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(This short story came to me nearly all at once. Don't worry, A Bet to Lose will continue.) Polly was under a lot of stress. One of the main sources, at least on a day-to-day basis, was her children. Her seven-year-old daughter, Nicole, usually acted far younger as she was often in a world of her own making, a world where she was usually a special superhero who could and did do pretty much anything. While her mother tolerated her daughter's imagination, it really didn't help when the little girl would barge into her room uninvited - despite being told very many times not to - in the middle of a Zoom meeting and started talking about how she had just given the Sneedles back their wings. That kind of thing had stopped being cute weeks ago. Polly knew that she could probably spank her out of such behavior, but she couldn't bring herself to seriously punish her daughter. She just couldn't do it. The girl had been through enough pain already. One of her father's past-times had been making her cry. He didn't hit her, although he did grab her very hard a few times. He didn't tell her that Santa was dead; instead, he would go into exquisite and exacting detail about how Santa was using the elves as unpaid child labor and that all the batteries in all the toys that all the kids got for Christmas ran entirely on elf tears. Now, did she want anything for Christmas or not? Five years, from her birth, of merciless psychological abuse by her own father. Polly had turned a blind eye to it all, before he had finally rubbed Polly the wrong way and the two of them had gotten into a more or less permanent argument, followed by divorce. It hadn't helped that Polly had had nothing but miscarriages after Nicole's birth. And then there was Hunter, who had simply told her that it was all stupid childish bullshit and that she needed to grow up right now. He would punish her, severely, and Polly had had to talk him out of throwing her favorite toys away more than once. Nicole had two more problems, at least from Polly's perspective. The first was that she couldn't sit still in front of a screen for very long. The 'electronic babysitter' simply didn't work on her; she would sit for twenty minutes or so, and then she would be off playing with her toys again or getting into things she shouldn't, pretending she was a fairy princess of a kingdom that you could only get to through a mouse- hole in a closet, because that's where the interdimensional teleporter was. (She actually knew those words. At least her birth father, along with her mother, had encouraged her to read.) The second was that, after her father had enjoyed making her cry, some very unpleasant experiences in school, and finally maltreatment and abandonment by her stepfather, she had developed a powerful, nearly phobic aversion to all males, everywhere, period, even the stepbrother that Hunter had brought with him and then left behind. Polly's efforts to bring the children closer together had ended in utter failure, and Stephen didn't normally want to talk to her, either. He wasn't too surly, but he was withdrawn, playing his computer games and not really making a lot of friends. It didn't help that he had a double whammy: a congenitally small bladder along with a night-time bladder control problem. The combination had led to him still needing to wear Pull-Ups to bed at the age of ten ("Don't call them 'incontience briefs', just call them what they are!" he had once snapped at her), a fact that his mother would never make fun of him for. Well, she thought of him as her child, at least. She couldn't just abandon the boy the way his father had. Six months. That rat bastard Hunter had lasted six months with her, six months of a whirlwind romance and false promises. And then one day, he had simply up and left, draining the family's bank accounts - everything she had - and absconding to Mexico to chase an underage girl. He'd even lied about having paid the bills, concealing collection notices from her. There was no justification, no explanation. She had simply found out that he'd done it after her debit card had come back declined and she could no longer get a hold of him. That call with that federal officer had been something she would always remember. She had gotten a divorce with him in absentia, won full custody of Stephen along with child support, had legal claim over nearly all his assets - but it hadn't mattered. The money was gone, and so was he. (The IRS, among other agencies, was looking for him. Polly didn't think they'd have much luck.) Polly despised her ex-husband. Nicole feared him. But Stephen hated the man with a fiery rage, for all the times he lied, he promised, he cheated his son out of everything from simple toys to basic decency, for constantly insulting him for his uncontrollable bedwetting, mocking him to his face every time he had to put on a pull-up before he went to bed. A few weeks after Hunter had run off, leaving the boy with his stepmother and stepsister without so much as a goodbye, Polly had asked the boy what he'd want to say to his father. 'I wouldn't say anything,' Stephen had spat out. 'I'd already be stabbing him as soon as he walked in the door.' The boy needed a psychiatrist, but all three of them did, and that was something Polly couldn't have afforded even before her ex- husband had run away with her savings. At least he at least seemed to appreciate her for still taking care of him, and he did his share of the chores even though he despised them. Their living situation could have been worse, too. The state welfare office had offered, oh so generously, to set her up with some housing before the bank was due to evict her even despite the pandemic. Section 8, of course. The local schools? Well, they're not the best in the state, but classes will still be held online so there's no risk of bullying or anything like that. Besides, beggars can't be choosers, after all. The audible gunfire? The junkies and the open-air drug markets? Not really a problem, the official had promised her. Overblown. Compared to the other nearby districts, it's really a safe neighborhood. The riots will be over soon, that's nothing to worry about. Really. Once her dying mother had told her that she could have her share of her inheritance early, an old house far from where she was currently living and had intended to sell, she got the hell out of that city with everything that would fit in her car - she sold the rest, she couldn't afford to store it and there was no room where they were going - and never looked back. Even still, she was barely able to live in that house, out there in a declining small town at the end of a curving street, next to questionably owned forests and unused train tracks and a farm that had run entirely to seed, full of vintage furniture and an attic that had a lot of very old stuff from her mother's or possibly grandmother's day. Her sister was in another state, taking care of the deeply ailing woman, and fortunately Polly's job had allowed her to work from home for some time, so her manager was supportive when Polly left her cozy suburb and moved out there, to that rickety old house with barely functional plumbing and barely enough space for two children, the younger of which was lost in her own imagination and the other of which wasn't even related to her. Fortunately, her hyperactive daughter was in her room playing with her toys, but now the boy was bouncing a ball around the house. It was super soft, he promised. It wouldn't break anything. There wasn't anything he could knock over. He just liked making it bounce around the solid walls. CRASH!!! Oh, no. Polly was interrupted from her work - fortunately, it was still lunchtime according to her schedule - and ran out in shock. Her mother's expensive secretary was pitched on its side, the various collectibles in it surely broken, Stephen standing near it with a guilty expression. Nicole rushed out of her room, clutching a doll, and looked horrified, crying a bit. "Are you all right?" Polly asked. God help her if she had to take the boy to the hospital. She didn't have Medicaid in her new state yet. Insurance? Don't make her laugh. "I'm sorry..." Stephen started to cry as she checked him. There were no bruises on his arms and legs, and he was standing up. "The ball went on top of it and I went to get it and then the whole thing just fell over!" Polly tried to make herself not scream. It was all too much. "I was going to sell that," she said. "God, Stephen, that was worth four hundred dollars, I could have gotten another two hundred for the stuff in there. I told you to be careful with this stuff, and now you're climbing on things?!" "I didn't think it would just fall over! It was an accident!" She took a breath, trying to force herself to calm down and think. He'd cost her, cost their family, just having to take care of him was costing her in many ways, but she couldn't blame him for that. She just needed this kind of thing to stop. She couldn't deal with both of them like this, not on top of everything else. "Stephen, it was an accident," she said slowly and carefully, half- formed ideas coalescing in her mind. "You made a mistake, and there will be consequences. They won't be terrible consequences, but it will depend on you." He nodded, and she spied her daughter coming closer. "Nicole, stay away from that secretary right now! There's broken glass!" The little girl jumped back from it like the broken glass was going to jump out and get her. "We can discuss how you can pay for it after we clean this up." They spent fifteen minutes pushing the secretary back up onto its legs - it was still usable despite the large crack on its side - and carefully picking broken glass out of the soft carpet. As they worked together, him feeling guiltier by the minute and her tired mind working frantically to find a way to put an end to this kind of thing, she remembered some of the things her mother had stashed away in the attic, and her idea finished forming. No, she couldn't do that to him. Not without giving him a real choice. "Listen to me, very carefully. I'm very angry with you right now, but I'm going to give you some choices. There's different ways you can pay for this." He listened, tears in his eyes. "There's a lot of small farms around here and I'm sure the older people who own them can use the help. Yes, it'll be legal. And they might be a little bit strict, but you'll be outside." He shook his head furiously. He really didn't want to be subjected to that, and she felt guilty for just suggesting it for a ten-year-old. "There's another choice. I make you into a girl for three weeks." He looked up at her in surprise. "You play with your little sister from noon to four on weekdays." She said those last six words with emphasis, but he didn't pick up on it. "I found some dresses in the attic and you'll be wearing them all day, except when you're asleep or in the tub," Polly told him. "But you only have to play with her for that time. You can keep playing your video games for the rest of the time and I won't disturb you. No one will know, it'll be over before school starts. If anyone finds out and it's not your fault, I'm calling this off and paying you back for it," Polly promised. "Somehow." He stared at her in something like shock. This was obviously the option she wanted him to pick. She wanted to turn him into a girl! "If you're very nice to her and you want to be a boy for the weekend, we can skip a day or two and make the days up later." He didn't know how to reply. "If you don't like that, you could do my share of the chores every day until Christmas instead," Polly suggested. She had already devised a schedule that made him do half the work in the household, except for some things that he was too young for. Twice the vaccuuming, twice the dishwashing, twice the garbage taking out, twice all the mopping and cleaning he was already doing. He already grudgingly did his share. Twice was too much, especially for four whole months! He was emotionally overwhelmed with guilt and fear, and he started to sniffle a bit. "I wish I could just fix everything," he said. "I wish that too, Stephen. But that's not an option here. If you want other choices, I could ground you, no computer, for three weeks." That really wasn't an option he wanted at all. Not only would he lose his one connection to what he thought of as the real world, his game's special event would end before then, and his character would be forever underpowered, forever behind the curve, if he did that. "Or give you a firm spanking, every single day, for two months." He liked that idea even less. "Or, if you really don't like all of those, I can take you right down to the department of family services and say that I can no longer take care of you. I don't want to do that. Please don't make me have to." "That's all... you just want to turn me into a girl over a piece of furniture!" Polly shook her head and gestured to Nicole. She bent down a bit to look him in the eye. "It's not me who wants to do it," she said very quietly. She spoke slowly and carefully. "Weekdays, noon to four. Do you understand?" Suddenly, Stephen did understand. Those were the businest hours for her job, the time when she least wanted her daughter, or him, pestering her. Polly (he still had reservations about calling her 'Mom') wasn't doing this to humiliate him or because she thought that putting him in a dress would change his behavior. She was doing it because her daughter would never accept playing with a boy, and the girl needed to be kept out of her mother's hair. "Can't I just be a girl for four hours a day?" "It'd be less real for her," Polly whispered to him. "You know how she is." That was half the reason. The other half was that she didn't want to make him want to skimp on the playtime just so he could take his dress off early. Stephen fretted. He was actually more worried about playing with a hyperactive seven-year-old for four hours a day than simply wearing a dress where no one else would see him. His bedwetting secret was worse, and Polly and Nicole already knew that one. Still, though, to become a girl for three weeks? 