Robert offered to buy breakfast at a local diner for all of them, an offer that was immediately accepted. Treating Richard, his family, and his friends to a nice breakfast was the very least he could have done. Repay him? How? With what? He didn't even know how to thank him.
Richard and Zoe rode with their mother, who was obviously deep in thought. Heather knew the WoW analogy wasn't quite right but kept drifting back to it: Her children had become higher level than she was. She was in the mid-levels, hunting monsters and gathering herbs, and apparently her children had been powerleveling while she was gone, and now her son had joined the same guild as his sister and friends, kitting himself out with endgame loot after having defeated a raid boss. She thanked her intuition for telling her what she needed to hear yesterday -- her son had just singlehandedly sent two people to jail with nothing but his computer and his determination, and she'd almost been insane enough to seriously piss him off!
Both Robert and Willa had been very clear with her: As their mother, it was her duty to keep them safe and help them grow, and whoever or whatever they were was not something that she could force into one identity or another. She took this advice very much to heart. She did, however, allow herself one point of pride: if her son could do that, it meant that she had, in some way, succeeded in parenting him.
The diner had recently reopened, and obviously the same people were working there; the staff recognized Leslie's family on sight and immediately found a table that would accomodate all eight of them, including Leslie's wheelchair.
As before, Richard's friends simply didn't treat him any differently than they had the last time they'd eaten together. It never crossed their minds that they should. Richard developed a new metric for judging people: 'How much would this person treat me differently if I were in a dress?' In fact, they were all regularly stealing looks at him - even the adults were doing that, and for reasons that had nothing to do with how sweet he liked to look. He understood, very thoroughly, that some statuses were more critical than others, that real life really did resemble many of his games. In the greater scheme of things, his pretty dresses were almost entirely cosmetics; his stats were what counted, and apparently those were enough to complete a very critical quest. He was not merely Richard, the boy who liked to look cute and girly; he was Richard, the Sith apprentice who liked to look cute and girly.
"Hey, Ricky, there's somewhere I want to take you today," Susie told him. She'd been using her phone at the table, and he'd caught a glimpse of a map.
"Yeah, Mom, I think we're going to spend the day with them," Zoe added.
"Go on ahead," Heather replied. What else was she going to say? She'd taken off Friday so that she could spend time with her children, get them to see things her way, but that had been pulverized before it even started.
Robert tipped well, and no one but Richard noticed when Susie slipped a twenty under her plate for the waitress to pick up. Caroline chuckled as they got in the car together, shaking her head. "Your mom. From hyena to pussycat. I bet she thought you were going to do her next." She had meant it as a joke and was surprised to get general agreement.
"She thought I was going to do her next yesterday, and she didn't even know what it was," Richard said, and abruptly decided that the best definition of it was 'do dirty'. "She'd said some real ugly shit." Did the woman not get that forcing people into dresses just wasn't something you did, especially to your own children? Was this hard somehow? He didn't want to do his own mother dirty, didn't even really want to intimidate her, and really, really hoped that what she'd learned today in addition to Leslie's parents telling her off would put a stop to stupid parent tricks forever, even if she found out things the Squad didn't want her to know.
"No, we're not talking about this now," Zoe said. It was killing the mood. "We can talk about where we're going."
"No we can't," Susie replied. "It'll be a pleasant surprise for at least one of us. Assuming it's open."
"We can talk about what Ricky did," Leslie offered. She understood, mechanically, what had happened. She did not understand why Richard had delved deep into all-consuming hatred and monomaniacal fixation to do it. Wasn't it her problem? She'd only known him for a few days! She knew that this was the kind of 'low self-esteem' thing that her parents talked to her about fairly often, but she had a difficult time understanding that people cared about her. Was he the same sort of rarity as the rest of her friends and her parents? She had to remind herself that her parents were telling the truth, that this was just the sort of thing real friends did for each other.
"Heroic," Susie said, simply. "Is there a better word?" She intended to reward him for it, reward him in a way that the both of them would very much enjoy. Today's trip was something she was probably going to do anyway, but she had even more exciting plans in mind for later.
"Isn't that what's supposed to happen with a princess around?" Richard joked. The girls giggled and he realized his mistake: he'd never called her that before in front of the rest of them. Susie didn't seem to mind, though, as she was giggling as well, although she added yet another item to her to-do list for when they were alone.
