Two-Sided: "Me and My Shadow"
by: Rocketman

 

She started out when I was quite young. Early teens.

I was playing a board game by myself and looked across the board at the empty place on the carpet.

If only friends came more easily for me.

Well, half-muse, half-solution to my problem, she came to mind. A Frankensteinian collection of bits and pieces of girls I’d seen in school. She had on a miniature version of a blouse and jeans my mother regularly wore. Long, blond hair glowed in a halo around her head.

She had the cutest face, which possessed a contradictory presence of cunning in her taut lips and relaxed lean.

"You’re gonna have to move my pieces and roll for me." She declared.

I nodded.

"Or we can just kick this tacky game to one side and talk."

Boy, she really had good ideas.

Sending it into the corner with my foot, I leaned back and looked at the half-reclining girl before me.

She deserved a worthy name.

"How about Amber?" The girl asked.

"Too common. And it’s got to be more girly."

"I thought I was supposed to be brash and tomboyish."

"Why ruin you with that?"

She grinned at me. "Cassandra?"

Not bad. I’d heard the name on one of mom’s shows before and it sounded girly enough. Plus, it could be shortened into something like Cass or Cassy or Sandy or Andrea…whatever.

"Stay with Cassy. Sounds like a girl at school."

"Okay."

"So now what?"

"I don’t know." We sat there for a while and I thought about the time. Glancing up at the clock, I realized that mom wouldn’t be home for several hours yet.

Thinking about that, I added, as a finishing touch, a slender watch to Cassy’s equally slender wrist.

"Thanks." She muttered, looking at the clock face.

"What’s it like to be a girl?" I asked her.

Cassy stopped leaning on her arm, crossed her legs and stared at me. She had Nina’s green eyes. "What do you think it’s like?"

"I have no idea. I’m not a girl and that’s not exactly something you ask girls."

"Why is that?"

"Huh?"

"Why not go up to a girl and ask her, to her face, calmly, "what’s it like?", then you’ll know." Her revelations surprised me.

I made a mental note to bring that precise issue up with my mother.

"But don’t you know something about girls?"

"I know I am one."

"What’s between your legs?"

"Never looked?"

"Nope."

Another thing to bring up with my mother, but I would have to disguise the question of what was between her legs a little better. I knew with my inscrutable junior high school logic that girls did not have the exact same anatomy as boys. As taught to me by the ‘older’ kids at school who’d learned all the mysteries of the universe and major cuss words by the age of eight. As well as the more colorful rhymes, phrases and terms for bodily parts and functions.

Naturally, an analysis outside the bounds of my language at that time.

"What do you think it is that you’ve got between your legs?"

"No idea."

There had to be some way we could find out. The same ‘older’ kids had mentioned magazines in passing that had photography of the anatomy of girls, albeit those several years older than Cassy and me. Grown-ups.

I could make her older, but I didn’t really have much interest for that. Then she might try to boss me around.

"Take off your clothes."

She gave me a skeptical look, but glaring back told her I meant business. She stood up and off came the blouse. A small training bra, deduced from observations of mom dressing in a hurry (alas no peeks at the underlying anatomy) and outlines of clothes, made of silk covered up her breasts.

Pants down next and a panty just like I’d glanced on mom. Flatness prevailed. As for what was concealed underneath like a gift-wrapped Christmas package was an enduring conundrum.

With her standing there in her undies, my mind fought between going off assumptions and letting her stay as she was. Finally, curiosity won out. Off came the bra. She had nipples like mine but enlarged. Not to the point of milk bottle nipples, but I’d examined enough chests to figure out that they sat in a happy medium between that and male nipples.

As for the groin, I had it smooth and featureless. Then, thinking back to an ‘older’ kid’s comment, I placed a feline head between her thighs to see how it would look. It was laughably ridiculous. Now it was Cassy’s turn to glare, so I put it back the way it had been.

I was about to leave it like that when I wondered how she would urinate. Maybe that was part of the mystery about girls. Different restroom, so that meant they probably peed a different way. And flatness meant nothing sticking out in front.

A childhood "Eureka!" seemed within my grasp. The next connection. Nothing out there meant nothing to point, to hold and pee from. So no control over flow. That meant it ran down, no penis, no stream.

Could there be something in place of it? I thought about that, but liked my first idea better. Since girls can’t aim, sitting seemed to work. Guys could sit if they wanted to, but it seemed like girls were limited to sitting to pee.

So what did it come out of? A hole? Sure, like a butt hole.

A tiny hole appeared in her groin about the same width as the hole in my penis where her pee would come from. Of course, since she was just a figment of my imagination, bodily functions were not required of her.

"What now then?" She asked.

"Put your clothes back on," I told her. "And maybe we can go play outside or something."

After replacing all her clothes with assumed fluidity, Cassy walked over and sat next to me. It was the closest I’d ever been to a girl.

"You sure made me nice," whispered Cassy, slipping her hand into mine.

Tears welled up inside of me. How come real girls never wanted to get close to me?! What was with them?! Not that I really wanted them to be close to me, just not as distant.

Her hand was so graceful and soft. I hugged her close to me, feeling her warm, human body next to mine. Turning slightly, she wrapped both her arms around my chest and leaned her head on my shoulder.

I can’t remember how long I stayed like this. It’s kinda like one of those things where you don’t want it to ever end, but it does somehow. Only this time, I had the say in when and how it would end, so there was no time limit.

When my shoulders began to ache, I pulled away.

Cassy had a pair of streaming tears in her eyes and so did I.

They fell, warm and wet, down our cheeks until we wiped them away.

"This carpet is getting kinda hard to sit on," remarked Cassy, getting to her feet.

I agreed with her totally. So we sat together on the couch in the living room. Staring at her, all I wanted to do was hug her all over again, maybe even give her a peck on the cheek.

"Why don’t we go play outside, as you said?"

"Sure."

And outside we went. To the swing set at the center of the apartment complex where I lived. A few other kids were playing on them, but fortunately there were two available for us.

I didn’t bother myself with introducing Cassy to them. Besides, they wouldn’t see her anyway.

Starting up my swing, I wondered how Cassy would swing in hers. I could give her a push, but that wouldn’t be enough to carry her the whole way.

The solution came to me after a moment. If I imagined Cassy, then why not just imagine her interaction as well. Slowly at first, Cassy’s swing drifted up and back, coinciding with the motion of her legs.

We competed for height. On one upswing, I was in the lead, then that was traded to her and then back again. Soon, we reached the highest upswing where you get a few instants of weightlessness.

Cassy giggled as we came back down.

