Jon walked around in a daze the rest of the morning, like a robot that had lost its programming. He had finally settled on a black peasant top with a ruffled collar, which he had tucked into a black pleated skirt that was held up by a belt with a three-inch skull on the buckle. That felt right, but everything else did not.
The only thing that seemed to exist in Jon’s world was a pair of panties that, while sized to fit him, were not quite tailored to his anatomy. It was an alien object that seemed to contravene everything Jon knew about himself. So if he was wearing it, then who was he?
Jon ate breakfast alone and in silence, and only once he had opened the front door to leave did he realize that he was still barefoot. He returned to his room. His shoes were too big.
What do you do when you need something? You ask your big sister for help.
With a blank stare, Jon stepped silently to his sister’s bedroom door and knocked. Groggily, Zoe answered.
“Can I borrow some shoes?” Jon asked. “Mine are too big.”
There were several problems that Zoe needed to solve, and a shrinking brother was certainly one of them, but she could only treat the symptom for now while she figured out what to do about the cause. So she produced a pair of Doc Martens that she had recently outgrown and shut the door behind her.
Jon took the shoes back downstairs, and found that they fit perfectly when he put them on. Then he finally left the house.
There was a car waiting at the end of the driveway. As Jon reached the sidewalk, the car’s window rolled down, revealing a blonde head of hair sitting atop a cheerleading uniform.
“Hey,” the person in the car chirped, “you must be Zoe’s little sister!”
For just a moment, time stopped. Jon’s body froze. Sarah’s body froze. The birds flapping through the air all froze. There was nothing.
There was an equilibrium that had been reached when Jon had allowed a fundamentally feminine undergarment to embrace his fundamental rejection of femininity. With equal forces pushing in either direction, the result was something completely neutral, something without identity.
But then Sarah McMillan said “you must be Zoe’s little sister,” and even if by just a small amount, the side of femininity was now the larger force.
Within that bubble of stopped time, there came a small movement. Jon’s hair grew from his scalp in earnest, curling around his ears, brushing the nape of his neck, and settling around his shoulders. The belt that held up his skirt tightened by a single notch, drawing his waist in with it, even as his chest expanded into a small roundness that promised future growth. Beneath his skirt, an anatomy that had been fighting against the restriction of a garment tailored for a different form, surrendered to its cotton jailer and retreated into a configuration that agreed most readily with the purposes for which the clothing had been designed.
And just as the grip of the feminine finalized its hold over Jon’s body, time began once more.
“That’s me!” She smiled at the teenager in the car. “My name is Dawn, what’s yours?”
“I’m Sarah. I was waiting to give your big sister a ride to school. Why don’t you hop in and you can come with?”
Excitedly, the newly-minted girl complied.