"It was the best timing, but not the worst revenge I ever heard of," Caroline said, looking behind her as she merged onto the highway to downtown. Traffic was much lighter than it was before everyone who could had started working from home. "I heard this like five years ago, it's a rumor, but I think it actually happened. There were these mean girls, and this nerd, and she didn't have any other friends so she kept hanging out with them even when they made her help bully other people, and then she was arguing over something, and one of the mean girls cut her bra strap in school, and then she waited for years and then... it was her boyfriend, husband, I forget, but she hooked him up with a drug dealer, something really addictive, meth or coke or something. Totally fuc-ked them."
Leslie whistled. Susie's lips pursed. "Ouch," Zoe said.
"That is hardcore," Richard added. He felt a great deal of respect for whoever pulled that off and wanted to meet to swap notes.
"Hey, Ricky, lean your seat back," Susie said, and he found the lever that would let him do that, putting his head near his girlfriend's lap.
"Not entirely safe, what are you doing?" Coraline asked.
"Braiding his hair," Susie replied. "Don't worry, it'll be okay for where we're going." Caroline's car had good suspension, and he smiled as she put his hair back into its familiar, comfortable pigtails. She kissed him on the forehead when she was done, and he sat back up happily, not caring one whit if anyone saw him. They chatted the rest of the way, about Leslie's treatment (which Leslie had to remind herself was actually, for-sure, going to happen now), about everything else they'd been doing, about the food they'd eaten. The agreement was that the bacon and eggs had been good; the milkshakes had been excellent.
They arrived at their destination, a place close to the upscale part of the downtown area, and Caroline had to check her phone to make sure that it was the right place, frowning. "This is the address," she said, unconvinced. It wasn't a bad neighborhood, but weren't they going to a boutique? Where was the glass storefront, the displayed clothes? Why would a 'boutique' be a plain brick building with a single, forbidding-looking door? Okay, it did say "Spectral Boutique" on the small glass window, in rainbow cursive, but other than that, it looked almost like a crime den. She decided to go in first, and as they entered, Leslie walking, the group was startled by the sheer colorful flamboyance of two things.
The first was the proprietor. He had the certain look of the guy who owns the place, and he also had a massively overdone, glittery, pastel rainbow concoction of a suit festooned with an abundance of buttons and pins, a Mad Hatter-style top hat, and sparkling rimmed glasses with no lenses. Not his fashion choices but his overall demeanor marked him as unquestionably, undeniably gay, leaving them all to wonder how much was of it was an act. Susie, who knew more about these things than a fifteen-year-old probably should, strongly suspected that the man had additional items on underneath.
The second was everything else in the store. If the store had a theme, it was 'rainbows', with 'pastels' and 'fishnets' vying for second place. There was a section in the back labeled "Must Be 18 To Enter", which Susie found relieving because she'd worried that maybe the whole store was like that.
"Okay, I'm seeing four girls, three underage, and one underage boy in pigtails," the proprietor said in exactly the sort of super-gay, lisping voice they were envisioning. (Caroline smirked but did not correct him.) "Before we even start, I have to ask, are you coercing, punishing, blackmailing, or threatening him in any way to be here?"
All five of them burst out in spasms of uncontrollable laughter, Leslie needing to hold on to Zoe for support. "Coerce HIM?!" Caroline exclaimed, pointing. "Oh my God, he'd kill us all, there would be a giant smoking crater. You have no idea, we can't even tell you what he's capable of. Why would you even ask that?!"
The man's voice became several notches less campy. "Three months after I opened, there was a boy, middle school age or so, and his face had been made up really garish, and his hair in super tight curlers, and he had so obviously been crying heavily. And his mother, could have been his aunt, and two sisters, cousins, whatever, were telling me to pull down the most ridiculous sissy stuff I have in the store to punish him with, and he's just standing there sobbing. Not sure if you noticed, but I have some pretty ridiculous stuff in here." Richard held his tongue; it would be mean to point out that the most ridiculous thing in the store was its owner.
"What happened?" Leslie asked.
