as sensitive down there as a girl is — or a boy, for that matter; maybe that’s why it didn’t hurt like I expected.

The rest of the physical was about like usual, except that she did some extra tests of my reflexes and stuff to make sure I didn’t have delayed symptoms of a concussion, and she spent extra time checking the bruised areas too. She said I could go back to P.E. next Monday, which gave me more time to argue the school into letting me use the boys' showers.

I asked her if she could write a note to the school saying I wasn’t actually a girl and didn’t have any business using the girls' restrooms or showers.

“Hmm,” she said. “You still think of yourself as a boy, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am. Sort of. I mean, I know I’m not a boy, biologically, but I still think like one, and I’m certainly not a girl either.”

“Well... I can write a note saying that you’re neither a boy nor a girl, medically speaking, if that’s what you want. And I could say that you identify as a boy and ought to be treated as one... but that might sound more convincing coming from a psychologist or psychiatrist than a general practitioner.”

I looked at Mom. “I don’t think I need a psychologist,” I said, “but if it would help convince the principal to let me use the boys' showers and bathrooms, I guess it would be worth it.”

“Maybe it would help,” Mom said slowly. “Some counseling about the things you’re going through at school might do some good — you mentioned people staring at you and gossiping about you in the last couple of days. Dr. Borenstein, could you write us a referral?”

“Sure,” she said. “Do you have someone in mind, or do you want me to recommend someone?”

“Yes and yes,” she said. “I know someone at church who’s a clinical psychologist and does counseling, but if you can recommend someone too, I’ll check with our insurance and see if either or both of them are in the network.”

We changed buses twice on the way home; the last bus stop was at the entrance of our subdivision, and we had a fair way to walk to get home. I was tired long before Mom was, mostly I guess because I was using a lot of energy to heal from those bruises. The suspension on the county public transit buses were better than on the school buses, but they still hadn’t done my back any favors; I crashed as soon as we got home, reading my history textbook for a few minutes and then falling asleep.

---

I took Dr. Borenstein’s note to the office next morning before going to homeroom. The receptionist asked if I needed to see the principal or just wanted her to give him the note; I figured there wasn’t any point in confronting him again, since he’d already conceded what Dr. Borenstein said in her note, and didn’t think it mattered.

I got to Algebra early enough to talk to Latisha for a couple of minutes. “Where were you yesterday?” she asked.

“I had a doctor’s appointment,” I said. “Following up with my family doctor after the emergency room visit last week.”

“Oh. What did they say?”

“The bruises are healing fine, and there’s still no sign of a concussion.” I kind of wanted to talk to her about the exam, and about being referred to a psychologist, but not in front of other people.

When I saw Will in Biology, I didn’t say anything about being referred to a psychologist; I told him my parents were arguing with the school about me using the boys‘ or girls’ restrooms and neither side had backed down yet. Latisha and I talked again at lunchtime, but not about anything important.

I was thinking I’d call Latisha or IM chat with her that night, but what with taking half a day off school the day before and not helping with the homebound ministry for the last few days, I’d forgotten what day it was; Mom and I went to church that night, and I didn’t have time to talk to Latisha — or Will — privately until Thursday after school.

In spite of the principal’s edict, I kept using the boy’s restrooms, and for a few days nobody reported on me. Some guys gave me dirty looks, and a couple of times they made fun of me, but there was nothing as bad as the bullies I’d run into on Monday.

Thursday evening, I ate supper with Dad — it was the first time I’d seen him since Sunday, with him sleeping until I was gone to school and being at work until after I went to bed. We talked about school and the principal’s stupid policy and Dr. Borenstein referring me to a psychologist.

“It might be a good idea, but you should be prepared to take it seriously,” he said. “You want someone to tell the school they ought to let you keep using the boys' showers and bathrooms, but a good psychologist, like Dr. Ceccato at church, isn’t going to just rubber-stamp what you’ve decided to do — he’s going to dig into your thoughts and motivations and help you figure out what you ought to do, whether you like it or not.”

“And you think maybe he would agree with the principal — and Mom?”

Dad flattened his ears. “I don’t know. Your mother and I both want what’s best for you, but — maybe Henry Grady High just isn’t it. I’m afraid trouble with the boys or the girls or both is going to be inevitable, if you’re the only one like you at your school. Would you want to go to school in Athens, if we can work it out?”

I gaped at him. “You mean, we’d move there? Close to Uncle Mike?”

“Maybe. It depends on various factors, whether your mother or I or both can find jobs in Athens over the summer, and whether Athens has good enough public transit for your mother’s needs. We probably can’t afford a car customized for her build, not if we’re moving this year. But another possibility — I talked with your uncle about it this afternoon — is that you could live with him during the school year, and come back to live with us in the summer. We’d visit often on weekends, of course, one direction or another...”

“I don’t know. It would be... It would avoid a lot of trouble, I guess, but all my friends are here; I don’t know anybody in Athens except Uncle Mike.”

