High On Laura High free porn video

Author's Note: (i) This wasn't written chronologically, so bits of it are incomplete. It's okay, though, because it's light on actual plot. (ii) While there are occasional uses of strong language and passages with strong sexual undertones, there are no sex or masturbation scenes yet. For now, the story is a slow-burn. If people respond well, I'll try to post additions, which would eventually include a more graphic Part Two. (iii) The original story was written with the narrator's thoughts in italics but for Fictionmania, I've had to put thoughts inside single apostrophe ('---') quotation marks and direct speech in double apostrophe ("---") quotation marks. You might sometimes have to double- check whether something is direct speech or the narrator's thoughts but I can't see any way around this problem. (iv) I always read stories on Fictionmania looking for this or that specific moment which will excite me, so I've split my chapters into short sub-sections in order to allow readers to scan through easier. I hope you find at least something to enjoy... HIGH ON LAURA HIGH PART ONE I An Out-of-Body Experience (Friday, 17:00-17:30) (1.1) Undressing... 'This is not the real you,' I assured myself when I paused to give a moment's thought to what I was doing, 'for one thing, the real you would never be this close to an actual living, breathing girl'. Laura's head rocked from side to side as I dragged her through the cramped equipment room and propped her up against the back wall. I had to keep reminding that she was too heavily sedated to feel anything. Whilst kneeling, I leaned her upper body against my right shoulder and worked her gym shirt over her head. I didn't want to be any more invasive than I had to be, so I tried to avoid touching her bare skin. Once the shirt was off, I unhooked and removed her lime-green sports bra, trying hard not to look too long at her boobs and also choosing, for no good reason, to hold my breath. Her shorts and panties I left alone for now, I could remove them after I'd transformed. My hands shook slightly as I moved onto her shoelaces. One of them wouldn't budge, so I had to lift her foot onto my knee for a second while I picked at the knot. With that task done (or, rather, undone), the trainers slipped off fairly easily. She'd obviously walked in sock feet across dewy grass or across the floor near the girls' showers because her ankle socks clung to her like fresh papier-m?ch?. Once I'd peeled them off, her feet had the flushed look of body parts that were used to being bare but had had to suffer being wrapped up. I thought of hostages sitting in stunned silence after the gag is removed. I noticed that there was a faint mustiness in the air, so I shuffled away from the likely source: a pile of worn gym mats. The smell followed me, however, and I found myself wanting to know where it was coming from. Then, I looked down at Laura's foot resting in my cupped hand and swallowed hard. 'Human after all', I thought. This was followed by another realisation, one accompanied by a large throb in my pants: 'that odour is soon going to be my odour'. I squeezed the pinkie toe of her right foot like a farmer inspecting a grape and told myself that I would paint my toenails the same shade of pink as soon as those feet were mine. (1.2) Countdown... Using a 5ml syringe, I drew some blood from her arm. The gender transformation serum needed to be taken in combination with the blood of the person. Back home, I'd thought at length about the risks involved in ingesting another's blood but here, in the moment, the adrenaline was stopping me from worrying about details like that. I slid a vial from the canister in my backpack, poured its contents into a test tube, added the blood and swilled the mixture until it was a murky brown. I brought the vial to my lips and was about to drink when a voice in my head stopped me. 'Don't do it, this is wrong.' I looked over at Laura's slim near-naked body and watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest. 'Is this wrong?' My thoughts were racing. 'I can't be her, I'm not her, I'm just not.' My nervous hands made the serum slosh around. It seemed eager to be drunk. It was as if it had memories of what it was like to be Laura and knew that it needed a body - my body - if it wanted to re-realise its fading dreams of womanhood. 'No. This is wrong. I can't do this.' I lowered the test tube. 'I need to dress her back up.' I grabbed one of her trainers with my free hand and was about to hook it over her toes when something came to me, a memory. I remembered the day when I'd tried to start a conversation with her and she'd just rolled her eyes at me and walked away. Just the thought of talking to it shows her there's nothing between us.me had bothered her. I could still picture her pretty face contorted in disgust. 'She deserves this,' I told myself. The tube was against my lips again. I took deep breaths as my thoughts came faster and faster. 'Do it. Take her, take her whole body, take all of it. One drink and it's done. It's flesh and bone and it'll be yours, and you'll be her and that'll be the that, so just drink up. Man up... drink it! Man up...' I gave out a nervous laugh among at my choice of phrase. 'Man up and become a woman!' I saw my shadow fall like a scar across Laura's peaceful sleeping face. 'Drink!' She gave out a guttural moan ('take it!') and it sounded like ('drink!') a moan of deepening worry ('be her!'), as if she could sense ('the girl with...') on some sub-conscious level ('smooth skin') what I was about to take from her ('kissable'), what I was about to do ('sexy'): assimilation ('drink!'), permeation ('drink!'), transformation ('DRINK!')... The serum tasted slightly acidic and left me coughing into the back of my hand. 'It's done', I thought. 'Two minutes' incubation period. Right.' My stomach growled as it tried to make sense of what it had been given. The status quo of my DNA was about to be broken soon and every effort my body made to maintain its original form would fail. It would struggle to understand what my re-written DNA was telling it to make itself into. 'You want a vagina to go where?!' my body would ask, 'and the, um, existing structure?!' The situation was like physiological Stockholm syndrome. I had given my body permission to escape its underwhelming manhood but it was hesitant to do so. 'Ninety seconds...' I took off my shirt, my trainers and my socks but left my shorts and underwear on. I had no desire to see my penis turn into a vagina. 'Sixty seconds...' I tried to put the wool blanket from my backpack over her but she shied away from it, moaning in her sleep. "It's okay," I whispered, "Shhh". As I tucked the blanket under her armpits, her limp arms momentarily tensed behind my back and it felt almost like she was trying to hug me. I guiltily backed out of her weak hold. "It's okay," I murmured, untangling the water drip I'd brought. "Here." She was mumbling something, the name of her boyfriend. As the needle went in, her brow furrowed and her nostrils flared. "There." I hung the liquid packet on a nail that I'd drilled into the wall myself three days earlier. It was a slow drip that would keep her healthy for the seventy-two hours of my transformation. 'Thirty seconds...' I accidentally touched her palm as I backed away and her fingers closed on mine like a baby's on its parent's. 'It's fine,' I told myself, 'she'll soon fall back into a deeper sleep'. Her slack face made her look helpless. 