Mysterious Changes - Part 2

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It was funny because as she tentatively stepped from the shadows, I could see she was really cute and looked just a little bit familiar. She was probably a freshman, I thought, and I was under the impression that I had already taken note of all the cute freshman girls, but somehow I had missed her. Still, as I said, she looked a little familiar, with her blue eyes that sparkled once she moved out into the light and her long, light brown hair. She was dressed in a feminine pink tee with a neckline low enough to display growing breasts, and her legs were well displayed in a very short khaki mini. As she nervously approached me, she seemed to wobble a little bit, perched on those wedge sandals that are like a casual high heel. Her makeup and jewelry were as sophisticated as their equivalents of girls in my class, giving her a more mature look.

Along with the mature appearance, there was a shadow of something else confusion, I thought. It was as if she knew something was wrong. I began to realize the sparkle in her eye was light-reflecting tears.

"Steve?" she said again, a quaver in her voice.

"Yeah," I replied, a little alarmed by the look of fear and disorientation on her face. "I'm sorry, but I don't know your name."

"Oh Steve!" she exclaimed, her voice wavering. "It's me, Lucas!" With that, she broke into a sob and threw herself against me.

It was probably the last thing in the world I expected to hear and the most incredible. While the girl did look faintly like my brother, I didn't believe for an instant what she had just said. Still, I instinctively put an arm around me. What guy wouldn't when a hot-looking girl wrapped herself around his body? But I knew there was no way this attractive creature could be my brother. I sensed one of Lucas's devilish pranks coming up, and I was determined not to fall for it.

Ron sensed the same thing. As I stood there holding the sobbing girl, he calmly said, "Gee, Steve, I didn't know your brother was a transvestite."

That brought a grin to my face, but the girl had her head buried too far in my chest to see it. Now from past experience, I knew that when Lucas plans a stunt, the best thing to do is pretend to go along with it until I could figure out where he was going with it although this particular prank seemed almost too much to use that tactic. Surely Lucas had to know that there was no way in the world that I would believe this girl's assertion that she was somehow my brother. I supposed I was expected to believe that my brother had been made up to look like a girl. If that was his expectation, I thought, he would soon be disappointed, because while he had undoubtedly chosen her because of a faint resemblance to him, there was no way that the person in my arms could have been a boy made up to look like a girl. The curves and swells of her small body smaller than Lucas's I might add were very obviously feminine, and I was a little embarrassed to note that she was making me hard.

"You want to tell me what this is all about?" I asked softly.

The sobbing stopped for a moment. She looked up at me, hoping to emerge from her tear-filled eyes. "You mean, you mean you believe me?"

I gently pushed her away from me, careful not to appear to reject her or overbalance her on her wedges. "I didn't say I believed you yet," I clarified. "Tell me what this is all about first and then I'll decide if I believe you or not."

She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she nodded and said, "I guess that's fair. Look, Steve, I've seen that look in your eyes before. I know you're just stringing me along. But let me tell you what happened. Then maybe you'll believe me."

"I doubt it," I told her, "but you can try."

"You know Dave and I were going to be here tonight," she began. "We got here a couple of hours ago. Dave's older brother dropped us off. Mostly we just wanted to look around. You know figure out if there were any good rides this year and look over the booths and figure out which games we had a chance of beating."

That was innocent enough. I had often done the same thing with my friends when I was too young to work on setting up the show. I nodded.

"Then we spotted the fortuneteller's booth. It was already set up just in front of the trailers."

Again I nodded. I had noticed it myself earlier and figured that was where Marty was now trying his best to get laid.

Now her face reddened a little. "We suddenly thought it would be neat to snag her crystal ball. You know those things are neat."

I had an uncomfortable little twinge. Lucas actually did think they were neat. He had a couple of crystal ball paperweights actually in his room and often liked to hold them up to the light to watch the colors shift along the surface.

"There was nobody in the booth," she went on. "Or at least I didn't think there was. Dave was pretty nervous about the whole thing. He stood lookout while I scooped the ball up off a table in the back of the booth. Some lookout he was. She got in from the other side. I didn't even see an entrance there. But you should have seen her. She's Indian American Indian, I mean. Long dark hair. Good looking."

Again I felt a little uncomfortable. I had seen the fortuneteller and she did indeed look like the girl's description. Still, the best lies are laced with elements of the truth. Ask any politician.

"She grabbed me. Then she accused me of trying to take her crystal ball. The next thing I know she's chanting something. It sounded like what the Indians are saying to each other in those ceremonies in the movies. You know what I mean. It's almost like a song. The next thing I know my body feels weird. It didn't exactly hurt, but it was like the feeling you get when you have a muscle spasm and things start moving around without any conscious control. It's like your arm last spring,"

I nodded. The previous spring I had pinched a nerve in my throwing arm. For a few days, I seemed to lack complete control over my arm. It was curious that Lucas would tell the girl that particular story to make her identity sound more credible.

