Exploring the abandoned lab of a mad scientist, what could possibly go wrong?

Sheldon Wye stood naked within the circle he had marked out with orange chalk on the platform under the machine. He felt like an idiot. “I probably look like one, too,” he thought — a short, skinny idiot with messy auburn hair.

“S-s-say when,” his taller, pudgier friend and classmate George Thissel suggested from across the room. Both boys were in the seventh grade but George had turned fourteen in October and Sheldon wouldn’t be thirteen until June. They attended the same academy for exceptional students in the spring of 1973.

George reminded Sheldon, “N-nothing’s going to happen till you step on the tr-trigger, but I can start ch-ch-charging the condensers.” He had his hand on the power switch for the busbar that led to the coils and capacitors lining one wall of the underground chamber. Some of the items were huge, and all of them looked old, much like the rest of the machinery that mostly filled the sixteen-by-sixteen room under the old abandoned mansion outside of Thibido, Arizona.

‘Yeah, do it,” said Shel, nodding abruptly. He nibbled his upper lip nervously then made himself stop.

George pulled down, the massive switch made a loud clack sound, the lights dimmed momentarily and the room filled with an eerie, nearly subliminal, hum. George jumped sideways at the noise and laughed his high nasal chortle.

A whiff of ozone made Shel sneeze. “It’s come to this,” he thought. His bare foot inched sideways involuntarily, closer to the trigger button in the top of the platform. He hoped that he and George had rewired things properly. The lab, if one could call it that, had been almost wrecked when they found it.

“Don’t hit the button till things are properly ch-charged,” George warned. “You wouldn’t want to end up half-baked.” He pushed his stiff black hair out of his eyes, adjusted his thick-framed glasses and snickered again, laughing on the in-breath as well as the out.

“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” thought Shel. “It makes him sound like a cartoon character.” The not-too-bright companion of the main character, perhaps, but that thought made Sheldon blush. In reality, Shel would be flunking many of his seventh-grade classes at Carson Rogers Academy if not for George’s tutoring.

It wasn’t that Shel wasn’t bright himself, he just had a problem with reading, paying attention and sitting still in class. One-on-one with George, he did fine, but with twenty other boys in class, he got distracted. Reading in class was always hard and the courses based on rote memory, like history, were definitely not his strong point.

Shel’s parents had sent him to the special boarding school east of Tucson because of his reading problems, mostly, and George had ended up there for his stutter and general inability to communicate verbally. Except with Shel.

The school turned out good for both of them. Maybe it was the student-teacher ratio: instead of one teacher for forty students in many schools, at the academy, they had a teacher and an assistant for every twelve students.

As long as George and Sheldon kept their grades high, they were often allowed independent study on their own projects. That’s why it had seemed so important when he and George had done research into the history of the town and found out about it being where the not-quite-famous 40’s and 50’s superheroine, Ultragirl, had called home.

No one had seen her in more than a decade, but George was a whiz at researching the newspaper files in the town library. One thing led to another, and here they were — they’d found the lab underneath the mansion and the notes and journals that convinced them that Ultragirl had gotten her powers from this spooky machinery.

But they wanted evidence to show for their research. Fixing the machines had taken more weeks but what better proof would there be than giving themselves super-powers? Their first year at the top-rank prep school academy for gifted but troubled students would be ending soon and how cool would it be to go home for the summer as superheroes?

And if they turned everything over to the adults at the school, or even their parents, they might never get the chance—especially since the instructions had warned that bathing in the energy lights had to be done nude. Or, “N-n-nu-nu-naked,” as his partner in crime said.

“Ch-charged!” squeaked George just as a buzzer sounded.

Sheldon turned his foot on his heel and pressed the trigger button with his big toe.

It's not easy seeing green...

The rays from the multiple strange lamps over the platform hit Sheldon like a green avalanche. He went to his knees first, then a crawling position, then prone before he lost consciousness. “It doesn’t hurt,” he remembered thinking later. In fact, it felt better than anything else in his life ever had. Even better than… well, better than anything.

He tried to open his eyes to avoid thinking too much. Green. At first, he saw nothing but green. It surrounded him, penetrated him, held him up. He seemed to exist in a bright green flood.

