Mistakes and Choices

[sissyboy1212]

Well done.  I am enjoying this so far. As someone who has tried (with varying degrees of success) to write a story that is both titillating and still somewhat believable, I appreciate your imagination and efforts.

Always at some point, I seem to get to the point where I just tell myself, "Well the reader has to suspend their disbelief." This story is more or less plausible enough that I haven't reached that point.

As a side note, I am a little curious about the focus on the ribbons around Margaret's arms. I wonder if that will become more significant. It is a fresh detail I don't think I've seen in these types of stories before.

Nice!

[Jacqueline]

Stephen woke up the next morning with half-remembered dreams and a strange sort of contentment from the idea that his father would never yell at him again. He also had the serious urge to urinate. That was a very good thing for him; he immediately got up, threw on a yellow dress (it was basically identical to the previous day's except for the color) because he figured that either Polly or Nicole might be miffed with him if he didn't, and ran to the bathroom, lifting the dress to pee, his unused Pull-Up at his feet. A pee day, not a wet day. Every time he managed to make it to the bathroom in the morning, he'd hoped that the problem was gone, but that dream had never come true. He brushed his teeth and took a (sadly lukewarm) shower, toweled himself off as best he could, and put the dress (and Pull-Up, to hide it) back on before leaving the room.

Nicole, wearing a bright pink nightgown decorated with pictures of princesses, was waiting for him. "Margie, you forgot your ribbon!" she pointed out on her way to go pee and brush her teeth. He sighed. He'd completely forgotten that the ribbon in his hair was still there yesterday, and he'd only noticed as he went to sleep. It was fine; the whole reason he'd forgotten about it was because he stopped feeling it, so if Nicole wanted Margie to wear it, then Margie would.

He took the small piece of yellow ribbon, started to place it in his hair, and realized that he had no idea what he was doing. Nicole had finished her morning stuff, at least the parts she could do by herself, before he figured it out, and he stepped out of his room with a guilty expression. "Nicole, could you help?" he asked quietly, stooping down so she could tie it.

"Mom!" Nicole yelled instead. "Margie needs help with her ribbons!" The little girl looked up at her big sister and smiled, as if Nicole had just done her a big favor.

"Nicole, you woke her up!" Margaret quietly admonished her little sister as their mother's door opened.

"I'm already awake," Polly said, still in her nightgown. The toilet flush had woke her up, and the shower had kept her awake. The house really did have terribly thin walls, and she was grateful that both she and Stephen had headphones for their computers. "Let's take a look at these ribbons and then let's worry about you," she told her little daughter.

Margaret held out the ribbon. "It's just like tying your shoes," Polly told her, tying it into her hair. "Loop it around this tuft of hair here, cross the ends over, tie the bow. You can practice, it won't take you long to get the hang of it."

"So how do I do the sleeves myself?" Margaret asked as Polly tied them for her. She'd need to either do it one-handed or bend her arm at an awkward angle.

"There is a way, but they're so loose that you can just tie them before putting it on," she suggested, and he thought that was a good idea. "It's your turn to do the dishes... no, hold on. Don't do anything with water until you hear the tub stop running." She kept forgetting just how bad the water pressure was. It wasn't the city's fault; there was some bottleneck on the property, something that she didn't have the money to have professionally inspected. Margie nodded. "Go put on your socks and shoes, Margie, it's also your turn to take out the trash." Margie - no, Stephen, suddenly Stephen again - visibly balked at the idea.

Polly sighed. "Nicole, just wait there for a bit while I talk to your big sister," he said, leading him into the living room. Her voice dropped low. "Our next-door neighbor is eighty years old, housebound, senile, and nearly blind, and his caretaker comes every Wednesday afternoon." It was Thursday. "The house beyond his, which you can barely even see from our backyard, is vacant. I checked. All I'm asking you to do outside today is to take the trash bags, put them in the pail, and come back. It's still the early morning. No one is going to see you at all."

Stephen just nodded. He put on Margaret's socks, the ribbons of which he could tie himself, buckled on her vintage shoes, took all the trash bags - they were all full or close to it - and rushed out the door as quickly as he could, the leather Mary Janes slapping against the pavement. He tossed all the bags into the outdoor garbage can, closed the lid loudly, and ran back inside as quickly as he could. He felt silly afterwards. There had really been no reason to panic; no one was out there. He surfed the Internet for a bit until the bath water stopped running and felt sort of relieved that he was way out there. This place had its problems, but the stuff happening in the city they had just left was way worse.