Nothing could have made that moment any better. But reality brought it back to Earth. Pudgy Winston waddled over to Cassy’s swing. Seeing this behemoth of human flesh, she frowned and sighed.

Deftly, she leapt backwards off the swing and drifted as a leaf to the ground behind the set, just in time to prevent a flattening.

I hated Winston more than anything in the whole world, his awful, nasal laugh, the lingering odor of his farts and the slime trailing down his nostrils.

He looked numbly at me, perhaps trying to start up a conversation. I turned away from him and looked over at Cassy, who was leaning on the pair of support bars on that side of the swing set.

"What are you gonna do about him?"

I couldn’t answer her like this, but I knew she could hear my mind, so that wasn’t a problem.

"You could push him off, send him to the ground."

Flopping to the ground, I added, like a whale cast ashore.

"But what would happen then?"

He’d run and cry to his mother. And there’d be all these witnesses.

Short and freckle-faced Billy scrambled up in front of my swing and said, "One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, one-hundred. Get off!"

Little cheater, then he’d go running to one of his parents and tell them that I didn’t obey a fair count and, as they said, he was too cute to lie. I felt like inching my leg out a little more and kicking his head like a soccer ball. Then once he’d fallen down screaming, I’d jump off the swing and trounce his coke-bottle glasses to pieces, ramming them into his lovely blue eyes.

Cassy frowned, "Get off."

I trailed my feet on the ground, coming to a stop. Using his arms to shove me off, Billy happily secured the swing for himself. Walking in a state of shock, I stood beside her, demanding an explanation.

"Let’s go some place with fewer people," was all she said. How dare she order me around?! I confronted her face to face and I said as much to that effect.

She didn’t seem intimidated by me. "I’m not ordering you around, you are."

That made no sense to me. Nor did it to her. Shaking my head, I glumly followed her away from the swing set.

"You’re not a very understanding person when it comes to other people," she intoned.

"Huh?"

"It’s been said to you before. In fact, I’ll peg it as one of the reasons you have so few friends. Violent feelings, hatred. It’s got to stop."

Who did she think she was?! My mom? When in reality she was nothing but a creation of mine. I felt like hitting her.

"Go ahead, punk!" She glared into my eyes.

Punk? I looked down at my hands. They were balling up into fists. How could I hit her? I walked back to the apartment.

She was waiting for me inside, legs up on the hassock, arms behind her head. I sat down beside her.

She edged away from me.

"So what do you want to do now?" She asked, glancing at the television. Taking in her distant demeanor and hidden anger, I broke down. I couldn’t take it anymore. I cried on her shoulder.

I was so sorry for thinking ill of others. Shivering, I felt myself lifted up and warmed by her presence. She moved my head to look deep into my eyes.

"Hmmm. Well, try to be more kind next time. And if you do harm and let’s hope it’s an accident and not something malicious. And always remember to apologize." Cassy was definitely beginning to resemble my mom.

"Go eat a worm," she muttered with a sly grin.

We chuckled together and officially healed our differences. For the rest of the day, we watched cartoons on TV. Mom came home around six.

Cassy waved and said, "Hi." Naturally, mom didn’t hear her, so I had to speak in her place.

"Hi, mom, how was your day? I made a new friend today!"

She looked me over tiredly and gave me a hug.

"Hmm. Well, that’s great. At school?"

I shook my head.

"Where?" She didn’t seem in the mood for guessing games.

"At home."

Immediately, visions of burglars and kidnappers praying on children that she’d heard about over and over from the nightly news came to mind and in a flourish she asked me about them all in a single breath.

"Nooope," I added the lengthy "ew" to tell her nothing was wrong. "Someone my age."

She put her hand to her chest in relief and to a blouse identical to Cassy’s, save adjustment for size.

"What’s his name?"

"Her name…" I grinned.

The ice was broken with that. She rubbed my hair with her hand vigorously. "Okay, what’s her name?"

"Cassy…It’s short for Cassandra."

"Hmm. Nice name."

Cassy waved a little more. And I had a choice to make. Could I share this with my mother? Then what of my other questions to make Cassy more complete? I knew little of strategy at this stage in my life, so I took the wrong approach.

"She’s here."

"What?"

"She’s in this apartment."

Mom smiled, "Go fetch her then, I’d like to meet her."

"She’s right there," I pointed to the couch.

It took a moment for mom to compose a response to that.

"Harry, buddy. We gotta talk."

She laid her purse down on the table and crouched on her knees in front of me.

"I know it’s hard for you to make friends. But to make up friends is not the right thing to do because they don’t really exist. You know that right?"

I nodded.

"So forget about this, umm, Cassy girl."

This I didn’t understand. "But she’s nice."

"Please, honey. Pretending is just gonna hurt you. You’ll prefer her company to the company of actual people."

She kissed me on the cheek. "Please…for your mother."

I decided that it would just hurt her to say that I wanted to keep Cassy, so, for her sake, I agreed to forget about her. An empty promise, I know, but it made her happy.

Cassy stood beside me, "Why do you think she doesn’t like me?"

Granddad’s mental illness probably was part of her reasoning. She couldn’t bare to see me talking to people who weren’t there, like he’d done all his life.

Folding her arms, she said she didn’t see this as much of a reason. Nor did I.

"I’m gonna cook pork chops for dinner, okay?" Mom said, walking over to the kitchen and washing her hands. "How’s your homework going along?"

"Okay."

"Finished?"

"Not yet."

She looked at me a second, then opened the fridge. Nothing else had to be said. I walked over to my room, Cassy ambling behind me.

I took out my books and looked over the assignments.

"Do you want to be a girl?" Cassy asked.

This right-field question took me by surprise. I should have seen it coming though. When the question was given voice, I felt a pang of fear, relief and disgust at the same time. All of which Cassy could hear.

This unasked question grabbed ahold of my head and refused to let go. What was it like as something else? Questions of being dragons and werewolves came first.

Girls were too human, too realistic to warrant serious thought. People were girls. No people were werewolves or dragons. But still being something other than you were brought excitement. Life lived in your own skin gets old after a while. At least for a kid.

Things that didn’t happen all the time or at all were more interesting. Sure, I could try being a girl. But that assumed a time limit, like a short-term deal.

Cassy’s question had no such assumption present. Girl and stuck.

"I don’t know," I finally said after a moment’s reflection. "I guess if I didn’t have to stay a girl."

"What do you think I’d be like to be a girl?" She leaned against my bed.

Again, I was stumped. So I leafed through a school book, trying my best to ignore her presence. But she persisted. "What if you were given a choice to be a girl for the rest of your life, any kinda girl you wish, would you take it?"