“Let’s think about it more later, then. See how these issues at school work out. And if you think it would help to talk to someone other than us about it, we’ll find someone — Dr. Ceccato or somebody just as good.”

A little later, after I’d gone to my room and done some homework, Latisha came online and we chatted.

scribbler371: have your parents talked about moving to hartwell or athens or somewhere around there?

obsidian14: a little, yeah. but there aren’t as many jobs in hartwell. that’s why we moved here when i was little.

scribbler371: my parents are talking about sending me to live with my uncle mike next year. or moving the whole family there if they can find jobs in athens. so i won’t be the only athens neuter boy in my classes.

obsidian14: that might be good for you. but i’d miss you.

scribbler371: i’d miss you too. and will, and arnie, even though arnie doesn’t have much time for me lately with his new friends. all my friends are here.

obsidian14: so tell them you want to stay. even if you lose this fight with the principal and have to use the girls' rooms, that wouldn’t be as bad as losing contact with all your friends, right?

scribbler371: ...probably not.

obsidian14: what’s the worst that could happen?

scribbler371: i dunno. people get used to seeing me going in and out of the girls' restrooms and start thinking of me as a girl?

obsidian14: that bad, huh?

scribbler371: be serious!

obsidian14: i am.

scribbler371: but no, it could be worse. i didn’t tell you yet about that wolf who threatened me monday

obsidian14: what???

scribbler371: in the guys' bathroom, monday afternoon. this wolf grabbed me and called me a girl, and bad names for girls, and asked if i wanted to have sex with him, and stuff. there were a couple of other wolves there, maybe his friends. one of them told him to leave me alone, and he did after a minute. the other was making fun of me too but didn’t hit me or anything.

obsidian14: omg! what did the teachers do when you told them?

scribbler371: i didn’t. i don’t know the guys' names.

obsidian14: you’ve got to tell somebody next time.

scribbler371: sure, if they do worse than call me names.

obsidian14: even if it’s just that. promise me.

scribbler371: i’m not sure it’s a good idea. i don’t want to get a reputation as somebody who runs to the teacher whenever something bad happens.

obsidian14: promise me. at least if they touch you, even slightly. much less grab you like that, or hit you.

scribbler371: ...okay. anyway, nothing that bad has happened since then. eventually i figure they’ll get used to me, probably, and stop picking on me when they see i can take it like a man. but if i start using the girls' rooms like the principal wants...

obsidian14: some girls are going to pick on you too. call you a peeping tom or whatever.

scribbler371: yeah, and the guys, too, worse than before.

obsidian14: you just have to stand up to them, guys and girls both.

scribbler371: yeah.

obsidian14: in athens or hartwell the bullies wouldn’t pick on you for the same reasons, but you’d have to make new friends from scratch. and you might get picked on for being new in town or being geeky or anything else.

scribbler371: yeah. might not be any better. i’d rather stay here.

obsidian14: i hope you do.

scribbler371: so, i told you i went to the doctor

obsidian14: yeah, they said you’re getting better right?

scribbler371: yeah. the bruises are healing, and still no sign of a concussion. it was a routine physical, except. um.

obsidian14: ?

scribbler371: it was weird and embarrassing but i sort of want to talk to somebody about it and maybe you don’t mind...?

obsidian14: what?

obsidian14: ...oh. i see.

scribbler371: so, yeah. the doctor poked around between my legs and muttered about how fascinating it was. i don’t think she’d ever seen one of us before.

obsidian14: probably not. i haven’t been to a doctor since the changes. i don’t know if it’s going to be worse or better than last time. i’m sure it was worse for you than usual.

scribbler371: yeah. it was like, i’ve gotten used to sitting down to pee and that doesn’t bother me much anymore, i can still think of myself as a guy, but now my doctor is poking around inside me as if i were a girl, in ways she couldn’t poke around if i were still a guy, and... i don’t know.

obsidian14: you still act like a guy. that’s the important thing, i think.

scribbler371: thanks.

obsidian14: and she couldn’t poke around very deep, like she would on a real girl.

scribbler371: thank god. yeah, it could have been even worse.

obsidian14: don’t i know it.

obsidian14: what i think is, we’re something new, and we shouldn’t let people tell us that we’re girls or guys, or assume that we want to be girls or guys just because we used to be. but we can be if we want. it’s cool if you want to keep being a guy, as much as being a guy is about how you act instead of what parts you have. does that make sense?

scribbler371: yeah. thanks, i needed to hear that.

obsidian14: it’s like, the wolves can’t digest anything but meat now. like we can’t have kids. and for some of them, like vegetarians, that hurt a lot. but mostly, they haven’t let that get them all depressed. and being wolves doesn’t say who they are, it’s not like all wolves have to be aggressive because they’re carnivores or something.

scribbler371: yeah. i mean, lyndon and i didn’t react to this thing the same way, and my uncle mike is different again, and all the other guys in athens or hartwell or in between reacted to it a little bit differently.

obsidian14: but it’s not just reacting. it’s deciding who you want to be.

scribbler371: yeah. — i asked my doctor to write a letter to the principal saying i was still a guy inside — in my head, you know what i mean — and she said she wasn’t sure she should, she’s a family doctor and not a psychiatrist. or is it psychologist? but she wrote a letter to our insurance company saying maybe i should see one. one of those.

obsidian14: oh

scribbler371: she didn’t say i was crazy or anything, just that it could be good if i talk to somebody like that about the way kids at school are treating me and stuff. i haven’t gone to see one yet. mom and dad are figuring out who to send me to.

obsidian14: i hope that goes okay.

scribbler371: thanks.

