Mistakes and Choices

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline, That was a fun chapter.  I think that Margaret is starting to like her new lifestyle.  She had fun out in the yard with Nicole, pushing her on the swing and playing freeze ray.  The old geezer spied Margaret while she was pushing the lawnmower and because of his dementia, thought she was a girl from his past. 

Great chapter and I am sitting on the edge of my chair waiting for the next chapter. :D

[Jacqueline]

The rain started to get harsh quickly, and Polly turned her computer off and even unplugged it, not trusting any of the equipment to save it from a lightning strike, and told Margaret to do the same; she agreed with the risk and did as she was told without complaint. Stephen was certainly not going to risk losing his computer to a power surge, and besides, Nicole needed her big sister's love and attention, as she was quietly rocking back and forth on her bed, curled up into a ball. The wind and rain were audible through the windows, and lightning flashes could be seen through the window, low rumblings following them in the distance.

"It's okay, Nicole," Margaret soothed her little sister with, climbing on her bed next to her. The girls had taken off their shoes but were still wearing their socks. "It's just a storm. You've been through storms before."

"Not in here," Nicole said. The girl was right; this was the first serious thunderstorm that had passed overhead since they'd moved in. The walls were considerably thinner, and everything was much noisier. There was definitely a draft coming from somewhere, too.

"This house has seen lots of storms before this one," Margaret reminded her little sister. "Get up for just a little bit." Nicole did, and Margie got up and pulled the pink Dora the Explorer blanket off the bed, Nicole sat down next to her again, and Margie draped it over both of them.

KA-POW!!

The windows rumbled, and the girls even felt the bed shake. Nicole started crying, and Margaret held her little sister safe. Polly came in to check on them. "Hey, Mom, does this place have a storm cellar?" Margaret asked.

"There's a basement, but I wouldn't take her down there, it's just like the garage. We'll have to clean it out before we can use it. I wish I'd done that earlier," Polly replied. It was difficult to hear her, as sounded like something was beating on the house, a loud crackling of solid objects bouncing off the roof.

"What's thaaaat?!" Nicole wailed.

"It's just hail, honey," Polly replied, looking out the window - it was very dark - and then getting under the Dora blanket herself to sit on the other side of her daughter. "It's only the size of golf balls." She laughed a bit at herself. Only! Only the size of golf balls! She was just glad this place had a garage. Car repair was not something she could have afforded at the moment. "All the windows are closed, everything's as sealed as it can be. This place actually used to have shutters a long time ago, but there's newer windows, it should be okay. Nicole, you'll be fine. The storm can't come in here. It's just a hailstorm, not a tornado or anything like that."

A little bit later, lightning struck nearby again, but this time, there was a THUNK before the POW, and the old wooden lamp that Nicole had by her bed instantly shut off. The surge had hit them before the sound had reached them. Nicole, still huddled between her mother and big sister, started whimpering faintly.

"Glad I unplugged my computer," Stephen said, hoping very strongly that the power would come right back on. But, as Nicole sat there shivering in fear even with her mother and big sis next to her calming her down, quite a lot of minutes passed, thunder still booming and the hail gradually lessening. "Do you think we're getting the electricity back?"

"The breaker flipped," Polly told her children. "I have to find it and turn it back on, and I'm not doing that until the storm passes. I think, at least I hope, that there's no real damage." She smiled a bit. "I'm just glad we have a gas stove, if this stays off, we might have to eat what's in the fridge before it goes bad." It wasn't just veggies; there was chicken in the freezer that she'd planned on having ready for dinner.

"It's too bad the water heater suc-ks," Stephen said before realizing his mistake. 'suc-ks' wasn't something that a girl like Margie said. Nicole had her fingers in her ears anyway. "What's this place going to be like in the winter?"

"Don't even talk about that right now," Polly said. "There's a lot of things we need to get looked at first, but hopefully, our finances will be stable by then. At least there aren't any leaks, knock on wood." She looked at the ceiling. "Gas or water."

