Friday morning during homeroom, a few more people got their new schedules; I think everybody had them by then. The morning announcements included a notice that centaurs would be allowed to snack during class, though not during quizzes or tests; apparently there'd been a lot of complaints, not only from students, but from irate parents.
I had a little time before Algebra to talk with Latisha about the interview questions she'd given me, but I didn't really feel comfortable talking about them where other people might overhear.
"I read some of it last night after I finished my other homework," I told her, "but I haven't had time to think about it a lot. Can we talk about it tonight?"
"Or at lunch," she said.
"Sure."
In Biology, Ms. Killian talked for about half an hour about some of the other neospecies in the Atlanta area; toward the end of the class she reviewed what she'd said earlier in the week, about the general patterns of the changes and about centaur anatomy, and said we'd have a quiz on that stuff next Monday.
My P.E. class had even more students in it than before, as the last few people got their new schedules assigned; there were almost forty of us who didn't fit into the all-centaur or all-wolf P.E. classes. Coach Renfrew divided those of us who were still pretty much humanoid into a couple of teams and had us play dodgeball while he worked one-on-one with some of the kids of the stranger neospecies -- there were some who walked on all fours, for instance, and the guys with tentacle arms, and so forth. As luck had it, I was on the opposite team from Latisha and Tyrone; my team lost.
As before, I took the quickest shower I could and kept one towel wrapped around my waist while I dried off the rest of me with another. I was careful, when I sat down on the bench by my locker, not to have my legs too close together -- or too far apart. And I slipped a clean rolled-up pair of socks into my clean underwear before pulling them on, without anybody noticing. I was starting to think I could keep doing that indefinitely.
At lunch, I looked around for Latisha, and I saw her sitting and talking with a couple of wolf girls. I was nervous about sitting down next to them, but I had to at least give her back the list of interview questions she'd loaned me, so I nerved myself and went over to them.
"Hi, Jeffrey," Latisha said. "Keisha, Wanda, this is Jeffrey -- we're working on a project for Ms. Killian's biology class."
"Hi," I said, and sat down next to Latisha, across from one of the wolf girls -- I wasn't sure which was Keisha and which was Wanda. They seemed to think Latisha had introduced them adequately and didn't clarify.
"Did you have time to read that thing I gave you?" Latisha asked.
"Um," I said. I had read as much of it as I could, and I had some ideas about rephrasing some of the questions -- assuming I'd deciphered them correctly -- but I didn't want to talk about them in front of a couple of girls I didn't know. Talking about them with a girl I'd known only for a few days would be embarrassing enough under ideal circumstances. "See, I looked at it after I finished my homework last night, but there were parts of it where I couldn't read your handwriting. Maybe you could type it up and email it to me?" I took the paper out of my backpack and took a bite of whatever I had on my tray -- it must have been meat because the carnivores weren't complaining too loudly, but I don't know what kind.
"There were only some parts you couldn't read?" Keisha (or Wanda) said, and giggled.
"You're doing better than me if you can read anything she wrote," Wanda (or Keisha) added.
"Hush," Latisha said. "Okay, I'll type it up tonight. What about the parts you could read?"
I took another bite and tried to think of something both useful and non-embarrassing to say about it. "Maybe it's already there in the parts I couldn't read," I said, "but what about ask if they happened to be looking at a clock or watch when the changes happened, and if they know how long the changes took, or how long the queasy feeling lasted?"
"That's a good idea," she said, and wrote something down.
"And, um, did the queasy feeling start before the obvious physical changes, or afterward, or at the same time?"
"I think it was at the same time," she said, "but I'll ask."
From what Uncle Mike said, I thought she was right. I'd been too distracted to notice, myself. But it would be more scientific to ask a bunch of guys about it.
"What happened to you?" Keisha (or Wanda) asked me. "You look old-fashioned, like Latisha."
"Did you used to go to school with her in Hartville?" Wanda (or Keisha) asked.
"It's Hartwell," Latisha said, and I said hastily:
"No, I've lived in Marietta my whole life. I didn't meet Latisha until we started working on this project."
