Chris and I had started trying to do the homework. I looked over at him and scanned him up and down. He looked like such a little geek, with his short hair, awkwardly parted but with stray strands sticking out in a bunch of directions. I couldn't blame him for having switched to contact lenses. His sixth-grade glasses looked giant on his face and completely hid his eyes behind smudgy panes. The pimples were something else. He had them all over - chin, nose, forehead, everything. Speaking of everything... I scanned his body downward. His whole body, admittedly not the most muscular even before this change, had been winnowed down dramatically. His little arms looked like twigs, and his legs were completely swallowed up by those navy dress pants, inside of which... well, he probably didn't have much of a dick to speak of, any longer.
Which brought me back to myself. I immediately looked down at the front of my jumper, which lay completely flat against my chest. When the little girl changed me, I had felt my bra shrink down, but it wasn't gone entirely. I seemed to be wearing some sort of training bra, barely more than an undershirt. Not that it was doing any good. I hadn't developed at all until after sixth grade, and I was sure there must be other sixth-grade girls -- girls my age, I realized with a sinking feeling in my stomach -- who were much more developed than I currently was. Every time I moved my arm to write something in this homework with my little pink pencil, I was conscious of the change. There was nothing there to obstruct my view or movement, but it didn't feel freeing. I felt naked. Small.
I tried brushing my hair back and was reminded of those changes, too. My long brown mane had shrunk into an almost stringy shoulder cut with a wide hairband to hold stray strands back from my freckled forehead. There was nothing to do with it. I grabbed a strand and looked at it out of the corner of my eye. It was dull and lifeless. No wonder the boys hadn't been after me when I was this age.
Back to the homework.
Or so I tried. But the geometry just seemed impossible. I tried paging back through the chapter and was met with a wall of text. I knew I should have been able to puzzle it out -- certainly with my former reading ability, I could have -- but any sentence that was longer than ten words or so seemed too much for my shrunken capacities to handle. I tried focusing on one of the formula. "Area = 1/2 Base X Height," I read. Okay. So that was for triangles. I flipped back to the questions. Now just to plug in values. Which did I have? I had base, there: 8. And height: 4. Okay. So now I just had to multiply those, but there was something else. Back to the formula. Ah, 1/2. But what were the numbers...?
And so it went. I was able to get up something of a system, paging back and forth between numbers and formulae, neither of which I could seem to remember. My handwriting looked abysmal, like someone had completely stolen my ability to make fluid lines. I gave up on cursive and resorted to a sort of chicken scratch that looked maybe passable... for a middle schooler. Some of the multiplication didn't come as easily to me as it should have, either. 4 x 4 was fine. 16. I knew that. But then I hit, in the midst of another problem, 3 1/2 x 14.
Maybe I had a calculator.
I dug into the giant backpack that we'd pulled out from under the tables. The back pocket was all books, the front a trove of loose ends and supplies. This is probably where it would be. I dug through loose erasers, broken keychains, little scraps of paper with all sorts of things written and drawn on them. I grimaced at a little page with three hearts on it. In one of them was inscribed S.B. + T.L. T.L. Who might that have been?
"What are you looking for?" Chris's squeaky voice interrupted me.
"Calculator," I mumbled, not wanting to raise my voice too much. If I kept it low like this, I could almost pretend I still sounded like an adult instead of a little helium baby.
"Better hurry up," he mused. He jerked a pointy elbow up at the clock, which read 4:55. "I think we might only have a few minutes."
"A few minutes until what?" I asked.