They sat there together for fifteen more minutes or so, before the hail let up and the rumbling faded off and all they were left with was a moderate shower. Polly went to go find and reset the breaker, and Margie looked down at her still terrified sister. "It's all over now, it's just rain now," Margie said gently. "Unicorn Town is safe. We built a storm shield, remember? That storm can't hurt us."

"Yeah," Nicole said, smiling slightly. For her to just say 'Yeah', and not go off on an imagination-fueled tangent, meant that she had really been scared. "I gotta go pee!"

"Then go, you don't need to ask permission!" Margie replied immediately, and the little girl jumped off the bed and rushed to the bathroom. Stephen knew very well what having a full bladder was like. The lamp came back a few seconds later, and Polly came back in. "Where's Nicole?" she asked loudly and immediately, startled at not seeing her.

"I'm peeing, Mom!" Nicole shouted from the bathroom, and Polly sighed in relief.

"Just checking!" Polly shouted back. "I'm so wound up, too," she said quietly. "God, Stephen, when you reminded me of the winter... if we can't get this place ready for it, we might have to move out, it really won't be livable. I've applied to every government agency I can, we got that call earlier, and I still don't know what's going to happen. Do you see why I was so upset at you about the secretary? We need every dollar we can get." He just nodded quietly. "And now I'm late for work. They should understand, though. Please, just keep her occupied until dinnertime." Nicole had left the bathroom then, proudly proclaiming that she was done and that she'd washed her hands. (There was a stepstool by the sink for precisely that purpose.)

It did not take very long at all for Nicole, terrified of storms, to become mighty Sun Princess Nicole, with Princess Celestia as her noble steed. Unicorn Town, and the whole planet, would never suffer the terrible fury of lightning again, as the whole planet was to have a whole lot of lightning rods that went all the way into the stratosphere (and she actually knew the word 'stratosphere'). Henceforth, all plants were to be watered, and rivers filled, by gentle drizzles (and snowmelt, Margie reminded her), on every planet, everywhere, ever. So proclaimed Sun Princess Nicole!

But, Margie reminded her (cribbing unrepentantly from his favorite game), the dreaded Storm King was not happy about that, and she retrieved an old Voltron toy from Stephen's bedroom to play the part. He summoned lots of minions (the Lego people, the only parts that Nicole hadn't used up) to do his evil bidding, but Sun Princess Nicole vanquished (another word she knew) them all with one blast of Princess Celestia's horn, blasting off the Storm King's arms and legs! (It was a Voltron toy, after all.) But Thor, God of Thunder, wasn't happy with that either, so...

Sun Princess Nicole had just finished making a mockery out of Marvel Comics when Polly came in and said it was time for dinner. She'd cooked the chicken very well, and there was even some sauce to go with it, and Nicole and her big sister ate together as usual. Stephen was starting to feel a bit weird. He wasn't just wearing a dress, as he thought this was going to be like; he'd actually spent pretty much all day doing things as a girl. But Nicole was finally starting to get tired out and just wanted to read, and so he thankfully retired to his room as well and FLYING fuc-kGOBLINS HIS COMPUTER WOULD NOT START.

[Jacqueline]

Oh. Right. He'd unplugged it to keep it from being fried. He had never been more relieved to hear the Windows bootup sound.

Stephen had just come out of the bathroom after a few games when Polly came up to him, following him into his room. "Stephen, I'd like to make you an offer," she said quietly. "Don't worry, Nicole's asleep." That was unsurprising. She was a little dervish of creative mania when she was awake, but she woke up late and went to bed early.

"What is it?" Something about the look on her face told him it was going to be something he might not like.

"I should have told you this much earlier, I know, I wanted to give you time to get used to this first. I have a friend coming over tomorrow, and she has a couple of daughters, one and two years older than Nicole, and I'm worried about them picking on her, even if they don't mean to."

Stephen understood what she was going for and why she wanted to do this, but just the idea... "And you want Margaret to be there with her," he said, trying to stay unemotional and failing. She actually wanted him to play a girl in front of other girls, girls who certainly did not think the way Nicole did. Anxiety started flowing into him, and he firmly gripped the arms of his chair, and Polly didn't pick up on it.

