I was not looking forward to my next class; it was P.E., and I'd been dreading it all day, worrying about how I could shower and change afterward without anybody seeing what I was missing. As long as I could do that, I could carry on pretending to be a Huntsville telepath indefinitely; if not, my secret would be out, and I'd have to own up to Arnie and Ms. Killian and everybody else that I'd lied to them.

The hoax wouldn't have been possible at all -- I wouldn't have even tried to pretend -- if our school had had open communal showers. Fortunately, it had separate shower stalls. But there would be danger of slipping up, every afternoon for the rest of the school year, and every year until I graduated.

Most of the kids at my school had become centaurs, as I think I've already told you; in my P.E. class the proportion was even higher. And the principal had decided to let the centaur kids skip P.E. until they'd put on some more weight. So there were only five kids in the class, three boys and two girls; of the other boys, one was a Smyrna wolf and one had something like tentacles where his arms used to be. I'd seen a few kids like him in the halls, but hadn't had any in my classes so far.

Our P.E. teacher, Coach Ormond (who'd become a Kennesaw chameleon), started the class by talking about how he thought the changes would affect sports. I didn't care particularly about sports, and hadn't thought about the way the changes would affect them; he said he expected it would be the end of nationwide or worldwide competitions, since it might be impossible to ensure that opposing teams of different species were fairly matched. And he expected that local sports leagues in most places, including around here, would have to be completely reorganized, but that team sports would continue on the local level. So that was interesting in a way, but I kind of zoned out about halfway through that, since he went on about it for quite a while. When I started paying attention again, he was talking about doctors figuring out how some neospecies' muscles were structured differently, and how we'd have to figure out new kinds of exercise for people of those neospecies to work out with. Again, interesting in the abstract, but it didn't affect me.

Finally he put those of us with more boring changes (from his perspective) to running laps around the track, while he worked one-on-one with the kids whose muscles and skeletons had changed a lot to figure out what kinds of exercises would work for them. I paced myself, jogging just fast enough that he wouldn't yell at me and slow enough that I could last as long as he'd want us to keep running.

With only two other guys in the locker room and showers, it wasn't as hard as I'd feared to shower and change without them seeing me. I dawdled until both of them were in the shower, then got in myself, closed the curtain, took off my underwear and hung it over the curtain rod, and showered fast. Then I dried off in the shower stall and put on my clean underwear before I got out.

That wouldn't be possible once the centaurs got strong enough for P.E. The locker room would be crowded and everyone would be in a hurry; I wouldn't be able to get away with occupying a shower stall someone else was waiting for while I dried off and got partly dressed. I could figure that out when the time came, though.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I saw Will again when he got on the bus. He sat down across from me, looking exhausted.

"Bad day?" I asked.

"My legs are killing me," he said. "And I'm starving. They've got to let us start snacking between classes, or better yet during class, or there's going to be a revolt."

"A lot of the teachers are centaurs too -- they must understand..."

"Yeah, but the principal's a wolf and the assistant principal is I don't know what. I haven't seen either of them, but somebody said he's got a tail?"

"Well, at least you got to skip P.E."

"Just walking around the halls between classes tired me out as much as the worst P.E. class I've ever had." He looked suddenly thoughtful, and asked me: "So... how was P.E.?"

"Not too bad," I said. "Tell you later." There were too many other kids on the bus by then, and I couldn't really whisper across the aisle.

Mom wanted to know how school had been, of course. I told her most of what I've told you -- about the problems the centaurs had with lunch, and how I got through P.E. without flashing my new junk or lack thereof.

"I don't like this," she said. "I don't see how you can keep it up, and the longer you manage to pretend, the more people are going to be hurt and offended when they find out you lied to them."

I was starting to worry that she might be right, but I wasn't going to back out unless she and Dad forced my hand by telling people.

"Are you going to tell on me?"