'You shouldn't leave her. Maybe once you've transformed, you should just stay here, keep an eye on her, wait out the seventy-two hours within these four walls. Make sure she's safe.' I pictured the scenario in a host of different ways: seventy-two hours of me sat next to her doing nothing but twiddle my thumbs; seventy-two hours with me maybe having to move her body once or twice to avoid an unexpected janitorial visit... ('Fifteen seconds...') ...seventy-two hours in which a gang of opportunistic youths find her, threaten to do horrible things to her and I have to fend them off. It's interesting but the one thing all of these scenarios had in common, as I imagined them, is that, in them, I was still a man. I still had, say, the strength to move her and the strength to fend off a group of men. Maybe I didn't have faith that my serum would work, maybe that was it... but, looking back now, I think this oddity had more to do with a kind of programmed masculine protective instinct. I could forget what I'd done to her, if I could now just make myself into her protector. I'd be like the closet cross-dresser who has rough sex with young women to compensate. I would atone for my theft of her womanhood by using my masculinity to look out for her. 'Ten seconds...' I was so shaken by this wave of sympathy that I'd managed to put the serum out of my mind. It's as if my stomach growling signified hunger now and nothing more. I crossed my arms and perched myself on the gym mats like a watchful guardian. 'I'll look out for her,' I thought confidently, 'protect her.' What I'd forgotten is that shortly I wouldn't be protecting anybody. For the next seventy-two hours, my masculinity would no longer be available to me. I would be unable to move her as easily or fight of a gang of men at all. I would have different abilities in their place. 'Zero...' It felt like the bottom of my stomach fell out. A warm sensation spread throughout my body. Feeling lightheaded, I slid off the gym mats and lay down flat on my back, panting. The subjects that I'd tested the serum on had been incapacitated for fifteen minutes as the transformation ran its course. I'd monitored their seizures but never been able to tell whether or not they were in pain. They'd made sounds that had made me think they were. Nevertheless, I hadn't anaesthetized my subjects or myself in case it would interfere with the serum. (1.3) Waist, bum and breasts... I tried to slow my breathing. My stomach made a slurping sound like the one you make when you suck up the dregs of a milkshake. Cool air washed over my genitals as my waistband grew slack. My pudgy belly shrank and the iliac crests of my pelvis rose up out of the now-darkening skin like the tops of tall buildings in a flooded town when the floodwaters recede. The light patches of hair around my navel softened, wilted and disappeared. As I looked at the hairless navel, this image crossed my mind of someone using their ring finger to scoop out a little indent in a just-opened pot of coffee-flavoured ice-cream. Meanwhile, like a car jack lifts up a car, I found myself slowly being rolled onto my left-hand side as my right buttock inflated, and inflated, and inflated. A pleasurable tightness came and went in my sphincter and I had this childish notion that my anus was greedily gulping the air it needed to swell my bottom as much as it could. My left buttock quickly caught up with the right and the fabric of my gym shorts was drawn tight against my curves. If you forced me to stick with car similes, I'd say that mine now had exceptionally bouncy hydraulics. My bum pushed my pelvis upwards like a teacher in the wings giving a shy but talented child a firm nudge onto the stage. My newly trim, tanned and talented waist (talented, that is, in the way a bikini would really accentuate) was inches higher than my shoulders. It started to feel as if gauze was being lightly scraped across my nipples. I brought my hands up to my chest and tried to drive away my invisible tormentor but nothing I did helped, the feeling was coming from somewhere just below the skin. I pictured bees passing in and out of the little cells of their glistening honeycomb home. Pressing my fingertips into my chest, I wanted so badly to peel back the sticky- smooth walls of the 'honeycomb' and scoop out the scratchy feeling that was building there, but I couldn't do it. It was like trying to bite something that your jaw simply can't open wide enough to accommodate. With my palms pressed flat against my nipples, I fanned out my fingers until their tips were dug into the folds of my armpits. I then pulled them all back towards their respective palms, hoping that they would get a firm grip on, or at least locate the centre of, that elusive itch. None of them did, though. Not one finger. Every fold of skin slipped out from under them and snapped back into place on my flat chest. In, out, in, out, my fingers fumbled in vain. 'They can't reach the... itch,' I thought. In, out, in out. 'Nothing.' In, out, in, out. 'Nothing.' In, out, in, out. 'Nothing.' In, out, in out. 'It's no fucking good.' In, out, in, out. 'Are they there, Laura's breasts, trapped below the surface?' In, out, in, out. 'Is my body holding them back, stopping them from growing?' In, out, in, out. 'Just. Let. Them!' In, out, in, out. 'Please!' In, out, in, out. 'Just let them grow!' In, out, in, out. 'Please.' In, out, in, out. In, out, in, out. 'Just let them... WAIT!' In, out, in, out. 'What's that?' In, out, in, out. 'THERE!' My fingers were no longer uselessly tugging against shallow folds of skin. They were definitely holding something, cradling it... two palm- sized pouches of blushing skin which toppled outwards from my chest. The initial scratchiness was joined by the same pleasantly numb feeling you get when blood returns to a previously bloodless limb; at first the limb is numb and doesn't even feel like it belongs to you but then with every passing second it feels more and more like yours, more and more like it belongs. I gave out an unusually girlish giggle and clung to the two new growths. I was experiencing something that men never get to. That moment of quiet exhilaration a girl has when she admits to herself for the first time what her body has planned for her. I dared to take my hands away but the two mounds wobbled and collapsed and it was almost as if they had never been there at all. But I knew they had been... I lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling and absentmindedly drawing circles around where I felt the edges of my areola to be. I didn't notice straight away but, after the first few, each circle started to take a little longer than the one before. Without warning, my nipples themselves grew uncomfortably hard. They were like two baby birds' beaks poking out of their shells. I looked at them and there was something vaguely obscene about these indicators of sexual arousal existing as part of the kind of limply puddled breasts you'd find on a prepubescent girl. Uncomfortable, I tried to nip each one and squeeze out the blood but they just quivered in protest. And like that, their infancy was over. As if eager to outrace its sister, the left breast was the first to start jiggling violently. There was a creaking sound like what a woman makes when she's slipping into a pair of Lycra pants. 'This feels good,' I thought, 'really good'. It felt less like something was being added to my body and more like my body was finally being allowed to, I don't know... breathe? 