A Bet to Lose

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline, Ricky loves his life now that Susie has him wrapped around her finger.  That love making part was HOT!!!  You have got to give us another chapter.  This is GREAT!!!!

[Jacqueline]

[1/4]

Richard got the text from Susie half an hour after his mother had gone to work: 'Ricky, what are you doing?'

'The wash,' he texted back. 'And some other chores. :)' He actually was, again. His sister was helping him - she didn't feel right making him do everything around the house - but of course he was wearing his housewife dress and four-inch heels, and he had been washing his correctly separated girly clothes like a good sissy.

'Oh? Your own chores? When will you be here to do mine, pretty little servant boy? :heart:'

He was a little bit confused. 'Do you think I'd have time before Caroline picks us up?'

There was a minute's pause, and then the reply came back: 'Ricky, you will never, ever tell anyone that I completely forgot about that.'

He nodded. He'd forgotten stuff before, too. 'Yes, Your Highness. :)' He was just glad it was a quickly cleared-up misunderstanding. The very last thing he wanted was a genuine tug-of-war between different people wanting his time, especially Zoe and Susie, and he put down his phone because his housewife dress didn't have any pockets. He was in the middle of cleaning out the refrigerator when Zoe handed him his phone, as Caroline was talking to him in the chat.

[10:02 AM] Caroline: ricky, dont bring any girl clothes today, just your white sneakers.
[10:03 AM] Richard: Do you mean the flats or heels?
[10:03 AM] Caroline: flats for where we are going!
[10:03 AM] Caroline: also, everyone, high of 90 today, prepare to sweat
[10:05 AM] Leslie: I 100% love how he has to ask LMFAO
[10:05 AM] Zoe: For him, it's a valid question!
[10:05 AM] Leslie: That's what's so funnnnyyyy!! :laughing:
[10:06 AM] Caroline: actually leslie i dont mean to pick on you but does your wheelchair have any bigger tires?
[10:07 AM] Leslie: I think so. We've never used them. I'll have to ask Dad where they are. Are we going somewhere muddy?
[10:07 AM] Caroline: it can get kinda dirty/sloppy there yeah
[10:08 AM] Caroline: its not that far, like 40 minute drive, big frolfing course
[10:08 AM] Caroline: you all good with that?
[10:09 AM] Zoe: 40 minutes isn't a problem here, just as long as we can still call mom.
[10:09 AM] Leslie: I'll be okay.
[10:10 AM] Susie: As long as we're back before nightfall lol!
[10:10 AM] Caroline: cool beans

He got all the chores done, food back in its rightful places after he was done scrubbing out the fridge, before Caroline arrived. She'd stopped to pick up Zoe and Richard before she went to pick up Susie, and that was fortunate for him because he got to see what happened next.

Holding something in her hands, wearing a dark midriff-baring top and thigh-length skirt over her purple bikini, Susie took the seat behind Richard and reached forward to hand over her present. "Here you go, Caroline, we have no need of these," she said, handing the older girl a length of locked-together chains, the keys in each of the locks.

"What. Holy. Shit. Where did you-- was this from that box?!" Caroline blurted out, while Leslie and Zoe stared, incredulously.

"That's still for Ricky to tell you if he chooses, but these are yours if you want them."

"We didn't use them," Richard quickly added. "They were literally never used for their original purpose."

"Yeah, but what could they possibly have been... you know what, no. I already know the answer. Was it cute, Susie? The stuff you didn't lock him into?"

"It was very cute," Richard answered for her, and Caroline nodded. "And yes, restrictive. And that's all I'll say, okay?" Leslie started giggling, and Zoe followed, and Caroline was going to bring something related up before they went swimming, but she decided not to. Later. It'd sound like an accusation if she said it just then, and she didn't trust herself not to be a bitch about anything that day. Instead, she accepted the gift, and Richard caught a glimpse of a familiar red hat in the car's central compartment before she tossed the chains in there and slammed the lid closed.

They arrived at the Y a few minutes early, as Caroline had planned. Richard never really had a lot of patience for routines, in general. He absolutely hated school, watching the clock in his classes, and he was unapologetically grateful to the pandemic for finally pulling him out of there, at least for the year. But this new routine, the routine of being picked up by Caroline, driven to the local YMCA, and swimming with his girlfriend for an hour - that was a routine he was very much enjoying. A car ride with the girl he loved. A session of swimming, in which he was increasingly able to keep up with her every time he went, especially as the hour came to a close. And then the culmination, the trip to the bathroom in which the girls determined what he would wear until he had to go back to his mother, and so he said "And here's the last part of the bi-weekly fun routine" as soon as he stepped in there with them.

"I'm never going to get tired of this either," Caroline replied as she pulled out what she'd planned and proceeded to dress him in it while Zoe did his hair - using the ribbons he'd brought - and Susie diapered him. (There was no makeup on any of them; they would have sweated it off.) The clothes had been out in the front of a yard sale that Caroline had happened to pass, noticing that they happened to be substantially larger than normal for clothes of that kind. She'd drove around the block to go back there, and understood what was going on as soon as she saw the obese girl who had grown out of them. Of course, the outfit didn't quite fit him in the way the designers intended, as it roughly matched his breadth and width but not his height. The shirt, with its pattern of pink and white hearts over darker pink, was fine, as the skirtall covered the area below it. The skirtall, made of lavender denim with a big, embroidered pink heart in the center, had reached to the knees of the girl it was designed for. On Richard, it was slightly above his mid-thigh. Bending over would show his diaper to everyone behind him.

Caroline nodded and smiled at him, having known it'd be like this when she bought it. He smiled back. He might have spoken up, said that this was too short on him, but it looked incredibly cute and he absolutely loved it. He just wished one of them had brought matching socks. Oh well, the white ones were okay too.

They left the bathroom and were face-to-face with Mindy, Leslie next to her in her wheelchair wearing a 'nothing I could do' expression. The woman had simply had to go to the bathroom, and she realized what was going on as soon as she saw the group, and there was two seconds of awkward silence.

"Sssssssh," Leslie abruptly started doing, putting her finger to her lips. Instead of an explanation, Caroline, Zoe, Susie, and Richard all started doing the same thing.

Mindy laughed out loud. As a physical therapist whose specialty was teenagers, she'd thought she'd seen it all, and for a few seconds, she just didn't know what to make of this. She actually was a mandatory reporter, but this decisively wasn't abusive, as everyone involved - including the boy who'd just been dressed up like a girl - was actively motioning her to keep quiet about it with nervous, conspiratorial smiles behind their pursed, shushing lips. What was she going to do? Lose the trust of her teenage client and get a bunch of other kids in trouble for fooling around with crossdressing? Why? For what purpose? For whose benefit? She made the same finger-over-lips gesture, nodding. "I saw nothing," she whispered, and walked past them to use the bathroom as she'd intended. They all breathed a sigh of relief and headed for the back door.

"Leslie, I thought you said no one knew about that bathroom," Caroline said irritably.

"Yeah, she's the one who told me about it," Leslie replied. "Before I knew you, she changed me back there," she whispered. That had been before the pandemic, on weekends and late afternoons rather than on what used to be school days, and the women's locker room had been significantly more crowded. Caroline thought of saying something sharp in response but made herself not do that. Maybe she could get through the day without needing to tell them what was going on with her.

"Well, now she's in on it," Caroline replied. "Leslie, be straight with me, here. Are we going to have to worry about this? Because I don't want it to be 'oh, cool, she knows and won't tell,' and then suddenly one day it's 'oh, there's Ricky's mom, oh hey, did you know...?'"

"She's not going to tell, Caroline," Leslie replied, trying to talk in as much of a normal voice as possible despite how much it made her chest hurt, particularly after swimming for an hour. "She told me that the only reason she ever wants to make me mad is to make me work harder, and that wouldn't be it. Especially now, she gets to be the first physical therapist to help with the new treatment."

"Put yourself in her shoes, Caroline," Zoe suggested. "Would you screw that up just because you saw a boy in a skirtall?"

"Believe me, if I were in other people's shoes, the world would look a lot different," Caroline replied. "All right, I believe she's sane. That actually kinda reminds me," she said. "Wait, hold up, let's get everyone in the car and then I'll tell you." Getting Leslie out of the wheelchair and into the car was a necessary sort of routine, one that Richard still didn't partake in.

