Mistakes and Choices

[Jacqueline]

(This short story came to me nearly all at once. Don't worry, A Bet to Lose will continue.)

Polly was under a lot of stress.

One of the main sources, at least on a day-to-day basis, was her children. Her seven-year-old daughter, Nicole, usually acted far younger as she was often in a world of her own making, a world where she was usually a special superhero who could and did do pretty much anything. While her mother tolerated her daughter's imagination, it really didn't help when the little girl would barge into her room uninvited - despite being told very many times not to - in the middle of a Zoom meeting and started talking about how she had just given the Sneedles back their wings. That kind of thing had stopped being cute weeks ago.

Polly knew that she could probably spank her out of such behavior, but she couldn't bring herself to seriously punish her daughter. She just couldn't do it. The girl had been through enough pain already. One of her father's past-times had been making her cry. He didn't hit her, although he did grab her very hard a few times. He didn't tell her that Santa was dead; instead, he would go into exquisite and exacting detail about how Santa was using the elves as unpaid child labor and that all the batteries in all the toys that all the kids got for Christmas ran entirely on elf tears. Now, did she want anything for Christmas or not? Five years, from her birth, of merciless psychological abuse by her own father. Polly had turned a blind eye to it all, before he had finally rubbed Polly the wrong way and the two of them had gotten into a more or less permanent argument, followed by divorce. It hadn't helped that Polly had had nothing but miscarriages after Nicole's birth.

And then there was Hunter, who had simply told her that it was all stupid childish bullshit and that she needed to grow up right now. He would punish her, severely, and Polly had had to talk him out of throwing her favorite toys away more than once.

Nicole had two more problems, at least from Polly's perspective. The first was that she couldn't sit still in front of a screen for very long. The 'electronic babysitter' simply didn't work on her; she would sit for twenty minutes or so, and then she would be off playing with her toys again or getting into things she shouldn't, pretending she was a fairy princess of a kingdom that you could only get to through a mouse-hole in a closet, because that's where the interdimensional teleporter was. (She actually knew those words. At least her birth father, along with her mother, had encouraged her to read.)

The second was that, after her father had enjoyed making her cry, some very unpleasant experiences in school, and finally maltreatment and abandonment by her stepfather, she had developed a powerful, nearly phobic aversion to all males, everywhere, period, even the stepbrother that Hunter had brought with him and then left behind.

Polly's efforts to bring the children closer together had ended in utter failure, and Stephen didn't normally want to talk to her, either. He wasn't too surly, but he was withdrawn, playing his computer games and not really making a lot of friends. It didn't help that he had a double whammy: a congenitally small bladder along with a night-time bladder control problem. The combination had led to him still needing to wear Pull-Ups to bed at the age of ten ("Don't call them 'incontinence briefs', just call them what they are!" he had once snapped at her), a fact that his mother would never make fun of him for. Well, she thought of him as her child, at least. She couldn't just abandon the boy the way his father had.

Six months. That rat bastard Hunter had lasted six months with her, six months of a whirlwind romance and false promises. And then one day, he had simply up and left, draining the family's bank accounts - everything she had - and absconding to Mexico to chase an underage girl. He'd even lied about having paid the bills, concealing collection notices from her. There was no justification, no explanation. She had simply found out that he'd done it after her debit card had come back declined and she could no longer get a hold of him. That call with that federal officer had been something she would always remember. She had gotten a divorce with him in absentia, won full custody of Stephen along with child support, had legal claim over nearly all his assets - but it hadn't mattered. The money was gone, and so was he. (The IRS, among other agencies, was looking for him. Polly didn't think they'd have much luck.)

Polly despised her ex-husband. Nicole feared him. But Stephen hated the man with a fiery rage, for all the times he lied, he promised, he cheated his son out of everything from simple toys to basic decency, for constantly insulting him for his uncontrollable bedwetting, mocking him to his face every time he had to put on a pull-up before he went to bed. A few weeks after Hunter had run off, leaving the boy with his stepmother and stepsister without so much as a goodbye, Polly had asked the boy what he'd want to say to his father. 'I wouldn't say anything,' Stephen had spat out. 'I'd already be stabbing him as soon as he walked in the door.' The boy needed a psychiatrist, but all three of them did, and that was something Polly couldn't have afforded even before her ex-husband had run away with her savings. At least he at least seemed to appreciate her for still taking care of him, and he did his share of the chores even though he despised them.