'My test subjects hadn't been experiencing pain', I realised, 'it was pleasure, they were experiencing pleasure'. I arched my back and thrust my chest upwards like a woman who thought she'd never orgasm but finally had. I tried to hold in my moans so that if the janitor came he wouldn't think a trespasser was masturbating in the equipment room (even though it was starting to feel like I essentially was). There was only so much I could do, however. I realised that I was squeezing too hard or needed to loosen my grip because my doughy breasts were now bulging through the gaps between my fingers. When I took my hands away, there were pale imprints left behind on my milky-gold breasts. More important, however, was the fact that they were standing on their own. They were two sentries watching over the rest of the changes my body was undergoing. I was actually hesitant to touch them again. They looked powerfully alien to me as they continued to swell. I pressed a tentative fingertip into the right one with the thrilled curiosity of a child who wants to know how hard he can depress a balloon before it pops. My mind was struggling with the duality of the situation: 'I am both massively aroused by them and feverishly excited by the knowledge that they are mine'. I knew I needed to fix this. There was no room for embarrassment in a transformation as complete as this: a timid mouse in the body of a lion is still a timid mouse. Before I lost my nerve forever, I took both breasts in a confident hold and, in that moment, I felt the duality move closer to resolving itself. I claimed them, accepted them, whatever. They were no longer Laura's breasts, they were mine: my tits. (1.4) Hands and genitals... My hands had never looked more masculine than they did then, holding - and even holding their own, size-wise against - my large breasts. But holding my own female breasts with my own paper-rough male hands was having my cake and eating it, something my body couldn't allow. The criss-crossing wrinkles of my palms reduced themselves to a more youthfully simplistic pattern of creamy white folds. It became harder and harder not to look at those palms and wonder what they would feel like tugging against the shaft of my penis. The skin of my fingers snaked itself tighter around my bones until the fingers themselves were thinner and more delicate. The clear lines of my knuckle wrinkles softened until all that was left was the mere suggestion of lines. A neat white edge grew at the end of each nail. These were the kind of fingers that would inspire any man accepting strawberries from them to leave the berry to the teeth and send his lips around it until he was, in actuality, sucking and sampling on the tasteless, cool skin of a female digit. My hands were now unable to encompass my breasts. Humans are very tactile and it's alarming how much of our understanding of the relationship between our self and the world around us is rooted in touch. 'What muscle memory exists in these hands?' I thought. 'What will they make of the fresh new authority now governing their every movement? Do they know what to do with a man's... y'know?' My attention suddenly moved from my hands to more, um... pressing concerns. I realised that I might as well have taken my shorts off because my penis was now so hard against them that its outline was perfectly clear. At my age, horniness is nothing new but during this transformation my desire to stick my penis into anything and everything was truly overwhelming. But then, to my relief, my penis seemed to find something to stick itself into... No, not Laura, ME. Myself. At least, that's what it felt like. I was both thrusting and receiving. Blood was shooting down the length of my penis but the pleasure -what seemed like a glowing pinprick of pleasure - was being pulled down into my crotch. It was like a rocket flying at warp-speed that was still caught in the pull of a black hole. My penis was pumping furiously but my body was moving around it rather than with it. I didn't even notice the moment it went inside me. All I noticed was an increase in wetness down there and that my waist was lighter. It felt like when, in winter, you take off your gloves and after their fumbling warmth your bare hands feel unusually sensitive and dextrous. My inquisitive hand slid into my shorts but this new growth had no obvious shape to trace. It was a length of impossibly soft skin rippling outwards from where my penis had receded. It was a vagina, my vagina. I had a cunt. (1.5) Face and feet... I felt like I was blushing more intensely than I had ever blushed before. All the skin below my nose-line felt razor-burned and my lips felt like they were being pressed against a suffocating wall of saran wrap. Even though I couldn't close my mouth, the air inside was thick and unmoving like a dish cloth. It felt like a gum shield full of clay was being jammed up against my teeth and palates. The hairs on my neck bristled and there was something the size of a golf ball stuck in my trachea. I felt the pain of plucking an eyebrow or nose-hair multiplied by a thousand all across my scalp and I had these random thoughts of needles being pulled through fabric with a thwick sound. The veins in my neck bulged like the gnarled roots of an old tree. I coughed viciously and a string of what looked like phlegm dangled from the corner of my mouth. The pain was like the pain of a gunshot to the head refracted through space and time. My vision grew blurry and there was a searing pain in my optical nerves. Consciousness was slipping away. But then it stopped... it was like a release. My cheeks cooled and my mouth became more responsive. The thing in my throat disappeared. My lips plumped outwards and tasty fresh air rushed into my mouth. My vision cleared and the pain in my scalp stopped and I realised that my head felt slightly heavier than normal. The discomfort of the transformation once again receded and reappeared somewhere else. It now felt like water was running from the spaces between my toes and dribbling down my soles. In reality, though, my feet were damp with sweat and dirtied from their contact with the floor but were otherwise untouched and unchanged. And yet, looking at them now... didn't they seem more tanned than normal? The knuckles of my toes, my instep, the rim of my heel... these were areas of skin that now boasted a healthy bronze flush rather than the usual pasty white. I started to clench and unclench my toes as a painless throb ran down my legs. One second, I could see the familiar white whorls of dry skin on my balls and heels, but the next, all the parts catching the yellowish luminescent light looked moist and baby-smooth. Every time I fanned my toes out after squeezing them tightly together, they had become thinner and longer. Each big toe, both of which were normally shorter than my long toes, had swollen and was now the size of a small, squashed Apricot. There were cramps in various parts of my foot, which forced me to continuously roll my ankles. To an onlooker, it would have looked as though an invisible demon was trying to pull me along by my feet, perhaps like a protagonist in a Paranormal Activity movie. My thick gray veins throbbed until they looked like the map of a city's train routes. I juddered and after a few involuntary kicks, the veins were gone, invisible beneath my lightly tanned skin. Once my arches had steepened and my heels and balls narrowed, the throbbing stopped and it looked for a moment as if I was going to end up with Laura's cute feet but my own hard, blunt and uneven nails. But then both feet twitched, as if they were trying to throw off a bothersome insect that had landed on the tip of a toe, and Laura's toenails (ruler-straight edges and glossy like a polaroid) snapped into place on the ends of my - or rather HER - toes. (1.6) Freedom... It was over. I felt like I'd just been hurled off a carousel. The air crackled on my tongue and I could feel every bead of sweat on my skin. It felt like leaving a heavy metal concert in a basement and walking out into the cool night air. In hindsight, I think it's safe to say that for that half-hour after the transformation, I was in shock. With my body running on auto-pilot, I dressed myself in Laura's clothes, including those panties I'd decided not to remove earlier. My mind was so numb that I forgot to put on any socks before I slipped into her trainers. It's also a miracle that I managed to get the bra on without thinking too much, if at all, about the fact that I now had boobs. All of the worries and plans that I'd had before the transformation had been replaced with a single- minded desire to