"As I was saying," Caroline continued in a collegiate, speaker tone after making sure the doors were closed and that no one had opened a window (no one would, not with the AC going on a hot day), "I have seen some rather INsane things relating to this, ah, activity that we have been doing with our dear Ricky here." Richard looked unamused. Had she seriously been...? "In particular, I have seen the, ah, desires of many people who enjoy the same sorts of things that he enjoys."

Oh, crap, she had been! "Big mistake, Caroline!" Richard interjected, turning to look at her.

Caroline dropped the faux voice. "Yeah, believe me, I know. Anyway, one of the most common fantasies is, 'Oh no, I am a child being feminized by this domineering woman or all these evil girls, and I cannot do anything about it, and no one will help me because I live in a hell-world where everyone's in on it and no one ever intervenes.' You don't get to even pretend that one, Ricky, you never get to pull the whole 'it's not my fault, they did it to me' schtick. That kind of shit might actually happen to boys, very rarely, but it sure as hell doesn't happen to you." She pointed at him sharply before putting both hands back on the wheel. He just nodded, knowing exactly what she was talking about. She was telling the others what he was never going to tell them about.

Zoe frowned a bit. "How often does anyone even try to do that to boys? I mean, there was that psycho babysitter Susie was talking about, and then there was that kid in Franklin's store..."

"There's another one I know about," Richard said. "There was a kid who wet the bed at night, so his mother and her landlord punished him by putting him outside in a princess dress. In the end, he discovered his girl side and lived happily everNO ACTUALLY the adults both went to jail for felony child abuse and the kid went to his grandma. He was traumatized as fuc-k." He couldn't even imagine how many nightmares that kid must have had. "This was on a news site, I can find it if you want," he said, reaching into his skirtall's pocket but deciding that he didn't want to prove that this *actually happened* unless any of them asked. Besides, the article didn't tell him what he was most curious about: if those people had been taking the wrong sorts of fantasies seriously before reality met them.

"Her landlord?" Zoe asked, confused.

"I don't know, it's what the news site said. Maybe halfway her boyfriend or something."

"Sounds like something Mom's last boyfriend would do," Zoe said. "Remember? The one who hit me?"

"Oh my God, why did you remind me of that?" Richard rhetorically asked, rolling his head back. "I was in second grade or something. I'm still so glad you told and that she believed us. If Mom would have stayed with that guy..."

"Can we please stop talking about this stuff?" Leslie asked quietly.

"I kind of want to know the story," Susie said.

"There is no story," Zoe replied. "He hit me and I told Mom and Ricky backed me up and she threw him out and never found another boyfriend again. The end."

"Yeah, well, guess who she was joking about making her boyfriend a couple days ago? Susie's dad," Richard changed the subject with, chuckling and getting back some incredulous laughter.

"No, no, relax, that would never actually happen," Susie said, laughing but then getting serious. "Dad won't ever have a relationship again. He doesn't want to dilute our inheritance. He's got this whole thing about it. He'll be in love with Mom until he dies."

"It's just so sad," Zoe said. "He loves your mom so much and she got... that."

"Yeah. fuc-k cancer," Susie quietly replied.

"And fuc-k Duchenne's, too," Zoe added. "Two more weeks," she said, putting her arm around her disabled girlfriend. Two more weeks, for a therapy that might have been delayed indefinitely if Richard hadn't intervened. It wasn't just the bad that could have such long-lasting repercussions, Richard realized. The good could as well.

"And, while we're at it, fuc-k drive-thru only," Caroline lamented, managing to get into the back of a very long line of cars without the rear bumper sticking out into the street. "Mid-90s today and get to idle and run the AC the whole time. Hate this shit. Sorry for the wait. It's still worth it."

"Isn't gas cheap now?" Leslie asked.

"Yeah, it wastes gas, but the problem's the heat," Caroline replied. "Wears things down, burns the oil. And the worst part is, poor Ricky here doesn't get to show off his outfit to everyone inside." They laughed, and Susie was about to say something, but Caroline kept going. "So what does everyone want?"

"Just a burger, no fries, and just with vegetables, no pickles." Leslie said. The salt wasn't good for her. "And ice water."

"Plain double cheeseburger, fries, lemonade," Zoe said. "It's been so long since I've ate a burger."

"Just a plain burger, fries, and Coke," Richard said. "Oh yeah, plain with bacon."

"Give me the same as Ricky," Susie added. "I don't like all the stuff they put on burgers."

Caroline looked around the car with exaggerated offense on her face. "Oh my God. You guys. Plain. Plain. Plain. Leslie, I can understand, but I am seriously the only person in this car who eats an everything burger like a normal person. You all deserve each other, and I'm not even talking about his girl clothes or whatever you didn't use these for," she said, pointing to the chains in the central compartment.

"We do, and you were wrong about him not showing off his outfit," Susie told her. "Hey Ricky, go skip around the block so everyone in line can see you," she continued, and Richard immediately took off his seat belt.

"Oh my fuc-king God," Caroline started, but he had already stepped out the door, closing it and then skipping around the burger joint in his ribboned pigtails and pretty skirtall outfit, against the direction of traffic so everyone who cared to look could see his smiling face. He didn't even look at the people in the cars to see if they were looking at him. Did they think he was doing it on a dare? Were they worried about him? Did they think he was cute? Did any of them glimpse the white between his legs, and how many of those knew it was a diaper? (He doubted that any of them saw it. They didn't have the viewing angle.) He didn't know and only cared a little bit, and as he stepped back into the passenger's seat - the car had only moved a single spot forward - he heard the tail end of Caroline's sentence.

"-with great responsibility!" She turned to him. "Ricky, she can just tell you to do things like that and you'll do them."

"Yeah, pretty much," Richard said, smiling and nodding.

"It's not something he has a problem with, Caroline. I'm not going to abuse him, and he knows it," Susie said firmly.

Richard nodded. "Caroline, it's like you were saying before, it's not like I didn't want to do it," he admitted. He very much enjoyed showing off his pretty clothes, especially in an indirect way that probably wouldn't involve any awkward or embarrassing conversations, and especially when Susie told him to do it.

Caroline threw up her hands. "My verdict stands. You deserve each other."

Zoe laughed. "You know that's nowhere near the worst thing he's done, right? You know he goes back and forth to Susie's house in a jingling dress."

"I thought you were kidding. Oh my God. No offense, but you're all crazy, and the person who bought his outfit is crazy too," Caroline said.

"That's not fair to Leslie," Zoe started pointedly. "She never really-"

"Wait," Leslie said. "Ricky, if this treatment works, I want to go skipping with you. We can be twinsies." Richard smiled and agreed, Caroline chuckled, and Zoe looked surprised. Caroline had been fair to her after all.

"Daaaaw. All right, I'll let you borrow him," Susie said with a big smile, getting laughter in response. They made it to the ordering window and Caroline ordered what they had all asked for - combining their orders of fries into a large, shared bucket - plus a stacked double burger and a large Coke for herself. Caroline almost offered to pay, but Susie overrode her with a "Rule 1" and handed her two twenties. For a brief moment, Caroline looked upset and indignant, but forcibly controlled herself.

"Caroline, is something wrong?" Leslie asked quietly.

Damn it, they knew, of course they could figure out something was wrong with her, and Caroline took a sharp breath and forced herself to say the words she'd memorized. "I get really bad PMS, it makes me a total bitch, and I'm sorry I get like this." It had taken quite a few bad months for her to recognize what the problem was and even more to get enough control to stop blaming other people when it struck. It was embarrassing to admit, but having her friends think that she was just being a bitch for no reason was a good way to lose them. "Can't blame you for not wanting to be a girl, Ricky. You don't need to deal with this shit!" she spat out, letting her bottled emotions loose.

"I don't either," Leslie reminded them, "but I used to get roid rage."

Zoe was startled and confused. "Did you just say... ohhhhh. Right." She understood at the same time her brother did.

"What's roid rage?" Susie asked.

"Muscle-building steroids can give you mood swings," Leslie explained. "They changed my prescription so I don't get it anymore. Dad thought it was all just from my birth parents at first."

It was finally their turn to drive up to the window, and the pimply-faced cashier was deeply smiling at Richard as he handed Caroline the bags of food. Smiling back, Richard wondered, again, if the teenager thought he was cute and in what way he thought he was cute.

"You saw him checking you out," Caroline pointed out as she drove to a parking spot. She did not want to eat and drive at the same time, and she didn't want bumps or turns spilling anyone's food or drink in her car either. "I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd asked for your number." General giggling filled the car.

