Jake felt a strange tingle pass through him. He paused for a moment, looking confused by the sensation. Then, he shook his head to clear his thoughts and focused back on wimpy little Billy. Grabbing Billy by the T-shirt with both hands, Jake pulled him up towards him.
"So, Billy. What's it going to be?" he asked. "Are you going to give me what I want, or am I going to beat the shit out of your sorry ass?"
Billy's eyes were wide with fear. "J-Jake..." he stuttered. "P-Please."
Jake gripped his shirt tighter.
"What was that you just said you mumbling little dork?" Jake asked, but at the word "dork" his voice cracked, jumping up a whole octave.
He looked confused again.
This was a common look for Jake. Most surprising and complicated things confused him. Whenever possible, he would simply try to break or otherwise destroy what was confusing him, and being a large boy, this wasn’t hard for him to do. Since a problem with his voice wasn't something he could touch, Billy was now in real trouble.
Jake pulled back his thick right hand and prepared to punch little Billy, but paused when he realized that Billy didn't seem so little anymore. In fact, Billy was at least a few inches taller than him now. He caught sight of what had been a thick right hand a moment ago. It now looked a bit daintier and thinner, like a girl's hand.
Looking back at Billy, Jake had the strange (and confusing) experience of seeing the boy in front of him apparently growing taller.
"What's going on?" Jake peeped in a squeaky little kid voice. His eye's went wide at the sound his own voice. Billy looked surprised as well.
It was then that Jake noticed that he was still holding onto Billy's shirt with his left hand. Instead of lifting Billy up as he had been, Jake was practically hanging off of him. A feeling a of weakness flooded over Jake as he continued to shrink.
Then, a new (and even more confusing) sensation came over Jake's body as his clothes started to shift and change on him. His shirt and socks grew pink and then melded together into a tutu. Then, his shorts became a frilly pink skirt. The skater shoes he was wearing became ballet slippers as his dark hair grew long and red and became tied up in a tight bun. Finally, to top it all off, a cute plastic tiara appeared on Jake's head.
When the changes stopped, Jake had become a 7-year-old ballerina girl. With her little pink tutu, pale doll face and adorable upturned button nose, she was far from threatening to Billy, who now towered over her. Jake, the former bully, was now only 4 feet tall and weighed barely 50 pounds.
Jake let go of Billy’s shirt and held her hands up in front of her eyes. They were unmistakably the skinny little hands of a 7-year-old girl. To her horror she noticed that she was even wearing pink nail polish.
At this point, Jake was beyond confusion. She was terrified. She looked up in fear at the now relatively huge Billy. He stood a full head taller than her. She shivered when she saw his face.
Looking down at the little bully turned ballerina in front of him, Billy was starting to smile.
“Oh shit!” she said in her darling little girl voice. This might mean trouble for her.
***
Witnessing this all from her bench, Carrie was smiling and quietly chuckling to herself.
What next? she wondered.