The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended. This story is copyright (c) 2010 Amy Komori. All rights reserved.

Chapter One:

Something Happens

I had the absolute coolest fucking girlfriend in the world and everything about her excited me and jazzed my nerve endings:  Emily Komori.

For one thing, Emily and I were almost the same height when we started dating, which I immediately dug about her. Maybe because I had this thing for Liv Tyler; they were the same height.  Only Emily was a lot more angular and waifish than the lusciously curvy Liv. Small breasts, long limbs, slender, with bony hips.  For another, she was also Japanese.  Not very commonplace in the town where we lived. She had long black hair and the most beautiful dark eyes. I could gaze into her eyes for days, and when she smiled, they became little crescent moons that twinkled like black glass.

Mostly what made her intriguing to me back then were the things she was into.  She was an artist and she usually painted people, but in this deformed, colorful style, with very visible brushstrokes. Sort of like if Joseph Singer Sargent saw some of Van Gogh's work and it blew his mind. She got paint all over her clothes when she worked over a canvas.  Super-gestural art girl.

She was also liked the coolest music. I mean, she liked some standard stuff for girls her age- Beck, Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros, the Pixies, Cibo Matto, Liz Phair, Tori Amos.  A few of the local bands in our semi-famous musical town. She liked mostly girl groups, but there were various guys musicians (Dave Navarro, Frank Black) she had crushes on and tortured me with. She also cherished these ancient cassettes from her childhood: Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson.  She'd sing along to the King of Pop without a trace of irony.  She just didn't give a fuck what anyone thought.

But beyond all that, she was also into Japanese rock like Shonen Knife, Electric Eel Shock, Melt-Banana and- best of all- Happy Monkey Do.  I really came to love me some Happy Monkey Do.  How did she know all these bands?  Well, most people around us knew Shonen Knife.  But the others came from having some very distant cousins back in the Motherland (as she called Japan), and from having the investigative intuitions of an ace musical detective and the willingness to pursue them.

She did origami and talked about taking martial arts, but she was actually way to lazy to exercise. She loved bad movies. The stupider the movie, the more she laughed and memorized to perfection the worst lines, which she then used at inappropriate moments.

"Grease 2," "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo," those John Cusack teen comedies from the 80s?  She had all of them on tape. You wouldn't believe how many times we watched "Better Off Dead."  But she was also obsessed with things like “Brain Donors,” and “Desire and Hell at the Sunset Motel.”  She would turn herself into Bridey from “Desire and Hell” if she could.  She would turn everybody into Bridey, probably.

And she had about a hundred silly voices (she thought her regular voice is too deep, but actually, it was very smoky and very sexy at times) and talking to her was sometimes like talking to several people at once. She could be so demure and shy, batting her eyelashes in this melodramatic way, then suddenly start cussing a blue streak like one of the guys and dominating the room.

So Emily was a freak, and she would tell you as much.  If you weren’t too chickenshit to ask.  And I you would have been.

We met at a party at a friend's apartment. I was a guy named Martin then, 21 living on my own, working at a video store and taking the occasional class at the university. Emily was a senior in high school, and she came in with two girl friends- I knew them both from around town, but I had never seen her before.

Of course, every guy in the apartment couldn't stop staring at her. Who's this abnormally tall, skinny Asian chick wearing a white, wide-collared shirt and a black velvet jacket? She wore a small, fake pearl necklace I thought was a choker because it clung to her long neck. Later, I found out it was a dress-up toy necklace for little girls.

If I had known where all this would lead, maybe I wouldn't have gone up to her and started talking.

Then again, maybe I would have.

She told me was there to meet this guy she had just started dating, but, incredibly, she fell for me that night. Instant attraction, with a touch of lust. Nothing wrong with that.

Emily's man never showed up, but she and I hit it off so well, we ended up going with the other two girls to IHOP.  We didn’t stay long enough to even get our orders because we acted up so much, they kicked us out. The IHOPers weren't too happy when we started pouring syrup on the table.

Not long after that, Emily and I had our first date. She was extremely quiet and reserved that first time at the movies, which surprised me because she had been very animated and funny at the party. Later, she told me it was because she really liked me and didn't want to scare me away with her "dorky" behavior. After the movie, I drove her back to her mom's house.

When we pulled up, there was a car parked by the curb, someone sitting in it.