[Jacqueline]

[2/4]

"You know, this is actually kind of a dic-kish thing to do to people," Richard said. "Some of them think I'm a teenage girl who's dressing cute and skipping around because she wants to be asked out, but surprise! I'm a trap!" He didn't get as much laughter as he was expecting and took a bite of his plain burger - which actually was really good, considerably better than the larger chains - eating over the paper bag and napkins on his lap so as not to get food all over his pretty skirtall or Caroline's car.

"Any boy who asks random girls out takes his fuc-king chances," Caroline said firmly. "They're the ones rolling the dice, they don't get to complain when it comes up snake." There was a lot more laughter.

"Or he knows Ricky's a boy and he's gay," Zoe said after swallowing a bite of burger. "Is there such a thing as a double trap?"

"He rolls his dice, he takes his chances," Caroline said with emphasis. "I don't do dice rolling and neither do any of you."

"But we all did get really lucky," Zoe pointed out.

"That's called being in the right place at the right time," Caroline said before taking a big bite. "Which, yeah, is kind of the same thing." She almost said how unfair it was, how they all got to have who they wanted while she had to wait, but she knew it was just the PMS talking and clamped down on it.

The girls in the back started a conversation on the way to the frolfing course, and Richard had no idea how it started, and at no point in it did he have any idea what they were talking about. Occasionally, they would talk about characters he vaguely recognized, and he almost started following some of it, but then one of them - often his sister - would bring up some comparison to something else and he would be completely lost again. The worst part was that it was almost like a normal conversation, except it might as well have been conducted in a foreign language, and what was more, Susie wasn't quite on the same wavelength as Leslie and Zoe, and Richard could not even tell if they were actually communicating or if they were simply gabbing about basically nothing. Was this a girl thing? Should he even ask? He tried to get into their mindset, to become part of the conversation, and he just couldn't.

"And I thought you were the weird one," Caroline told Richard quietly, as Zoe was explaining the plot of something based on something else based on something else Richard only vaguely recognized. "How do they get so deep into that stuff?"

"It's probably better than the shit we've been looking at," he replied wryly, and she didn't disagree.

Zoe and Richard put on sunblock in the car before they reached their destination, a very out-of-the-way park near a lake, and Caroline parked next to the bathroom and immediately ran towards it, trying the door, her eyes opening wide. Then, to everyone's surprise, she ran to the men's room. Locked as well. Her mouth moved, and while they couldn't read her lips, her unspoken words were surely of the four-letter variety.

She ran back to the car. "Leslie, I need a diaper and a couple of wipes," she said immediately.

"They won't fit you," Leslie replied.

"It doesn't need to fit me, I'm not really putting it on, just going into it," she replied, and she snatched the items out of Leslie's hands before running to the bathroom area, going behind a concrete barrier where none of the others could see, and Zoe started doing the work of helping Leslie out of the car.

A few minutes later, Caroline came out from behind the barrier with a pile of dirty plastic in her hand and a serious scowl along with a deep-red blush. Richard suddenly grasped why Leslie wanted to have a diaper buddy. Being the gross one, singled out, was not something girls liked to do, and Caroline was actually humiliated by this. "Caroline, you're not gross, people need to poop," Richard said quickly. "There's nobody here, and a boy would have just used a plastic bag and maybe a leaf." Zoe was visibly grossed out at him but didn't say anything coherent. He decided that it was okay if everyone thought he was gross instead.

"Now you know what it's like," Leslie said softly. Richard nodded; he'd been right. "I don't know what I miss more, being able to walk right or being able to use the toilet," she continued. Two more weeks, as her girlfriend had said, before she could even start working on it. And if her girlfriend's brother, that incredibly, girlishly cute boy with the ribbon pigtails, hadn't worked his magic... she tried not to think about things like that. "I just hope I'll be out of them in a couple of months." She really had no idea how long it would take, and neither did anyone else.

"Then Ricky won't have to worry about wearing those either," Susie said with a chuckle. Richard knew what she really meant. Susie had other diapers for him to wear instead.

"Can we just change the subject and never talk about this again?" Caroline demanded, thrusting the used diaper and wet wipes into a nearby trashcan, and they all agreed. She took a breath, trying to calm herself. "This way. You're about to see why I asked for the big tires." The reason was evident: this frolfing course was perpetually muddy in a lot of places and slightly overgrown. The distances were substantially longer than the ones at the park, too, so Richard wasn't sure whether he was doing better or worse than last time. At least this time he was wearing flat shoes and didn't have on any extra padding, but he still wasn't sure if that actually had much of an effect. Leslie went first, and she had to throw as hard as she could, at a perfect angle, just to have any hope of getting anywhere near the goal.

It wasn't until the third course that Richard realized that he was having a lot of fun. It really was burning hot out there and he was very glad his sister had remembered the sunblock, and sometimes one of them (never Leslie) would seriously overshoot and have to carefully step through tall grass to find the disc, especially when it bounced off a tree. Nobody was really keeping score. Caroline was blowing them all out of the water anyway, despite how much she cursed herself for missing the occasional shot that none of the others could ever have made.

But between the eighth and ninth holes, there was a mushy, muddy, slowly running creek, only a few inches deep but about five feet across. If all of them were healthy, they would have simply taken running jumps over it, no problem, but... "Okay, how are we going to do this?" Caroline asked. Richard wondered if a couple of them would have had to carry Leslie over in her wheelchair.

"Can't we just go around?" Zoe asked. "See, there's a bridge." She pointed to a small footbridge only about fifty yards away, but there was a lot of tall grass and brush between them and it.

"We'd have to go all the way around, that'd take forever. Leslie, can you get out for a bit?" Caroline asked before helping her out of the wheelchair. Oh! Right! Richard felt like an absolute retard. It weighed less than the average bicycle, and Caroline easily held it over her head as she jumped across. "Now, getting you across, that'll be a little bit trickier." She considered how to do this, it was the kind of problem she'd seen at the shop. The only issue was that those were steel parts, and this was a girl with serious core muscle problems. Anything that required synchronization or timing was a very bad idea.

Leslie looked unnerved as Caroline visibly thought, and Richard spoke up. "No, it won't be." He also considered how he was going to do this. He didn't trust the strength of his arms to carry her that way, so he kneeled down in front of her. "Can you get on my shoulders?" Zoe helped her sit on the back of Richard's neck, her braces digging into his skin, and with effort, he stood up, holding her ankles and making sure she was balanced, and she held onto his ribboned pigtails like handlebars. She was lighter than he expected, and his legs and back were more than enough.

"You think you can make that jump like that?" Caroline asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I'm not going to jump," Richard replied, walking through the muddy stream with slow, heavy, purposeful steps, kneeling down so that she could sit in the wheelchair again. His socks and shoes, of course, were a muddy, wet mess when he was done.

"Thank you, Ricky," Leslie said, beaming at him as she sat down.

"Yes, thank you, little bro. I probably should have done that, but I'm really kind of glad you did," Zoe added. She'd bought the sneakers she had on just last month.

"I figured someone was going to take one for the team," Caroline said, and playfully flicked one of his pigtails. "Looks like our little sissyboy has a spine."

"Yes, and it doesn't hurt like I thought it would," Richard replied. His skin did hurt a bit from the braces, but whatever. Leslie's safety and happiness were more important, and Susie was smiling at him, and that was worth everything.

Their unscored game continued. Hole #12 was a doozy, twice as long as all the others, and Hole #15 required careful finesse because they were on the side of a hill and if they had tossed one too far there, it would have just kept going. After #18, they finally crossed the bridge that Zoe had pointed out earlier, walking back to the car, which was still entirely alone in the parking lot. "I'm sorry, everybody," Caroline said, shaking her head.

Susie was confused even more than the rest of them. "Sorry for what?"

"For dragging you through all that distance." She pointed to Ricky's feet. "And for your shoes!"

"That was a lot of fun, Caroline!" Susie pointed out.

"Yeah, okay, my shoes are a mess, I don't care, maybe that's a boy thing. But it really was fun!" Richard replied.

"Seriously, stop beating yourself up," Zoe said. "Coming out here was a good choice. We're not saying that just to make you feel better."

"I want to come back here in a few months or so," Leslie quietly added.

"All right, I choose to believe you," Caroline said as they got to the car.

"Just one small thing," Richard said. "My socks and shoes aren't all that got dirty out there." The girls giggled, even Leslie. He'd gone #1 sometime around hole #10. "I don't want to do the whole lie back thing, it's all concrete out here."

