Ultragreen 5 - Now what?

She smiled at her reflection, feeling her lip tremble just a bit. She had to smile or start crying again. Would she never grow up to be a man like her father? Moses Wye stood an inch over six feet with the muscles and rough hands he had made for himself as a young man in the building trades. That he’d ended up a wealthy contractor had taken hard work and some luck.

And now his only son had gone and turned himself into a girl.

Shellie blinked and sniffed. She shook her head. “I am not going to cry,” she said out loud. “Even if I have turned into a girl, I am not going to cry!” She glared at her image in the mirror—daring the girl dressed as his old self to make him a liar.

“No one would know just to look at me,” she said, telling herself. Maybe she could keep being Sheldon long enough for George to find out how to reverse it.

She blinked again, eyes stinging but noticing something else now. Her eyes, once blue-gray, were now a startling, vivid green—as if an emerald light were shining out from inside her. Now that might be noticed, she thought. Sunglasses?

“‘Ew? ‘Ewwie?” George’s mushy voice came up the stairs and down the hall. 

Shellie rolled her bright green eyes. George was half-problem and half-solution, and she puzzled for a moment over what to do about him.

Downstairs, George tried again, really bellowing, and this time with the stutter. “Sh-sh-shel? She-shellie?”

She ran to the top of the stairs, “Stop yelling! Someone might hear! And don’t call me Shellie!”

“Huh-uh-huh-uh!” George laughed in relief, the gasping intake that made him sound like a cartoon. “Y-you okay?” He started up the stairs from the kitchen.

“I’m fine,” Shel said, backing up to allow George room. He was a big kid, as tall as some adults and twice as heavy as many. She laughed to see him, too, affectionately but with some exasperation. “If you start calling me ‘Shellie,’ someone might look at me really closely and find out what we’ve been doing. Okay?”

George nodded, peering around theatrically as if searching for eavesdroppers. “But we’re alone, Shellie,” he pointed out, his soft brown eyes guileless.

She rolled her own eyes again. 

“I like calling you Shellie,” said George, grinning. “You’re the only girl I know well enough to call by name.”

“I’m not supposed to be a girl!” she told him. “No one is going to find out and we have to figure out a way to change me back!”

George nodded, the cowlick on the back of his head bobbing up and down. “Why?” he asked.

“George!” Shel snapped at him. “Just don’t call me Shellie where anyone might be able to hear, okay?”

George nodded again. “Okay, Shellie,” he said happily.

Grumping a bit, she turned away, trying to remember what she had been about to do. “Maybe he’d like it if I started calling him Georgie,” she muttered.

“Ug-gug-gug-ug!”

She turned back quickly to see George turning bright red, grasping the banister of the stairway tightly in one hand and clawing at the air with the other. “Gug-ug-ug-a-gug!” he gasped.

She reached him quickly. “George! Are you okay? Can you breathe? What’s wrong?” George had to be okay, she’d never be able to get him safely down the stairs and out of the building without help.

The bigger boy’s gagging sounds turned to laughter, at least, the wheezing in-and-out gurgle that George used for that purpose. He tried to speak in between rattles and whoops.

Shellie finally managed to decipher what he was saying. “You can call me Georgie if you want to.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said. “I’m not going to call you Georgie!”

George looked at her with his big sad eyes. “Please? Sometimes?”

She threw up her hands. “Okay, okay. If we’re alone and no one can hear and I really want you to do something you don’t want to do, I might call you Georgie. Okay?”

He nodded, smiling with his mouth wide open which she had told him a thousand times not to do.

She turned away, giggling a little in spite of herself. What in the world were they going to do next?