What did I accomplish by ignoring her questions? After all, they ultimately were my questions. Going back to that second one, I replied. "I’d still be human as a girl, so nothing too exotic, but if it were permanent, that’d probably be the most I’d accept."

And answering the permanent conundrum, I set aside my roundabout answers and said, "If I could be any girl, yeah, I’d take it."

"Why? Do you really wish you’d been born a girl?"

Back to indirect, "I don’t know. Not that I wish things had been different, but then I don’t know for sure how things would be if I had been a girl. They could have sucked real bad and I could’ve wished I’d been born a boy."

Then I added as an afterthought, "But that’s just imagining."

Cassy grinned slyly. "Who’s to say there isn’t magic in the world?"

"Mom says and the books at school say."

"Oh, they’re just grown ups. Come on, let’s go over to the bathroom."

Curious, I walked over and joined her in front of the mirror. Naturally, she didn’t have a reflection. So I gave her one.

"Thank you. Now let’s make you up."

"Huh?"

"As a girl, silly."

"Oh. How?"

"Like you make me up. Come on, it’ll be fun. Let’s start with your size."

I felt my body shrinking. Was I doing this or was Cassy? Someone must have been doing it. Anyway, I lost a little bit of height, but not too much. I’d never really been that tall for a boy.

Aside from losing that, I lost my penis and gained an identical to Cassy’s pee hole. My hair hung long on my shoulders, still it’s same dull brown.

Cassy pondered this for a moment and added a reddish tint lifted from Melanie a few seats next to me in Math class. That brought a slight smile to my face.

Then she touched me up my lending me as many of her characteristics as possible. When she was done, the image in the mirror changed as well. Had I really been doing all of that?

"Now to dress the part." She put me in an outfit with a blouse and matching skirt that reached down my girlish legs. And sandals for my feet. All a blending.

"Lovely. Let’s go."

"Where?"

"Out into the world."

What did it matter? None of it was real. In reality, I was wearing the same thing. I probably had a bit of an erection too. I had been getting those for a few months.

Cassy folded her arms. "And what’s so great about living in reality? It’s got fears and disappointments and all that other crap. Take a walk in wondrous fantasy for a little bit and see how it is."

She did have a point. But I wasn’t too sure about how wondrous being a girl was. My voice was too high for one, and the lack of penis more than a bit unnerving.

"Okay, so now what?"

She, being me, was stumped too. "Go to the library?"

"Yeah right. I’d rather do my homework!"

As evidence that it was a good idea, she reasoned that there probably were adult materials at the library. I’d heard of National Geographics with naked African women, but library materials were mere conjecture.

"It’s easy to explain to mom. And it’s not that far away. We can go, do what we need, and get back in an hour."

Easily said of course. I would have preferred to check out a Playboy from a newsstand. Unfortunately, there was the curb on people under 18 procuring them. Blast it!

Then, as though pulling her brilliant plan out of her sleeve, Cassy launched into an idea that we could get just such a Playboy from a library, because didn’t they keep collections of magazine?

Bursting her bubble, I pointed out that those would probably be kept out of our reach. She flicked this argument aside like a flea, "All we need is misdirection. Say we concoct a story about your brother needing research materials. Just get them through the automated checker then and we’re set!"

"So we make out a list?"

"Yeah. Try not to put Playboy on every single line and they won’t suspect anything." What could possibly be in a Playboy that one might deem research material?

I had doubts about this plan, but it was my plan after all and it was the best I had. First though, I had to get past mom if I even hoped to have a chance. And how could I do it looking like this?

Two breaths later, I remembered that it was all in my head. I wasn’t really a girl. Was I? Cassy shrugged and led the way to the living room.

"Best to just go and tell her," whispered Cassy, standing over by the door.

So I did. "Mom, I need to go to the library really quick."

She turned a knob on the oven and looked over silently at me. "Why didn’t you go before I got home?"

Gee wiz, the only question I didn’t have an answer for. And I really should have thought of it, or Cassy should have.

"Tell her you remembered an assignment due tomorrow," said Cassy.

I repeated this to mom. She appeared frustrated, but was never one to impede me when it came to school.

"Want me to drive you?" I assured her that I would be fine the short way there and absent-mindedly wondered what she thought of how I looked, then reminded myself again that none of it was real.

 

The walkway to the front of the apartment complex was busy and required Cassy to do some complex maneuvers to avoid getting passed through.

Along the way, we amused ourselves with games like "name a strange thing for a letter of the alphabet" or "sing a song". Cassy was so much better at them than me. Especially the singing.

I heard myself singing in a high, chirpy voice too, but no one else did. Brushing back my hair, I eyed some of the older boys who’d outgrown the swing set and were chatting about sports near the parking lot.

In my mind, I heard them swivel their heads, whistle like in the occasional commercial and ask us where we were headed. We’d giggle in reply and act coy, maybe hint a little or say something flirtatious.

Then we’d walk on, leaving them to call after us. None of this happened though since, in actuality, there was no us.

"You have no ability to suspend disbelief!" Cassy shook her head and folded her arms again. What if I just giggled? Naw, what would it accomplish, they’d just think I was weird.

Cassy’s calm voice tried to encourage me to act the part, but I was reluctant. No amount of egging changed my mind, so she eventually sighed and walked beside me in silence.

 

The local library was extensive when it came to library standards, so we had high hopes for the magazines.

Brushing my long hair out of my eyes again, I went up to the information desk and asked about magazine records. The pudgy woman at the desk, surely a grandmother of Winston’s….another glare from Cassy….directed me to a set of card catalogs. No computers. Not that I was surprised. It’d been like this for quite some time.

So I flipped through the cards and finally got to the Playboy listings. I was in luck, the listings showed a great deal of literature related with the magazine. Marking down a short story by Isaac Asimov and several others by related authors, I soon amassed a largely logical collection of resources with red herring articles tossed in to make the Playboy listings less potent.

Then I went over to the request window with Cassy and handed my slip to an acne-ridded late teen with a finger nearly done probing the vast recesses of his ear. He looked it over, wiped the wax on his fingertip onto an unsanitary napkin and muttered.

"What’s this?"

With Cassy as my story coach, I launched into a detailed explanation of my dear brother’s research paper due tomorrow and his request that since I was going to the library anyway, I might as well do the dirty work for him. A balance of duty and resentment at getting stuck with this job and purposely hinting that I had no interest in what magazines my brother chose to borrow.

The guy huffed and handed it back to me. "Some of those I can get, but since you’re not 18, I can’t get you all of them."