"No," she said with a sigh. "You're old enough to learn from your own mistakes -- in some areas," she added hastily, seeing my look of wild surmise. "And your father seems to think it's a good idea, for some reason."

"He understands," I said. "He can imagine what it would have been like for him, being in my position."

"And I can't?"

"The girls in Athens don't look any different."

"Never mind," she said. "Let's go fix something to eat."

"You're cooking?" I asked, pleasantly surprised. She got up off the sofa, holding my arm, and we went into the kitchen.

"I'm getting stronger," she said. "I'll want to sit down again in a few minutes, but I can stand by the counter and stove as long as it takes to get something started."

I helped Mom cook supper. She sat in one of the kitchen chairs to rest after a few minutes -- it still looked strange, even after seeing a hundred centaur kids sitting like that in class, the way she sat down with her hind legs and kind of leaned back on them with her front parts.

"I need to talk to Aunt Karen," I said, after we'd gotten the potatoes and carrots chopped and put them in the stewpot. I told her about the extra credit report I was going to do for biology.

"Oh, Jeffrey," Mom said, "I'm worried about this. It's not enough you're lying to your friends, but your teachers as well -- and in a report? You could get expelled for cheating. That's it, I can't let you do this --"

"Mom, hold on," I said. "I'm not going to say in the report that I'm a telepath. That's, like, not being scientifically objective. I've got to interview at least three telepaths -- Aunt Karen can be one, and I can ask her to get me in touch with a couple of other people there in Huntsville that can answer my questions by email. Ms. Killian said anybody could do an extra credit report on any new species they want, as long as it's not a local one."

"Maybe it's all right," she said doubtfully. "I'll talk to your father about it some more."

-----

After supper, I went to my room and turned on my monitor. I had an email from Tyrone -- he'd cc'd the girls too -- asking us what day of the week suited us best and proposing Tuesdays. I replied, saying that any day but Wednesday suited me, and sent Aunt Karen an email asking her if I could interview her for my project, and if she could help me find other people in Huntsville to interview.

I started the IM client and sent quick "are you online?" messages to Tyrone, Latisha and Tandy. None of them replied right away, so I worked on American History homework for a while, and then started working on a list of questions for Aunt Karen and my other interviewees. I switched windows when the IM client plinked to say I had a message. It was from Latisha.

obsidian14: yeah i'm here

obsidian14: saw tyrone's mail, tuesday's okay. i've got band practice on mondays and thursdays.

I replied.

scribbler371: then it's tuesday unless that doesn't work for tandy? not sure where we could meet. at school maybe, but i'd need to get a ride home from someone -- my mom can't drive and my dad's usually at work that time of day.

obsidian14: i'll ask my mom if she can give you a ride home when she picks me up

scribbler371: thanx

scribbler371: btw, you didn't say where you were val-day?

obsidian14: oh i guess not

obsidian14: i was in hartwell. my whole family was at my grandma's house for her birthday.

Hartwell? I started to ask her where that was and what happened to people there, but decided to Google it instead of wasting her time.

The Wikipedia article on Hartwell, Georgia told me that it was the county seat of Hart County, that it bordered Lake Hartwell (which was named for the town, not vice versa), that it had a population of 4,188 people at the last census, and...

...that except for a narrow strip along the shores of Lake Hartwell, it was located within the Athens-Danielsville-Hartwell change-region.

I clicked the link to the article on that change-region, but I already knew what I'd find. Before the page loaded, the IM client plinked and I switched windows.

obsidian14: ...we kind of lost our reproductive systems

obsidian14: i'm kind of not sure about this project, actually

I thought hard. Should I tell her? In retrospect, it seems obvious that I should have. But I barely knew Latisha -- I'd barely been aware of her before today. I didn't know if I could trust her to keep my secret.

scribbler371: that's harsh

scribbler371: i kind of figured it was a limited physical change, from
what you said in class

obsidian14: yeah. girls and women don't look any different on the outside. i feel sorry for the guys though. my dad and my brothers have been really depressed.

scribbler371: i would be too

obsidian14: but you see what i mean. if i'm not going to do a half-ass job of this report, i need to interview both guys and girls. but interviewing guys about this stuff would be *so* embarrassing. but i need the extra credit.

scribbler371: you could tell ms killian you want to do a report on some other neospecies?

obsidian14: maybe we could swap? you give me your aunt's email in huntsville and i give you my cousin's email in hartwell?

scribbler371: um, maybe.