He swam in a glowing green sea. He had no trouble breathing and seemed to move rapidly with no effort at all. He recognized his motion by the fact of his zooming past other glowing figures in the greenness. They all seemed to be female and expressing varying degrees of astonishment. “Mermaids?” he barely had time to wonder, but all of them had legs instead of fish tails.

He approached a woman standing on a familiar looking platform. Leaves and plant-like tendrils served her for clothing, barely covering her nude form. She beckoned him to come closer. He tried to look to see if he were still naked, too. He saw nothing but green when he tried to look down at his body. Had he misplaced it somewhere?

“That would be so embarrassing,” he thought just before George’s shouting and shaking brought him back to the spooky basement laboratory.

At the best of times, George’s stutter gave him problems with words that started with sounds involving the tip of the tongue. Like Sheldon’s name, for instance. But when he really got excited, George tended to gabble, making no sense at all to hardly anybody, though his best friend could almost always understand him. Which is what he was doing when Sheldon came to, along with shaking Shel’s shoulders and patting his cheeks, a little too roughly.

“Eh-wing! Eh-wing! Wake-up! Pweags wake-up! Ew me oor aw gheag!”.

“I’m not dead. I’m not dead!” Sheldon managed. “Stop slapping me!” He pushed his friend away.

George sat back on his heels, adjusted his glasses and sighed in relief. “I fo’kweeg kiwg’oo.”

“No, I’m okay. Actually, I passed out because it felt so good!” Shel laughed at how that sounded, and George made his snorting chortle. He tried to sit up, realizing as he did that George had apparently covered him partly with one of the dusty canvas tarps that had concealed and protected a lot of the machinery. “Huh?” he said. "Why did you cover me up?"

Words failed George completely; he just blushed and gestured.

Shel rolled over and pushed the tarp off himself while George stood up and turned around to face away. He kept gesturing at the wall, though, as if explaining a hard problem in geometry to a classroom full of apes.

“You’re being weird,” said Shel. “Weirder than usual.” When he had the tarp down to his waist, he paused. “Hey! My skin looks a bit different.”

Sitting up now, he bent forward to try to get a good look at what seemed to be smoother skin on his belly. Shel wasn’t looking at him, but George still faced the wall, shrugging repeatedly and ever more dramatically until his whole body flinched.

Shel felt excitement building up. He suppressed a squeal of delight. The strange machinery had actually produced an effect. He threw the rest of the tarp aside to look at his legs.

Being a girl is not a superpower...

She screamed.

Her sudden outburst caused George to launch himself into a head-down run. Unfortunately, he was still facing the wall. He smashed into a shelf containing a few bottles of something, bounced off, landed on his wide butt and collapsed in a pile of multi-colored goo, moaning incoherently.

Shel leaned forward, gasping, reaching, touching. The newer, smoother, softer-looking skin of her upper belly continued down to a cleft between her legs, the soft folds of a pre-pubescent girl just out of sight. Hands trembling, Shel investigated down there and discovered something she had never seen or felt before—her own very feminine private parts.

She snatched her hands back and did squeal this time then burst into tears. “The machine turned me into—into—into a girl!” she hiccoughed. She collapsed onto the platform again, this time on her back. She thumped her head on one of the orange lines she had drawn but didn’t seem to notice. “Whattamaye— hoosa— howda?” she gabbled.

George spasmed on the floor beside the platform, and the two of them made nonsense noises for almost a minute.

“Am I crying?” Shel thought. “I guess I am.”

George sat up first, wiping what appeared to be finger paint off his chin. “Hass why I covered ‘oo up,” he said, still not looking around.

Shel nodded without lifting her head. Her tears had run out the corners of her eyes and onto her temples, but she had stopped crying. “I think I’m a girl now.” She frowned. “Being a girl is not a superpower,” she added. It sounded a little petulant even when she said it.

George laughed one of his in-and-out laughs, turning it into a red-faced choking fit.

Suppressing a nervous giggle, Shel sat up to examine himself/herself, avoiding the critical area. “At least I didn’t grow tits,” she mentioned. It was true. Her chest was as flat as Sheldon’s ten-year-old sister’s was back in Burbank, California.

“Ack,” coughed George.

“My skin is smoother and softer,” commented Shel.

“Ack, hack,” said George, still not looking around.