get out of there. I locked the equipment room. I'd stolen the janitor's keys a few months ago and had copies made before returning them. This week and the next, the janitor would be on vacation somewhere, so the college had hired someone to cover for him. This meant it was unlikely anyone (including, of course, any opportunistic youths) would be around until Monday morning. My other concern had been the camera near the fire exit but, in the end, it wasn't a problem. Youths (not students at the college) had used the exit as a smoking and drinking area and had always vandalised the camera. Sick of paying to fix it, the college had convinced the police to swing by occasionally to clear the youths off. They'd moved on but now anyone (like me) who took the time to learn when the police came by had a surveillance-free way into the college. The wind gently lifted the hair off my neck. It was still over an hour till sundown but the sky was an ominous greyish-blue. The railing of the wheelchair ramp was bitingly cold. I knew the train station was nearby and that from there it was no more than a fifteen minute ride to the suburbs where Laura lived. That was the plan: go to hers. Her parents were away, so it would be safe to stay there during my three-day transformation. It would also give me a fuller idea of what it's like to live as someone else, a different person. When I'd first created the serum, I'd been certain straight away that I wasn't going to let myself do this experiment in half measures: I was going to turn, first time, into someone who was the complete opposite of myself, an attractive and popular member of the opposite sex. Laura was the obvious candidate. How many people over the years had wished that they could be her? Hundreds? More? And what would it mean now if I showed that they actually could? I didn't wish Laura any harm - not exactly, anyway - but SOMEONE had to be my subject and, well... she WAS a little too full of herself. It felt good to just stand there, thinking about what I'd accomplished. And I would go ahead and finish this chapter by saying something coy about how little I knew about what awaited me in the future, but I'd just be lying for dramatic effect. I had a pretty good idea of the kind of madness ahead... I mean, how could I not? Changing into another person was madness on its own, so the consequences of it could only be equally as mad. The only ambiguity was how I felt about it all. 'Is it excitement,' I thought, 'or is it... something else?' I exhaled deeply and continued to stare into the distance, just your average attractive and contemplative girl, alone in her gym kit, watching the horizon. II Homecoming (Friday, 17:30-19:00) (2.1) Train... When a middle-aged businessman gestured for me to get on first, I completely failed to return his smile. I was going to have to get used to being the kind of person who could smile back at others without inspiring pity or fear. I chose the middle seat of the three-seat bench that was lengthways against a window at the front of the carriage. 'Carriage's nearly empty,' I thought, 'small mercies'. My backpack was behind my feet, my legs were tight together, my hands were beneath my thighs and my knees were raised so that only the front of my bulky trainers touched the floor. My legs had gooseflesh from the cold but I couldn't bring myself to rub them. The idea of doing so seemed faintly embarrassing. As the train rolled out, I looked up at a Calvin Klein ad featuring two half-naked representatives of each sex. I was reminded that I was wearing panties too. While I'd sometimes worn y-fronts as a man, they had always felt uncomfortable. The panties I was wearing now, although tighter than any of the y-fronts had ever been, surprised me by not doing any of the things I'd come to associate with form-fitting underwear, namely slipping into the bum crack or riding up the crotch. When I'd been planning my transformation, I'd always kept worrying about how uncomfortable I would be wearing women's clothing. The one thing that made all the difference had never quite sunk it: once I'd transformed, I'd be a GIRL... and one for whom tight clothing was a flattering, snug fit. 'You might actually be wearing Calvin Kleins right now,' I thought. 'Check the label.' I stared at the woman in the advert. 'Bet YOU look like that underneath your clothes.' I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. It was excitement by way of fear. I was wanted to know if I was wearing Calvin Kleins. It felt as though if I was, that would mean, in some abstract way, that I WAS that woman in the ad, or at least a part of the same ideal as she was. So, once I'd made sure that the businessman was hidden behind his broadsheet, I slid a cautious hand out from between my legs and, without looking yet, pried open a gap where my shorts met my shirt. 'Nobody can see,' I assured myself. I peered down at the exposed top of the panties. There were three horizontal stripes - black, skin-pink and white - but before my brain could decipher their meaning (shorts, skin, shirt), I'd turned away nervously, my face glowing red. 'Idiot,' my inner voice scolded, 'idiot, idiot, idiot. Look properly.' So I tried again... Naturally, I made sure to check on the businessman again. I failed, however, to notice that the train was already in the next station. I was reading my panties' label when the doors slid open with a startling KRRR-THUD and I accidentally tugged it upwards. A good five inches of pantie lifted out of my shorts. People were boarding the carriage from both the front and back. I tugged the right side of my shirt down as a tall man sat to my left. 'Your panties are lopsided on your bum!' Two chatty guys with designer stubble sat on the seats diagonally opposite me, facing the direction the train travelled. 'Fix them now, before everyone sits down!' And a businessman, this one much younger and more Fifty Shades of Gray than the one at the back of the train, came and sat on the bench opposite me. 'Why won't they fit?' And while I was busy trying to thumb the panties back into the fold of my shorts, another man, a college guy wearing Vans with no socks, sat next to the businessman. 'Just fit in, damn it!' And the universe, apparently sticking with the young and attractive theme, then presented yet another man, this one in Beats headphones ('maybe if I just switch buttocks...') and I saw enough to know that his eyes were searching the back of the carriage ('wriggle around...'), and it was pretty clear to me that he was headed back there ('force it AROUND the buttock...'), but then, just as he was about to pass me by ('arrr!'), he happened to glance down ('fuck!'), maybe even double-took ('fucking panties!'), and before I knew it ('almost... there!') he'd backtracked ('that's it') and, by the time I finally looked up, ('fixed!') there he was ('wait, where did... did he... see...?'), sat straight across from me. We made eye contact and I blushed. By the time the train left the station, every seat near me was occupied by a man. The bums of the guys on either side of me encroached on my seat. I looked down to where the older businessman was sat. 'Row after row of empty seats.' I sighed. 'Fuck. Me. Just... why?' I returned my hands to between my thighs where they couldn't cause any more trouble and looked up at the Calvin Klein ad. 'Fuck Calvin Klein too,' I sulked. 'It's all the objectification of women anyway...' (2.2) A new home... The first time I tried to get the key in Laura's door, I dropped it. "Shit," I whispered. A corner of the neighbours' closed curtains flapped suspiciously. When I finally did get the door open, though, as I'd expected, no alarm went off. The Highs had been having some trouble with their system for the past few weeks and had, in fact, almost cancelled their trip over it before changing their minds and deciding that the place would be safe so long as their daughter was still at home. [Section incomplete: the narrator briefly explores the house] (2.3) Bedroom... I fell belly-down onto the double bed. There was a hair on one of the round cushions. 