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A House Divided by Trismegistus Shandy This short novel is in the same setting as my earlier novelette "Butterflies are the Gentlest." They take place simultaneously, but there are no characters in common; I reckon you could read them in either order. I'm calling the setting itself "the Valentine Divergence"; see http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/37626/valentine-divergence for details on the setting. (The setting notes contain spoilers for both "Butterflies are the Gentlest" and "A House Divided.") Earlier versions of this novel were serialized on the tg_fiction mailing list (December 2011 to January 2012) and BigCloset (June-July 2012). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. You can also create derivative works, including adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story and release your own stories or adaptations under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ My secondary-world fantasy novels "Wine Can't be Pressed Into Grapes" and its sequel "When Wasps Make Honey" are available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format. Both involve multiple human/animal and TG transformations. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CUPYSFG http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CU584JM https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/319765 https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/319769 ----- For most of the drive, Uncle Mike didn't say anything, and I didn't either. The wrecks had all been cleared from the roads, but the closer we got to Atlanta, it seemed like there'd been so many of them that they hadn't had time to haul them all away -- we saw lots of wrecked cars in the ditches on both sides of the highway and in the median, and once we got into the more densely-populated areas there were big piles of wreckage, where you could hardly tell where one squished car left off and another began. I wondered how many of the people who'd been in those cars at the moment of the change had survived, and of them, how many would ever recover from their injuries. Somewhere around Norcross I said I needed to use the bathroom. Uncle Mike stopped at a gas station and we both went in. We used the men's room -- I felt vaguely guilty about that, but I was too embarrassed to use the ladies' room, and we both still looked male, as long as we had clothes on. I was about to ask Uncle Mike which he thought we should use, but he went into the men's room and I followed him quietly. There was only one stall; he let me go first. I peed, trying not to look at myself any more than necessary, and went out. Uncle Mike went into the stall while I was washing my hands; after I dried them I went out and looked at the magazines. Or I was going to look at the magazines; the other customer looking at the magazine rack caught my attention first, and I stared at him for several seconds before I remembered that wasn't polite and made myself look away. He had black fur and long, sharp claws; he looked more like a big cat than a wolf, but more like an ape than either. I wondered if my Dad looked like that now, and I was trying to work up the nerve to ask him where he'd been last Saturday when it all changed, when Uncle Mike came out of the restroom. "See anything you want?" he asked. "Nah," I said. "Let's go." From there it wasn't far to home; we were well ahead of rush hour, and Uncle Mike said the traffic on I-285 was lighter than usual even for early afternoon. Thirty or forty minutes later we were pulling into my driveway, and I suddenly got really nervous -- I'd been a little nervous all day, but as Uncle Mike turned off the engine it suddenly hit me all at once, and my heart was pounding just as hard as when I realized, last Saturday, what had happened to me. Uncle Mike started to get out of the car, and then looked at me and said: "Are you okay?" "Yeah," I said. "Just give me a minute, okay?" We sat there in the parked car for a while, and then I opened my door and we both got out. I trailed behind Uncle Mike to the door; he rang the bell. By the time I caught up with Uncle Mike, my Dad was already opening the door. I drew in a deep breath when I saw him. He wasn't much like the guy I'd seen at the gas station, though they both had fur and claws. Dad's fur was more yellowy-tan, what you call "tawny" if you see a cat that color, and he had a longer snout -- not as long as a dog or wolf's snout, but enough to make his face barely recognizable. He was just wearing shorts, and I could see how his knees bent the wrong way. "Jeffrey!" he said, and grabbed me in a big hug, like he hadn't done since I was little -- I mean, he hugged me often enough, but it was years since he picked me up and whirled me around like that. He put me down and said to Uncle Mike, "Come on in." We did, and there was Mom, lying on her side on the living room sofa. She was wearing a loose T-shirt, and covered with a big blanket from the waist down. "Jeffrey!" she said, "come here and give me a hug." I did. From the waist up, she looked a lot more human than Dad. But when I leaned over and hugged her I couldn't help feeling how flat her chest was, and remembering the centaurs I'd seen on CNN, and thinking about what she looked like under the blanket. I stood up and looked at her again. She still looked like herself, her face was hardly changed, but she was so skinny -- almost like a famine victim, with all the mass she could spare rearranged to make the lower torso and hind legs. And when she smiled, you could see, if you were paying attention, that she had herbivore teeth. "Darlene's still having some trouble walking," Dad said to Uncle Mike. "Have a seat." We all sat around in the other chairs; I sat in the smaller easy chair, next to Mom. "How are you feeling, sis?" Uncle Mike asked Mom. "Better," she said. "I've got a little more energy, and I'm a little steadier on my feet, but I'm still hungry all the time. I'm putting on weight, but I still look like I'm anorexic." She had a big salad bowl on the table beside her, and she picked it up and started eating again while we talked. "There's not many calories in that," Uncle Mike said. "I know," she said, "but I can't eat a lot of things now. Not meat, or dairy products, or a lot of processed foods, apparently. I get queasy just looking at meat, and the others I look at and know I couldn't digest them. Pavel bought me some organic bread, and that's fine, but I can't eat a lot of store-bought breads, or nachos or potato chips... I need to start making my own bread. What about you and Jeffrey?" "We're still eating the same things," he said. I thought my appetite was slightly less than before, but not a lot less, not enough to be sure it wasn't just from stress and not part of the changes to my biology. "You're just eating meat now, Pavel?" Uncle Mike asked. "Yes," Dad said. "Cooked or raw, either way's fine. But I can't eat in the same room with Darlene, of course." "Tell me again how it happened," I said. "It was so staticky when we could finally reach you on the phone --" "All right," Dad said. "So we went out to lunch last Saturday -- we were going to have our romantic Valentine's Day dinner in the evening, we had reservations, but then the hospital called and wanted Darlene to fill in for someone on the evening shift. I said go ahead, we could have dinner at lunchtime; the restaurant wouldn't be as crowded and we might not need a reservation. And we didn't. We'd been seated and had our appetizers served when it happened." *When it happened.