“I don’t know if I look any different.” But… Shel didn’t say anything about how she felt as if the green light had filled her up, that she might be glowing with it inside her. That she had seen a world where everyone was female and glowed green.

Without being asked, George shook his head. No, he was not going to turn around and inform the new girl about whether she looked like her old self or not.

Shel looked at where she had left her clothes on the other side of the platform. “I think my stuff should still fit.”

George’s head did a circular wobble on his wide, fleshy neck.

“You’d better go upstairs to that bathroom we found and get that paint off you,” she suggested to him. She reached across to pull the tarp back over most of her body, up to her chin. “I’ll stay down here and get dressed.”

Her best friend didn’t move at all for a bit. “You gonga be okay?” he finally asked. Unlike Sheldon, his voice had started changing six months ago, and at the moment, he did not squeak at all and sounded oddly older than just thirteen.

“I’m fine,” said Shel, surprising herself. “I feel great, like I’ve got tons of energy or something.” It must be the light inside her, she thought.

George got to his feet and shambled out of the room, snagging a small bottle of paint remover on the way and a yellow bar of industrial soap. “Maybe i’will wear off,” he said.

“The paint?”

“You being a girl….” Still not looking back, her friend trudged out of the room.

Wishing for a mirror sounded rather girly...

 
After George left, whispering to himself in his weird, broken voice, Shel emerged from under the tarp and retrieved her old clothes.

“I hope these still fit,” she muttered. They seemed like someone else’s clothes, especially the underwear, but they did fit. The blue slacks and buff-colored button-down shirt were the school uniform, needing only the blue and gold tie and brown (grades 7-9) or blue (10-12) blazer to be completed. But George and Sheldon had not worn complete uniforms to work in the old mansion.

Shel tied the laces on the non-uniform sneakers (did they seem a bit looser? No matter) and slipped on a watch (and yes, the band needed to be tightened one hole), noting the time. “We still have three hours before Saturday check-in,” she said aloud. “Wish I had a mirror down here….” It occurred to her that wishing for a mirror sounded rather girly and she blushed. “Well, I need to see if I look enough like me to pass at roll call,” she said aloud, defending herself from self-accusation.

She didn’t think of herself as a girl, but she no longer felt quite right as a boy, either. Things had moved quickly, and she sought a distraction.

She checked the room to see if they were leaving anything behind that they would need back at the school. It was a twenty-minute ride to the gates, so they needed to leave in about two hours to have a cushion of time. But first Shel needed to reassure herself that no one would know that something had happened to Sheldon.

That’s why she wanted a mirror. Right. She really didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what had happened. The idea of telling anyone that she had accidentally turned herself into a girl in an effort to gain superpowers was almost terrifying. Being a girl was not a superpower, she reminded herself.

But if she didn’t look too different…. And seriously, shouldn’t she still look like Sheldon while wearing Sheldon’s clothes?

She found the journals and logs George had been using to guide their experiments and almost moaned in frustration. Her reading and math problems at school were even worse when it came to stuff that did not have to be endured. She opened one of the fiberboard-bound booklets and stared at the chicken scratches inside. That her good friend could make any sense at all of such a mess amazed her.

The notes in the margins in George’s own handwriting were no easier to read, even though she knew her friend’s penmanship was quite decent. But she couldn’t read any of it and marveled that George could.

She frowned. Or maybe George had made a mistake? She sniffed and her lower lip trembled. How would she ever know? Perhaps the process could be reversed, maybe not. Her one hope of becoming a boy again rested on George’s genius and understanding of the old books. Still sniffing and trying not to cry, she headed up the stairs to the first floor of the mansion.

The building had once belonged to the Thibodeaux (tibb-uh-doze) family, after whom the town of Thibido (tee-bee-doo) had been named (sort of). Three stories tall (plus basement) it had 29 rooms, including two kitchens, and was maintained by the city according to terms of a trust and lease. Twice a month gardeners came to care for the lawn and once a month, a crew cleaned the interior and did any repairs needed.

The gardening crew had welcomed the help of two students from the academy. Which the boys had volunteered after George’s research suggested that Alison Thibodeaux Vassilyev (last resident of the house) had actually been the superheroine Ultragirl. For slightly different reasons, both boys had been eager to do more research, and the old building offered the best opportunity.