He was just going to take his diaper off and replace it with his swimming trunks, but Leslie said something to Susie, who handed him a spare and a handful of wipes right away. "Here you go, Diaper Buddy," Susie told him, giggling, and how could he possibly refuse her?

"Be right back," he said, grabbing the stuff, running off to the same spot Caroline had been to, and changing himself into a fresh diaper without lying back on the solid concrete. He came back with the expectation of giggling, but instead he saw Leslie's legs hanging out of the car with Zoe in attendance, and at Caroline's insistence, he took off his socks and shoes and used his other boy clothes to wipe off his dirty feet before throwing them all back into his backpack.

"Shit, it's almost four already," Caroline said once they were done. "Where to?"

"A gas station for drinks, then the mall," Susie replied. "The same one we went to before. I need to get Ricky a pair of kneepads." The car, just beginning to move, jerked to an abrupt halt as Caroline could not possibly drive laughing that hard, and Zoe and Leslie were also laughing hysterically.

"OH MY fuc-kING GOD!" Zoe shouted. "Ricky. She actually means that, doesn't she. Oh my God. I'm sure it'll go with the rest of the stuff - no, I'm not asking! I'm not going to ask. Actually, wait, one question. Do you want to change back? Are you going to wear your muddy shoes in there with your pink stuff?" She was right, but Richard wanted to enjoy being pretty as long as he could.

"I have an idea," Leslie said as loudly as she could. "But, um... Susie, is it okay if I ask you to buy something for him?"

Susie's face screwed up a bit. "It depends, what is it?"

"I want to go over to Spectral Boutique again. I saw the perfect shoes for that outfit." Susie's worried expression became a smile.

Caroline grinned. "If that's what they want, that's where I'm driving."

"Let's go, then," Susie agreed.

"I'm just glad you're all having fun," Caroline said, and her tone of voice made it clear that she wasn't, despite having done well in their game.

Richard wondered if anger wasn't the only thing being caused by her PMS, and he opened his browser to search - and couldn't connect. There was cell service, but no data. "I can't browse the Internet, we must be in the boonies!" Richard shouted, half-seriously.

"The real boonies, you can't even get a signal," Caroline said.

"Yeah, I know."

"Would you like that, though?" Caroline asked mischievously. "To be all dressed up out in the real boonies?"

"As long as I had stuff that I could live on and the clothes were good for it, I would actually be okay with that," Richard replied. "It'd actually be better, I wouldn't have to worry about anyone seeing me."

"Get you a nice, big pioneer dress, then. The big Thanksgiving kind with the bonnet. Because women totally walked around the middle of nowhere wearing those."

"And then I could fix wagon tongues, hunt animals, drink bad water, get dysentery..." Richard joked, and they all laughed, and then it turned out that Leslie had read the ending of the last book of A Song of Ice and Fire, and the conversation continued until everyone got sick of the foul subject matter and they went back to talking about their favorite fanfics, and when they were finally back in range, Richard started looking up what was really wrong with Caroline. Ah, it wasn't just PMS, it was something called PMDD, and it was a lot more than just anger. He decided not to talk about it right away. It might just make her mood worse.

[Jacqueline]

[3/4]

They got Slurpees instead of regular drinks, Richard keeping Leslie company in the car while the others went to the bathroom and Caroline accepting Susie's money this time, and the brain-freeze effect hit them all hard. They'd long since finished them when they got to the Spectral Boutique, and the girls giggled as he very gingerly stepped onto the concrete with his bare toes, carefully watching his steps and tiptoeing around like a little princess. The store had a couple of customers already inside, a pair of men roughly as gay as Franklin, and he recognized and greeted them before noticing what wasn't on Richard's feet.

"Um, I'd never thought I'd need a sign saying no shirt, no shoes, no service, but..." Franklin started awkwardly. His customers were usually appropriately dressed when they were buying things, despite the frequent inappropriateness of the things they were buying.

"That's what we're here to buy for him, though," Caroline said. "And socks."

"I know exactly what shoes match that outfit," he replied.

"So do I," Leslie added, and with Zoe's help, she walked with him to the shoe section, and Franklin and Leslie shared a laugh when it turned out that they were talking about the same pair.

Richard walked out of the Spectral Boutique in his new shoes with a big smile on his face. The socks he was wearing were almost a perfect match for his girly shirt, the hearts around the lightly frilled edges almost the same color, and his bright pink shoes with lavender laces were absolutely perfect, especially as both the two-inch heels and the front parts lit up in patterns every time he took a step, the little hearts flashing various shades of pink, the word 'Spectral' in lavender cursive on the sides. Other than the heels, they would have been perfect for a girl in first grade, and he completely loved them and wanted to go walking around in them, and they went to a mall where he could do exactly that.

The entirely soft, padded kneepads were very easy to find in the sporting goods store, and a few shoppers looked at the tall elementary school girl and disabled girl out with their friends. Susie picked them out for him, he knew they could be adjusted to fit him, and the clerk didn't even give Richard so much as a second glance as he rang up their purchase. Then Susie recalled that he also needed a headset, and he happily walked along to the game store, showing off his ribboned pigtails, pretty clothes, and light-up shoes to whoever cared to look. He wondered if anyone would ask how old he was, and he wondered what he should give as an answer, but no one said anything to them.

Thy browsed the game store for a bit, and Susie found a headset that she thought would work, but Richard whispered back, "No, not that kind. That has attached headphones. This one. 'Compatible with Bluetooth headphones.' The specs are better, too." Bent over and focused on the products, Richard had no idea that he was flashing the bottom of his diaper to the store clerks, one of which was staring and very much keeping his mouth shut; the other one was talking with Leslie, who was gushing about the JRPG she had bought there and nearly finished, although the clerk knew more about the secrets than she did.

Susie went up to the counter to pay, and the clerk was looking at Richard the whole time. "Hey, um, I know this is out of nowhere," the clerk awkwardly asked while ringing up the purchase, "but where do you like to go to hang out?"

The teenage clerk was four or five years older than Richard, but he saw right through his clumsy attempt at flirting anyway. "All over," Richard replied. "With my significant other," he decided on saying. He smiled, and the clerk clumsily apologized and handed Susie the bagged headset and receipt.

He overheard some of the conversation as they left. "Dave, you're such an idiot. That's a boy, and that's his girlfriend." A brief pause. "He was in here last week, you monkeytard!"

"I wasn't in here that day!"

"You seriously couldn't tell he's the kid we told you about, you must be the..." The conversation continued, but the group was out of earshot. Richard sighed inwardly. Confronting him in public? Not likely. Talking about him behind his back? Likely! He'd forgotten how much people enjoy doing that. He decided he didn't really care other than the fact that it made his friends giggle.

"Rolled the dice, took the chance," Caroline said, shrugging, and the other girls giggled louder.

"You need to start taking a tally," Zoe suggested half-seriously. "'Number of males I've fooled today.' I bet you could get to at least hundred a week if you hung out all day in a mall like this."

"God, Zoe, I'm not going to do that!" Richard replied, laughing a bit but actually a little offended. That wasn't the point, at least not for him, but he caught himself in a mental contradiction. Was he trying to fool people by dressing up like this in public? He loved being cute in public, but the problem was that the public was made out of people, and he still thought that getting a random male stranger - who was probably just as horny as he was - interested in him was really kind of a douchey thing to do, even when it wasn't dangerous. He realized that he was dressing for attention but didn't actually want it, at least not the wrong kind. "Besides, Susie, wouldn't you be jealous?"

"I don't care if you attract boys, just as long as you don't attract girls," Susie replied with an aristocratic air.

"But what if he attracts a girl pretending to be a boy?" Leslie wondered.

"Traps trapping traps trapping traps..." Richard muttered, and this time the group laughed.

"Or an actual transsexual that's has bottom surgery," Caroline said.

"Why does it matter how big her butt is?" Susie asked, confused. Leslie giggled, and Zoe and Caroline exploded in laughter, attracting even more attention. "Isn't that what 'bottom' means?" The laughter continued.

Richard wasn't going to let her be made fun of for too long. "It means 'bottom' as in 'lower body'," he explained quietly, making a scissoring motion with his fingers.

Susie frowned. "No, we're talking about turning girls into boys. Can people actually do that?"

"Oh my God, you are the most innocent... how can you be so innocent about this stuff?!" Caroline asked on their way out the mall door. "You're the one doing the whole... I thought you knew about all of this!"