The water stopped and he did the dishes as instructed. It was annoying and tiresome, as they had no dishwasher, but there was decent dishwashing liquid and a good scrubbing sponge and it wasn't a terrible task. They had breakfast as a family, pancakes made from mix that was nearing its expiration date, and Stephen retreated back to his computer as was his wont. He thought that it was just a shame that Nicole was so random, so forceful in her imaginative play that she hated constraints, hated computers in general.

But what if...?

Smiling a bit, he concocted a plan to save his sanity while still giving Nicole something fun to do.

[Jacqueline]

Noon rolled around, and with a smile on his face, he left his room to play with his little sister as Margie once more. A folded-up piece of paper sat in his hand. (He had considered making cards but didn't have time.) He played along like usual for a while, knowing that while every adventure of hers was different from the last, there were a few predictably common themes. (Stephen gave her enormous credit for that. He might go crazy trying to follow along, but at least he'd never get bored.) Once Space Princess Nicole had saved Equestria from the Scourge, he made his move.

"Well, you saved the ponies from the Scourge, but aren't you forgetting something? The big hairy Scourge wiped out their whole city!" He got out a large pail of Legos that he'd spied the previous day. "It looks like they want you to stay and rebuild!" Nicole looked a bit pleasantly surprised that Margie was starting to direct the narrative, as her big sister set out one of the large, flat pieces that were used for building other things. "So what's the name of the new city, Space Princess Nicole?"

"Unicorn Town!"

"Awesome! Now build a new City Hall for Unicorn Town. Don't make it too big, there's a lot of other buildings that need to be made too once you're done!"

The piece of paper contained random events. There was nothing in there that would actually smash buildings; rather, the tornadoes picked up buildings and moved them elsewhere, or swapped places, or said that blocks of a particular color had to be set aside for use in a shield generator (to keep the Scourge from returning, of course). Stephen was awed at how quickly she made her imagination take root. He could never have constructed the way he did, and he of course made no move to interfere, except for the list of things on his piece of paper.

Eventually, they simply ran out, and when Nicole asked to build something else, Margie just shook her head. "Um... we can't expand Unicorn Town anymore. I'm sorry." Margie showed her little sister the totally empty pail. Nicole had even used up the little, decorative pieces that Stephen had thought nobody used. "We're out of Legos to make it with."

"Then Mommy can go get us some more!" Nicole said, heading for the door.

"You can't bug her now, little sis!" Margie said, quietly but forcefully, holding out an arm to block her. "If you bother Mom while she's working, then she'll lose her job and we won't have any money and we'll have to live somewhere bad!" The little girl looked up in surprise, tears welling in her eyes. Margie hugged her little sister close, only partially to muffle her sobs. That was all too much at once, Stephen realized; Margie had come down too hard too fast on her little sister. "You're not supposed to bother Mommy now," Margie said, in a much gentler voice. "That's why she wants me playing with you. If you go to her right now, we'll both get in big trouble and it'll be terrible and awful."

"You're mean," Nicole whined softly.

"If you want to tell her that, do it after she's done working, okay? Then she'll still have her job and I guess I'll just be in trouble."

"I don't want you to get in trouble," Nicole said, sniffling, her tears soaking into Margie's dress.

"Then just play with me, okay? I wish we had more stuff to play with. I wish we could make Unicorn Town as big as our backyard." Stephen suddenly got an idea. "But, you know what I think? I think that Unicorn Town needs some unicorns in it." Margie got up gently, picked up the cheap toys that Nicole had been playing with before the founding of Unicorn Town, and started putting them in the streets.

"Noo, that's Twilight, she belongs in the library, see? I built it for her. And Pinkie Pie belongs in..."

Polly didn't have her headphones on at the moment. She didn't have a meeting and was busy organizing a spreadsheet instead. She'd heard absolutely all of that, since the empty tub of Legos, through the thin walls, and she tried not to let the tears well up while she worked.