"Please, Stephen? You can skip tomorrow if you want and I'll push it back a day, but I'll take four days off the end of this if you do this for us. This is the last time I'm going to see Alice in person for a very long time, possibly ever, and if Nicole doesn't have an older girl there to protect her, I'd have to do it and that'd take all my attention. They've never seen a picture of you within the last few years, I'll tell them you're my niece. You're just ten years old, no one will be able to tell you're a boy just by looking at you."

Stephen felt a deep, overwhelming swell of envy and insult, and not just from the last sentence. If he had any friends willing to visit this old, rickety house off in the corner of this dilapidated, godforsaken wreck of a town - he didn't think any candidates even existed within fifty miles - his stepmother would never have even considered putting him in a dress to begin with. This was on top of the weird, confusing feelings he was getting, the strange sensations of enjoyment, the amount of time he had been spending as Margie, and abruptly, he decided that he just couldn't, shouldn't take it. What was he doing? What was he letting be done to him? He felt a stab of panic and the words "I quit! I can't do this anymore, just give me the chores!" were out of his mouth before he even realized he was saying them. He barely retained enough self-control not to speak them loud enough to wake up Nicole.

"Stephen, do you really..."

He pulled the ribbon out of his hair and the dress over his head, pushing his arms out of the ribbon-tied sleeves, tossing it all aside onto his bed. "I said I quit, Polly, and if you try to make me, I'll tell everybody, your job, your friend, and her daughters too!" Polly would never have tried to make him. She had never intended to get any leverage over him by dressing him up; it was entirely the other way around, and they both knew it. If he wanted to get her in serious trouble, he could. If he wanted to ruin everything for Nicole and traumatize her further, he wouldn't even have to try very hard. "Nobody'd ever come way out here to get that stupid secretary anyway! The only thing I'm sorry for is I ever dressed up like a girl!" His hands were shaking, and tears welled up in his eyes. He didn't know why he was crying, and in emotional pain and rage he said the first scarcely-formed thought that came to mind. "I wish Dad had taken me with him." His mind was in complete chaos, and he suddenly had the idea that maybe if he'd impressed the man more, if he were stronger and more manly and didn't need to wear fuc-king Pull-Ups to bed, then his father might have brought him along to Mexico and that, if Stephen were there, the two of them would never have been found.

Polly knew he didn't really mean that but refrained from saying so. She realized her mistake. She'd talked about herself, about what she needed, about her friend coming over when he had no real friends at all. God, had she even suggested before that she might ground him from the computer for three weeks? The Internet was about all he had left. Then she realized another mistake: how on earth was she going to tell Nicole that Margaret wasn't going to play with her anymore? Even if he hadn't done this just then, it was all going to end in three weeks (she was surprised she got him to agree even to that), and the little girl wasn't going to grow up enough before then. Polly had been pushing that back as 'a problem for later', making the all-too-common mistake of forgetting that later eventually shows up.

She took a small breath. "Do you want to know what Nicole was talking about the whole time you were mowing the lawn today, before I got that call?"

"Let me guess, she talked about Margaret?"

"She couldn't stop. She loves you."

"No, she loves someone that she should know doesn't even exist! You need to get her looked at!" He certainly didn't have such a tenuous grasp on reality when he was in second grade.

"We all need to be looked at, Stephen, all three of us. But I still don't have the money for that and probably won't for a very long time." He was sharply reminded of why he hated his father and that he really would not have wanted to go with him, and he squinted his eyes and pursed his lips angrily. The tears were flowing freely now. He hadn't been anywhere near this upset even after breaking the secretary, she realized, and she almost moved to hug him, but he would probably not have taken it well. She wanted to remind him how much fun he'd apparently had playing with Nicole, but that would have been an even worse decision. He needed time to himself. "I'm sorry. I pushed you too far. Play your game and get a good night's sleep, and if you're still serious about this in the morning, I'll pack these all back up and give you your chores and we'll never talk about this again." She was starting to think that this whole thing was a mistake. Surely there was some other way to keep Nicole occupied.