'I'll just do the chores', he almost said, but he looked past his stepmother and caught a pleading, almost desperate look in Nicole's eyes. Despite her enormous repulsion for boys, he couldn't hate her for it. She was too little, too innocent, too hurt. They were fellow-travelers, all three of them, in betrayal and abuse and heartbreak, and he knew that neither Polly nor Nicole would make fun of him for this, any more than they did for his bedwetting problem. He was still conflicted when Polly pulled out her strongest weapon: "Think of what your father would say." Stephen barked out a single, "Hah!" Dad would despise him for it, he knew, despise him even more than he despised the boy's bedwetting problem. Stephen had a brief, vivid visualization of his angry, sneering father somehow, for some reason, coming to this extremely out-of-the-way home at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere, asking why he wanted to wear a dress instead of work like a man. He would belittle the boy for his weakness, call him a baby and a queer and a pansy and a lot of other things, and, finally, tell him that he wasn't his son anymore. But to that last, Stephen had only one word: GOOD! And then he would take the very longest and sharpest of the knives in the cutlery set and gut the lying bastard like a fish! He still wanted to know what he was getting into. "Can I see the dresses first?" he asked quietly. "They're in the attic. I'll be right back." She pulled on the attic's string, dislodged the ladder - to Stephen's eyes, none of this looked safe - and was back quickly, holding a cardboard box covered with dust. Stephen sneezed loudly. Nicole was just watching in fascination, still holding her doll. Stephen never had any idea what the girl was thinking. "Okay. Let's start with this. Dress, socks, shoes, and ribbon, just to complete the outfit. We're going to try it all on, but it's still summer, you won't have to wear all this every day. Just the dress, like your sister wears, and just your underwear or your pull-ups if you want. And don't complain, if you want to just give up and do the chores instead, at any point, you can just say so. Nicole, we'll be right back." The little girl sat on the couch, waiting for her mother and Stephen to be done, imagining what the new girl would be like. Stephen examined the dress carefully before he let Polly put it on him. He was surprised that he wasn't surprised. If someone had asked him to describe what a dress looked like, he would have described precisely that. It had no buttons or fasteners and was A-line in cut, with a long light green skirt that had faded over the decades and slightly puffed sleeves that were tied off with ribbons. "All right, Stephen, strip down to your underwear, and the only time I want to hear a complaint is if something is scratchy or too tight or something like that," she said quietly. She wasn't about to make him wear panties; it felt too perverted to even ask. "If you really don't want to do this, just tell me that you'd rather do chores and we can end this right here. If you want to say that later, we can end this then, too." Her anger subsiding, she was already feeling guilty about doing this to him. She couldn't leave him with no way out. He'd hate her, if he didn't secretly hate her already, and might start seeking revenge, and their position was bad enough as it was. If he were to tell pretty much anyone in this conservative, rural area that she was putting her ten-year-old stepson in a dress, she'd be in doo-doo up to her eyeballs. And God, if he took it out on Nicole... But he didn't have any hatred or anger in his expression. He was still feeling tremendous guilt over having smashed the secretary and was upset at being punished for it, but he quietly let her put him in the dress. The only time he spoke up, saying something felt funny, was when she started tying the ribbons around his sleeves. "They're not too tight, are they?" She'd made them fairly loose. "No, they're just weird. It's almost like... wearing a shirt neck on my arms." She smiled. "You got used to shirt necks, didn't you? There's nothing scratchy, is there?" She was worried about the lacing. "No, it's all really soft." "Okay. Ribbon, socks, and shoes left, and again, we can take them off once she's seen them." She tied a simple, single faded lime green ribbon in his hair, just slightly off-center, and smiled gently. He really did look very cute, but she was not foolish enough to say that to his face. He pulled up the socks and she lightly tied them with the faded lime green ribbons, just below his knees. The worn leather flats, with hard soles, fit him well, and the buckled straps were comfortable. "Okay. If Nicole doesn't accept you looking like this, I'll make everything a lot easier on you just for trying." But Nicole did accept her new sister, cheering and squealing giddily as soon as she saw Stephen all dressed up. 'No,' Stephen realized. 'She doesn't see me, she sees a girl.' "What's her name?" Nicole asked giddily. Polly realized what she'd forgotten. "Well, we haven't given her one yet. Why don't you name her?" she asked to Stephen's shock. "It can't be too childish or silly, and it can't be Stephanie or anything like it," she continued to his relief. "We don't want to give any hints." The girl already had an idea. "Margaret!" Polly had no idea where she got the name from and didn't ask. "That's a perfectly good name, Nicole. Okay, Margaret. It's almost exactly noon, I need to get back to work. Nicole, you be super nice to your new sister. No rough-housing, no throwing things, and no breaking anything, we've already had enough of that," she told them firmly. "And Margaret, just let her play the way she wants. Try to keep up." After taking off his shoes and socks, Stephen very quickly learned what 'try to keep up' meant. He had worried that maybe Nicole, playing with her new gift, would try to force him into dressup and tea parties, treating him like a new doll. Instead, the little girl didn't even acknowledge that he had ever been a boy; rather, she played what he could only describe as the girly version of Calvinball, a purely random mishmash of ponies and rainbows and adventures. Cowgirls in outer space. He tried to follow where he thought she was going and simply couldn't, and eventually he stopped trying. If she said that Margie could fly on one imaginary planet but not another, for reasons he couldn't fathom, then that's how it was. If Rapunzel from Tangled was going to tie up the nasty Garglers with her hair on the planet of Avalon, where she got to by opening a magic door in her spaceship, then that's what happened, and it was Margie's job to play along. Occasionally, Stephen got in a few words, trying to keep continuity if not plausibility, which only fueled the little girl's imagination further. He missed a lot of cues, but at least she didn't tell him that he wasn't playing right, and eventually he got through it all. Four straight hours, unceasing! At least the girl seemed tired out at the end of it, and so was he, and all he wanted to do by the end of that was play some Fortnite Save the World and level up in the seasonal event. Polly, unlike his shithead father, kept her side of bargains, and she let him play as promised. He was nearly through three games, headphones on, when his mother gently tapped him on the shoulder. Stephen let his headphones dangle, although most of his focus was still on the screen. The fight was almost over, and the traps were taking care of most of the enemies, but he still had to be careful. "Was the dress comfortable all day?" she asked him lightly. Except for the sleeves, which still felt slightly weird if he thought about it, it had been just like wearing a long shirt. He didn't want to admit it, and she knew it. "Is it getting in your way at all?" He lightly shook his head. "That's what I thought. So, how was playing with your little sister? She told me you were a lot like a doll, just sitting there a lot." "I tried to play along with her, I just didn't know what to do, so we just did whatever. She was just... all over the place, everything at once. It was like a really weird dream. Four whole hours, she didn't stop. I really tried, I swear!" He was still mentally exhausted from it. Polly nodded, patting him gently. "I know you tried your best. That's just how she is and how she'll be until she grows out of it. But that's not the important part right now. The important part is, she didn't complain about you halfway through. She didn't run to me in the middle of my work and start yelling about how horrible you were or how you wouldn't play with her or about something she made up." Her voice grew serious. "You made the right choice, Stephen. If she would have interrupted me today, I think I might have lost my job." "So you're thanking me for smashing the furniture?" Polly laughed. "Don't push it. C'mon. I see it says 'Victory' on your screen. I made spaghetti and meatballs, just for you." Stephen perked up. Nicole disliked being served too much spaghetti - it bloated her up and made her feel full way too fast - but he could wolf it down. So, she got a little bowl with fruit on the side while he got plenty of his favorite food, and both of them got the kinds of vegetables they could eat. (There was no such thing as dessert in Polly's household. It wasn't that she didn't want to give it, it was just that sugar before bed was a very bad idea for Nicole.) Nicole moved her chair right next to her big sister's when dinner started, treating Margie as if they had always been sisters, and Stephen wondered if the little girl thought that she could actually, physically transform him with the power of her imagination. He chuckled to himself at the idea. If she really could do a thing like that, his father would have suffered multiple, hideous, transformative fates in a row before finally dying in some horrifically ridiculous cartoon way. (If he could have actually made that trade, turning into a prissy, delicate girl at the mercy of her super-imaginative little sister in order to cause his father to suffer a comically brutal end, he would have taken the offer in a heartbeat.) Polly noticed that Nicole actually listened to Margie in a way that she had never listened to her own mother. When Margie twirled the spaghetti around her fork, showing Nicole how to eat it instead of getting it everywhere, Nicole gladly imitated her big sister. Nicole would have shrank back if her mother had tried to wipe her face, but she let Margie do it without complaint. It was only after Stephen had finished his dinner that Polly noticed that the ribbon was still in his hair. Stephen woke up the next morning with half-remembered dreams and a strange sort of contentment from the idea that his father would never yell at him again. He also had the serious urge to urinate. That was a very good thing for him; he immediately got up, threw on a yellow dress (it was basically identical to the previous day's except for the color) because he figured that either Polly or Nicole might be miffed with him if he didn't, and ran to the bathroom, lifting the dress to pee, his unused Pull-Up at his feet. A pee day, not a wet day. Every time he managed to make it to the bathroom in the morning, he'd hoped that the problem was gone, but that dream had never come true. He brushed his teeth and took a (sadly lukewarm) shower, toweled himself off as best he could, and put the dress (and Pull-Up, to hide it) back on before leaving the room. Nicole, wearing a bright pink nightgown decorated with pictures of princesses, was waiting for him. "Margie, you forgot your ribbon!" she pointed out on her way to go pee and brush her teeth. He sighed. He'd completely forgotten that the ribbon in his hair was still there yesterday, and he'd only noticed as he went to sleep. It was fine; the whole reason he'd forgotten about it was because he stopped feeling it, so if Nicole wanted Margie to wear it, then Margie would. He took the small piece of yellow ribbon, started to place it in his hair, and realized that he had no idea what he was doing. Nicole had finished her morning stuff, at least the parts she could do by herself, before he figured it out, and he stepped out of his room with a guilty expression. "Nicole, could you help?" he asked quietly, stooping down so she could tie it. "Mom!" Nicole yelled instead. "Margie needs help with her ribbons!" The little girl looked up at her big sister and smiled, as if Nicole had just done her a big favor. "Nicole, you woke her up!" Margaret quietly admonished her little sister as their mother's door opened. "I'm already awake," Polly said, still in her nightgown. The toilet flush had woke her up, and the shower had kept her awake. The house really did have terribly thin walls, and she was grateful that both she and Stephen had headphones for their computers. "Let's take a look at these ribbons and then let's worry about you," she told her little daughter. Margaret held out the ribbon. "It's just like tying your shoes," Polly told her, tying it into her hair. "Loop it around this tuft of hair here, cross the ends over, tie the bow. You can practice, it won't take you long to get the hang of it." "So how do I do the sleeves myself?" Margaret asked as Polly tied them for her. She'd need to either do it one-handed or bend her arm at an awkward angle. "There is a way, but they're so loose that you can just tie them before putting it on," she suggested, and he thought that was a good idea. "It's your turn to do the dishes... no, hold on. Don't do anything with water until you hear the tub stop running." She kept forgetting just how bad the water pressure was. It wasn't the city's fault; there was some bottleneck on the property, something that she didn't have the money to have professionally inspected. Margie nodded. "Go put on your socks and shoes, Margie, it's also your turn to take out the trash." Margie - no, Stephen, suddenly Stephen again - visibly balked at the idea. Polly sighed. "Nicole, just wait there for a bit while I talk to your big sister," he said, leading him into the living room. Her voice dropped low. "Our next-door neighbor is eighty years old, housebound, senile, and nearly blind, and his caretaker comes every Wednesday afternoon." It was Thursday. "The house beyond his, which you can barely even see from our backyard, is vacant. I checked. All I'm asking you to do outside today is to take the trash bags, put them in the pail, and come back. It's still the early morning. No one is going to see you at all." Stephen just nodded. He put on Margaret's socks, the ribbons of which he could tie himself, buckled on her vintage shoes, took all the trash bags - they were all full or close to it - and rushed out the door as quickly as he could, the leather Mary Janes slapping against the pavement. He tossed all the bags into the outdoor garbage can, closed the lid loudly, and ran back inside as quickly as he could. He felt silly afterwards. There had really been no reason to panic; no one was out there. He surfed the Internet for a bit until the bath water stopped running and felt sort of relieved that he was way out there. This place had its problems, but the stuff happening in the city they had just left was way worse. The water stopped and he did the dishes as instructed. It was annoying and tiresome, as they had no dishwasher, but there was decent dishwashing liquid and a good scrubbing sponge and it wasn't a terrible task. They had breakfast as a family, pancakes made from mix that was nearing its expiration date, and Stephen retreated back to his computer as was his wont. He thought that it was just a shame that Nicole was so random, so forceful in her imaginative play that she hated constraints, hated computers in general. But what if...? Smiling a bit, he concocted a plan to save his sanity while still giving Nicole something fun to do. Noon rolled around, and with a smile on his face, he left his room to play with his little sister as Margie once more. A folded-up piece of paper sat in his hand. (He had considered making cards but didn't have time.) He played along like usual for a while, knowing that while every adventure of hers was different from the last, there were a few predictably common themes. (Stephen gave her enormous credit for that. He might go crazy trying to follow along, but at least he'd never get bored.) Once Space Princess Nicole had saved Equestria from the Scourge, he made his move. "Well, you saved the ponies from the Scourge, but aren't you forgetting something? The big hairy Scourge wiped out their whole city!" He got out a large pail of Legos that he'd spied the previous day. "It looks like they want you to stay and rebuild!" Nicole looked a bit pleasantly surprised that Margie was starting to direct the narrative, as her big sister set out one of the large, flat pieces that were used for building other things. "So what's the name of the