George might be a whiz at reading and calculation, but it had been Sheldon who had acquired keys to the house and its basement. And he hadn’t even stolen them. Well, not really. He’d just borrowed them, had copies made, and returned them before they were noticed as missing. After that, sneaking into the laboratory for a few hours on Saturdays had become a weekend routine.

Climbing the darkened stairs, she paused for a moment to rub at her chest. It itched. In fact, she sort of itched everywhere. Sheldon’s clothes fit well enough, but she could not get over the subliminal thought that they weren’t her clothes. Rolling her eyes in more exasperation, she continued upward emerging in the first-floor kitchen.

The hallway off the dining room had a mirror, but it was pretty dark that deep into the house. And George was probably using the large first-floor bathroom with its skylight and mirror to get cleaned up. So she took the narrow kitchen stairs up to the master suite on the second floor, noting as she did so that she was not tired at all and felt filled with energy.

Green energy? Did she have superpowers she hadn’t discovered yet? Immensely cheered up by the thought, she decided that she and George needed to do some more investigation. And the first thing to do was get a look at herself. She hurried up the stairs, unaware that she was giggling in excitement.

On the second floor, Shel approached the master bedroom cautiously.

The whole house was mothballed, in effect. Most of the appliances and furniture had been removed or stored away and others covered in linen dust cloths. Paintings, wall and floor coverings, and things like china and silverware had been moved to storage on the third floor. The huge master suite lay almost empty but light came in from the north-facing balcony through small gaps in the heavy drapes, and a huge mirror hung on the wall beside the door to the bath.

Shel practically sneaked up on it, a little afraid of what she might see. George had been dumbstruck by her after all, and it might not have been just the change from boy to girl. She stepped in front of the mirror and examined her reflection.

And there stood Sheldon looking much like himself. She stared. Same wide oval face. Same wavy hair with every color of red, auburn and ginger possible. Was it a little longer? Did her mouth look… plumper? Her nose tipped up a little more? Hard to say. Her skin did seem smoother, almost certainly….

She looked at the fit of her clothes, Sheldon’s clothes. Had her shoulders always been so narrow? She nodded. Yes, they had, it had been something Sheldon had hoped would be corrected as he grew.

Now, what?

Would she never grow up to be a man like her father?

 

She smiled at her reflection, feeling her lip tremble just a bit. She had to smile or start crying again. Her shoulders had never seemed so narrow, her skin so smooth and clear.

Would she never grow up to be a man like her father? Moses Wye stood an inch over six feet with the muscles and rough hands he had made for himself as a young man in the building trades. That he’d ended up a wealthy contractor had taken hard work and some luck, but he still wore steel-toed boots with his suits.

And now his only son had gone and turned himself into a girl.

Shellie blinked and sniffed. She shook her head. “I am not going to cry,” she said out loud, pushing her red hair away from her face. “Even if I have turned into a girl, I am not going to cry!” She glared at her image in the mirror—daring the girl dressed as his old self to make him a liar.

“No one would know just to look at me,” she said, telling herself. Maybe she could keep being Sheldon long enough for George to find out how to reverse it.

She blinked again, eyes stinging but noticing something else now. Her eyes, once blue-gray, were now a startling, vivid green—as if an emerald light were shining out from inside her.

Now that might be noticed, she thought. She frowned accusingly at her reflection. She didn’t need another complication. She’d never heard of people’s eyes changing color, other than babies, maybe. Could she hide behind sunglasses?

And what was going on with her hair? She pulled a nearly blonde strand and tucked it behind her ear. Had her hair always had so many different colors? Maybe she just hadn’t noticed?

“‘Ew? ‘Ewwie?” George’s mushy voice came up the stairs and down the hall.

Shellie rolled her bright green eyes. George was half-problem and half-solution, and she puzzled for a moment over what to do about him.

Downstairs, George tried again, really bellowing, and this time with the stutter. “Sh-sh-shel? She-shellie?”

She ran to the top of the stairs, “Stop yelling! Someone might hear! And don’t call me Shellie!”

“Huh-uh-huh-uh!” George laughed in relief, the gasping intake that made him sound like a cartoon. “Y-you okay?” He started up the stairs from the kitchen, his feet awkwardly kicking the risers and clumping on the treads.