"Shit, Martin- just drive away.  Go… go," Emily hissed, and I did. As we passed the car, out came the guy who stood her up at the party, Toby. He just stared helplessly as we drove around the corner.

After that, she told me the story about him, which made me feel strange at first, but she couldn't stop talking, a flood of words. She really thought of Toby as just a friend (my heart stopped on that dreaded phrase... would she describe me that way to someone else in a month?), but they'd gone out for about a month and now he was getting possessive and needy. That little bit of info turned the conversation very personal and we really got to know each other.

I dropped her off later that night, late enough that she would be in trouble with her mom. We didn't kiss. I was scared to, because I was really starting to fall for her. If we kiss, I thought, my heart's going to explode and I'll die right here in my car.

In fact, it was several dates later before we kissed, but once we did, I quickly found out she wasn't shy about doing other things.  One afternoon, we had her house to ourselves and she had my shirt off and started unbuttoning my pants before I could even tell her she was a great kisser. She had this very serious look on her face, a frown (it looked so cute). Maybe my being so reluctant to kiss her all those nights put the idea in her head I didn't find her attractive, and she was determined to change my mind. She never really explained all that to me, but she did tell me she had decided that morning she would sleep with me that day, and if I wasn't going to start it, she was.

And that's how it was for months. We spent a lot of time together in bed, watched 80s sitcoms in syndication for mocking purposes and our joint collection of VHS movies for culture, went to silly places like the Toys-R-Us, or the IHOP. And to parties and coffee houses with her friends.

I had to get to know them all, too. The girls she hung around hen were an artsy bunch, and one of them was this rich bisexual chick (and consequently, the hero of all the others) who had run away from home and lived for a year in Costa Rica with a group of hardcore American surfers. They liked to think they were wild, and they kind of were, but they got most of their ideas from magazines-- Rolling Stone or Raygun, sometimes Spin.  ‘Zines their friends made and traded.  They were not a Marie Claire or Cosmo crowd. If an independent film about lesbians or junkies or lesbian junkies came out, they saw it as soon as it hit town.

Emily liked them all but privately, when we were together, she said the rudest things about them; sometimes, she did it to their faces.  For their part, maybe because of her strong persona, they seemed to think of her as something of a leader.  At least they called her constantly to get her opinions on events in their lives and help them make decisions, which cut into our "alone" time. One girl in particular, Darla, had been Emily's best friend before we started dating. Toby hadn't been much competition for Darla, but now, Emily was pushing her to the side in favor of me. And the more Emily did, the more Darla called and came over and hung out and wouldn't leave until late at night, which caused Emily and me not to do quite as much a certain thing we both loved to do, although we were doing it an insane amount by that time.

And then, things got really strange. It started with an innocent-seeming comment. One morning, while I was flopped on the couch and Emily was about to leave my apartment, she narrowed her eyes and asked, "Did you dye your hair?"

"No," I replied. Emily kissed me and shrugged.

After she left, I went to the bathroom to shower, and looked in the mirror. Yes, my hair was darker, as if I'd dyed it, only without the flatness that comes from cheap color jobs.   Weird, I thought, but at least it's not gray. It felt a little different in the shower as I shampooed it. Stronger, but softer. It reminded me of Emily's hair, her thick hair that sometimes whipped me in the face when she was lying on top of me. Fine, very silky, but also unbelievably healthy and lustrous, like you could knot a battleship rope from it. Emily had the best head of hair I'd ever seen or felt until I washed mine that morning.

Well, there were worse things that could happen than to wake up with better hair.  Like shrinking, which is what I started doing next.  Getting shorter and losing weight.  Not just weight, but mass.  Size.  This played out over several days. With Emily's height, I never had to lean over much to kiss her, but now I wasn't leaning over at all.

One afternoon, I actually had to tilt my head back to kiss her.

"Jeez, man," Emily told me, "You're wasting away!"

I tightened my belt a few more notches to keep my increasingly baggy pants from falling down, but Emily pulled them down anyway and backed me onto the bed as I stepped out of them.  She undressed me and then herself, and all the while our tongues wrestled.  Emily’s hands moved all over my body, her beautiful Japanese eyes wide in wonder. She sat up, straddled my hips.

"Are you feeling okay?" she asked.

“Never better,” I said from underneath.  Of course, my penis (which I called Little Martin and Emily sometimes called Emily, Jr.) was throbbingly erect and probably wondering why he wasn't inside Emily.