"Caroline..." Richard started, sounding a bit whinier than he wanted to, looking up at her even despite his heels, and then looking around to make sure no one else could overhear. "Susie, they can kinda do it but it's not a real dic-k, they take skin from off the arm or leg, and I've seen the video on Bitchute and you really don't want to see the video." He turned to Caroline. "Okay? Can we please stop?"

"Stopping," Caroline said. "But speaking of traps, I'm really curious what kind of world she's going to trap you in with that and maybe those," she said, pointing to the bags.

Susie reclaimed her arrogant, aristocratic air immediately. "I told you before, that is all between us. Although I do wish there were an interactive world for boys like him." She'd searched for something appropriate in that vein, but all she found was just banal, tawdry pornography videos. Richard nodded, although he much preferred modded AAA games than the low-quality, amateur, boring, and often unfinished games that were usually made for his circle of fetishes, particularly since basically none of them were in 3D at all and many were in text, and in his opinion, anyone could just write stuff. (He briefly wondered if his own life would make a good story but decided that there wasn't anyone lame enough to write it - and who the hell would ever want to read it?)

"Make a pitch to Valve," Zoe suggested. "Capture the VR sissy market, you'll make a killing." It took them a bit to realize she was joking, and they got in the car as usual, doing the same tiring ritual to get Leslie out of her wheelchair and into the seat.

"Everyone, I'm sorry you're not getting any private time today, and I'm really sorry I'm being a total bitch," Caroline said once they were all inside. "I hope you're not pissed at me."

"Caroline, it's fine," Richard said immediately. "It's what I was looking up, it's called PMDD, it's not just anger, you have anxiety too."

"Shit. You're right. I'm not even sure if I should drive like this." Caroline sighed. "I'll just be careful, thanks for telling me. I'll get Leslie home first, and Susie, your dad's going to be here how long?"

"He'll be here early tomorrow morning, leaving in the afternoon Wednesday next week," Susie replied. "And Caroline, it really is okay, it's just hormones and stuff, we had a lot of fun, you never did anything bad." She smiled. "I'm more worried about Ricky. He's going to have to go a whole week without me," she said very femininely, and Leslie giggled.

"And here I thought I wasn't ever going to be tortured," Richard replied wistfully. Spankings, housework, and being dressed up like an elementary school girl in light-up sneakers were all fine; being without her was something he wished he could safeword out of.

"I'm sure you can make it a whole week," Susie replied with a wink in her voice, and only Richard got the full meaning of what she was talking about.

[Jacqueline]

[4/4]

Zoe got a text from her mother asking where she was and when she'd get home; she answered with general honesty, saying that they had been frolfing and were just leaving the downtown mall to drop off Leslie first and that Caroline would be dropping them off soon.

"Hey Zoe, switch with me," Richard said once they had gotten Leslie out of the car, and Zoe knew exactly why. Now that Leslie was out, Richard had no reason to be in the front seat, not when Susie was back there, and he didn't care about showing himself because everyone in Leslie's household knew about him anyway. He swapped seats with his sister, and Susie took the middle back seat. She wanted to be pressed next to him, and, smiling, she had her hand under his skirtall, playing with his diaper, their mouths interlocked, even before Caroline had pulled out of the driveway.

"These windows aren't tinted," Caroline pointed out as the two lovers were engaged in a snogging session. Even Zoe and Leslie had never done that in a moving car. (Zoe was starting to wonder if maybe they should have.)

Richard was in too good of a mood to care. He took his mouth off his girlfriend's just long enough to tell Caroline, "fuc-k 'em! Let them all think we're lesbians. They don't like it, they can stop staring into people's cars!" Susie giggled, and the two resumed their clothed, seatbelted lovemaking.

Zoe considered her words carefully. "I never thought that my brother had a such very good sense of the important things in life," she decided on.

"Destroy the enemy and fuc-k the women. Total masculine paragon back there," Caroline replied flippantly, and Richard and Susie laughed while their tongues were in each other's mouths. "Straight up serious, the combination of traits that he has? I never thought I'd see a boy like that. I am not even kidding. Zoe, your brother is unique."

"Yeah, I know." She spoke more quietly, but Richard and Susie could still hear her, despite their divided attention. "I didn't even know more than half of them until last week. I still feel like a bad big sister for that."

"Yeah, well, your mom won't feel much better when she finds out," Caroline replied. Abruptly, she honked her horn. "LIGHT'S GREEN, ASSHOLE! Anyway... sorry. Anyway, I'm just glad your mom found out about his dangerous side first. Means she's waaaay less likely to pull shit."

Zoe chuckled and formulated how she was going to say it. She decided to imitate Susie. "Caroline, you are not the only person in this car to have had such a thought," she said aristocratically.

"This car has a one princess rule," Caroline replied. "If the two of you want to compete, give me time to set up a betting station."

"Well, if we're judging by clothes, we already have our winner," Zoe replied, gesturing with a thumb to Richard, and Caroline pfffted in laughter, and her laughter was infectious to all of them.

Susie broke off their kissing, shaking her head. "We can't even... never mind, it's your car, sorry, Caroline. You have the right to be distracting and funny."

"I also have the right to be a bitch, and that's a right I've been making a bit too much use of today," Caroline added, as Zoe responded to another text from her mother, telling her that they just dropped Leslie off and that she could start making dinner if she wanted. "All right, we're going to go to Susie's house so Ricky can change, then... wait, she doesn't have any GPS tracking shit on your phones, does she?" Caroline asked, and Zoe just stared at her from the passenger seat, hoping that she'd figure this one out on her own.

"Caroline, who does computer shit, us or our mom?" Richard replied, bewildered that she would ask such a thing.

"Oh fuuuuck I am not thinking straight," Caroline said, not rolling her eyes too hard because she was driving. "Sorry! Mega brainfart. I hope you guys never see me like this again."

"Part of the condition makes you make a really big deal out of the condition," Richard reminded her. He'd had similar thoughts about himself. Finally being able to do what he wanted with who he wanted removed most of his anxieties, giving him the perspective to look back at his old self and recognize what he had been doing.

"Right. Note to self, drink a massive pot of chamomile tea next month. And make sure I'm somewhere with a working bathroom."

Not wanting to be distracted again from something deeper, Richard and Susie just held each other on the way to her house. Once Caroline parked, they ran out opposite doors, she unlocked the house rapidly, and the two of them embraced deeply once they were in, kissing passionately once again as Whiskers walked around them, his tail tickling their legs. Richard sighed even as they embraced. God, fuc-k, a week without her. He didn't want to let go, but he knew he had to, his mother was waiting for him. Once he did, he changed clothes as fast as he could, throwing his girly stuff into the backpack, not caring that his shoes and socks were still soggy - he'd wiped his feet on his other clothes and the dirt on his socks and shoes had spread as well, but he didn't care, boys were supposed to be dirty - and running out the door to jump in the car.

"I'll deal with the backpack," Zoe said. "You'll get Mom's full attention like that, believe me."

"I'm not worried," he replied. "I'll just tell her the truth about how I got dirty."

Zoe understood the plan, and it worked perfectly. His mother, predictably, asked him why he was filthy while Zoe was not. He, equally predictably, told her the general truth: that he had been out frolfing and that the reason he was so dirty was that he had carried Leslie across a muddy creek. His mother continued the predictability by telling him to go take a shower and change his clothes before he sat down at the dinner table, and he did just that, and he came back just as his mother and sister were distributing the food on the table. Normal, predictable family dinner.

As they sat down to eat together, Heather decided to begin the conversation she'd planned on having. "The two of you should be pleased to know that one of your cousins you despise so much will be gone for a while," she told them, and Richard wondered how anyone was going to go traveling for a gap year when most international travel was blocked. "Michael's father is sending him to residential treatment."

Richard felt something inside him give way, like a muddy cliff sloughing off into a river.

'So much for a predictable family dinner,' he barely had time to think before his entire mental process slid into a very familiar, very goal-oriented, very ruthless pattern. Of course it would never happen to him, nothing like that would ever happen to him, but the people he knew, even the people he didn't like, were apparently fair game. Richard didn't do anything theatric like drop his fork or spill his drink; he finished his bite without spitting or choking. But he couldn't stop it from coming on, the fury, the dissociation, the raw, burning, electrified connection to something deep within him that was not quite himself. He stiffened immediately, and his mother saw that look again, that desire to destroy. He immediately began formulating a plan. The most likely thing was that his uncle had no idea what he was getting into, that he just plain old didn't know that he was about to send his son to a genuine, certified hellhole.