'One of mine,' I thought, humorously. A cowlick fell across my face as I let the side of my head sink into the pillow. I noticed how the bed didn't seem to smell of anything even though it showed signs of recent use. 'It smells of you,' a voice said. 'You just can't smell your own scent.' I closed my eyes and found myself growing sleepy. It turns out that even sleeping as someone else has a unique appeal. It's as if deep down I was worried that the second I fell asleep, my pretty young body would slip away from me. It would be like a woman I'd picked up and gone to bed with who was gone by the time I woke up. But I didn't need to worry. While my consciousness was away, my body would still be there, just as I'd left it. To anyone who came in, I would look like nothing more than a young woman and the kind of vulnerable creature men love to caringly put their jackets or a blanket over. If they woke Laura up, it would be my consciousness they summoned. 'But there's time for sleep later,' I thought. My eyes snapped open. On the bedside cabinet, there was a photo of Laura at the beach with her arms around the waist of her boyfriend, Aaron. Aaron was in my Mechanics class and was the kind of ungovernable student that the teachers ended up liking despite themselves. It amazed me that someone so unaccomplished could have such high self-esteem. I knew that I would have to interact with him if I wanted to keep transforming into Laura, at least in the early days. I looked at Laura's smiling face in the photograph. It was like looking at a magazine advert aimed directly at me: it was showing me how happy I would be if I had MY arms around Aaron's waist. I realised that Laura's arms fit so neatly around him that all I had to do was hold mine out now in the same relaxed way and, et viola, I'd have a circle the exact circumference of his waist. 'I could be a piece of measuring equipment in a factory making robot versions of him.' I stretched out my arms and, even though I told myself it was just because they were stiff, for a fraction of a second, I confess that I made... IT: the Aaron-sized circle. In fact, when I sub-consciously noticed what I was doing, my arms shot apart like two magnets of an opposite charge. I knocked over one of the cushions and after I picked it up I held it to my chest instead of putting it back. My eyes were still on the photograph. It's normal to see a girl in the street and just know, with absolute certainty, that she would look good in a bikini even though you've never seen her in one. Less normal, however, is looking at a photograph of a person who is not you and learning from that that you will look good in one. Also, put it this way: it was clear to me now that the lime-green sports bra I was wearing was working hard NOT to do my breasts any favours. 'Maybe Laura had some modesty after all,' I thought. 'Nobody likes too many envious looks.' My eyes lazily wandered over the snapshot and when they snapped back into focus... 'huh!' The fuzzy little area of creams and browns that my unfocused eyes had been especially drawn towards was replaced with the curves of Aaron's six-pack. I squeezed the cushion in horror. It was an instinctive reaction, like turning away when a strange girl catches you looking, except squeezing that cushion was more the equivalent of a man turning away and then nervously starting to smooth out creases in his crotch. I rolled onto my back and suddenly realised why it felt like I was messing around on someone else's bed rather than relaxing on my own, which is what I really wanted it to feel like: I was still wearing trainers. I pushed each one off, taking care when I used my bare right foot on the left trainer to avoid the dried mud. Even though the laces were as tight as they'd been when I struggled to take the trainers off the original Laura, they came off easily now. 'They know their master,' I thought. I pulled my legs up into a birthing position. When you're at a friend's place and they give you permission to sit on the bed, you always make sure that part of your body is hanging off or that you're positioned in a slightly awkward way because you know their bed is their space: it's where they allow themselves to be at their most vulnerable, one of the few places where they feel free to just... collapse. You want to get comfortable but not TOO comfortable. You want your friend to know that you are on their bed but you are not on their bed. It's where they're most intimate with both themselves and their romantic partners. It is the soft, penetrable zone of the body that is their home. It cannot be violated, should not be violated, never. And yet... I could have rolled to either side and still not fallen off! I dragged my sweaty soles across the duvet with a thrush sound. I felt compelled to put my hands behind my head but, in the end, I left my limps fists resting on the pillows to either side of my face. My shorts slipped into the crack of my bum and my shirt slid up my torso but I didn't care. I found myself looking over at the wardrobe. During my reconnaissance on Laura, I'd made notes about her various outfits and formed a mental instruction manual on how to dress myself. Whenever she'd worn something conservative or tomboyish, I'd breathed a sigh of relief ('I can wear that,' I'd thought, 'that'll be alright') but whenever she'd worn something more revealing, which was upsettingly often, I'd understandably grown nervous. 'Maybe I should pick another subject?' I'd pictured my male self in those clothes looking ridiculous and being laughed at. Now, however, I saw the arm of a shoulder-less crop top hanging out of the half-open wardrobe and the thought of foregoing that in favour of something more conservative seemed unappealing. I released the cushion, slid off the bed and padded over there. 'Let's have a look at what I've won,' I thought as I slid open the door. 'The costumes I need to play the role of Laura...' I held the arm of the crop top out alongside my own. The hangars clattered gently against each other and drew my attention towards her dresses. I crouched down to look at her shoes. There were flats with toe-prints on the in-sole, red Converse with the outer heels worn down, chequered Vans with a small hole in the toe, gladiator sandals with faded straps, scuffed knee-high boots, wedges, heels... I reached in and dug out a pair of Family Guy flip-flops, just curious because they looked far too big to fit me and, as it turned out, I was already developing a sense of my own measurements. It took me so long just to wriggle my big toe up to and around the Y-strap, it looked for a second as if I was doing Uma Thurman's dance from Pulp Fiction. There were at least five inches between my heel and the end of the flip flop. 'What the...? Why has she got...?' I then noticed something else in the wardrobe: the end of a pink rubber sole poking out from under some boots. It was a pair of Hello Kitty flip flops. They looked tiny when I put them next to the Family Guy ones. 'Aaron and Laura,' I thought. 'Him and her.' The flip flops looked like they were ready to be photographed for the minimalistic cover of a paperback romance novel. I realised that I was now nervous about trying on the Hello Kitty pair. I wondered whether the couple had been wearing them when the photograph near the bed was taken. 