"Well, something's going on with you, Martin," Emily replied.  "You're growing in reverse a-and all skinny..."

Emily hopped off the bed and led me to the mirror. I was shocked at how much I'd changed over the past week or so.  I was apparently a couple of inches shorter than Emily now, and rail-thin (not that I'd been huge to begin with). To my eyes, my arms and legs were incredibly stick-like. My hair was definitely black now, just like Emily's: the same luster, the same thickness, same consistency, still in my shaggy, sloppy guy's cut, or lack thereof.  But below, on my body, the hair looked very sparse. Only Little Martin was familiar, winding down as he was from his recent near-miss.

"Oh man, this is fucked up," I said. But I didn't feel sick. I hadn’t lied to Emily; I felt great, better, in fact, than I had in months.  We sat on the bed, didn't bother to even put our clothes back on. Little Martin kept softening, probably sulking.

"What have you been eating?" Emily asked.

“Nothing different,” I told her.

“Have- have you slept with anyone other than me?”

“What?”

“I wanna know if you’ve cheated on me.  If you have like an STD or something…”

“I don’t have an STD!  Unless I got it from you!”

She’d pissed me off and hurt my feelings, and now I’d done the same to her.  Emily flushed and she started to say something to defend herself or attack me.

I put my little arm around her shoulders.  Then I told her something I’d been keeping secret:  “Emily… I-I’ve actually… I’ve actually never slept with anyone besides you.”

I'd told her I'd slept with at least three girls before we met. But no, I'd been a virgin. So now she knew that, and we started this crazy, confused argument through tears, because by now, we were both crying and I was feeling thoroughly humiliated. Of course, we ended up fucking and as soon as I shot my hot jet onto Emily's thigh (she bore it stoically as she always did, but she wouldn't let me come inside her, even though she was on the pill), she sort of mumbled about my vanished chest hair for a bit, then faded out on me, because it was late and she was emotionally wrung-out. I could only get murmurs from her.

Then she was completely asleep.

I lay there beside her, my body pressed against hers. It felt warm and womblike under the covers, but there was definitely a newness there, smooth skin against smooth skin. I felt a creepiness in my guts, a sickly, syrupy feeling. I'm shorter than Emily now, and my arms and legs are like twigs, I thought.

What was happening to me? Was I reverting to my teen years somehow?   But if that were the case, why did my hair turn Japanese on me?  That song "I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so" kept running through my mind.

Chapter Two:  Terror in the Club

I became very self-conscious of how short I was and kept imagining everyone looming over me like fairy tale giants. And my clothes were loose and obviously not fitting me. They must've been at least two sizes too large. I felt jumpy and out of sorts, with my sleeves flapping over my little hands and the way I started constantly stepping on my pants cuffs.

As if I wasn't paranoid enough, at work, the other guys started to crack jokes about me behind my back, racist jokes about my having caught some sort of Asian STD they called "Yellow Fever." Some of the customers started asking me where that nice Martin was who always recommended such good movies to rent. After a couple of days of that, I quit. I didn't bother to write a letter of resignation or phone or email, I just didn't show up anymore.

I called my parents and told them I got fired and after a long lecture, they sent me some money to live on while I looked for another job. They also wanted me to get serious about school and had been after me about it for some time, so I agreed to that to buy some time to sort out what was happening to me.

Emily and I went out with her friends, Darla would barely speak, which was great because I knew she hated me, and usually the things she said would be breathless and stupid.  But I could tell she was studying me.  I would glance in her direction and she’d look away, which meant she’d been watching.  Of course, that made me suspicious.

One night after I'd been feeling particularly uncomfortable and embarrassed at the coffee house (one of Emily's friends wanted us to all dress up in freaky dresses and go to this party at a friend's house-- all of us in dresses, which I might have done under any other circumstances), I had another talk with Emily about the whole thing. I knew Darla was into Wicca and paganism, and had a lot of books on magic, all of which both Emily and I thought was complete bullshit. But as long as it made her happy. Now, however, I had this silly suspicion.  It first crossed my mind when my hair changed... but I made myself forget it. Lately, though, it was increasingly starting to nag me.

"I know this is going to sound crazy, but you don't think Darla might've slipped something into my drink sometime, do you?" I asked. I was standing in the bedroom in my underwear, which I now had to roll down a couple of times, or else they'd fit like a big, white diaper. I was about to slip on a T-shirt when Emily stormed into the room.