I really did not want to do a report on the "Athens neuters," to use the more polite of the several proposed names mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

scribbler371: there are lots of others you could write about.

obsidian14: nowhere else i have contacts, really. ms. killian said anywhere outside of metro atlanta, but all my friends and relatives are either here or in hartwell.

obsidian14: that's where my family is from and it's the end of us because none of us are ever going to have kids

scribbler371: sorry.

scribbler371: i've got to go. ttyl.

I closed the IM client, even though I didn't really have anything else urgent to do. I didn't like to keep lying to her, and I couldn't trust her with the truth yet. I sat there staring at the Wikipedia article on the Athens neuters for a while, not really reading it, and then I got out the small art pad I carried around at school. I looked at some of the sketches I'd done in class of kids of the rarer neospecies, and drew a larger version of the guy in P.E. with tentacle arms, and then a sketch of Tyrone's face... and then, not really thinking about why, a sketch of Latisha.

-----

Tuesday morning during homeroom, Mrs. Jessup announced that we were going to have major schedule changes.

"We're going to start splitting the lunch hours by diet instead of grade level," she said. "The herbivores will eat at third period, and everyone else at fourth period. And changing class schedules for all the ninth and tenth-grade meat-eaters and all the eleventh and twelfth-grade herbivores is going to cause cascading changes in almost everyone's schedules. I've got revised schedules for some of you here..." She started handing papers out. "If we don't have your new schedule yet, and you're a carnivore or omnivore -- or insectivore -- you can skip your fourth-period class to go to lunch at that time, and go to study hall at third period. The office says they'll have revised schedules for everyone by the end of the week.

"But... if you're not getting an A in your fourth-period class, and you can stand eating a vegetarian lunch for a few days, I suggest you stay with your current schedule until you're assigned a new one. If you want to do that, let me know and I'll let the office know."

I raised my hand; I'd much rather have a vegetarian lunch with Arnie and Will than skip Ms. Killian's biology class in favor of study hall.

In my next couple of classes, I noticed that several students were missing and others had taken their places -- people who'd had new schedules assigned already. I sat with Arnie and Will at lunch; it was really crowded, since centaurs were way more than half of the students, and all of them were in the cafeteria at once. There were a lot of arguments and a few fights between seniors or juniors and sophomores or freshmen over where they'd get to sit -- they all had their usual places staked out at different times, and now they were in the same place at the same time. Will, Arnie and I managed to steer clear of the fights and squeeze into a spot that nobody was fighting over.

I was one of very few non-centaurs present. Of the others, I wasn't sure how many were herbivores, how many were vegetarians, and how many were just eating vegetarian today so they wouldn't have to skip their fourth-period class; there weren't many of us, I suspected. Arnie had worn a skirt to school today; it was a rougher makeshift than the ones my Mom and I had been making, and a lot worse than the one Will was wearing. Mrs. Benson was good at making clothes. I looked around and thought I saw more centaurs in skirts than yesterday, and fewer bundled up in multiple pairs of pants.

"See," Will said to Arnie, "nothing to worry about. It's so much easier to deal with that everyone's going to be wearing skirts by the time hot weather comes around."

"It still feels a little weird," Arnie said, "and it was cold waiting for the bus, but it was a lot easier to get ready this morning than yesterday or Sunday."

"You'll get used to it pretty soon, I guess," I said. "Has anybody picked on you for wearing skirts?"