“Most of you already know Jeffrey Sergeyev,” Ms. Turner said in a loud voice. “She will be using the girls' facilities from now on, as I explained Friday. Please be courteous to her.”

“Ignore the bit where she called me ‘she’ and ‘her’,” I said to the girls nearest me.

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 7 of 7

---

This short novel is in the same setting as my earlier novelette “Butterflies are the Gentlest.” They take place simultaneously, but there are no characters in common; I reckon you could read them in either order. I’m calling the setting itself “the Valentine Divergence”; if anyone else wants to write stories in this setting, feel free.

An earlier version of this novel was serialized on the tg_fiction mailing list from December 2011 to January 2012.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. You can also create derivative works, including adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story and release your own stories or adaptations under the same license.

---

With their work schedules, it wasn’t unusual for me to go all day sometimes without seeing Mom, or Dad, or both. When I was little, they would arrange their schedules so one of them was always off work when I was home from school, which often meant they didn’t see much of each other during the week. But in the last couple of years, since they trusted me to take care of myself at least for a few hours after school, they would try to both work the same days so they could both be off at the same time.

Not so much since Mom went back to work after the change. They didn’t have full control over their work schedules, of course; they often had to work inconvenient times to cover for co-workers who covered for them at other times, or in crises when they needed more nurses or paramedics on duty than usual. So I didn’t put it together right away. But while I was eating breakfast with Dad before school Friday morning, I realized I hadn’t seen Mom and Dad at the same time since we got home from church last Sunday, and the only time I saw them together during the previous week was when Dad and I went to see Mom at the hospital. Either one was working while the other was off, or Dad was out running errands — errands that took longer than they should — while Mom was at home, or Dad was working in the yard while Mom did stuff in the house. They must have talked together about me and my problems at school sometime, but I didn’t know when; obviously not at mealtimes, and not in bed at night since Dad started sleeping in the guest bedroom. I started worrying even more about them; were they systematically avoiding each other, or was it just bad luck with work schedules the last couple of weeks? And if they were avoiding each other like that, could they stay married? And if not, what would happen to me?

I still couldn’t bring myself to ask Dad outright about that stuff during breakfast. And by the time I got through the first couple of periods at school, I was worrying more about my own problems. This was the last day I was excused from P.E., and unless something changed over the weekend, Coach Renfrew would probably make me use the girls‘ locker room and shower next Monday. Weird, right? Two months ago, the idea of going in the girls’ locker room — or being ordered to do so by the coach — would be like “Please don’t throw me in that brier patch!” But now, well, it was like it would be the last irrevocable stage of becoming a girl, socially. And without any of the benefits of being a girl, like in one of those vaguely perverted manga where a guy gets turned into a girl. Just the worst of both worlds, being seen as an ugly girl by the guys and as a peeping Tom by the girls.

By this time I was trying to avoid drinking much with breakfast and lunch, and then avoid dehydration by drinking a couple of big glasses of water as soon as I got home after school. But I still needed to go to the bathroom a couple of times Friday. The first time, between study hall and lunch, wasn’t too bad — there were a couple of other guys in there when I went in, and they looked at me oddly but didn’t say anything. When I came out of the stall after doing my business, a centaur who was just coming in called me a bitch and said I should go to the girls' room, but I just ignored him and washed my hands. He went into the stall I’d vacated. (A male Marietta centaur can pee standing up just fine, of course; but the way they’re built, it’s tricky for them to use a urinal built for old-style human males without risk of messing up their clothes or getting pee on the floor. Eventually the school and most other public places around Marietta installed trough-urinals designed for centaur males in their men’s rooms, but at this point the centaurs were using the stall toilets whenever they were available.)

The second time, just before American History, I ran into Mr. Meredith, who was just zipping up his pants and heading for the sink when I walked in.

“Jeffrey,” he said, before I could go into the stall, “I saw your name mentioned in a memo from Ms. Turner. She said that you’re supposed to use the girls' restrooms.”

I had known something like this would happen eventually, and I’d rehearsed a response. I managed to remember most of what I’d planned to say.

“My parents and I are disputing her arbitrary ruling, sir,” I said, though really nothing more had happened since Mom’s wussy talk with the principal Tuesday. “As you can see, I’m still male in general appearance, which makes it inappropriate for me to use the girls' facilities.”

A couple of centaur guys walked in while I was talking, and they took the last couple of unoccupied stalls.

Mr. Meredith frowned. “I sympathize. But for the moment, that is school policy, and I have to enforce it even if I don’t agree. Please leave.”

