Jon gasped. Hadn't Sarah said yesterday that she had already been exposed to the disease? But now the pixie-boy's behavior made sense; obviously, Sarah was trying to lay low until "she" changed back, so as not to harm her carefully-crafted image. No wonder Sarah had been so impatient.
Sarah hung his head. "Go ahead," he said. "Laugh. You know you want to."
Truth be told, Jon kind of did. Even setting aside the bitchery Sarah had displayed towards Karyn over the years, this seemed to be inherently pretty funny, now that she wasn't on the receiving end. But...as much of a jerk as Sarah was, Jon didn't think being a jerk back would help. She just sat silently, lost for words yet again.
"What are you waiting for?" Sarah continued. "I got the news this morning; it's permanent. What luck, huh? The bitch-queen of the school, the girl who said others were cool and you weren't, and probably kept from getting a date with at least one girl, she's destroyed; aren't you happy?"
Against all odds, Jon found herself feeling sorry for the ex-girl. She thought of the revenge fantasies that just about every teenager has at some point; here was that sort of story being played out for real. Granted, Sarah was more of a thorn in Karyn's side than hers, but still, Jon had had his share of run-ins with the high-school social hierarchy. By rights, she should be smugly pleased with this turn of events.
But it wasn't satisfying at all. Despite her many flaws, Sarah wasn't deserving of having her life arbitrarily ruined. She wasn't a serial killer or anything, just a garden-variety jerk. And Jon's changes were just going to be difficult to adjust to. Sarah, on the other hand, had her whole life carefully structured around an image she could no longer maintain, if her changes were indeed permanent. Like a house of cards with the base knocked out, it was all going to come crashing down; it was just a question of when.
"Not really," Jon replied. "It sucks, doesn't it?"
Sarah just gaped at her for a moment, then zoomed off down the hall.
At the elementary school across town, Mikey was sitting in class, wishing that today was one of her school's frequent half-days. She would have given just about anything to be back at home, away from the stares and whispers of her classmates. She knew that her mom was right and she was going to have to face this sooner or later, but she would have much preferred later.
Lunch had been the worst, with various snickering epithets thrown around in the cafeteria babble, further provoked by the fact that hard-boiled eggs were on the menu that day. This would have been embarassing enough without Mikey knowing that they were right and she was going to be laying eggs, but one of the fifth graders had gone so far as to whip an egg at her. The eggs were pre-peeled, so she hadn't actually been hurt, but it stung a bit, got cooked yolk in her hair, and was embarassing as hell, even though the offender had been promptly whisked away to the principal's office.
After lunch, she'd gone to the bathroom to get the egg out of her hair and gone in the boys' room by mistake, and once she'd gotten the yolk taken care of, she'd had to use the toilet as a girl for the first time. Her mom had explained it to her the night before, but it was still profoundly weird.
And now here she was, back in class, trying to focus on the teacher's droning to drown out the sounds of her classmates noting that she wasn't wearing pants. She wondered whether it would be better or worse if she'd worn a skirt, but it didn't really matter anyway; there was no way she was wearing girly clothes, even if that meant going around bottomless.
Mikey had spent the last fifteen minutes sitting mostly still, trying to focus on the teacher, but she was just too bored. She brought one wing-hand up onto the desk to softly drum her fingers on it. Her fingers didn't respond. Mikey tried again to make them move, but there was no response. She realized that she couldn't feel them at all. Worried, she whacked them againt her other wing, hoping to wake them up...
With only a bit of resistance, they disconnected from her wing entirely, the flesh tearing like sunburned skin, only thicker. The bloodless fingers scattered, rolling across the floor. Mikey sat silent for a moment, then screamed in terror.
Some minutes later, the hysterical harpy-girl was led into the nurse's office, crying about her body "falling apart." It took several minutes for the nurse to calm her down. "There, there," the nurse consoled, "it'll be okay. That kind of thing will take anybody by surprise, but it's not out of the ordinary, and nothing to panic about."
"I'm losing my fingers!" Mikey protested. "How is that nothing to panic about?"
"Oh, it's freaky, alright, the older woman replied, getting out a nail-file. "But you're not in any danger. It's just your body shedding some organs that aren't part of the new blueprints; it happens sometimes when people change."
"You mean this is supposed to happen?" Mikey moaned. "But then I won't have any hands!"
The nurse nodded as she began gently twisting off the fingers on the other hand. She held one up for Mikey to inspect. "See?" she said. "All the blood's been cut off, and the joints have disconnected. On your wing, you've already got new skin grown over the joints; that's all these were holding onto." Dropping the finger in a metal tray, she gently filed off the dead skin that remained on Mikey's wings, eight callous-like stumps of dead cells. "Now," she said, "it's true that you're lacking anything to grip or manipulate with. But your talons are pretty flexible, and they work for the large majority of harpy transformees. You'll figure it out."
Mikey was speechless. First she became this bird-girl thing, and now she was losing her hands, and she was just supposed to get used to it?
