Another time, a lesson with a price was suggested by Claire. Only this was a very unusual lesson with a price. She didn't want to teach a bully the error of his ways or have some socially domineering girls experience the powerless side of life. No, the recipient she had in mind for a lesson was Felix Fairfax a boy with whom both she and Tony were friendly.
Felix was one of the smartest kids in school. He stood 5'11'' tall and weighed 125 pounds soaking wet with strawberry blond hair and glasses. He walked, stood, sat, and spoke, at all times, as if about to apologize. The apology might be for an actual failing. It might be for something made up. He would give it. There was no more timid boy in the junior class than Felix Fairfax.
Finding himself always the victim of aggressive boys from the very beginning of school, Felix, naturally one of the smartest, drifted more and more into the intellectual world. He was never a boastful boy. He wouldn't dare be so aggressive. But the world of books and numbers, the world of ideas was one where he flourished. Boys who called him names weren't there in the world of Hemingway novels. Stupid girls who thought the whole world was a popularity contest didn't venture into the world of calculus. Felix had his world and he stayed in it. Even more, he unconsciously was always trying to bring more of the world of sights and smells and sounds and punches into the intellectual world. He had a mania for trying to break things down into discrete categories and describing things in intellectual terms. He immediately converted every experience, everything that he saw into a scientific description in his own mind.
Tony turned to Claire after she'd presented her idea for a lesson to the group gathered in Tony's room. "You want to change Felix like that and make him . . how'd you put it . . revel in everything physical?"
"Yeah"
"And you really think that'll work the way you expect?" Jack asked skeptically.
"I do. Everything starts with your appearance, with your body. And Felix is such a nice guy. But he almost doesn't exist in the physical world"
The others all sighed and agreed to let her do it. No one had even considered the idea of a lesson that wasn't negative reinforcement. They didn't have much idea of how to judge what Claire was proposing.
The next day, Claire spent a morning study class in the library with Tony loading all their changes to Felix's profile into the chronivac. It was the period after lunch and Felix Fairfax sat in his usual seat in the front row of his American Novel class in his usual uniform of a white 13.5/34 button down shirt and a pair of dark 24 waist, 34 inseam chinos meekly taking notes of most everything Mrs. Porter said when he suddenly felt an electric charge go through him.
"Ow" he stifled a yelp but it was still loud enough that the teacher paused in her lecture and a couple kids snickered at him. Felix looked at the steel tubing connecting his desk's chair to the desk top. Why should I suddenly get a shock from that tube? Why would the tube have suddenly accumulated static electricity to give me a shock? Why would the tube . . ?
Felix's eyes went wide as he suddenly noticed another tube. He felt his white cotton briefs suddenly yielding to his amazing telescoping penis. He could feel it stretching and stretching and yet, somehow, he didn't feel a tingle.
How can this be? I haven't had those spontaneous erections since I was 14. What the heck's going on? Felix hunched over for the rest of the class only occasionally glancing up from his notebook. He desperately waited for this incredible and unprecedented soft erection to subside, but it didn't. And then, with just a few minutes to go in the class, it got worse, as suddenly, he felt the bizarre organ, almost a foreign thing attached to his crotch, swell and swell like a magic marker multiplying in diameter to become the roll at the center of a paper towel package.
When the bell rang at the end of class, Felix immediately pressed his notebook to the front of his pants and hurried to the boys' bathroom. A few steps back was Tony. When Tony stepped inside the boys' bathroom, he could see Felix's shoes below the door of one of the two stalls.
"Hey, Felix! Are you okay, guy? You ran off like maybe you're sick"
Inside the stall, Felix stared down at the giant flaccid penis in his hand. What the hell is going on?! How can I attenuate and become so tumescent but not hard? How can this happen without a single tingle?!
"Felix? Are you okay?"
"Um, yeah, um . . thanks Tony. I'm . . I'm okay" With effort, Felix stuffed the astonishing organ into the front of his tighty whities and flushed the toilet for show. Tony was waiting by the sinks where Felix washed his hands, again for show. An idea occurred to Felix.
"Say, um, did, did you see anybody messing with-with my stuff at lunch?"
