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.