'If I ever went to the beach with Aaron,' I thought worriedly, 'we'd be wearing these flip flops.' My breath caught in my throat. The fact that nobody was forcing me to go anywhere with him, let alone the beach, slipped from my mind. All I could think was, 'They wore them in the photograph'. Perhaps I was just overcome by the idea that everything Laura had done before was something I could now recreate. Whatever the reason, I kept coming back to how they must have been on her feet that day when she passed her camera-phone to a friend, straightened her bikini and wrapped her arms around Aaron. I plucked nervously at the carpet with my toes. Hello Kitty's face looked up at me from where the ball of my foot was meant to go. It would be so easy to try them on. I tentatively pressed my toes down on the heel of the right one and the front of the rubber sole reared up like an excitable animal. I bit my lip. I could see it now: the carpet was the sand, the wood of the wardrobe's bottom was a towel, and the flip flops were waiting for their owners, one big, one small, to come back from a dip in the sea. To wear these flip flops was to be the same girl who'd put her arms around Aaron Cooper. It was to lean on his broad shoulder and laugh along with him as you slipped them on. Hell, it was even to accept, in the first place, that you had a pair of feet that could go toe-to-toe with Hello Kitty (pun intended) in a cuteness competition. The 'me' that had drunk the transformation serum had had no thoughts of beaches and boyfriends and open footwear, but maybe that's the point... I was changed. I was a new 'me'. The toes of my right foot were far enough along the flip flop that pressing down barely raised the front at all. It did rock a little, though, as my toes pulled it backwards across the carpet and further onto my foot. I felt the strap appear against the sensitive skin of the gap between my big and long toe. The tip of each of my toes stopped within millimetres of the flip flop's edge. A perfect fit. I slipped on the left one and let out a deep breath. 'Talk about overthinking...' I flexed my toes, sad that there was no-one around whose covert efforts to sneak a look at them would confirm to me their attractiveness. It was like the tree proverb: if a pair of attractive feet show themselves off and nobody is around to see them, are they really attractive? I looked at Aaron's untouched flip flops and for some reason I felt sad. 'I bet his feet couldn't fill them anyway,' I snorted, as if Aaron's pretension was the main reason behind my sadness. (2.4) Bathroom... After turning the lock on the door, I immediately kicked the flip flops off. I didn't want them squeaking on the linoleum. I didn't expect the heat to drain from my soles so quickly. Digging my feet into the fluffy gray mat below the sink, I left faint footprints where I'd been stood. The wool curling around my toes led to a small revelation: I was ticklish. I gazed at myself in the mirror and Laura High looked back. She looked shyer than I'd ever seen her before. She'd also never waved back at me. I stared into her intense brown eyes but there was no hint of a new consciousness there. They were the same eyes she'd rolled at me when I'd tried to talk to her that time. For a split second, I think I had an existential crisis: 'maybe I was always Laura', I thought, 'maybe I just DREAMED that I'd been a man?' I reached out to touch her face but my fingers came up against mirrored glass. Then the weirdness passed and I remembered that, of course, all I had to do if I wanted to touch that pretty face was touch my own. My fingers felt boneless against my cheek. It looked as though the Laura in the mirror was worried about what I planned to do with her body and I started to feel sorry for her. I took off everything except my white panties. 'It's now officially dangerous for me to be around members of the opposite sex.' The luminescent lights couldn't find any flaws in my tan and I wondered if I'd ever have to visit a salon to keep it that way. I held my breasts and the movement of my lungs made it look like I was squeezing them even though I wasn't. While I waited for the shower to warm up, I walked over to the toilet and reached for my penis but... "Oh." New plan: I hesitantly sat down. 'Okay, now where does the...' "Oh". The sound of the urine hitting the water was unsettlingly loud since I was used to quietly hitting the sides. 'My body knows how to be a woman better than I do.' I patted the floor with the balls of my feet while I waited impatiently. 'You're peeing out the amount of liquid you drank as a much larger man, that's why there's so much.' When I was done, without looking I wiped where I thought needed wiping. The toilet paper had wet patches, so I assumed I'd hit the spot. With my panties still around my ankles, I took one foot out of them and used the other to fling them over to where the flip flops were. In a Hollywood movie, the camera would pan up from the flip flops and panties and there'd be a vague, curvy shadow behind the shower door. For better or for worse, though, this wasn't a movie; I'd be getting in the shower right alongside the attractive woman. In fact, I would BE the vague, curvy shadow. I had my hands across my chest like an Egyptian mummy as I stepped under the water. "Eee," I squealed, hopping from foot to foot as I adjusted the temperature. Gravity pulled the water around my left and right boobs, causing the two streams at their seven and five o'clock, respectively - which is where the water sort of collected before trickling off - to become much thicker than any of the hundreds of other streams (really just droplets) coming off my body elsewhere. Looking down, I might have worried that my breasts were punctured and leaking water if their size hadn't remained so obviously undiminished. I pushed my head further under the water. Something started to press down on my shoulders and back. I turned my head to the left and felt the flat weight slide upwards like a responsive masseuse's hand. I brought my hands up to my neck and pushed all the hair away in a wave. There was an especially loud shrrat as water hit the ceramic. I placed my hand on the wall next to the showerhead and let the water slide down my back. The thickest stream of water was now falling from near the top of my bum crack. I traced the curves of my lower body with my free hand. 'Just keep yourself clean,' I thought. 'No funny business.' There was a fine line between cleaning my new body and feeling it up and I wanted to observe that line. It was inevitable, however, that the thumb and index finger of my right hand would eventually slip from my hip into a comfortable V-shape over one side of my crotch. 'Do I need to clean... IT?' I thought. I had no idea what measure of strength was necessary to properly clean a vagina. I imagined it would be like trying to scrub the petals of a rose with a dishcloth. Peeling back the lips with my middle finger, I let my index finger scout ahead. It was definitely WET... probably from the shower but also possibly from being a vagina and therefore a thing naturally given to wetness. 'Okay,' I thought, 'not feeling any cleaner... if anything feeling DIRTIER, much DIRTIER... so, onwards...' Ticklish... yes, it also turned out to be ticklish, except it only caused my thighs to tighten and even that inconsistently... so, ticklishness with localised, irregular spasms then. When I noticed that my worried "Oo" sounds were becoming rather sexual, my fingers immediately retreated. 'Alright,' I nodded, 'so cleaning this thing with my fingers, or even a fist, is out... so it's gonna have to be...' I dragged the bar of soap across my vagina with the nervous care of someone running a wet swab over a beloved coma patient's chapped lips. Suds soon collected, allowing me to approach it as a vague pink slit rather than something incomprehensibly multi-parted. I lifted my feet up and wiped the soles, putting my fingers through the gaps in my toes. The flecks of dirt from the equipment room came off easily. Both feet were flushed a pleasant pink. Before I put each one down, I gave its big toe a tug, like a hairdresser giving a man's coiffure a final flick before stepping away. 