I stood there for a second or two, and then walked out. I stood in the hall, kids rushing past me in both directions, thinking for several seconds about trying to hold my bladder all through sixth period and the bus ride home — and regretfully walked into the girls' restroom.

Just my luck: it was pretty crowded. All the stalls were occupied, there were three girls at the sink, two centaurs and a chameleon, and a wolf and another centaur were standing around waiting for an empty toilet stall. All of them reacted to my entrance.

“Yah!” — “What are you doing here?” — “Get out!” — “Pervert!” — “Hi, Jeffrey.”

“Hi, Kelly,” I said to the only girl I recognized, the chameleon — she was in my P.E. class. “Ladies, believe me, no one regrets my presence here more than I do, but I have no choice; I am under orders from Mr. Meredith, who is under orders from the principal.”

“It’s okay,” Kelly said, “I know him. He’s really a girl, kind of. The nurse told us that he’s going to be showering with us when he’s well enough to come back to P.E.”

“You’re not helping,” I said. “It’s true that I have to sit down to pee, since Valentine’s Day, but that’s about all I have in common with you. The school nurse and the principal seem to think that girls are defined by the plumbing facilities they require — I suggest you add your complaints to mine, and perhaps we’ll get somewhere.”

As I spoke, the centaurs who’d been washing their hands or freshening their makeup or whatever stomped out, glaring at me as they passed. The door of one of the stalls opened and Lindsey Babcock came out.

“Jeffrey!” she said. “Are they making you use the girls' bathroom now?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. The wolf who’d been waiting stepped into the stall behind her, giving me a strange look as she closed the door.

“So what’s up with you?” the other centaur asked. “Kelly said you’re sort of a girl? You don’t look like one.”

“I’m not,” I said. “But I’m no longer male, strictly speaking — nobody who was in Athens on Valentine’s Day is either male or female.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard about that. So you’ve got a vagina, but no breasts?” she asked.

“It’s not really a vagina,” I insisted, but Kelly was saying: “Yeah, the guys in our P.E. class were talking about it after they saw him in the showers.”

“All right,” the centaur girl said, “I don’t like it, but if they won’t let you use the guys' bathroom, I’m not going to kick you out.”

Not helping. Lindsey washed her hands and listened in, but didn’t say anything more for the moment.

“What do you mean, it’s not really a —?” Kelly asked, and then interrupted herself: “I’m sorry. Are you okay? They said you hit your head pretty bad —”

“I was just bruised,” I said. “They excused me from P.E. this week, but I’ll probably be back Monday. I’ll be showering with you unless I can get the principal to change his mind by then — it would help if you and the other girls in the class all complain and get your parents to phone the principal too...”

“I guess it’s okay,” Lindsey said. “I mean, I’ve noticed you don’t stare at girls' breasts like other guys do. You’re not going to stare at us in the locker room, are you?”

“I’ll try not to,” I said, “but I’d rather —”

A sophomore wolf girl came out of a stall, and the centaur went in after her. “What’s he doing here?” the wolf asked, and bared her teeth.

“It’s okay,” Kelly said, “he’s like an honorary girl, everything but boobs.”

“No ovaries or womb either,” I added hastily. “I’m neither one nor the other, biologically, but I’m still a guy psychologically.”

“Hey, if you think like a guy then you shouldn’t be showering with us,” Kelly said.

“That’s what I keep telling the principal, but —”

“I heard some of what y’all were saying,” the wolf interrupted. “I think she should show us what she’s got before we let her do her business in here.”

“Gross!” Lindsey said, and stuck out her tongue. When a Valdosta frog sticks out her tongue at you, you know you’ve been tongue-stuck-out at.

“Not going to happen,” I insisted. “And don’t call me ‘she.’”

“Whatever,” the wolf said. “I’ve got to get to class.” She ran out without washing her hands.

I took the next open stall, without giving the astonished centaur sophomore coming out of it time to say anything. I was late to class, but Mr. Meredith didn’t say anything about it.

---

I had a fair amount of homework to do that weekend, but I procrastinated Friday evening, going over to Will’s house to play video games after school and then staying up late chatting with Latisha. Late Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed to go to the bathroom, then sat down at my desk and looked at the pile of papers and textbooks confronting me. I decided to procrastinate a few minutes more, and checked my email and IM.

Latisha was on IM.

obsidian14: are you there? have you checked your email? read it now!

I had several new emails, including one from Uncle Mike and one from Latisha. The subject line on the one from Latisha just said: “OMG read this!!!!”. The one from Uncle Mike was more helpfully titled: “Hermaphrodites, not neuters”. I opened both of them.

Uncle Mike had sent me a link to an article in that morning’s Athens Banner-Herald. I clicked on it, and read about how a couple from Athens on their honeymoon — honeymoon? what was the point of getting married anymore, for us? — had gone camping in the Florida Everglades, where something about the environmental conditions had apparently triggered a metamorphosis. They’d grown huge white flowers in their crotches, right above the pseudo-vagina, and the flowers lasted several days before the petals fell off. And when they returned home to Athens and doctors examined them, they found that they had wombs — both of them, the former man as well as the former woman.

