You Got Nothin' to Hide and Everybody Knows it's True. Too Bad, Little Girl, It's All Over for You
“ … inside every woman, no matter how grown up she is, there is still a frightened little girl.”
Lukyanenko, Sergei. (2009). The Last Watch . Hachette Books.
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An unsettling wave of lightheadedness and a shaky sensation of unbalanced weakness suddenly flowed over Jacob.
Then as quickly as it had come it was over.
Blinking the blurry, wavy haze from his eyes, Jacob shook his head a few times and tried to readjust his physical equilibrium. Something still felt “off.”
“That was weally stwange,” he said aloud with an immature, almost sissy sounding voice that clearly did not belong to Jacob.
Panic swiftly gripped Jacob as the realization came to him: he had been physically transformed into a little kid. That's why his sense of equilibrium was all wrong. He had shrunk! All his former surroundings now towered above him. And not only had Jacob been reduced in size, but the proportions of his arms, legs, head, and torso had changed as well, morphing and re-shaping themselves into lengths and diameters more appropriate to a five or six year old than an post-pubescent teenager.
“I'm a wittle kid!” he gasped in a girlish, lisping voice.
And right about that time, shock number two hit Jacob as he finally looked down at his diminutive, new form and realized his gender had been altered as well. He was now wearing a blue tartan jumper atop a long sleeved, light blue peter pan collar shirt. On his legs were a pair of navy blue knee high socks and below that were a pair of white t-strap ballet flats. As he looked down, cascading waves of dark brown hair flowed downward, bookending either side of his face.
“Emiwy, hewp!” he whined in a feeble, high-pitched whimper. “Kaitlyn's dumb Towoid of Twansfowmation changed me into a wittle giwl!”
Jacob looked around the front lawn furiously, but Emily was nowhere in sight. Had this tarnished lump of copper trash made her disappear?
“Oh no,” sighed Jacob as his eyes finally caught sight of the girl he loved.
Emily was in the passenger seat of a car being driven away by Michael Jones: her date for the evening.
While Kaitlyn's magic doughnut of transmogrification was busy inverting Jacob's gender and age regressing him a decade, Emily had, evidently, been oblivious to all that and had merrily hopped into Michael car and been whisked off for a magical, romantic evening.
“This is so unfaiw,” sighed Jacob, sounding far more petulant in his puerile, new voice.
He glowered stormily at the corroded bronze ring he believed to be responsible for all this.
“Wisten up, Towoid: I heweby owdew you to wevewse this twansfowmation pwonto!” he growled in what came out as the comical voice of a playful little girl pretending to be a big, angry monster.
Absolutely nothing happened.
Again Jacob scowled at the inert artifact still grasped tightly in his now tiny, immature hands.
“I don't want to be a wittle giwl!” he cried in his tiny voice.
Again: nothing.
“What am I going to do?” he sobbed. “I can't wet peopwe I know see me wike this!”