After going through seven sentences, nothing worked. Jenna and Willow tried some creative prompting, performing activities while regenerating the sentences to get more varied results. They came close to success with the fifth sentence, "The 21-year-old is making the bed," but removing "bed" resulted in an error message saying the sentence wasn't grammatically correct. They guessed 'making' wasn't a valid verb for noun 'the.'"
Willow tried to trick her tongue into saying "the" by sounding out neighboring syllables. She tried conjoining "Th" with "Uh" in rapid succession, but just as she was getting close to closing the audible gap between sounds, her tongue stopped working properly.
"I just can't do it," she grunted, flopping onto the fresh bedsheets.
"It'll be all right," Jenna said. She tried to soothe her best friend by stroking her silky hair.
"Ugh," Willow murmured. But she didn't indicate that Jenna should stop.
"We can keep using the app for other stuff. We're bound to get a chance to give you that word back."
"We don't have any other choice," she conceded. "I just hate way I sound. Ugh," she rolled her eyes. "I tried NOT to phrase a sentence with it just now but didn't realize. I'm so used to using it!"
"Let's get going. Moving around will take your mind off it." Jenna gently tugged Willow's arm to coax her off the bed.
Willow followed, begrudgingly. Jenna paused to brush her hair and put it up in a ponytail. She offered a hair band to Willow.
"No, thanks. I'm good with it loose." She brushed her blond hair behind her shoulders, taking one more chance to admire it in the mirror. "I thought a few times about growing it out as a boy, you know. Reason I didn't was because my dad said I wouldn't land a job."
Jenna smiled sympathetically. "You would have looked good. You look good now, too."
"Thanks. I appreciate you not, uh, being more harsh on me with what I did yesterday."
"Turning you into a woman is harsh. Just you wait."
"Okay, yeah." Willow acquiesced as they headed to the apartment door. "Guess I'll find out. Where are we going first? To get me some clofff..."
Willow stumbled on her words just as Jenna shut her door with a loud thud. She looked at Willow, whose face was turning sour again.
"Come ON! I can't say clo...?! Cloww..." She tugged on her blouse. "Fabric things! For bodies!"
Jenna thought for a second. "Clothes... Clothes has 'the' in it!"
"Okay, you don't have to say that like you're answering a question in class."
Jenna shrugged. "It's interesting. The app decided that you can't use anything containing 'the'... that's a lot of words. Like..." She smiled coyly. "Hey, how about we take your earlier suggestion and go to the THEATER?"
"I hate you." Willow crossed her arms and started walking away.
"My revenge is at hand after all, haha!"
"Oh my god."
They got to Willow's car. When she plunked down in the driver's seat, she noticed that she didn't have to adjust it or the mirrors, even though she had lost a couple inches when Jenna changed her gender.
"Weird. Everything's already in... where things fit for me in this body."
"I only set the app to make you and me aware of our changes. The rest of the world thinks you've always been a girl."
"No shit?" Willow noticed the air in the car smelled sweet. There was an air freshener on one of the air vents that wasn't there before. Everything changed to fit the way she was now, so then... "So tff... So I might get recognized if anybody who I know sees me?"
"Maybe?" Jenna said with a silly smile.
"What's that face for?"
"It's nothing." She caught her girlfriend's glare. "Okay, okay, it's the way you're putting your sentences together to avoid T-H-E words. It must really be throwing you off."
"Yeah," Willow pouted as she turned the engine over. "And so is way you're constantly pointing it out."
"It's kind of cute. You sound a little like my mom. She had major trouble learning English. But you've still got your regular accent, so it just feels like you focused more on nailing that than you did on learning grammar when you migrated here."
Willow actually smirked at that notion, but said nothing further to dignify how her girlfriend was making her apprehensive over her newfound loss of control over her own mouth.
Meanwhile, Jenna grinned to herself. She passed the drive to the mall by calling up new sentences. She liked the train of thought she was headed down, so she looked for more ways to mess with Willow's grammar.
A helpful sentence popped up as they waited behind a truck at a red light. They needed to turn right, and the shoulder was wide open, but Willow was playing it by the book and holding patiently behind the truck. When Jenna pressed, Willow commented "I stopped us too short of rear end. I don't want to..." She paused to reconsider her sentence, as she was about to say "risk hitting them." "...risk a hit when we turn."
The phone displayed "The blue-eyed driver won't utilize a shoulder unless it's absolutely necessary."
Aha. Jenna deleted "shoulder" and hit Confirm. Now Willow should be saying "a" less often, if at all. That pairs well with dropping "the" from her vocabulary, Jenna figured.
She wondered what else she could do. She didn't want to keep tweaking Willow, which might distract her at a crucial moment. Maybe it was better to leave her alone for now and focus on other things.