"Okay," he said, shaking and crying. Polly left the room and he looked at the dress on his bed, torn between the subtle desire to put it back on and the hot urge to rip it in half. He was at least thankful that Polly had backed off and given him time and space. If she had pushed him or suggested that she was going to punish him with worse things than chores, he really would have woken up Nicole and the results would not have been pleasant at all for anyone.

He wiped his tears on his arm, not wanting to admit to himself that he had been crying, and returned to his game. One of the benefits he got of having played STW for a year and a half - he'd gotten it back when his parents had been together and his real mom hadn't yet had enough of his father's steadily increasing bullshit - was that he'd almost entirely maxed himself out (except for the new event) and so could spend his daily trickle of earned V-Bucks on cosmetic items instead of power he didn't need. (He'd wanted to turn them back into real money, but of course it didn't work like that.) The daily turnover had happened, and he went to check the store. One of the items for sale was the Starlie skin, a pink-haired woman who wore one of the girliest outfits in the game.

He stared at it for a bit and decided, why not? It was just a game after all, everybody had whatever usernames they made up, nobody knew or even cared who anybody else was (getting people to care about you was the difficult part, and he didn't want to become a streamer). The last time he'd seen this skin, its player had dominated the mission with hover turrets while dancing Star Power (a dance he already had) almost the whole time. He was fairly sure that most of the people running around in the Harley Quinn skins were boys. He bought the skin and played a couple of games with it, safe behind a shield of pure anonymity.

But was that who he really wanted to be? A boy in a dress?

Unsure of himself, he finally stopped playing and curled up in his bed to sleep.

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline,  two masterful chapters that had me scared of that storm.  Poor Nicole needed her big sister to comfort her during the worst part of it.  Nicole and Margie played until dinner was ready.  It also sounds like the house they are in is in pretty bad shape.  I can't wait for the next chapters.  They will be good.
 :D

[Jacqueline]

Stephen's dad took him to Mexico, and he could tell it was Mexico from the deserts and Southwestern-style square buildings everywhere. Polly and Nicole stared at them at a faraway shore, and Hunter promised to take his boy to every bar and opium den in the country. "We'll make a man out of you yet," Hunter said, his fist clenched, sadism in his look. "Go talk to that pirate, get some of his rum," he said, pointing to a pirate ship off the coast.

Stephen was afraid, but the pirate looked like a cross between every pirate he'd ever seen in media, and there was a smile on his swarthy, weather-beaten face under his bright red cap with a skull and crossbones on it. The pirate looked at Stephen and his father, and with a sneer, he drew his cutlass. But then the pirate flipped the cutlass over in his hand, handing it to Stephen hilt-first. "Think ye'll be needin' this, lassie," he said, chuckling, and Stephen - Margie - looked down at the laces of the seventeenth-century dress she was wearing.

"Did he just call you..." her father started, but Margie had already leapt up, skirts fluttering, and clove through Hunter's neck with one quick slash. A yellow, eight-digit number appeared over his head, his eyes turned into large X's, and he disintegrated into nothing.

Stephen woke up early - and dry again, thank God - and the sound of the shower through the weak walls kept Polly awake as well, as she hadn't enjoyed a particularly restful night either. Eventually, the water stopped running, and after a lot of toweling (he'd already brushed his teeth), the door opened, and Stephen was surprised to see Polly standing there, especially since all he had on was the Pull-Up he'd walked in with.

"Stephen, we need to talk for a little bit," she told him as lightly as she could, and he went into his room and sat down on his swivelchair, expecting some kind of lecture and having no idea what it would be. He was worried, had woken up that way, but tried to calm down. She had been nice last night; she wasn't going to give him any nasty surprise this morning, was she?

"Are you going to stop or continue with our arrangement?" Polly asked simply, and he relaxed just a bit.