The man raised an eyebrow. "What do you think happened? I told them to get the hell out of my store before I called Child Protective Services! And then I followed them out to their car, got their license plate, and called CPS on them anyway before they did something else to him. Never found out what happened after that, but from the conversation I had, it wouldn't surprise me if the kid got put in a home somewhere and the adult got sent to county for child abuse. To hell with assholes like that, our community doesn't need more crap coming down on it and I sure as hell don't. Anyway, that was a couple years ago." Richard considered asking for more details, just so he could make sure that family was well and truly destroyed, but there was no way this guy remembered what he'd need to know. The man turned the camp back on. "Welcome to the Spectral Boutique, my name is Franklin, what can I get you?"
"I actually want to see your ridiculous stuff, just to see what it looks like," Susie said, and he pointed to the wall behind her. She turned and looked, as did the others. A long line of extremely, comically frilly, mostly babyish, and nearly all pink dresses hung on that wall, answering the question of why there were no windows. If anyone could just look through and see this stuff, somebody would target the place for sure. A lot of it had price tags that made even her suc-k air between her teeth, which wasn't surprising for things that shouldn't have existed outside a drawing or cartoon. Each one of them must have come in multiple layers; how else would you wash a thing like that? All of the teens were awed at seeing something like that in person. It was like something from a movie. "Wow. Holy... wow. That's not what we're here for, though. What we're looking for is that rainbow dress you've got, the one that goes from red to violet."
"Yes! The Spectral Dress. Our flagship product, this is for him, right?" She nodded. "Okay, his size is right here," he said with the authority of someone very experienced at telling sizes at a glance. The dress he pulled out made a very smooth transition through all the colors of the rainbow, from red at the collar to a deep violet at the hem, which was slightly elastic in nature and retained a circular shape on its own. "Pockets are here and here, and the hoop part down here actually comes out, makes it easier to wash," he explained.
"Nice!" Richard exclaimed, smiling from ear to ear.
"If you're going to get it, I recommend the Spectral Gloves, at least one pair of Spectral Boots, and Spectral Socks. We've got them all in your size." The Spectral Gloves were soft, satiny, elbow-length opera gloves that didn't go through the full spectrum; instead, they matched the colors on the dress where his hands would be at his sides. The Spectral Boots were knee-length suede, going from violet to red, and coming in three heel heights: flats, two and a half-inch wedges, and five-inch wedges that he was both nervous about and thrilled to try. The socks were exactly the same length and color as the boots. "Buy the whole set and I'll throw in the Spectral Pants, the Spectral Shirt," These items were normal for boys except that they followed the same color pattern as the dress. "and a set of Spectral Hairbands." He held up a ten-pack of elastic hairbands that looped around the RGB color spectrum.
"Ricky?" Susie asked, and he eagerly agreed. "We're buying all of this. Do you have a fitting room so he can wear some of it home?"
"We certainly do, it's right over there." The two of them held hands into the fitting room, Susie selecting the dress, gloves, and medium heels for him, and she pulled out a makeup kit and a spare, folded diaper from her purse. Less than five minutes later, the two of them emerged, with Richard wearing his new Spectral outfit, his new rainbow hairbands holding his pigtails, subtly cute makeup, and a gigantic smile, his ordinary clothes in his arms.
"You're pretty good on heels," Franklin noted with a smile. Richard was exactly the sort of kid he'd envisioned wearing that outfit when he'd made it. Most of his customers were adult men, with adult females in second place followed by curious teenage girls, but it was definitely an outfit for boys like him.
"I've been practicing," Richard admitted. "I kinda always want to wear them, unless I'm doing something physical where I really shouldn't."
"Just make sure you lift your toes and stretch your calves regularly," Franklin advised. "The shortened tendons thing can happen for real, especially since you're still growing. All right, you got the whole set, and there's tax, you know, let's just call it two-thirty even." Caroline whistled faintly, but Susie plopped down a dozen twenties like it was nothing and received a picture of Alexander Hamilton in return.
"By the way," Susie said, "since you know a lot about this stuff, can you confirm a rumor for me? I heard that some babysitter tried to put somebody's ten-year-old kid into some bondage dress thing and his twin sister almost blew her head off for it."
