We played fighting games for a dozen minutes or so, before it became evident the difference in skill was too big and we switched to a multiplayer platformer. We had a weird arrangement where we switched each level who got to play the girl character.

    On one more instance of Snake’s character taking a hit and shrinking down, they muttered aloud “I wonder what it’s like to be small…”

    I kept my eyes on the screen, my character jumping over a pit. “We were small when we were kids…”

    “I mean small but as a grown-up, dumbass.” They groaned as they had to wait for the respawn timer again. “Like, I guess if my girl form was a shortie…” They idly scratched their cheek and threw a glance at the potion they’d dropped next to them on the couch.

    “Do you… Do you want it to be?” I replied with curiosity, timing a jump just right to grab a collectible.

    “Urgh… Maybe? I never had to ask myself what I’d wanna look like as a girl before, so… ” Snake dropped the controller, apparently just content watching me play at this point.

    “Yeah, right, right…” As I idly wondered, I realized I’d actually had that train of thought many times before, and just didn’t take particular notice of it. I’d imagined what would happen if I’d been turned into a girl by something or other, how my parents would react, how I’d react, what I’d look like… I reached the goal and made my way to the next level in solo, leisurely getting to play the girl without fighting for her. “I guess I’d just want to… Be average or something?” I finally replied. “Being a pretty girl sounds exhausting… If I ended up too stunning I’d just wear baggy clothes and keep it to myself…”

    “You’re a weirdo, Jamie. If you’re a girl you don’t have a choice not to be good looking.” They grabbed their potion and inspected it for the fifth time since they’d gotten it.

    I shot them an unimpressed glance. “Do you even believe in what you’re saying?”

    My question caused Snake to pause for a minute, and once more it was almost like I could hear actual mechanics rattling in their head. “Yeah, I guess it’s shitty to think like that, actually… Can’t believe it took me getting a girl’s mind to realize that.”

    “Well, if we have girl minds, I guess that makes us girls?” I bounced off both of their phrasing and the head of an enemy to get an extra jump. “Since minds are more sacred than bodies…”

    A blush appeared on their face as they pulled their legs up against their torso, and they started uncharacteristically stammering. “T-that’s how that works, but… It feels weird to think of me as a girl… Weird but good, but weird…”

    We stayed silent for a while, the only sounds being the background music of the game and chippy quips of my character. I rolled my tongue against my palate and took a breath, speaking aloud to no one in particular. “Hello. My name is Jamie and I am a girl. Jamie is a girl. She is a girl.” I coughed and felt both the embarrassment and the happiness catch up to me and color my cheeks. Snake was in a similar state, their gaze stuck on me.

    “I guess… I guess Snake is a girl too…” I heard her mutter under her breath.

    More silence. I focused back on the game just to wrangle my emotions back to something I could handle… And heard a little ‘plop’ on my right. Turning my head to the side barely gave me the time to see Snake, cork in hand, drinking from her body change bottle.

    I pushed myself into the corner of the couch while Snake stood up, her eyes looking glazed over as if she was groggy. In a surprising bout of effort she managed to recork her potion before letting it softly land on the cushions.

    She pressed her hands against her temples and grunted in pain. I saw her height fluctuate back and forth for a moment, before her limbs settled on growing, making her even taller than she already was. At first she seemed pleased with the development, but her expression instantly switched to a grimace and she muttered “No, no no no no, please, no-”, prompting the potion to completely reverse ship and shrink her down to a half foot smaller than she was before.

    She collapsed on her knees and hugged her arms as she lost her hard earned muscles in favor of softer limbs. In hindsight she must’ve had a slightly precocious puberty to have such a masculine body at our age, and her new form reflected that in femininity just as much?

    Well she definitely didn’t have the curves of an eighteen year old supermodel, but she definitely screamed girlish, with just a modest layer of fat settling on her hips and chest. Connecting this new appearance to the Snake I’d always known until today was nearly impossible - it was really as if simply changing her gender had integrally changed her personality and desires too, a thought that made me queasy.

    Though that seemed unlikely since Snake started to sob, as her hair lightened to a wheat blonde and poured down until it hung limply on her shoulders.

    I waited to make sure the changes were over before approaching her and gently rubbing my hand on her back. “Are you okay, Snake?”

    “I dunno, I don’t fucking know…” Snake replied, absentmindedly shifting positions to sit on the ground and give her knees a break.

    There was a knock at the door.

    “Did you drink your potions, girls?” Lucille asked from the other side.

    “Wait, we were allowed to?” I responded, at least relieved we weren’t in trouble.

    “Wouldn’t have given them to you this soon otherwise.” The alchemist opened the door and saw us sitting on the ground. She approached Snake and looked at her for a moment, crouching down. “Are you okay, Snake?”

    My friend stifled a giggle and smiled despite the tears pouring on her face. “Of course I’m okay. I’m in a girl body now, but, like… I can’t do sports or fight or anything anymore, there’s really no turning back now…”

    Lucille raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. “Girls can do all that too, you know.”

    “Yeah but it’s not girly! It’s manly! It makes me feel bad when I do, now!” Snake exclaimed, her eyes fixated on a small dirty spot on the carpet. “Being manly was my world and now it’s like I want to puke when I think of doing boy stuff…” I let my hand continue to rub in circles on her back.

