Mikey didn't get it. One minute he'd been walking down the hallway in his own house, minding his own business. Then the next minute his stupid brother Jon had come bowling down the hall crying his eyes out for some reason, and the two of them had run into each other. And the next minute Mikey was here, standing in a girls' locker room, with half-naked cheerleaders all around him.
He didn't get it. But he sure wasn't complaining.
At first he thought it must have been a dream, because he'd been having a lot of dreams like this recently. After all, this was the kind of thing his friends talked about all the time. It was every guy's dream, wasn't it? Being in the girls' locker room with a bunch of undressed cheerleaders, and none of them seems to notice you're there? But this was real; it was way too vivid to be a dream. Here he was, little Mikey Madison, surrounded by practically naked women. Man, the stories he would have to tell his friends. This was awesome.
At least, he thought it was awesome at first. Until he happened to glance down at his own body and see that he was wearing nothing but a black bra and matching panties. And then this was the last place in the world he wanted to be.
Mikey panicked. His dream had suddenly turned into a nightmare. His eyes darted around the room, but he couldn't see any quick exit. Looking down at his body again, he felt mortified. He saw his skinny chest wrapped in black lace; he saw his toothpick arms and pale skin; and he saw the shape of his boy parts deforming the front of the skimpy panties he was wearing. (He'd never admitted it to anyone, but Mikey was worried that his parts were way smaller than they were supposed to be.)
"Janelle, is something wrong?"
Mikey turned and saw a redheaded girl looking at him with a concerned expression. But he didn't pay attention to his expression for long. Instead, his eyes focused squarely on her chest. Most of the girls around him had been wearing underwear or cheerleading uniforms, but this girl had apparently decided not to wear a bra that day. And Mikey, who was a little short for his age, found himself at eye level with a pair of naked. White. Boobs. He drooled a little.
"J... Janelle?" The girl raised an eyebrow, then slowly brought an arm up to cover her breasts. "Is... there something you want to tell me?"
Mikey grinned... but then a minor detail rammed its way past the boobage and into his hormone-crazed brain. Was she calling him "Janelle"?
Suddenly the pieces were beginning to come together, as weird as they were. Without a word, Mikey pivoted on his heel and raced through the locker room, his eyes frantically scanning the walls. At last he found what he was looking for: a mirror. A little nervously, Mikey approached the mirror... and gasped at what he saw.
Looking back at him from the mirror, Mikey saw a girl.
What. The. Fudge?
The girl was Jon's age, or perhaps more relevantly, she was the same age as the other cheerleaders in the locker room. He skin was dark, the color of mahogany, and her hair was black and curly and pulled back in a high ponytail. She was several inches taller than Mikey, though so were all the other girls in the room, so that wasn't so strange. What was strange... what was almost incomprehensible... was the fact that she was wearing the same black bra and panties that Mikey wore, and her expression, her every gesture, mirrored Mikey's own.
Mikey was a girl.
He was this girl.
"Janelle," said one of the cheerleaders as she passed by, looking straight at Mikey, "are you getting dressed? We have to get to practice."
Practice? He was a girl and a cheerleader? Oh man. Oh MAN. Oh...
Oh, man. If he got to stand at the bottom of a pyramid, he could probably look up the skirt of the girl above him. Oooh, he bet after practice, all the cheerleaders would take a shower together. He hoped there would be fondling...
Eagerly, Mikey skipped back to Janelle's locker. He was looking forward to this.
He fidgeted uncomfortably. When he'd imagined cheerleading practice, he hadn't taken into account the fact that he was going to have to wear one of the cheerleading uniforms. He recognized the uniform from Jon and Zoe's school; it had looked pretty hot on other girls, but Mikey didn't like actually having to wear it. The uniform had two pieces two it, both pretty skimpy. The sleeveless top left his belly completely naked, and the skirt rode really high up on his thighs. The shoes were fine, thought he'd been a little annoyed to notice that the girly ankle socks he had to wear were pink. He felt so. Totally. Gay right now.
What was amazing, though, was how the uniform had shrunk to fit him. Mikey was a good head shorter than everyone else on the team, and than Janelle herself, judging from her reflection. The uniform, and even the shoes, had looked way too big to fit him as he'd pulled them out of Janelle's locker. And yet somehow, like magic, they had shrunk to fit him perfectly. That part was actually pretty cool.