Their living situation could have been worse, too. The state welfare office had offered, oh so generously, to set her up with some housing before the bank was due to evict her even despite the pandemic. Section 8, of course. The local schools? Well, they're not the best in the state, but classes will still be held online so there's no risk of bullying or anything like that. Besides, beggars can't be choosers, after all. The audible gunfire? The junkies and the open-air drug markets? Not really a problem, the official had promised her. Overblown. Compared to the other nearby districts, it's really a safe neighborhood. The riots will be over soon, that's nothing to worry about. Really.

Once her dying mother had told her that she could have her share of her inheritance early, an old house far from where she was currently living and had intended to sell, she got the hell out of that city with everything that would fit in her car - she sold the rest, she couldn't afford to store it and there was no room where they were going - and never looked back.

Even still, she was barely able to live in that house, out there in a declining small town at the end of a curving street, next to questionably owned forests and unused train tracks and a farm that had run entirely to seed, full of vintage furniture and an attic that had a lot of very old stuff from her mother's or possibly grandmother's day. Her sister was in another state, taking care of the deeply ailing woman, and fortunately Polly's job had allowed her to work from home for some time, so her manager was supportive when Polly left her cozy suburb and moved out there, to that rickety old house with barely functional plumbing and barely enough space for two children, the younger of which was lost in her own imagination and the other of which wasn't even related to her.

Fortunately, her hyperactive daughter was in her room playing with her toys, but now the boy was bouncing a ball around the house. It was super soft, he promised. It wouldn't break anything. There wasn't anything he could knock over. He just liked making it bounce around the solid walls.

CRASH!!!

Oh, no.

[Jacqueline]

Polly was interrupted from her work - fortunately, it was still lunchtime according to her schedule - and ran out in shock. Her mother's expensive secretary was pitched on its side, the various collectibles in it surely broken, Stephen standing near it with a guilty expression. Nicole rushed out of her room, clutching a doll, and looked horrified, crying a bit.

"Are you all right?" Polly asked. God help her if she had to take the boy to the hospital. She didn't have Medicaid in her new state yet. Insurance? Don't make her laugh.

"I'm sorry..." Stephen started to cry as she checked him. There were no bruises on his arms and legs, and he was standing up. "The ball went on top of it and I went to get it and then the whole thing just fell over!"

Polly tried to make herself not scream. It was all too much. "I was going to sell that," she said. "God, Stephen, that was worth four hundred dollars, I could have gotten another two hundred for the stuff in there. I told you to be careful with this stuff, and now you're climbing on things?!"

"I didn't think it would just fall over! It was an accident!"

She took a breath, trying to force herself to calm down and think. He'd cost her, cost their family, just having to take care of him was costing her in many ways, but she couldn't blame him for that. She just needed this kind of thing to stop. She couldn't deal with both of them like this, not on top of everything else.

"Stephen, it was an accident," she said slowly and carefully, half-formed ideas coalescing in her mind. "You made a mistake, and there will be consequences. They won't be terrible consequences, but it will depend on you." He nodded, and she spied her daughter coming closer. "Nicole, stay away from that secretary right now! There's broken glass!" The little girl jumped back from it like the broken glass was going to jump out and get her. "We can discuss how you can pay for it after we clean this up." They spent fifteen minutes pushing the secretary back up onto its legs - it was still usable despite the large crack on its side - and carefully picking broken glass out of the soft carpet.

As they worked together, him feeling guiltier by the minute and her tired mind working frantically to find a way to put an end to this kind of thing, she remembered some of the things her mother had stashed away in the attic, and her idea finished forming. No, she couldn't do that to him. Not without giving him a real choice. "Listen to me, very carefully. I'm very angry with you right now, but I'm going to give you some choices. There's different ways you can pay for this." He listened, tears in his eyes. "There's a lot of small farms around here and I'm sure the older people who own them can use the help. Yes, it'll be legal. And they might be a little bit strict, but you'll be outside." He shook his head furiously. He really didn't want to be subjected to that, and she felt guilty for just suggesting it for a ten-year-old.