"I see you've found a new game," Polly said after Margaret was done playing with her little sister, right after Stephen had seated himself at his computer. She still had some work to do, but she could make time to talk to him after everything he'd been doing.

"Yeah. I kinda took it from Sim City and Animal Crossing. She's still the player, but I'm the computer. There's still not a lot of rules."

Polly suddenly started laughing, holding her face in her hand. "Oh... oh. That's.." She sighed, trying to explain this in a way that wouldn't make fun of him. "You've gone backwards to tabletop gaming. See, those computer games of yours, those were developed from roleplaying games, where you have somebody directing the world and other people playing in it. You've rediscovered the whole idea of Dungeons and Dragons from the opposite end."

"Is that good or bad?"

Polly kissed Stephen - or was it Margie? - on the head. "It's very good." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for taking care of her, for paying me back this way. I hope we'll have a better life for us, after all this."

"I hope so too, Mom," he replied, and Polly tried not to react to him finally directly calling her Mom. She smiled as she gently kissed him on the cheek, and it was only after she'd left that he realized that he had called her Mom. After dinner, he played well into the night, glad that at least he - they - had found a way to deal with everything that didn't involve him being kept off his computer and wasn't driving him totally crazy. He slept well, and he didn't pee himself that night, and he tied the sleeves before putting the light blue dress on (he realized that these nearly identical dresses must have been sold as a set) and managed to put on his ribbon by himself the next morning after a few tries.

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline, another masterful chapter.  Stephen, now Margaret, is becoming more like a girl each day.  He hates going outside, though.  His little sister is a dynamo that just can't wind down.  I'm enjoying this story just like I have on all of your stories that you have posted.  Keep up the great, descriptive stories.
 8)

[sarahpenguin]

Mmmm good luck teaching her the rules of a game of d&d though. Don't think she would have the patience.  She's doing freeform ruleless roleplaying well enough :)

[Jacqueline]

"Just one big chore for you today, Margaret," Polly said after breakfast, interrupting Nicole's babbling about the cereal they had been eating and how it compared to other cereals. "Put on your socks and shoes and come with me to the garage, please." Stephen thought that maybe she was going to ask him to clean it. There were a lot of household products of questionable age and questionable provenance, and that plus the abundance of rusted metal and sharp objects made the garage an absolute 'I will actually spank you, I mean it' no-go zone for Nicole unless she was getting into the car right then. Polly gestured to an old, unpowered push-mower sitting in the corner. "Your only chore to do today is to mow the lawn. There's a fifty percent chance of a thunderstorm in a few hours, and this needs to be done before it gets here."

"Mow that lawn with this thing?!" Stephen asked. Their backyard was substantial and that wasn't even a real lawnmower! It seemed like an unreasonable punishment and one that wasn't part of their agreement. He was already wearing girls' clothes and now she was telling him to do this?!

"Stephen, this isn't anything new, it's just your half of the chores," she told him quietly. "I already did this when it was my turn, and the grass was taller when I did it and there was some garbage and branches I had to get rid of." That had been shortly after they'd moved in, and it had taken her all day. "Yes, I know, it's just an old mechanical mower, if I could afford something better I would have used it myself." They'd hired a service to do their lawn back in suburbia, just for convenience. Hunter hadn't been paying that bill, either. "I've sharpened the blades and oiled the wheels, it works fine. You're just walking to the treeline and back for most of this. Keep the mower well in front of yourself, and make it tight so you're not leaving little strips of unmowed grass."

"Wearing this stuff?!" He was starting to panic a bit.

"Calm down and think about it for a moment. You're wearing a very light dress that won't get in your way, soft knee socks, and leather shoes that fit your feet and have been thoroughly broken in a long time ago. If you get even a single blister from just pushing that mower, I'll subtract a whole week and you can go back to wearing your sneakers indefinitely." He still looked nervous. "Senile, nearly blind eighty-year-old. Vacant house. There is nobody else here, Stephen. Whatever you're scared of happening cannot happen out here, and the longer you wait, the hotter it's going to get, and the more likely it is you'll be caught by the storm. Pace yourself, if you do it right, you'll be pushing it for a little over two and a half miles." She caught his look. "It's only about an hour or so of basic exercise. If the mower gets clogged up, tell me, don't try to unclog it yourself. And if you get thirsty, come back in for water, I'm serious." His bladder issues made him not want to drink enough liquids, which could cause even more problems.