The worst case scenario. Cassy encouraged me to play it cool.

"Why is that?" The guy shrugged. "It just is. If you want to borrow those Playboy ones, then your brother will have to come and pick them up with a photo ID. Like a driver’s license or something."

He didn’t seem as intelligent as us. Cassy agreed with me that we could well be able to outfox him. Playing the innocent little girl would have helped if I only had the real body to go with it. But alas….

"Why do you need all that? My brother said there were some essays and a story he needed for his paper."

"They’re *cough* restricted materials," he said, as though repeating what had been ingrained into him a thousand times.

Now for some childhood logic. Not that it would work. "Why are they ‘restricted’?"

"They’re porno rags," muttered the guy. I wore my best look of confusion, which worked pretty well at wearing into him.

"Sorry, buddy, but I can’t get them for you. I can get them for your brother though, if he’s over 18."

Head hung low, we decided it was time to regroup and reassess our strategy.

Cassy had plenty of her mind to give. "How dare he push us away like that? What’s with him? What’s with all of them? What’s so awful about the female body? Why is seeing a girl so wrong?" My own questions, no answers.

But then, it was the way things were and we didn’t have the ability to fight things larger than ourselves. We needed a loophole, something to slip through. I could settle for reducing the listing to one and play it not quite as greedy. But then how to get past the archives guy?

As much as I didn’t really want to go back to that fat librarian (another Cassy glare) for help, I figured I had no choice. At least she seemed more understanding than him. It would be a delicate work in selling myself as a puritanical choir boy.

Fortunately, faces blur together and I had a good chance that she’d never seen me before or at least didn’t yet have a name to connect to my face. Had I been kind to her on previous occasions? Nothing mean came to mind.

Cassy coached me on posture and tone again. "Try for a mixture of naïve and polite." I tried my best.

"Excuse me ma’am. I found what I needed from the listing, but I’m having trouble with archives."

She asked me what I meant by that. Then it struck.

A collusion of fictional events tying themselves together and honest frustration provoked an downpour of flowing tears. I suppressed bawling since this was a library after all.

Now her attention was riveted to me, my concerns were her concerns.

I rambled on about my brother’s troubles, a mixture of the more improbable things Soap Operas had to offer and how he was working hard on this paper to keep his grades up and sent me here for the items.

She took the paper from me and looked it over. "Why did you have trouble?"

"The clerk didn’t want to give me the stuff."

That set her off. Like an Amazon, slightly less built, unleashed she marched to the request window and roused the same guy, who was fiddling with a sharpened pencil.

"Are you harassing library patrons?!" Despite the firmness of her voice, she kept constant regard for the sound regulations in a library.

As though slapped, he fumbled for an adequate answer. "Ummm. No."

"Then what of this poor little boy?!"

He took one harsh look at me and all was clear in his eyes. "He asked for restricted material."

"This is not restricted material!"

At which point, to refrain her anger from getting to epic levels that would be a breach of library procedure, she leaned in and whispered inaudibly to him. I strained to listen, as did Cassy, but we dared not edge closer.

Well, maybe she dared. Not that it mattered though.

After a short conversation, she turned to me and smiled. "All this has been cleared up. You’ll get what’s on your list." And Cassy danced the gig.

I felt relieved at this momentous accomplishment. A single-income home and eagle-eyed mother had tried to keep me from it, not to mention the sanitized Internet on the computers at school and various laws.

But, then it was not as if I was going to ‘whack off’ as the ‘older’ kids said, to this stuff. I just wanted a complete picture and telling by the strain on my mom’s face day after day, questioning her wouldn’t get me anywhere.

"It’s still worth a try though," reminded Cassy. "Even though just so you can let her know how you feel about this."

The information lady waited by the window until the material was passed forward. The error in my logic came to light when I realized that she was holding xerox copies.

"I thought it was gonna be the original magazine?"

"No, that’s restricted, like he said. But reproduced articles aren’t, there’s nothing in them that’s risqué, anyone can have them."

I felt like hitting her as hard as I could, but I figured her flab protected her from that. My fist would probably just bounce off.

As I flipped through them, she cheerily announced that they were just as good as the originals. "I hope your brother appreciates them. My, he has such a wonderful sibling in you."

Cassy even balled up her fist in frustration for a moment, before proceeding to hit her head against the wall, which I had no argument against. Just as long as it wasn’t my head.

It was time to regroup and rethink the basis of our strategy. First, we needed some privacy. A rarely used block of study tables would do.

"We’re going about this the wrong way. I have a feeling that these ‘restricted materials’ will be strictly enforced all over the place. What we need to do is try for some of their sterilized stuff."

I had to concur with her on that point. But where to look first? We did have a time constraint working against us. Cassy, ever clever, told me to look up anatomy. From there, we got a plethora of books to look for.

Before I moved on though, I noticed the word ‘erotic’ in the mix and went looking for it in the listings as a keyword. Then I came across a true abundance of materials. Each with names like "Erogenous Zones", "Pleasing Your Lover" and "Kama Sutra". Several even had pictorials.

We took several precious minutes to look them over. And I learned about the true words for the slang ‘older’ kids tossed around. Vagina, from the former, pussy. Clitoris, out of the sharper, compressed, clit. Cunnilingus, replacing pussy licking. Areolas, in the place of the nipples.

How classy for a sex book.

A fortunate spread that included a lovely woman with her legs also spread and hand at the ready to touch her genitals. Not quite the close up that we were looking for, but at least all the notable landmarks where there.

A little more than just a pee hole. In fact in this picture, it was difficult to figure out where the pee hole exactly was. We figured there had to be one somewhere.

That question was solved by a glance at an unfortunately black and white and reference-itemed copy of Gray’s Anatomy. As well, we discovered that the majority of the female sexual organs were on the inside. Something that came back to me as a "family life" item which had been quickly passed over. And supplemented by grainy dittos for coloring of the different parts of the internal organs.

Nothing external though.

And just a vapid run through of each congealed into the quickly blurted phase "this is where the egg goes through." And then forty minutes devoted to that dumb little egg. Then the ovarian cycle. And then coloring.

Ted, the loser who sat next to me, colored everything in false color. Fuchsia for the ovaries. Yellow for the "little glove that catches the egg like a baseball." Naturally, brick red for the several eggs in procession, even though the teacher had explicitly said they were light in color. He laughed like a loon. Of course, teacher had to compliment him on his work, as she did with everyone.

And while the sketches before us, expert work, brought back those distasteful memories, they were nothing like the dittos.