"No," Will said. "I heard about this, though -- a couple of sophomore wolves were picking on a freshman centaur who was wearing a skirt, and several sophomore centaurs ganged up on them and made them take it back. It's weird, they were the fat kids everyone picked on before, and now they're the buffest kids in the school. Have you seen Tara Saunders?" he asked.

"Not since the change -- I sort of know who you're talking about, but I don't have any classes with her." She'd been extremely overweight, and had a bad case of acne too, if I remembered right.

"Yeah, I've got history with her fifth period," Arnie said. "She's pretty hot now."

That made me feel weird and left out, and I didn't say much for a while as Will and Arnie talked about which girls were looking the best since the changes. I noticed that they were only talking about centaurs -- that could have been coincidence, since centaurs were the majority of kids at our school, but I was pretty sure it wasn't. I couldn't imagine being attracted to any of the centaur girls, even the ones who'd been really overweight before and now looked a lot healthier than most. But that wasn't all; I hadn't been attracted to anyone that way, even the ones who looked mostly or entirely human. After a while I tuned out Will and Arnie's conversation, took out my sketchpad, and drew quick portraits of some of the centaurs at the next table -- I could see them better than the ones I was sitting right next to.

In biology, Ms. Killian talked for a little while about the general patterns of the changes -- the range of populations and areas among the change-regions, and how people swimming in lakes or rivers or oceans got aquatic adaptations while people swimming in chlorinated pools changed along with the people on dry land around them, and so forth. You probably know most of that, I guess. Did you know that the lowest-population change-region was Antarctica? I thought so.

After a few minutes of that, she started talking specifics about centaur biology -- she showed us an anatomical chart of how their skeletons and internal organs were arranged, and I wondered how anyone had managed to find out so much so fast. She told us, soon enough; she always liked to talk about the specific scientists who discovered the things we were learning about, and she told us about a pathologist at Northside Hospital who'd done autopsies on centaurs who'd died in accidents on Valentine's Day, and written a paper on centaur anatomy. That started several of us crying over the people we'd lost that day, and when Ms. Killian saw that, she apologized and took a break from the lesson for a few minutes.

Since this was a fourth-period class, a fair number of people were missing -- all the wolves and other carnivores, and more than half the omnivores. Tyrone and Tandy were both missing, whether just skipping biology in favor of lunch or whether they'd gotten their new schedules assigned already I didn't know. There were just two other non-centaurs besides me and Latisha.

I copied the anatomical diagram from the projector screen into my sketchpad, not sure how much of that would be on the test but wanting to make my drawings of centaurs more accurate. She couldn't expect us to memorize the new anatomy of all the neospecies in Atlanta, surely? But probably most of them didn't have as radical a rearrangement of their internal organs and skeletons as the centaurs had. And we lived in a majority-centaur area, even if we weren't centaurs ourselves, so it made sense to learn a lot about them.

After class, I talked to Latisha briefly.

"Have you seen Tyrone or Tandy?" I asked.

"I have Algebra with Tyrone," she said. "I haven't seen Tandy."

"So we still don't know when we're meeting. I can't stay after school today, anyway, I'd need to make arrangements for a ride home. We can try for next Tuesday."

"Have you thought about swapping assignments?" she asked me.

"Um," I said. I wanted to tell her why I didn't want to, why it would be just as awkward for me as it would for her -- but I still wasn't sure I could trust her to keep the secret, and even if I could, I wouldn't tell her there where other people might overhear. "I haven't thought about it much, but I'd kind of rather not. Maybe it would be easier if you interviewed people you don't know? Don't interview your family, but just ask them to get you in touch with other people to interview?"

"Maybe," she said. "Yeah, that would be easier."

"I've got some stuff you might can use, if you don't already know about it," I said. "There's a doctor in Athens who's been blogging about what he's learned about their anatomy, and some other sites, regular people writing about their experiences and stuff. Bloggers like attention, you could interview them."

