Jon Malucci wasn't really thinking about Mikey Gibson as he approached the boy at the end of the school day. He was thinking about having something new to tell the girls the next day at lunch. He was thinking about how it felt good to be one of the girls. Was he a girl? He set that thought aside. It didn't matter.
What mattered was grabbing Mikey, pulling him around a hallway corner, and planting a forceful, if childish, kiss right on his lips.
"That's for helping me with math this morning," Jon said as he turned to walk away with a sway to his hips that he didn't recall ever having. On the outside he was playing it cool. But on the inside, he was barely holding himself together.
Mikey, for his part, was stunned into paralysis, his eyes following the swing of Jon's corduroy skirt as it retreated away. Eventually, that skirt turned towards the entrance to the girl's bathroom and disappeared behind a swinging door, finally releasing Mikey from his apparent spell.
That Jon sure was something, Mikey thought to himself. Why had he never noticed Jon until just the day before?
Inside the bathroom, behind the visual safety of a solid door, Jon finally let his nerves overtake him, and collapsed against the tile wall with a light thud and let out a high-pitched whimper.
A toilet flushed, a stall door opened, and a girl gave a cry of surprise and concern. "Jon?" Paige McMillan rushed over to her friend. "Are you okay?"
"I just kissed Mikey," Jon stared past Paige, and into his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
"What?"
Jon turned to look at his friend. "I just kissed Mikey. Like, a full kiss. On the lips. I kissed him, and then I walked away. Just now."
Paige clasped her hands together, then her body started vibrating, as though she was filled with an energy that she couldn't contain. "Oh my god! That is so cool." She wrapped her arms around Jon's shoulders. "Is he still out there?"
"I don't know, I just walked away, then came in here."
"Okay," Paige's eyes turned serious, "then you can't leave this bathroom until you look one hundred percent perfect. Give me your shirt."
"What?" Something about being topless in front of someone else felt embarrassing to Jon.
"Take off your shirt, and give it to me," Paige repeated, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. "Come on, we're all girls here."
That's right. Jon was one of the girls. He untucked his T-shirt from his corduroy skirt and pulled it over his head, revealing his bare chest covered only in a training bra.
Had he put on a training bra that morning? The thought dismissed itself immediately. Of course Jon had put on a training bra. How else would he be wearing one. And something about going to school without a bra on felt suddenly very icky to him.
"We'll hang it here to keep it dry," Paige said as she placed Jon's shirt on a stall door's hook. Then she wet a paper towel under the sink and wiped down Jon's young face. "A clean, fresh face for a clean, fresh mind."
The water dripped off of Jon's chin, and he was glad it wasn't dripping onto his shirt, when Paige came back with a dry paper towel to soak up any moisture from his face and his chest. Paige squinted her eyes, then looked down, then looked at Jon with a wicked grin. "We're going to stuff your bra."
"What?" Jon was scandalized. "That's-- that's illegal!"
"It's not illegal," Paige laughed at Jon's reaction. "My sister says that high school girls do it all the time."
That triggered something in Jon. High school girls. He wanted to be like high school girls, right? No, not high school girls in a general sense. There was one specific high school girl that he wanted to be like. An image formed in his head. His guide. His model. The platonic ideal of who Jon wanted to be. He didn't know her name, but she had to be around 18 years old. Straight black hair, tied back in a braid. Round face, friendly eyes. Not too short, not too tall. Maybe she was carrying a little more weight than most girls of her height, but she carried it well. She was what Jon wanted to be when he grew up.
And most importantly for that moment, Jon saw the breasts that she carried on her chest. Large and round. An adult woman's breasts, so unlike the flat chest that Jon kept within his training bra.
Well, he was still young yet. But he wanted to look like her as much as possible, and if Mother Nature wasn't going to do it, then a few wads of toilet paper would have to do the job.
"Okay." Jon opened his eyes and looked at himself in the mirror once more, determination coloring his face. "Let's stuff my bra."
For a fraction of a moment, Jon's face shifted into something unfamiliar as Paige raided a bathroom stall. He was looking at his own face, just like he had every day of his life, but it was like there was a puzzle piece missing. A brief voice told him that he was supposed to have loose brown hair in a scruffy bowl cut, but that's not what he saw in the mirror. What he saw was his normal straight black hair, pulled back into a perfect braid. The same hair he always saw when he looked into the mirror.
Paige came back and was surgical in her molding of Jon's augmented assets, then she helped Jon back into the My Little Pony T-shirt. And when Jon looked back in the mirror, the person who looked back was definitely not the same boy who had arrived at school that morning. It wasn't even the same girl who had burst into the girl's restroom just a few minutes earlier. With just a little bit of help, with a fresh face, with some new hair, with a little bit of a boost to the chest, the person in the mirror was, without a doubt, a woman in the making. And she was ready to take on the world.
Jon did a little spin in front of the mirror and stuck her hands on her hips. "Alright Paige," she declared with a sense of feminine confidence, "I'm ready. Let's head out."
