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.