"Finish your dinner, and then we can talk about what you're going to do," his mother told him, very carefully, as if she were talking to a live grenade. Zoe looked at him abruptly, and she realized he was doing that thing again. For her cousin, who was a disgusting, creepy loser and probably an incel to boot! What the hell?!

"I'm just going to look stuff up and show it to you, and him too, that's all," Richard said immediately. 'At first', he didn't add. This was Plan A. Plan B was to anonymously destroy his uncle's career - whatever it was - so he couldn't afford to pay for it. Plans C through Z would be worse. "Did he tell you the name of the place?"

She answered, and he didn't recognize the name, but it sounded exactly like the sort of place he was worried about. After he was done what he needed to do, he didn't even want to remember it anyway. He did finish his dinner like his mother asked - quickly and quietly, consciously chewing every bite - and then he dealt with his dirty dishes and went to his room.

"Ricky, why are you freaking out about something that's happening to my cousin?" Zoe asked him on the stairs, completely weirded out.

"Because I can't let evil win, Zoe," he replied.

Compared to password guessing and social network tracing, this was a breeze. Search engines - he didn't use just one - did most of the hard work for him. He couldn't believe how easily he remembered the names of the websites he went to, despite them being long deleted out of his browser history. He saw the same forum topics, the same screenshots, the same articles, still all preserved from the first time he'd dived down this particular rabbit hole, one of his first forays into disturbing material, and his very first, fumbling searches as a dark neophyte had pulled down both fictional and real descriptions of child torture, a wonderful and wholesome experience for a boy who had just turned twelve. This particular place was new, with a fancy website promising rehabilitation and family connection, but it proudly put the names of everyone involved on its website, and a few searches of their names showed what those people were really about.

Hell, even the marketing material - the basic marketing material, sent to the parents by the place itself! - had so many giant red flags it made Richard think of some of the worst fantasies he'd seen. Extremely limited contact with parents. A level system with rewards and poorly defined punishments. Deprivation of every sort. A break-them-down, build-them-up attitude that was guaranteed to cause lifelong trauma. Forced marches in the middle of nowhere, gussied up with different words. If he didn't know better, he'd say that this was all a sick prank, that the 'transporters' would show up at his uncle's house and proceed to play Rick Astley's most infamous hit at max volume with the lyrics rewritten into 'You went and tried to send your kid, send him off to be tortured...' But no. The world wasn't that nice.

He still had to go digging, and he really, really didn't want to read the detailed descriptions of absolute mental and occasionally physical abuse, but it wasn't for him to read and he could skim it. Ah, there, a main director of this new place was described by a woman - then a teen girl - on a forum as being sexually abusive at a since-closed facility, that was a good one to add. Another employee... wait, was that an actual criminal record? Throw that in, too. Holy shit, that person had been sued successfully, that goes in there too. Acc-umulating and connecting the direct evidence took him all of half an hour, a bit less than half of which was spent collating screenshots together to provide a clear, unbroken chain. Done. He realized that he'd deleted the old emails his uncle Martin used to send him - bad move, but how was he to know when he was eleven? - and got Martin's email addresses, and then those of Martin's wife and son, from his mother. Richard would have acquired them even if Heather didn't give them to him, and both of them knew it.

He thought for a while as to what to say in the email and just decided to say nothing at all. The screenshots - more than a dozen of them, some made into combined images - entirely spoke for themselves. His uncle got the To line, the wife and son got CCs, and he decided to CC his mother as well, as he figured she deserved to know what the hell he was doing. He then sent a copy of the email to Zoe, with an explicit warning not to read it unless she really wanted to know what the fuc-k he was trying to save such an awful person from.

Zoe was at his door three minutes later. "It's that shit. It's that conversion therapy gulag shit. You should have just said it was that."

"It's similar," Richard agreed. "I thought you knew what the words 'residential treatment' usually meant."

"I do now. fuc-k, Ricky." Her thoughts were a complicated mix of relief and frustrated anger at herself. Sure, she hated her cousin like poison, but there was shit she shouldn't let happen even to the people she hated. Fortunately, her brother had come through. Again. Two for two.

"I thought it was a psychiatric facility," Heather said from the hall, passing Zoe while stepping into her son's room. "Richard, I'm not angry with you, but I need you to tell me the whole truth right now. When did you start learning about this sort of thing? Why do you know so much about it?" She knew her son was a computer genius, but she knew that there was no way - absolutely no way - he could have compiled such things so quickly unless he was extremely familiar with the material.

Richard got up from his chair and went up to his mother to speak quietly. "Last year, just because it was the kind of stuff I wasn't supposed to be looking at," he confessed. "It was all just morbid curiosity."

"A fascination for the macabre," Zoe added, pronouncing 'macabre' perfectly.

"Yeah, pretty much that. I just couldn't stop looking at stuff like that. But I did stop, Mom, I don't look at it anymore unless I have to." There was a bit of accusation with the last two words, but it wasn't at her. It was, after all, his mother's brother who had caused Richard to go back down into that pit.

Heather sighed. No wonder her son was so high level. He'd gone to the Abyss. "Well, I certainly don't think Michael will be going to that place now," she said. She shook her head. "The things we do to each other. The things we do to ourselves." Neither of her children knew quite what she meant. Abruptly, she hugged him so quickly that he didn't even realize what was going on until she was already in her arms. "You're too good, Richard," she said, and he could hear the tears. "I'm so glad you're such a good boy." Richard blinked in shock, not sure what had brought that on. Oh, right. He'd just sent his mother extremely vivid descriptions of real world child abuse. That might have done it. She released the hug and started hugging his sister instead. "You two go to bed on time, and you have a wonderful day tomorrow."

The thing that had shook her the most about the material Richard had sent her, beyond anything else, was the disconnect between parents and children, that the parents were willing to believe someone who was effectively a random stranger, having no contact with their own children for months and months. How bad did a child have to be before that was even considered, she knew Michael wasn't that awful! And the money, the cost! What on Earth had her brother been thinking? She was brooding on the subject in the middle of Candy Crush when, half an hour later, she got an angry, short text from Martin to check her email.

---

Heather, I don't know what possessed you to acc-umulate this material nor why it was sent from your son. You did tremendous damage to us. HE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TOLD HE WAS GOING. I told the treatment center and now THEY ARE NO LONGER WILLING TO TAKE HIM because the well has been poisoned. Now my wife thinks I am the devil and my son said he wants to see me dead. So thanks for that. Needless to say, I don't think you'll be attending another wedding of anyone we know. Consider this a goodbye.

Martin.

P.S. I don't believe that a 13 year old could do that, but my wife does. If it was him, you need to get that boy under control right now.

---

Of course, she would do no such thing. Instead, she called her son in to read it, and his sister followed. Perhaps they could make more sense of it than she could. Not telling Michael that he was going away for months? What sort of bizarre idea was that?

"He's crazy, Mom," Zoe said upon reading it. "I know, he's my uncle, but he's crazy."

"I wouldn't even reply to him, Mom," Richard said. "He's totally coco-nuts." The plan hadn't succeeded the way he wanted, and he was very surprised that a place like that wouldn't even want a kid anymore because he was simply informed - he wondered whether something else was going on, but he didn't care. This was still a major win in his book, in fact a double win - neither he nor his sister wanted to want to talk to that branch of the family again anyway. Richard had prevented horrifically evil things from happening to someone he detested. Was that heroism? He didn't know and didn't care. His monster sense wasn't tingling anymore, and he just wanted to relax.

"Just go do whatever," Heather told her children with a sigh. "I'll deal with your crazy uncle." She shook her head, admitting to herself that her older brother had always been kind of a prick, even when she was little, but he was still family and she didn't want to think ill of him.

Richard went back to his room and checked his own email just in case the man had sent him something. His uncle hadn't, but he got something from Michael, an email that had obviously been heavily coached, sentence by sentence, by Michael's mother.

---

Mom says I should thank you, so thank you. I don't know what else to say to you. You prevented me from being sent somewhere bad. People would have come to take me away if you didn't do that. Thank you very much.

Sincerely, Michael

---

Richard reminded himself that he wasn't actually talking to a small child - a lot of disturbing concepts were at play when he thought that - and his reply was terse. He knew he could have said more, but he was creeped out and way too tired and didn't want to communicate with this douchebag any more than he absolutely had to.

---

I just wanted to stop evil from happening. Now stop lusting after my sister.