'Shampoo,' I reminded myself. There was an Herbal Essences' bottle. I was about to put it back because it said Normal Hair when I remembered that I obviously didn't have dandruff anymore. As I massaged the stuff into my scalp, the smell reminded me of when I'd been stood behind a small redheaded girl on a crowded train a few weeks ago. 'Now conditioner...' The conditioner was a thicker, spermy white but its smell wasn't strong enough to challenge the shampoo. It came and went. 'And finally, body wash...' There was a bubble-gum pink bottle with Flirty Fruit written on it. The blurb on the back found as many as eight different ways to tell the user that they'd feel invigorated and would be irresistible to men. I drew a cross on my chest with the stuff and, I guess, started to smell like a flirtatious fruit. (2.5) Make-up... Laura's laptop automatically logged her into Facebook and I just couldn't resist taking a photo of myself pouting with the webcam (a parody of the kind of photos Laura herself took) and making it her new profile picture. I think I wanted to prove something to myself but I don't know what exactly. I wrote in the description, 'No make-up! Horrible!'. Within a minute, I had sixteen responses. "So pretty!" "Uh, I hate you! [Smiley emoticon]" "Lol. Looking good." "Rather you than me! See you tonight! xxx" "I've seen better [Smiley emoticon]" One of them, from another Mechanics classmate of mine, Harry Taylor, said "Lol. Duckface". Given how prominent his upper teeth and sideburns are, I couldn't resist responding with "At least I don't look like a beaver!" "Not from the waist up at least..." he replied, with a cheeky emoticon. My heart was racing as I hurriedly closed Facebook. Being reminded that I had a vagina still had the power to short-circuit me. "That's enough Facebook for now," I said aloud. I typed in make-up tutorials on Youtube and scrolled down looking for a girl that resembled Laura. They didn't have to be as pretty but a similar shape and skin tone would be helpful. My right ankle was tucked under my thigh, leaving a flip flop empty on the floor next to the swivel chair. The low-fat strawberry yogurt I'd grabbed from the fridge had turned out to be pretty good. I held the spoon upside down whenever I licked it. At one point, a tiny dollop fell on my left boob and I had to scoop up and eat what I could of it with my middle finger before using my saliva to rub out the stickiness. 'JUST showered,' I sighed. [Section incomplete: the narrator applies make-up and receives a phone call from Laura's parents (see below)] "Um, hello?" "Oh, hi sweetie. How's it going? Just thought we'd call while we had a moment." "..." "You burn the house down yet?" For some reason, I looked around me before answering. "No?" Laura's dad laughed. "Did you eat the pasta in the fridge?" "Not... yet." "Well, eat it, don't forget about it!" There was a crackle as he moved the phone. "We're just getting ready for our dinner here too. Your mom's been in the bathroom for an hour... [there was a muffled cry in the background and Laura's dad chuckled] but, um... how was the hockey practice?" "Good," I nodded blankly. "Good? Did you score any points?" I scratched my right nipple. "Two?" "Two, huh?" he scoffed. "You don't sound so sure..." "Uh, no..." I leaned forward, brushing the fabric covering my nipple as if there were crumbs on it, "two, DEFINITELY". [Section incomplete: the narrator finishes applying make-up and ends up watching TV downstairs] III The Boyfriend (Friday, 19:00-20:00) (3.1) Warm welcome... I was sat cross-legged with my back sunk deep into the sofa, which meant that my knees were almost in-line with my face. There was nothing on TV but it didn't matter, I was much too interested in blankly observing how even the slightest movement of my toes made my dangling right flip flop wobble and threaten to fall off. On the wall was a photo of Laura when she was around ten, looking much the same as she did today except softened by puppy-fat and with twin ponytails. Seeing it made me squirm; it was sort of like how a man might react if he learned that his new dildo was made from recycled pacifiers. Then I thought I saw someone walking past the window in the corner of my eye. 'What the...' I turned to look and yes, there was someone there: a young man staring at me from outside in the semi-dark. He smiled and pointed to his right. 'Does he want me to go... with him?' I turned off the TV and tried to sit up but was pulled back into the sofa. 'Do girls get propositioned through windows?' I put the soles of my flip flops against the edge of the low coffee table, like a fisherman preparing to reel in his catch, and heaved myself out of the sofa's quicksand grasp. Once I'd opened the door, the man got one foot up on the step and was about to try and push it open fully when he realised that the safety latch was still on. "Uh-oh," he smiled playfully, stepping away. He cleared his throat, "Um, may I come in?" I suddenly knew who this was. It was Aaron Cooper, Laura's boyfriend. I hadn't recognised him in the dark. And whereas at first I'd had my body pressed against the door because I'd felt protected behind it and because I'd wanted to be prepared to shove it shut if the man turned violent, now I mainly needed it to stop myself from collapsing to the floor. "Hell-o?" Aaron joked, innocently waving his fingers inches from my inexpressive face. I slammed the door closed and leaned against it, palms flat on wood, legs at a forty-five degree angle to the floor and my flip-flopped feet pale from pressing down hard on the frayed welcome mat. "Loz?" Aaron laughed uncertainly. Every inhalation felt like a cold Popsicle stick on the tip of my tongue and my breasts felt like they were going to dribble out of the bottom of my shirt like half-cooked egg yolks. "Loz, you alright?" There was a tiny nubbin digging into the back of my head, the peephole. I tensed my neck and pressed my head back until the little bump dug painfully into my skull. "Laura, what..." I opened the door, latch still on. "Password." My eyes were on the doorframe instead of him. He laughed. "Password?" He got one foot up on the doorstep again and, with his eyelids sinisterly low and his voice secretive and deep, said "Fidelio". His straight face immediately cracked. It looked as if he was about to reach in and put his hand on my waist but I closed the door before he could. 'Okay,' I thought, 'okay.' The safety latch felt like ice but it was really my fingers that were frozen. I couldn't bring myself to slide it. 'You have to let him in.' My mind kept repeating the moment when his hand had gone from dark gray to maize-yellow as it passed into the light from the doorway and closer to my body. 'You have to let him in.' The sharp SNAP of the latch made my breath catch and, for a second, I had a clear mental image of the hand from the doorway (in my mental picture: disembodied) giving my bare bottom (unfortunately not disembodied) a sharp slap. I opened the door and stepped backwards with it until my bum was against the wall of the hallway and out of Aaron's reach. He made a motorboat sound as he stepped smiling into the hallway and my shoulders instinctively moved forward causing my boobs to shrink away from him. "Cold," he said, rubbing his hands together. I was surprised by how much taller than me he was. He leaned in to kiss me, probably hoping that I'd stick out my lips, but I turned my neck... "No," I muttered, "um... ". "What's the matter?" he asked, putting his hand on my waist. I tensed like a cat but somehow managed to let him leave it there. "I, uh... uh..." He put the backs of the fingers of his other hand on my forehead. "You FEELING alright?" The radiator was hot against my right calf. "Loz?" "Mm..." I replied, trying to nod but actually just lowering my chin. He backed up against the opposite wall and stared at me. What? I thought. Then I realised that the door was still wide open. 