And apparently, both of their flowers had both pistils and stamens. Thanks, Ms. Killian, I know what that means.

I opened Latisha’s email. She’d sent me links to that newspaper article, and to an article in the Flagpole, the Athens alternative weekly, and a couple of blog posts talking about it — one guy was posting from a motel in Valdosta, where he and his wife were staying the night on the way to the Everglades to “try to reproduce the experiment.”

I sat there reading for a few minutes before I remembered that Latisha was online waiting for me to reply. I switched to the IM window.

scribbler371: ok, i read those articles. wow.

obsidian14: it’s pretty awesome. i went and woke mom and dad up and told them as soon as i checked my google alerts this morning.

scribbler371: yay google

obsidian14: they were pissed until they woke up good and understood what i was saying

scribbler371: and then?

obsidian14: mom started dancing, and dad smiled and kissed her. and they shooed me out of their bedroom. and i went and emailed you. what have you been doing?

scribbler371: sleeping late.

obsidian14: so what do you think?

scribbler371: i’m still taking it all in. i was just barely getting used to being neuter, and now i’m apparently a hermaphrodite. i don’t think that’s going to change the principal’s mind, but it’s worth a try.

obsidian14: cause you’re both a guy and a girl, not neither one. and so am i! hey, maybe i could tell him i want to use the guys' bathroom.

scribbler371: better not

obsidian14: j/k

scribbler371: so i guess now you’ve got a lot of extra work to do on your report

obsidian14: oh yeah. i’m gonna email you some more interview questions in a little while, before i send them to the people i interviewed before. tell me what you think about them?

scribbler371: okay

obsidian14: and hey, can i interview you now that you’re out?

scribbler371: sure. i’ll go through those questions you sent earlier and answer them.

obsidian14: thx

scribbler371: so what do you think it was? the banner-herald just said “environmental conditions”, and the flagpole was talking about insect pheremones and stuff — they said there were a bunch of athenians going to beaches in florida since the changes and the heat down there didn’t trigger this metamorphosis

obsidian14: i don’t know. it might be it’s more humid in the swamp than on the beach? or the salt air hinders it? thing is why in florida, and not in athens? do we have to be like migratory birds, going south to mate?

scribbler371: maybe the weather in athens will be right for it later in the year

obsidian14: maybe. it’s kind of weird and scary, though. we might grow those flowers any time and then we could get pregnant whenever a bee or butterfly lands on our flowers...

scribbler371: now that’s a scary thought

obsidian14: catholics aren’t going to be allowed to use bug spray

scribbler371: yeah, drugstores are gonna keep bug zappers and flypaper behind the counter like condoms

obsidian14: and beekeepers are gonna be really popular.

scribbler371: eww. human-flower honey? wouldn’t that be cannibalism?

obsidian14: no, it would be like milk. there was a company that made ice cream from human women’s milk but the government made them stop.

scribbler371: i bet they won’t allow people to sell honey made from human flowers either.

obsidian14: ohh...

scribbler371: what?

obsidian14: i think mom and dad just turned the thermostat up. way up.

---

Mom had to work that Sunday, so Dad and I went to church by ourselves. We talked with Mr. and Mrs. Barnes after service; I said I felt pretty much recovered, and we decided I’d go visit some people after school Tuesday with Mr. Barnes and some others Thursday with Dad.

Monday arrived, and I still didn’t have a solution for P.E. When I arrived at the gym, the coach and the nurse were both waiting for me.

“I heard you’ve been ignoring school policy and using the boys' restrooms,” Ms. Turner said. “I came here to make sure you understand that we’re not going to ignore you and let you do whatever you want.”

“You need to use the girls' locker room,” Coach Renfrew said. He looked like he wasn’t sure he agreed with Ms. Turner, but wasn’t going to disagree with her in front of me.

“My stuff is in my locker in the guys' locker room,” I pointed out.

“I’ll go with you to get it,” he said.

“The girls don’t want me showering with them,” I said as we walked toward the door of the locker room. “Y’all are going to be in hot water with their parents by this time tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Ms. Turner came by and gave the girls a talk after class last Friday. I think most of them understand your situation now.”

“You know about what they just discovered over the weekend?” I said. “We’re not neither male nor female like we thought, we’re both.”

“Yes, Latisha told me a few minutes ago. I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything.”

When we walked into the locker room, everybody stared at me. Before anybody else could say anything mean, Tyrone said: “Hi, Jeffrey. Good to see you’re well again.”

“Jeffrey is just here to get his things out of his locker,” Coach Renfrew said. “As Ms. Turner explained Friday, he will be using the other locker room from now on.”

“Makes sense,” someone muttered.

Even though nobody was naked, they all seemed a little tense while I was getting my stuff out of my locker; nobody took anything off while I was there and a couple of guys who’d been partway through changing put their gym shorts on over their jockeys in such a hurry that they stumbled over their own feet. I could see they didn’t want me there any more than the girls wanted me showering with them.