new city, Space Princess Nicole?" "Unicorn Town!" "Awesome! Now build a new City Hall for Unicorn Town. Don't make it too big, there's a lot of other buildings that need to be made too once you're done!" The piece of paper contained random events. There was nothing in there that would actually smash buildings; rather, the tornadoes picked up buildings and moved them elsewhere, or swapped places, or said that blocks of a particular color had to be set aside for use in a shield generator (to keep the Scourge from returning, of course). Stephen was awed at how quickly she made her imagination take root. He could never have constructed the way he did, and he of course made no move to interfere, except for the list of things on his piece of paper. Eventually, they simply ran out, and when Nicole asked to build something else, Margie just shook her head. "Um... we can't expand Unicorn Town anymore. I'm sorry." Margie showed her little sister the totally empty pail. Nicole had even used up the little, decorative pieces that Stephen had thought nobody used. "We're out of Legos to make it with." "Then Mommy can go get us some more!" Nicole said, heading for the door. "You can't bug her now, little sis!" Margie said, quietly but forcefully, holding out an arm to block her. "If you bother Mom while she's working, then she'll lose her job and we won't have any money and we'll have to live somewhere bad!" The little girl looked up in surprise, tears welling in her eyes. Margie hugged her little sister close, only partially to muffle her sobs. That was all too much at once, Stephen realized; Margie had come down too hard too fast on her little sister. "You're not supposed to bother Mommy now," Margie said, in a much gentler voice. "That's why she wants me playing with you. If you go to her right now, we'll both get in big trouble and it'll be terrible and awful." "You're mean," Nicole whined softly. "If you want to tell her that, do it after she's done working, okay? Then she'll still have her job and I guess I'll just be in trouble." "I don't want you to get in trouble," Nicole said, sniffling, her tears soaking into Margie's dress. "Then just play with me, okay? I wish we had more stuff to play with. I wish we could make Unicorn Town as big as our backyard." Stephen suddenly got an idea. "But, you know what I think? I think that Unicorn Town needs some unicorns in it." Margie got up gently, picked up the cheap toys that Nicole had been playing with before the founding of Unicorn Town, and started putting them in the streets. "Noo, that's Twilight, she belongs in the library, see? I built it for her. And Pinkie Pie belongs in..." Polly didn't have her headphones on at the moment. She didn't have a meeting and was busy organizing a spreadsheet instead. She'd heard absolutely all of that, since the empty tub of Legos, through the thin walls, and she tried not to let the tears well up while she worked. "I see you've found a new game," Polly said after Margaret was done playing with her little sister, right after Stephen had seated himself at his computer. She still had some work to do, but she could make time to talk to him after everything he'd been doing. "Yeah. I kinda took it from Sim City and Animal Crossing. She's still the player, but I'm the computer. There's still not a lot of rules." Polly suddenly started laughing, holding her face in her hand. "Oh... oh. That's.." She sighed, trying to explain this in a way that wouldn't make fun of him. "You've gone backwards to tabletop gaming. See, those computer games of yours, those were developed from roleplaying games, where you have somebody directing the world and other people playing in it. You've rediscovered the whole idea of Dungeons and Dragons from the opposite end." "Is that good or bad?" Polly kissed Stephen - or was it Margie? - on the head. "It's very good." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for taking care of her, for paying me back this way. I hope we'll have a better life for us, after all this." "I hope so too, Mom," he replied, and Polly tried not to react to him finally directly calling her Mom. She smiled as she gently kissed him on the cheek, and it was only after she'd left that he realized that he had called her Mom. After dinner, he played well into the night, glad that at least he - they - had found a way to deal with everything that didn't involve him being kept off his computer and wasn't driving him totally crazy. He slept well, and he didn't pee himself that night, and he tied the sleeves before putting the light blue dress on (he realized that these nearly identical dresses must have been sold as a set) and managed to put on his ribbon by himself the next morning after a few tries. "Just one big chore for you today, Margaret," Polly said after breakfast, interrupting Nicole's babbling about the cereal they had been eating and how it compared to other cereals. "Put on your socks and shoes and come with me to the garage, please." Stephen thought that maybe she was going to ask him to clean it. There were a lot of household products of questionable age and questionable provenance, and that plus the abundance of rusted metal and sharp objects made the garage an absolute 'I will actually spank you, I mean it' no-go zone for Nicole unless she was getting into the car right then. Polly gestured to an old, unpowered push-mower sitting in the corner. "Your only chore to do today is to mow the lawn. There's a fifty percent chance of a thunderstorm in a few hours, and this needs to be done before it gets here." "Mow that lawn with this thing?!" Stephen asked. Their backyard was substantial and that wasn't even a real lawnmower! It seemed like an unreasonable punishment and one that wasn't part of their agreement. He was already wearing girls' clothes and now she was telling him to do this?! "Stephen, this isn't anything new, it's just your half of the chores," she told him quietly. "I already did this when it was my turn, and the grass was taller when I did it and there was some garbage and branches I had to get rid of." That had been shortly after they'd moved in, and it had taken her all day. "Yes, I know, it's just an old mechanical mower, if I could afford something better I would have used it myself." They'd hired a service to do their lawn back in suburbia, just for convenience. Hunter hadn't been paying that bill, either. "I've sharpened the blades and oiled the wheels, it works fine. You're just walking to the treeline and back for most of this. Keep the mower well in front of yourself, and make it tight so you're not leaving little strips of unmowed grass." "Wearing this stuff?!" He was starting to panic a bit. "Calm down and think about it for a moment. You're wearing a very light dress that won't get in your way, soft knee socks, and leather shoes that fit your feet and have been thoroughly broken in a long time ago. If you get even a single blister from just pushing that mower, I'll subtract a whole week and you can go back to wearing your sneakers indefinitely." He still looked nervous. "Senile, nearly blind eighty- year-old. Vacant house. There is nobody else here, Stephen. Whatever you're scared of happening cannot happen out here, and the longer you wait, the hotter it's going to get, and the more likely it is you'll be caught by the storm. Pace yourself, if you do it right, you'll be pushing it for a little over two and a half miles." She caught his look. "It's only about an hour or so of basic exercise. If the mower gets clogged up, tell me, don't try to unclog it yourself. And if you get thirsty, come back in for water, I'm serious." His bladder issues made him not want to drink enough liquids, which could cause even more problems. "How do you know it's over two and a half miles?" Stephen asked. "Because the land is fifty yards on each side, the house is about two thousand square feet on the outside, and that's an 18-inch mower." He looked puzzled. "You're a bright boy," she told him gently. "Why don't you figure it out while you work?" Stephen, given a math problem to solve, let his mind fixate on that instead of the fact that he was going outside in vintage girls' clothes with a pretty ribbon in his hair, walking next to the hedges that demarcated the property line, pushing a mower that must have been as ancient as the clothes were. He knew inches, feet, yards, and miles - and he knew to start at the corner! - but he didn't quite get it. Fifty yards was 150 feet, and he could quickly do in his head that 150 times 150 was 22500, and subtracting the house was 20500 feet. But that was four miles! Wait, no, that was area, not distance. Ohhh. It would be a four-mile walk if it was 20500 feet divided by a width of 1. But 18 inches was 1 and a half feet, so yeah, a little over two and a half miles. Proud of himself for figuring it out even before he'd finished the first strip, he suddenly realized how far he was from the house, and he was suddenly afraid that someone would see him. But who? Those two houses really were the only ones visible, and he'd played enough video games to know very well that visibility was usually bidirectional unless someone was trying to hide. In general, if you could see them, they could see you, and vice versa. What was he going to believe, that there was someone hiding in the window or concealed in the forest, just out there to spy on crossdressed boys? Mom had been right: there was nobody out here, that was the whole thing about this place. He really was just out for a long walk, pushing a modestly heavy mower against modest resistance where nobody could see him. And, the truth was - and he had no plans to tell her this - it actually felt kind of nice. The light cotton skirt was pleasant against his upper legs and his ribbon-tied knee socks gently hugged his lower legs. The shoes really did fit him nicely and he liked how the old, supple leather felt even if the soles were inflexible. He was not about to get a blister, and the mower was not clogging up either. He gently touched the ribbon in his hair - still facing away from the house! - and found himself smiling. With nothing better to do other than monotonously make sure that he was keeping the strips tight, preventing himself from going too far off either way and making even more work for himself one way or another, he decided to simply immerse himself in the persona. Nicole wasn't the only one who got to escape by using her imagination. He wasn't Stephen, a boy who had an absconded father and worried about whether his stepmother was going to be able to keep him and Nicole out of a slum; she was simply Margaret, a girl who loved her pretty dresses and her mom and whose main job was to keep her little sister out of trouble. Margaret reached the old but still functional swingset in the backyard and carefully mowed around the metal poles. She didn't really envy little girls from the era when this was built. Sure, it was probably nice to play on it, but she would have been bored silly if stuff like this, along with baby dolls and similar toys, was all she had to play with. Not everyone's imagination was as powerful as Nicole's. She continued mowing, and Stephen imagined what life was like back when this town was thriving and not a cast-aside and forgotten bit of America. He recalled some half-remembered things regarding small towns that he'd barely paid attention to, most of which were from different sources, none of which he really trusted, and a lot of which seemed to have an ideological axe to grind, and he decided that it didn't matter. Margie was a proud resident of the fantasy version of this town, a place where all the girls wore pretty dresses from the 1950s, went to sock hops, and read printed Sears catalogs, and yet they somehow still had cable Internet connections and multi-gigahertz computers at home. Like a good girl, Margaret got a glass of water in the middle of her mowing like her mother had told her to, happily told her mother (who hadn't yet started working for the day) how quickly she'd solved the math problem, and then went right back to her mowing with a smile on her face. The wind started to pick up a bit - there was definitely a storm on the way - and Margie saw half her dress fluttering a bit, but what she noticed the most was how the other half pressed against her legs. She was glad she was mowing front-to-back; if she had been mowing side- to-side, her dress would have been pushed directly against her - or in front of her - rather than just to the side. It didn't particularly impede her walk, it just felt funny, and she let herself giggle a little bit. It wasn't like Stephen enjoyed this. Margie enjoyed this, but so what? She didn't even really exist. (Next door, an eighty-year-old man looked out the window, squinting behind his glasses. Oh, there was that pretty little girl again, the one he saw right before he'd graduated high school. It was nice to know that she was still out there mowing the lawn sometimes. Something about this confused him terribly, but Alzheimer's disease had ravaged his brain and confusion was his constant companion.) When she finished, putting the mower back in its original place, her mother smiled at her and brought good news. "They found Hunter. In the Baja, south of California. He's being charged with all kinds of felonies, we're getting something back from him, I don't know how much, but it's something." Legally, she and her children would get the owed money first; anyone else he owed money to came second. There would probably be lawyers involved. "Good!" Stephen replied, more in vengeful satisfaction than anything else. What he really wanted to happen was for the various prison gangs to set aside their differences and, in an unprecedented display of racial harmony and cooperation, run a train on his father and give him every venereal disease in existence along with COVID, Ebola, and necrotizing fasciitis. His tone and the vindictive look on his face were clear. "Stephen, whatever you're thinking, do not speak it aloud, especially not at the lunch table with Nicole," Polly warned him. "And you still have to take care of her on weekdays, we can talk about this weekend later." He just nodded. He might have vicious hatred toward his father, but sweet Margie had nothing but compassion in her heart and no father at all. She didn't even complain when, right after the early lunch, her little sister asked her that now that she had mowed the area around the swings, could she please push her on them? It wasn't playtime yet, but Margie, being a good girl, agreed, although she did have to go to the bathroom while Nicole changed out of her nightgown - which she often wore all day - and into a light blue dress to match her big sister. As Margaret pushed, Nicole chittered excitedly about how there was going to be a Unicorn Town on every planet, or somehow Unicorn Town would be on all the planets at once, it wasn't clear. What was clear was that Nicole kept asking to be pushed higher, and abruptly Margaret was grabbing an empty swing to prevent it from whacking her in the face. Nicole had jumped off, landing easily on her feet. Perhaps Margaret could have admonished her for doing that, but Stephen had been yelled at for jumping off swings and hated it. There was no debris on the lawn, nothing more solid than dirt and grass for Nicole to land on. "You'll get grass stains on your dress if you fall over," Margie decided on as a warning. "Grass stains wash out, silly," Nicole said, and Margaret pushed her on the swing again, and she jumped off for a perfect landing again. "Hmmm.. Freeze