"So my body started changing while she held on. God, you should have seen the grin on her face. It was like an animal. What's the word I'm looking for?"

"Feral," I told her.

She thought about it for a moment. "Yeah, that's the word. It was a feral grin. I tried to break free, but I couldn't. She wasn't that big and I should have been able to break away, but I couldn't. It was as if she was sapping my strength as she held me. I could feel everything shifting inside me bones, organs, skin hair, everything."

"Where was Dave in all of this?" Ron asked. I looked at him strangely, realizing he was actually getting caught up in the story.

"The pussy ran off," she muttered. Then, surprisingly, she gave a little laugh. "That's good. Who am I calling a pussy? Look at me."

I had to admit, she even talked a little like Lucas. The inflections were similar for one thing. And Lucas had a habit of calling people pussies and worse. But I knew that she was just playing along with Lucas. She had to be. After all, it was completely impossible for a person's sex to be changed that way. It had to be.

"Okay, great story," I said loudly so that Lucas could hear me if he was hiding in the shadows. "You've had your fun, Lucas, but we aren't buying it." I was talking loudly enough to be heard all over the place, sure that Lucas was lurking behind a tree or a parked car.

"Damn it, Steve, weren't you listening?" she practically wailed.  "It's me! I'm your brother."

"So okay," I laughed, "you're a great actress, whoever you are. Now run along."

Her look of anger and frustration turned to one of fear. "You, you aren't going to leave me out here, are you?"

I wanted to leave her there, but it wasn't a good idea. Leeds was a quiet little town, but bad things could happen in quiet little towns, too. That might be especially true if one of the rougher carnival workers spotted her cute little body and decided to see what he could get away with. "All right," I sighed. "I'll give you a ride back into town."

The fairgrounds were just on the edge of town, so we didn't have far to go. In spite of my insistence that she tell me where she lived, she just wanted to be dropped off at my house. I supposed she was going to meet Lucas there later. Dave's older brother was probably picking them up.

The girl rode silently in the back seat. I thought I heard her whimpering every now and then, but I wasn't sure, and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of asking her what was wrong. I looked over at Ron who was examining something.

"What's that?"

"It's a purse," Ron said. "She must have dropped it while getting in the car. I thought I'd find out who she was. It must be hers. But it's funny she didn't ask about it. It was just lying on the ground over by where we first saw her."

"Give me that!" she demanded when she heard what we were talking about.

"Not just yet," Ron told her as he rummaged around in her purse. "I want to know who you really are." He extracted an ID, looked at it in the light of the street lamps on Main Street, and began to frown.

"What's wrong?" I asked him. Silently, he passed the ID to me. We were stopped at a traffic light, so I had a moment to study the ID. It was a standard ID issued by Leeds High School to all students. The picture on it was certainly the girl in the back seat. I froze as I looked at the name on the card: Lisa Ann Hall.

I handed the ID back to Ron. "It's a fake."

"Are you sure?" Ron asked.

"What's wrong with you? You don't really think someone changed my brother into a girl, do you? I'll tell you what's happened. Lucas and Dave probably got into the office and made up this ID for their little girlfriend." I looked back at the sullen girl in the back seat. "It isn't going to work, sweetheart."

"Fuck you!" she said, dabbing her eyes with her hand, causing her makeup to run.

"No time," I told her. "We're home my home that is."

Ron said goodnight and headed off for his house a couple of blocks away. He had said he wanted to walk or he would be stiff in the morning from our workout at the carnival. When he was gone, I looked at the girl. "This is where we part company," I told her. "It's not too late though. If you'll just tell me where you live, I'll drop you off."

"Fuck you."

"You already said that."

"Then bite my ass." Before I could think of a snappy comeback, she turned and headed for the house. The front door was unlocked, and before I could stop her, she was inside. I was right behind her though.

The next few moments changed my entire view of reality. Up until then, I was convinced that my brother was playing an elaborate prank with the help of a willing and talented young actress. I had shown my determination to not fall for the stunt. But there are two people in the world I knew who hated Lucas's pranks more than I did our parents. And the two of them were waiting for us when I rushed in the door after the strange girl.

By chance, my mother was in the entryway when we walked in. She had just gotten back home herself, and my father was standing there talking to her.

"Lisa, what's wrong?" my mother asked with concern upon seeing the girl's makeup-streaked face. I don't know who was more shocked me or the girl. She skidded to a stop in front of Mother and asked, "What did you just call me?"

Mother laughed. "Why Lisa, of course. What else should I call you?"

