A House Divided/Part1
{{#ifeq: | | {{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | ||
Author: Trismegistus Shandy
}} |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
Author: Trismegistus Shandy |
Author: Trismegistus Shandy
}}
}} |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | | Authors: ' |
Authors: Trismegistus Shandy
}} |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
Authors: Trismegistus Shandy |
Author: Trismegistus Shandy
}}
}}
}} {{#if:| — see also [[:Category:{{{category}}}|other works by this author]]}}
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 more densely-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 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 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's a paramedic; they needed him badly, with all the wrecks and other accidents, so after he got Mom situated on the sofa with plenty of things to eat in arm's reach, he went to work. They needed Mom at the hospital even more than when they'd asked her to fill in on the evening shift, but she couldn't go in to work in her condition.
"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. 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. Some 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, how 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 North America 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 loose 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 pretty 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.
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 really being 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 it 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. Those Italian artists 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 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 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 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."
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 steadied himself on my shoulder as we walked to lunch; 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. "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 hands 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 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.
"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 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 :(
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 whether sure 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 help 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, though 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 that 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 hours 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 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.