* Uncle Mike and I had been using that phrase, and so had some of the other people we'd talked to in Athens. It was easier than saying exactly what had happened, and of course everyone knew anyway. "I felt queasy for a moment," Mom said, "and then numb -- I couldn't feel my body at all, and I fell out of my chair, but I couldn't feel myself hit the floor. I was numb for several seconds, and I heard people screaming -- then just as I was starting to worry enough to scream myself, I could feel my body again, and it felt strange. I tried to sit up, but it was awkward -- my arms were skinny and weak, and my legs weren't much stronger, and there were too many of them. But I didn't realize that at first, I just knew I felt strange." "I went numb for a few moments too," Dad said, "only not as long as your mother. It didn't last long enough for me to fall out of my chair. But I saw her fall over, and I was near panicking, seeing her like that and unable to move. I sort of saw other people at other tables changing, out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't focus on it or consciously think about it until later, I was so worried about her. Then I could move, and I got up to go help her. Only I didn't realize how my legs had changed, the knees working the other way around, and I fell flat on my face." "He was fine, really," Mom reassured us; "he learned to walk on those legs in just a few minutes. I still haven't got the hang of these, and they're still weak. He crawled over to me, and I'm afraid I didn't recognize him --" "No reason you should," Dad said. "I screamed and tried to back away, but I was too weak to move. He reached out to me, and I slapped his hand away -- and I realized then how skinny my arms were. And he seemed to notice his hand, too." "Yeah," Dad said, "I hadn't realized what had happened to me -- when I saw my hand I looked at my other hand, and then felt my face, and I said, 'Darlene, it's me, Pavel.' And I was just taking it in, how Darlene had changed -- she was wearing a long dress, but it couldn't cover much of her new hind legs. She was better off than the people wearing pants in that half of the restaurant; they were mostly naked from the waist down." The zigzaggy boundary between what we later called the Marietta centaurs change-region and the Smyrna wolves change-region ran right down the middle of that restaurant, and right through the table my Mom and Dad were sitting at. The people on one side, most of the customers and whatever waiters were serving them, turned into centaurs like Mom, and the people on the other side, the other customers and most of the waiters and all the kitchen staff, were suddenly like Dad -- fur, claws, a carnivore's long teeth and short digestive tract. Why, we didn't know and still don't. They told us how they got home -- it took hours, first with Dad being unsteady on his feet, and then with so many wrecks blocking the roads, every centaur driver and most of the wolves having lost control of their cars. Dad got one of the waiters to help him carry Mom out to the car and help her get into the back seat; she was too weak and wobbly to walk, and she couldn't fit into the front seat anymore. Still, they were better off than the families who were all centaurs; their arms were mostly too weak to handle a steering wheel even if their car was spacious enough for their new body shape to fit in the driver's seat. They tried to call me and Uncle Mike, as we tried to call them a little later, but the phone networks were jammed with everybody who'd survived the changes trying to call everybody they knew at once. They ate at home -- that was when they first realized how their teeth and digestions had changed. They turned on the news, and found out stuff like that was happening everywhere, and they kept trying to call people they knew, me and Uncle Mike twice as often as anyone else, but it was days before we got to talk, and then on a bad, staticky line. (Uncle Mike lost his Internet connection a few hours after the change and didn't get it back for several days.) Dad's a paramedic; they needed him badly, with all the wrecks and other accidents, so after he got Mom situated on the sofa with plenty of things to eat in arm's reach, he went to work. They needed Mom at the hospital even more than when they'd asked her to fill in on the evening shift, but she couldn't go in to work in her condition. "What about y'all?" Mom asked us. Uncle Mike and I looked at each other -- I'm not sure about him but I was too embarrassed to talk at first. Uncle Mike had already told them basically what happened, on the phone, but still... ----- For us in Athens, that queasy feeling Mom had mentioned was worse, and the numbness she said affected her whole body hit us -- the men, anyway -- just in one spot. I didn't even realize what had happened to me until -- wait, let me start with the moment it happened. I'd gone to spend the weekend with Uncle Mike at his apartment in Athens so Mom and Dad could have a quiet Valentine's Day weekend together. Uncle Mike and I had slept late that Saturday morning. He got up earlier than me, but not very early, and fixed pancakes. I'd just eaten five or six pancakes, and we'd talked about what we might do before the concert we were going to that night; after breakfast we sat down and played video games for a while. Uncle Mike has a great collection of old video game systems; their graphics are terrible, but some of them have better gameplay than you'd expect, and even the ones that just aren't as good as modern games are interesting to play once in a while. A little after noon Uncle Mike said he was going to the bathroom, and left me alone in the living room. I was going through his Intellivision and Atari 2600 cartridges, looking for a one-player game I hadn't played before, when I suddenly felt nauseous; and before I could run to the bathroom or kitchen, or even turn my face away from Uncle Mike's antique game systems, I threw up my five or six pancakes all over them. I got a lot of vomit on my clothes and my arms and the carpet, but what I was panicking about, enough to not notice the weird feeling in my crotch, was that I'd probably ruined those irreplaceable games. I started frantically trying to clean it up -- I ran into the kitchen and got a couple of towels, soaked one and wrung it out, then went back to the living room and kept trying to clean the vomit off the game systems and cartridges. I figured I could clean myself up later. I was so engrossed with that task that I didn't consciously realize that Uncle Mike was taking a long time in the bathroom. Then I heard the shower running. A few minutes later, Uncle Mike came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist -- that was unusual, he usually took his change of clothes into the bathroom with him, at least when I was staying with him. And even weirder, he didn't go straight to his room to get dressed; he came into the living room, and saw me cleaning up the vomit. "You got sick too?" "Yeah," I said, and then hurried to say, "I think I've got all the sick off the cartridges and the consoles, I haven't tested the Intellivision yet but the Atari still seems to work fine --" "Never mind," he said, and that worried me. "Go clean yourself up -- I'll take care of the rest of this." So I went and washed my hands, then got a change of clothes from my suitcase and went to the bathroom. I turned on the shower and started taking off my vomit-soaked clothes -- and that's when I realized my dick was gone. I sat on the edge of the tub, numb with shock, for a while. I poked around down there a little bit, but not much. I'd never seen a girl naked, and the pictures of naked women I'd seen mostly didn't show their crotch close up, so I thought what I had there was normal for a girl, and it scared me. I wondered if I was fixing to start growing breasts, too, and I felt around my chest, but it didn't feel any different. I finally showered and got dressed. When I came out of the bathroom, Uncle Mike had gotten dressed and finished cleaning the game consoles and was working on the carpet. He had the TV on, but when I came out he turned the sound off. He looked up at me and said, "Did it happen to you too?" "Do you mean..." I couldn't make myself say it. "Let me tell you what happened to me, and you tell me if the same kind of thing happened to you." I could tell he was trying really hard to speak calmly, but his voice trembled a little anyway. "I was standing at the toilet, peeing, when I suddenly felt sick, and almost threw up -- not