"But you weren't in Marietta on Valentine's Day," Keisha (or Wanda) pointed out.
I told them about Huntsville, and of course they had questions about what telepathy felt like, which I answered as best I could using what I'd heard from Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave. I steered the conversation back to our project, and asked Latisha if she had any ideas about what I should ask my interview subjects.
"Well," she said, "there's what you said -- did they notice the times, how long the headache lasted and how long it was before they started hearing other people's thoughts."
"And can they keep other people from hearing what they're thinking?" Keisha (or Wanda) asked.
I wrote those questions down.
That evening, Latisha and I talked again by IM.
obsidian14: i just emailed you my list of questions
scribbler371: thanx. i'll look at it. here, i'll email you my list
Ten or fifteen minutes later,
scribbler371: sorry i was so vague at lunch. it's weird and embarrassing talking about this stuff at all, and i really didn't want to talk about it in front of your friends.
obsidian14: it's ok. could you really not read my handwriting or was that just an excuse not to talk about it in front of keisha and wanda?
scribbler371: both, kind of. it was kind of hard to read your handwriting but even the parts i understood i didn't want to talk about just then.
obsidian14: what about now?
scribbler371: so. you could be, i don't know, more clinical?
obsidian14: like how?
scribbler371: like instead of asking "did you throw up when the changes happened" you could ask "did you vomit" or even "did you experience nausea" etc.
obsidian14: that would be more scientific i guess
scribbler371: yeah. and probably less embarrassing for you and them both.
obsidian14: what about you?
scribbler371: what do you mean?
obsidian14: did you experience nausea when the changes happened?
scribbler371: i threw up five pancakes all over my uncle's thirty year old atari 2600.
obsidian14: that sounds bad.
scribbler371: could have been worse. no permanent damage. most of the vomit went on the carpet. what about you?
obsidian14: yeah. we were eating lunch when it happened. most of us threw up.
scribbler371: how long before you figured out what happened?
obsidian14: us girls, not until we watched the local tv news talk about it. dad and my uncles and brothers and guy cousins knew what happened to them right away but they didn't talk about in front of us girls.
scribbler371: huh. i guess that makes sense
obsidian14: did you feel what happened or not figure it out till you looked?
scribbler371: i was busy being sick. felt weird but didn't know what happened until i went to change out of my vomity clothes.
obsidian14: that's weird. that you could change so much and not feel it happening.
scribbler371: you too, though, right?
obsidian14: only with me it was all inside
scribbler371: well, i guess the numb feeling made it hard to figure out exactly what was wrong
obsidian14: probably
scribbler371: interview enough guys, you'll find one who was peeing when it happened
obsidian14: eww, gross. i am not thanking you for that image.
scribbler371: sorry :(
obsidian14: where is the brain bleach?
scribbler371: they sell big industrial size bottles of it at sam's club. you'll need lots by the time you finish this project.
obsidian14: yeah. sure you don't want to swap?
scribbler371: it would be just as embarrassing for me as for you
I didn't really think, then, about why I could so easily talk about such weird, embarrassing things with a girl I'd known for barely a week, which I couldn't bear to talk about with my parents or friends I'd known for years. Even with Uncle Mike, I hadn't talked any more plainly about this stuff than I was talking about it with Latisha. We talked for a while longer about questions for both her interview subjects and mine, and said good night; then I sent another email to Aunt Karen with a few additional questions Latisha and I had come up with.
-----
Saturday, I walked over to Will's house just after breakfast. Will and I played *Champions of Marduk* for a while, until Arnie's brother dropped him off. Will and Arnie had both gotten stronger in the last week -- their legs were still skinnier than mine, but not as rail-thin as they'd been when I first saw them after I came home, and their arms were filling out too. We hung out for a few hours playing video games, and then went for a walk down to the creek that runs behind the houses at the end of Will's street. They sat on a fallen log and I sat on a big rock, and we talked about everything and nothing for an hour or so, and I drew several sketches of them and the trees and the creek. I liked the view a lot, and several times in the next month I walked down there, by myself more often than with Will, and did a bunch of sketches, then my first real landscape painting.