"There's another choice. I make you into a girl for three weeks." He looked up at her in surprise. "You play with your little sister from noon to four on weekdays." She said those last six words with emphasis, but he didn't pick up on it. "I found some dresses in the attic and you'll be wearing them all day, except when you're asleep or in the tub," Polly told him. "But you only have to play with her for that time. You can keep playing your video games for the rest of the time and I won't disturb you. No one will know, it'll be over before school starts. If anyone finds out and it's not your fault, I'm calling this off and paying you back for it," Polly promised. "Somehow." He stared at her in something like shock. This was obviously the option she wanted him to pick. She wanted to turn him into a girl! "If you're very nice to her and you want to be a boy for the weekend, we can skip a day or two and make the days up later."

He didn't know how to reply. "If you don't like that, you could do my share of the chores every day until Christmas instead," Polly suggested. She had already devised a schedule that made him do half the work in the household, except for some things that he was too young for. Twice the vacuuming, twice the dishwashing, twice the garbage taking out, twice all the mopping and cleaning he was already doing. He already grudgingly did his share. Twice was too much, especially for four whole months!

He was emotionally overwhelmed with guilt and fear, and he started to sniffle a bit. "I wish I could just fix everything," he said.

"I wish that too, Stephen. But that's not an option here. If you want other choices, I could ground you, no computer, for three weeks." That really wasn't an option he wanted at all. Not only would he lose his one connection to what he thought of as the real world, his game's special event would end before then, and his character would be forever underpowered, forever behind the curve, if he did that. "Or give you a firm spanking, every single day, for two months." He liked that idea even less. "Or, if you really don't like all of those, I can take you right down to the department of family services and say that I can no longer take care of you. I don't want to do that. Please don't make me have to."

"That's all... you just want to turn me into a girl over a piece of furniture!"

Polly shook her head and gestured to Nicole. She bent down a bit to look him in the eye. "It's not me who wants to do it," she said very quietly. She spoke slowly and carefully. "Weekdays, noon to four. Do you understand?" Suddenly, Stephen did understand. Those were the busiest hours for her job, the time when she least wanted her daughter, or him, pestering her. Polly (he still had reservations about calling her 'Mom') wasn't doing this to humiliate him or because she thought that putting him in a dress would change his behavior. She was doing it because her daughter would never accept playing with a boy, and the girl needed to be kept out of her mother's hair.

[Jacqueline]

"Can't I just be a girl for four hours a day?"

"It'd be less real for her," Polly whispered to him. "You know how she is." That was half the reason. The other half was that she didn't want to make him want to skimp on the playtime just so he could take his dress off early.

Stephen fretted. He was actually more worried about playing with a hyperactive seven-year-old for four hours a day than simply wearing a dress where no one else would see him. His bedwetting secret was worse, and Polly and Nicole already knew that one. Still, though, to become a girl for three weeks? 'I'll just do the chores', he almost said, but he looked past his stepmother and caught a pleading, almost desperate look in Nicole's eyes. Despite her enormous repulsion for boys, he couldn't hate her for it. She was too little, too innocent, too hurt. They were fellow-travelers, all three of them, in betrayal and abuse and heartbreak, and he knew that neither Polly nor Nicole would make fun of him for this, any more than they did for his bedwetting problem. He was still conflicted when Polly pulled out her strongest weapon: "Think of what your father would say."

Stephen barked out a single "Hah!" Dad would despise him for it, he knew, despise him even more than he despised the boy's bedwetting problem. Stephen had a brief, vivid visualization of his angry, sneering father somehow, for some reason, coming to this extremely out-of-the-way home at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere, asking why he wanted to wear a dress instead of work like a man. He would belittle the boy for his weakness, call him a baby and a queer and a pansy and a lot of other things, and, finally, tell him that he wasn't his son anymore.

But to that last, Stephen had only one word: GOOD!

And then he would take the very longest and sharpest of the knives in the cutlery set and gut the lying bastard like a fish!

He still wanted to know what he was getting into. "Can I see the dresses first?" he asked quietly.