Lucas, I thought. She should call him her Lucas. No, that wasn't right. There was no way on Earth that my mother would have played along with a prank like the one I thought Lucas was pulling. My eyes tracked over to the family portrait hanging on the entryway wall. There were Mom and Dad, smiling in acknowledgment of their bountiful lives. There I was, trying to look older than the fifteen years I had achieved at the time the picture was taken, and there was Lucas? No, there was Lisa in the picture. There was a girl, ten or eleven at the time, her long hair looking almost more blonde than brown, a smile on her face as she stood there in her pale blue dress, Oh shit.

"Yes, what's wrong, sweetheart?" my father asked with a slight glance in my direction to see if she had been crying because of something I had said or done.

"I, I" she began.

I didn't know what was going on, but enough had happened to convince me that the unhappy girl before me was what had become my brother. Yet for some reason, our parents noticed nothing strange. I had to come up with an answer for them before "Lisa" said something wrong. "She had an argument with her boyfriend," I explained quickly.

The girl who had been Lucas turned on me in a heartbeat, and I thought I was going to be subjected to another of her foul-mouthed tirades. But then she saw the desperate look in my eyes and realized that while she and I might remember a person named Lucas, our parents knew only of Lisa.

"Yes, that's it," she said in a small voice as I gave a quiet sigh of relief.

"Oh, Lisa," our mother said, putting a comforting arm around the girl. I couldn't help but note that when Lucas had left for the fairgrounds, he was a good three inches taller than Mom. Now he was shorter by at least that same amount. "Don't worry. I'm sure you and Dave will work it out. He's such a nice boy."

I saw the fear in the girl's eyes as she realized that my parents thought her friend Dave was now her boyfriend. The obvious question in her mind was how many other people thought that and did Dave now think he was her boyfriend?

"Uh, yeah, Mom," she said, gently moving away from Mom's comforting arm. "I need to go to bed now. I'll be fine; don't worry."

I realized she just needed to get up to her room and away from our parents. They apparently had no way of knowing that they were freaking both of us out. Neither of us had expected what we saw and heard when we walked in the door.

"I'll check up on her," I volunteered, following the girl who had been my brother up the stairs. I'm sure our parents thought we were both acting a little weird. If only they knew, but apparently they had no idea what had happened. As far as they were concerned, they had always had a daughter named Lisa. There was no Lucas, never had been.

I found my new sister sitting in a nearly catatonic state on the bed in her room. I suppose I should have expected the room that had been Lucas's to be changed, but it just hadn't crossed my mind. I was too worried about my brother to think about that. It must have been mind-blowing for her to throw open the door of her room and find that everything she remembered every trophy or memento had been changed or removed.

"Holy shit!" I said softly. Everything was feminine. Every corner of the room announced that a girl lived there. An open closet door showed a rack of girls' clothing, with pair after pair of girls' shoes spread across the floor. Instead of a tall chest of drawers, there was a lower set now supplemented by a vanity. The colors were soft pastels the walls a cream color and the drapes a slightly lemon shade. I suppose it could have been worse. Everything could have been pink.

"So now you believe me," the girl on the bed mumbled, her lower lip trembling as if she were about to cry again.

"I believe you, Lucas," I replied, sitting next to her on the bed. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you before, but this is, well, it's pretty unbelievable."

"I guess I can't blame you," she said softly. "If somebody else told me this had happened to them, I wouldn't believe them either. I really don't believe it myself."

"Maybe it will wear off," I offered lamely.

She looked at me with sad eyes. "I don't think so."

She fell back on the bed, hair spilling over the covers and her small breasts shifting beneath her tee. I couldn't help myself, I was staring at her. Her smooth legs wrapped in fine nylon, her widening hips, her slim waist, her small but pronounced breasts, and her attractive face and hair were worth looking at. Even if she had been my brother, it was hard to think of her as my new sister.

"Steve, what am I going to do?"

"Tell me again what happened."

This time as she told me about the Indian fortuneteller and the transformation, I listened more closely. After all, this time I believed her. There was one important addition to the story though, but I had to ask her about it first.

"Did she say anything, anything at all when she changed you?"

She thought for a moment. She was sitting up Now closing her eyes to try to remember the details. "Yeah, she did. When she caught me, she said something. It sounded like 'walking talking.' Then she grabbed me even tighter. She just laughed and chanted while I changed. Then, when it was over, she left. I was too stunned to stop her. The change didn't exactly hurt, but it takes a lot out of you. But just before she left, she said something like 'Tell your father to let me go.' I don't know what she meant. It didn't seem to make any sense."

It didn't make any sense to me either. Walking, talking? What could that mean? And as for the part about our father, that meant nothing to me. It was crazy. Everything was crazy.