"You know a lot about it," she said, raising her eyebrows.

"I've got an uncle who lives in Athens," I said, "so I already knew a little about it. And I looked some stuff up after you told me last night. My Google-fu is strong."

That wasn't totally a lie. I'd followed some links from the Wikipedia article on Athens neuters, and discovered this doctor's blog that way. But most of the links I was planning to email Latisha were ones I'd found days ago -- a couple as early as Valentine's Day.

"Why didn't you tell me about your uncle before?"

I didn't have a good answer to that. I made something up.

"I wasn't sure Athens and Hartwell were in the same change-region until I looked it up," I said. "I've got to get to P.E., let's talk later."

P.E. was no worse and no better than the day before; there were four more people in the class, three girls and a guy, all Smyrna wolves, and the guy with tentacle arms was gone -- presumably he'd gotten his new schedule. I could still take my time drying off behind the shower curtain before getting my underwear on, with nobody yelling at me to get out and let him in.

I kept thinking about Latisha and what we'd said to each other during P.E. and Literature and on the bus ride home. As soon as I'd said hi to Mom, I went and checked my email and IM. Latisha wasn't online, but there was an email from Tandy saying she'd gotten her new schedule and had Mr. Logan for biology at third period now. I emailed Tyrone and Latisha suggesting that we meet next Tuesday in the library after school; then I sent Latisha an "are you there?" IM, and sat at the computer working on homework and waiting for her to reply until Mom stuck her head in and asked if I was all right.

"Doing homework," I said. "Sorry, do you need help with supper or something?"

"No, we're having leftovers from last night. If you're in the middle of homework go ahead, but you could come and heat up some stew any time you're hungry."

"Sure," I said. I ate supper with Mom, distractedly answered her questions about my day at school, and went back to my room as soon as I'd put my bowl in the dishwasher.

There was an IM from Latisha.

obsidian14: i'm here

obsidian14: you said you've got links for my project?

scribbler371: yeah just a minute

I went through my bookmarks, copied several links into the IM window, and sent them.

obsidian14: wow that's a lot of stuff

scribbler371: you're welcome

obsidian14: were you really in huntsville?

I stared at the screen for almost a minute before I typed,

scribbler371: promise not to tell please?

scribbler371: i'm sorry i lied but you can understand why i think

obsidian14: okay i won't tell

scribbler371: i was in athens with my other uncle. i really do have an aunt and uncle in huntsville, that's how i know so much about the telepaths.

obsidian14: can i interview you for my project? :)

scribbler371: maybe on condition of anonymity

obsidian14: you don't have to, i was just thinking it might be less weird and embarrassing than interviewing my brother or cousin

scribbler371: you have to interview at least two people you're not related to, why not three or four? like i said those bloggers would probably love the attention

obsidian14: okay. thanks again.

obsidian14: i understand why you'd lie about that. my brother was kind of depressed all last week, but the last couple of days since school started he's mad at everybody and won't talk about why. it's obvious anyway.

scribbler371: guys at school picking on him?

obsidian14: i'm sure that's it

scribbler371: is he younger than you or older?

obsidian14: older. both of them. leroy is in college, at morehouse, but he came to grandma's house with us for her bday. lyndon is a senior at HGHS.

If Lyndon was a senior at our school, I'd probably seen him sometime; but I didn't know him or recognize his name.

scribbler371: that's what i was afraid would happen to me.

obsidian14: mom says dad should talk to him about it but dad's almost as depressed as lyndon

scribbler371: sorry. my parents seem to be sort of okay about their changes, but i'm worried because they're different species. mom's a centaur and dad's a wolf.

obsidian14: oh

obsidian14: so they can't eat in the same room anymore

scribbler371: right

obsidian14: are they still, you know.

scribbler371: i don't know. i don't think so.

obsidian14: neither are mine :(

TrismegistusShandy

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.

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