“I’m fine,” Shel said, backing up to allow George room. He was a big kid, six inches or more taller than Shel, as tall as some adults and twice as heavy as many. She laughed to see him, affectionately but with some exasperation. “If you start calling me ‘Shellie,’ someone might look at me really closely and find out what we’ve been doing. Okay?”

George nodded, peering around theatrically as if searching for eavesdroppers. “But we’re alone, Shellie,” he pointed out, his soft brown eyes guileless.

She wasn’t fooled. She rolled her own eyes again. George was pretty funny—even when he wasn’t trying to be and when he tried, he had a natural talent at clowning.

“I like calling you Shellie,” said George, grinning. “You’re the only girl I know well enough to call by name.” He waggled his eyebrows.

“I’m not supposed to be a girl!” she told him. “No one is going to find out, and we have to figure out a way to change me back!”

George nodded, the cowlick on the back of his head bobbing up and down. “Why?” he asked, standing there in front of her, his spiky black hair standing out in all directions, shifting his weight from one foot to another in a sort of syncopated rhythm.

“George!” Shel snapped at him. “Just don’t call me Shellie where anyone might be able to hear, okay?”

George nodded again. “Okay, Shellie,” he said happily. His goofy grin got even wider. He obviously enjoyed teasing her.

Grumping a bit, she turned away, trying to remember what she had been about to do. “Maybe he’d like it if I started calling him Georgie,” she muttered.

“Ug-gug-gug-ug!”

She turned back quickly to see George turning bright red, grasping the banister of the stairway tightly in one hand and clawing at the air with the other.

“Gug-ug-ug-a-gug!” he gasped. His body had stiffened, his movements even more jerky than usual.

She reached him quickly. “George! Are you okay? Can you breathe? What’s wrong?” George had to be okay. She’d never be able to get him safely down the stairs and out of the building without help.

The bigger boy’s gagging sounds turned to laughter, at least, the wheezing in-and-out gurgle that George used for that purpose. He tried to speak in between rattles and whoops. He swung one arm wildly, and she had to step back to avoid it.

Shellie finally managed to decipher what he was saying. “You can call me Georgie if you want to,” she made out between gasps, gurgles and the heavy swallowing sounds.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said. “I’m not going to call you Georgie!”

George looked at her with his big sad eyes, the face one of the counselors called hound-dog-hit-by-a-semi. “Please? Sometimes?” he begged. She wasn’t sure he didn’t mean it seriously.

She threw up her hands. “Okay, okay. If we’re alone and no one can hear, and I really want you to do something you don’t want to do, I might call you Georgie. Okay?” Her hands went to her hips, and she glared at him.

He nodded, smiling with his mouth wide open which she had told him a thousand times not to do. For all his smarts, George had a lot of little kid in him.

She turned away, giggling a bit in spite of herself. George could always make her laugh with his antics.

But what in the world were they going to do next?

...always assuming that nothing went wrong.

 

Shellie had always been precise. And analysis, calculation and method were how George dealt with the world. So of course, they made a plan.

First, they decided, they had to secure the lab, so no one else found out what they had been doing. Because if someone interfered, Shellie might be stuck as a girl. Security would be a continuing problem, but maybe they could eventually replace the locks with ones only they had keys to.

Second, they had to get back to school; they had permission to be off campus only until 7 p.m., even though curfew was 10, and they had to show up for evening roll call if they missed dinner in the mess hall. Shellie felt a pang of hunger, so it would be better to get back in time to eat.

Third, they had to figure out how to conceal the fact that Shellie was now a girl. At least until this wore off or they could reverse it.

Fourth was going to be figuring out how to tackle the reversal problem, though usually, they wouldn’t be able to get back to the mansion until next Saturday. Maybe they could come on Sunday this week?

Fifth had to be ordinary stuff like school work and maybe visits from parents and such. George’s folks would not be coming, Kansas was a long way away, and they weren’t rich. Shellie’s parents lived in Southern California, only a six-hour drive away, the speeds Shellie’s dad drove. They weren’t scheduled to come before the end of the term, but they had made unplanned trips before. And they had the money to fly in if they wanted to do so.

That pretty much covered the basics of the plan, always assuming that nothing went wrong.

Step one went as planned. They had done this before so cleaning up and locking everything down so no one would suspect they had been inside the mansion went without a hitch.