"They're in the attic. I'll be right back." She pulled on the attic's string, dislodged the ladder - to Stephen's eyes, none of this looked safe - and was back quickly, holding a cardboard box covered with dust. Stephen sneezed loudly. Nicole was just watching in fascination, still holding her doll. Stephen never had any idea what the girl was thinking.

"Okay. Let's start with this. Dress, socks, shoes, and ribbon, just to complete the outfit. We're going to try it all on, but it's still summer, you won't have to wear all this every day. Just the dress, like your sister wears, and just your underwear or your pull-ups if you want. And don't complain, if you want to just give up and do the chores instead, at any point, you can just say so. Nicole, we'll be right back." The little girl sat on the couch, waiting for her mother and Stephen to be done, imagining what the new girl would be like.

Stephen examined the dress carefully before he let Polly put it on him. He was surprised that he wasn't surprised. If someone had asked him to describe what a dress looked like, he would have described precisely that. It had no buttons or fasteners and was A-line in cut, with a long light green skirt that had faded over the decades and slightly puffed sleeves that were tied off with ribbons.

"All right, Stephen, strip down to your underwear, and the only time I want to hear a complaint is if something is scratchy or too tight or something like that," she said quietly. She wasn't about to make him wear panties; it felt too perverted to even ask. "If you really don't want to do this, just tell me that you'd rather do chores and we can end this right here. If you want to say that later, we can end this then, too." Her anger subsiding, she was already feeling guilty about doing this to him. She couldn't leave him with no way out. He'd hate her, if he didn't secretly hate her already, and might start seeking revenge, and their position was bad enough as it was. If he were to tell pretty much anyone in this conservative, rural area that she was putting her ten-year-old stepson in a dress, she'd be in doo-doo up to her eyeballs. And God, if he took it out on Nicole...

But he didn't have any hatred or anger in his expression. He was still feeling tremendous guilt over having smashed the secretary and was upset at being punished for it, but he quietly let her put him in the dress. The only time he spoke up, saying something felt funny, was when she started tying the ribbons around his sleeves.

"They're not too tight, are they?" She'd made them fairly loose.

"No, they're just weird. It's almost like... wearing a shirt neck on my arms."

She smiled. "You got used to shirt necks, didn't you? There's nothing scratchy, is there?" She was worried about the lacing.

"No, it's all really soft."

"Okay. Ribbon, socks, and shoes left, and again, we can take them off once she's seen them." She tied a simple, single faded lime green ribbon in his hair, just slightly off-center, and smiled gently. He really did look very cute, but she was not foolish enough to say that to his face. He pulled up the socks and she lightly tied them with the faded lime green ribbons, just below his knees. The worn leather flats, with hard soles, fit him well, and the buckled straps were comfortable. "Okay. If Nicole doesn't accept you looking like this, I'll make everything a lot easier on you just for trying."

[Jacqueline]

But Nicole did accept her new sister, cheering and squealing giddily as soon as she saw Stephen all dressed up. 'No,' Stephen realized. 'She doesn't see me, she sees a girl.' "What's her name?" Nicole asked giddily.

Polly realized what she'd forgotten. "Well, we haven't given her one yet. Why don't you name her?" she asked to Stephen's shock. "It can't be too childish or silly, and it can't be Stephanie or anything like it," she continued to his relief. "We don't want to give any hints."

The girl already had an idea. "Margaret!"

Polly had no idea where she got the name from and didn't ask. "That's a perfectly good name, Nicole. Okay, Margaret. It's almost exactly noon, I need to get back to work. Nicole, you be super nice to your new sister. No rough-housing, no throwing things, and no breaking anything, we've already had enough of that." she told them firmly. "And Margaret, just let her play the way she wants. Try to keep up."

After taking off his shoes and socks, Stephen very quickly learned what 'try to keep up' meant. He had worried that maybe Nicole, playing with her new gift, would try to force him into dressup and tea parties, treating him like a new doll. Instead, the little girl didn't even acknowledge that he had ever been a boy; rather, she played what he could only describe as the girly version of Calvinball, a purely random mishmash of ponies and rainbows and adventures. Cowgirls in outer space. He tried to follow where he thought she was going and simply couldn't, and eventually he stopped trying. If she said that Margie could fly on one imaginary planet but not another, for reasons he couldn't fathom, then that's how it was. If Rapunzel from Tangled was going to tie up the nasty Garglers with her hair on the planet of Avalon, where she got to by opening a magic door in her spaceship, then that's what happened, and it was Margie's job to play along. Occasionally, Stephen got in a few words, trying to keep continuity if not plausibility, which only fueled the little girl's imagination further.

