Tabby stood there, confused and a little hurt. She hadn't done this! Why was the teacher acting like she was responsible? Even if it had been one of the other catgirls, why was Mrs. Sanders mad about it, if it was a present like she seemed to think? Just because she was a human? But her dad didn't get mad over stuff like this...
And anyway, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense for her to think that. If one of the catgirls had wanted to leave her a present, they would've left it already dead where she could find it, not hide it in her desk while it was still alive. Had it been one of the human kids, then? Her thoughts suddenly turned to those two boys who had been snickering about something earlier; she could still hear them trying to stifle their laughter behind her. Tabby's ears went back, and she thought about telling Mrs. Sanders, but she knew they'd just deny it if she said they were the ones...
Anyway, the teacher seemed to want the mouse gone more than anything. She looked up at the human woman. "Do...d'ya want one of us to get rid of it?" she asked, hoping that that would be a way to placate her teacher. Mrs. Sanders stared down at her with a mix of suspicion and confusion. "...Sure, fine, just get it out of my desk, please..." She didn't seem as grateful as Tabby had hoped. But the young catgirl shrugged, darted a hand into the desk drawer, and grabbed it out.
She looked at it curiously. It was a field mouse, not the white kind the older kids had in some of the science classes. She wondered if those boys had caught it themselves. But...nobody would miss it, then...? Tabby felt that tingling feeling creep up the back of her neck that she often felt when her instincts were prodding her onto a different path than her conscious mind suggested. Her ears and tail pricked straight up and her whiskers began to twitch slightly. It didn't belong to anybody, and the teacher just wanted it gone...almost without further thought, she snapped it down.
The room pretty much exploded. Several of the human girls shrieked out loud, and at least half of the boys burst into laughter, while the rest made exaggeratedly grossed-out "ewww!" noises. Mrs. Sanders looked white as a sheet. Tabby looked around, truly confused this time. Why was this such a big deal to everybody? Some of the other catgirls in the class seemed just as confused as she was, but practically every one of the human kids was staring at her bug-eyed - and in particular, two of the boys in the back.
"Oh my God!" yelped Kenny Miller. "She did it! She actually did it!"
"I told you!" laughed Bernie Drullers, who was sitting next to him and struggling to keep breathing during a fit of giggles. "I told you it'd work!"
Tabby turned back to her teacher, wanting to make sure that she was hearing this as well. Mrs. Sanders was turning an interesting shade of green, but it was immediately apparent that she had heard them just fine, even with her less sensitive ears. She shot a look across the classroom that was almost tangibly icy, and both boys were suddenly intimately aware that they were going to be making a visit to the office later, even if Bernie still couldn't stop himself from giggling. Then she looked back at Tabby, convulsed slightly, put a hand over her mouth, and dashed out of the classroom.
Jon put a hand on her friend's shoulder. "Look, Karyn," she said, her voice echoing off the tile of the girls' bathroom, "we'll figure this out. The wish was only that we couldn't alter the effects of the dice - there's gotta be a loophole we can find in there somewhere." Karyn turned to her, still a bit teary-eyed, and Jon put on the best smile she could muster. "After all, we've got almost a year to come up with a solution."
Still sniffling a bit, Karyn smiled back. "Y-you're right. It's just...I mean, I don't even know her, but she's still a person, even if she only exists because of the dice..."
Jon nodded. Not to mention the baby that Steve Farber's going to be having, or who knows how many other people... "Yeah. This got a lot more complicated than we figured on. But we'll sort it all out somehow."
Karyn smiled again. "I guess I'd better get used to having a little sister, then." She looked up into the mirror. "Aw hell, my fur's all matted now. Joni, check my purse, wouldja? I think I've got a handkerchief in there."
Jon took Karyn's purse off the sink counter and began to rifle through it. Wallet, hairbrush, hairbands... "You know there's paper towels right over there, right?" she said.
The calico catgirl laughed. "Please. Those things are so flimsy they start to disintegrate if you leave the sink on eight feet away. I'd just get little shreds of 100% Recycled Paper in my fur."