They mounted up on their bikes, taking along the few tools and their lunchboxes they were taking back to school and set off with plenty of time to reach the academy gate before seven. Along the way, they discussed what they saw as their problems.

It was a beautiful spring day in Thibido, the desert valley awash in new spring grass and the trees on the hills were dressed in new spring leaves. Higher up the slopes, the evergreens were evergreen still, and so the world seemed to be celebrating the discovery of green light.

Shellie had never felt more alive. It was all she could do not to ride along, whooping and hollering. Even George seemed affected by the light, staring around in his open-mouth way and grinning every time he and Shellie locked gazes.

It seemed like a glorious time to be alive. Shellie felt sure that her exuberance was fueled by the dose of that ultragreen light she had gotten during their experiment. Yeah, it had changed her sex instead of giving her superpowers but, wow, even that was something amazing, wasn’t it?

They pedaled on across the heights, even pedaling on downslopes to get up speed for the next upslope. Shellie felt at times that she had strength and energy she had never had before, and that was probably due to the green light, too.

They practically flew along the empty road. Carson Rogers Academy for Exceptional Boys lay behind the first rank of hills above the town at the end of a road constructed for one purpose, accessing the school. So there was almost no traffic on a late spring afternoon.

“It’s a boys only school,” George mentioned, subtracting the distortion caused by his speech impediments.

“You’re right,” said Shellie. “So we can’t let anyone know what happened or they’ll kick me out.”

“Huh, huh, huh,” George laughed.

“It’s not funny.”

‘Yes, it is, Shellie,” said George, still grinning his gargoyle grin.

“No, it isn’t! And don’t you dare call me Shellie at school,” she insisted.

“Huh, huh, huh,” laughed George. He’d gotten over his monstrous fright, knowing that his friend was all right. “I’m glad we didn’t kill you,” he said.

“Well,” Shellie admitted, “I’m rather pleased about that too.”

They both laughed, ironically and un-ironically because they felt good.

“Do you like being a girl?” George asked.

“Sh!” Shellie hushed him. “You should be thinking about how we’re going to change me back or how to keep it a secret until we can!”

They rode in thoughtful silence for a while. Carson Rogers was organized more like a college than any ordinary middle or high school. Shellie considered it lucky that he and George shared a room with only each other and that students at the school changed clothes in their own bunkrooms instead of a common gym locker area. They should be able to keep her secret for the rest of the term.

George commented, “I’ve never had a girl friend before.”

“I’m not your girlfriend,” squeaked Shellie, appalled. Another fortunate happenstance was that hardly anyone, besides herself, could understand George most of the time. “Don’t let anyone hear you say things like that!”

“Huh, uh, huh, huh,” laughed George.

They topped the crest of the last hill, the school gates lay directly ahead, and it was barely six p.m., they could even eat dinner if they wanted to. Saturday night was barbecued beef roast. Normally a light eater, Shellie’s mouth watered already. George, of course, would eat almost anything and lots of it. One of his nicknames at the school was, “Thirds.”

Beaming, George pulled even with Shellie and whispered. “It’s going to be strange having a girl for a bunkie.”

Sleeping in the same room with George’s snoring was always a challenge, but Shellie suddenly imagined George changing clothes in front of her. Wouldn’t he be too shy to do it? And what would Shellie wear to sleep in? She didn’t own any pajamas and usually slept in just undershorts.

When put that way, she guessed it was going to be strange for both of them.

The heck? she wondered. Do all girls have this problem?

 
Shellie and George pedaled through an emerald cathedral made by the pines and oaks of the mixed forest between the town and the academy. The Arizona hills never looked so green, as if they too had been soaked in the radiation from the machinery in the basement of the old house. Even the verge of the steeply winding road glowed with the short winter grass that sprouted after every rain in the mountain springtime.

George made his peculiar noises, exuberant with the effort of climbing the hill, and Shellie felt so alive she came near to bursting out in some silly song, like a character in an old-time musical.

They rode through the gates at Carson Rogers with plenty of time to spare, stopped at the office to sign back in and waved casually at the weekend office person, Harry Bonds, who also taught woodshop and history, part-time.

Their bunk was in Cabin 23, Room B, a rustic building made of timber and stone in the second row behind the main campus quad. They biked there and stored their machines in the nearby utility shed, a more modern building of aluminum sheeting. It wasn’t really necessary to lock the bikes up on campus, but they did so anyway, so they wouldn’t get in the habit of not locking them up when off campus.