ray!" she shouted, abruptly pointing, and Margie obligingly froze in place. Giggling, Nicole walked around her frozen sister, eventually touching her on her leg. "Unfreeze!" she yelled, giggling and running away. Margie ran after her, but before she caught her, she shouted "Freeze ray!" herself, and Nicole stood still for about three seconds before abruptly shouting "Antifreeze!" "Are you sure you're not cheating?" Margie asked. "I wouldn't be using a freeze ray if I hadn't been drinking antifreeze, silly," Nicole said. "What if I froze myself on accident?" She didn't understand why her big sister was laughing so hard. "The only one who should be drinking antifreeze is my dad," Stephen said. "No, I get it, this is special antifreeze for fairy space princesses. Not antifreeze for cars, don't drink that." "Of course not, geeesh. You're weird sometimes." "I might be weird, but at least I haven't made a terrible tactical mistake," Margaret replied. She smiled down at her little sister. "I didn't bring a freeze ray to a tickle fight." She started tickling her little sister under the armpits, watching her reactions closely. Stephen had never liked this kind of physical contact; if Nicole showed any signs of reacting the way he would have at that age, Margaret was going to immediately stop and apologize. Instead, she giggled uncontrollably and tried to tickle back, with limited success. Eventually, she escaped by simply falling backwards onto the grass. "Tickling is now hereby punishable by unicorn prison!" she declared. "Oh no! I want to stay out of unicorn prison," Margie replied. (Stephen had a mental image of just what might happen to someone in 'unicorn prison', where the guards had horns on their heads, but that was not something that Margaret was ever going to share with her little sister.) "Then don't be mean, don't tickle people, and remember to drink your antifreeze!" Stephen could not stop himself from laughing again, and Nicole suddenly decided that she wanted to play on the swings again. The two of them continued before Nicole abruptly shouted "It's raining!" and Margaret felt a drop on her hair as well, and the girls rushed back inside before it got serious. Stephen was relieved. He was already worn out from pushing that mower so far. The rain started to get harsh quickly, and Polly turned her computer off and even unplugged it, not trusting any of the equipment to save it from a lightning strike, and told Margaret to do the same; she agreed with the risk and did as she was told without complaint. Stephen was certainly not going to risk losing his computer to a power surge, and besides, Nicole needed her big sister's love and attention, as she was quietly rocking back and forth on her bed, curled up into a ball. The wind and rain were audible through the windows, and lightning flashes could be seen through the window, low rumblings following them in the distance. "It's okay, Nicole," Margaret soothed her little sister with, climbing on her bed next to her. The girls had taken off their shoes but were still wearing their socks. "It's just a storm. You've been through storms before." "Not in here," Nicole said. The girl was right; this was the first serious thunderstorm that had passed overhead since they'd moved in. The walls were considerably thinner, and everything was much noisier. There was definitely a draft coming from somewhere, too. "This house has seen lots of storms before this one," Margaret reminded her little sister. "Get up for just a little bit." Nicole did, and Margie got up and pulled the pink Dora the Explorer blanket up, Nicole sat down next to her again, and Margie draped it over both of them. KA-POW!! The windows rumbled, and the girls even felt the bed shake. Nicole started crying, and Margaret held her little sister safe. Polly came in to check on them. "Hey, Mom, does this place have a storm cellar?" Margaret asked. "There's a basement, but I wouldn't take her down there, it's just like the garage. We'll have to clean it out before we can use it. I wish I'd done that earlier," Polly replied. It was difficult to hear her, as sounded like something was beating on the house, a loud crackling of solid objects bouncing off the roof. "What's thaaaat?!" Nicole wailed. "It's just hail, honey," Polly replied, looking out the window - it was very dark - and then getting under the Dora blanket herself to sit on the other side of her daughter. "It's only the size of golf balls." She laughed a bit at herself. Only! Only the size of golf balls! She was just glad this place had a garage. Car repair was not something she could have afforded at the moment. "All the windows are closed, everything's as sealed as it can be. This place actually used to have shutters a long time ago, but there's newer windows, it should be okay. Nicole, you'll be fine. The storm can't come in here. It's just a hailstorm, not a tornado or anything like that." A little bit later, lightning struck nearby again, but this time, there was a THUNK before the POW, and the old wooden lamp that Nicole had by her bed instantly shut off. The surge had hit them before the sound had reached them. Nicole, still huddled between her mother and big sister, started whimpering faintly. "Glad I unplugged my computer," Stephen said, hoping very strongly that the power would come right back on. But, as Nicole sat there shivering in fear even with her mother and big sis next to her calming her down, quite a lot of minutes passed, thunder still booming and the hail gradually lessening. "Do you think we're getting the electricity back?" "The breaker flipped," Polly told her children. "I have to find it and turn it back on, and I'm not doing that until the storm passes. I think, at least I hope, that there's no real damage." She smiled a bit. "I'm just glad we have a gas stove, if this stays off, we might have to eat what's in the fridge before it goes bad." It wasn't just veggies; there was chicken in the freezer that she'd planned on having ready for dinner. "It's too bad the water heater sucks," Stephen said before realizing his mistake. 'Sucks' wasn't something that a girl like Margie said. Nicole had her fingers in her ears anyway. "What's this place going to be like in the winter?" "Don't even talk about that right now," Polly said. "There's a lot of things we need to get looked at first, but hopefully, our finances will be stable by then. At least there aren't any leaks, knock on wood." She looked at the ceiling. "Gas or water." They sat there together for fifteen more minutes or so, before the hail let up and the rumbling faded off and all they were left with was a moderate shower. Polly went to go find and reset the breaker, and Margie looked down at her still terrified sister. "It's all over now, it's just rain now," Margie said gently. "Unicorn Town is safe. We built a storm shield, remember? That storm can't hurt us." "Yeah," Nicole said, smiling slightly. For her to just say 'Yeah', and not go off on an imagination-fueled tangent, meant that she had really been scared. "I gotta go pee!" "Then go, you don't need to ask permission!" Margie replied immediately, and the little girl jumped off the bed and rushed to the bathroom. Stephen knew very well what having a full bladder was like. The lamp came back a few seconds later, and Polly came back in. "Where's Nicole?" she asked loudly and immediately, startled at not seeing her. "I'm peeing, Mom!" Nicole shouted from the bathroom, and Polly sighed in relief. "Just checking!" Polly shouted back. "I'm so wound up, too," she said quietly. "God, Stephen, when you reminded me of the winter... if we can't get this place ready for it, we might have to move out, it really won't be livable. I've applied to every government agency I can, we got that call earlier, and I still don't know what's going to happen. Do you see why I was so upset at you about the secretary? We need every dollar we can get." He just nodded quietly. "And now I'm late for work. They should understand, though. Please, just keep her occupied until dinnertime." Nicole had left the bathroom then, proudly proclaiming that she was done and that she'd washed her hands. (There was a stepstool by the sink for precisely that purpose.) It did not take very long at all for Nicole, terrified of storms, to become mighty Sun Princess Nicole, with Princess Celestia as her noble steed. Unicorn Town, and the whole planet, would never suffer the terrible fury of lightning again, as the whole planet was to have a whole lot of lightning rods that went all the way into the stratosphere (and she actually knew the word 'stratosphere'). Henceforth, all plants were to be watered, and rivers filled, by gentle drizzles (and snowmelt, Margie reminded her), on every planet, everywhere, ever. So proclaimed Sun Princess Nicole! But, Margie reminded her (cribbing unrepentantly from his favorite game), the dreaded Storm King was not happy about that, and she retrieved an old Voltron toy from Stephen's bedroom to play the part. He summoned lots of minions (the Lego people, the only parts that Nicole hadn't used up) to do his evil bidding, but Sun Princess Nicole vanquished (another word she knew) them all with one blast of Princess Celestia's horn, blasting off the Storm King's arms and legs! (It was a Voltron toy, after all.) But Thor, God of Thunder, wasn't happy with that either, so... Sun Princess Nicole had just finished making a mockery out of Marvel Comics when Polly came in and said it was time for dinner. She'd cooked the chicken very well, and there was even some sauce to go with it, and Nicole and her big sister ate together as usual. Stephen was starting to feel a bit weird. He wasn't just wearing a dress, as he thought this was going to be like; he'd actually spent pretty much all day doing things as a girl. But Nicole was finally starting to get tired out and just wanted to read, and so he thankfully retired to his room as well and FLYING FUCKGOBLINS HIS COMPUTER WOULD NOT START. Oh. Right. He'd unplugged it to keep it from being fried. He had never been more relieved to hear the Windows bootup sound. Stephen had just come out of the bathroom after a few games when Polly came up to him, following him into his room. "Stephen, I'd like to make you an offer," she said quietly. "Don't worry, Nicole's asleep." That was unsurprising. She was a little dervish of creative mania when she was awake, but she woke up late and went to bed early. "What is it?" Something about the look on her face told him it was going to be something he might not like. "I should have told you this much earlier, I know, I wanted to give you time to get used to this first. I have a friend coming over tomorrow, and she has a couple of daughters, one and two years older than Nicole, and I'm worried about them picking on her, even if they don't mean to." Stephen understood what she was going for and why she wanted to do this, but just the idea... "And you want Margaret to be there with her," he said, trying to stay unemotional and failing. She actually wanted him to play a girl in front of other girls, girls who certainly did not think the way Nicole did. Anxiety started flowing into him, and he firmly gripped the arms of his chair, and Polly didn't pick up on it. "Please, Stephen? You can skip tomorrow if you want and I'll push it back a day, but I'll take four days off the end of this if you do this for us. This is the last time I'm going to see Alice in person for a very long time, possibly ever, and if Nicole doesn't have an older girl there to protect her, I'd have to do it and that'd take all my attention. They've never seen a picture of you within the last few years, I'll tell them you're my niece. You're just ten years old, no one will be able to tell you're a boy just by looking at you." Stephen felt a deep, overwhelming swell of envy and insult, and not just from the last sentence. If he had any friends willing to visit this old, rickety house off in the corner of this dilapidated, godforsaken wreck of a town - he didn't think any candidates even existed within fifty miles - his stepmother would never have even considered putting him in a dress to begin with. This was on top of the weird, confusing feelings he was getting, the strange sensations of enjoyment, the amount of time he had been spending as Margie, and abruptly, he decided that he just couldn't, shouldn't take it. What was he doing? What was he letting be done to him? He felt a stab of panic and the words "I quit! I can't do this anymore, just give me the chores!" were out of his mouth before he even realized he was saying them. He barely retained enough self-control not to speak them loud enough to wake up Nicole. "Stephen, do you really..." He pulled the ribbon out of his hair and the dress over his head, pushing his arms out of the ribbon-tied sleeves, tossing it all aside onto his bed. "I said I quit, Polly, and if you try to make me, I'll tell everybody, your job, your friend, and her daughters too!" Polly would never have tried to make him. She had never intended to get any leverage over him by dressing him up; it was entirely the other way around, and they both knew it. If he wanted to get her in serious trouble, he could. If he wanted to ruin everything for Nicole and traumatize her further, he wouldn't even have to try very hard. "Nobody'd ever come way out here to get that stupid secretary anyway! The only thing I'm sorry for is I ever dressed up like a girl!" His hands were shaking, and tears welled up in his eyes. He didn't know why he was crying, and in emotional pain and rage he said the first scarcely-formed thought that came to mind. "I wish Dad had taken me with him." His mind was in complete chaos, and he suddenly had the idea that maybe if he'd impressed the man more, if he were stronger and more manly and didn't need to wear fucking Pull-Ups to bed, then his father might have brought him along to Mexico and that, if Stephen were there, the two of them would never have been found. Polly knew he didn't really mean that but refrained from saying so. She realized her mistake. She'd talked about herself, about what she needed, about her friend coming over when he had no real friends at all. God, had she even suggested before that she might ground him from the computer for three weeks? The Internet was about all he had left. Then she realized another mistake: how on earth was she going to tell Nicole that Margaret wasn't going to play with her anymore? Even if he hadn't done this just then, it was all going to end in three weeks (she was surprised she got him to agree even to that), and the little girl wasn't going to grow up enough before then. Polly had been pushing that back as 'a problem for later', making the all-too-common mistake of forgetting that later eventually shows up. She took a small breath. "Do you want to know what Nicole was talking about the whole time you were mowing the lawn today, before I got that call?" "Let me guess, she talked about Margaret?" "She couldn't stop. She loves you." "No, she loves someone that she should know doesn't even exist! You need to get her looked at!" He certainly didn't have such a tenuous grasp on reality when he was in second grade. "We all need to be looked at, Stephen, all three of us. But I still don't have the money for that and probably won't for a very long time." He was sharply reminded of why he hated his father and that he really would not have wanted to go with him, and he squinted his eyes and pursed his lips angrily. The tears were flowing freely now. He hadn't been anywhere near this upset