The pee hole was clearly visible, as was what it called labia, with inter and outer ones given different designations.

"Seems like this is better than Playboy could ever be," remarked Cassy, glancing glowingly left and right at the tons of illustrations. I had to agree with her, despite their lack of color.

I could feel my now vagina shifting to match the visuals. We derived the sensation of having an orifice in the front from conjecture. A pair of inter and outer labia too. We wondered if they stuck together like a plastic bag. Probably not.

Cassy checked her slender watch, as did I. "We better head back or your mom will be upset."

So we took the items to the automated checkout. At least it didn’t pass judgment.

 

The way back was clear and swift. Cassy seemed significantly uplifted. As she remarked, "Now I know what I’ve got at least. As do you."

I’d really grown attached to her modifications of me, despite the fact that no one else recognized them. Walking along, I perused the books carefully a few more times as Cassy peeked over my shoulder.

"Hey! That’s impolite!" I informed her in my girlish voice. Since leaving the complexity of the library, which took so much of my concentration, we’d been able to focus on getting my particulars correct.

Cassy giggled and shot back, "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah!" Then I proceeded to chase her around, arm reaching out as she giggled in mock terror. "Can’t catch me!"

"Sure I can *huff*." We were both beginning to run out of available air, so we agreed upon a temporary truce and walked back home.

Mom was waiting for us their, her hands resting on the table, two plates set before her. All the playfulness faded from our faces. Time for brinkmanship.

She appeared calm.

"Take longer than you thought, honey?"

All I could say in response to that was a non-committal, "I guess."

Perhaps not really the best thing to say since it brought up the next question as I shifted my hold on the books to hide their covers. "Did you have any trouble finding what you needed?"

A carefully place lure. "Not too much. Umm, I’ll go wash my hands."

"Okay, sweetie." Okay, no yank on the rod, but I knew where she was leading us with this.

Cassy seemed relieved, "We did it! Woohoo!" I cautioned her against early exuberance, but she wasn’t listening. All I could do was hide the books away in my room and suds my delicate hands up for dinner.

"We can look through them after dark, maybe with a flashlight and then get the whole picture into focus," rambled Cassy, using my brush to comb her hair so it looked more presentable.

"You think I should change?" She asked, examining her blouse and jeans. I told her it didn’t really matter, to which she gave me another patented glare and sighed.

"I suppose not."

 

Mom was in the same position when we got back to the dining room. She smiled faintly and asked, "What books did you get?"

Cassy plunged her fingers into her mouth in worry. "Darn it!" She shouted. "I knew this would happen!"

Instead of the other way around, I had to calm her down and lead her through what seemed like the logical path. A pregnant pause on my part was perfectly acceptable and necessary to come up with a reply.

"Umm, some I needed for science class."

"Really? May I see them?" There came the tug. I had no other choice, I had to show my sins. But were they really sins? Who’s to say they were?

Cassy pulled out of her spin and came up with an idea. "Just replace the ones you picked up with ones from your room."

"Sure, mom."

And we went back to my room and picked out books about weather and space in place of them.

If my mom were any other mom in the universe to whom semantics were not nearly as much an issue, we would have gotten off scot-free.

"Don’t you have these?"

"Really? I don’t remember them." Could it get any more difficult than this? Indeed, it could because mom was standing and walking in the direction of my room.

Cassy exploded in frustration and lashed out at the door, and then at the tiffany lamb on the table near the window next to it. With a crash, the lamb leapt and shattered against the linoleum.

Mom whirled around and stared at horror to see her lovely lamp in pieces. Could she blame me even though I was several feet away? Sure she could.

"Harry! What on Earth are you doing? NO! Oh!!! Why on Earth? What possessed you to do this? Tell me that!"

I had no easy answers for her. By all accounts, I was out of reach. So all I could do was tell her what I knew.

"I didn’t do anything to it." But the truth wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Did she even want to hear a lie? So why even ask me in the first place?

"Harry, right now I am so very upset with you that I don’t even know what to think. This lamp was my favorite. Your father gave it to me on our anniversary. I can’t even conceive of why you would brake it."

"But I didn’t do anything to it."

"You were upset that I would look at what you got from the library. So what did you really get?" Despite her claims, she didn’t have a lick of feminine intuition, just the ability to jump to rash conclusions.

But she was already at phase two of her assumption, and definitely past logic.

"How did I do that?" Cassy muttered. Maybe I could tell her it was Cassy’s fault, because it was. She’d been the one who pushed the lamp over in a fit of anger.

"Cassy did it."

Not the right thing to say given the tension of the moment. Mom paused, her limbs shaking with emotion, likely anger, and turned around. Paradoxically, tears were streaming down her face.

She tried to say her question, but couldn’t. Then she turned back to my room and walked into it.

Mom came back with the books that I’d been hiding. Beyond words, she looked them over and walked over to her room, vanished for a moment, came back and locked the door behind her.

"We are taking those back tomorrow and I don’t want you to ever to touch books like those again. They’re not for little boys."

She reached over and slapped my hand with a stinging shock. I held back the tears as long as I could while she led me by the hand over to the table.

"Now you’re going to eat, then finish your homework. If you even have any. Did you lie to me about that? No TV, no books other than your school books and you go straight to bed. I want you to think about what you’ve done today. And about this Cassy nonsense. I want you to stop it. It’s wrong for people to see people who are not there and even worse to blame things you do yourself on them. Do you understand?"

A quiet, croaked, "Yes," came from my lips as I sat down in my seat. No way was I just going forget about Cassy, who folded her arms and looked my mom over, eyes narrowed.

 

Dinner went slow, painfully slow, each look from my mother was agonizing. But finally it ended and she dismissed me.

Once away from the table, Cassy cleaned up the errors in my skirt, which had been melding into a pair of jeans.

"There you go. Back to normal. She’s a real bitch." As much as I loved my mother, at the same time I couldn’t understand her logic. Okay, maybe the lamp, whoever had done, it was understandable, but why the books? Isn’t it under the First Amendment, which they have in a copy of in the Bill of Rights in class that anyone has the right to such materials? Or does that only apply to people old enough to write the laws, excluding the young, who had voices and questions too.

Part of me felt angry and another part understood that since I didn’t vote, I meant nothing to the rest of the country. So, I was at the mercy of those around me.

"Oh come on, it’s not that bad. We got punished, but at least we got to look through it before it got taken away. You still remember it, right?"

I nodded.

"So what’s wrong?"

"It’s the principle of it. I mean, I wasn’t using those books to hurt anyone. Just for information. And I learned something. I learned proper terms for anatomy. More than free-no-information TV gives out. I know more than the ‘older’ kids who are considered crude. But am I encouraged? No, I’m disciplined!"