Ms. Turner was waiting for us outside the boys‘ locker room, and she walked with me across the gym to the girls’ locker room.

“This will be a little awkward at first,” she said, “but it’s really what makes most sense. I’m sure you know that, even if you won’t admit it to yourself.”

I didn’t reply. We walked in.

“Most of you already know Jeffrey Sergeyev,” Ms. Turner said in a loud voice. None of the girls were naked, but a few were in their underwear, and one was in the process of changing into a sports bra; she kept her back turned to us. “She will be using the girls' facilities from now on, as I explained Friday. Please be courteous to her.”

“Ignore the bit where she called me ‘she’ and ‘her’,” I said to the girls nearest me.

“Jeffrey, find an empty locker and get changed. I’ll be back near the end of class before you shower.” Ms. Turner left the room.

“Take your stuff and go change in yonder behind a curtain,” one of the girls said, pointing to the showers, “not here in front of us. We’ll figure something out about the actual showering later.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, starting to move in that direction. “If you all ask your parents to phone the principal and complain, we won’t have to put up with this for more than a couple of days —”

“A couple of days is too much,” Teresa Tapley said angrily. She had four arms, and was still struggling into her imperfectly modified T-shirt. “What about if you just don’t shower after P.E.? The kids in the rest of your classes can put up with your sweat stink for as long as it takes us to get the principal to change his mind. You can tell them we wouldn’t let you near our showers and the coach wouldn’t let you into the boys' showers.”

“Yeah,” Kelly said. “I mean, Jeffrey’s a nice guy, and I know the nurse says he doesn’t have a guy’s equipment anymore but he says he still thinks like a guy. He shouldn’t be looking at us while we change clothes, much less shower.”

“Stop being silly,” Latisha said. “I’ve been trying to tell you — we just found out we’re hermaphrodites, not neuters. That means Jeffrey’s got as much right to be here as I do —”

Or as you have to be in the boys' locker room, I thought.

“— And my brother’s been showering with the senior girls for a month now, and they’ve gotten used to it. It’s a stupid policy, sure, but you don’t have to be crybabies about it.”

“Thanks, Latisha,” I said. “I’ll go change in one of the shower stalls — we can talk more about this later.”

By the time I came out of the shower stall in my gym clothes, all the girls had finished changing and left the room except for Latisha. I stashed my regular clothes, towels and toiletries in an empty locker and went out into the gym with her.

I don’t even remember what we did in gym that day, I was so distracted. We might have been playing Coach Renfrew’s new mutant volleyball game, we did that a lot, but I’m not sure. No, it was probably his mutant basketball, because the teams were mingling chaotically instead of staying on opposite sides of a net. I do remember that a couple of guys who bumped into me in the course of the game said “Watch where you’re going, bitch,” or worse things. It was an active game, whatever it was, and I was as sweaty as I ever get when I went off to the locker room with the girls.

Ms. Turner must have gotten held up by a crisis with an actual sick or injured student, because she didn’t come back to chaperon like she’d said. I walked into the locker room to find Teresa and a couple of like-minded girls standing in the doorway between the locker area and the showers.

“You’re not coming in here,” Teresa said. “Change into your long pants and get out of here.”

I wondered if that might be a good idea. Latisha spoke up before I could decide what to say:

“You must not want me in there either,” she said. “I’m as much a guy as he is. If he can’t shower today, I can’t.”

“Suit yourself,” Teresa said with a shrug. Four arms and as many breasts made for an impressive shrug.

“Oh, come on,” Lindsey said. “When Jeffrey said he still thinks like a guy, he means he still likes violent video games and superhero comics and stuff like that. But he doesn’t look at your breasts instead of your face when he’s talking to you, like most guys. Look; Jeffrey and I are going to undress and go in yonder to the showers, and we’re going to have a conversation, and he’s going to maintain eye contact with me the whole time. Right, Jeffrey?”

“Right,” I said, and swallowed hard. I started taking off my clothes as she did.

“Ms. Turner’s a bitch, isn’t she?” Lindsey said as she pulled her T-shirt off.

“Cast-iron,” I said. “On a power trip.” I took off my T-shirt, then my shoes and socks.

“I bet she’s sleeping with the principal,” Lindsey said, taking off her sports bra and her shorts.

I thought about that while I took off my gym shorts. “You might be right. She does seem to have more influence over him than you’d expect from her official position...” I took a deep breath, stood up and pulled down my underwear. I made sure I was standing facing Teresa and her cronies, not toward the wall of lockers, and I took a long pause before I wrapped a towel around my waist and headed toward the showers beside Lindsey.

“No,” Teresa said, but she was starting to look uncertain. Lindsey ignored her, and said to me, “Why do you reckon she’s got it in for you and Latisha’s brother?”

“Probably just a power trip,” I said, keeping my eyes on hers. It wasn’t all that hard. “She sees an excuse to meddle with our lives for supposedly medical reasons, and she gets bored sitting in that clinic all day with not as many students getting sick since the changes...”