He had been thinking about it all morning, of course, as he showered. He was still conflicted over if this was who he was, how much time he wanted to spend as Margie, whether he should be doing this at all. But no matter how he looked at it, there was one overriding constant, one person who just did not deserve to suffer. "I'll do it, Mom, but I'm not doing it for you," he said, still a little upset. She was just glad he was calling her Mom again. "I can't make Nicole cry today. There's two other girls coming over and they'd both see her crying if Margie went away now. Is it really just two girls and no boys?"

"Two girls and no boys," his mother said affirmatively.

He nodded. The idea of being Margaret in front of a boy, especially an older boy, terrified him to the core, and if there were a boy around his age, Stephen would want to also be a boy anyway, just to play with him and so keep him away from Nicole. "It's not going to be a sleepover or anything like that, is it?" he asked.

Polly smiled and shook her head. "I actually asked if they wanted to do that, but their flight leaves at 7 AM and their hotel is three hours away. They're going to be tired as it is. Alice is not going to go to bed early and then wake her daughters up in the middle of the night to drive in the dark for three hours." Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she leaned down. "I'm sorry for last night. I was being very selfish. I'm not mad at you for saying those things, you were angry and hurt. Thank you for doing this for her." He just nodded, not knowing what to say. "Today, I'm going to ask you to dress up as girly as possible, you'll look as little like a boy as I can make you. They'll probably think you're a bit weird, but you can tell them you dressed up because your little cousin was having friends over. For girls that age, it's not as strange as it looks."

"Girly with makeup and nail polish?" Stephen asked. The idea was a bit off-putting. He just didn't like the idea of goop on him, especially his face.

"Oh, good lord, no. Not at your age." Especially after last night, she would absolutely not tell him that his prepubescent natural features were enough to easily pass as a girl without assistance. The only thing that might give him away was his still relatively short hair, as Hunter had insisted on short haircuts throughout the boy's life, but he hadn't had one since the man had left them and she was certain that the bows would more than make up for it. "Besides, I haven't worn makeup or nail polish since your father left us, and the stuff in the attic, I wouldn't put on anyone." It certainly hadn't been tested to modern standards when it was made, and it had been sitting around up there for more than half a century at least. She had no idea what those chemicals stored for that long in those conditions would turn into, and she did not care to find out. She would sell the boxes to collectors when she found the time. "All I'll have for you for our arrangement is clothing. Just stay the way you are. I'll be right back."

It took over five minutes of rummaging, Nicole waking up and going to the bathroom herself, before Polly returned with a packed box. "Before we begin, if you don't feel comfortable with wearing any of this in front of those girls, if you think it'll be too much, just say so and we can work something out," she said as soon as she entered. She didn't want him freaking out again, but what she was most afraid of was that he'd freak out in the middle of it. Her beginning things that way made him a little bit worried, but he waited for her to show him what was in there.

"The first thing we should discuss is underwear. Given the way some of this stuff is, it might or might not be a little bit tricky going to the bathroom," Polly said delicately, and Stephen grasped her intentions.

"You want me to stay in my pull-up."

"I think it would be the most prudent decision, yes. Stephen, believe me, with the rest of this, they are not going to see it unless they're looking straight between your legs. Which is very bad etiquette, especially for girls." He nodded in acquiescence. He didn't want to have to stay in the bathroom too long and leave Nicole alone, and he certainly didn't want to need to ask for help. He also didn't know what, if anything, Polly had ever told her friend about his bladder problems.

She opened the box and held out what looked like a rather small vest. "They might know that Stephen is ten years old, so Margie will be eleven, with her birthday coming up in, oh, February." His real birthday was in November. "And an eleven-year-old girl is developing, just a little bit, in the chest area." She held out a training bra, and Stephen opened his mouth a little bit but did not complain. "Arms out, please." He held his arms out in front of him and she put the lightly padded bra on him, zipping up the front. It was a bit weird, and the padding on his chest pressed against him a bit, but it wasn't terrible.