"It doesn’t seem right," Cassy continued. "That she would feel so against it. And what’s her problem with me? This is not the same as granddad!"

I knew she was right, but what could we do about it? The lamp that mysteriously fell over occupied my mind for a moment. What could have possibly caused that? Cassy?

She shrugged. "Maybe it was you?" Visions of the movie "Firestarter" entered my mind. Did I have some kind of weird psychic power?

"You can only know if you try it out. Lemme see….hmm," she picked up one of my action figures and place it upon the dresser. "Okay, knock it over."

Hardly a worthwhile example since the figure’s spindly legs could barely hold it up anyway. Cassy manipulated it for a minute until it looked reasonably stable.

"Okay, now do it." All right, but what exactly was I supposed to do? I hadn’t really done anything the last time, Cassy had. Maybe that was the answer. She was my psychic power.

She chuckled, getting it as soon as I did. "I see, so if I tip it over, it’ll happen, right?"

"It just did." Cassy had manipulated the figure when placing it correctly. And I hadn’t even gotten near it. It must only work when I forgot that she wasn’t a real person or focused of what she was doing. Kinda tricky, but cool.

"Definitely…" The sly grin from before was slowly returning to her face. "How’s about we play a little bitty practical joke on mother dearest."

"Just as long as it’s nothing mean."

"Oh, of course not. Just embarrassing."

I enjoyed the way she thought.

Peeking around the doorway leading to the dining room, I could see mom sniffling, her elbows on the table, and crying into her hands.

My resolve waned. This didn’t seem like the right time. Cassy encouraged me, "Oh don’t fall for that, the only reason she’s crying is because she thinks you’re a wacko like granddad. She deserves to think she’s going nuts!"

We weren’t in full agreement. But as long as Cassy agreed to keep things from getting out of hand, I was willing to go along.

Unnecessarily tip-toeing her way along the carpet and then linoleum, she walked over to mom and poked her in the shoulder.

"Ouch!" She yelped, looking in the direction of the pain. Seeing no one there, she probably put it down as a muscle cramp and nothing more.

Covering her mouth, Cassy giggled and looked over at me. I still wasn’t comfortable with doing this. But Cassy was ready to try her next prank. Slowly, she lifted the closest dish and let it wobble around.

Mom looked even more confused. Cassy backed away as mom put a hand up to steady the dish.

"That’s odd," murmured mom, standing. Rushing behind her, Cassy yanked her skirt down to her feet and dashed back to my side, sniggering all the way.

"Oh my God!" Shrieked mom, fumbling for her skirt. Now it was time for me to show up.

"Mom?" She was still clawing at the fabric, shaky and uncertain. Her eyes looked over at me. No questioning or accusation this time, only confusion.

"Is something wrong, mom?"

Yanking her skirt back all the way up, she put a hand to her stomach, as though to quell a growing unrest inside of it and faintly spoke. "It’s okay, sweetie."

"If you’re not very mad, would it be okay if we hug?"

All the fury was gone, only love and fear remained. Tears trickling down the sides of her face, she reached out her arms to meet mine and whispered, "Look at my face, Harry, I’m not very mad."

So we hugged tightly to one another, mom crying on my shoulder. I didn’t want to let go of her.

When we finally broke our hug, I was blubbering about how sorry I was. Now it was mom’s turn to be a shoulder. I wanted to tell her how real Cassy was to me and how this was nothing like granddad, but I knew that would just hurt her.

How about showing her? She’d probably pass out. Even then she’d be in denial, have herself committed and us in social services. Not a good outcome.

No, it would be best if we kept quiet about this whole thing and I owned up to the lamp.

So I promised to pay for it over time. She said it didn’t matter. "Really?"

She nodded and cried. When I asked her what made her so upset, she just diverted the topic and asked if I wanted to watch TV for a little bit before bed.

But I told her I was tired, which I indeed was. To which she gave me an incredulous look, then a smile and pat on the head.

"Sleep tight, honey."

Cassy met up with me on the way back to my room. "That was sweet."

"Hmm…"

"But you think I went overboard. Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to spook her quite so badly. I guess we don’t know our own powers."

"Too true." I closed the door behind me and took off my blouse, which was in reality a regular shirt.

"I wonder if….you know since things can be moved around…that other things can change too."

Naturally, I knew what she was leading into. "So you’re saying, maybe I can make things change, as well as move?"

"We, dear male friend, we."

"Hey."

"Okay, closer than that. But what I’m saying is who’s to say it stops at being able to move things?"

An interesting query, but did it hold water? I handed my blouse to Cassy and told her to do her thing. Immediately she was holding it, meaning that it was probably hovering in the air.

"Now what?"

I shrugged, "What do you think will work?"

"I don’t know. I figure it’s about as real as we make it out to be."

"But that only makes it so to us."

"Or so we believe. Maybe it’s about how strong our conviction is."

Which meant that I have to be sure that it was not only a blouse to me, but a blouse to anyone. All it took was a suspension of disbelief.

Staring at it, I tried to see a blouse, a girl’s blouse, something that wasn’t there. Unfortunately, the notion that all this was made up corrupted the image I was trying to create. It kept licking at my brain like an incessant reminder of the confines of plain-old reality.

Shaking my head to clear that image did nothing to help the situation. As far as I could tell, there was a blouse in Cassy’s hands, but I was failing at making it so others could believe the same thing.

What did it take? What special method was required to bridge that gap? Faith that it was truly a blouse when it wasn’t? Darn it! It was a blouse, no question. In all of reality that before me was a fucking blouse made of cotton blend and with a low, feminine neck which unnecessarily allowed for the presence of breasts when those it was intended for were just entering puberty.

It was smaller than my shirt, but not by much, a simple cotton blouse that a girl at my school wouldn’t have second thoughts about wearing. Maybe a few thoughts about the depth of the neckline, but no gripping concerns because it was such a lovely blouse, after all.

Focusing on that, I tried to keep it in mind as I took it from Cassy’s hands, put on a old shirt lying to one side and walked off to present the blouse to my mother, because it was, after all, a blouse.

She sat there drying her eyes as I held it up in my hands, "Do you know where this came from, it was in my room?" Forget about wondering if she saw a blouse, she did see a blouse. I felt a twinge of doubt, which I quickly suppressed since that would only lead to a reversion of the item. It was a blouse.

Mom looked down at the item in my hands, first with concern and then with utter confusion. "What? This is a blouse." Mom asked, taking it out of my hand and looking it over.