quite, though. At the same time I lost feeling in my penis, but with the hand I was aiming with I felt it pull back inside my pants. I couldn't stop peeing, something was wrong with my sphincter muscle, and I soaked my underwear and pants. "I sat down on the edge of the tub and pulled them off, and then I realized it was gone -- penis and testicles both. I have something that looks kind of like a girl's vulva, but not exactly. I showered and came out and saw you'd been sick, and then I figured it might have happened to you too, if you got nauseated at the same moment I did." "Yeah," I said, "I guess so. Only I didn't realize it was gone until I took off my clothes to shower. I guess I was too busy cleaning up the mess to notice how my crotch felt different." "Listen to this," he said, and he turned on the sound on the TV. It was CNN, and they were talking about how weird changes were happening to people all over the world. I'm not going to go into detail about that; you know it as well as I do. After a few minutes Uncle Mike turned the sound down and said, "Let's try to get some local news." He got out his laptop and tried to connect to some local Athens news sites and blogs. Some of them were down, but on one of them there was a post from five minutes ago, the blogger saying the same thing that happened to us had happened to him and some guys who were hanging out with him. Their girlfriends reported feeling sick at the same time as the men's penises vanished, but didn't feel any different afterward. It wasn't until a couple of days later that we found out how much women were affected by the Athens change. Athens didn't have anywhere near as many car wrecks as a lot of other places, so it seemed safe enough to go out, but we found out, when we went downtown, that the Sound Tribe Sector Nine concert Uncle Mike had gotten us tickets for had been canceled. We were hearing worrying things about Marietta, how the car accidents were worse there than most other places, and we were worried about my Mom and Dad, but every time we tried to call them we got busy signals or worse. We did manage to exchange IM messages with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave in Huntsville, Alabama, just before Uncle Mike's Internet connection went out -- Aunt Karen is my Mom's and Uncle Mike's older sister. They didn't feel the queasiness or numbness we'd had at the moment of the changes, or any noticeable physical changes at all -- but they had bad headaches for several minutes, and when they cleared up, they could hear each other's thoughts. Not just each other's, but anybody else who was close enough. A few days later we found out that their telepathy only worked with other people who'd been in Huntsville at the moment of the changes; they couldn't hear people of the other new human species that were all around them. I remembered that fact, and made use of it. When we finally got Mom and Dad on the phone, they told us to stay in Athens for a while longer, until the wrecks were cleared from the roads. Cobb County schools were still closed, anyway. When they announced they were going to start school again the second Monday after the event, Uncle Mike talked to Mom again and said he'd bring me home that Friday, to give me a couple of days to visit with them before I had to go back to school. By then, things were almost back to normal in Athens -- as normal as they could ever be. We kept telling each other we were lucky, that most other places in North America and western Europe had a lot worse fatalities and injuries from accidents at the moment of the changes. But we also knew we'd been castrated, and our efforts to talk around it and ignore it just made it worse. I found out -- I expect others did too, but we didn't talk about it -- that there was no point in masturbating with our new equipment. You could poke around down there all you wanted, and it wasn't any more interesting than picking your nose. I wondered if women were affected the same way, and guessed probably so; but the local news just said they'd lost their wombs and ovaries and stuff. Uncle Mike and I played a lot of video games, and went for walks around downtown and various parks. We talked to some of the people we met, people Uncle Mike knew -- about the weather or the music scene or anything except the changes. As days passed, we saw more people who'd been away from Athens that Saturday and had come back since then, but none who'd been in Marietta or Smyrna. ----- When we got done telling Mom and Dad about what had happened -- not everything I've just told you, but a suitably edited version -- Dad said he was getting hungry, and asked if we were too; we said yes. He went into the kitchen to start cooking. When he was out of earshot, Mom said: "So, I'm not sure I understand... You're girls now? You look just the same." "No," Uncle Mike said, and I added: "Even the girls in Athens aren't girls anymore." "Everybody of both sexes lost all their reproductive organs," Uncle Mike said. "We look kind of like girls, undressed, but we aren't." "Have you seen a doctor since the changes?" "No, but lots of people have, and the results are pretty consistent. The hospitals and doctors told people not to come in unless they had some sickness or injury unrelated to the changes, they were so overwhelmed." "Well, we'll get our doctor to look at Jeffrey next clinic visit. I want to know for sure." "Can I ask you to do something for me, Mom?" I said. "What is it, honey?" "Don't tell anybody I was in Athens." "What?" Uncle Mike looked at me curiously. "I want to tell people at school I was in Huntsville with Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave," I went on. "They still look like regular people, and so do I, as long as I've got pants on. And their telepathy only works with people who were in Huntsville on Valentine's Day, so unless I run into somebody from Huntsville, I can pull it off." "Why?" she asked. But Uncle Mike understood: "He doesn't want the kids at school to know he's been -- that he's lost -- I don't blame him. Lying's usually not a good idea, but I'd consider going along with him on this, Darlene." "And you didn't understand at first -- it would be worse with the kids at school, Mom. Maybe with the principal and teachers, too -- they might make me use the girls' restroom and locker room, and that would make it even worse." "And think about this," Uncle Mike added; "probably most of the kids at his school were at home, here in this school district, that day; most of the rest were probably nearby, in the same region as Pavel, or one of the other neighboring regions. I don't know how these physical changes are going to affect the cliques and social groupings in high schools, but I'd be surprised if a lot of the kids who were a long way from their school district, like Jeffrey, don't end up somewhat isolated and excluded anyway just because they're the only kid of their kind in the school. If they think he's changed into a girl, too -- don't make it any worse, Darlene." "Let's talk to your father about it," she said. "I don't like the idea -- I don't think it's going to work, you can't fool that many people for very long." ----- Uncle Mike and I ate at the kitchen table with Dad. Dad ate nothing but steak; Uncle Mike and I shared some of the steak, and Dad had baked a couple of potatoes for us. We told Dad about my plan. "I understand," he said, "and if you want to tell your friends you were in Huntsville instead of Athens, I won't contradict you. But if the school officials, or the state or Federal government, ask us where you were and what happened to you, I'm not going to lie to them -- we could get in serious trouble for lying on a census or tax form or whatever. I might refuse to answer, though. We'll see." "Thanks, Dad." Uncle Mike was going to go home after supper, but Mom and Dad didn't want him on the road after dark, and he agreed to spend the night. Next morning, after he left for Athens, I told Mom and Dad I wanted to go over and see Will. "All right," Mom said; "maybe you'd better call first." I