"What are you saying?" she demanded.

"Well, I know she hates me," I said. "She's got all those fucked up books."

"Oh, fuck, Martin, you're talking about magic," Emily protested.  “Darla reads that stuff but I don’t think she really believes in it.  That’s stupid.”

"Yeah, well, I was just asking," I said hotly, my face flushed.  "This shit that's happening to me is real, anyways."

Suddenly, Emily grinned devilishly and she pushed me down onto the bed and started kissing my face all over. Then she stopped. "You are a girl!" she exclaimed.

Well, I could feel my penis making a statement to the contrary, but I knew what she was getting at. My face was completely smooth, and my body was mostly the same way. I still had some dark arm hair, but it had become very fine, almost invisible.

Emily ran her palms down my chest. "God, your skin is so soft."

"This is most definitely some weird, fucked up… weirdness," I said in a little voice that barely sounded like me at all.

I watched her hands move all over my chest and torso and it was like watching her touching someone else, like some kind of fucked up first person porno with nothing of myself in it except the tactile sensations she was giving me.  It felt different from all the other times, like my nerve endings were so much more delicate and the surface of my skin gave her hand so much less resistance.  Smooth on smooth, so very little friction.  Our bodies gleamed the same way in the light from the hallway.

People like to think girls are hairless, but they're not; they have very fine body hair all over, and in the sunlight sometimes it glints like silver.  Emily had the same kind of dark hair on her arms that I had now. But we definitely looked like two girls in the half-light and the thought suddenly got me very excited. Not my being a girl, but the whole two girls thing. Emily settled back onto my thighs and gave lie to the illusion by revealing my penis, completely erect and pointing straight at my face.

"You can do anything you want with it," I told her.

"Can I have it in me?"

I smiled in reply. She lifted up and lowered herself down onto my dick and we moved together. I certainly didn't feel girlish anymore, but as our hands worked all over each other it was hard to tell where she ended and I began, and vice versa. It was like we were one and the same in a way mere physical contact couldn’t account for.  Her tremors and feelings communicated blended with mine as if our nervous systems were inexplicably linked and I felt her come at least twice, and then she pulled off as I pumped hot semen all over my belly and thigh.

Emily settled down on top of me, gluing us together with my come, which I ran in warm streams down my stomach and thighs towards the bed. I felt drowsy and peaceful-- if I woke up tomorrow with a vagina, I'd deal with it then.

I still had my penis the next day, but another factor came into play. We could no longer deny that I looked Asian. Like a very skinny, extremely androgynous Japanese kid of about 15 or so. My skin tone had gone from pale pink to pale tan, and my eyes were dark brown and almond-shaped, and I could see I'd soon have the epicanthic fold that gives some Asian eyes their distinct appearance.  Actually, I looked more part-Asian or even Hispanic, but given the way things had been going, full Asianhood no doubt awaited.

"We have got to get you to a doctor," Emily said.

"With what money?" I asked.

"Call your parents."

"And tell them what- that I'm turning Japanese so I need to see a doctor? Yeah, they'll love that, right after I told them I quit my job."

"Don’t tell them that.  Just tell them you're sick."

Emily was right. I did think for a moment it would even be a relief to turn over my existence to some scientifically-interested third party to maybe find out why this was happening to my body, but another part of me, the willful part, wanted me to just deny the whole thing.  After all, there was always a chance it was just a dream. A very detailed and exacting dream that seemed to be lasting a whole month, but a dream nevertheless.

But as scared as I was of this transformation, I was absolutely petrified of prying eyes and poking needles. And what if the doctor confirmed I was turning into an Asian girl?  My mind conjured up images of myself imprisoned behind Plexiglas, costumed as Patient Zero in a white dressing gown, the body-changing process continuing but with a whole new layer of torture on top of that.  Wires up my asshole, little doors cut in my skull and all kinds of metal probes and monitors shoved into my brain, EKGs, body scans, blood tests, interviews, therapies, experimentation. 

And after that phantasmagorical stint as Alice at the mad surgery party in Medical Wonderland, maybe some kind of “Oprah Winfrey Show” infamy, with doctors getting rich off books all about the dumb guy who changed race and sex like some kind of human chameleon.  I’d become less than a person.  I’d become some kind of cultural metaphor.