    “Oooh, I see how it is.” The alchemist gave Snake a compassionate gaze. “Methinks you have a lot of internalized sexism to get rid of.” She grabbed her shoulders, prompting my friend to finally look up at her. “Hey. You’re still young! It’s way easier to get rid of dumb beliefs early than as a jaded adult. We’ll make you forget that manly-girly nonsense and just have you do you the way you damn want to. Won’t make you any less of a girl, Snake.”

    She exhaled, then buried her eyes in her arm and wiped away her tears. “Thanks.” That too, I had never heard from Snake before.

    “Yeah!” Lucille gave her a gentle grin. “When I’m done with you you’ll get to do whatever you wanna do, no matter if it fit in the boy or the girl box before. No matter what you choose to do it’ll be girl stuff, because it’ll be a girl doing it. No need to forfeit anything you love just to please those that say girls and boys aren’t allowed to do certain things, even when some internal voice inside of you is part of that dumb group.”

    “That’s a lot of ways to repeat the same thing.” I muttered as I took a moment to think of where I stood in that whole girl stuff-boy stuff thing. I’d never actually… Really cared, didn’t I? I knew what was supposedly labelled which, and I guess I did consciously avoid most boy stuff, but more because it just didn’t grab my interest than because it made me feel bad. I mean, I still played video games a lot, and that has a boy sticker on it, doesn’t it? A dumb one that shouldn’t be there, but still, I don’t feel awful when I play video games. So, at least compared to Snake, I definitely had a head start.

    “Why don’t you check out your own potion instead of sassing under your breath, Jamie?” Lucille snarked back, helping Snake to her feet and directing her towards sitting on the couch.

    I threw a guilty glance at the flask I’d left next to my controller, torn between wanting privacy and just drinking it here and there, being a bit apprehensive after seeing how my friend had turned out. “I won’t… Go ultra stereotype girly like Snake, right?” I received a growl from her.

    “Not unless you want to.” Replied Lucille, sitting down as well.

    “Right, right.” I paused for a moment before standing back up and fetching my potion.

    I quickly understood why Snake had looked like she almost fell down at the start. The moment the potion burned my throat I felt all my senses going haywire. My skin felt microscopic prickles all over, like I was hyper aware both of the air against my skin and the minusculely uneven flow of the blood under my flesh. Colors spilled and slurred into one another no matter where I looked, and the potion felt like it weighed a million tons, yet I still held it in my hand effortlessly. I did as Snake had and recorked it before I risked dropping it.

    The moment passed as quickly as it arrived and I was left with just the lingering feelings. My point of view climbed up a few centimeters as I gained some amount of height I’d be hard pressed to determine. 

    I felt a very light, budding amount of flesh come pile on my chest and I hoped it would hide my apparent ribs. I wanted the potion to help with my skinniness too, but was it even something it could do? The fat Snake had received didn’t come from nowhere, and comparatively there was nothing on me the potion could even fetch and use as material, and if anything, with the extra height I was stretched that much further. Just then, almost like it heard me, I shrank back down to my usual height, narrowly avoiding looking ghastly thin. With a sigh I resigned myself to finally accepting my mom’s demand that I take nutritional supplements, I guessed I would tell her later today.

    My hair gained a single inch, going from a bowl cut to stopping at my cheeks. After it settled I confirmed it hadn’t changed color, and wondered how much of Snake’s change had been affected by her image of what a girl could and couldn’t be at the moment she drank it.

    As for my down-there, I won’t go into details. I’m twelve and that’d be creepy.

    Snake seemed to have the same realization as me that most of her changes had been unnecessary, as she guiltily glanced away, refusing to look at me.

    “Hmm…” I muttered, testing my voice. “Hello, I am Jamie. I am a girl. She is a girl.” I was surprised this time not to feel any embarrassment or discomfort. The joy was more muted, mostly being a passive feeling of rightness.

    Lucille shot me a warm smile. “That’s the spirit, Jamie.” Her expression shifted back to something more serious. “Speaking of, this should be about the moment for a new name if you want to change it, girls? Well, Jamie is pretty gender neutral already, but what about you, Snake?”

    “I don’t… I don’t have one in mind…” Snake replied, squishing her hands between her legs, while I went to join them in sitting on the couch.

    Lucille raised her eyebrows and slowly nodded her head, stretching her arms along the backrest. “Right, the whole never had to think about that until now deal. Well don’t worry, it’s not like you have to change it right this instant, especially since you already have a nick’. You’re still fine with Snake, right?”

    “Definitely. Yeah.” She blushed for a moment, biting her lower lip and squeezing her left hand with her right one. “But, like, a cute snake instead of a mean looking one now. Or one that’s both.”

    “Both suits you.” I piped up, throwing her a teasing smile. Though after seeing that her reaction was her blush deepening, it just prompted me to get one of my own and I scuttered deeper in my seat.

    Lucille gave the TV a thousand yard stare. “You know what? I am not comfortable near soapy tween love so I’ll leave you two to it, okay-thanks-bye.” She blurted out, before she powerwalked out the room.

    At least that seemed to have cleared up Snake’s thoughts pretty thoroughly, as I recognized a more familiar expression from her on her face: annoyance. “What the actual fuck.”

    All I could do was offer a shrug and pick the controller back up, pretending the alchemist’s misinterpretation had also left my mind.