did. Will's mom answered the phone. "Hi," I said, "it's Jeffrey. Is Will home? Does it suit for me to come over?" "Jeffrey! Yes, sure, come over any time today." So I walked over to Will's house, just down the street. I rang the doorbell, and Will's mom answered it. She was walking better than Mom, though a little unsteady, and she wasn't nearly as skinny as Mom -- of course she'd been a little overweight, though not really fat, before she turned into a centaur. She wore a big skirt that covered her whole lower torso and came down to her knees on both pairs of legs, and she had two different kinds of slippers, both of them too big for her, on her front and back feet. Her chest was as flat as a little girl's, which seemed stranger in a way than her being a centaur. "Hi, Jeffrey," she said. "Come on in." "Hi, Mrs. Benson," I said. "I'm sorry about your husband." I'd exchanged emails with Will while I was staying at Uncle Mike's, and learned that Will and his mom were at home at the moment of the changes, but his dad was out running some errands. He apparently lost control of his car when the changes happened -- along with everybody else on the road in that area -- and was killed in an eleven-car pileup. "Thank you, Jeffrey." She gave me a hug. "I still can't get used to it. In a way it's good that I had all this to get used to as well," gesturing at her extra pair of legs, "it took my mind off losing him, a little bit... Just a little bit, but maybe it made it easier." She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, then said: "Will's upstairs in his room -- can you wait a moment?" "Sure," I said, following her into the kitchen. She got a big bowl out of the cabinet, opened the refrigerator, and put a head of lettuce and a couple of cucumbers in the bowl. "Could you please take this up to Will?" "All right." I went up the stairs and down the hall to Will's room. The hall door was open. Will was lying in bed reading; he had an empty bowl on the bed next to him. "Hey," I said. "Your mom sent some more food." "Thanks," he said. "I'm getting hungry." He was even skinnier than my Mom. He was wearing a T-shirt, and covered up with a blanket from the waist down. I sat down on the bed next to him and handed him the bowl; he tore off some lettuce leaves and ate them before he said anything more. "I'm sorry about your dad," I said. He closed his eyes for a moment, chewed and swallowed, then said: "Thanks." He didn't say anything else, just took another bite of lettuce, then picked up a knife off his bedside table and started slicing one of the cucumbers. "Want some?" "Sure," I said, and took some of the cucumber slices. Finally, after he'd eaten enough to take the edge off his hunger, he said: "So... what's it like?" I shifted uneasily. "You mean, what happened to me in Athens?" "Yeah. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to --" "Before I tell you, I want to ask you a favor." "Sure." "I'm pretty sure you're the only person besides my parents, around here, who knows I was in Athens this weekend. Promise not to tell anybody." "Okay... But people will look at you and know you weren't anywhere around here. I mean, almost everybody in Georgia, except around Athens, looks totally weird now -- mostly not as weird as me and Mom, but --" "Yeah, I know. I'm going to tell people I was staying with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave instead, in Huntsville, Alabama. They still look human -- sorry." "No problem." "Anyway, they didn't get any physical changes out there. They're telepathic --" "Cool! But how are you going to fake that?" "I don't have to, as long as I don't run into anyone from there. Their telepathy only works with each other, not with other kinds of people -- people in other change-regions." "Okay, that might work." "I don't guess anybody from our school was in Huntsville on Valentine's Day. The middle of February's not the most popular time for going to the Space Museum." "But if somebody was there, and they can't talk with you telepathically they'll know you're lying about where you were, right?" "Yeah, it's a risk. But think about what people are going to act like if I tell them I was in Athens, and what really happened to me." "Good point. All right, I won't tell anybody." So I told him about what had happened to me, in more detail than I'd given him in my email; a little more than I'd told Mom or Dad, even. But not everything. "Wow," he said. "That's harsh, man." "I shouldn't complain," I said; "I mean, I just lost my dick, but you lost your dad -- and lots and lots of people died, or got hurt so bad they're never going to get better. How are you for walking, since the change?" I guessed not well, since he'd stayed in bed the whole time I'd been there. "I can walk now -- I couldn't at first, just didn't have enough muscles on my legs, not until I'd eaten a lot over the first few days. But I'm still pretty unsteady and I get tired fast. Actually -- I need to go to the bathroom. Could you help me stand up, let me lean on you?" "Sure," I said, and stood up. He threw off the blanket and slowly swung all his legs off the side of the bed. He was wearing a pair of shorts over his hind legs, and loose socks on all his feet, but nothing on his front legs or lower torso. I put out my arm, and he leaned on me as he stood up, wobbling a lot. I guess if you've never been to Atlanta, you might never have seen a Marietta centaur. There are four-legged people called centaurs in other places -- I've met a couple -- and I've heard that in eastern Europe somewhere they've got people who look almost like the old mythological centaurs, with hooves instead of feet, and all hairy from the waist down. Ours aren't like that; all their individual parts look human, but there's too many of them and they're put together oddly, by pre-divergence standards. Their legs are skinnier and their feet are smaller than an old-style human of the same height, and their lower, horizontal torso is a little longer than their upper, vertical torso, but otherwise just like an old-style human's. The main difference is that a female centaur's breasts, or a male centaur's vestigial nipples, are under the lower torso instead of on the upper chest like in old paintings of female centaurs. If you think about it, or if you've ever seen a female Marietta centaur nursing her baby, it makes a lot more sense. If they were way up there, how would the baby reach them without his mom having to lean way over and probably hurt her back? Anyway, I didn't know all that at this point; my Mom had scarcely gotten up off the sofa, when I was in the room, since I came home, and Mrs. Benson was wearing a long skirt, like I said. But this seemed like a good time to tell you. Will's shorts were really loose on him, his legs and butt were so skinny, and they fell off him halfway down the hall -- I didn't realize at first, I was just ahead of him with his arm on my shoulder, and only saw he was naked when we got into the bathroom and he said, "Okay, I'm good from here. You can wait outside." So I turned around and left, half-closing my eyes in embarrassment at his scrawny hindquarters. I picked up the shorts and underwear from the floor and tossed them into the bathroom, not looking, and then closed the door behind me. I waited in the hall, figuring he might want help getting back to his bedroom too, until I heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. He opened the door, and I saw his legs wobbling as he steadied himself with one hand on the sink and another on the door. "Help me," he said. I let him lean on my shoulder again and we walked back up the hall to his bedroom. I wondered how he'd gotten his shorts back on, or wiped his butt if he needed to -- his arms didn't look long enough to reach. I finally worked up the nerve to ask. "Not easily," he said. "But my lower torso is pretty flexible, so I can bend and reach it. -- What about you?" "What do you mean?" I asked. "I mean, I guess you have to pee like a girl now, and wipe afterward and stuff...?" "Yeah," I said, blushing. "I don't want