Chapter 1 - Wheat For It...

Sometimes I hate being alone so much I just want to run screaming into the nearest crowd of people and grab hold of everyone till they all have long hair and large breasts. For anyone but me, that would be very strange.

I have what a few people call a superpower, many call a curse, and most prefer not to talk about at all. If I’m near another person for a certain period of time, something about me starts to feminize them.

I have no idea why, nor do a multitude of scientists, doctors, and religious leaders who have poked, prodded, and thrown things at me. It started the same day I ate wheat pasta for the first time in over a decade. This fact has been scrutinized and experimented with every time I bring it up to those looking for explanations but it seems to be entirely unrelated to whatever changed in me.

When I was very young, I would get flu-like symptoms whenever I ate anything with wheat in it. This meant my mom needed to be creative with meals.

We frequented the natural foods store for alternative kinds of pasta mainly made from rice flour. She used to work there, so they always gave us a fair discount. It’s a small place with just three short aisles but they still manage to pack the walls with an abundance of questionable supplements and even more questionable books about how one particular thing is the answer to any and every health problem.

Their wheat-free brownies with carob are the first brownies I can remember, though I try to forget about them. They dissolved when you tried to eat them. The bitterness of the phony chocolate screamed through the mashed, discolored rice texture. I didn’t know any better.

It was a monumental and nervous day when a skin test revealed my wheat allergy was not only no longer there but that it probably hadn’t even been around for years.

My mind soared with the possibilities of stuff I could eat without fear of illness. So, we went to the nearest chain restaurant which served mediocre pasta. In retrospect, this was a good choice because there was nowhere to go but up.

Sitting there with my family as I anticipated pasta with some freakish Italian name I’d never remember, I felt so happy about how normal it all was. I didn’t need to ask about ingredients. I didn’t need to sift through what was available and what I could enjoy. I could just do the same thing everyone else there was doing. Get gassy on overpriced pasta drowned in salt and butter. It was comforting.

I was seated by the window with a great view of the cars circling around the mall parking lot. Behind me, a young boy rocked his legs back and forth as he rubbed a green crayon all over the face of the cartoon chef on his placemat. I only noticed them when his chair rocked back far enough to nearly touch mine. His parents, who were a good decade younger than mine, whisper-yelled whenever he looked ready to whine about the food. His mother inhaled several glasses of red wine.

Our meal started slow because we were in an area towards the back. I worked slowly through one breadstick to savor the experience. When I wasn’t eating, I flipped through the middle of an overwrought, padded techno-thriller about a supercomputer spreading and mutating human viruses. I was old enough to know it was full of junk science but I wasn’t yet old enough to let that deter me from reading it.

My parents questioned me through my breadstick about how it tasted and whether I enjoyed it. I did enjoy it but all I could really offer was that it was just like what I’d had before but...smoother? Like this was how pasta was meant to be and everything else was just a close or distant imitation. Having the ‘real thing’ wasn’t an epiphany. It was more like answering a curiosity.

That’s not to say it wasn’t good, especially when I received my entree with tiny bits of seafood mixed in. I was halfway through the dish before I noticed my dad’s silvery, thinning hair had gotten longer around his neck. Not so long it was unusual but longer than I remembered from when we arrived.

I dismissed this immediately as impossible. I told myself I’d just been wrong about how long it was before. It happens. You think something is different, but it’s just your awareness of it that has changed. That’s what I told myself. Mom gave him a look but didn’t say anything.

My dad has never had the deepest voice, but it sounded even slighter than usual. His salt-and-pepper mustache looked fainter, like the time he had to grow it back after accidentally shaving it off for a reason I couldn’t remember. All this could be easily dismissed as some trick of the light or a growing, unrealized madness clawing its way through my skull. But his hands looked different too. They had a narrower contour to them.

They were always broad and square with stubby fingers and a simple, stainless steel wedding band pressed against his skin. The ring wiggled loosely from its normal spot, dipping down further to the base of the finger than I’d ever seen it go.

Still, I told myself it was nothing.

As I finished the best parts of my meal, I turned a little and noticed the couple staring at their kid. I hadn’t been listening, but I picked up that they were arguing to one another with the same hush sternness they’d used with the boy.

The boy seemed indifferent to the whole thing but he was annoyed with his blond hair slipping over his eyes as he bent over his masterpiece of an alien-toned chef with gray lasagna shooting laser beam stink rays at a leaf shape trying to be a flying dinosaur.  

I attempted to think, but my brain wasn’t ready for it and returned to whether the hero scientist in the book I was reading would survive his climb down the side of a cliff. I did notice when the mother led the boy away by the hand. I noticed how his hair was touching his shoulders and his jeans were so loose on him that she had to use her other hand to hoist them up. The father gave me a quick look but said nothing.

My father wiped off his glasses with an unused napkin and asked me if I was alright. Gazing at the small but significant changes to him I still wanted to ignore, it took me a long pause before I answered, “I think I might need new glasses…”

I still had the same ones I’d gotten years ago after no amount of discrete squinting in class could hide the fact it was impossible for me to see what was written on the marker boards. Not that fuzzy vision explained anything. but it was just enough of an explanation for me.

By the after-dinner mints, my father’s face was bare, even though there were no signs of his whiskers on his lap or around him. I caught half of an argument between the couple when the little boy returned with his hair no longer touching his shoulders and his pants able to stay up on their own again.

I felt like something had changed about the father, but I was more concerned about what was going on with my dad. His voice, even after several clearing coughs, sounded like mom’s. That’s not saying much, as she has neither a rough voice nor a sweet one. Hers is light while still feeling harsh and intimidating, like someone polished a smoker’s tones to their razor edge even though mom has only smoked once in her entire life.

My next concern was to look above me. A small potter with a plastic fern was all I could see aside from a bubble light switched off and the sloping curve of the pale-yellow ceiling. Not even any vents.

After some muffled words exchanged with their server, the parents and the boy were gone and a pair of young women soon replaced them.

We also wrapped things up quickly, leaving the fishless portion of my meal for a plastic take out container. Of course, my mom’s next comment to my dad was to bring up his prior illnesses and the urgent fact he should see a doctor. He brushed it off, claiming, “It's nothing.”

He did so while speaking in a voice softer than mom’s. What my mom didn’t notice was that her own hair had gotten a little longer than her regular perm, which just grazed her shoulder.

The bright, reddish tones I saw in pictures of her from decades before had long ago dulled to a flat, deep brown while mine had shifted from a burnt, sandy color to the cherry-stained mahogany of my teen years. As I watched, a little of that reddish tint returned to her hair. I opted not to bring this up as we left our table.

At that time, our teal minivan was brand-new. I always sat in the back because it allowed me to sprawl across the cushion and curl up with whatever book I had.

Far beyond arm’s reach, my parents were up in front and arguing about more tangible things than usual with my father’s bare face. I closed my eyes and tried to lose myself in an imaginary space where everything was ridiculous in the appropriate manner.

As an afterthought, mom asked, “You alright back there, Kenzie?”

I wore my best smile and told her a quick, “I’m fine. Is dad okay?”

Listening, I heard dad answer, “I’m fine”, in a voice closer to his usual sound. By the time we were halfway home, his hair was back and gone from all the appropriate places and he spoke the way I expected him to speak. Words failed each of us for the first time in a long time. Illusions of light and shadow were played up as plausible explanations as we pulled into our driveway. Mom's hair had shifted back to normal as well.