---

After he sent it, he suddenly realized that he might have gotten Michael in even more trouble - his mother had obviously been looking over his shoulder! - but he got back a reply much sooner than he expected, and this one was not coached at all, nor was it even remotely checked for spelling and grammar.

---

she had fuc-king fetish customes, , why was she dressing like that for, if she don't want people stearing at her then shouldn't dress up to get steared at, you were there you saw her a whore, maybe next time shell think first and be stupid later
you did get my whole ass dad almost a heart attack though so thanx for real
>I just wanted to stop evil from happening. Now stop lusting after my sister.

---

Richard shook his head. It really disturbed him that there were actually people this stupid in his family, and this jackass apparently had no idea what the hell he'd just avoided. ('The well had been poisoned, my ass. He still doesn't know even after I told him!') There were so very, very many things that Richard could have replied to him with, but he decided not to bother. He considered forwarding that last one to his mother, to drive home a point, but that wouldn't have helped anything and he really didn't want to deal with that shit just then, or ever. Instead, he forwarded it to his sister because she deserved to know, but Zoe didn't do anything with it either. It was disgusting and it would just make her mom feel like crap. She filed it away as ammunition if she ever needed to use it.

Richard flopped onto the bed in his T-shirt and loose shorts, lights off, staring at the ceiling until he fell asleep, his computer's monitor on until it went into sleep mode, swearing to himself. It had been a very long and tiring day. Enjoying dressing like a little girl was the very least of the weird shit in his life. He was thirteen years old and didn't want to deal with evil crap anymore. He didn't want to talk to crazy people. He didn't want crazy people in his family nor his life. He didn't want to have to explain bizarre and evil shit to his mother. He didn't want to have to bring out that anti-monster shit again. He wished that Caroline's PMDD-induced bad mood would have been the worst thing he'd had to deal with that day. He realized that he was being selfish - he had enjoyed a mostly fun day and he knew from the different emails that his cousin's family was in chaos - but he was completely exhausted and felt like he really needed to catch a break.

Except he was getting a break from Susie, which was no break at all.

Zoe told the Squad about what Richard had done, but he was already asleep.

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline, Richard had fun on his outing with the squad.  Then when Richard got home, he learned that Michael's father was going to send him to a residential treatment center.  Richard did his magic with the computer and saved Michael from a horrendous fate.  Great chapters as usual.  Keep them coming. :)

[Jacqueline]

[This chapter starts ugly but ends happily.]

[1/4]

"Well, there she goes," Zoe said as Heather left for work. She smiled at her brother. She'd been meaning to spend time with him, and as Susie's father was home and Caroline wasn't driving anyone anywhere that day, she figured it was the perfect chance. "So. How am I going to be dressing my little sissy up today?"

"I don't feel like it," Richard replied morosely, intending to just spend the day in his T-shirt and boxers like a regular boy. Thinking about spending so much time without Susie didn't put him a good mood. Without her around, dressing up just felt like a big waste of time, like half the equation was missing, like he was going back to the lame part of a game after having enjoyed so much of the fun part.

"Seriously?" Zoe asked, disappointed, and he nodded. Of course, she knew what his mood was about, but she didn't want to push him, and his spirits needed lightening. "You want to play a game, then? Do that Archon thing again, teach me some more? It beats sulking for a week."

Richard let himself smile. His sister had a point. He couldn't spend the whole week moping; that really was a painful waste of time, and his princess would be angry with him if he did. "You know what, yeah, let's do that."

They ran through a 1v1 against an Elite opponent together, talking through the open doors, Richard telling his sister what to do when and in what context, trying to get across the casual, easy familiarity that he had. He realized that just telling her what to do wasn't enough. He was learning how to teach.

They were in the later part of the middlegame when there was a knock on the door, a sharp, fast, irregular knock that Richard did not like at all. They could have paused the game, but Richard said, "I'll get it, you can finish this yourself." Something was very wrong, and, without thinking through it, he intuitively decided that he did not want his sister talking to whoever was at the door. He silently crept downstairs and peered through the peephole. Nobody. "Hello?" he asked. "Who's there?" Nobody answered. He looked through the windows and saw nobody. He really didn't like this.

Their front door had what their mother called the full monty: latch, deadbolt, chain. Heather had locked both latch and deadbolt on her way to work, and Richard was never happier for that fact. He didn't want to open that door at all unarmed. Getting a three-inch knife from the kitchen, he applied the chain to the door and unlocked it, then opened the door as far as the chain would go. He intended to yell again, but abruptly, an envelope fell from the inside of the door and hit the concrete. 'What the hell?' Looking carefully, listening for the sound of someone breathing, Richard reached his unarmed hand through the door and snatched the envelope in one quick motion, then he slammed the door shut and locked both latch and deadbolt. Abruptly, he dropped the envelope, suddenly certain that he shouldn't be touching it with his bare hands. He retrieved a pair of rubber gloves from the kitchen, and used the knife to very carefully cut open the envelope, emptying the contents onto the living room table.

He had almost expected what was in there. Pictures, of him skipping the neighborhood in his jingling dress, taken from various angles, one from an elevated position and one very uncomfortably close to his house. And a note, printed in Comic Sans, alongside a picture of a location he'd skipped past.

---
You are so unbelievably cute!!! I really appreciate you sharing your cuteness with the whole world. I would like to see some more of you! Meet me at this spot at 11 tomorrow and I will $$$reward$$$ you just for showing up!

Of course, if you don't share your cuteness with me, I will just have to share your cute little secret with the whole world, too! Don't worry, I really don't want to hurt you, so you have nothing to worry about when you do come!

Looking forward to seeing you there, cutie! But come by yourself or you'll be in BIG TROUBLE!
---

Other thirteen year olds would have been intimidated, deeply creeped out, and probably terrified. Richard was offended that whatever psychotic retard had left that there obviously had no idea who the hell he was dealing with. He was also angry with himself for not seeing photos being taken of him, and he was extraordinarily pissed off and frustrated at having to deal with shit like this yet again. First Leslie, then his cousin, and now the monsters of the world had finally come to literally knock on his door. He was just glad that this guy hadn't done this yesterday. If this had happened when he wasn't home, and then his mom had come home to see this stuffed in the door, things would have been very ugly indeed.

"You're actually going to try to blackmail me," he quietly said to the empty room. "ME." He felt like he was playing Fallout 4, wearing modded dress-armor while a ghoul was rushing him from a hundred yards away, consulting his modded, bright pink Pip-Boy and deciding which overpowered weapon to kill it with.

The first, of course, was to send it all straight to the police. He didn't doubt that they could and would find and arrest this dipshit in short order, and he vengefully wished for a very large, very sadistic cop with a very heavy knee. The problem there was that they might involve his mother, and that was an awkward conversation he really didn't want to have.

The second was to pretend to agree and then get Caroline's PTSD veteran crew to ambush him. He was fairly sure that 'Wanna go kill a pedo?' was something that such people would actually be down for. The man might be armed, though, although Caroline's buddies would surely also be, but... no, bad idea, as were similar things such as burning his house down. It wasn't that he had any moral compunctions about doing such things - this monster had thought he was blackmailing an innocent child instead of the Sith apprentice he actually got, he deserved an excruciating death at the very least - but Richard didn't want to get himself or his friends in trouble.

The third was the thing in the darkness, but he already knew what it would say: that he could handle this himself. This required merely apprentice-level Sithery for which he didn't need to call up his master.

The fourth was the nuclear option of telling the entire Internet himself, taking pictures of all of it with his phone and posting the entirety somewhere like Tumblr. If he really wanted, he could do even worse: send it all to every single news organization and law enforcement agency he could possibly contact. This would basically guarantee the end result he wanted, but it wasn't good either. If he wanted to act indirectly, he had access to computer proxies; he didn't need to use meat ones. Besides, the asshole already had his home address - giving him any time to react was a bad move. The after-effects of being widely known as a sissy boy were less important, but this one was just sending it to the cops, only with extra, negative steps.

The fifth was counter-blackmail, 'Surprise, you just sent me evidence on yourself', but that would have required this guy to suffer an outbreak of sanity and could lead to very bad outcomes. It was a dumb fantasy and Richard forced it out of his mind as stupid kiddie shit that he was too old to consider.

The sixth was to break into the guy's wi-fi and sniff his packets. Richard discounted this idea as well. How could he anonymously tell the FBI the guy had child porn - which he probably did - and have them react as quickly as he'd need, even if he could pull it off?