to talk about it." "Okay." He was silent for a few minutes, and then said: "Want to play a game?" So we played *Champions of Marduk* on his Playstation for a while. He wasn't playing his best, because every time there was a slight lull in the action he'd take a hand off the controller and eat a piece of lettuce or cucumber, and several times he got caught off guard that way. And maybe lying on his side, seeing the screen sideways, was affecting him too. After an hour or so we took a break. "So, school's starting back Monday," I said. "Yeah," he said. "I wonder what it'll be like. I don't know how many of us are still alive, how many kids got killed in car wrecks or plane crashes or whatever, and I don't know how many of us were right around here and how many were in other places." "I don't know either," I said. "I'm guessing it'll be mostly centaurs like you, with some who were in one of the nearby regions, wolves like my Dad and otters like my grandparents... Have you heard from anybody else?" "I heard from Arnie that Kim's dead," Will said. "She was in a car accident, like my Dad, with her whole family... Arnie's a centaur too. I haven't seen him, but we've talked on IM." Arnie and Kim had been dating since near the beginning of the school year. "Oh, no. I hope it was quick... How did Arnie sound when you talked to him?" "Pretty torn up. He wouldn't say much, just that she and her parents and sister all died in a wreck." We were quiet for a while after that. Something else occurred to me. "What are you going to wear to school? It looks like your old clothes don't fit you...?" He scowled. "We got mail from the school board with changes to the dress code... They said if we're having trouble getting pants tailored for centaur bodies, it's okay for boys to wear skirts. I'm going to have to do that, Mom's been working on altering some pants to fit me, but making skirts is a lot faster and she's made five or six skirts and only one pair -- a quartet, really -- of nice pants for wearing to church." "Huh," I said. "I guess it'll feel weird at first, but probably everybody else will have to do the same, so it's not like anybody's going to pick on you." "Except maybe some rich kids who can afford to have plenty of tailor-made clothes." "Yeah, maybe. You could call it a kilt, I guess." Mrs. Benson invited me to stay for lunch, and after calling to check with Mom and Dad, I accepted. Will leaned on my arm with one hand and held the stair rail with the other as we went down the stairs. This time his pants didn't fall off, thank God. Mrs. Benson asked after my family, and I told her the truth about Mom and Dad, and the briefest possible lie about myself. I was worried she was going to ask a lot of questions about what it felt like to be telepathic, but she focused on my parents instead. "How are they taking it?" she asked. "Being so different, I mean..." "Okay, I guess," I said, shifting uncomfortably. "I've been home for less than a day, but they seem to be working it out fine. Dad eats in the kitchen, and Mom eats in the living room, so she doesn't have to see him eat meat --" I hastily changed the subject when I saw how even talking about that was making Will and Mrs. Benson look queasy, but I wondered how the school lunchroom was going to handle that, with a mix of herbivore, carnivore and omnivore students -- and who knows what else; maybe there would be some kids who needed to eat grass or carrion or something? "What about you?" she asked. "Is this okay?" "This is delicious," I said, which was mostly true. She'd made a pretty good vegetable soup; I would have liked it better without the carrots and celery, but I made myself eat them anyway. She felt bad enough about her husband getting killed without me hurting her feelings over her cooking, too. "And at home...?" "I ate supper with Dad yesterday," I said, stopping myself just in time from saying, "with Dad and Uncle Mike." I continued after another spoonful of soup: "And I ate breakfast with Mom this morning... We'll work out some kind of schedule like that, I guess." After lunch, Mrs. Benson said: "Why don't you boys go play outside for a while? It's not too cold." Will looked reluctant, but he said: "Sure. Jeffrey, can you help me get dressed?" We went upstairs, Will leaning on my arm again. "Okay," he said. "Can you open the window and see how cold it is out there?" I did, just for a moment. It had warmed up since I walked over there a few hours earlier, but I didn't think he'd want to go out there in shorts or even a skirt. I'd never worn a skirt, but I thought they looked drafty. "I thought so," he said. "Help me with this." He was pulling two pairs of jeans out of a drawer. It took several minutes to get the jeans on. To make them stay on, we had to use his dad's suspenders, and we had to roll up the cuffs, especially on the front pair, because they wouldn't go up as high on him as they used to. That still left a good part of his belly in front, and most of his lower torso, uncovered. He put on another long-sleeved shirt -- also one of his Dad's, I thought -- and that covered his belly and a little bit of his lower torso. "Wrap a blanket around my middle," he said, "and let's see if we can make it stay with a belt or some suspenders." After a couple of tries, I did just that. By now he was looking even more wobbly, and he laid down as soon as I was done. "Let's rest a minute before we go out." "Are you all right?" I asked. "Yeah, just a little tired. I'm getting stronger every day, but not very fast." We were quiet for a few moments, and then I tried to cheer him up by talking about some other places where people were worse off -- Nashville, for instance, where they'd all gone blind. We got to talking about other places and weird changes we'd heard about, and forgot we were supposed to be going outside, until Will's mom yelled at us. "Coming," Will called back, and got out of bed. We went downstairs and out the back door. Will has a cool backyard, hilly, with a lot of trees; it goes back maybe five or six hundred feet to the neighbor's fence. We went far enough to be barely in sight of the house, and Will leaned against a tree. "Man," he said, "I don't know if I'm going to be ready by Monday. All that walking from one classroom to another..." "Most of the other kids will be in the same boat, I guess, along with a lot of teachers. They'll have to work something out -- give you more time between classes, or rearrange your schedules so you don't have so far to go between one class and the next, or something." We walked around in the little patch of woods for a little while, and tossed a ball back and forth, stopping and resting a lot. Not long after we went back inside, I went home. ----- Mom was still lying on the sofa -- I wasn't sure if she'd been there all day, ever since I left. I sat down beside her and told her about my visit with Will, hoping it might encourage her to get up and walk around more. She smiled -- she saw right through my attempt to manipulate her, but it seemed to work anyway, because she said: "You're a good friend to Will. Can I lean on your shoulder for a while, too?" So I stood next to her, and she slowly stood up, putting one hand on the arm of the sofa and the other on my shoulder. The blanket slid off her, and I gave a loud "eep!" and shut my eyes; she wasn't wearing anything under it. She laughed. "You won't be much help walking if you don't watch where we're going." "Mom! I can't..." "I don't have anything you don't have, now... okay, a couple of things, but it doesn't matter now. I need your help; your Dad's at work, and it's just us -- I won't say us girls, but, well. I think you know what I mean." "Do you need me to help you rig a blanket so it won't fall off you?" I opened my eyes again, and tried to keep my eyes on her face. "Not just yet. For now, just help me get to the bathroom. I could probably do it on my own, but I'll feel more comfortable with your help -- I've fallen down several times, going to the bathroom by myself when your Dad wasn't here..." So I helped her get down the hall