What was not cool was having to listen to his fellow cheerleaders' prattle. Mikey had been sidelined at the door by a couple of other cheerleaders. He'd recognized one of them as Sarah Something-or-other; Jon and his friend Karyn, and even Zoe, talked about Sarah all the time, even though Sarah wasn't their friend at all. It was like they were all obsessed with her. It was weird. He hadn't recognized the other girl, though he'd figured out that her named was Gabby. And man was she ever gabby. Her and Sarah both. It was pretty annoying; the only upside was that they were babbling so much that they didn't evem give Mikey a chance to speak. He could just hang out a step behind them and keep his mouth shut.
As Mikey and the girls strolled toward the soccer field for practice, Sarah suddenly let out a squeal and shouted, "Biffy!" She darted out to the bleachers, where a big hulk of a boy dressed in a football jacket stood huddled in the shadows. When she reached him, Sarah threw her arms around the boy and kissed him on the cheek. "Biffy, shouldn't you be getting to practice?"
The boy, who had flinched at Sarah's kiss, and who seemed equally uncomfortable with her arms around his waist, looked startled. "Practice?"
"Football practice, silly" Sarah said. "Didn't it start half an hour ago?"
The boy--Biffy? Biff, maybe?--stared dully at Sarah. Then he grinned an evil-lookiong grin. "I'm quitting the football team."
Sarah's arms fell away from Biff's body in shock. "You're... quitting? Wh... why?"
"Football is an idiotic game played by moronic louts who like nothing more than getting their heads bashed in by their fellow players," Biff said. "It's stupid, and I'm tired of it." He held his fingernails out in front of him and looked them over. "I think I'll join a witch's coven instead."
"Biff?" Sarah said, frowning. "What on earth has gotten into you? Is this some kind of joke?"
"Not at all," Biff said. "And in fact,"--here his grin grew wider and crueller--"I'm also breaking up with you."
Now Sarah, for the first time all morning, was totally speechless. Tears formed along the rims of her eyes.
"That's right," Biff said. "I'm dumping you. You are the single cruellest, most shallow, most superficial, most moronic, most vapid bimbo I've ever met in my entire life. I could date a dog and have a better time than I've had with you." He sneered in triumph; he was clearly enjoying this. Then his gaze drifted over to Mikey, and his eyes seemed to light up, as though he'd stumbled on the master stroke of his cruelty. "But instead, I think I'm going to go out with your friend here." Biff suddenly swept Mikey up in his burly arms and kissed him directly on the lips.
Mikey squealed and struggled out of Biff's grasp. Spitting and rubbing his hands, he shouted, "Why did you do that, you homo?" before he remembered that, to Biff and Sarah and everyone else, Mikey didn't look like himself but like a girl. Still, Mikey had never ever felt so violated.
But Biff wasn't even looking at Mikey. Instead, he was grinning over Mikey's shoulder. Turning, Mikey saw that Sarah was running away, crying hysterically, and Gabby had set off after her.
And then Mikey heard Biff mutter a few words of gobbledygook in... Latin, or Greek, or Chinese; Mikey didn't know. It might have been Klingon for all he knew. Mikey couldn't place the language... but he recognized the words. He'd heard them before. Many times before, in fact, although he'd only heard one person in the world speak them. His sister Zoe said those words all the time when she was mad at someone. And actually, now that he thought about it, Biff's body language had been pretty feminine for a big macho football player. Could it be? He'd already witnessed stranger things that morning...
Turning slowly to the figure standing next to him, he said, quietly, "Zoe?"
EDIT: Oy. I realized just after I'd submitted this episode that Sarah touched Zoe-as-Biff, quite intimately in fact. According to the rules I've set up for this story, that means Sarah should have "leapt" into someone else, but clearly she didn't. I can't really think of a way to correct this and still stay true to the characters and the momentum of the story... and besides, writing "correction" episodes always seems to make a bit of a mess. I can't really think of a way to explain why Sarah can touch Zoe without getting switched with someone, while every other instance of physical contact between someone who's been switched and someone who has not results in the latter getting switched. So let's just turn our heads and whistle our way past this inconsistency, shall we? :/
I'm willing to ignore it if you are, lol