even after breaking the secretary, she realized, and she almost moved to hug him, but he would probably not have taken it well. She wanted to remind him how much fun he'd apparently had playing with Nicole, but that would have been an even worse decision. He needed time to himself. "I'm sorry. I pushed you too far. Play your game and get a good night's sleep, and if you're still serious about this in the morning, I'll pack these all back up and give you your chores and we'll never talk about this again." She was starting to think that this whole thing was a mistake. Surely there was some other way to keep Nicole occupied. "Okay," he said, shaking and crying. Polly left the room and he looked at the dress on his bed, torn between the subtle desire to put it back on and the hot urge to rip it in half. He was at least thankful that Polly had backed off and given him time and space. If she had pushed him or suggested that she was going to punish him with worse things than chores, he really would have woken up Nicole and the results would not have been pleasant at all for anyone. He wiped his tears on his arm, not wanting to admit to himself that he had been crying, and returned to his game. One of the benefits he got of having played STW for a year and a half - he'd gotten it back when his parents had been together and his real mom hadn't yet had enough of his father's steadily increasing bullshit - was that he'd almost entirely maxed himself out (except for the new event) and so could spend his daily trickle of earned V-Bucks on cosmetic items instead of power he didn't need. (He'd wanted to turn them back into real money, but of course it didn't work like that.) The daily turnover had happened, and he went to check the store. One of the items for sale was the Starlie skin, a pink-haired woman who wore one of the girliest outfits in the game. He stared at it for a bit and decided, why not? It was just a game after all, everybody had whatever usernames they made up, nobody knew or even cared who anybody else was (getting people to care about you was the difficult part, and he didn't want to become a streamer). The last time he'd seen this skin, its player had dominated the mission with hover turrets while dancing Star Power (a dance he already had) almost the whole time. He was fairly sure that most of the people running around in the Harley Quinn skins were boys. He bought the skin and played a couple of games with it, safe behind a shield of pure anonymity. But was that who he really wanted to be? A boy in a dress? Unsure of himself, he finally stopped playing and curled up in his bed to sleep. Stephen's dad took him to Mexico, and he could tell it was Mexico from the deserts and Southwestern-style square buildings everywhere. Polly and Nicole stared at them at a faraway shore, and Hunter promised to take his boy to every bar and opium den in the country. "We'll make a man out of you yet," Hunter said, his fist clenched, sadism in his look. "Go talk to that pirate, get some of his rum," he said, pointing to a pirate ship off the coast. Stephen was afraid, but the pirate looked like a cross between every pirate he'd ever seen in media, and there was a smile on his swarthy, weather-beaten face under his bright red cap with a skull and crossbones on it. The pirate looked at Stephen and his father, and with a sneer, he drew his cutlass. But then the pirate flipped the cutlass over in his hand, handing it to Stephen hilt-first. "Think ye'll be needin' this, lassie," he said, chuckling, and Stephen - Margie - looked down at the laces of the seventeenth-century dress she was wearing. "Did he just call you..." her father started, but Margie had already leapt up, skirts fluttering, and clove through Hunter's neck with one quick slash. A yellow, eight-digit number appeared over his head, his eyes turned into large X's, and he disintegrated into nothing. Stephen woke up early - and dry again, thank God - and the sound of the shower through the weak walls kept Polly awake as well, as she hadn't enjoyed a particularly restful night either. Eventually, the water stopped running, and after a lot of toweling (he'd already brushed his teeth), the door opened, and Stephen was surprised to see Polly standing there, especially since all he had on was the Pull-Up he'd walked in with. "Stephen, we need to talk for a little bit," she told him as lightly as she could, and he went into his room and sat down on his swivelchair, expecting some kind of lecture and having no idea what it would be. He was worried, had woken up that way, but tried to calm down. She had been nice last night; she wasn't going to give him any nasty surprise this morning, was she? "Are you going to stop or continue with our arrangement?" Polly asked simply, and he relaxed just a bit. He had been thinking about it all morning, of course, as he showered. He was still conflicted over if this was who he was, how much time he wanted to spend as Margie, whether he should be doing this at all. But no matter how he looked at it, there was one overriding constant, one person who just did not deserve to suffer. "I'll do it, Mom, but I'm not doing it for you," he said, still a little upset. She was just glad he was calling her Mom again. "I can't make Nicole cry today. There's two other girls coming over and they'd both see her crying if Margie went away now. Is it really just two girls and no boys?" "Two girls and no boys," his mother said affirmatively. He nodded. The idea of being Margaret in front of a boy, especially an older boy, terrified him to the core, and if there were a boy around his age, Stephen would want to also be a boy anyway, just to play with him and so keep him away from Nicole. "It's not going to be a sleepover or anything like that, is it?" he asked. Polly smiled and shook her head. "I actually asked if they wanted to do that, but their flight leaves at 7 AM and their hotel is three hours away. They're going to be tired as it is. Alice is not going to go to bed early and then wake her daughters up in the middle of the night to drive in the dark for three hours." Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she leaned down. "I'm sorry for last night. I was being very selfish. I'm not mad at you for saying those things, you were angry and hurt. Thank you for doing this for her." He just nodded, not knowing what to say. "Today, I'm going to ask you to dress up as girly as possible, you'll look as little like a boy as I can make you. They'll probably think you're a bit weird, but you can tell them you dressed up because your little cousin was having friends over. For girls that age, it's not as strange as it looks." "Girly with makeup and nail polish?" Stephen asked. The idea was a bit off-putting. He just didn't like the idea of goop on him, especially his face. "Oh, good lord, no. Not at your age." Especially after last night, she would absolutely not tell him that his prepubescent natural features were enough to easily pass as a girl without assistance. The only thing that might give him away was his still relatively short hair, as Hunter had insisted on short haircuts throughout the boy's life, but he hadn't had one since the man had left them and she was certain that the bows would more than make up for it. "Besides, I haven't worn makeup or nail polish since your father left us, and the stuff in the attic, I wouldn't put on anyone." It certainly hadn't been tested to modern standards when it was made, and it had been sitting around up there for more than half a century at least. She had no idea what those chemicals stored for that long in those conditions would turn into, and she did not care to find out. She would sell the boxes to collectors when she found the time. "All I'll have for you for our arrangement is clothing. Just stay the way you are. I'll be right back." It took over five minutes of rummaging, Nicole waking up and going to the bathroom herself, before Polly returned with a packed box. "Before we begin, if you don't feel comfortable with wearing any of this in front of those girls, if you think it'll be too much, just say so and we can work something out," she said as soon as she entered. She didn't want him freaking out again, but what she was most afraid of was that he'd freak out in the middle of it. Her beginning things that way made him a little bit worried, but he waited for her to show him what was in there. "The first thing we should discuss is underwear. Given the way some of this stuff is, it might or might not be a little bit tricky going to the bathroom," Polly said delicately, and Stephen grasped her intentions. "You want me to stay in my pull-up." "I think it would be the most prudent decision, yes. Stephen, believe me, with the rest of this, they are not going to see it unless they're looking straight between your legs. Which is very bad etiquette, especially for girls." He nodded in acquiescence. He didn't want to have to stay in the bathroom too long and leave Nicole alone, and he certainly didn't want to need to ask for help. He also didn't know what, if anything, Polly had ever told her friend about his bladder problems. She opened the box and held out what looked like a rather small vest. "They might know that Stephen is ten years old, so Margie will be eleven, with her birthday coming up in, oh, February." His real birthday was in November. "And an eleven-year-old girl is developing, just a little bit, in the chest area." She held out a training bra, and Stephen opened his mouth a little bit but did not complain. "Arms out, please." He held his arms out in front of him and she put the lightly padded bra on him, zipping up the front. It was a bit weird, and the padding on his chest pressed against him a bit, but it wasn't terrible. The frothy petticoats came next, a single white mass of nylon that extended a foot past his knees in every direction. Polly had felt the inside of it to make sure that it wasn't scratchy; perhaps it had been starched at one point, but that point was long in the past, and the nylon was soft, silky, and comfortable. Stephen, at least, didn't have any problem with it, although he did understand why having such a large mass belted around his waist might make going to the bathroom a bit more awkward than usual. Then there was the dress, a short-sleeved white confection with pink bows down the center, pink bows around the hem of the skirt, and a big pink bow to tie in the back, right below the buttons. The only thing this dress lacked was arm ribbons. Polly wasn't sure if the dress had originally been like this or if her grandmother had added additional bows for her mother to wear, but Stephen accepted it without complaint, letting her pull it over his head and button up the back. (He could still get out of it without damaging it, she was sure. The boy could lift one arm over his head and the other behind himself and interlock his fingers.) She added two more bows, this time in symmetrical locations on his hair, and smiled at her handiwork. The socks came next, and she was certain that additional bows must have been added at some point, as they were evenly spaced down the sides. She tied the ribbons just below his knees. "I won't ask you to wear the shoes and gloves until Alice gets here, but I think you should keep the socks on. It's a bit chilly today." Stephen nodded. His feet had been a little cold. It was still August, but it was starting to feel like fall. The shoes were black patent Mary Janes with a small heel, and Polly realized that she'd need to get on them with a leather polishing kit before he went outside with them. At least they fit him well. The gloves - with pink bows at the backs, even! - were next, and they, too, fit him well, especially since he kept his nails short. "Is this all?" he asked. Polly couldn't help but laugh. "Is this all! Were you expecting even more?" "The way this was going, yeah," he admitted. Polly let herself laugh again. God, he looked so unbelievably, unbearably cute dressed like this, but of course she was not going to tell him that. "Stephen, if you're going to say no to all this, please do so now," she said instead, quietly and very seriously. "It's okay," he replied, smiling a bit. Polly was worried about him having a reaction to all the frilly pinkness, but that reaction wasn't coming. The ultra-girliness of the clothes really wasn't making him worry more or feel any more trepidation than he already did. From his standpoint, he'd be seen as a very girly girl no matter what of the attic stuff he wore. Being dressed up even more femininely than Margie usually did couldn't possibly be more embarrassing - and her guests would see Margie, not Stephen, so who cared? - and was actually kind of fun. He kind of wanted to dance Star Power in real life wearing this, but he couldn't do that one arm movement quite right. "All right, then. Let's show your little sister." Nicole had finished going potty and brushing her teeth, and she waited in front of Stephen's door, waiting both for her mother to bathe her and to see what Margie was going to look like. Polly might have had inhibitions about saying how cute he looked, but of course Nicole had none. "Margie, you're really pretty!" she squealed upon seeing her big sister, and immediately Stephen knew that he had made the right choice for the very simplest of reasons. Anything that led to Nicole crying was bad, and anything that led to her joy was good. "Thank you, Nicole!" Margie replied happily, because of course she loved compliments from her little sister, especially about how pretty she was. "Mommy, I want to wear my princess dress today!" Nicole asked. That pink and purple dress had originally been for Halloween, and it was made of some thin, silk-like polyester, reaching down to her upper calves. It still fit her, and she could get it off by herself but had trouble putting it on. It was very obviously a costume, but she didn't care. Princess costumes were her ideal daily wardrobe. "I was going to suggest that anyway," Polly replied, and Nicole squealed in glee. "But let's give you your bath first. Margie, will you please put this on and cook us breakfast? Bacon and eggs with toast today, I moved the bacon to the fridge last night. And remember, low heat. Gas stove, beware the grease." "Okay, Mom," Margie obligingly replied with a smile, putting on the offered pinafore, a frilly garment all of its own, to keep her pretty dress from being stained. "It's still going to be my eggs, though." 