I said, “Colin? Victor? Is that you?”
No words came out, but there was a rush of music radiation from me, flashes of wings of light.
Vanity screamed again.
Victor said, “Fascinating. Is that Amelia?”
Colin put his hand out. With a bump, the world snapped back into place. My new senses went blind. I was blinking.
I looked around. Everything was normal looking. No noises from subspace, no ripples of hyperlight thudding through skew planes. Just a room, and four friends staring down at me.
I looked down at myself. Honestly, I expected to see unimaginable horror, arms and legs twisted into Mobius strips, my body stretched into a Klein bottle, bones at right angles, lungs turned inside out, my head shaped like a question mark, with webs of flesh connecting me to older and younger versions of my body. Something like that.
But I was just normal. A girl in a plaid skirt, white shirt, black patent leather shoes, and a stupid necktie.
“What happened?” I asked.
Colin said, “You had too much energy in you. I sucked it away.”
I said, “How?”
Colin leaned over and offered me his hand. “I wanted you back the way you were. My desire was stronger than the desire of the world to keep you looking weird. I won.”
I put my hand in his hand. Instead of lifting me to my feet, he just caressed the back of my hand with little motions of his thumb.
“But—how did you know what to do?”
He smiled. “It’s not something I do consciously. It’s like lust. I mean, a man can’t ejaculate just by a silent act of willpower. He needs a girl to lick his…”
I yanked my hand away and climbed to my feet without his help. He started to brush off my bottom, and I clipped him one on the ear.
“Ow!” he said, clutching his ear and stepping back. “And you’re welcome for me saving your life.”
Quentin said, “I wish I had his paradigm. No fuss. No knives. No candles. No lists of names.”
Victor said, “Clap, and the dead Tinkerbell gets better, only if you really believe. Seems like a rather inflexible system to me. How can you perform experiments? If you can only do what you really believe in, you cannot be curious.”
Quentin said, “But look at how well he does with women!”
Victor said, “Does what? Annoy them?”
I said to Colin, “Thank you for saving me. Do you want me to say I’m sorry about hitting your ear?”
Colin, still rubbing his ear, said, “No, thanks. I want to stay mad at you, I’ll have an excuse later on for hiking up your skirts, turning you over my knee, and spanking you. Hit me again.”
Vanity said, “How come everyone starts talking about spanking when Amelia is around?”
Colin said to her, “It had to do with the shape of her butt. Some girls, you can just tell from the shape of their butts, that what they really want is a nice, strong…”
“Ugh!” said Vanity. “Just shut up! You’re the kind of fellow who thinks boogers are funny.”
“Well,” said Colin, looking a little puzzled, “Boogers
“Speaking of gross things,” I said, “what did I look like? Just now, I mean.”
Colin said, “Big squid with eyestalks, just like you said.”
Vanity said, “It was gross. You got all thin and stretched, and these blurry lights and colors and sounds were coming out of you. I think you had wings. And tentacles—fiery tentacles coming out of behind your shoulders. There was a white spike through your head.”
Quentin said, “You had wings like an angel, and the horn of a unicorn. You looked like a centaur. From the waist down, your body was deerlike and very sleek. More like a dolphin, than a deer, actually. It was beautiful.”
Victor said, “I saw four legs, also. You had a long tail or flukes trailing behind that, which seemed to be embedded in the bookcase behind you. Although that must have been an optical illusion, because I can see the bookcase is unharmed. From the waist up you looked fairly like your self, except that your neck was longer and your head was smaller, and surrounded by a reddish haze. You had wings, or some sort of fans or vanes hovering behind you. They did not seem to be connected to any particular place on your shoulders. Streamers of energy composed of groups of light-dots were issuing from your arms and shoulders, and reaching to various points around the room. I also noticed a group of bulbs or globes floating in the air near your head, though some smaller globes were floating further away. You were also playing music, and filmy lights like aurora borealis were rapidly coming out from your wings in concentric ripples. There was an intense magnetic disturbance. I think the bulbs near your head were sensory apparatus. When Colin and I were still in the hall outside, we both saw a trio of bulbs appear in a splash of red light and move toward us. Colin told me you were looking at us.”
Vanity said, “Oh my God! She has floating eyeballs! Yee-uk!”
Quentin said, “I think you are being too harsh, Vanity.”
Vanity said, “You don’t understand! Girls get freaked out if we have a mole or if one breast is slightly bigger than another. Little things. A crooked nose. A blackhead. You know. The only thing you boys actually judge us on. So how do you think we should feel if we grow another hand out of our forehead or something? Even a nice-looking hand with long nails? And now she’s got energy and matter and music and God-knows-what coming off of her, and too many legs, and… Do you know a guy won’t look at you on the beach if you have one toe missing? One toe!”
Colin said, “You were never on a beach.”
Quentin said to me, “It really did not look that bad. There was something spiritual about the shape. It looked… hmm… more ‘real’ somehow and less frail, than the normal objects in the room here.”
Colin said, “There were other shapes, beyond what we saw. Maybe one for every different angle she can turn in this so-called ‘fourth dimension’ of hers, or whatever dumb visualization she uses to focus. There’s more. I sense the untapped energy.”
Victor said, “Shape doesn’t matter. Beauty is an arbitrary judgment.”
Colin said to me, “Look here, Amelia, a flat picture of a girl can be as good-looking as the 3-D real thing. Better looking, actually, if she takes off her shirt for the camera. So why can’t a 4-D picture of a girl look good?”
I said to him, “(A) I never said I thought I looked bad, only Vanity said that, so you don’t have to try to cheer me up, and (B) I thought you said I looked like a squid?”
He said, “A cute squid. What’s the problem? We’re all shape-changers. You just happened to be the first one to pop up a new shape.”
Victor said, “You also can manifest limbs at a distance. There was also a mist or cloud connecting various disconnected bulbs and wing elements around you. Wherever an object—I assume part of your body—was appearing or disappearing, there was always a puff of cloud and a visible light distortion. Parts of your body seemed to be energy fields rather than flesh and bone.”
Quentin said, “The misty clouds looked just like the ones we saw around the hands of the Hecatonchire last night.”
I looked at him in amazement, dumbstruck.
Vanity said, “How do you know that, Quentin?”
“Because I remember, now,” he said quietly.
And he smiled.
13
