"Um, me I guess." I was trying to diffuse things by taking the attention away from Sarah.
Sarah just laughed, shrugged, and sat back again. "Alright. You heard him. Chris first."
The kid nodded solemnly and turned towards me. "Are you ready?"
"Uh, sure. Do I have to do anything?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes were shut tight, and she had her right fist clenched in her pocket.
Nobody spoke for a good twenty seconds. My eyes darted to the clock. 4:05. Sarah looked like she was getting bored. She fished into her jeans pocket for her phone again. I twiddled my thumbs a bit.
Sarah got her phone and looked up at me. Suddenly, she looked confused. "What?" I said.
"Your hair," she said slowly. "Did you put it like that on purpose?"
"Like what?"
My hair was normally just a shaggy blonde mess, somewhat longer than average but still well above my color and out of my eyes. When I reached up to touch it, though, there wasn't half as much as I was expecting. It had receded up over my ears, like it always is just after I get a haircut and before it has a chance to grow out. The back felt neatly trimmed, the top parted nicely to the side. I looked directly at the girl.
"Is this a trick? What did you do to my hair?"
"Shh, Chris!" Sarah said. She had gone from confused to wide-eyed. "You, uh. You need to look in the mirror."
There was one immediately behind me. I turned my chair around and looked quizzically at the reflection. That was me, all right, but the hair was all wrong, and some other things seemed off, too. It took me a few moments to figure out precisely what. I realized suddenly that I had no stubble on my chin. I never had much of a beard, but now there was nothing there. I reached up to feel it with my hand and found that it was completely smooth. No, not completely. There was something else there, too. Pimples. And freckles. That was odd, since I hadn't had either for years. My face looked a little... younger, too. There were no bags under my eyes. My nose looked smaller, even a little upturned. I stifled a sort of weird gasp.
"What is this? What did you do to my face?"
"Not just your face..." Sarah muttered.
She was right, and now I noticed that things were actively changing. My t-shirt and jeans had started to hang on me. My shoulders were no longer near as broad as they'd been, and a look at my arms confirmed that my modest muscles had started to dwindle away. My arms looked like they belonged to a high-schooler.... no, maybe a middle-schooler. My jean legs had started to pool around my ankles, and I could feel that I had more space in my shoes. I tried standing up, tripped a little bit on my seemingly larger clothes, and found that I'd lost at least five inches and counting. The girl was still shorter than me, but obviously less so than before. Sarah was still sitting down, but I had the sinking feeling that she might already be taller than me.
My neck felt funny. I pressed a hand to where my Adam's apple should be and found nothing there. "What is... " I almost gagged. My voice! I had squeaked like a little kid. My new voice was at least an octave higher than it should have been. Sarah tried hiding a smile but couldn't help it. I felt powerless. My hands looked almost dainty. There was no hair on my arms and probably hardly any on my legs, now. I had only been about 5'10" before, but I couldn't be more than five feet, now. My reflection in the mirror looked gawky, gangly. Little blotches were slowly spreading all over my forehead, and suddenly something bigger -- a pair of quite round, brown-rimmed glasses, like the ones I'd had until eighth grade, materialized on my nose. I opened my mouth in surprise and saw something glimmer -- braces.
I looked down to see that the rest of my clothes -- my blue t-shirt, faded jeans, and black sneakers -- were shrinking and changing too. The shirt was slowly being drained of all its color. Suddenly it sprouted a color and little buttons appeared on it. I was wearing a white polo shirt, just like all of the uniformed middle school students. My jeans were becoming darker, smoother, a pair of navy dress pants that would have been much too small for me only minutes ago. My sneakers reshaped themselves into clunky brown shoes with thick laces. My short white socks had lengthened and become navy dress socks. My belt had disappeared completely. I peeked under the waistband of my pants to see not boxers but tight white briefs, of the sort I hadn't worn in nearly a decade. I tried clandestinely to get a peek at my privates, but I could already feel what I most feared. There was no hair down there whatsoever, and my penis was maybe half the size it had been before. I had definitely found myself on the wrong side of puberty.
I looked up at the mirror first. I didn't dare look at Sarah or even the girl. Instead of a college-aged man, a seventh-grade boy, with nerdy glasses and braces, a short blonde haircut, stubby pimples, and a weak, gawky body hung in starched, plain uniform stared back at me. He looked as surprised as I felt.
I heard laughter behind me.