'Stephen's eggs' were the result of his clumsy attempts at cooking: a scrambled mess, yolk and white inevitably messed up together in bacon grease. But that was how Nicole liked them anyway. "I never said that wearing a dress would magically make you better at cooking," Polly told Margie with a smile. "Just as long as we can eat it when you're done." Margaret carefully set aside her gloves and shoes and then went to work, making sure her pretty socks didn't slip on the polished wooden kitchen floor. She used the last of the bacon, taking a sizable share for herself; of course she still had Stephen's boyish appetite, and there wouldn't have been much left anyway. Knowing her limits, she focused on edibility rather than presentation, although she did set out the carefully buttered toast nicely next to the bacon-and-eggs mishmash each one of them got, pouring a glass of orange juice for each of them and setting out the plates and utensils on the small table, reminding herself that Nicole loved sitting close to her big sister. Her mom and little sister still weren't done yet and she definitely wasn't going to stand around waiting, so she sat down to eat. They came into the room together, and Margie swallowed her bite. "You're very pretty, Nicole!" she said, smiling. It was the right thing for a big sister to say to her little sister when that little sister was very nicely dressed up in her princess dress, her plastic tiara carefully tied in place by her hair. "Thank you, big cousin!" Nicole replied, and Margie understood immediately. Polly had coached her daughter very carefully. Polly did not begrudge Stephen's mild gluttony; the boy had always liked bacon, after all, and food was one thing they could still afford. The boy's knees weren't completely together, but she didn't say anything about that, either; there was still stuff down there along with a pull- up, after all. Instead, she complimented Margie on the taste and doneness of the food, and received warm thanks in reply. She started to harbor suspicions, then, about the idea that maybe Stephen, or something in him, was very much enjoying this on a basic level. She didn't think that he was completely a girl wanting to be let out but that there was a feminine kindness in him, a light-hearted pleasantness, something that he could never have been as a boy living with that bastard of a father. He deeply cared for Nicole, at least, and with Nicole the way she was, this was certainly the only way he would be able to show that care. Polly was enjoying this as well. Although Stephen had never been a particularly bad boy, Margaret was much more pleasant in general, needing no prompting to be courteous and kind. Polly had no intention of telling him this, either. Suggesting that she was getting some kind of advantage from this - or, even worse, suggesting that he was better this way - was practically guaranteed to make him want to repress it. Instead, she simply enjoyed the company of her new polite daughter, especially as sweet Margie did not even need to be told to do the dishes, and she let herself be satisfied when Margie - well, Stephen - played his game ("I just want to get to level 50 before the event ends!") and Nicole went to read yet another book before Polly's friend arrived. At least the girl had plenty of those. Polly would have to pick up some more at some point. Alice was supposed to come around noon, and Stephen didn't want to be interrupted in the middle of one particular game (it was extremely bad manners to abandon one's teammates) - he was just a few more games away from getting to 50 anyway, and there was still plenty of time before the event ended. Margie decided it was a good idea to check in on her little sister, who was laying on her bed, staring at the back cover of her book. "Hey Nicole, feeling nervous?" Stephen was, for obvious reasons. "I had a bad dream," Nicole told her big sister quietly. "A bad dream?" "Uh huh. I dreamt that you turned back into a boy and never played with me again." Perhaps Nicole had overheard their conversation and was pretending it was a dream; perhaps it had influenced her dreams, or she'd been awake and thought it was a dream. Or perhaps it was a complete coincidence. Margie could never ask. "You really don't like boys, do you?" she asked instead. "I hate them, they're mean and evil and they lie all the time, just to hurt people because it's their fun!" Polly had told Stephen, in vague, general terms, about the kind of shit that Nicole's birth father had pulled on her. Stephen didn't understand, and he still didn't, why a grown man would spend so much time and effort towards hurting a little girl. If he were a year younger, he probably would have said something like 'We've been the same person this whole time' or 'I've just been pretending, that's all this is'. He might have even pointed out that, for someone who didn't like liars, Nicole did a heck of a lot of pretending that false things were true. Instead, he decided on "I'm not going to turn back today, little sis." Maybe he'd turn back tomorrow, just to get her used to him being Stephen, before returning to Margie for their weekday playtime. Polly would certainly not object to that. "I'm your little cousin, not your little sister today, remember?" Nicole corrected Margie. "Oh! That's right. How could I forget?" she replied, smiling. "I'm your eleven-year-old cousin Margaret." "Yes, you normally live with my sister," Polly said as she walked in. "But, she sent you over here for a visit while Stephen is visiting his birth mother." Stephen laughed with no humor. That woman had made a simple deal with his father: he got the boy, she got the (much younger) girls, and she would see neither Hunter nor Stephen ever again. "Yes, I know, it's ridiculous, but Alice doesn't know that. And Margie came here from, oh, Thursday to Tuesday without a suitcase because she wanted to try the clothes in the attic instead, you don't have to do a lot of pretending this way. I'm sorry, I really should have thought of all this beforehand. They shouldn't pry terribly much. I think they'll be more interested in what life is like here rather than where my sister lives, which is really just the same old suburbia as everywhere else, and you can tell them as much. They'll be here in fifteen minutes, and I need to finish cleaning up." She was not going to ask Margie to help. Stephen was doing quite enough already. "We should curtsey to them," Nicole suggested. "Curtsey?" Margie asked. She didn't even know the word. "Like this, this is a curtsey," Nicole demonstrated. "Oh, okay," Margie agreed, practicing mimicking her little sister a few times until the little girl decided she'd gotten it right. And then Nicole had a flight of fancy about what the girls would be like, whether they'd be wearing pretty dresses like herself and her big cousin, and the polite knock on the door finally came. Margie remembered to put on her shoes and gloves, and Nicole put on her matching purple princess shoes. Polly opened the door for Alice, who was carrying a full plastic bag, and the two women immediately embraced, with the usual stuff of "It's been so long since I've seen you!" and then introductions of their children to each other, upon which Nicole immediately curtsied and Margie followed suit, much to Alice and Polly's delight. But the other girls, eight-year-old Braelynn and nine-year-old Brandi, didn't seem particularly amused, nervously saying hello. They were dressed like normal girls from the modern world, in T-shirts and shorts and sneakers, and Margie doubted that either of them had worn a dress for many years. It hadn't occurred to Stephen nor Nicole that the visitor girls might be even more nervous than either of them. Of course they were nervous. They were out in the middle of nowhere, looking into a rickety old house, meeting other girls that were dressed very strangely and had just curtsied to them, like out of a movie! "I know you two want to stretch your legs," Alice said to her daughters to break the ice. "Why don't you all go play outside while Polly and I take a look around?" Her daughters eagerly agreed after they went to the bathroom first. Stephen and Nicole had gotten used to it, but to them, the place even smelled old. They were still too nervous to want to talk, so Margie offered them a chance to use the swings, which Braelynn took with Brandi following. Margie noticed that the wet, mown grass, with grass clippings left behind, was slippery under her smooth-bottomed Mary Janes. "This thing's not going to break, is it?" Brandi asked. "It didn't when I sat on it," Margie said. "It's as old as your dress," Braelynn pointed out. "Braelynn!" Brandi scolded her younger sister, a thing she was used to doing. "But, Margaret, where did you find that?" "Out of the attic, Polly's mom left her with a lot of stuff," Margie replied. "It's actually pretty nice." "It's like this place is an even bigger time warp than Disney World," Brandi replied, pumping to get higher on the swing. At least the hinges were oiled. Margaret laughed. "Tell me about it. At least I can still get online out here." "I cannot wait to play Animal Crossing again," Brandi lamented. "Dad packed up our Switches!" Braelynn slowed down her swing, stood up, and sat back down on it the other way to talk to them. "Yeah, Dad took all our stuff, and put it in a truck and hired a bunch of guys he knows instead of moving people, but they're driving all the way across the country, and he's got this whole big thing about wanting us to move in after everything's unpacked, so he sent us to Disney World." Brandi jumped off the swing. "Yeah, spoiler alert, Disney World isn't that fun except for the water parts." "Did you get to be princesses?" Nicole asked. "That's for little kids!" Brandi replied, and Nicole frowned. "Like, really little, way younger than you." Nicole's frown deepened. Couldn't Brandi tell by what Nicole was wearing that she wanted to do it? "Out here, we get to be princesses every day, even if we're older," Margie said, holding her little sister close. "And don't say anything about Nicole's castle! We know already!" For some reason, both Braelynn and Brandi found this uproariously funny. "Okay, um, secret," Brandi said, and Braelynn jumped off her swing to join the huddle. "Mom told us that we are really super not allowed to make fun of that after all your aunt's money got stolen," she told Margie. "I totally legit feel sorry for you. "At least the weather's nice," Braelynn said. "Braelynn, God!" Brandi scolded her younger sister again. "Didn't Mom tell you about the big hailstorm they had? Look at the grass we're walking on, it's still wet!" "It was really scary," Nicole said. "It was thundering and lightning-ing and all the hail was trying to break into the house." "That's awful!" Braelynn replied sympathetically. "But we get to have cupcakes today!" "Cupcakes?" Margie and Nicole asked simultaneously, and all four girls giggled. "Yeah, Mom bought some stuff to make cupcakes and lemonade with. Actual baked cupcakes." Nicole sniffed the air. "I can smell them!" They all could, even from outside the house. Apparently, Alice and Polly had wasted no time, not with four little girls waiting. "I wanna play a game," Brandi abruptly said. "Tag, whoever loses has to get stuff and wait on everyone else." Margie wasn't sure if she liked the sound of that, but Nicole immediately piped up "Okay!" and Margie wouldn't contradict her. Braelynn agreed as well, but instead of going after Nicole or Margie, like she looked like she wanted to do, Brandi immediately tagged her own sister. "You're it!" "Hey!" Braelynn shouted, confused, but the others were already running, Nicole hiking her dress up and running in her princess shoes and Margie being careful not to slip in the wet grass on her Mary Janes. Margie could have yelled at her little sister just then. Why on Earth had Nicole agreed to something like that when they were both wearing this stuff?! She waited for the tag, but of course it didn't happen. She was older. Braelynn would go for someone she thought she could more easily catch, which was, of course, Nicole. Stephen realized, then, that it didn't matter that he was wearing petticoats and slippery Mary Janes. He could still certainly outrun Nicole, and then Nicole would be the loser, and that was something that Margie couldn't allow to happen. "Bet you can't catch me, Nicole!" Margie yelled, as Nicole was fruitlessly trying to tag Braelynn while lifting up her dress with one hand. It worked; Nicole started running after Margie instead, and Margie lifted her arms up in a very feminine and not very fast run, and the little girl caught up to and tagged her. "Gotcha!" Nicole yelled triumphantly. "Oh no!" Margie replied, running after her with the same girly run, and then going after Braelynn and Brandi the same way. Even in those shoes, he probably still could have caught Braelynn at least, but then the girl would just tag Nicole again. "You're all faster than me," Margie said with an exaggerated pout. "I'll go get the cupcakes and lemonade now." It was good timing; she went in just as Alice was putting on the packaged icing as Polly talked to her. "At least there isn't any asbestos up there, thank God, we had it professionally stripped of that and lead paint fifteen years ago, right after Mom moved back in here. My older sister really wasn't going to let that happen. Oh, hi Margie!" "I'm here to get everyone cupcakes and lemonade!" Margie said happily, not mentioning the lost game of tag. "Well that's very nice of you! Everyone gets two cupcakes and one big glass of lemonade," Alice said. After she came out with eight cupcakes and four lemonades on two plates, she'd noticed that the other three girls had dragged three old plastic lawnchairs out to the other side of the lawn, where the trees and shade were, and she smiled as she walked over to serve the other girls. The most important part was that Nicole was seated between them, and they were talking to her as a friend. Margie would gladly serve all three of them all day if they kept that up. "...and then the power went out and we couldn't turn it back on until the storm was gone, so... Hi Margie!" Nicole chirped, and Margie had to set the plates down on the ground to hand cupcakes and lemonade to the others, consuming her own standing up, and they all ate them happily, with Margie making sure that she didn't get too much on her pretty gloves or dress. "Hey, Margie! Go get us towels and sunblock from our car, chop chop!" Brandi demanded, pointing to the wide open trunk of their rental car. (Stephen was suddenly more jarred by that than anything else. But of course it was safe. No one was out here to steal anything.) "What does 'chop chop' mean?" Braelynn asked. "I have no idea, it's something I read somewhere," Brandi replied, as Margie went to get the towels and sunblock with a smile on her face. (Sunblock was something that Stephen was fortunate enough never to need, at least not while out for only a little while during the day, and definitely not while in the shade.) After she returned with the stuff, another hundred-yard walk in total, Margie was expecting more demands from the other girls, but Nicole, sick of watching her big sister get pushed around, told her in a firm, princess-like tone to sit down on the (now towel-covered) chair so that Nicole could sit on her lap while she applied sunblock to her own face, and of course Margie definitely obeyed that. "Oh my God, you two are so precious together. You really are a princess, aren't you," Brandi said with sincerity in her voice. "I'm not just a princess, I'm a mayor, too!" Nicole replied. "A mayor of where?" Braelynn asked. As Nicole talked at length about the mystical city of Unicorn Town and all the ponies that lived there, Stephen almost broke character as he felt the sharp twinge in his bladder. He'd made an enormous mistake. He hadn't gone to the bathroom since that morning, Nicole was sitting on his lap putting more pressure on his bladder, and he'd just drank a full glass of lemonade. And Nicole was talking about her fantasy world, which he intuitively knew could lead to them mocking her for it. He had no other good choice, and was suddenly glad that his mother had talked him into making a prudent decision earlier. With no emotion on his face, and no hint given to the girls, Stephen quietly let himself wet his pull-up as Nicole talked all about the Unicorn Town tornadoes that moved everything around and how she needed a new box of Legos to make Unicorn Town bigger.