to the bathroom. I was going to leave her there, but she said: "Stay. I need to talk to you about something, and now's a good time..." I wondered what it could possibly be that couldn't wait five minutes. I reluctantly stayed there with her, wondering if she might need more help than Will did, and dreading the necessity, but not wanting to let her down. She sat down on the toilet with her hind legs and butt, but her front legs and upper torso were still standing up straight -- it was weird. From where I stood by the sink I could see that her breasts were now on her underbelly, about a quarter of the way forward from her privates; they were a lot smaller than before. She had nothing between her front legs, not even hair. It turned out that she wanted to ask me if Uncle Mike had told me how a girl was supposed to wipe after peeing. I turned beet-red, and said no, -- he'd said we weren't really girls, and what we had wasn't really like what girls had... So she explained, and demonstrated, and I saw what Will meant about being so flexible. Then after she washed her hands, she wanted me to show her what I meant about not really being like a girl. I figured I might as well, or she'd keep on at me about it until I gave in. She knelt with both pairs of knees, and inspected my crotch, while I looked at the ceiling and prayed that it would be over soon. Then she grabbed my arm and the doorknob and pulled herself up, and said: "Well, no, it's not really the same. But it's similar enough that I think what I said still applies. Be sure you remember it." "Okay," I said, pulling up my pants. "Can you please get some clothes on? I can help if you want..." I explained how we'd gotten Will bundled up to go outside, and how Mrs. Benson had made herself some oversize skirts to cover her lower torso and legs. "That sounds good," she said. "I should have been working on something like that. Maybe I can make something out of a sheet or blanket, but first I need to eat something. Are you hungry?" By then I was, so she laid down on the sofa again and I went to the kitchen to fix us something. I opened a couple of cans of vegetable soup into a pyrex dish, added some water and spices, and started heating it in the microwave. Mom had been snacking on salad all day, but it didn't stop her from eating her share of the soup. I was worried about her, and Will, and all the other centaurs -- how many of them were starving because they didn't have anybody to fetch or cook for them and they were too weak to walk? How long would it take them to build up their leg muscles enough to walk steady? They ought to have better stamina than us bipeds, once they were finished, but it seemed to be taking a long time. "Have you been out of the house since the change?" I finally asked her. "Not really," she said. "Not for very long. For the first several days I just couldn't walk, and I'm still not very strong or steady... and it's been cold enough that I didn't want to go out if I didn't have to." "I bet we can work something out," I said, "with blankets and sweat pants and stuff." So she directed me where to find her fabric scissors, and needles and thread, and showed me how to use them -- she hadn't used them in a long time, she said, and wasn't very good at it. Still, by the time she was too tired to work on it any more, we had pieces of a skirt cut out of a couple of sheets and had sewn several of them together. It didn't come out quite right at first, and we started working on hemming it to the right length all around so it would come just to her ankles and she wouldn't trip over it. After she went to bed, I turned on my computer and started my IM client to see who I knew who was online. Mostly it was friends from a long way off, people I'd met through art or gaming forums and knew only online. In between some chat with them, I unlocked the encrypted filesystem on my external hard drive and looked at my collection of naked pictures. It was pretty much what I'd feared: they weren't particularly interesting to me anymore. Most of them, anyway. I said "naked pictures" instead of "porn" because not all of them were porn; a lot of them were what grown-ups call real art. Those Italian artists in the Renaissance painted a lot of naked people, and I'm pretty sure you have to look in a really small town to find people who call that porn. Anyway, some of them still looked interesting, but not in the same way, and some of them were just boring or disgusting. They were the same ones that were disgusting but fascinating before, mostly, the ones that were just porn with no pretension to being art. I deleted them, and experimented with looking at some of the paintings of naked people, and then at some other stuff, not on the encrypted part of the drive, pictures of tigers and wolves and squid. The naked people were still more interesting than the animals, but not a lot more, and I found I was looking at their faces a lot more than their breasts and crotches. They weren't any more interesting than pictures by the same artists of people with clothes on. And they weren't exciting, however pretty -- I didn't seem to have anything to get excited with. Nothing to get hard, obviously, but what I had didn't seem to get wet either. Oddly enough, in some of the pictures I found my attention drawn to the backgrounds, the flowers and trees and stuff. I wasn't sure why. I searched on Google Images for landscape paintings, and a lot of what I found was boring, or just interesting enough to look at once, but some of them were really fascinating, and I saved local copies of them. Dad still wasn't home from work when I went to bed. ----- Sunday morning, though, he was up earlier than me, and woke me up at nine-thirty or so to remind me to get ready for church. I did. "Mom, are you coming with us?" I asked her, after I'd gotten out of the shower and dressed. She was lying on the sofa, covered with a blanket, again. "I don't think this thing is quite ready," she said, fingering the unfinished skirt. "You can help me finish it this afternoon, and maybe I can go to evening service with y'all." There were fewer people at church than usual. And there were plenty who weren't going anywhere again, or not anytime soon; when the pastor (who was now a Smyrna wolf like Dad) prayed for people in the hospital, and the families of people who'd died recently, it was a much longer list than usual. Some of the centaurs I saw were wearing homemade skirts kind of like the one Mom and I were making; a few had skirts that looked professionally made, and some of the men were wearing two pairs of pants held up with suspenders and the space between them covered with makeshift materials, the way Will and I had bundled him up. Our church was inside the centaur region, but with so many dead or in the hospital, and so many of the rest unable to walk or drive yet, I think most of the people who showed up were Smyrna wolves or Allatoona otters or Kennesaw chameleons. I hadn't seen any of them before, though I'd heard about them; they were bald and their skin changed color to match what they were standing or sitting on. The pastor preached about how we needed to help people in need, particularly the centaurs who couldn't walk or drive yet, and other people who were injured in car wrecks on Valentine's Day, and so forth. After the service there were a couple of people at a table in the vestibule recruiting volunteers to visit people at home and help them out. Dad stopped to talk to someone, and I walked over to the table where a couple of Smyrna wolves, a man and a woman, were talking to a couple of people. Once I got close and heard their voices I recognized them as Mr. and Mrs. Barnes -- Mrs. Barnes used to be my Sunday school teacher, when I was in fourth and fifth grades. I waited until the other people they were talking to left, and said: "I can't drive yet, but if one of the other volunteers can give me a ride to people's houses, I could help them out with stuff around the house." "We'll be glad to have you, Jeffrey," Mrs. Barnes said. "What's your schedule like? Do you have