"How do you know it's over two and a half miles?" Stephen asked.

"Because the land is fifty yards on each side, the house is about two thousand square feet on the outside, and that's an 18-inch mower." He looked puzzled. "You're a bright boy," she told him gently. "Why don't you figure it out while you work?"

Stephen, given a math problem to solve, let his mind fixate on that instead of the fact that he was going outside in vintage girls' clothes with a pretty ribbon in his hair, walking next to the hedges that demarcated the property line, pushing a mower that must have been as ancient as the clothes were. He knew inches, feet, yards, and miles - and he knew to start at the corner! - but he didn't quite get it. Fifty yards was 150 feet, and he could quickly do in his head that 150 times 150 was 22500, and subtracting the house was 20500 feet. But that was four miles! Wait, no, that was area, not distance. Ohhh. It would be a four-mile walk if it was 20500 feet divided by a width of 1. But 18 inches was 1 and a half feet, so yeah, a little over two and a half miles. Proud of himself for figuring it out even before he'd finished the first strip, he suddenly realized how far he was from the house, and he was suddenly afraid that someone would see him.

But who? Those two houses really were the only ones visible, and he'd played enough video games to know very well that visibility was usually bidirectional unless someone was trying to hide. In general, if you could see them, they could see you, and vice versa. What was he going to believe, that there was someone hiding in the window or concealed in the forest, just out there to spy on crossdressed boys? Mom had been right: there was nobody out here, that was the whole thing about this place. He really was just out for a long walk, pushing a modestly heavy mower against modest resistance where nobody could see him.

And, the truth was - and he had no plans to tell her this - it actually felt kind of nice. The light cotton skirt was pleasant against his upper legs and his ribbon-tied knee socks gently hugged his lower legs. The shoes really did fit him nicely and he liked how the old, supple leather felt even if the soles were inflexible. He was not about to get a blister, and the mower was not clogging up either. He gently touched the ribbon in his hair - still facing away from the house! - and found himself smiling. With nothing better to do other than monotonously make sure that he was keeping the strips tight, preventing himself from going too far off either way and making even more work for himself one way or another, he decided to simply immerse himself in the persona. Nicole wasn't the only one who got to escape by using her imagination. He wasn't Stephen, a boy who had an absconded father and worried about whether his stepmother was going to be able to keep him and Nicole out of a slum; she was simply Margaret, a girl who loved her pretty dresses and her mom and whose main job was to keep her little sister out of trouble.

Margaret reached the old but still functional swingset in the backyard and carefully mowed around the metal poles. She didn't really envy little girls from the era when this was built. Sure, it was probably nice to play on it, but she would have been bored silly if stuff like this, along with baby dolls and similar toys, was all she had to play with. Not everyone's imagination was as powerful as Nicole's. She continued mowing, and Stephen imagined what life was like back when this town was thriving and not a cast-aside and forgotten bit of America. He recalled some half-remembered things regarding small towns that he'd barely paid attention to, most of which were from different sources, none of which he really trusted, and a lot of which seemed to have an ideological axe to grind, and he decided that it didn't matter. Margie was a proud resident of the fantasy version of this town, a place where all the girls wore pretty dresses from the 1950s, went to sock hops, and read printed Sears catalogs, and yet they somehow still had cable Internet connections and multi-gigahertz computers at home.

[Jacqueline]

Like a good girl, Margaret got a glass of water in the middle of her mowing like her mother had told her to, happily told her mother (who hadn't yet started working for the day) how quickly she'd solved the math problem, and then went right back to her mowing with a smile on her face. The wind started to pick up a bit - there was definitely a storm on the way - and Margie saw half her dress fluttering a bit, but what she noticed the most was how the other half pressed against her legs. She was glad she was mowing front-to-back; if she had been mowing side-to-side, her dress would have been pushed directly against her - or in front of her - rather than just to the side. It didn't particularly impede her walk, it just felt funny, and she let herself giggle a little bit. It wasn't like Stephen enjoyed this. Margie enjoyed this, but so what? She didn't even really exist.

