"Witches... that's stupid! I can't believe I actually fell for that," Dan scolded himself, laughing. There was still that problem of how Kat vanished right in front of him, but he convinced himself this was just some sort of hallucination or something. "Maybe she left the room while I blacked out or something," he thought.
Dan felt a pressure between his eyes and his mouth that signaled the formation of two bumps that were swelling and hardening and growing. In a few moments, they they had turned into nubs that were twitching and lengthening. His nose shriveled away, and Dan had to breathe through his mouth. He could see the things stretching out in front of his face, so he scurried into the bathroom to check himself out in the mirror. By this time, two flexible stick-like appendages longer than his forearm were swiveling around above his mouth. Before he could begin to process this, a bunch of new nerves linked up into the boy's brain, causing him to spasm and then go still as a sudden onslaught of sensory stimulation sends him into a short stupor. When he came back to himself, Dan realized the sensations he was getting were smells. They were many times as strong as the barely noticeable scents that used to come in through his human nose. He could smell his own sweat, and the water dripping from the faucets and sinks. If he wanted to smell something more closely, all he had to do was hover an antenna over it like an insect.
"Like an insect," he thought, taking a deep breath through his mouth. "Is that my inner animal? At heart, am I really just a bug of some sort?" he thought.
Nervous and hoping to find his parents or Kat, Dan started pacing through the house, panting and twitching his new antennae, until he started to feel something else. His body seized up, and he clutched his chest as his breathing stopped and he felt like his lungs were dissolving.
"Is this it? Am I dying? Am I having a heart attack or something?" thought Dan, looking back on his short life, wishing he hadn't taken it for granted, and especially wishing he had gotten along better with his sister even if she was betraying him like this now.
Dan wasn't dying, though. He suddenly relaxes some new muscles in different parts of his body at once, and felt the calming flow of fresh oxygen course through him.
"What's happening?" he thought. "I'm still not breathing, am I?" He couldn't feel his chest expanding, but he also didn't feel like he was suffocating anymore. In fact, he felt the flow of air... pretty much everywhere.
That's when Dan found one of the new holes that had opened up on his side. He found he could close it or open it at will, or force air through it with muscles he didn't have before there. The boy didn't need lungs anymore, because like an insect he know had breathing tubes all through his body.
"This is freaky," he tried to say out loud, only to discover that he no longer had a voice.