'Oh...' My flip-flops made painfully loud KER-CHACK, KER-CHACK, KER-CHACK sounds as I slowly closed it (it felt like locking myself in a cage with an animal!) and shuffled back towards Aaron. I leaned my left shoulder against the wall and he then turned so that he was leaning on his right shoulder, straight facing me. Our eyes never met for more than a fraction of a second. "Are we still going to Tiffany's?" he asked, tugging on his jacket's zip. 'Tiffany,' I thought, 'I don't recall any Tiffanys in my college year group.' I crossed my arms tightly. "If you're not feeling right," Aaron added, "we don't need to..." I tried to speak but it was actually a cough that came out and cut him off. "I'm fine... [I cleared my throat] I feel fine." It wasn't that I wanted to go to Tiffany's (in fact, I don't think what he was asking had registered in my brain) but I didn't want people to think Laura was ill. "I... how are..." The fingers of my left hand lifted off my forearm as I searched for the right words, ANY words. "Have you... eaten?" "Ah no," he smiled, "I was going to grab something on the way over but I knew I was a bit late, so... so I thought I'd... [he gestured behind him towards the kitchen] I mean if you've gone anything that I could..." I walked past him, arms still crossed and my left shoulder raised as if to protect me. My shoulders and left buttock were also particularly tense. "Do you want me to take my shoes off?" he asked, stopping me in the dining room doorway. For a second, I thought he was going to say, 'Do you want me to come with you?' to which I would have been able to reply 'No, I won't be long' or something before making him his food, bringing it back to him and just sending him on his way. He wasn't there for just food though. I knew that he'd taken my turning away without answering as a yes when I heard the thud of his shoes hitting the floor. (3.2) Just food... By the time he entered the kitchen, I had my head deep in the bottom cupboard like an ostrich's in the sand. I guess I didn't know what it meant for a bum like mine (or Laura's) to be on display. No matter what tin or packet's label I read, the words didn't make any sense. My brain was too numbed by the false safety of that stale, warm wooden space. "What's the chef got in mind, then?" Aaron drawled. The sound his footsteps made on the kitchen tiles was woolly and heavy. "I'll just have, like, a ready-meal or something if you've got one, because I don't... I mean, you don't need to be cooking anything for me, obviously, I'll..." He paused. "Laura?" "The fridge," I muttered, pulling my head out of the cupboard as Laura's name snapped me back to reality. Everything pulsed as the blood rushed back to my brain. "Here," Aaron said, patting my shoulder with a concerned expression, "I'll have a look". He was like Marlon Brando, standing there with his arm draped over the top of the refrigerator. He took some things out and put them back again but I couldn't see what they were. "Not much in here," he said, "did your mom and dad leave you money to go out and get some more, some more... [he trailed off for a second] oh hang on, how 'bout this?" There was a scrape and a clatter and then he took out a saran-wrap- topped glass tray and held it up to the light like a scientist looking at a fish he'd caught in a bowl. "Is there... tuna in this? What is it?" "Have it," I said. "Haddock?" he frowned. "HAVE IT." "Oh yeah, but I can't tell what's in it... it just smells like [he sniffed] sauce." "There's sauce," I added, as if that was what he was unclear on. "Just put it in the..." I looked around me for the microwave. It turned out to be next to a cookie jar shaped like a fat cat. Seeing that I clearly wasn't going to help him, he stopped asking any questions about its contents and just continued to investigate for himself as he brought it over to the microwave. "How long d'you reckon, four, five minutes?" he asked, sticking out his lip and rocking his head to illustrate his uncertainness. Without saying a word, without looking, without so much as altering an eyebrow on my face, I took it from him, put it in the microwave and set the timer to what I felt was five minutes. "Well... okay," he said dryly, his arm still outstretched as if he was holding the tray. The microwave hummed like a chorus of monks. Once Aaron had hung his polyester jacket in the laundry room, he started work on fixing his sleeves. For every inch of fabric he rolled back, my fingers seemed to dig themselves an inch deeper into the underside of the kitchen top. I slid my right calf smoothly in front of my left leg. Standing in silence, one of us (him) was clearly more comfortable than the other. "I saw the first half of your game when I was leaving..." 'What game,' I though, 'I'm not playing any games!' "...you were playing well... but that other girl, what's her name, with the red hair... she got the ball and went down the side but she tripped over herself and... ha, it was SO funny..." I raised my head. You don't always plan to give someone a death stare, sometimes you just do. 'He's awful,' I thought, or rather I felt... in my gut. "Katie," I growled. Katie Simmons was a nice girl but not a natural athlete. She'd joined hockey club at the start of the semester to keep fit and have some fun. It was typical Aaron to laugh at someone behind their back. His smile faltering, Aaron replied, "But YOU were great though..." He squirmed as my eyes bore into him. Fittingly, the microwave sounded like an MRI machine. (3.3) Window... [Section removed by author: An old neighbour who has locked herself out of her house knocks on the door. The narrator tries to help by climbing in through the neighbour's open window but gets stuck. Eventually, Aaron gets the narrator out. As a result, the narrator starts to feel less hostile towards Aaron. They return to Laura's house and head upstairs.] IV Aaron's Sistine Chapel (Friday, 20:00-21:00) (4.1) Should I let him?... "You said you were going to paint your toes, right?" Aaron asked. He ran his fingers over the tops of the bottles. "Sooo... how 'bout this one? Um..." He was about to try and read its full name but settled instead for... "Blue?" He uncapped it, sniffed and recoiled. "Woah. That's STRONG." He pretended his breath had caught. "You'd pass out doing your feet." I forced a smile as he looked to see how I was reacting. Sensing my unusual mood, he gave the bottles a more serious inspection. He picked up three in quick succession - black polish, base coat and top coat - as well as what looked like a scalpel, and came over to the bed, sat down and slapped his thigh. "Come on. Up." He wanted me to give him my foot. I kept my feet on the floor and tight in my flip flops. "That one's empty," I said, flicking my chin at the bottle in his hands. I had no idea whether it was or not but I felt inexplicably compelled to say so. "Oh." He trusted Laura enough not to check before returning to the dresser. "Well, which one do you want then?" When I didn't answer, he looked at me over his shoulder. "Loz?" I couldn't meet his gaze. I kept slipping my left foot in and out of my flip flop in a kicking motion. There was a SHUSH sound every time it came down hard. "Oh, and these... do we need these as well?" He lifted up a pair of aquamarine toe separators made of what looked like jelly (his index fingers through the holes for the big toes) and he dangled them in front of his face with his palms upwards. For some reason, my cheeks grew warm. It seemed like it would be the silliest thing in the world to claim the separators as mine. They looked like minnows fished out of the sea. "You alright?" he asked. I stuck out my bottom lip and nodded. Sure, the almost-haughtily cryptic expression said, why wouldn't I be? He quickly dropped his sad face and danced over to me singing, "Bay- bee, bay-bee, bay-bee" (like in the Bieber song) b