Richard realized that he was totally overthinking this. He really didn't need to get incriminating evidence to smash whoever this was. Few things were more self-incriminating than what he'd just left at Richard's house! Leaving physical evidence that he was attempting to blackmail a child?! That was basically handing Richard an axe and laying his own neck out on the chopping block. Best just to chop.

Wait a minute - if this jackass had been following him, then he also probably knew where Susie lived! Who knew what about himself wasn't even remotely important - this guy had to be chopped, no mercy, no hesitation, as quickly as possible and at any cost!

"You were right, I could finish that myself. So who was it?" his sister asked right after he made his decision.

"Some asshole's trying to blackmail me," Richard replied casually.

"Seriously?!" Adrenaline rushing, she rushed downstairs to look at the pictures and the note.

"Yeah, wasn't sure how to handle it," Richard admitted. "I'm giving it to the cops."

"Let's ask Leslie's parents what to do," she suggested instead, pulling out her phone.

Richard facepalmed at his own stupidity. "Oh, right, cripes, I forgot!" Robert was a more experienced wielder of that particular axe.

Zoe laughed, glad to have something to laugh at. "Yeah, Ricky, you forgot that the parents of your sister's girlfriend are experts in this kind of thing and you don't need to do everything yourself." She chuckled lightly and speed-dialed. "Oh, hey, Robert. Yeah, somebody took pictures of Ricky in one of his dresses and left them here with a really stupid blackmail note." Richard didn't hear the man's response, but it made Zoe laugh and he could guess what it was. "I know, right?! Can you or Willa help with this?" Another response. "Yeah, right now's perfect." Zoe smiled at the response. "Cool, thanks a lot." She hung up. "Get this, he actually goes to people's houses sometimes, and stuff like this counts as part of his job."

"He's coming now?"

"Yup, fifteen minutes. So, have you found out who's blackmailing you yet?" She was only half joking with the question. Her adrenaline was dwindling, as she knew that Robert had been right: the guy had definitely chosen the wrong kid to try that on.

"I'm about to," Richard replied, pointing at the picture taken from a high angle. That one had to have been taken from someone's house, which was almost certainly the asshole's or the house of someone he knew. With Zoe's help and a bit of mapping and triangulation later - he determined exactly which house it was, and they were in the middle of looking him up with free resources when another knock came at the door, this one much more polite.

Zoe peered through the peephole and opened the door. "Hey, Robert. We found out what house he took one of the pictures from, we're trying to find out who lives there."

Robert stepped in the door, and Richard was once again surprised by just how much he looked like Gordon Freeman. 'Forget the axe, this asshole's getting smashed with a crowbar.' "That's good. Did you search the sex offender registry?" Robert asked.

Richard perked up. "No, crap, I didn't even think about that." Lo and behold, searching found a sex offender with the same address that Richard and his sister had triangulated, and Richard laughed. "He really was dumb enough to take that from his own house! While on the sex offender list! Oh my God, what a dumbass!" A grotesque, out-of-shape dumbass who apparently liked to perform Gross Sexual Imposition on twelve-year-old girls and would have certainly done the same or worse to him, given the chance.

"Smart people usually aren't in the business of blackmailing children," Robert replied, looking at all the pictures and the note, exhaling a bit. "Honestly, this is one-and-done, I don't need more than what's right here." The police could get other people's doorbell camera recordings, but they wouldn't even need those. "I know who this is. He's on parole, they let him out because of COVID. Hundred percent, he's going straight back to prison, and he's probably not getting out until you're well over 18. Unless something goes awry, your involvement is no longer necessary and we won't have to get your mother involved either. The investigation'll be on him, not you. I'm still glad you came to me." There was some victim-contact procedures that Robert could make not happen, making sure that neither Richard nor his mother would be automatically called. "Let's pack this all up and I'll give it to who needs to get it."

"Be careful, fingerprints," Richard said, putting his gloves back on to handle the material.

"I wouldn't worry about fingerprints at this point. By the way, I know you like going out like that, and I know, it's your right, it's a free country and a nice neighborhood, but don't do that alone."

"I'm really obviously bait, and my phone is right there," Richard replied, pointing to his purse in the high-angle picture.

"Yeah, well, as I'm sure you've noticed, some people take obvious bait, and when seconds count, the police are minutes away. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying don't do it by yourself, makes you much less of a target."

Richard nodded in acquiescence. This was the guy's job, and he had a point. "Yeah, you're right. Hey, thanks a lot, Robert."

"Pfft. After what you did last week? This isn't even a fraction of that." He got up, taking the envelope with him. "By the way, I don't think he has friends, but if you see anyone else creeping around here, you call the police, or me, somebody."

"We will," Zoe promised him.

"Also..." He sighed. "Your mother is going to find out about you sooner or later, especially if you're doing things like this. You can't keep this from her indefinitely, and it's really better if you tell her in a calm environment. If you want me to be there when you tell her, just ask."

"I just want later and not sooner," Richard replied.

Zoe wasn't in the mood to consider telling secrets, because she figured that once his was out, hers would be as well. "You've got a point, but... for now, just get rid of this guy, please?" Brother and sister had a unified attitude: they just wanted to be done with things like this.

Robert nodded. "All right. You two be safe. I'm not going to try to tell teenagers to properly keep masks on outside, but try not to get within spitting or sneezing distance of anybody you don't know. For multiple reasons." He waved and left, his next stop being the police station, where he and the sex crimes unit's supervisor were on a first-name basis.

[11:20 AM] Zoe: Well, that was fast lol
[11:21 AM] Zoe: Some pedo tried to blackmail Ricky by leaving pictures of him in a dress and a crazy note.

"Hey, Zoe?" Richard asked as he put the knife and gloves away. "Do you think there's any chance of that guy actually having friends to come here?"

"If Robert says he doesn't think it'll happen, it really won't happen, he's super cautious," Zoe replied. She severely doubted that anyone who looked like that freak had very many friends at all, let alone anyone that would help blackmail teenagers. "He'd want Leslie always wearing a mask if she could breathe through it okay."

"Then can we just pretend that didn't happen and go back to what we were doing? I want to see the replay." Zoe heard the deep frustration, the sick-of-it-all, in her brother's voice.

She reached out to run her fingers through his long hair, and he did not pull away. "Sure thing, little bro." They went to her room and replayed the first part on regular speed to focus on early game micro, and Zoe briefly looked down at her phone long enough to type replies as his brother sat on her bed, occasionally pointing things out.

[11:25 AM] Caroline: so what happened to the pedo
[11:26 AM] Zoe: Leslie's dad came over and the guy's going to jail
[11:28 AM] Caroline: the guy should thank his lucky stars tbh
[11:28 AM] Zoe: IKR! lmfao

Zoe actually did laugh and looked back at the screen. Richard explained some more stuff, about units and what the computer was probably doing and what a player would do, doing a very good job of acting like they hadn't just shut down a blackmail attempt.

[11:31 AM] Zoe: Leslie's dad also said that Ricky shouldn't go out there by himself dressed like that.
[11:33 AM] Leslie: Oh wow. Yeah that guy made a big mistake LOL
[11:34 AM] Leslie: Dad's always cautious about stuff like that. It's good advice.
[11:34 AM] Leslie: Even for you, Ricky!
[11:35 AM] Richard: Yeah, he's probably right. I thought I was too obviously bait. Some people just take it anyway. Guess I'll just have to wear boy clothes to Susie's house :(

They sped up the replay some.

[11:41 AM] Susie: Or you just need someone to walk with you instead, sissy boy :heart:

Hearing from Susie, even in text, was exactly what Richard needed just then, and he perked up immediately.

[11:41 AM] Leslie: LOL yeah, or that
[11:42 AM] Richard: Yes please :) Surprised you're on, you're out with your dad?
[11:43 AM] Susie: At the grocery store. He's surprised half the people aren't wearing masks.
[11:43 AM] Richard: Is he at risk?

Susie didn't reply right away, and the replay ended shortly thereafter. Richard exhaled deeply, laying back on Zoe's bed, feeling a mix of emotions, the strongest being that he was missing out on something. "You know, actually... do you want to dress me up?"

She got out of the chair and looked down at him, smiling. "Not just that. I want to treat you just like my sweet little sister," she said with a small, swift pointing motion.

"Okay," Richard said without any hesitation.

"All right, little sissy. Take off all your clothes, turn around, and close your eyes. I've got a surprise for you." He looked a little concerned, and she gently tapped his nose. "Your big sister isn't going to do anything bad to you."