(He was not worried about it leaking. His whole problem was his small bladder, after all; it could hold twice that without giving any sign.) And then Braelynn had mentioned how they'd brought a jump rope, and chalk to make hopscotch with, and Stephen had never played hopscotch and somehow neither had Nicole, and Braelynn said that they should skip, so the four girls happily skipped across the lawn to play. Margie and Nicole both found hopscotch easy, even in their pretty outfits, but jumping rope was something that was tricky. Nicole was better than her big sister, of course, and Margie struggled to keep above the rope as the other girls turned it. Both Braelynn and Brandi, it turned out, had extensive practice, and they were even able to dance while doing it. And then Brandi started talking about dances, and then so did Braelynn, and the four of them copied each other's movements without a care in the world. (Seeing what he perceived to be a mixture of old and modern girls playing together, the 80-year-old man's confusion suddenly broke; he became convinced that he was hallucinating, and he prayed for God to take him away while he could still recognize unreal things for what they were.) "Girls, would you come in for a moment? There's something I'd like you to try," Alice called them inside with. In her hands were two different dresses, somewhat similar to what Margie was wearing, only with fewer bows. Braelynn looked enthused at the idea, but Brandi stepped back. "Mom, I don't wanna wear that stuff," she said, nervously. "Not even once?" Polly asked, giving the girl a bit of puppy-dog eyes. "Sweetie, it's just the one time, you're never going to get a chance to do it again. I know, this isn't your thing, but try it. For me, please?" Brandi still looked very opposed to the idea, and Stephen didn't quite like what he was seeing. Margie, fully in character, could react to the emotional pressure. "If it's not going to be fun for you, then don't," she told Brandi. "If it's going to be too embarrassing, then just don't." Brandi visibly relaxed. Alice pursed her lips, knowing that she really didn't want to try to force her daughter into a dress, and the two women looked at each other, silently agreeing that they had been a bit overbearing. "But your mom's right, you're not going to get another chance to try it." "All right," Brandi said. "But. No. Pictures," the girl told her mother and Polly firmly. "No pictures," Alice agreed. When they were younger, she had innocently, blithely put photos of them on her Instagram page, and then she had gotten comments she really didn't want from people she couldn't believe were allowed to be there. She had never uploaded a picture of them to any social media site again, was very circumspect in sharing any pictures even with family, and would always listen if her children asked her not to take them. Braelynn and Brandi wore similar, purple dresses and matching socks, with lots of lace around the holes, and Brandi let herself smile because her little sister was smiling. And then, much to the girls' surprise, it wasn't four of them wearing pretty dresses but six. There were adult clothes up in that attic as well, and Polly and Alice took similar sizes. They sat down together, the girls on the floor and the adults on the couch, around the old TV and watched a VHS - an actual VHS! - of the original Generation 1 My Little Pony movie. Nicole stayed in place mostly because everyone else was and because her big sister was physically holding on to her, although Margie was certain she was daydreaming throughout. They said their goodbyes after the movie ended; they couldn't stay for dinner, unfortunately, as it had taken longer than expected to get there and the girls needed a good night's sleep in their hotel. Even Brandi seemed a little reluctant to change back into the clothes she'd come in with. As soon as they left, Margie's demeanor changed back into Stephen's. He wasn't crying, but he was obviously upset, and both Nicole and Polly noticed. "Stephen, what's wrong?" Polly asked quietly. "I've spent all day in a frilly dress with bows and the last three hours or so in a wet pull-up!" he confessed, not caring whether or not they knew. He couldn't describe his emotions. He felt so weak, so feminine, in his girly dress and wet pull-up after having done girly stuff with girls all day. And yet, a part of him was so fulfilled, so happy, so complete. He'd done things he never did before, had experiences he'd never had, enjoyed things that he as a boy had no business enjoying, and half of it was when he was in an acute, unspoken state of embarrassment, even if no one had found out. Polly didn't know what he was feeling, either, but she felt obligated to talk to him, to comfort him. "I assure you, nobody knew about that. Even I didn't know." She was very glad she'd bought the odor-absorbing brand. "Let me help you with the dress," she said, unbuttoning it, worried that he might rip it off. "Is Margie going to be okay?" Nicole asked as Stephen walked into his room. "Margie will be fine, but you're a good little sister for asking," Polly told Nicole with a smile. "Cousin today!" Nicole reminded her. Polly smiled. "I know I said 'today', but the whole cousin thing was for them, Nicole, and they're going home. So she's your sister again, if she wants." Stephen had quietly retrieved a pair of underwear from his room and went into the bathroom. Nicole picked up on his sullen, conflicted look. "Is Margie mad at me?" Nicole asked sadly. "No, of course not, sweetie! She might be mad at me. Or maybe she's mad at herself. But let's see who comes out of the bathroom before we worry about things like that, okay?" "I hope it's Margie!" Nicole replied, intentionally loud enough for Stephen to hear her. Polly decided then and there that if it was Stephen who walked out of the bathroom rather than Margaret, she would not be cross with him; if he wanted to stay a boy for the evening, she would not penalize him; if he canceled this entirely, she would give him, oh, a month of double chores, just to show she was still serious about it, and if he did them well, it would be only a couple of weeks. Certainly, if he didn't want to be Margaret tomorrow, she would just let him have the day and not tack on another one later. Wait, no. She really wanted him to be Margaret again tomorrow. There were things she had to do, and things she could trust him with. She'd ask tomorrow morning. But it was Margaret, not Stephen, who walked out of the bathroom after having used it, with even her white gloves and pretty socks still on, and the first thing she did was squat down to her little sister and hug her. Polly noticed that she'd even done up the back buttons on her own dress. "Nicole, why would I ever be mad at you?" Margaret asked her little sister. "You did nothing wrong at all." Well, there was that part where she'd accepted that game of tag, but that was a little girlish mistake to make, and Margaret - nor Stephen - couldn't blame her for that. "Neither did you, Margaret," Polly said. "Except forget to go to the bathroom and pee myself," Stephen muttered. "And is anyone making fun of you for that? You took a precaution and it was the right precaution to take. No one is calling you names, not me and not your little sister. You did exactly what we needed you to today. You even stepped in on Brandi's behalf when Alice and I were being too pushy. I don't know what you see in the mirror, but what I see is someone who is doing a very good job at making amends and helping a sister who needs it. Now, would you like to help me make dinner before you play this evening?" "Okay," Margaret said. Mom was right. No one had done anything hurtful, no one was calling him a pansy or a baby or anything else. He had simply been Margie. Even when she'd forfeited the game of tag and done things for them, the other girls had simply treated her as one of them. Margaret put her pinafore on without being asked and helped her mother prepare vegetables and chicken, and then Nicole sat next to her and talked about how much she'd enjoyed having fun with Braelynn and Brandi and how she was so glad that Margaret had been there with her. And then Margaret retired to her room to play her game and finally, finally got to level 50 - Stephen's character with pink hair and a pink banner and a frilly dress - well before the event ended. After fitful dreams, all of which involved him wearing a dress, Stephen woke up without peeing himself again, and he breathed a sigh of relief and went to the bathroom, feeling like he was finally gaining full continence. His bladder had overfilled yesterday and he'd let go, yes, but that wasn't the same thing. Was being Margie helping him with that somehow? He didn't know. All he knew was that he was glad it was happening. As it had before, the sound of the water running woke Polly up, and she went into Stephen's room to talk to him again. He'd expected another morning conversation, but he was worried that she'd ask him something he didn't know how to answer. What she had said last night had stuck: no one was making fun of him. "I don't know how much you heard of our conversation yesterday, but Alice's husband is upper management of a hardware chain. It turns out that one of the perks is being able to give a certain amount of gift certificates and discount cards. Alice very generously gave me all of that allowance, and I intend to make full use of it." Stephen immediately understood where she was going with this. "So while you're buying that stuff, you want Margaret to babysit Nicole?" "I really don't want to have to worry about bringing her with me into a hardware store and I know that shopping bores you silly. I need to go buy food and other stuff anyway. Listen to me carefully, Stephen. I'm trusting you by yourself, and I'm trusting you with her. I'll take another two days... wait." Combined with the days she'd already shaved off, that would put the end of this on a Wednesday. "If you take care of her while I'm gone today, and you keep being nice to her and playing with her like you have been for the rest of this week, we can start letting her down slowly starting Friday afternoon, and that will give her two days to get over it before I go back to work." "Okay," Stephen agreed immediately. That was effectively cutting his original punishment in half, although he wasn't entirely sure if it was a punishment anymore. He could finally admit it to himself, at least: he'd kind of miss being Margie when this was over. Maybe he could get Nicole to accept him as Stephen, but it wouldn't be the same. "You can make your own breakfast and lunch, there's enough stuff that you don't have to worry about cooking anything, and I'll be home for dinner. If you need help, call me, I mean it, and make sure you can hear your phone." Stephen nodded. He seldom used his ancient, hand-me-down flip phone, and he just left it in the charger indefinitely. Even if it wasn't a piece of crap, he'd have few uses for it; there wasn't any data service out here, and his mom didn't even have a data plan anymore. Another bill that Hunter hadn't been paying. "Don't let her get into anything dangerous, both of you stay out of the basement and the garage - and the attic, for that matter - and definitely no climbing on things!" He wanted to say something to her, that she didn't need to harp on that, but he didn't want to start an argument and so just nodded. "If you wouldn't do it while I was here, don't do it while I'm gone," she told him very seriously. "Also, I'm starting the wash before we go. Everything that's in the washing machine right now gets the lowest heat and an hour of time in the dryer, everything else can tolerate hot water and a hot dryer. Just throw it all together, there's nothing new in there and we're out of bleach anyway. You've done the wash before, you know what you're doing." She smiled at him. "I've also given you and Nicole matching outfits today," she said, draping a white-and-yellow dress onto his bed, with long, ruffled socks, sweet white gloves, and Mary Janes to match, along with a long, wide ribbon for his hair. The theme this time was daisies instead of bows, as there were little daisies embroidered all over everything, even little yellow daisy buckles on his shoes. Stephen smiled as he thought of how happy this was going to make Nicole. Leaving the pull-up on, Margie tied the arm ribbons and the hair ribbon and put on the dress, socks, and gloves. It was a little cold in the morning, after all. Polly gave her daughter a morning bath, as usual, and kissed both the girls goodbye before leaving. "So you're going to play with me all day today?" Nicole asked as she, in her perfectly matched daisy outfit, sat down at the breakfast table with her big sister, who had poured them both bowls of cereal. "My main job is just to keep you out of trouble," Margie replied. "When you got into trouble, Mom turned you into a girl," Nicole said straightforwardly. "Yeah, well, maybe if you get into trouble, she'll turn you into a boy!" Margaret replied. Nicole froze, her gloved hand on the spoon, and she looked at her big sister with utter, absolute horror. She started hyperventilating, still frozen in place. Margie thought at first that maybe her little sister was faking it, exaggerating how offended she was, but very quickly realized that she was absolutely not faking it. "I'm so sorry, I was joking and it wasn't funny, please don't be mad at me," Margaret said. She was worried that Nicole would run to her room and slam the door behind her, spilling her cereal on the way out. Nicole did no such thing. Instead, she ate carefully, with very small bites, because to do otherwise would be to get in trouble. To her, the idea made total sense. If Stephen could do something bad and Mommy would turn him into a girl for a while, then Mommy could do the same thing to her in reverse and Stephen would be doing boy stuff with his new little brother, maybe even for a really long time if she got into really bad trouble. Why didn't she think of that before? "Nicole, I really was just joking," Margaret said once the little girl was done eating. "That doesn't mean you were wrong," Nicole replied firmly. "Mom isn't... well, I don't think she's going to do anything like that." Stephen realized that most other boys would have reacted just as strongly as Nicole to the mere idea of wearing a dress, not quite the same way but with reactions just as fierce. Those boys' mothers would have probably known that and, therefore, would never have even suggested this. But instead of doing double chores for four months (which, he calculated, would have taken him less time overall), he'd became Margie just to make his little sister happy. He thought to himself that maybe he'd betrayed his maleness somehow and found that he really didn't care. Nicole was happy having Margie as her big sister, and her opinion was of much more value than anyone else's. "You can ask her, if you want, but maybe it's just better not to find out." Nicole mulled that over. "Hey! You just want me not to get in trouble!" "Oh no! You saw through me! I don't want my little sister getting in trouble the first time Mom leaves me here with her!" Margie decided to get serious the way Polly sometimes got serious. "What might happen is that if you get into trouble while I'm supposed to be looking after you, Mom won't WANT me to look after you anymore. She might not even want me to PLAY with you. So, seriously, Nicole. Don't get into things you shouldn't, today. Tell me what you want to do, and I'll do it with you." It occurred to Margie that Hunter would have had a strictly given list of dos