“No,” I said, making my choice.  “I do not want to go to a doctor over this.  What if it’s like testicular cancer?  I’m so different now it’d probably be in the terminal stage-“

“And you’ll die if you don’t see someone about it!”

“I’ll die anyways!  But before dying, I’d get the joy of spending my last months getting cut into little pieces or puking my guts out on chemo.  Right now, I feel pretty damned good, so no thanks.”

“But you’ll die, Martin.”

Yeah, all those things and even Emily’s insistent words were screaming at me inside, scaring the shit out of me, to be honest.  But there was no way I was going to spend my remaining time like a lab monkey or a victim in a torture flick-slash-snuff film.  Because despite the fear-rush and frequent panic attacks, despite the fact I might be dying, what I’d said about feeling pretty damned good was only half the truth.  Actually, I felt incredible.  Energetic, feisty, giddy.  My metabolism was sped up like a hummingbird’s heart.

Finally, something happened that sent me over the edge. Emily and I went to a show with her friends (by now, I had stopped even talking to my friends on the phone because my voice was so different and embarrassingly high, and I wasn't about to let them see me in my new altered state). A local alternative band called the Enemies was opening for a some up-and-coming-group called Seven Brothers that actually had a recording contract. The show was at the world-famous Lava Lamp club downtown, and as much as I wanted to see the bands, I really did not want to go and make my public debut as a teenage Japanese girly-boy.  I’d thought it over for approximately ten seconds, then opted out, but Emily talked me into it by making some outrageous promise or other about some insanely desired physical activity we'd do when we got back. I still had sex going for me, even if it was becoming more problematic too.

Emily drove that night, because I'd sworn off now that I no longer matched my driver's license in any way. She had a battered Ford Bronco II with plastic Mardi Gras beads hanging from the rearview mirror. I slumped as low as I could in my seat, hardly talked. Emily played her Pixies tapes and sang along, occasionally giving me these funny, soulful looks as she wailed her favorite parts. Once she even punched me on the arm and asked me to sing with her instead of moping. I gave her a nasty look that shut her down until we got to Darla's house, and then the Bronco was full of giggling girls breathlessly talking a mile a minute about nothing in particular.

So there we were, outside the club, everyone pretending I was still my old self. Emily got in with no problem; she didn't have to even show her fake ID and got stamped as if she were legal. I was concerned about getting turned down, but they did the same for me-- passed me by and stamped my hand. Through the doors we went, and the whole smoky place opened up before us. The Enemies still hadn't taken the stage, so we mingled with the sparse pre-show crowd.

And then it happened.

Some guy, some tiny little guy with wire-rimmed glasses and the start of a goatee came up to me. At first he just stood near us, listening to the conversation, to which I certainly wasn't adding much.

Then, he said something to me.

"What?" I asked, from surprise and because I could barely hear him over the loud music blaring on the club's PA.

"I said, `How are you?'" he said, smiling and nodding his head. I immediately recognized the look on his face, because it'd been on mine plenty of times. The "I'm trying to pick you up" face. From his twiggy looks I couldn't be sure he wasn't just gay, but for some reason, the vibe I got from him was hetero.

"I'm... um... I'm okay," I stammered, then I grabbed Emily's arm and walked her to a secluded corner of the club.

"Did you see that?" I said, fighting the noise so she could hear me, but no one else could.

I glanced over at the guy, and sure enough, he had his eyes on me. He saw us no doubt talking about him, smiled and held up big Grolsch in salute, just as I'm sure I'd done to girls dozens of times before I met Emily.  I thought, Shit, he thinks we’re talking over my attraction to him, or the possibility of me catching a ride with him after the show.

"What, that guy?" Emily asked.

"Yeah, that guy," I said.

"What about him?"

"He hit on me."

"He didn't."

"He did."

"He did?"

"Yeah," I said. I was mortified. I was probably blushing like crazy.

Emily told me not to worry about it. I told her I couldn't help but worry about it. I mean, I was a skinny Asian boy-type kid and some guy was trying to get with me and I was pretty sure it was because he thought I was a skinny Asian girl-type kid and that’s what had me freaking out.  If I thought in any way he was gay, it wouldn’t have bothered me in the least.  But there was a distinct guy-meets-girl going on, and the boy clothes I wore wouldn't have put anyone off; we lived in a pretty liberal college town where people tended to dress eccentrically to make a name for themselves.  I told myself Emily was right, to forget it and that maybe if my hair had been shorter he would have realized that I was male.