[Jacqueline]

The frothy petticoats came next, a single white mass of nylon that extended a foot past his knees in every direction. Polly had felt the inside of it to make sure that it wasn't scratchy; perhaps it had been starched at one point, but that point was long in the past, and the nylon was soft, silky, and comfortable. Stephen, at least, didn't have any problem with it, although he did understand why having such a large mass belted around his waist might make going to the bathroom a bit more awkward than usual.

Then there was the dress, a short-sleeved white confection with pink bows down the center, pink bows around the hem of the skirt, and a big pink bow to tie in the back, right below the buttons. The only thing this dress lacked was arm ribbons. Polly wasn't sure if the dress had originally been like this or if her grandmother had added additional bows for her mother to wear, but Stephen accepted it without complaint, letting her pull it over his head and button up the back. (He could still get out of it without damaging it, she was sure. The boy could lift one arm over his head and the other behind himself and interlock his fingers.)

She added two more bows, this time in symmetrical locations on his hair, and smiled at her handiwork. The socks came next, and she was certain that additional bows must have been added at some point, as they were evenly spaced down the sides. She tied the ribbons just below his knees. "I won't ask you to keep wearing the shoes and gloves until Alice gets here, but I think you should keep the socks on. It's a bit chilly today." Stephen nodded. His feet had been a little cold. It was still August, but it was starting to feel like fall.

The shoes were black patent Mary Janes with a small heel, and Polly realized that she'd need to get on them with a leather polishing kit before he went outside with them. At least they fit him well. The gloves - with pink bows at the backs, even! - were next, and they, too, fit him well, especially since he kept his nails short.

"Is this all?" he asked.

Polly couldn't help but laugh. "Is this all! Were you expecting even more?"

"The way this was going, yeah," he admitted.

Polly let herself laugh again. God, he looked so unbelievably, unbearably cute dressed like this, but of course she was not going to tell him that. "Stephen, if you're going to say no to all this, please do so now," she said instead, quietly and very seriously.

"It's okay," he replied, smiling a bit. Polly was worried about him having a reaction to all the frilly pinkness, but that reaction wasn't coming. The ultra-girliness of the clothes really wasn't making him worry more or feel any more trepidation than he already did. From his standpoint, he'd be seen as a very girly girl no matter what of the attic stuff he wore. Being dressed up even more femininely than Margie usually did couldn't possibly be more embarrassing - and her guests would see Margie, not Stephen, so who cared? - and was actually kind of fun. He kind of wanted to dance Star Power in real life wearing this, but he couldn't do that one arm movement quite right.

"All right, then. Let's show your little sister." Nicole had finished going potty and brushing her teeth, and she waited in front of Stephen's door, waiting both for her mother to bathe her and to see what Margie was going to look like.

Polly might have had inhibitions about saying how cute he looked, but of course Nicole had none. "Margie, you're really pretty!" she squealed upon seeing her big sister, and immediately Stephen knew that he had made the right choice for the very simplest of reasons. Anything that led to Nicole crying was bad, and anything that led to her joy was good.

"Thank you, Nicole!" Margie replied happily, because of course she loved compliments from her little sister, especially about how pretty she was.

"Mommy, I want to wear my princess dress today!" Nicole asked. That pink and purple dress had originally been for Halloween, and it was made of some thin, silk-like polyester, reaching down to her upper calves. It still fit her, and she could get it off by herself but had trouble putting it on. It was very obviously a costume, but she didn't care. Princess costumes were her ideal daily wardrobe.

"I was going to suggest that anyway," Polly replied, and Nicole squealed in glee. "But let's give you your bath first. Margie, will you please put this on and cook us breakfast? Bacon and eggs with toast today, I moved the bacon to the fridge last night. And remember, low heat. Gas stove, beware the grease."

"Okay, Mom," Margie obligingly replied with a smile, putting on the offered pinafore, a frilly garment all of its own, to keep her pretty dress from being stained. "It's still going to be my eggs, though." 'Stephen's eggs' were the result of his clumsy attempts at cooking: a scrambled mess, yolk and white inevitably messed up together in bacon grease. But that was how Nicole liked them anyway.