and don'ts, needing to assert his authority. Polly had just been actually worried about them getting hurt or breaking anything. "I wanna read my book, but I can't read it by myself," Nicole said. "A book you can't read by yourself?! Well, let's take a look at it!" The girl read so far above her grade level that Margie actually wondered what kind of thing would be both challenging for her and that Polly would actually want to give her. Nicole eagerly led her big sister into her room and pulled one from the well-stocked bookshelf. Margie - Stephen - was utterly shocked. The Fellowship of the Ring! The original! He wasn't even sure if he could read something that arcane properly. It wasn't just that he used words they didn't know, it was that he used common words in unfamiliar ways. Even the very first words in the foreword stumped them: "The tale grew in the telling." What, exactly, did that mean? Fortunately, Stephen had a resource for finding out what things meant, one that Polly was certainly never going to deprive him of. "I can help you read this, let's go to my room to look stuff up," Margie told her little sister. "But that's a boy's room!" Nicole shouted, the illusion of Margie as Stephen instantly broken. "Nicole, it's still me," Margie said as gently as she could. "There's nothing in there that's going to jump out and bite you." There wasn't a lot in there at all; the soft ball that had gotten Stephen into trouble, his bed, his clothes, his computer, and a handful of toys he barely even touched anymore. All the furniture was old people stuff that had come with the house. "You're not gonna get cooties." Nicole was still visibly afraid, and her fear doubled as she reluctantly walked in the room. "Nothing's going to hurt you in here, Nicole. Stephen's not going to hurt you, either." "I don't want Stephen," Nicole said, sniffling. "I want Margie." "And Margie's right here," she replied, and kissed her little sister on the forehead. "C'mon. This book's full of boys, too. Let's find out what they did." But Nicole, sitting on Margie's lap at the computer, drew a clear distinction between real boys and storybook boys, and Margie was getting the distinct impression that she was visualizing them all as girls. After they slogged through the foreword - they were both surprised to find that it was really about the book's authorship during World War II - they got into the details of Middle-Earth, and it helped that Nicole'd had The Hobbit read to her when she was younger. Their slow reading, full of Internet searches and Nicole visualizing in detail everything that was going on, was interrupted by the absence of sound. "Oh, the washing machine stopped," Margie said, gently pushing Nicole off her lap and opening up a small sliding door to uncover the washer and dryer. What was that Mom had said? Right, everything in the washing machine goes in the dryer on the lowest setting for an hour. Oh! Of course, it was the girly stuff that Margie had been wearing, and Mom was worried about it breaking down. She understood and moved it over, noticing that Nicole had followed her out, still carrying her book, not wanting to be in that boy's room by herself. Margie remembered to wash everything else on hot, most of the family's clothes. Polly hadn't given precise instructions on what the dials meant, but Margie could read and knew to be careful. And she used a scoopful of the powdered detergent as well. Smiling, Margie turned on the old washer, and it rumbled louder than it had before. "Ummm... it's gonna be okay?" Nicole asked. "I think so, I don't think I messed up," Margie replied. "It's just really old, like everything else here." She looked around the washer for leaks, nervously thinking that she'd done something wrong, and determined that she hadn't. "C'mon, let's get back to reading." For all that she hated boys, Nicole loved hobbits, and Margie suspected that Nicole the Hobbit would be a major feature of tomorrow's playtime. Or maybe they would finish the books within the week. Nicole definitely wouldn't want to be in Stephen's room looking stuff up if Margie wasn't there with her. Maybe Mom would do it? But Margie wanted to, too. The washing machine stopped again, but the dryer was still going, and Margie waited for that to stop before she found a good breakpoint. It was good timing; Nicole was starting to get overwhelmed. "My head's starting to hurt, can we play outside?" Nicole asked as they left together. "I was thinking the exact same thing," Margie replied. "Let me get the wash and we can play." Margie took the wash out of the dryer and wasn't sure where to put it, so she folded it up as neatly as she could and left it on the living room table while Nicole went to pee. The washer hadn't done anything terrible to the clothes, and she hadn't used too much detergent. Phew. "Margie, our petticoats are dry!" Nicole pointed out as Margie moved the stuff from the washer to the dryer. "You're right!" Margie replied. "Can you put yours on by yourself?" "Uh-huh!" "Okay, then I'll put mine on too." Margie figured it would keep the wind from blowing her dress around too much and decided to put on her training bra as well. It was really doubtful that anyone would see them, but it couldn't hurt to look a little less like a boy. She was just glad she remembered to go to the bathroom before she left, even if she was still wearing her pull-up. As she walked out of the house, she suddenly stopped - Mom had told her to stay near her phone, and the dress didn't have any pockets! "Wait, Nicole, I need to carry my phone in something!" Nicole thought for two seconds. "I've got something!" She ran into her room and retrieved a plush, purple belt pack in the shape of a unicorn's face. "Here you go!" "Thanks!" Margie replied. It fit her well and looked really cute. Her little sister was so thoughtful! The two girls put on their matching daisy Mary Janes and sat on the swings together, their petticoats fluttering in the air, as Margie taught her little sister how to gain height by herself. "Just don't hurt yourself or we'll be in trouble!" Margie warned. "I won't, silly," Nicole replied, and they stayed out there for a while in the breeze, when Margie's unicorn pack started ringing. It was Mom, of course. "Hi Mom!" "Hi Mom!" Nicole yelled. "Hello, Stephen. Say hi to Nicole for me too." Margie wondered about the resignation in her mother's voice as she did so. "Please keep taking care of her today, but this will be the last time you'll have to take care of her like this." Margie was suddenly very worried that she'd done something wrong or that something was going on with Mom. "Mom, what happened?!" she asked. "I'll show you when I get home. Just keep her happy until then. Did you do the wash?" "Yeah, the delicate stuff came out okay and the rest of it's in there now." A gust of wind picked up as she talked. "Are you outside?" their mother asked, suddenly worried. "Yeah, we're just playing on the swings. Mom, you gave me the shoes, I thought you wanted me to use them." Polly laughed, relieved. "That's a good point. I've got to hang up now. You two have a very nice day." Margie put away her phone, still very worried. What the heck could make Mom say that Margie wouldn't have to take care of her little sister? She didn't find another boyfriend, did she? Suddenly, Stephen had the terrifying idea that she would come home with a man, and that she'd show him her two girls, and then Stephen would have to stay Margie in front of him. The idea passed as quickly as it came. Mom would never do that, and Nicole would also be terrified of him. Still, it had to be something, and Margie was still worried about what her mother would come home with even while she was fixing sandwiches for herself and her little sister and carefully reading more Tolkien afterwards (as before, the soft training bra and petticoats made it more comfortable for Margie to have Nicole sitting on her lap). Their mother came home carrying heavy grocery bags, and Nicole immediately rushed to her. "Mommy! If I do something bad, you're not going to turn me into a boy, are you?" "Oh, honey, no, never, I know it would actually hurt you if I did that." She was not stupid enough to ask where the little girl got the idea. "Did you have fun?" she asked instead, looking around the room. Nothing was broken, and her and Margie's laundry was folded on the table. She would have liked it to be put away, but Stephen probably didn't feel comfortable putting away his mother's underwear anyway. This was fine. "Uh huh! We're reading The Fellowship of the Ring!" "Really? I bet your big sister's giving you lots of help." "Mostly it's from the Internet," Margie admitted. "At your age, that doesn't surprise me. Help me put this stuff away and then we can talk." The cold stuff was all multiple-bagged together to keep it from warming up on the way home, and, nervously, Margie did what her mother said. What was going on? That question was answered from a series of text messages from Polly's phone. In the car going to the airport, Alice and her daughters had talked about Margie, Polly, and Stephen, and they'd all come to the same conclusion, the one that Alice had decided to tell Polly about after their plane landed: Margie was Stephen in a very good disguise. He'd performed very well, but his hair was still too short. He'd never played jump rope or hopscotch, but in many other ways, he was simply too girly. Polly blamed herself for being wrong: she'd thought that that couldn't happen. In return, Polly had not explained Margie's existence as a punishment. Instead, she had told Alice something very like the truth: that Stephen had done it as a favor for Nicole, providing her with much- needed companionship because the girl wouldn't have wanted to hang out with a boy and needed someone in her corner. Nearly all of the messages in reply to that were of praise. They all agreed that Margie had been as good of a host as she could possibly be, and Alice was particularly impressed at the fact that - as she had to tell her girls - she'd obviously let Nicole tag her and lost on purpose. None of them were going to tell anyone else about this, and, Stephen thought with a bit of pique, who would they even tell? All the friends he had? He'd worried about being confronted by some weirdo, but he was unblackmailable, uncancelable, simply because he had no social life to ruin. Even the Internet's worst Sith master wouldn't have been able to affect him. Polly had her own private thoughts as well. She couldn't live with herself if she tried to frame this as his fault. She'd considered simply not telling him, not least because dealing with Nicole was going to be tricky, but she mentally punished herself for even considering that. She was not going to be the cruel stepmother. He'd really tried his best, and she'd made an agreement. She'd also been thinking of how Stephen had been behaving, and a suspicion had been growing in her mind. "Well, it looks like I owe you, now," she told him. "It wasn't your fault, and someone found out. Given all you've done, I figure I owe you about three hundred dollars for all this, although I don't have the means to pay it yet. If you want me to do your share of the chores, I'll do that." Margie shook her head a bit, not willing to take that deal; she wanted the money. She actually wasn't ready for this to be over at all. She loved her pretty outfits, and if nothing else, she wanted to finish the first book, if not the whole trilogy, with her little sister. "You can take that off now if you'd like, although-" "Nooooo!" Nicole wailed from the other side of the door. She'd put her ear to the door to listen in. "Please, Mommy!" "Nicole, don't be selfish. We had an agreement," Polly said patiently as she opened the door. "I told Stephen that if someone found out and it wasn't his fault, then it was over and he wouldn't need to wear dresses anymore if he didn't want to." Those last five words were said very clearly and carefully. She took a look at Stephen's face and her suspicions were confirmed. "But I think that Margaret has another choice to make." "Please don't go, Margie!" Nicole begged, crying. "I'll learn how to make cupcakes and I'll push you on the swings and I'll never get mad and I'll be the nicest, best little sister ever!" Her dress and petticoats fluttering, she ran into the boy's room and jumped on her big sister, hugging her tightly as if to stop her from vanishing. "I need you!" "Nicole..." Polly started. Margie was suddenly very sure of many things. "I won't leave you, Nicole," she said, hugging her little sister back. "I might have to turn into Stephen sometimes, but I can always just turn right back into Margie when I'm done. And when I get older I might look more like a boy instead of a girl, and sometimes I might wear boy clothes, but I'll always be Margie when you need me to. I promise. Forever and ever. Just don't ask me to play with you all the time, that's greedy." She turned to her mother and smiled. "Mom, I wanna spend at least a little of that three hundred on Legos. There's this place called Unicorn Town that needs an expansion." "Of course, sweetie," Polly replied, hugging her daughters close. "It's actually Stephen I need to borrow today, and probably a lot of days in the near future. I might have gotten a lot of supplies, but that doesn't mean I can afford a professional to come and fix up our roof or insulate the house. This is a two-person job, and I'm going to need the assistance of a very diligent and careful young man for this." It was actually more of a three- or four-person job, but Nicole was simply too little. Normally, Stephen might have balked at the additional work, but this needed doing so that they could keep living there. She wasn't asking him to do anything just to teach him a lesson or because he needed to learn responsibility, and she never had. He was actually included, actually part of the family, in a way that he had never been before, and he was happier than he'd ever been in his life. "Okay, Mom!" --- Ten years later There was a very important word that Nicole had learned, one of her favorites, and not just because it had once led to her victory in her school's sixth grade spelling bee. The word was 'consanguineous', and it was the reason that she and Margie would be together forever. As stepsisters, one of which happened to have fully functional boy parts instead of girl parts, they did not share consanguinity, and so there was no legal problem with them marrying each other once Polly had given her approval for her seventeen-year-old daughter. Nicole didn't care that Margie turned back into Stephen when she had to, such as when dealing with the rest of the world. Margie was Margie, and it didn't matter if she had the body of a boy and pretended to be one sometimes. That just made Margie better at protecting Nicole from real boys. Polly had suspected, even before the day she'd seen evidence of their teenage fooling around, that this is how things would be for them. Nicole had never entirely gotten over her deep-seated fear of males, and there was only one biological male she'd ever really trusted. Margaret wasn't interested in boys that way, and even when presenting as Stephen, she would never be romantically close to any other girl than the one she'd grown up with. The world saw Stephen and Nicole on their marriage certificate, but Margaret and Nicole knew better, and so would their children. (If anyone is curious just what Stephen's character looks like, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmJMdzj9v28 )