"Messing with your . . stuff? What . .?"
"With my food, or my milk. Did anybody do something to my lunch?"
Tony kept a straight face. "What are you talking about, Felix? You were right there reading your book all lunch period long"
"You're sure nobody dropped a blue pill into my milk, a little blue pill"
"A . . blue . . pill?"
Felix sighed with exasperation he went over to one of the five urinals and pointed to the one next to it. Once Tony was there, he unzipped his pants and pulled out his fantastic new phallus.
"Wow. I didn't realize you were so hung, Felix. Good for you"
"I'm not! I mean I am, but I wasn't. I'm not like you. I'm-I'm 'cocktail weiner Felix', remember? My generative organ can't just suddenly attenuate like this. It can't just suddenly become lastingly tumescent like this. I was . . I was. I . . " He put it away and zipped his fly feeling silly at having shown himself to Tony.
"I don't get it, Felix. What's viagra got to do with this? I thought viagra just lets you get hard? It doesn't make a small penis a large one" said Tony with a pat of Felix's shoulder. "See ya in calculus"
Felix sighed a few times, composed himself and followed Tony out the door and up to the room where their calculus class was. The teacher had already written three long equations on the board when Felix sat down in his seat in the front of the class. But to Felix's surprise, despite being in the front row, the writing looked a bit blurry. He carefully removed his glasses and wiped the lenses to remedy the situation. But, before he put them back on, he noticed that the chalk writing was clear when seen over the lenses.
"What the . . ?"
He looked at the board with and without the glasses. It was perfectly clear without but blurry with his corrective lenses. Felix sighed in bewilderment but folded the glasses into his shirt pocket.
For a while normalcy seemed to have restored itself as Felix followed along iwth the calculus lecture with his perfect eyesight. It was reassuring to Felix. Math was even more predictable than the other subjects, more trustworthy, more enjoyable. The only thing taking away from Felix's enjoyment was his sore butt. It wasn't unusual, though. With his pancake flat rear, Felix had very little padding for sitting on these hard chairs. But this was ridiculous. He shifted onto his left buttock and then a minute later onto his right. But nothing seemed to work and now, at the end of class, his tightie whities and his chinos felt like they were being yanked up from behind in a wedgie. He glanced behind at little Amy Levitt, a mousy grade grubbing girl.
No, it can't be her. What was I thinking? My pants just rode up on me. Felix pulled down on both his pantlegs but nothing changed. If anything, it got worse. At last the bell rang and again, Felix hurried to the nearest boys' bathroom, this time with books held over both the front and the back of his pants.
In the bathroom, he glanced at himself in the mirror in amazement. His ironing board flat buttocks that had never made even a dent in the seat of his 24 inch waist pants were bulging out back of him, two arcs of muscle to put any high jumper or ballet dancer to shame. And, if anything, they seemed to be still growing. Felix's emotions pinballed among shock, pride and embarassment but finally, simple physical discomfort won the day. At last, his amazing, growing gluteals stopped expanding just as his briefs disappeared into the cleft between them, easing the painful pressure on his crotch.
"This is so anomalous! How can my gluteus minimus and maximus expand like this?! This is impossible! Impossible. To stretch muscle tissue like this is impossible. Cellular elasticity doesn't permit this. It just doesn't!"
Yet, as Felix patted his magnificent new rear and felt how wonderful his new dimensions were, he stopped arguing with physics and with biology. This was . . great. Felix smiled at his own image in the mirror, not even noticing that his crooked teeth were now perfectly straight. His reveries were suddenly interrupted by Tony charging into the bathroom.
"Hey, Felix. Are you okay? I thought, again, that maybe you felt sick"
"No, I feel . . great" replied Felix. "I'll see you in gym class"
Tony nodded his assent and went off to the locker room. Felix went to his locker to get his gym bag with his clothes and walked from there to the locker room as quickly as he could with small steps. Felix was desperate to pull of his clothes, but his pants felt like they might burst at any moment. And it was not just his new bubble butt or giant penis. The seams at his calves had nearly popped. His thighs felt like sausages within their casings in his pants and suddenly his button down shirt seemed like a tight t-shirt.