He missed a lot of cues, but at least she didn't tell him that he wasn't playing right, and eventually he got through it all. Four straight hours, unceasing! At least the girl seemed tired out at the end of it, and so was he, and all he wanted to do by the end of that was play some Fortnite Save the World and level up in the seasonal event. Polly, unlike his shithead father, kept her side of bargains, and she let him play as promised.

He was nearly through three games, headphones on, when his mother gently tapped him on the shoulder. Stephen let his headphones dangle, although most of his focus was still on the screen. The fight was almost over, and the traps were taking care of most of the enemies, but he still had to be careful. "Was the dress comfortable all day?" she asked him lightly. Except for the sleeves, which still felt slightly weird if he thought about it, it had been just like wearing a long shirt. He didn't want to admit it, and she knew it. "Is it getting in your way at all?" He lightly shook his head. "That's what I thought. So, how was playing with your little sister? She told me you were a lot like a doll, just sitting there a lot."

"I tried to play along with her, I just didn't know what to do, so we just did whatever. She was just... all over the place, everything at once. It was like a really weird dream. Four whole hours, she didn't stop. I really tried, I swear!" He was still mentally exhausted from it.

Polly nodded, patting him gently. "I know you tried your best. That's just how she is and how she'll be until she grows out of it. But that's not the important part right now. The important part is, she didn't complain about you halfway through. She didn't run to me in the middle of my work and start yelling about how horrible you were or how you wouldn't play with her or about something she made up." Her voice grew serious. "You made the right choice, Stephen. If she would have interrupted me today, I think I might have lost my job."

"So you're thanking me for smashing the furniture?"

Polly laughed. "Don't push it. C'mon. I see it says 'Victory' on your screen. I made spaghetti and meatballs, just for you." Stephen perked up. Nicole disliked being served too much spaghetti - it bloated her up and made her feel full way too fast - but he could wolf it down. So, she got a little bowl with fruit on the side while he got plenty of his favorite food, and both of them got the kinds of vegetables they could eat. (There was no such thing as dessert in Polly's household. It wasn't that she didn't want to give it, it was just that sugar before bed was a very bad idea for Nicole.)

Nicole moved her chair right next to her big sister's when dinner started, treating Margie as if they had always been sisters, and Stephen wondered if the little girl thought that she could actually, physically transform him with the power of her imagination. He chuckled to himself at the idea. If she really could do a thing like that, his father would have suffered multiple, hideous, transformative fates in a row before finally dying in some horrifically ridiculous cartoon way. (If he could have actually made that trade, turning into a prissy, delicate girl at the mercy of her super-imaginative little sister in order to cause his father to suffer a comically brutal end, he would have taken the offer in a heartbeat.)

Polly noticed that Nicole actually listened to Margie in a way that she had never listened to her own mother. When Margie twirled the spaghetti around her fork, showing Nicole how to eat it instead of getting it everywhere, Nicole gladly imitated her big sister. Nicole would have shrank back if her mother had tried to wipe her face, but she let Margie do it without complaint.

It was only after Stephen had finished his dinner that Polly noticed that the ribbon was still in his hair.

[babycakes]

A really intriguing start to what promises to be a really interesting story.  Always love your initially reluctant but begrudgingly willing protagonists with usually a heart of gold or at least strong empathy.

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline, your descriptive manner in which you paint the pictures of the participants in your stories is amazing.  You weave your plot convincingly and put your readers in the middle of your story, right along with the people in your story.  You have done another masterful story and it is much appreciated.  Keep up the fantastic work.
 8)

[Andlat]

You have this remarkable skill for crafting rich, detailed worlds for your characters to live in. It really helps make them feel like actual people, along with the fact that this particular scenario seems restrained and grounded in interesting ways.