We Can Shake like a Milkshake – Buzz like a Bee
Hey Everybody: Can You Move like Me?
“... the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids – all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine – it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order.”
Bryson, Bill. (2006). The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir. Broadway Books.
__________
Kaitlyn's next class of the day took Jacob to the terra incognita final frontier of adolescent boys – the girls' locker room … and gym class as one of the girls.
For an introverted wallflower like Jacob, it was thrillingly frightening … or perhaps frighteningly thrilling? In either case, it was irresistible (mostly in the sense that any attempt at resistance would prove fruitless). The inexorable force of middle school compelled Jacob to follow “her” daily schedule unwaveringly. Onward then to gym class!
He easily enough navigated the crowded, bustling corridors of the school, still a bit nervous at perceiving himself as taller, older, and much more masculine than did everyone else here. Nervously, he stood hesitating outside the girls' locker room, and tugged at the hem of his pinafore. Should he really go in there?
“Out of the way 'Sailor Moon'!” came a harsh, haughty voice.
And Jacob suddenly found himself roughly shoved against one of the interior walls of the locker room.
He looked up and spotted his assailant: a smug looking, fashionably dressed blond girl, currently busy giggling and chatting with a few other popular looking girls.
Right, thought Jacob. Kaitlyn was just as much a social pariah here in middle school as Jacob himself had been in high school. So now all the mean girls will be picking him … thinking that he's her.
Slowly trudging deeper into the locker room, Jacob spotted a massive mirror covering most of one end of the chamber. There, in the mirror, was the reflection of a moping and very forlorn looking Kaitlyn Johnson.
“That's me,” he grumbled.
No which locker was Kaitlyn's?
Scanning the locker room, Jacob was suddenly struck by the fact that he was surrounded by teenage girls in various states of disrobing. They all ignored him, as the weird nerdette he was. No surprise there. No, the truly disturbing part of the entire experience was the realization that none of this was the slightest bit arousing for Jacob. Sure, the girls were all a year or two younger than he was. But he was still (from his perspective) a teenage boy, and here he was in a sea of half-nude teenage girls … shouldn't he feel a little something down below? And yet, Jacob's manhood remained flaccidly uninterested, comfortably ensconced in Kaitlyn's panties.
But last period, during English class, when Jacob had happened to look up and catch sight of that one boy in Kaitlyn's class gazing his way …
No!
No, that was a coincidence. Jacob had just had to adjust himself a little then, due to the uncomfortably alien sensation of wearing girls' clothes. That was why he'd shifted in his seat, fidgeting with the hem of his dress and fretting about what he hoped and prayed was merely a bit of phantom tumescence.
Still, that didn't explain why he'd blushed.
“Forget it,” he muttered. “I've gotta find my locker.”
Kaitlyn's locker he thought, mentally correcting himself.
Fortune was with Jacob when he spotted a locker plastered with stickers of anthropomorphic kawaii animals.
“That one's mine,” he grumbled.
It took a couple failed attempts at spinning the dial on the combination padlock before he finally realized Kaitlyn had conveniently left a sticker with the combination on the reverse side of the lock itself. Once open, the gym locker heaved forth a nasty effluvium of pungent sweat, stale body odor, and sickly sweet teenage perfume – all mixed together into an unpleasant bouquet of adolescent anxieties and angst.
His cheeks flushed hot red now with humiliation, Jacob clumsily fumbled to remove Kaitlyn's clothes and was soon clad in nothing but bra and panties, standing in the midst a sea of chattering, gossiping teenage girls, still oblivious to the fact that he was biologically male.
“Ouch!”
Someone had just suddenly painfully slapped or pinched his back.
“Who did that?” he asked, whirling around and finding himself face to face with the blond girl who'd earlier shoved him into the wall.
Did she just snap my bra? thought Jacob.
“Sorry little, Pikachu!” laughed the girl. “I didn't think that training bra of yours was even for real. You've got zits – not tits, on your chest. Guess that's what comes from playing 'Hello Kitty' instead of growing up.”
She snapped my bra, thought Jacob. What a bitch!
Uneager to provoke a confrontation though, Jacob merely scowled wordlessly at the girl and allowed the embers of seething resentment to burn within.
Just get through the day, Jacob told himself. Tonight, after school, I'll go find the real Kaitlyn and together we'll make that corroded doughnut of doom thingy switch everything back to normal.
As Jacob pulled forth a small blue t-shirt with armpit stains and an impossibly small pair of white dolphin shorts, the girls behind him moved on to slandering other classmates with their incessant babbling about middle school scandals Jacob neither understood nor cared about. But at least they were leaving him alone.
Putting on Kaitlyn's stale, sweat-soaked gym clothes proved to be a repeat of the experience he'd had back at the Johnson family home this morning. Magically, the small shirt and tiny shorts seemed to adjust to fit the expanded girth of Jacob's older, masculine body. And predictably, when he stole a glance in the mirror at the far end of the changing room he saw gazing back a frazzled, nervous looking Kaitlyn Johnson, looking decidedly uncomfortable in a gym outfit that seemed perfectly normal for a girl her age to wear.
With a heavy sigh, Jacob then trudged out to the main gymnasium to await whatever tortures the P.E. coaches had in mind today to inflict upon their pupils.
“All right ladies – move it, move it, move it!” bellowed the largest of the several barrel-chested, short haired women in the gym. “Warm-ups. Get to it! I want to see sweat. Now! Start those warm-ups. I mean you. Get moving! You, too Johnson. Don't just stand there. Johnson. Kaitlyn Johnson, do you hear me? Start your warm-ups now!”
Shit, thought Jacob. I'm not used to being called “Kaitlyn.” Cut me a little slack here, coach.
Nevertheless, Jacob quickly started in with a clumsy imitation of the series of stretches and aerobic exercises he saw the other girls busily performing. Except of course, Jacob really had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. And to top things off, in his haste back in the changing room, he had neglected to properly knot the laces on Kaitlyn's gym shoes.
It didn't take long for him to trip on a loose shoelace, slip, and crash painfully to the hard gym floor.
“Nice move, Godzilla!” laughed the blond girl.
I swear, Jacob thought. As soon as I get my hands back on the Toroid of Transformation, the first thing I'm going to do is use it against that bitch queen there.
“Knock it off, everyone!” barked the coach. “No time for lollygagging. Keep the heart rate up. You – Johnson! What's wrong with you? You're worse than usual, and that's saying something. Get with the program, girl!”
“Yes, ma'am,” muttered Jacob.
The coach silently frowned, unaccustomed to the usually impertinent Kaitlyn Johnson suddenly being uncharacteristically docile and obedient. The girl always had some smarty pants backtalk. What was going on today?