Felix made his way down the stairs to the boys' locker room past three girls who looked at him oddly as he passed. But Felix realized what the look in their eyes had been. It was . . attraction. They-they think I'm . . hot, he realized with amazement. Oh my god. Felix was fascinated by this notion turning it over in his mind as he entered the locker room with such complete focus that he scarcely noticed the seat of his pants bursting with a -POP-. Luckily he had his back to his locker and only Tony St. Martin saw that his briefs were fitting him like a G-string before he pulled them off and changed into his jock and shorts. He looked at himself in the mirror across the room. Fantastically developed deltoids and lats gave his torso the V shape of an olympic swimmer. Objections to the unlikelihood of his physical transformation didn't even occur to Felix. He just sighed with satisfaction at the sight of his lean, muscled body, now 6'1" 171 pounds.
When the boys went out to the gym and played basketball, Felix suddenly found he had the ability to dunk. Forward, backward and with two hands. He swatted away shots by some of the boys who'd most taunted him with shouts of "Get that SHIT out of here!" He was the beast of the class. Even Tony the freak couldn't jump as high as he could. Felix laughed and joked with Tony as they returned to the locker room and showered. He gave one of his former tormentors a playful shove as he passed him. Felix stood naked in the middle of the locker room and felt no physical threat from anyone. With one deep slow sigh, he took in this new feeling of security. He remained naked a bit longer, not by exhibitionist choice but because he didn't have any clothes to fit him. He held the shredded remains of his shirt up to his too large for it chest. Nope, that won't work. He held up his tattered pants. Nope. He finally picked up his tiny seeming briefs.
"So, um, what do you call the ballet underwear that your brother wears under his tights?" he asked Tony next to him.
"A dance belt"
"That's right, a dance belt" sniffed Felix pulling the miniscule cotton briefs up as well as he could and ending up with them wedged between his buns just like a dance belt.
"I've got a running suit you could wear" Tony offered and Felix acccepted without ever wondering why Tony had been so prepared. They walked out of the locker room together. Felix reveled in his new body, in the spring of every step, in the amazing energy he felt. But still, Felix could not stifle his impulse to categorize and analyze. How could this possibly happen? I weigh a hundred twenty five pounds, not a hundred seventy one. This violates conservation of matter. I haven't eaten 46 pounds of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen or whatever chemical components comprise my muscles, these new muscles. How can this happen?
He turned to Tony. "Tony. I haven't always looked like this, have I?"
"No"
"You . . you know that I changed today? You know?"
"Yeah"
"Why-why doesn't anyone else seem to know? And-and do you know how this happened?"
"I do"
"How!? You've got to tell me! How?"
Tony explained about how the chronivac works.
"Felix asked a flurry more questions about the chronivac. More questions than even Tony, a veteran of its use could answer. Felix kept asking questions till finally Tony stopped him.
"Felix! Enough! This-this is what we wanted to give you a chance to get away from even if only for a while. Don't . . don't try to reduce the whole universe to concepts, to ideas. Simple feelings, simple . . perceptions are okay. You don't have to be embarassed about enjoying your body or what you can do with it"
"I'll-I'll try I . . I just . . I've been so introverted all my life"
"It's not just introversion. Reading and writing and ideas are fantastic. But kiss a girl. Play some sports. Watch a sunset and think of how beautiful it is, instead of wondering out loud the whole time whether it looks like a Claude Lorrain painting or a Tintoretto ceiling or a Maxfield Parrish background. Just enjoy it."
Felix let out a lung emptying sigh and nodded.
In the next week, he ran a 5K race and came in second despite having never done it before. He signed up for the swim team and for piano lessons and he he asked out a girl he met while signing up. He still saw golden mean swirl patterns in the water jets at the edges of the pool but he also felt satisfaction in the feeling of hard work that was physical exhaustion. He saw whole pages of notes in his head as he played but could smile and laugh at little comic runs of notes fooling around on the keyboard before trying to learn Liszt or Beethoven. And the girl he met taught him to enjoy the silliest, most mundane things.
Tony and Claire had intended on turning him back the way he was but as they watched him grow and still retain his humble nature, they couldn't bring themselves to do it.