Jon took an uneasy look around the classroom as it filled up. For the moment, she was ignored in the bustle, but she wasn't expecting that to last long. As it turned out, there were a few other transformees in her class - much fewer than she would've expected for a one in five chance, but a moment's reflection reminded her that quite possibly many of them had already changed due to the virus and then changed back, since evidently not every change was permanent. (And, she reminded herself, there was the old tidbit about flipping a coin a hundred times - probability wasn't the same thing as a hard-and-fast rule.) One of the girls had the lower body of a giant rattlesnake, there was a harpy boy with bright rainbow plumage, and another girl was an full-fledged anthropomorphic rabbit.
And, with her heightened senses, she realized that they smelled different. The rabbit-girl was the most pronounced, probably because she was the furthest from fully human, but all three of them were somewhere in between human and what she assumed was the smell of whatever animal they partly were; certainly the boy had something of that smell you got in the bird section of a pet shop. She wondered to what extent people without her sense of smell could notice this. Did it take long for them to get this way? Jon wondered whether she, if she weren't changing back this afternoon, would acquire a kind of big-cat smell herself in time. For that matter, she wondered if any of them were also permanent transformees, or if they were just putting up with this for a week or however long it went for most people.
Pretty much everybody had filtered into the classroom by now, and the teacher had managed to get things more or less underway when one of the students, seated a few rows behind Jon, remembered that there had been some kind of commotion in the hall earlier. He raised his hand innocently. "Mr. Johnson?"
"Yes, David?" the teacher said.
The boy pointed at Jon, who was sitting next to her desk and trying (unsuccessfully) not to look conspicuous. "Is it true that that's Jon Madison?"
Jon cringed, trying not to make eye contact with anybody. The teacher frowned. "Do you have a question that's relevant to the class, David?"
"I think it is," one of the other students volunteered. "I heard his sister talking about it."
That (along with her obvious discomfort) was all the confirmation her classmates needed. Suddenly the whole classroom was abuzz. Jon's classmates were variously staring, snickering, pointing, talking amongst themselves, et cetera, while the teacher was trying to regain order. Jon felt herself growing red in the face from a combination of acute embarassment and building anger. She turned and stared daggers at David, who only laughed. "Nice pussy, pussy," he said. Jon cringed (even though she knew he couldn't actually have seen anything, since she was seated on the floor,) which only made him laugh more.
She felt her blood pressure rising as she got angrier, and was surprised to find herself growling. It was a somewhat deeper version of that very unnerving growl that a cat displays only when seriously provoked, and David was visibly taken aback by it; evidently he hadn't considered that his target was a smaller, chimeric, but nevertheless quite possibly dangerous version of a fearsome apex predator. Other students were also taking note, although there was still plenty of commotion.
The rabbit-girl stormed over to him. "Hey, lay off her, asshole!" she snarled, as David was regarding the angry sphinx and wondering whether he should try making a break for it. He scowled at her. "Shut up, Sarah!" he snapped. "You can get her in your stupid little club later."
Sarah? Jon thought to herself, momentarily distracted from her situation. She blinked; now that she looked again...she wasn't sure if it was something in the body language, or if she could really find points of comparison between a human face and one that was half a muzzle, but the rabbit-girl actually did look a bit like Sarah McMillan. What was odd was that she was intervening to stick up for her - the Sarah that Jon knew would've been...well, probably just sitting on the sidelines and marking Jon down as being even further out of her league, rather than actively harassing her, but certainly not trying to help her...especially since so many of the others were gossiping about or laughing at her as it stood...did it have something to do with being a transformee herself? How long had she been this way?
"EXCUSE ME!" thundered a voice. The entire class fell silent and turned to the front of the room, where Mr. Johnson was standing. He was slightly red in the face and visibly irritated. This was a sight none of them had seen before; normally Mr. Johnson was a teacher on the Ben Stein model, and nobody could recall hearing him raise his voice above a gentle, sonorous drone before. In fact, the drone was back immediately; looking around him at his surprised students, he singled out the the rabbit, the sphinx, and the jerk. "If we're quite finished," he said, "we do have a class to get to here. Mr. Lind, I'll need you to stay after class; we are going to have a very long talk about appropriate classroom behavior and respect for your fellow students."
Nobody much felt like arguing after seeing that it was possible to provoke him; even David remained silent, if sullen. With that, the teacher stepped around to the back of his desk and resumed speaking as if nothing had happened.