any after-school activities on certain days?" "No," I said, "nothing scheduled." "Or maybe your father can give you a ride?" she asked. I turned to look and saw he was coming toward us. "Are you volunteering?" he asked. "Good for you, son." "If you think it's okay," I said. "I know Mom needs a lot of help too, but maybe not so much that I can't go out and help other people too?" "Sure," he said. "I haven't seen Darlene," Mrs. Barnes asked. "Is she...?" "She's better," Dad said. "Not bedridden anymore, but she can't walk very far at a time -- she just started walking a few days ago." He didn't say anything about her not having decent clothes for her new form yet. "She said she might try to come to the evening service," I said. "I hope she can," Mrs. Barnes said. We talked about when I could help out with their ministry, and then Dad and I left. We stopped for groceries on the way home, and bought lots of vegetables and salad fixings, and lots of meat, mostly ground beef and chicken, but also a couple of steaks. We found Mom on the sofa, working on hemming her skirt. "I can help with that, if you want, after we bring all the groceries in," I said. "Thanks," she said, "but at this point it would be hard for both of us to work on it at once... Why don't you fix some lunch while I keep working on this?" "Okay." Dad and I brought the groceries in and changed clothes, and then we both started cooking -- Dad cooked some ground beef, and I stir-fried some vegetables for me and Mom. "Can you save me some of that?" I asked Dad. "Sure," he said. "How much?" I put a little ground beef on a plate and put it in the refrigerator for later -- I couldn't eat it in front of Mom -- and then put a couple of plates of stir-fry on a tray and took them into the living room. Mom looked up from her work and smiled. "Thank you, Jeffrey." We ate, and I told her about talking to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes about going to help bedridden and homebound people. "But I don't want to go off and leave you alone, if you need help here," I said. "Don't worry," she said. "I don't need you here all the time, and in a few weeks, or maybe just a few days, I won't need much help at all." After lunch she worked on the skirt some more, and asked me to bring her some other sheets so she could pick out ones to make into more skirts. After that, I started cutting out pieces for another skirt. When I was done, I went to my room and got out my drawing pad and pastels. "Do you mind if I draw you, like this?" I asked her. "I look like a scarecrow," she said. "It's just a sketch," I said. "I'll do another version later, after you've filled out again." "All right," she said, "but don't show it to anybody unless I say it's okay." So I did several quick sketches of her, propped up sideways on the sofa and putting the finishing touches on that skirt, and then started working on a better version, still a little sketchy. I wondered if I could ask Will to pose for me in just his shorts, sometime -- probably after he was strong enough to stand up for a while. I hadn't brought my art supplies with me to Uncle Mike's apartment, thinking I was just going to be in Athens for a couple of days and would be too busy visiting with him and going to the concert and stuff to draw; when the visit wound up stretching out for a week, I borrowed some pencils and printer paper from him and did a little sketching, but I was really glad to be home and have access to my good paper and pastels. Dad had been sitting at the kitchen table, reading, while he finished his lunch and for a good while afterward. He went around the long way to the bathroom, I later realized, so he could brush his teeth and use mouthwash before talking to Mom -- he didn't want meat on his breath when he kissed her. He snuggled in next to Mom on the sofa; she put aside the skirt and they hugged and kissed, but I thought I saw a little bit of hesitation, and it hurt. I mean, when you're little you're embarrassed to see your parents kissing, it's "mushy stuff," and when you're older you're embarrassed for a completely different reason, because it's weird to think about people that old having sex -- but however much they embarrassed me sometimes, I had sense enough to be glad, too. I knew too many kids at school whose parents were divorced, or looked like they might get a divorce any time now, and I was happy to think that my parents looked like the sticking-together kind. But when I saw her hesitate a little before letting him hug and kiss her, it worried me. Could they still stay together after changing in such drastic and different ways? And if not, what would happen to me? I was just about to start a sketch of Dad when he said: "Do you feel like going to the evening service, honey?" "I think so," she said. "I'll have to lean on you or Jeffrey a lot. First let me model this thing, and you tell me if it looks decent enough to wear to church." She pulled off the blanket and stood up, bracing herself on his arm. As the day before, she was just wearing the T-shirt and socks. "Help me get it on, Jeffrey?" I went and picked up the skirt, figured out where the hole was for it to go over her head, and put it over her head while she held on to Dad's arm. I messed up, and it wound up covering Dad's head and shoulders as well as Mom's upper torso and half of her lower torso; only Mom's head stuck out of the top, barely. It was an easy mistake to make, there was a lot of material in that thing. They laughed, and started fiddling with it to get it off Dad's head and over the parts of Mom it was supposed to cover. A minute or so later, we got it situated, and I thought it looked pretty okay -- the seams were a little rough in spots, it was obviously amateur work, but the hemline was fairly even, and it came about halfway down her calves, which was what she'd been aiming for. "That should be fine," Dad said. "I think we're going to have to modify our expectations of dress, what with all the changes -- I can barely stand to wear a suit anymore, and when warmer weather gets here, I don't think I'll be able to stand it at all. Certainly that's fit to wear to church, or to work when you're ready to go back." Mom walked into their bedroom, leaning on Dad's arm, and studied herself in the full-length mirror. I didn't follow them; I went and changed clothes for evening church. I sat down to read for a few minutes until Mom and Dad were ready for church, but Dad knocked on my door sooner than I was expecting. "What is it, Dad?" "I helped your mother into the tub," he said, "but she said she wants you to help her get out and dry off -- I said I would do it, but she didn't want me to get my fur wet, it would take too long to dry it again before church. I'm sorry you've already gotten dressed." So I changed into casual clothes again and went to help Mom. That was seriously embarrassing, but not as bad as watching her demonstrate how to wipe after peeing, and in the next few days I had to help her in the bathroom several times; eventually I got used to it. Mom laid down in the back seat on the way to church; when we got there it took both me and Dad to help her out of there, and she complained that her legs were cramped. "We'll get a bigger car as soon as we can," Dad said. "Maybe even an SUV or van, if we can't get anything smaller that you can fit comfortably into." Evening church was pretty uneventful; lots of people were glad to see Mom, and after the service she and several other centaur ladies sat around talking about clothes, how to make them and who you could hire to make them, for a while before we left. I hung out with some guys my age, none I was as close friends with as Will, while we were waiting for our parents to get done talking; they asked me where I'd been, of course, and I told them my cover story about being in Huntsville with Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave. I felt bad about lying in church, but not for very long. ----- The next day I got up early for school, and fixed breakfast for me and Mom. Dad was still in bed; he didn't need to