I was frozen with fear. I was afraid that if I moved, I’d make a sound and whoever it was would keep knocking. I hoped that the person would just go away after not hearing anything. But after a few seconds, the knocking came again. It was just as loud as the first time.
Bloody hell, I thought to meself. There was no time to change back to Joe. I had to think of something else. As I tried to think of something, a voice called out from the other side of the door. “Joe, it’s me,” said a familiar female voice. “Let me in, please.”
Double bloody hell. It was Julie! What in the world was she doing here? Now I really didn’t know what to do. I just kept standing there while hoping I didn’t make a sound. Then Julie spoke again, “Come on, Joe, I know you’re home. One way or another.” She said the last sentence very slowly and with a lot of emphasis on each syllable. Even I could figure out what she meant.
I walked to the front door. I put me hand on the door knob and opened the door. I opened the door and hid behind it so she couldn’t see me until she was inside and I closed the door behind her. She spun around to see me. She had a smirk on her face when she said, “I thought I’d find you.”
I acted indignant. “Oh, really? Just how so?” I asked.
“Because I’ve been there,” she answered. “When I first joined, I turned into Shifter a lot just to get used to it. Let me guess. Joe was surprised to find himself changing and didn’t know how to stop, am I right?”
“Well, yea, actually,” I replied. “So who was in control, him or me?”
“In a way, both of you. But still mostly him. He just didn’t understand how or why he triggered the change,” said Julie.
I said, “Why don’t you tell me how and why?”
She answered, “Because it’s something both of you need to figure out and understand for yourselves. We all have to at some point.”
I groaned. “Fine, right, then. So just why are you here?” I asked. “How did you even know to come here?”
“I wished I knew where Joe lived,” she answered. “Simple as that. If I could have, I would have just appeared inside the apartment. But that would mean making a wish that would affect another P.H.A.N.T.O.M. member, so I couldn’t.”
“How would that affect Joe?” I asked.
She replied, “Invasion of privacy.”
“Oh,” I said. I thought for a second. “Yea, I guess so. But why are you here then?” I asked again.
“For purely selfish reasons,” she said. “I told you I was a sex addict. The truth is I’m really not.”
She sat down on the couch. I followed and sat on the opposite end of the couch so there was space between us. “I’m confused,” I said.
She nodded. “I understand that. The truth of my situation is this. I started having sex at an early age. But I wasn’t too good about hiding it. My parents found out and they flipped. They thought it was this area, this school, something. So we moved to a much more conservative area and they forced me to start seeing this ‘therapist’ who said I had an addiction.” I thought it was humorous that she said little quote marks in the air with her fingers when she said “therapist.”
She continued her story. “There wasn’t a lot I could do. I thought about running away, but there was nowhere I could go. So I had to do what they forced me to do. But my therapy was more like brainwashing. That quack kept telling me how I was a bad girl, how I would become a whore if I didn’t stop having sex, all kinds of other things. Then I started to look into sexual addiction on my own and I found that I didn’t show most of the symptoms of an actual sex addiction. Do I like having sex? Yes. Was I promiscuous? Sure. I still am a little. But I do not have a compulsive need to have sex. I don’t put myself in dangerous situations in order to have sex. I’m just a person who embraces my sexuality. I’m not a danger to myself or others.”
“So how did you…get away from that? And how did you end up in P.H.A.N.T.O.M. if you’re not really an addict?” I asked.
“I’ll answer the second question first. I ended up in P.H.A.N.T.O.M. because of what I had to endure in ‘therapy.’ By joining P.H.A.N.T.O.M. and becoming Shifter, it helped me to understand a few things about myself. It helped me feel what having no sexual characteristics is really like. It helped me realize I wasn’t some kind of bad person. It mostly helped me realize that I wasn’t an addict, but a victim of other people’s beliefs. Being in P.H.A.N.T.O.M. gave me the courage and self-respect I needed to become a properly functional adult.”
She took a deep breath and continued. “As soon as I turned 18 and graduated high school, I was determined to get away from my parents and what they were going to make me do,” she said.
“What was that?” I asked.
“They were going to send me to one of those awful, ultra-religious schools that my ‘therapist’ recommended to them,” she said. “They were going to move close to the school to help keep watch over me, too. The idiot ‘therapist’ was going to do the same thing. I was going to keep living under their thumb. So I did something that I felt I had to do. It’s something that I have regretted ever since, but I felt like I had no choice.”