You stand there in horror, clutching your three feet of hair, water dripping onto the carpet.
"I'm so sorry!" Lee says after coming back to her senses. "I had no idea one glass would do so much! I...I'll get a towel!" She runs off to the bathroom.
"Hey," Clay says. "You gonna be okay?"
"I don't know," you whisper. You think your voice is even higher than before. You let go of your hair and look down at your hands to see that your fingernails have grown longer. They're even squared off at the tips as if you had a manicure without the nail polish.
Lee comes back with a towel and drapes it over your head. She starts rubbing your hair gently.
"I can do it," you say, taking the towel from her. "Thanks." Lee looks at you, dejected. "Don't worry about this," you tell her. "It would have happened the next time I showered anyway."
"So each time you get doused in water, you change to look more like a girl?" Clay says.
"And apparently anything we try to do to reverse it gets ignored," you respond, now patting down the soaked carpet. It's a chore made more difficult by your hair falling all over the place. "If I hadn't gotten that haircut, it probably would have grown to this exact same length. See my bangs? They're just like they were. They stopped growing yesterday even though the rest of my hair kept getting longer."
"What do you think that means?" Lee asks.
"Probably that whatever's doing this to me is trying to make me look a specific way."
"That would explain a few things, including those eyelashes and your lack of body hair," Clay muses. "That's stuff even girls have to take care of on their own. It definitely isn't natural."
"Okay, so it's the water that's changing you, but for some reason nobody else," Lee summarizes. "Why?"
You leave the towel to soak up the rest of the water in the carpet and stand up. Looking at Lee, you notice you've shrunk again. She now has a height advantage of about two inches.
You sigh, plopping down on the couch. Your hair falls around you in a delayed action, majestically draping across your chest and the couch cushions. Any other day, you might find it beautiful.
"It all started the other day, when I went to the park," you remember. "I walked through some woods, and I took a swim in a lake."
Clay slaps his forehead. "Get out of here. A lake? Like, a cursed lake or some gender-bending version of the fountain of youth? That's so Disney."
"What else could it be?" you reply. "You and I both talked about how weird it was that we never noticed that park before. And that lake had something strange about it. It was too clean."
"Clean?" Lee said.
"Clean like bottled water clean. Nothing in it at all. After I got out of it, my skin felt different." You slide a small hand over a smooth, thin arm. "That had to be the first change. And ever since, I've had this reaction to water."
"Sounds bizarre to me," Lee admits. "I don't even know what park you're talking about, but if it's big enough to fit a forest with a lake, it's gotta be impossible to miss. Which means it's got to be magical, and the lake too."
"Are you guys really sure it's the lake?" Clay says. "Maybe it was something else in the forest before you got to the lake."
"Maybe," you think. Then you snap your fingers. "My clothes! When I got dressed after the swim, they got wet."
Lee and Clay look at you expectantly.
"If I'm right...then maybe..." You run to the washing machine and open it. You'd forgotten to put your laundry in the dryer when you got back from the store, but that doesn't matter. You recall that your jeans felt strange when you tossed them in with the wash. "Would you mind?" you say to Clay. "They're probably still damp, and we don't know how much water it takes to make me change."
Clay pulls your clothes out of the machine. You check out each one, looking for the clothes you were wearing the night of your hike.
"That's one," you say, pointing to a red clump of fabric Clay just fished out of the washer. "I was wearing that tee-shirt."
"Tee-shirt?" Clay says, unfolding the garment. "This ain't no tee-shirt."