be at work until afternoon and he'd be working late. "Is there anything else you need me to do before I go?" I asked Mom before I went out to the bus stop. "No, this is fine," she said. I'd made her a large salad to snack on after breakfast, and she was ensconced under her blanket on the sofa again, with the materials for her next skirt within arm's reach on the ottoman and the end table. "Really, it's been wonderful to have your help the last couple of days, but I was doing mostly okay by myself when your Dad was at work and you were in Athens -- I can get to the kitchen and bathroom by myself, leaning on the walls and furniture, if I go slow and careful." "I love you, Mom. See you this afternoon." We hugged, and I went out the door. The bus was driven by a man I didn't recognize; he sat oddly on the edge of his seat, with a long tail sticking out of a hole in his pants, and he had webbed fingers. The bus had fewer kids on it than usual, but since most of the ones there were centaurs, and they took up twice as much room as the bipeds like me, it actually seemed more crowded. Will got on the bus just after me, wearing a skirt; I'd been saving a seat for him, but I realized too late that of course he couldn't fit there next to me, he'd need a whole seat to himself like the other centaurs. He found an empty seat, which fortunately was also across from another empty seat; I moved back there and sat across from him. "How are you doing?" I asked. I'd noticed he was leaning on the mailbox while he waited for the bus. "Tired and cold," he said. "This thing's drafty. I'm wearing long johns under it, but they don't cover everything." "Sorry," I said. I changed the subject, and we talked about games until the bus got crowded, and I gave up my seat to a centaur girl who looked like she needed it more. It was standing room only by the time we reached the school, even though I think there were only two-thirds as many kids on the bus as usual. I parted from Will just after we got off, as he had a different homeroom; I'd have a couple of classes with him later in the day. Mrs. Jessup, my homeroom teacher, turned out to be a Kennesaw chameleon. Most of the time, her skin was the color of the blackboard, but as she moved around, it would sometimes turn pale like the wall, or light brown like the wood of her desk. I sat next to Arnie. He was bundled up like Will had been when we went out in the yard Saturday, with two pairs of baggy pants and a blanket wrapped around his lower torso, held in place with a couple of belts. "Dude," he said to me, "how'd you get off so easy? Where were you?" I told him the lie about being in Huntsville. "Man, that's creepy awesome. What number am I thinking of?" "It doesn't work on centaurs," I said, "or anybody else except people who were there in Huntsville when things changed. I figure our brains changed so they'd broadcast and pick up coherent signals of some kind -- they're still trying to figure out how it works, but they say there's increased electrical activity in our brains." "So you're smarter too?" "No, we just think louder. But nobody else can hear us, and we can't hear other people because they aren't thinking loud enough." "Hmm. You think you might move out there after you graduate?" "Maybe. I'm not ready to make plans that far ahead." Mrs. Jessup called the roll right about then. Only three-fourths of the people whose names she called answered, and I noticed she left off several names of people who weren't there. When she was done with the roll she said: "I have some bad news." She paused, and looked at the papers on her desk, and said: "You know there were a lot of accidents the Saturday before last. A lot of good people died. Some of them were your classmates." She was quiet again, maybe nerving herself to go on. Amy Donaldson started crying, and that set off several others -- not all of them girls. Mrs. Jessup sniffled and went on: "There are others who were hurt badly that day and are still in the hospital, or recovering from their injuries at home or in a rehabilitation center. The school has had information from students' families about some of them; others we don't know about -- they may be missing, or their families may know what happened to them but haven't informed the school. If you know anything about the students whose names I called who aren't here today, let me know. As for those whose names I didn't call... Tony Gustafson, Ken Sanders, Connie Velasquez, and Tina Wilson were all seriously injured, and aren't yet ready to return to school, but are expected to fully recover. Penny Fanshaw and Doug Urquhart are still in the hospital in critical condition. Lyle Henderson, Kim Linder, and Arvind Patel are all dead." Except for Kim, I hadn't heard about what happened to any of them; I was pretty shaken up, but not as bad as some, who'd been closer friends with the kids who'd died. Arnie was crying, and trying not to show it. "Sorry, man," I said quietly. "She was cool. She didn't deserve that." I don't think that was the right thing to say, because it made him cry harder, so he couldn't even try to hide it anymore. Mrs. Jessup let people cry for a minute or two without saying anything more. Finally she said: "I wish I could leave you alone to grieve over your friends, but I'm afraid we have several administrative tasks before you go to your first period classes. I can see at a glance that many of you are what the news is calling Marietta centaurs, or Smyrna wolves, or Kennesaw chameleons like myself -- but others I'm not sure about. When I call your name, please tell me briefly -- not everything that's changed for you, though we might need to know that later on, but just whether your diet has changed -- if you're purely herbivorous, like the centaurs, or carnivorous, like the wolves, for instance -- and whether you need any special physical or academic accommodation because of your changes. Um..." She looked at her roll again, and said: "Lindsey Babcock?" "I brought my own lunch," she said. "The cafeteria doesn't have to fix anything special for me." If she wasn't sitting in her usual spot, I might not have recognized her; her face wasn't as radically changed as the wolves', but her eyes were bigger and farther apart, and her mouth and jaw were shaped differently -- larger, more rounded. "All right," Mrs. Jessup said, "but I still need to know..." "I eat bugs," she said in a small voice. "Ah," Mrs. Jessup said, and gave a stern glance to a couple of guys who'd started snickering. "Insectivore. Noted. The cafeteria can accommodate you with a day or two's warning, I think, if you don't want to have to bring your own lunch every day. Anything else we need to know?" "I don't think so." She went down the roll, calling on each of us who hadn't been in or near the school district on Valentine's Day. When she called, "Jeffrey Sergeyev?", I just said: "No, ma'am. I still eat the same things." And she went on. When she was done, she said: "Your second period teachers will go over this as well, but note that if you're herbivorous, you should sit as near as you can to the south end of the cafeteria, and if you're carnivorous, or if you're omnivorous and you want meat with your lunch, you should sit toward the north end of the cafeteria. If you're biologically omnivorous, but vegetarian, try to sit in the middle." Amy raised her hand, and asked which was the south end. "The one with the large windows," Mrs. Jessup said. Soon after that the bell rang and we left for our first period classes. I walked with Arnie, as we were both going to Ms. Tang's algebra class. "If you really can hear us thinking, and you didn't tell her, you're going to be in big trouble for cheating on tests and stuff," he said. "Dude, look up 'Huntsville telepaths' on Wikipedia if you don't believe me." ----- Arnie was moving easier than a lot of the other centaurs -- like Mrs. Benson, he'd been a little overweight before the changes, so he wasn't so skinny and had more muscles on his legs. Most of the centaurs were slow and wobbly, like Mom and Will; some of them were using canes or