"I never said that wearing a dress would magically make you better at cooking," Polly told Margie with a smile. "Just as long as we can eat it when you're done."

Margaret carefully set aside her gloves and shoes and then went to work, making sure her pretty socks didn't slip on the polished wooden kitchen floor. She used the last of the bacon, taking a sizable share for herself; of course she still had Stephen's boyish appetite, and there wouldn't have been much left anyway. Knowing her limits, she focused on edibility rather than presentation, although she did set out the carefully buttered toast nicely next to the bacon-and-eggs mishmash each one of them got, pouring a glass of orange juice for each of them and setting out the plates and utensils on the small table, reminding herself that Nicole loved sitting close to her big sister. Her mom and little sister still weren't done yet and she definitely wasn't going to stand around waiting, so she sat down to eat.

They came into the room together, and Margie swallowed her bite. "You're very pretty, Nicole!" she said, smiling. It was the right thing for a big sister to say to her little sister when that little sister was very nicely dressed up in her princess dress, her plastic tiara carefully tied in place by her hair.

"Thank you, big cousin!" Nicole replied, and Margie understood immediately. Polly had coached her daughter very carefully.

Polly did not begrudge Stephen's mild gluttony; the boy had always liked bacon, after all, and food was one thing they could still afford. The boy's knees weren't completely together, but she didn't say anything about that, either; there was still stuff down there along with a pull-up, after all. Instead, she complimented Margie on the taste and doneness of the food, and received warm thanks in reply. She started to harbor suspicions, then, about the idea that maybe Stephen, or something in him, was very much enjoying this on a basic level. She didn't think that he was completely a girl wanting to be let out but that there was a feminine kindness in him, a light-hearted pleasantness, something that he could never have been as a boy living with that bastard of a father. He deeply cared for Nicole, at least, and with Nicole the way she was, this was certainly the only way he would be able to show that care.

Polly was enjoying this as well. Although Stephen had never been a particularly bad boy, Margaret was much more pleasant in general, needing no prompting to be courteous and kind. Polly had no intention of telling him this, either. Suggesting that she was getting some kind of advantage from this - or, even worse, suggesting that he was better this way - was practically guaranteed to make him want to repress it. Instead, she simply enjoyed the company of her new polite daughter, especially as sweet Margie did not even need to be told to do the dishes, and she let herself be satisfied when Margie - well, Stephen - played his game ("I just want to get to level 50 before the event ends!") and Nicole went to read yet another book before Polly's friend arrived. At least the girl had plenty of those. Polly would have to pick up some more at some point.

[Jacqueline]

Alice was supposed to come around noon, and Stephen didn't want to be interrupted in the middle of one particular game (it was extremely bad manners to abandon one's teammates) - he was just a few more games away from getting to 50 anyway, and there was still plenty of time before the event ended. Margie decided it was a good idea to check in on her little sister, who was laying on her bed, staring at the back cover of her book.

"Hey Nicole, feeling nervous?" Stephen was, for obvious reasons.

"I had a bad dream," Nicole told her big sister quietly.

"A bad dream?"

"Uh huh. I dreamt that you turned back into a boy and never played with me again."

Perhaps Nicole had overheard their conversation and was pretending it was a dream; perhaps it had influenced her dreams, or she'd been awake and thought it was a dream. Or perhaps it was a complete coincidence. Margie could never ask.

"You really don't like boys, do you?" she asked instead.

"I hate them, they're mean and evil and they lie all the time, just to hurt people because it's their fun!" Polly had told Stephen, in vague, general terms, about the kind of shit that Nicole's birth father had pulled on her. Stephen didn't understand, and he still didn't, why a grown man would spend so much time and effort towards hurting a little girl.

If he were a year younger, he probably would have said something like 'We've been the same person this whole time' or 'I've just been pretending, that's all this is'. He might have even pointed out that, for someone who didn't like liars, Nicole did a heck of a lot of pretending that false things were true. Instead, he decided on "I'm not going to turn back today, little sis." Maybe he'd turn back tomorrow, just to get her used to him being Stephen, before returning to Margie for their weekday playtime. Polly would certainly not object to that.

