May dressed me like she was outfitting a new Barbie. First came cotton panties I pulled up under the towel, plain gray in what she called a boyleg style. I could see why; they reminded me of my briefs, low in the legs so they didn’t ride up my butt at all. She showed me a bag full of differently cut panties, and I ignored how the close fit of the one I wore felt against my smoothed-out crotch to veto any fashion experiments for now.
Next came the bra, light pink and plain. She’d brought several for me to try but the first one turned out to fit. According to her, anyway; to me it felt weirder than anything had so far, the band around my ribs not at all comfortable and the wide straps unignorable. She showed me how to put it on myself, snapping it on backwards and then rotating it around to bring the small cups in front and putting my arms through the straps. She also said she thought I was flexible enough to learn to put it on frontways and close the snaps in the back if I wanted to, that it was easier on the fabric if I did.
Then she gave me a plain black t-shirt, in my new small size instead of the tent I’d been wearing all day, and had me try on jeans until the third pair closed snuggly over my hips without cutting off circulation in my legs. (Its crotch definitely snugged right up into mine, though, and Oh my God how did girls get used to this?) The legs were a bit long but she said she could fix them and for now we just turned the cuffs up. Last were ankle socks that fit and canvas sneakers a little long in the toe.
She finished by pulling my hair back and tying it with a scrunchy to make a short ponytail. I honestly hadn’t thought it was that long; how much had it grown while everything else was changing?
“Perfect!” she pronounced. “For now, anyway. We’re absolutely doing a fashion safari once you’re more comfortable, but this is perfectly acceptable for home dining.” I wasn’t at all sure, myself. Even without a mirror, with clothes that fit looking down at myself I knew what I looked like. A teenager. Lapping past sixty, I was a teen again. God.
It was almost a prayer; I wasn’t at all sure I could do this again.
Then my stomach rumbled and May laughed. “Shall we?”
Carl had dinner plated with covers when we came downstairs and sat at the table. May led the short grace with their traditional chain of held hands and ending in amen. Steph burbled in her seat but had obviously already eaten, leaving us to tuck into leftover meatloaf, potatoes, and caramelized broccoli. I knew Carl hadn’t done the meatloaf, but the broccoli was warm and fresh, delicious.
“So, how was everyone’s day?” Carl asked innocently as soon as we’d all taken on enough calories to curb our hunger. I choked on a bite of potato and May swatted him. “What? Isn’t that the traditional family dinner question? I can’t ask my girls how they’ve been? Steph and I have already had our sharing time.”
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He waggled bushy eyebrows at us and I found my face heating up again; the man was such a goof but he’d just always aimed his clowning at May—point it at me and suddenly I didn’t know what to say. “I learned a new word today,” I blurted out then slapped a hand over my mouth with sinking horror. It was the kind of sarcastic rejoinder I might have thrown out there as David.
He cocked a weaponized eyebrow at me. “Oh? Do tell or no dessert.”
Perineum, rhymes with palladium, millennium, aquarium, hysterium, and now I was making up nonsense words. But after my embarrassment with the toilet, waiting for May to get back I’d decided to do my own research into feminine issues and started learning more about what I had now. Especially down there, the parts of me I could barely bear thinking about, reading up on what it all meant for me, and now I knew about an erogenous zone I’d also had on me as a man and hadn’t even known it. “Palladium! I read that scientists studying the Ship have recently discovered an alloy they can easily synthesize that replicates the properties of palladium? It’ll be huge for making cheap environmentally friendly fuel cells. What’s for dessert?”
May laughed and he just looked at me. “Okay . . . chocolate ganache ice cream, actually.” Nobody was fooling anybody and my hot face couldn’t be fire engine red over synthetic palladium, but Thank God he let it go. The conversation moved on to his cybersecurity work and a discussion of the next movie night.
I’d eaten over often enough to have established my right to help with the washing up, and after dinner I manned the post of stocking the dishwasher as Carl rinsed, taking each item he handed off to me. We worked together in silence until he broke it.
“Are you going to tell me what all that was about?”
“Not in a million years,” I said fervently. “My brain is— I’m a mess. I don’t know what’s going on in there.”
He shrugged. “Not to be all mansplainy or anything, but you’re probably going to feel like you’re going nuts for awhile. You’re a teen again, which means your hormones are back around their peak after tapering off for years and years, and there are different hormones in you now—or at least a different balance of them. And you’re going to have—” He looked over his shoulder and shuddered theatrically. “—hormone cycles. Us guys mostly live in a steady state of testosterone-driven madness after puberty hits. We get used to it. For you now?” He shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m ready for more crazy until you figure yourself out.”
And now I was flushing again at the thought of the crazy. Were all of these extreme reactions just female teen hormones? Was this what I’d have to live with, now? “Thanks?”
“You’re welcome,” he said magnanimously. “But one thing I’ve learned from May? Girls’ minds can be just as filthy as boys’ minds. You thought of something dirty, didn’t you?” He winked at me and now I wanted to hiss like a tea kettle. I glared back at him through my mortification and he smirked, obviously immune to stink-eye.
“I will hide your baseball cards.”
That wiped the smirk off his face.