But even that fact was increasingly coming into doubt.

The rest of the night, I avoided twig boy. Thankfully, he got the message I wasn't interested and found someone else to mack on. I couldn't help but think he'd found some "other girl." But as the Enemies began their set, there was blood in the water now, and the sharks started circling. A guy with a shaved head asked me if I skated. A hippie-type stoner dude wanted to know if I got high. Of course, guys were also hitting on Emily at the same time. Then, this guy I knew from work, Bob (who I always thought was a dork) asked me point blank what I was doing the next weekend. I definitely knew Bob wasn't gay, because I'd met his girlfriend.

"Bob," I said, then stopped.  What next?  Would he even believe me?  "It's me, Martin."

"Martin?" Bob asked, a weird look on his face, half-grin, half-shock. He looked me over and I guess he believed me due to the fact I had been so visibly different the last few days I worked at the video store, because he asked me what I was doing and what had happened to me.

"I wish I knew," I said, truthfully.

So Bob started apologizing profusely (and sweating that way, too), and I decided to get the hell out of there.  He didn’t even stay for the show, just bolted out the front door and into the night.  I told Emily I was ready to go, too, but Darla protested.

"I wanna see Seven Brothers," she whined. She was quite the whiner.

"Can you get a ride?" Emily asked her. Darla pouted, but said it was possible. There were a few guys from some of her classes there. Emily and I left, along with one of Emily's more wallflower-type friends, Beth.

We drove in silence, with the light in the cab shifting constantly from the streetlamps as we passed. I kept my eyes on the reflected dash lights on the windshield.

"Well, that was fun," Beth said from the backseat.

"Uh huh," Emily and I replied, simultaneously, obviously not believing it. But the atmosphere in the Bronco was deadly. I was grateful when we dropped Beth off and got back to my apartment.  Emily was in a foul mood now, and when I tried to get her to make good on her promise, she shook her head and we just lay there, side by side in bed, but feeling a million miles apart. 

Chapter Three:

Cornflake Girl

Emily was more understanding the next day. We talked the whole morning through as we ate Lucky Charms and watched cartoons on TV with the sound off.

"I'm getting kind of scared," I said.  Well, we already knew that.  What I meant was, the manageable fear from before was now stark terror.  Ghostly images of doctors in masks hovering over my bed, blinking machines…  get your metamorphosing ass to a hospital, sucka.  No, no, no!

I wasn’t sure if it was from inhaling smoke at the club or from shouting so much there, but I’d woken up with a changed voice.  Higher, reedier.  I tried to hide it by pitching it lower.  Fucking puberty in reverse.  I dabbed at my increasingly mushy cereal with my spoon, not even wanting to look at Emily as I voiced for the first time what exactly about the body changes had me scared:  "Everybody in there thought I was a girl. Is that what's happening to me? Am I turning into a girl?"

"I don't know," Emily said. "But I'm getting scared, too."

We were both in t-shirts and sweatpants (all mine). Impulsively, I put my cereal bowl down on the carpet, jumped off the sofa and went to the full length mirror on my closet door, took off my shirt, and slid down my sweats and boxers.

Just as I’d feared, whatever was happening to me was now affecting Little Martin, or, I should say, Littler Martin.  My penis was teensy now, practically buried in my black pubic hair, with just the nub of the head protruding, like the face of an animal in deep grass.

"Emily, come in here!" I shouted in my new, higher, uber-stupid sounding voice.

She came running and by the shocked look on her face, I could tell she knew it too. "Oh my god! Emily Jr.'s so... so tiny..."

"Oh man, oh man," I moaned. "If this keeps up, I'm the one who’s going to be Emily, Jr."

I felt like vomiting, but instead, I started crying. I threw myself down on the messy, unmade bed and wept like a little girl.  Which was fitting, I guess. Emily sat beside me and rubbed my back. Incredibly, my tiny dumb penis got erect. We started kissing, Emily and I, but when I tried to enter her, she pushed me away.

"I can't," she said, softly. She held me for a while, and my bitsy erection slowly subsided. I felt hollowed out and let down, emotionally wrecked. Being hit on by guys and finding out your penis is shrinking is certainly a blow to any preconceived notions of your own manhood you might harbor. My sense of self was shifting, and no longer under my control.

