After Dinner

After dinner, Jennifer went up to her room, eager to avoid any fallout from her mom's flushing of Zoe's catnip stash. Shutting the door behind her, she looked around the room and noticed that her room was mostly unchanged. Sure, her clothes were different, her dresser had gone from a plain vertical model to an antiquey horizontal dresser with a large mirror on top, and her bed was also a somewhat ornate cherry queen-sized bed, but everything important was unchanged - same Sega Genesis/CD and accompanying mini TV on the dresser (albeit placed on a thick piece of felt in order to not mar the finish,) same several-years-old computer on the now-classier desk, same combination record-tape-CD player on the nightstand with accompanying records and CDs (Dark Side Of The Moon was currently on the turntable.) Despite being a different gender and species, Jennifer in her altered history appeared to be mostly the same person as Jon had been, and she found comfort in the fact.
The phone rang. Jennifer waited for someone to pick up, but nobody did; she could hear her mother and Zoe arguing, and her dad was probably involved as well. She picked up the phone inn her room, a 20s-type model with the mouthpiece on the phone itself and an earpiece on a cord (after all, a normal handset wouldn't reach from a catgirl's ear to her mouth,) and answered.
"Hello?" It was Karyn's voice.
"Hi," Jennifer responded. "It's Jennifer."
"Hi, Jen," Karyn said. "Is it okay if I come over to your house?"
Jennifer thought for a moment. "Sure," she replied. "If you hurry you'll catch the tail end of Zoe getting busted for using catnip."
"Catnip?" Karyn's voice was a mixture of surprise and barely-contained mirth.
"Just come on over," Jennifer said, trying not to laugh herself.
Karyn arrived shortly afterwards, and the two went upstairs and stood outside the door of Zoe's room. The argument had apparently gone from catnip specifically to Zoe's behavior in general, and how her parents had tried to go along with the Goth thing at first but it had become clear that she was doing it primarily for teenage rebellion purposes and why couldn't she be more like her sisters and it was time for things to change...
That was about all they could take of that, so they retired to Jennifer's room and shut the door. "If they make her dye herself back to her natural color," Karyn said, "I'm going to laugh. In fact, I may not ever stop laughing." She began to snicker at the idea, and Jennifer couldn't help joining in. "No, wait," she laughed. "They couldn't do that, she's a tabby. They'd have to bleach her white until she sheds!"
What had been snickers and chuckles became an absolute gale of laughter which didn't settle down until their sides began to hurt. Gasping for breath and still giggling at the picture, they lay on the bed. "So," Jennifer finally asked, "what'd you come over for?"
"I just wanted to check in and make sure you were still okay," Karyn answered. "I figured I ought to stick around for a while in case your period started or something and you were too embarassed to ask your folks for help. It'd look pretty suspicious if a seventeen-year-old girl suddenly forgot how to deal with something she' been dealing with since twelve or thirteen."
Jennifer's ears drooped. "Period? Oh god..."
"Hey," Karyn said, "it could be worse. There are two options for this in mammals, and you're very lucky us catgirls wound up with the one normal for girls and not cats or you and I and every other post-menarche girl in town would be turning into sex-crazed animals on a regular basis. I don't know how regular, but that's something you wouldn't want to experience even once, right?"
Jennifer nodded. Damn, that was lucky. She really should have specified that back when she'd made the dice, but she hadn't expected to become an animal-girl, let alone thought about the gynecological implications of becoming one. "I can't believe I'm saying this," she said, "but...given that this is something I'll need to know...can you give me a rundown?"
Karyn nodded, and the two of them went to the bathroom, where she showed Jennifer how to use a pad. "I double-checked it with the encyclopedia today," she said, "and it comes about every 28 days, just like it does for humans. Given that you just became a girl yesterday, I'd bet that you're only a day into your cycle; I don't know if I stayed where I was or if the transformation reset things."
They returned to Jennifer's room, where Karyn ran Jennifer over a few other things she'd need to know. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door.
Jennifer opened the door; it was Michelle, clutching a stuffed catgirl doll. "Jenny," she said, "Mom and Dad are fighting with Zoe, and I don't like to hear it. Could...could I come in with you guys?"
Jennifer smiled. "Sure," she said. "Come on in." Michelle seemed to be a lot more likable than Mikey ever was; if it was surprising that the stone had changed someone's personality as well as their form, it was certainly a change for the better. She wondered for a moment about the ethics of that, but dismissed the question as unimportant since the change was only temporary. She turned to Michelle, who was huddled on the bed, beginning to sniffle. "I can still hear it," Michelle said.
Jennifer and Karyn listened. Sure enough, though they'd never have heard it as humans, the muffled sounds of the argument were still audible, even from across the hall and through the two doors. It had apparently become something of a knock-down-drag-out by this point. Jennifer shook her head sadly. Fights didn't happen often in her family, and she was grateful for that, but they were still ugly when they did occur, and they'd been happening more often since Zoe had gone into her Goth phase a couple years ago.
"Hey, Jen," Karyn suggested, pointing to the multideck, "maybe wecould put on some music."
Michelle brightened immediately at the suggestion. "Ooh," she squealed, "put on the one with 'Yellow Submarine!'"
Jennifer agreed, laughing. She carefully returned Dark Side Of The Moon to its sleeve, then put on Revolver. The three cat-girls lay on the bed together, the calico, the grey, and the little orange tabby, listening to four men on a recording made decades before they were born, singing about love, loss, and yellow submarines. As the final notes of "Tomorrow Never Knows" faded out, they all three drifted off to sleep.