Jon chuckled knowingly, conceding the point. Spare change, cell phone, earbuds... "What's this?" she asked curiously, holding up a small pill bottle. The label was green with some kind of an herbal theme and read "Evidas - 8 Hour Feline Relief."
Karyn looked at it, then giggled. "Isn't it obvious?" she said. "When it's got 'soothing' art design, a nonsense name with no hard consonants, and refuses to say what it's actually for?" Jon stared at her, not quite getting it. Karyn giggled harder. "That's all advertising code language for 'menstrual cramps,' Joni-girl," she said. "It's like Midol for catgirls, I guess. There's probably a dozen other generics of the same exact thing under equally meaningless names."
Jon grimaced. "Oh. Um." She dropped it back in the purse and finally fished out Karyn's handkerchief. Karyn laughed as she dabbed at the damp patches of fur on her cheeks. "Welcome to womanhood, sister. It's not all rainbows and buttercups. It's just a shame they already did the women's health class for seniors last semester, I'd get a kick out of sitting you down with that stuff."
Jon frowned, wondering why catgirls would need their own specific treatment for that when human women dealt with it as well, but she really didn't want to think about the subject at all right now, let alone delve into the gory details. She handed Karyn back her purse and the two of them left to go to their next class.
"An' then she just kinda looked sick an' ran off outta the room!" Tabitha said, relating the story of the incident in her class over dinner that night. "An' they had to get one of the other teachers in to get everybody to calm down." She shook her head. "It was like none of 'em ever saw somebody eat a mouse before."
Her dad laughed, reaching all the way across the table for the milk and getting a Look from his wife for it. "Well, Tabby, a lot of them probably hadn't. You've got a lot of human kids in your class, don't you?"
She nodded. "The teachers say it's the most outta any class in the school - almost half the class!"
He let out a low whistle. "Well, there you go. Probably a lot of them have never actually seen that, and even the ones that have likely find it odd."
Tabby frowned. "But you wouldn't mind if we did that, would you?"
He laughed again. "It wouldn't really bother me, no, but that's because I've been married to a catgirl for twenty years and have three daughters who are also catgirls. I'm used to things being a little different by now. And even then," he said, winking, "I'd want your mother to brush her teeth before I kissed her, if she did that."
"Dear!" Mrs. Madison said, batting at his head - but her claws were sheathed, and the rest of the family could tell that she was forcing her ears back for effect and couldn't hide the laughter in her eyes, even if she hadn't also failed to completely suppress a chuckle.
Jon picked idly at her casserole, thinking about what Tabby had said. Half of her class were human? How did that reconcile with the terms of the wish? But...hmm. She knew that around half the faculty at the school were human, which meant they (or, well, the women, anyway) must be parents to sons that had fathered children. With occasional exceptions (i.e. Leonard,) those sons were probably at least somewhat older than Jon's age. But they weren't necessarily the only children in their family, and their siblings must also be human. (Which, she guessed, put paid to the thought of the stone inventing second marriages or anything like that.)
And, she thought, looking across the table at her sisters, most couples with multiple children tended to have them a few years apart, and tended to stop after a certain period of time - there was only a difference of about six years between herself and Tabby, and she struggled to think of any family she knew with a difference of more than eight or ten years between the oldest sibling and the youngest. So any younger siblings of these older sons were unlikely to be a whole lot younger than Tabby, and depending on how far apart they were spaced out, any siblings that were much older than her were as like as not to have already graduated.
So, she imagined, it was probably about reasonable that the set of kids who had to be human because of an older brother who had to be human but were still in school would be most strongly clustered somewhere around Tabby's age. Or at least that was her best guess; there were other factors she still wasn't clear on, like whether these constraints, and the demographics that came from them, applied to the entire rest of the world as well, or whether that was restricted to the alleged range of the stone and the rest of the world had simply changed by necessity into one that would be compatible with having an "enclave" town like Lakeside had become in it.
One thing was for sure: it was a very strange world this wish had created, even before the subject of eating mice had come up.