Over the next few days, I barely ate or spoke, and I didn't bathe beyond quick sponge baths in the bathroom sink; I couldn't take seeing myself totally naked. Emily stayed with me the whole time, but after a while, cabin fever set in and I was starting to get pretty ripe. She talked me into going over to her mom's house to stay. I agreed in a daze and soon we found ourselves explaining everything to Emily's mother.

When I first met her over a month before, I was amazed at how All-American Mrs. Komori was; then, I found out she'd been born in California. Their house was the typical suburban ranch, except for the family photos with Japanese locations in the background, and a few touches here and there, such as Japanese dolls. They both owned kimonos, too (courtesy of Emily's grandmother, who spoke accented English because she was from Kawasaki, Japan), but never wore them. And we did take our shoes off (Emily insisted, not her mom), although by the time I moved in, I had quit wearing them except when absolutely necessary because they had become like giant clown shoes.

And yeah, that was the week my body went all the way.  Over the next few days, my already impossibly miniscule and increasingly strange-looking dick got smaller and smaller, and my testicles seemed to retract or vanish up inside me or whatever. It's not as if I sat there and watched, and it certainly didn't make me happy. I didn't look down there much, and when I did, each new configuration sent my heart pounding.  Towards the weekend, it was as though an invisible master had completed a flesh origami artwork and my Martin junk had been folded into a lotus or something and stuffed up inside me.  Which meant… I had all the stuff in there I’d seen in medical books.  Ovaries.  Fallopian tubes.  A womb.  When I dressed or undressed, I could tell I no longer had that comforting bulge and heft in my drawers, but there was no physical sense of “something’s missing.”  My body didn’t feel an absence of a penis and testicles.  It wasn’t as if I were now an amputee.  There was nothing gone from this body; it was 100% complete.

But talk about losing your best friend.  I pined for my man stuff the way a sea captain’s wife would have for her husband drowned in the North Atlantic. I missed feeling it throb and start cocking itself into sex-position whenever Emily looked at me a certain way, or touched me just right. I still felt something, but it wasn't the same (mostly, it just made me feel like I had to pee), and it was like a muffled, murmuring conversation compared to the shout-out a good erection is.

Apart from developing a perfectly formed little vagina and all the wonders that come with it, I wasn’t just smaller.  My proportions had changed, too.  My shoulders were narrower, and my hips were wider, but with my smooth skin, tiny size and lack of boobs, I in no way could have been mistaken for a teenage girl (or much of any kind of boy)- nope, I had become a prepubescent. I looked like I was about 11 or 12, but the shadow of the woman I’d one day grow into was already upon me.

Still, having a girl’s body wasn’t quite the same as being gendered as a girl.  I wasn’t about to surrender to biology.  And I kept wearing my grotesquely oversized boy's clothes as a way to deny my physical gender and maintain at least one area of continuity from who I’d been most of my life.  In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection and mouthing the words, “You’re still a guy.  You’re still a guy,” thinking my Martin thoughts from inside a female shell, peering out from these eyes like a shut-in from the windows of a house.

“Are you okay in there?”  Mrs. Komori asked, all worried.

“Uh… yeah!”  I shouted back, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Okay.  Supper’s almost ready.”

I frowned at myself in the mirror and watched my face turn almost purple.  I put one of my little fingers under my nose to simulate a mustache but gave up.  I sat on the floor with my chin on my knees, hugging my legs, just trying not to think of anything.  An empty brain is a happy one, I told myself.  But I found trying not to think only increased the likelihood of thought, so I gave up, got to my feet and went to supper.

While I could tell myself I was still a guy, I was powerless to stop my most important relationship from changing.  Emily looked at me now in a sort of maternal way. Or sisterly.  Whichever, I hated it.  We talked a lot, though. Every time I tried to bring up our immediate past, though, she'd go off on some painting she was working on, or a band Darla wanted her to see. I felt miserable.  Those longings were still there, only my physical equipment would or could scarcely acknowledge them. Although Emily would sometimes call me a "cute little lesbian-girl."

My social life was pretty much over. Emily still went out with her friends, but I had to stay home. Not that I could've gotten into any of the clubs this way. Not too many clubs will allow a 12 year old girl in, no matter how empty the place is. Emily would tell me all about all about their nocturnal adventures, and sometimes, she'd slip in that some old guy friend of hers had hugged her, or asked her out. She even started talking to Toby again in a cautious sort of way. She still turned them all down, but it had to be just a matter of time before she'd give in. I couldn't blame her, but still I fumed in impotent jealousy. How could I compete with all those guys now? And there had been plenty of them swarming around her even when I was still a guy. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how huge Asian chicks go over huge in this town, especially in the crowd we ran with.  They were like every indie rock guy’s dream girl, every shoe-gazer’s wet dream.  Call it the “El Scorcho Factor.”