Same for their rooms, really; theft was not a problem at the academy, but they had started locking their room when away as a declaration of privacy. This was allowed by school policy as long as someone in administration had a copy of any keys.

Cabin 23 was a four-by-eight, as it was called: four rooms and eight students. About half of the student living at CR was made up of such units. Each room had a separate entrance and shared a large bathroom with one of the other rooms. Fortunately, George and Shelley were not in one of the two-by-twelve dormitories where students had only cubicles instead of semi-private rooms.

The buildings were of stone waist-high, in a bungalow construction, with a covered porch all the way around. Being up in the mountains, the famous Arizona heat was not as much of a problem, and winters saw only a minimum of snow at their elevation. The last snowfall, much celebrated at the time, had fallen in January and was long gone.

Once inside, their room, Shellie threw herself on her bunk, dropping her satchel of books on the floor. “Wow,” she said. “The mountain seemed steeper today.” She rolled over to look up at George standing just inside the room, staring at her with an odd expression.

“You wanna go get dinner in the cafeteria before they stop serving?” she asked him.

He mumbled something and shuffled toward his own bed.

“Huh?” Normally she understood George, but sometimes his babble reached peak incoherence.

“I said, ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’” he replied a little more clearly, not looking directly at her.

Shellie giggled. It was a phrase they had both learned in their computer sciences class, and it had application in many places. “The cafeteria isn’t bad at all, really. And our folks do pay for it. Also, I’m kinda hungry.”

George waved vaguely. “Go ahead. I’ll come in a bit.”

Shellie nodded. “Saturday night is roast beef sandwiches with gravy, one of your favorites,” she got up and headed for the door to their shared bathroom. “I’m gonna wash up.”

“Lock the door while you’re in there,” George reminded her, looking concerned.

“I’m not gonna take a bath,” she said.

George shook his head, looking disturbed. “You gotta lock the door every time, so you don’t forget. I don’t want you to get kicked out for being a girl. It would be terrible, and I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.”

His hound dog expression almost made Shellie giggle again, but she repressed it. George might get his feelings hurt when he was trying to be genuine. “I’m more worried that they won’t let us continue experimenting and I get stuck, so yeah, you’re right. I’ll be sure to lock the door.” She turned to grin at him before going through the internal passage to the toilet.

George gave one of his spastic grins back, sudden and fake-looking as always. Shellie did not consider it significant. George was always George; kind but socially inept.

In the bathroom, she hurried, locking both doors before sitting down to do her business, and wasn’t that weird, and discovering that, furthermore, it was almost impossible not to dribble on herself down there. The heck? she wondered. Do all girls have this problem?

A bit of toilet paper took care of it, but she wanted to have a look. That proved harder than she expected. Without a hand mirror, she had to spread her legs and look between them at the full-length mirror to get a view.

Huh? A couple of fleshy folds but not much to see.

With the blood rushing to her head, she kept looking and used a finger to examine herself until she got dizzy. Yup, she thought, I’m a girl. And things are kinda sensitive down there.

Just then, someone tried the door from Room A, and Shellie almost landed on her head trying to stand up quickly. “Be done in a minute,” she called out. She blushed, thinking about what she had been doing when the neighbor had tried the door.

“Who’s in there?” inquired a voice from the A side of the door. It sounded like Andy Fluyt who shared A with Denny Pointer. Both of them were George’s age, two years older than Shellie.

“It’s me,” she called back, quickly pulling her pants up and turning on a faucet to wash her hands. The sound came out a bit higher pitched than usual when she raised her voice, but she didn’t notice, covering her anxiety with the noise of running water.

“Who is it?” asked Denny’s voice.

“Sounds like a girl,” said Andy.

But with the faucet running, Shellie didn’t hear that part, either.

She had used something on George that she would not have been able to do before the green ray hit her.

 
Shellie got out of the bathroom as quickly as she could, exiting to 23B where George lay across his bed, staring at the ceiling. Oak beams framed the building, but the walls and ceiling were paneled with pine, and the construction always seemed to fascinate George. He could stare at it for hours.