Finally Teresa’s friends moved aside and Lindsey and I walked into the showers. We kept gossiping about the nurse and the principal until a free shower opened and I stepped into it, nodding casually to the chameleon girl coming out of it.

I hadn’t actually maintained eye contact with Lindsey at every moment. I looked at my shoes while I was untying them, and I think I did glance over her body briefly. But we managed to convince the girls that I wasn’t going to be ogling them all the time; things were a lot easier after that. Still, enough of them complained to their parents, who complained to the principal, that by Tuesday of the following week he backed down — more than a week before Dr. Ceccato finally gave me a note saying I was psychologically a guy and should be treated as such.

Going back to the boys' showers was hard at first. Three or four guys were pretty mean about it, calling me names and joking about how I wasn’t pretty enough and they weren’t desperate enough... And at first I got stared at as much as the Waycross possum with two penises had been when the class was first put together. But I pretended it didn’t bother me, and eventually the bullies stopped picking on me except when they were really bored.

That Monday, when I got home from school, I had a pleasant surprise. Nobody was home, but there was a note on the refrigerator:

“This is the first day your father and I have both had off work in a while. We’re going out to dinner and a movie. There’s leftover vegetable stew and curried chicken in the refrigerator. — Love, Mom.”

I whistled and went to my bedroom. Latisha was on IM.

obsidian14: you and lindsey were awesome. i wish i’d thought of that.

scribbler371: you were pretty cool too. and honestly, if it were you, i’m not sure i could have kept my eyes on your face the whole time.

obsidian14: flatterer. :) really?

scribbler371: i don’t know.

I thought hard about whether I wanted to say this, and how.

scribbler371: i mean, i don’t obsess over your body the way i did over some girls i had a crush on before the changes. but i care about you a lot more than about lindsey. she’s nice, but she’s tyrone’s girl, and a different species from me. from us.

obsidian14: so you could be casual about her, but maybe not about me?

scribbler371: yeah. maybe?

obsidian14: you weren’t staring at me when i was naked, either.

scribbler371: not staring at your boobs and crotch like a horny teenage guy would. but i was glad to see you. not sure if that makes sense?

obsidian14: yeah. i was glad to see you too. it’s like, i wasn’t hot and excited about it, but it was nice to... um... get to know you a little better?

scribbler371: that’s it.

obsidian14: man, life is weird. did i tell you my dad bought a humidifier yesterday? :)

---

I’ll spare you Latisha’s gossip about her mom and dad’s experiments with the thermostat and the humidifier. They didn’t work; it was several years before scientists figured out why we “Athens magnolias,” as they’ve started calling us, will flower in the Everglades or the Okeefenokee in the early spring, or in north Georgia along about July or August, but not indoors in a temperature and humidity-controlled room. It’s a combination of several triggers — the temperature and humidity, but also the presence of suitable pollinators, as the Flagpole article had speculated.

When Mom and Dad learned about this, they dropped their plans to send me to live with Uncle Mike; they didn’t want any chance of me getting pregnant. Latisha and I both flowered on the Fourth of July weekend that summer, and spent a miserable three days indoors, forbidden by our parents to go outside or open a window. Mom and Dad hung several bug zappers outside every window and door of our house — and then nailed the window of my room shut. Latisha’s parents lay sunbathing in their back yard, letting the bees and butterflies pollinate them, while their children stayed inside in their separate bedrooms until their flowers faded and fell off several days later. Being in bloom and not getting pollinated was so agonizing that I didn’t even think about the fireworks and cookout I was missing until later; it was a whole year of teenage horniness compressed into seventy-two hours, and I could hardly think of anything except Latisha, naked, with bees and butterflies crawling in and out of her blossom... and then fluttering over and crawling into mine. But when it was over, I could think straight again, and was glad I hadn’t gotten pregnant, as I might have if I’d been pollinated by one of the same bees or butterflies that had visited Mr. and Mrs. Bailey’s flowers a couple of miles away, or if I’d been in Athens where almost any bee or butterfly of the species attracted to us would visit multiple people’s blossoms during our flowering. (It was another two weeks after that heat wave hit Atlanta before Athens, Danielsville and Hartwell experienced the right weather to trigger everyone who hadn’t already flowered while traveling to the Everglades or Okeefenokee or somewhere.)

Latisha and I celebrated our freedom by going to a movie together a couple of days later. I took a county bus that went by her subdivision on the way to the mall, and saved a seat for her; she smiled as she sat down beside me.

“I am so glad that’s over,” she said.

“Hell yeah,” I said. “I hope it’s only once a year.”

“Probably so; nobody’s reported flowering more than once since the change.”

Latisha had gotten an A+ on her extra credit report on the Athens magnolias — it was twice as long and thorough as Ms. Killian had asked for, three or four pages longer than mine on the Huntsville telepaths and ten pages longer than Tyrone’s on the Valdosta frogs. It had brought her up to an A- for Biology, and a B+ on her overall GPA for the year. I hadn’t done quite as well, but Ms. Killian didn’t fail me outright for lying about what species I was and my parents didn’t ground me for getting a C. Latisha had kept following the research on Homo athenanthus during the summer; she said she was thinking about double-majoring in botany and reproductive biology at UGA.