By the time spring rolled around, I had already developed a new status in the world. I was Emily's surrogate little sister.  Now that everyone was about to graduate from Delacroix High and all their sentimental, nostalgic love emotions raged in their pounding hearts, Darla and company started coming around again after having written us off  after the Seven Brothers Incident (as I named it). I was just an insignificant presence at their gatherings, but I would, every once in a while, catch Darla giving me the strangest looks. My old suspicions returned, but I had little to go on. Just because someone hates and resents you, would that be motivation enough for them to turn your body into a little girl’s?

With my personal identity in flux, we had to do invent a new one for matters of convenience.  Emily and her mother told people I was a cousin of Emily's from California. They introduced me as Amy (Emily's idea; she didn't even ask my opinion!), which made me a little nauseated at first, but I went along with it, even smiled and said, "Nice to meet you," when introduced with that name.  Invariably, someone would call me "adorable," or there'd be a joke about my clothes.

I must've looked ridiculous, like a short, dark-headed parody of my former self, a real tomboy, my clothes hanging off me, my black hair uncombed, my smooth, shiny face and pretty, narrow eyes.

Those stupid clothes!  I didn’t really have much of a choice about what to wear.  For lack of a better plan, Martin had become a deadbeat runaway. There was nothing I could do, except mail a couple of letters to my parents telling them I'd taken a sabbatical to Mexico. They called Emily once, and she helped convince them; I'd hitchhiked across the U.S. once or twice during summer breaks.  As a result, all I owned in the world were a couple changes of clothes, and I clung to them as desperately as I clung to my brain ID.

I started rolling up my pants cuffs, but now, instead of getting hit on by college age alterna-geeks in clubs, I was getting looks from junior high skater punks at the mall.  The mall wasn’t a place I hung out very often, but I couldn’t live without new music, so I still wanted to check out Sam Goody’s there.  Usually, when my friends or I wanted CDs, we had choices downtown, but they didn’t have everything.  This led to infrequent trips out the highway to retail hell.  I dreaded walking past the fountain where the snotty skater dudes hung out, all rude and carrying on like a telephone line full of jays or crows or whatever the hell kind of birds hung out on lines in noisy groups, taking their little shits on our heads.  And there was no way to avoid it because it was right outside Sam Goody’s, and even if I didn’t walk past it, they’d see me coming from the other direction.  I couldn’t win, even with Emily there.  As soon as I appeared—no doubt looking as scared as I felt-- the kids would start throwing skater slang at me, or saying the dirtiest shit when there were no adults around. Sometimes, I'd get really scared one of them might grow balls big enough actually to try something. I planned just to knee whatever jerk did right in those self-same nads and run like hell.

Which brings up something else- how completely weak and helpless I felt. I felt reduced, diminished. I had become this tiny, petite thing, although I looked like a little toughie in my baggy slacks and my shaggy, boyish hair. I hadn't been the biggest, strongest guy ever, but I had known how to handle myself. Now everything had been reset almost to zero. Little skater shits I'd never have thought twice about before were a danger now. I could run pretty fast, but if I couldn't run, what could I do with these pathetic doll arms and tiny hands if they really tried to carry out one of their crude come-ons? Not a whole hell of a lot, that's for sure. It was a constant source of stress and I learned very quickly to be cautious and aware of my surroundings.

But for now, I was still me inside, and I planned to fight to the last to protect the last bit of maleness I had, my mind.  The night before Emily’s high school graduation—which I planned to skip, although I’d truly wanted to be present-- I tried to drink beer, but two bottles got me so drunk I spent the rest of the night throwing up in the bathroom. 

“I-I’m all right,” I groaned.

“No, you’re not,” Emily said.  “But you will be.  Do it and you’ll feel better.”

“Oh shit, Emily, I’m such a lightweight now…  This sucks…”

Then I had to lean back over the toilet.  As I heaved and cried and Emily held my trembling shoulders, I conceived of this really radical personal imperative-- if I ever went fully girl inside to match my outside, I was still determined to grow up to be the manliest Japanese dyke ever.