(Next door, an eighty-year-old man looked out the window, squinting behind his glasses. Oh, there was that pretty little girl again, the one he saw right before he'd graduated high school. It was nice to know that she was still out there mowing the lawn sometimes. Something about this confused him terribly, but Alzheimer's disease had ravaged his brain and confusion was his constant companion.)

When she finished, putting the mower back in its original place, her mother smiled at her and brought good news.

"They found Hunter. In the Baja, south of California. He's being charged with all kinds of felonies, we're getting something back from him, I don't know how much, but it's something." Legally, she and her children would get the owed money first; anyone else he owed money to came second. There would probably be lawyers involved.

"Good!" Stephen replied, more in vengeful satisfaction than anything else. What he really wanted to happen was for the various prison gangs to set aside their differences and, in an unprecedented display of racial harmony and cooperation, run a train on his father and give him every venereal disease in existence along with COVID, Ebola, and necrotizing fasciitis.

His tone and the vindictive look on his face were clear. "Stephen, whatever you're thinking, do not speak it aloud, especially not at the lunch table with Nicole," Polly warned him. "And you still have to take care of her on weekdays, we can talk about this weekend later." He just nodded. He might have vicious hatred toward his father, but sweet Margie had nothing but compassion in her heart and no father at all. She didn't even complain when, right after the early lunch, her little sister asked her that now that she had mowed the area around the swings, could she please push her on them? It wasn't playtime yet, but Margie, being a good girl, agreed, although she did have to go to the bathroom while Nicole changed out of her nightgown - which she often wore all day - and into a light blue dress to match her big sister.

As Margaret pushed, Nicole chittered excitedly about how there was going to be a Unicorn Town on every planet, or somehow Unicorn Town would be on all the planets at once, it wasn't clear. What was clear was that Nicole kept asking to be pushed higher, and abruptly Margaret was grabbing an empty swing to prevent it from whacking her in the face. Nicole had jumped off, landing easily on her feet. Perhaps Margaret could have admonished her for doing that, but Stephen had been yelled at for jumping off swings and hated it. There was no debris on the lawn, nothing more solid than dirt and grass for Nicole to land on. "You'll get grass stains on your dress if you fall over," Margie decided on as a warning.

"Grass stains wash out, silly," Nicole said, and Margaret pushed her on the swing again, and she jumped off for a perfect landing again. "Hmmm.. Freeze ray!" she shouted, abruptly pointing, and Margie obligingly froze in place. Giggling, Nicole walked around her frozen sister, eventually touching her on her leg. "Unfreeze!" she yelled, giggling and running away.

Margie ran after her, but before she caught her, she shouted "Freeze ray!" herself, and Nicole stood still for about three seconds before abruptly shouting "Antifreeze!"

"Are you sure you're not cheating?" Margie asked.

"I wouldn't be using a freeze ray if I hadn't been drinking antifreeze, silly," Nicole said. "What if I froze myself on accident?" She didn't understand why her big sister was laughing so hard.

"The only one who should be drinking antifreeze is my dad," Stephen said. "No, I get it, this is special antifreeze for fairy space princesses. Not antifreeze for cars, don't drink that."

"Of course not, geeesh. You're weird sometimes."

"I might be weird, but at least I haven't made a terrible tactical mistake," Margaret replied. She smiled down at her little sister. "I didn't bring a freeze ray to a tickle fight." She started tickling her little sister under the armpits, watching her reactions closely. Stephen had never liked this kind of physical contact; if Nicole showed any signs of reacting the way he would have at that age, Margaret was going to immediately stop and apologize.

Instead, she giggled uncontrollably and tried to tickle back, with limited success. Eventually, she escaped by simply falling backwards onto the grass. "Tickling is now hereby punishable by unicorn prison!" she declared.

"Oh no! I want to stay out of unicorn prison," Margie replied. (Stephen had a mental image of just what might happen to someone in 'unicorn prison', where the guards had horns on their heads, but that was not something that Margaret was ever going to share with her little sister.)

"Then don't be mean, don't tickle people, and remember to drink your antifreeze!" Stephen could not stop himself from laughing again, and Nicole suddenly decided that she wanted to play on the swings again.

The two of them continued before Nicole abruptly shouted "It's raining!" and Margaret felt a drop on her hair as well, and the girls rushed back inside before it got serious. Stephen was relieved. He was already worn out from pushing that mower so far.