“You know,” I said after a pause, “I kind of feel sorry for the species that are in heat all the time.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean. I know it’s not so intense all the time for them as it is for us when we’re in bloom, but still — I remember it being pretty bad, sometimes, when I was Homo sapiens. Worrying about whether boys would notice me, and obsessing over them — scared of sex and wanting it at the same time — I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that very often now.”

“Yeah. Don’t take this wrong, but I’m glad your sexiness only distracts me from your beauty for a few days a year.”

“You know just what to say to a girl,” she said with a grin, and squeezed my hand.

We looked out the window for a while, and chatted about inconsequential stuff the rest of the way to the mall. The movie was an awful mess, but kind of fun. They’d been most of the way through filming it when the changes happened, apparently, and the producers decided to change the story so that it happened just before and after Valentine’s Day. But of course they film scenes out of order, based on when various sets and locations are available, so some of the scenes early in the movie, when the characters were still Homo sapiens, had to be filmed when the actors no longer were, and adjusted in post-production by not entirely convincing CGI. In the later scenes, the plot took a total left turn as the changes threw ten kinds of monkey wrench into the characters' romantic and heroic and villainous plans; most of the actors had become Hollywood capybaras, but there were three other California and Nevada neospecies among the main characters and a dozen others among the minor characters. Latisha and I both laughed so hard our rib muscles hurt.

After the movie, we went to the ladies' room. By the end of the school year, I’d decided Mom was sort of right; I wanted the flexibility to use whichever public restroom had a free toilet stall at the moment. And by then, both Latisha and I looked androgynous enough that we could get away with using whichever restroom we wanted. Her breasts had gradually atrophied to nothing, and my face had softened to where strangers occasionally called me “miss,” especially when I went a little too long between haircuts. By that time it didn’t bother me much.

We hung out at the mall for a while, and ran into Arnie and Tara and some other centaurs we knew from school when we were getting gelati at the food court.

“We missed y’all at the fourth of July party,” Arnie said.

“Sorry,” I said. “We were both... indisposed.”

“I hope you’re feeling better,” said Kirsten.

“All better,” Latisha said. “It’s just something Athens magnolias get this time of year.”

“Why do they call y’all magnolias?” one of the guys asked. Latisha giggled; Arnie blushed; Tara looked annoyed.

“Let me explain,” I said, and whispered in his ear.

---

When I got home, walking the last few hundred feet from the bus stop, I found Mom and Dad working together in the front garden. Along about Easter, Mom had gone insane with her spring planting; she’d planted not only the annual flowers she’d usually done, along the edge of the sidewalk and driveway and mailbox, but had plowed up almost all the lawn and planted a zillion different kinds of vegetables. Dad and I helped, sometimes. Now they were weeding the patches of tomatoes and okra, Dad wearing nothing but shorts and Mom nothing but a skirt. Sure, her breasts weren’t on her chest anymore, but it still felt a little weird to see her going bare-chested in hot weather.

“Did you have a good date?” Mom asked.

“Yep,” I said. “The movie was unintentionally funny — funnier than at lot of movies that are supposed to be comedies.”

“Latisha seems like a nice girl,” Dad said. “I hope you don’t — You know why we had to keep you inside until it was over, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “When I’m in my right mind I know I’m not old enough to have a baby. Latisha knows it too. Ignore everything I said for the last three days, I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m sorry I screamed those things at you...” This was getting awkward. “Hey, let me go change and I’ll come help you with this.”

“Thanks,” Mom said. “I’ll get a hug after you change into your gardening clothes.”

Mom and Dad never told me exactly what had happened between them, but over the years I picked up hints here and there from things I overheard. I think that day when I came home from school and found Mom crying and Dad off running errands, they’d tried to have sex, maybe for the first time since the changes, and it was a horrible failure. Then Dad started sleeping in the guest bedroom, and they avoided each other for a while. I worried that they were going to get a divorce, but they didn’t believe in divorce, and they did believe in each other. After a few weeks of giving each other plenty of space, they tried again to see how much affection they could give each other without making each other frustrated with almost-but-not-quite-right sexual signals; it turned out to be just enough.

Most of the drawings and paintings I did before I was seventeen or eighteen look embarrassingly crude to me now. I threw away a lot of them, except some that I gave Mom that she won’t give up. But the earliest painting that I’m still proud of is a portrait I did of Mom and Dad for their twentieth anniversary. Dad is standing next to Mom, and they have their arms around each other; they’re in our front garden, looking off at the sunset to the viewer’s left. And you can tell from their expressions that, barring accidents, they’re going to be standing there together in twenty years, and in forty, never mind that they were sitting on different sides of the change-region boundary that Valentine’s Day. They won’t let a little thing like being different species divide them.

I have the best parents in the world.

The End

 

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If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon