User:Yorkshire/Casey's Dress

Author's note: This is only the first part of the story, as you can probably tell. More to come soon!

The next time that Casey came to, she felt relatively lucid. The doctors pulled her our of the amnesia slowly on purpose, in order to soften the blow, so to speak. Coming to accept reality was easier when you were so loopy that nothing seemed strange to you- if Casey had seen a giant penguin in a pink tuxedo next to her bed the first time she came half out of the drugs, she probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. It was like waking up from a strange dream, only it took several hours. And, of course, the dream was reality. She actually felt like the technique had worked, to some degree. She wasn't going into shock at awareness of her existence, anyway, given that she had spent a few hours in it already, only when she was too drugged to find anything shocking. 

She hadn't opened her eyes yet. She just laid there, breathing deeply, thinking back to what she could remember about the last few hours. I must have been acting like a total ditz, she thought with amusement. It was mostly a big swirl of giggling and blond moments, as far as she could remember. 

She took a deep breath and then sighed. Mmm... she thought to herself. I wonder if I feel like opening my eyes yet. She was really comfortable. Her mother had brought a home-made quilt, which she snuggled into now. She felt... really good, to her surprise. She thought that after something like what her body had just done, she would have at least felt... sore, maybe? But there was nothing like that- she felt 100%.

I'm handling this really well, she thought. She didn't mean it in a braggart way, it was just surprising to her. Of course, her counselor had told her that, but she didn't believe her. After all, if you tell a teenage guy that he's going to be a girl for a few months, you shouldn't expect him to take it well- or believe you when you say that he'll have a minimal amount of stress adjusting. 

It's like imagining adolescence when you're in elementary school, her counselor had told her (or rather him, back then). You didn't believe it when you were an 8 year old that you'd start liking girls and doing calculus. But when it happened, it seemed totally normal, right? That's what it'll be like- when you wake up as a girl, you'll fall into suite quickly and wonder what you were so worried about. 

It hadn't calmed him down at the time to hear that (in fact, it probably made him even more nervous), but it made a lot of sense now. Granted, the fact that it wasn't permanent was a notable comfort. But he had considered skipping the rest of her senior year over it. Now that seemed like something of an over-reaction. Casey could see why the counselors and doctors insisted on her not making any permanent plans until after the shift happened. She would probably be a lot more reasonable about the whole thing now. 

It wasn't like she was ready to embrace the entirety of feminism. She still saw herself spending the next few months in sweat pants and hiding at home most the time. Darien had sworn that she would get Casey in make-up and short shorts before it was over, but Casey was still determined that she was not going to let that happen. Darien was a good friend, and had been sympathetic to Chase (which is what she had gone by since elementary school- Casey had been too girly for her. More than once had she considered the irony) when he had found out, but was one of those girls who liked to have fun with her guy friends, and after awhile she started to see this as a priceless opportunity. Casey knew that Darien really was trying to help her, and it was fair enough to assume that shunning the sort of world she was forced to live for the next few months was not the way to go. Still, Casey hadn't bought it for a second, and even now she was quite skeptical.

With another deep breath, she fluttered her eyes open.