Jon sighed. Maybe she was being too hard on her mother; after all, in the wish-altered reality, there was nothing to do about these changes but adapt to them. So maybe this whole c'est la vie approach was normal, even if it seemed to her like her mom was over-eager to move on to treating as a daughter. And Mikey had obviously been dressed in doll clothes because nothing else was available. Still, it didn't have to be a pink top. Jon hoped that was just an oversight; she didn't like the idea of fighting with her mother, but she wasn't just going to take attempts to gussy her up sitting down.
As for the top itself...Jon knew it was probably kind of silly, but she was going to do without. She just felt uncomfortable with the idea of wearing girls' clothing, and she couldn't really think of a good reason to wear it. She'd never really pictured herself as a nudist, but half of her body was going to go unclothed anyway. She didn't really care much what other people thought of her, and she probably wasn't going to be going anywhere where people would be offended by her toplessness. As for the support issue, Jon figured that living in water would make that a moot point.
She wasn't sure what the skin sensitivity thing had been about, though. If her skin was sensitive to fabric, why would she want to wear clothes? And would she really dry out that fast? Jon figured that to the extent that actually was true, it only referred to the scales of her fish half; after all, she'd spent all night and a good chunk of the morning with her top half exposed to the open air with no noticeable ill effects.
She was in the middle of pondering this when her mother came out, carrying a plate with a light lunch on it. Jon surfaced, drying her hands on a nearby towel, then took the plate with one hand and ate with the other. "Say, Jon," her mom said, "you wouldn't happen to have seen Mikey anywhere, would you? She left school without permission this morning. She's a little pixie-girl now, a few inches tall, with brown hair and powder-blue wings."
Jon nodded. "She's around here someplace. Hiding. What did the school tell you about her morning?" Her new voice still sounded strange to her.
"Well," her mom replied, "they said she undressed, refused to put her clothes back on, and then fled when they tried to take her to the principal's office."
"So they left out the part where the other students were tormenting her for being a pixie and wearing a skirt?"
Jon's mother looked surprised. "Is that what she said happened?" Jon nodded.
Her mom frowned. "Well! I didn't expect the school administration to leave out facts like that. I suppose that must have been hard for her."
"She's not going to wear skirts again, you know," Jon said. "And...to be honest, I'm not wearing girls' clothes, either. I don't care if I need to or not, I'm not wearing that thing."
Her mother stared at her for a moment, then sighed. "We'll talk about this later," she said. "I've got to go find Mikey." Jon thanked her for the lunch and handed the empty plate baxk to her, and she went inside.
It was rather dim in the attic, but Mikey had found a little battery lantern that she'd hung from the rafter; it wasn't much, but it made it easier to read the labels on the boxes. She flitted from box to box, looking at the labels, until she found one with her grandpa's name on it. She lifted the cardboard lid off of it, praying that there would be something inside that could change her back.