“George,” she said urgently, after getting close enough to be in his line of site. “You want to use the bathroom now, and then you can unlock the door for Andy and Denny.”

“They can go first, I can wait,” George mumbled, gaze fixed on a knothole that looked a bit like a pecan pie with one slice missing.

“No,” said Shellie. “If I unlock the door, they’ll see me.” She glanced back over her shoulder, folding her hands together in front of her chest.

George noticed, redirecting his attention. He got up, towering over his smaller roommate. “They’re gonna have to see you some time,” he pointed out, his mushy pronunciation not hiding his amusement.

“I know,” said Shellie. “But not now, Monday in class, where they won’t look so close at me.” She regretted not having taken time to examine herself in the big bathroom mirror, but the knock on the door had caused her to rush things.

George nodded, looking intense, as if he were considering a difficult math problem. But math was easy for George, Shellie knew. It was other people’s thoughts and feelings that were often mysterious to him, and sometimes you had to spell things out. Just now, she figured, even George could read anxiety in her expression.

“Please, Georgie?” she asked. She debated on whether she should bat her eyes but decided against it.

“Okay,” George said, grinning. “Huh-huh-uh-huk,” he laughed as he went to use the bathroom and closed the door to Room B behind him.

Shellie blushed, she recognized that she had used something on George that she would not have been able to do before the green ray hit her. She didn’t want to think about it.

The mirror over her dresser captured her attention, and she went over to examine her reflection in the better light of the cabin. Bright green eyes looked back at her. How would she manage to disguise those? If she started wearing sunglasses outside that might help, but she couldn’t wear them all the time. In the classroom, such subterfuge would stand out instead of conceal.

Picking up her brush, she idly worked on her hair, teasing out a few wind tangles she always seemed to get after riding her bike for very long. And after toiling in the dusty house, she was going to have to shampoo her hair, too. Soon, like after dinner tonight, she decided. Which would mean locking her neighbors out of the shared bathroom again.

She could hear them talking to George, probably still shouting through the closed door on their side. Communicating with her roommate in such a situation would be difficult, and George would make the most of any misunderstanding.

His speech could be completely opaque, even to her, if he wanted it to be. And she knew for a fact that he sometimes faked garble on purpose when he didn’t want to answer a question.

She giggled involuntarily, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Good grief, she thought, I have to be careful not to do that when anyone is around. I sounded like a six-year-old with a new Barbie doll! Do I sound like a girl when I talk? she wondered.

“Bleah,” she said to her reflection, making a face. I probably do sound like a girl, she told herself. I am a girl. I don’t think I can not talk for a whole week. And if we can’t figure out how to change me back right away, I may be stuck like this for a long time.

She pulled a lock of hair down in front of her face, measuring it against her chin. I think my hair is longer too. She needed a haircut. We’re just going to have to sneak away and go back to the old house tomorrow.

About that time her stomach made a chipmunk-like noise, and she realized that she had only fifteen minutes before the dinner line at the cafeteria closed.

At the bathroom door, she called out. “We need to get to the cafeteria, George?”

Faintly, through two doors, she heard one of her neighbors say. “George’s got a girl in his room.”

It made Shellie want to cuss. “C’mon, I’ll meet you there,” she said. She didn’t want to be in the room in case they came through the bathroom to check her out. Snagging a jacket in case it got cooler on the way back, she headed out of the cabin.

George caught up to her quickly. “Those guys think they’re being funny,” he said. “They know it was you. They said you sound more like a girl than usual.”

Shellie stopped, staring at George. “Did… did I always sound like a girl?”

George nodded. “Little bit. You’re younger than most of the guys.”

She frowned, thinking. She’d have to watch that.

Deciding to wear the jacket instead of carry it, she started putting it on as she walked. George gave her a hand by pulling the collar out of the way. “Thank you,” she said.

They reached the door of the cafeteria and went in. This late there was no queue, so they got their trays and went to the serving line.

“Are you hungry?” Shellie asked. “I’m hungry.” She filled a bowl with corn chowder and put it on her tray. Next, she chose a bowl of mixed green salad.

George laughed. “Huh, uh-huh-uh.” He filled his bowl with three-bean chili and added a slice of cornbread. “You eat like a girl, too,” he whispered.

Shellie shook her head and suppressed a nervous giggle. Was she even going to be able to get away with pretending to be her old self?