Franklin suc-ked in a long breath and dialed the camp down to zero. "You know, that actually might explain something. There's kind of a fetish, swinger group around here, the Greater Area Sissies," Susie abruptly recognized the acronym. "and they had a maaaajor falling out. I heard from one sissy who came in here, like half their members left, some won't even talk to each other anymore. I asked, but she just flat refused to say why. I might not ever know for sure, and that rumor sounds like bullcrap, but if it's true, it would explain a lot. By the way, can you not spread this? If this is true and gets confirmed to the general public, the feces is going to hit the rotary oscillator so hard it'll get on both me and him," he said, gesturing to Richard, and the group nodded in understanding.
"Keep the change," Susie told him, pushing the Hamilton back towards him. "Knowing that was worth it."
The campy voice returned. "Well, thank you very much, and please come back in the fall for our warmer stuff. You kids have a good day!"
"You too!" Richard replied, giving him a deep curtsey in his new rainbow dress before happily swishing out the door.
As they left, they heard him muttering to himself, "Eris, a freaking ten year old, like we don't have enough problems with the Munchausen's..."
"So, where to now?" Caroline asked.
"There's a local mall I've never been to," Susie said.
"With him like that?" Leslie asked, eyes wide open. Caroline had her eyes wide open as well.
Zoe giggled, remembering what Richard had told her after he'd skipped home Monday. "He's too obviously bait. Especially in a mall, who's gonna harass a 13 year old and all his friends in the middle of a mall, especially when everyone else is staring at him too? Maybe the mall cops?"
"Not around here," Susie said. "I checked, the whole reason Franklin put his store here is because this whole neighborhood is as gay as him. Well, uhh... mmmmaybe not quite that gay." They all laughed. "Unless Ricky's getting cold feet?"
"Pfffffft," Richard blew out, rolling his eyes. His accomplishment and his beautiful outfit made him feel like a transcendent being. He was where he belonged, wearing what he belonged in, and with whom he belonged. Physical danger was basically zilch in a fairly upscale neighborhood with security cameras and mall cops while they walked around in a group of five, and he would gleefully, mercilessly, and irrevocably do anyone who tried to mess with any of them very, very dirty.
"You got it, Princess," Caroline said, putting the car into reverse and pulling out of the parking lot.
The mall was large and fairly well taken care of, but there were still puddles from where it had rained yesterday, and Richard jumped over a small one in his heels. As soon as they walked in the door, they wondered if the place had even opened properly, but on looking through the shutters, they realized that more than half the stores had been shut down for a long time; malls had been dying for years even before the pandemic. Susie had wanted her boyfriend to strut in dress and heels through a crowded mall, not a graveyard, but at least they were out together, and she abruptly held him around the side of his waist, pressing up against his elastic hoop skirt, the side of her breast pressing against his chest. He held her close with his silky glove, smiling, her head against his shoulder as they walked.
They checked the directory, but it hadn't been updated in years, and Susie wanted to at least walk through with her friends anyway even if the place was mostly shut down.
"Check it," Caroline warned. A middle-aged guy with long hair and a stubbly beard was coming straight up to them only a few minutes after they'd entered, holding up a hand in peace.
"Where'd you buy that rainbow stuff at?" he asked immediately, clearly not wanting to be seen as a creep.
"Spectral Boutique," Susie answered, remembering the name first because she'd known about the place.
"Thank you!" the man replied, searching on his phone while leaving. Another nearby lady started tapping on her phone as well. They realized that they'd gotten Franklin a customer or two. It hadn't occurred to Richard, or any of them, that things like that could happen - that he'd be approached not by people wanting to harass him or ask where his parents were or call him gay but by people who were simply curious or envious. He wondered if the man would walk out wearing the Spectral outfit or one of the super-frilly ones.
"So, Zoe, do you want to wear an actually good dress on your birthday?" Susie asked, to her surprise. With everything that had been happening, it was easy to forget that Zoe's birthday was tomorrow, but none of them had.
"I've been thinking about that," Zoe said. "About what I actually want to look like. I wouldn't mind a real dress, but I don't want some humiliating, childish crap, I want to look like a queen."
"You asked the right person," Leslie pointed out, and they all giggled.
Betty Pearl's Sissy Stories 20.1
Topic: A Bet to Lose (Read 30080 times)