"I'm your little cousin, not your little sister today, remember?" Nicole corrected Margie.

"Oh! That's right. How could I forget?" she replied, smiling. "I'm your eleven-year-old cousin Margaret."

"Yes, you normally live with my sister," Polly said as she walked in. "But, she sent you over here for a visit while Stephen is visiting his birth mother." Stephen laughed with no humor. That woman had made a simple deal with his father: he got the boy, she got the (much younger) girls, and she would see neither Hunter nor Stephen ever again. "Yes, I know, it's ridiculous, but Alice doesn't know that. And Margie came here from, oh, Thursday to Tuesday without a suitcase because she wanted to try the clothes in the attic instead, you don't have to do a lot of pretending this way. I'm sorry, I really should have thought of all this beforehand. They shouldn't pry terribly much. I think they'll be more interested in what life is like here rather than where my sister lives, which is really just the same old suburbia as everywhere else, and you can tell them as much. They'll be here in fifteen minutes, and I need to finish cleaning up." She was not going to ask Margie to help. Stephen was doing quite enough already.

"We should curtsey to them," Nicole suggested.

"Curtsey?" Margie asked. She didn't even know the word.

"Like this, this is a curtsey," Nicole demonstrated.

"Oh, okay," Margie agreed, practicing mimicking her little sister a few times until the little girl decided she'd gotten it right. And then Nicole had a flight of fancy about what the girls would be like, whether they'd be wearing pretty dresses like herself and her big cousin, and the polite knock on the door finally came. Margie remembered to put on her shoes and gloves, and Nicole put on her matching purple princess shoes.

Polly opened the door for Alice, who was carrying a full plastic bag, and the two women immediately embraced, with the usual stuff of "It's been so long since I've seen you!" and then introductions of their children to each other, upon which Nicole immediately curtsied and Margie followed suit, much to Alice and Polly's delight. But the other girls, eight-year-old Braelynn and nine-year-old Brandi, didn't seem particularly amused, nervously saying hello. They were dressed like normal girls from the modern world, in T-shirts and shorts and sneakers, and Margie doubted that either of them had worn a dress for many years. It hadn't occurred to Stephen nor Nicole that the visitor girls might be even more nervous than either of them. Of course they were nervous. They were out in the middle of nowhere, looking into a rickety old house, meeting other girls that were dressed very strangely and had just curtsied to them, like out of a movie!

"I know you two want to stretch your legs," Alice said to her daughters to break the ice. "Why don't you all go play outside while Polly and I take a look around?" Her daughters eagerly agreed after they went to the bathroom first. Stephen and Nicole had gotten used to it, but to them, the place even smelled old.

They were still too nervous to want to talk, so Margie offered them a chance to use the swings, which Braelynn took with Brandi following. Margie noticed that the wet, mown grass, with grass clippings left behind, was slippery under her smooth-bottomed Mary Janes. "This thing's not going to break, is it?" Brandi asked.

"It didn't when I sat on it," Margie said.

"It's as old as your dress," Braelynn pointed out.

"Braelynn!" Brandi scolded her younger sister, a thing she was used to doing. "But, Margaret, where did you find that?"

"Out of the attic, Polly's mom left her with a lot of stuff," Margie replied. "It's actually pretty nice."

"It's like this place is an even bigger time warp than Disney World," Brandi replied, pumping to get higher on the swing. At least the hinges were oiled.

Margaret laughed. "Tell me about it. At least I can still get online out here."

"I cannot wait to play Animal Crossing again," Brandi lamented. "Dad packed up our Switches!"

Braelynn slowed down her swing, stood up, and sat back down on it the other way to talk to them. "Yeah, Dad took all our stuff, and put it in a truck and hired a bunch of guys he knows instead of moving people, but they're driving all the way across the country, and he's got this whole big thing about wanting us to move in after everything's unpacked, so he sent us to Disney World."