Things settled into a pattern for a while. I ate lunch with Latisha and Tyrone more often than not; Latisha's wolf friends joined us fairly often, as did Lindsey Babcock -- she and Tyrone were becoming pretty tight, being the only Valdosta frogs in our grade and maybe the only ones in our school. I learned to tell Keisha and Wanda apart, and I learned to not get sick watching Tyrone and Lindsey slurp up maggots and beetles with their long tongues. I met Latisha's brother Lyndon once, when he passed by our table and Latisha said hi to him and introduced him; he didn't want to sit with us freshmen, though, and he didn't say much.
Latisha, Tyrone and I met in the library after school the next Tuesday, and I got a ride home from Tyrone's mom; but after that we didn't meet after school again, since we had plenty of chances to trade pointers on interviewing and other research during lunch.
Mom, Will, and the other centaurs kept putting on weight and getting steadier on their feet. Within another couple of weeks, most of them could stand up longer and walk further without resting than me. Mom went back to work in early March; we still didn't have a car she could drive, but Cobb County had beefed up its lame public transportation system with new routes and more buses in response to public outcry from the centaurs, so she could take the bus to work now. There was even talk about getting MARTA to extend a rail line from Atlanta to Marietta, but that would take a few years.
I kept helping with the homebound ministry twice a week after school. Dad's work schedule got less hectic after a while, and when he started having several days off in a row again, he would pick me up after school some days and we'd go visit two or three people in the hospital or at home. We did their grocery shopping for them and helped out around the house.
I was getting worried about Mom and Dad. It used to be, when I got home from school on days when neither of them had to work, I'd often find them together -- both of them working in the garden in good weather, or both of them sitting in the living room, one reading aloud to the other, or both of them working on cleaning the same room. I hardly ever saw them doing things together now, and I didn't see them hugging or kissing very often.
One day I came home expecting to see both of them; Dad was gone somewhere, and Mom had been crying, though she tried not to let on. She vaguely said Dad had to go run some errands.
When Dad came home a few hours later, he asked me if I wanted some chicken wings, and I said I'd eaten supper with Mom and wasn't hungry. He nodded and put away the stuff he'd brought home in the refrigerator, then went into the living room. Mom said she was tired and was going to bed, and left the room almost as soon as Dad came in.
-----
When I got up to go to school the next morning, the door to the guest bedroom was closed. The door to Mom and Dad's bedroom was open, but no one was in there; I found Mom in the kitchen fixing breakfast. She didn't say anything about what had happened the day before, and I couldn't ask.
Aunt Karen had forwarded both my lists of questions to a bunch of local friends, and fourteen people responded to them, including her doctor. I had plenty of material to work with for my project. Latisha had sent her questions to several bloggers in Athens and other parts of that change-region, and one of them had posted her questions on his blog, asking his readers to answer them in the comments; she had a lot of irrelevant and unpleasant stuff to wade through there, but she wasn't hurting for material, either. Tyrone hadn't found so many people to interview, but he had enough to satisfy Ms. Killian's requirements -- he'd interviewed his dad, and Lindsey, and his aunt's doctor in Bainbridge. Latisha and Tyrone both had trouble finding enough printed or online sources Ms. Killian thought were reliable enough to use -- the first four or five online sources they showed her, she said weren't scientific enough to count. It was easier to find scientific studies on the Huntsville telepaths; there were at least three new telepathic species in the U.S. and another twenty or more worldwide, but still, they were the focus of a lot more interest from scientists outside their region than the Valdosta frogs or Athens neuters. Some of the papers I found were way over my head, and some were in academic journals that neither our high school library nor our county library had subscriptions to; I had to ask our librarian to request copies of them from university libraries.
On the biological front, there were new developments to worry me. When I realized that my pubic hair was falling out, as was my little smidgen of chest hair, I gradually worked up the nerve to ask Latisha if it was happening to her, or the people she was interviewing.
obsidian14: yeah. women and men both.
scribbler371: it's like we're turning into little kids?
obsidian14: we're not getting shorter though
scribbler371: i guess
obsidian14: other stuff's changing though
scribbler371: what?
obsidian14: i'm not going to tell you if you haven't noticed
scribbler371: what? why?
