Becoming April

Chapter Five

May dressed me like she was outfitting a Barbie. First came cotton panties, plain gray in what she called a boyleg style that I pulled up under the towel, ignoring how they felt against my smoothed-out crotch. I could see why they were called boyleg panties; they reminded me of my briefs, low in the legs so they fit snuggly and didn't ride up my butt at all. Next came the bra, light pink and plain. Barely more than a training bra May said. She'd bought several for me to try but the first one turned out to fit; according to her, anyway—to me it felt weirder than anything had so far, the band around my ribs not at all comfortable and the straps unignorable.

Taking it back off me she showed me how to put it on myself, snapping it on backwards and then rotating it around me to bring the cups in front where I could put my arms through the straps. She said she thought I was flexible enough to learn to put it on frontways and close the snaps in the back if I wanted to, that it was easier on the fabric if I did.

Then she gave me a plain black t-shirt, in my proper size instead of the tent I'd been wearing all day, and had me try on jeans until the third pair closed snuggly over my hips without cutting off circulation in my legs. (Its crotch definitely snugged right up into mine, though, and Oh my God how did girls get used to it?) Last were ankle socks that fit and canvas sneakers a little long in the toe, and she finished by pulling my hair back and tying it with a scrunchy to make a short ponytail. I honestly hadn't thought it was that long; had it grown just a bit while everything else was changing too?

"Perfect!" she pronounced, looking me over. "For now, anyway. We're absolutely doing a fashion safari once you're more comfortable, but this is perfectly acceptable for home dining." I wasn't at all sure, myself. With clothes that fit, even without a mirror I knew what I looked like. A teenager. A year into my sixth decade, I was a teen again. Oh God.

It was almost a prayer; I wasn't at all sure I could do it again.

My stomach rumbled and May laughed. "Shall we?"

Carl had dinner plated with covers when we came downstairs and sat at the table. May said grace with her traditional For what we are about to receive, may we be truly grateful, amen. Steph burbled in her seat but had obviously already eaten, leaving us to tuck into leftover meatloaf, potatoes, and caramelized broccoli. I knew Carl hadn't done the meatloaf, but the broccoli was warm and fresh, delicious.

"So, how was everyone's day?" Carl asked innocently as soon as we'd all taken on enough calories to curb our hunger. I choked on a bit of potato and May swatted him. "What? Isn't that the traditional family dinner question? I can't ask my girls how they've been? Steph and I have already had our sharing time."

He waggled his bushy eyebrows at us and I found my face heating up again. The man was such a goof, but he'd just always aimed his clowning at May; point it at me and suddenly I didn't know what to say. "I learned a new word today," I blurted out then slapped a hand over my mouth with sinking horror. It was the kind of sarcastic rejoinder I might have thrown out there as David and I was not going to follow up on it.

He cocked a weaponized eyebrow at me. "Oh? Do tell or no dessert."

Perineum, rhymes with palladium, millennium, aquarium, hysterium, and now I was making up nonsense words. But waiting for May to get back I'd decided to do my own research into female stuff and started learning more about what I had now. Especially down there, the parts of me I could barely bear thinking about, reading up on what it all meant for me, and now I knew about an erogenous zone I'd also had on me as a man and hadn't even known it. "Palladium! I read that scientists studying the Ship have recently discovered an alloy they can easily synthesize that replicates the properties of palladium? It'll be huge for making cheap environmentally friendly fuel cells. What's for dessert?"

May laughed as he just looked at me. "Okay . . . chocolate ganache, actually." Nobody was fooling anybody and my face couldn't be fire engine red over synthetic palladium but, Thank God, he let it go. The conversation moved on to his cybersecurity work and a debate over our next movie night.

I'd eaten over often enough to have established my right to help with the washing up and after dinner I stocked the dishwasher as Carl rinsed, taking each dish he handed off to me. We worked together in silence until he broke it.

"Are you going to tell me what all that was about?"

"Not in a million years," I said fervently. "My brain is— I'm a mess. I don't know what's going on in there."

He shrugged. "Not to be all mansplainy or anything, but you're probably going to feel like you're going nuts for a while. You're a teenager again, which means your hormones are back around their peak after tapering off for forty years, and there are different hormones in you now—or at least a different balance of them. And you're going to have—" Looking over his shoulder he shuddered theatrically, "—hormone cycles. Us guys mostly live in a steady state of testosterone-driven madness after puberty hits. We get used to it. For you now?" He shrugged. "Let's just say I'm ready for more crazy until you figure yourself out."

And now I was flushing again at the thought of the crazy. Were all of my extreme reactions just hormones? Was this what I'd have to live with, now? "Thanks?"

"You're welcome," he said magnanimously. "But one thing I've learned from my wife? Girls' minds can be just as filthy as boys' minds. You thought of something dirty, didn't you?" He winked at me and now I wanted to hiss like a tea kettle, glaring back at him through my mortification.

He smirked, obviously immune and it took everything I had not to stomp like a sulking brat. "I will hide your baseball cards."

That wiped the smirk off his face.