"Maybe it’s Cassy’s?" I offered, not really believing that she would even consider my suggestion.

Shaking her head, she just looked in wonder at this, probably considering whether I’d bought it intentionally for some reason.

"Did you get this from somewhere?"

"No, it just showed up in my room."

I looked ahead, knowing I wasn’t defenseless. Cassy could do anything, even yank the blouse out of mom’s hands and give it to me. But what then? Mom would faint and then where would I be?

A lie to say the truth. "I bought it at K-mart and told them it was for my little sister."

"Why, Harry?"

Sigh. "I’ve been curious about girls. And I’m too shy to go and ask them things about themselves. I think Cassy showed up for that reason and I just wanted to look over a blouse that a girl would wear. It was cheap. Only a few bucks and even I could wear it, I guess, if I had to."

A light flashed on inside her head, but the worry about possible poltergeists still seemed present. "Is that why? Why you got those books?"

Nod.

"Well, honey, you can just ask me. I’m a girl and I used to be in junior high. What would you like to know?"

Okay, the simple questions to make her think I didn’t know as much.

"How do girls pee? ‘Cause I saw in Gray’s Anatomy that girl’s don’t have boy parts. And school."

She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts. "Well, it’s like this. You know how boys have wee-wees. Well when boys and girls were in their mommys’ tummies and really young, they both looked the same. But what made them different was they had different genes, the things inside each and every cell in your body which tell you when to grow, how you look, and what sex you’ll be. For boys, they’re a little stub, like the tip of your pinkie, and at a certain age in their mommy’s tummy, those genes tell the stub to grow and the route for pee-pee grows inside of it. For girls, their genes don’t tell the stub to grow, so it stays small and right below it is a tiny little opening which never grew into the stub. So it stayed right there by itself. And since it’s so small and…right there….and urine is full of germs, it’s harder for girls to keep that area clean."

"What about the peeing part?"

"Oh, it just comes out like boy urine, but more in a spray for some reason rather than a stream. And girls have to sit right on the toilet seat to pee. Easiest that way." Mom looked exhausted from that.

"I understand. Is that all that’s down there?"

Now for another round. She cleared her throat and launched into explaining this bit. "No, that’s not all. Actually it’s inside of a mound, like a little hill. A fleshy hill. At the top girls, especially into puberty start growing hair, like boys do too, around their parts. It’s all in a patch a little lower in the groin area than boys. Anyway, there’s the little stub that would otherwise be a penis in a boy. And below that the pee-pee opening, then another kind of opening with want are called labia, there’s a larger, upper pair, like a slit into a girl and then one under that which enters into a girl’s uterus. And you’ve probably heard about what that is for."

"The egg from the ovaries?"

"Correct. And out from there comes the skin and blood and egg every month or so if a girl doesn’t get pregnant. It’s flushed out and new stuff replaces all that. But it can leave a mess, which is why girls who have these ‘periods’, as they’re called insert tampons inside there or wear pads to absorb the flow kinda like a diaper."

She was dearly hoping that I’d be satisfied by that, even though I’d learned more.

"What about sex?"

"We’ll discuss that another time." Whereupon she took one more look at the blouse, smiled faintly at me and ushered me back to my room.

I heard her sigh of relief through the door. Cassy sat cross-legged on the bed. "She wasn’t much help," she noted.

Agreeing with her, I felt back onto the bed and muttered, "At least she tried. Although it would have been nice if she hadn’t resorted to baby language. It almost seemed like she didn’t know what she was talking about. How could that be?"

"Maybe she’s a she-male."

"Come on!"

Cassy defended her position, "Sure, it’s on Jerry Springer. Maybe we’re adopted?"

"No way."

"Just a thought, sheesh."

Looking up at the ceiling, I wondered what else I could change. Could I change my mom, myself, or other people? It took a while on the blouse, but maybe I’d get better with practice.

"You should have tried on the blouse. Mom won’t let you wear it now."

"I can always make a new one."

Unraveling her legs, Cassy stood up, "Let’s try some more clothes."

"Like what?"

"Some other stuff. Like girl stuff."

"Sure." She opened up the drawer and took out an undershirt.

Shaking it once, she presented it to me and said, "Let’s make a tank top out of it. We’ve seen a tank top before so it should be easy."

Glancing at the undershirt, I decided on something entirely different. The image in my mind was that of a bra. Cassy had no qualms about this. Slowly, the material turned slightly sheer and lacy, like mom’s bra. White.

It was a bra after all, no doubts this time. My mind leapt to this conclusion without questions. What else could it be after all?

The lessened lag time allowed me to swiftly turn a pair of jeans into a skirt.

Trying on the bra (it went on easily), I felt the empty cups and pushed them in a moment and felt the lack of friction of my finger against the material. Just as I’d heard it talked about.

It would have been better if there could be something to fill it. Heeding my thought, Cassy took off her blouse and bra and presented her pubescent breasts for my inspection. Their details, vastly improved from my brief sessions with the erotic books, met my eye. What would such things look and feel like on me?

Hers still had their A-cup size, those trips with mom to the clothing shops invaluable for comparison to the girls’ breasts at school.

Denying the feedback my nerves were sending was the hardest part. When you don’t have a connection with something, it’s easy to focus on it being something else. Plus, I didn’t have any idea how breasts were supposed to feel. So I tried telling myself they were heavy like limbs, but without the mobility. Like the tip of your nose, just there but with softer contours. Reading the erotic books, I knew they were sensitive with oodles of nerves around the areolas. Which got harder in response to continued touching.

Ok, I’d got all the geography down. Now I just needed to convince myself they were mine. Wait, that was the hang up. Convincing. I couldn’t convince myself because that entailed doubt. It wouldn’t succeed by trying to force a change, but by realizing the truth you wished to be so.

My breasts were there, hanging from my chest with feminine nipples, my nipples, filling the cups of my lacy bra. They were there. They had to be there. Darn it, doubt!

A moment of rational thought messed up the whole thing. In disgust, I took off the bra and tossed it on the floor. Then I seized the skirt from Cassy’s hands and placed that on top of it.

In retrospect, it was a good thing that I did, because a few seconds later, mom came in, her eyes now dry and saw the small pile.

"What is that?"

Of course, no explanation of going to K-mart would fix things here when what I needed was a real way out. Or rather, the clothes not to be there.

Sitting on them, I focused on sitting on the carpet, nothing underneath me. Panic had a way of accelerating my abilities.

When mom lifted me off the floor to get a better look at the bra and skirt she’d clearly seen, she was shocked to find nothing underneath me and nothing clinging to my bottom.