After a long silence, she replied:
obsidian14: ok. my boobs are getting smaller. mom's too
scribbler371: oh
obsidian14: when i realized, i started hiding it. i'm sort of glad you didn't notice. maybe nobody else will either.
scribbler371: have you asked the people you interviewed about this stuff too?
obsidian14: no. i need to do that soon. been thinking about how to word the questions, and looking at blogs and stuff to see if anybody else is talking about it.
Other people were going through gradual changes too, subtler than the drastic changes on Valentine's Day and in many cases not noticed until they were far advanced. The centaurs were putting on muscle and fat, of course, building up to the right mass for their new shape, and there were others like them; others, like most of the winged people in various places, were more gradually losing weight, until four or five months after the changes they were light enough for their wings to support them... But you know about that already. As for me and Latisha and the others like us, my voice was getting gradually higher, partially reversing the change it had gone through a year or two earlier, and hers was getting gradually deeper -- though thankfully without the embarrassing abrupt mid-sentence tone changes I'd suffered, along with most boys, when I started going through puberty. It was happening so gradually that nobody who saw and talked to us every day noticed it; it wasn't until I talked to Aunt Karen on the phone for the first time in a couple of weeks that she remarked on it, and I realized what was happening. I worried that these changes would blow my cover as a Huntsville telepath, whenever people at school noticed them and realized they didn't match the purely neurological changes that I'd claimed. But it turned out that that worry was misplaced; my voice had barely changed enough to notice by the time -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.
More and more of the centaurs who'd been injured on Valentine's Day, or were just too weak to go to school, came back, and the centaur majority got even larger. The cafeteria, which was already full at third period, could no longer hold all the centaurs (and a few other herbivores); they moved the carnivores and omnivores' lunch into the auditorium, and let the upper-grade herbivores have the cafeteria at fourth period. Fewer people's schedules were changed this time, but it was still annoying.
And as the centaurs got their strength back, and became an even larger majority, the lines between social groups at school were redrawn. Competitive sports had been suspended indefinitely after the changes; the football and basketball teams and cheerleaders weren't the kernel around which all the less prestigious cliques orbited at one distance or another, and it wasn't clear yet who was going to be the new archetype of coolness. One thing was clear; a lot of the old cliques were breaking up and re-forming along species lines. The Smyrna wolves, who had been briefly dominant just after school started back, were losing their dominance to the centaurs as they got stronger and more confident. And the Kennesaw chameleons, to say nothing of the smaller minorities, learned to keep their heads down and stay out of the way of the centaur-wolf dominance battles.
Arnie was still messed up about losing Kim; but as he gradually recovered from the initial grief, he realized he had his pick of girls. He'd always been better at talking with girls than Will or me, and the changes apparently left him looking better to centaur girls than most of the other guys our age, at least in the critical first couple of weeks back at school when most of the former jocks were looking unhealthily skinny and some of them were too weak to walk without a cane or walker, or at all.
One Friday morning around the middle of March, I saw Arnie in homeroom as usual, and I asked him if he was coming over to Will's house the next day.
"I can't," he said. "Keith and Tara Saunders invited me to a party at their house." Keith was Tara's older brother, in tenth or eleventh grade, also a centaur; though he hadn't been as overweight as his sister before, I'd overheard centaur girls whispering about how hot he looked since the changes.
"All right," I said. "Some other time."
"I asked if you could come, but they said it's centaurs only," he went on, looking vaguely embarrassed.
"Have fun," I said. I felt weird about that, and wondered if things like that were going to happen often, and if so, if this was the beginning of the end of our friendship. It felt like it shouldn't be; even if we were different species now, we still liked the same kinds of games and movies. But I wasn't sure.
you'll find one who was peeing when it happened
wasn’t uncle mike one of them?
Oh, yeah, good point. I'm going to guess that Jeffrey didn't want to embarass his Uncle Mike by referring Latisha to him on this point -- but of course, the real reason is that I didn't think of it when I was writing this passage.