The next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake. I rubbed at one eye. “Did it work, are... we...” My voice trailed away. Because it wasn’t my voice.
I sat up quickly and opened my eyes. Sitting on the edge of the bed was... me. “Katie?”
The person who looked just like I’d looked that morning nodded. “Yeah, we’re us. We’re just turned around the wrong way.”
I looked down at myself. I was Katie. And I was still naked. “Shit,” I said. I crossed one arm over my boobs. “We’ve got to try again.”
Katie rolled her eyes—my eyes—at me. “Dude, what’s the point of covering up? It’s not like I haven’t been seeing those things every day since I was thirteen.” She looked around the floor, found the pants I’d shed back during my Mean Girls session, and pulled them on. I had to close my eyes as she arranged my junk, comando style, in the jeans and zipped them closed.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a shirt,” she said, digging through the discarded clothing on the floor.
“But aren’t we going to try again? I mean, we can’t stay this way!”
Katie gave up searching the floor and turned to look at me. “Are you saying you want to fuck. Like this?”
I shivered. “Hell, no.”
“Me neither,” said Katie. “I mean, that little body of mine does look hella hot from out here, but that would be just too weird. Besides, there’s no time. You were out for like fifteen minutes. Mom’s going to be here any second.”
“Shit,” I said again. I slid to the end of the bed and found that my feet were still dangling in the air. I hopped down and found myself looking up at Katie. It was strange enough looking at myself from the outside. It was even stranger looking up at myself from a body nine inches shorter. “Jesus,” I said. “I feel like a gnome.”
Katie grinned at me. “Aren’t you a little cutie. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that strange after all. “
“Shut up.” I peered past her shoulder at the mirror across the room. I could just make out the top of my head in the glass.
Just then there was a flash of light through the window as a car pulled into the driveway. Katie and I raced around the room gathering up the scattered clothes. Katie shoved the torn green dress into the stack in my ams.
“You need to go to my room,” said Katie. “If there’s one thing that would really freak mom out, it would be finding you in here naked.”
I nodded. “What do I do?”
“Just wait. Maybe we can try again when mom’s asleep.”
“Right.” I turned and started to leave, when Katie called me back.
“Hang on there, sis. You might want this.” When I turned around, she was holding out the silver vibrator.
I grabbed it and sprinted across the hall just as I heard mom coming in the back door. As quietly as possible, I closed the door to Katie’s room. For a few minutes, I just stood there in the dark, breathing. The light in the room was off, and with just the thin line of light leaking in under the door, I couldn’t see my new anatomy, but I could still feel the cool air over my bare skin. I shivered.
There had to be a way out of this.
Once I heard mom putting away things in the kitchen, I relaxed enough to toss the armload of stuff I was carrying onto Katie’s bed and fumble along the wall looking for a light switch. I scratched at the paint for what seemed like a full minute before remembering that the switch was now a lot higher than I was used to and slid my fingers up the wall to find it.
When the light clicked on, I saw a naked Katie reflected in the mirror tacked to the back of the door. Immediately I turned away.
Yes, this was definitely strange, but I still felt embarrassed about seeing my sister naked. I looked at the stuff on the bed. Besides the crumpled and torn blue-green dress, there was the skirt and black tank top Katie had worn while in Rory’s body. None of it looked inviting.
I crossed quickly to the dresser and pulled open a drawer. Inside was a heap of underwear even more disorganized than what was in my usual drawer. I held out a pair of panties at arms length, holding them between my fingers like a kind of unpleasant insect. I eyed them for a few seconds. Even from inside Katie’s body they seemed tiny. I dropped then on the top of the dresser and fished out a bra. 32-B, said the tag on the tan cotton and spandex contraption. I knew enough about bra sizes to know that B sized boobs were supposed to be small, but what I saw when I took another quick look in the mirror was nothing that I’d call small. Katie’s girls weren’t huge, but she was right when she said they beat what Rory—or Lorelai—was packing. I dropped the bra next to the panties and reached in the drawer again.
What I came out with next was one of the bodysuits Katie wore for gymnastics. I picked up the glossy suit and looked at it. Red stripes along the sides, pale blue in the middle. This wasn’t one of the fancier suits I’d seen Katie wear in the final rounds of competitions, but I remembered seeing her flip the length of the balance beam in this suit, or tumble the length of the mat in the floor exercise. Suddenly, I really, really wanted to try on the bodysuit.
As many times as I’d seen Katie and her teammates wearing the things, I had no idea how to get into it. Even wearing Katie’s petite body, the suit seemed ridiculously small. After turning it over in my hands a few times, I did the only thing I could think of—I stuck my feet into the open neck of the suit, slid each leg through one of the openings at the other end, then squeezed, wiggled, and tugged myself inside. It took me a few tries before I was able to wrestle my arms through the sides, but then it was on. Looking back at me from the mirror was not just Katie, my sister, but Katie Marshall, three time state silver medalist in uneven bars and last year’s bronze medalist in the all around.
I stepped closer to the glass. The sleek, shiny fabric of the suit hugged my small body. The flat strip of cloth between my thighs pressed against my smooth crotch. My breasts were smoothed down to neat little half globes by the tension of the fabric. The edges of the suit cut neatly along the sides of my round ass, and the red stripes on the side made my waist seem even tinier.
How many times had I ridden along to some competition of Katie’s? How many times had I done my homework up in the bleachers of some gym while mom cheered on Katie? How many times had I dutifully clapped while Katie won a medal? The whole family had been centered around Katie’s gymnastics as long as I could remember. And now I was Katie.
Slowly, I leaned to the left and raised my right foot off the ground. And raised it. And raised it. And raised it until my toes were pointing straight up at the ceiling. Amazing. I lowered my leg, leaned back and with only a slight wobble, curled back until I had balanced myself on my hands. I flipped back onto my feet, raised my arms overhead, and smiled toward the mirror. “Thank you,” I said, nodding toward imaginary watchers.
Being in Cady’s curvy body had been exciting, but it had felt kind of awkward. Being Lorelia hadn’t felt right at all. But Katie... This body felt like a pair of really good jeans. Tight, but flexible. Comfortable, but tough. For a moment I thought about the woman in the Treasure Palace who had given me the VCR. She’d said something about how good her body felt. Maybe there was a right kind of body for everyone. Maybe Katie...