Stuttering, she muttered to herself what a weird, hard day it had been, apologized for lashing out at me and shut the door behind her when she left.

"Far too close," said Cassy with a sigh.

"Yeah, let’s take a break. I’m exhausted from all this concentration."

"Is it me?" Cassy asked.

I shook my head, "No, oddly enough, you’re kind of relaxing to think about. No difficulty at all."

"That’s nice to know. So do I take my shower first or should you?"

"Why don’t we take one together?"

Cassy smiled and strutted, "Hmm, as the book said, kinky."

"Not really."

"Well if you think about it, yeah. But what if it were?"

"I don’t want to go around in weird circles and all that now. I’m getting tired." And I really was, but ever exuberant and wise old Cassy still wanted to play. She relented after that though. "Ok, we shower together, but nothing weird."

And we did.

 

Cassy dressed in a set of baby chick pajamas. Well, not exactly dressed since I made them just for her from her previous clothes. Personal illusions this time. Actually creating was beginning to ache something terrible. But I did take a shortcut of creating pajamas of my own with a generic stripped pattern, just for the sake of time saving, even though it caused throbbing in the front of my head.

"Good night, Cassy. See you tomorrow morning." I got under the covers and pulled the sheets around my body.

"Yeah, a school day, right?" Cassy got under the sheets but stay in a sitting position on the other side of my bed.

"Right…"

"That should be fun, with all we can do."

"Sure…."

"Super powers!"

"Shut up…."

"Ok. I’m just so anxious, I can’t sleep."

"I can…."

"Fine, rub my nose in it."

That made me giggle for a second. Then I put my placid face back on.

"You know I’m glad I met you, Cassy."

"Well, you didn’t really meet me, you made me."

"I’m glad I did that."

"So am I."

She pulled the covers close around her and leaned back, reaching out a hand to touch mine. I could feel it and grasp it just as easily as the hand of any living human being. Running my fingers across her smooth, slender knuckles, I sighed and wrapped my hand around it. I wanted to hold on for as long as I remained conscious, but she had other plans, slipping out of my grip and putting her arm on my shoulder in a half hug.

Her sweet, passive, feminine perfumey scent met my nostrils. I took a deep whiff and edged closer to her.

With a chuckle, I remarked, "At this rate we’ll get all of five minutes of sleep."

But, of course, I was wrong, because what seemed like less than a minute later, I was in dreamland.

  

The End….

…..Of "Me and My Shadow"

 

Author Post Script:

Status of Stories.

I fully expect my volunteering as an Armchair Review columnist to stifle my output a little, compounded with my class schedule. But not to fret you handful of fans out there….somewhere….I hope…

I AM writing.

And my wandering imagination has conjured up far too many stories for my own good. Here’s what I’m working on.

A modest length story entitled "The Way Things Have To Be". A marvelous tale which I shall be able to get out just as soon as I remember what it was supposed to be about and why I gave it that title. Don’t expect it out anytime soon though. Anticipated Finish Date – Five minutes before the last trump.

Series called "From the Files of NORM", a federal magical law force. The National Organization for the Regulation of Magic. And it had so much potential, but it just wandered into the depths of my hard drive. Note as I go along these each have a greater likelihood of seeing the light of day, some day. This is not one of them. Anticipated Finish Date – The conversion of the Jews.

Ahh, "Pyramid". I have no idea where it was headed, but damn does the prose sound great when I read it now. I need to find some way to bring back to life this tale of a duplicitous sister and a trip to Hawaii as told through a writer’s journal. Maybe by fixing the plot first. Anticipated Finish Date – Not soon.

And an unnamed story based on an actual, creepy experience I had late one night in an ice cream parlor. Oooooooo. *whoosh* Howl! Think about that…. Anticipated Finish Date – Who knows….Maybe Halloween.

"Resort Experience" another of those based on things, quite similar in surface concept to "Pyramid", but with a different set up since it’s based on a real resort where strange TG-type things have been known to happen to people when they take a special relaxation treatment. No fooling, truth is stranger than fiction, but darned if I could ever afford to go there or be that rare person something strange happens to. Anticipated Finish Date – This summer possibly.

And not to forget good old "Out of Contact", my answer to Secret Society in the sci-fi genre. Had Douglas Adams not gotten here years before I would have had more reason to pursue this one. But I still like the idea enough and want to see a guy wake up from an alien teleporter as Jodie Foster so much that it’s at least on my horizon. Anticipated Finish Date – This summer, possibly, likely fall or winter.

Then "Mr. Keller" the serial I only posted part one of on the list. I have no idea what floundered in this one. The ending is still all mapped out and the foreshadowing in place. Maybe "Amber Smith" took all the ingenuity out of me. I still browse through it every so often. Anticipated Finish Date – This summer possibly.

Not to forgot an unnamed story, which is a play on "Girl, Interrupted" with a guy turned into a girl who’s then institutionalized. The lack of a second act probably stalled this one, but I’m such a Winona Ryder fanatic that I want this bit of tribute real bad. Anticipated Finish Date – Before Winona’s next movie comes out.

A seemingly simple epic poem which tells the story of the preceding five episodes of Secret Society with brevity and clarity. I’ve written quite a bit of this but have run out of words that rhyme smoothly with "breasts." Anticipated Finish – June something.

And clearly the next episode of Secret Society with it’s Dark side vs. Light side battle between an evilling Kelly Lendridge and Chris/tine Wren all told in a non-linear format, all a jumble and with the subtitle "The Order." Yup, my hints are well hidden. Anticipated Finish Date – April 16^th. Maybe….

Well, what else could there be then? How about the one I’ve gotten quite a bit of e-mail for. The long anticipated…..*fanfare* "THE TEAM: ‘Spring Training’! It’s about a third down in words now, but since I recently got my writing groove back, this puppy is in the delivery room. Which makes absolutely no sense, but that’s all right. Anticipated Finish Date – Before the beginning of the baseball season, April 1^st.

This last one may flip flop with Team depending on whether it does or doesn’t click for me. It’s got the rather provisional title "The President" and it’s about the memoirs of a Bush aide and the day the President wakes up looking more than a little like Winona Ryder (see four up ^) and how he copes with it. I’ll give you a hint; she doesn’t turn into the female Clinton, thank goodness. Not intended in a political sense. Anticipated Finish Date – Late February or March.

And as for the second part of this series. I’d put it about fourth on the list.

Note: The synopsis is taken from "Me and My Shadow" By Dave Dreyer, Al Jolson and Billy Rose and performed as a duet by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

© 2001
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