Chapter 4: Lecture Hall Perils
The philosophy lecture dripped into a soupy haze of meaningless words. Being, nothingness, the phenomenology of whatever. John stared at the cracked projection screen until the Greek symbols blurred. His brain felt like overcooked pasta. All he could think about was the insistent, crawling memory of silk against his skin in the dorm bathroom, the panic of his own body rewriting itself.
You’re clenching your jaw, Amy’s voice chimed in his head, casual as a text notification. And your pulse is doing that weird fluttery thing. Boredom and existential dread are poor substitutes for discipline.
“Shut up,” he whispered into the collar of his hoodie. The kid next to him, a guy who smelled strongly of artisanal weed and Cheetos, glanced over. John pretended to have a coughing fit.
Fine. Suffer in silence. See if I care when you spontaneously manifest a push-up bra during the Q&A.
He forced his shoulders to relax, unclenched his hands. The lecture hall was too warm, the air thick with the heat of a hundred procrastinating bodies. Professor Carlisle, a woman with a severe bun and a penchant for dramatic pauses, paced at the front. Her pencil skirt was tight. John swiftly looked at his notes, at the stain on the ceiling, at the pigeon outside the window—anywhere else.
The panic from earlier, the sudden, intimate violation of his boxers becoming something lacier and completely alien, had receded into a shaky, cold sweat. He’d fought it back. He’d thought about spreadsheets, about compiler errors, about the particularly gruesome fungus growing in the communal shower. It had worked. The foreign sensation had melted away, leaving only the damp cotton of his briefs and a profound sense of spiritual nausea.
He’d done it. Maybe there was a way to control this.
“Therefore,” Professor Carlisle intoned, “we must consider Sartre’s assertion that ‘hell is other people’ not as misanthropy, but as a acknowledgment of the perpetual gaze that defines our—”
The door at the back of the hall creaked open. A latecomer shuffled in. It was Chloe from his Data Structures class. Chloe, who had a laugh that sounded like keys jingling and who always smelled like rain, even when it wasn’t raining. Chloe, who had once patiently explained a linked list to him while two girls at the next library table openly mocked his Algorithms of the Ancient World t-shirt.
She scanned the rows, her eyes a little wide with apology. They landed on the empty seat next to John. She gave him a small, grateful smile and slipped into it, her backpack bumping his knee.
“Sorry,” she mouthed, her face flushed.
“S’okay,” he mumbled. His heart executed a clumsy slam-dunk against his ribs.
She wore a soft-looking green sweater. A strand of honey-colored hair had escaped her ponytail and curled against her neck. She fumbled for a notebook, and her elbow brushed his arm.
A jolt, pure and stupid, went through him. It wasn’t even a sexual thought. It was just her. Her proximity, her smile, the simple, terrifying fact of her attention.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Amy groaned internally.
The heat started low in his stomach, a familiar, unwelcome ignition. It was different this time. Less about a clinical observation, more like a wave of warmth spreading outwards from the point where her sleeve had touched him. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Spreadsheets. Compiler errors. Shower fungus.
He thought about the shower fungus in vivid, technicolor detail. The greenish-black speckles. The slippery texture.
Chloe shifted beside him, leaning forward to copy a quote from the board. Her sweater stretched.
The warmth in his gut pulsed, defiant.
“L’enfer, c’est les Autres,” Professor Carlisle quoted, her voice echoing.
The heat was moving, coiling up his spine now. It was a physical feeling, like something liquid and alive was threading itself under his skin. A prickling sensation spread across his chest, a tightening that had nothing to do with anxiety.
No. No, no, no. Not here. Not now.
He grabbed the edges of the tiny desk, his knuckles bleaching white. He tried to think of something, anything else. The pigeon. The pigeon was fighting another pigeon. A brutal, feathery battle for supremacy on the limestone windowsill.
“You okay?” Chloe whispered, her voice full of genuine concern. “You’re breathing really hard.”
He couldn’t answer. A sharp, sweet ache bloomed across his pectorals. The cheap cotton of his t-shirt and hoodie suddenly felt abrasive, impossibly rough against skin that was becoming… smoother. Softer.
It’s escalating, Amy’s voice cut through the panic, all business now. The reversals are taking more out of you. The power is getting impatient. You need to leave. Now.
“Bathroom,” he choked out, the word a dry rasp. He didn’t look at Chloe. He stood up, his body moving with a jerky, marionette-like awkwardness. The desk squealed against the linoleum. A dozen heads turned.
“Mr. Abernathy?” Professor Carlisle paused, her glasses glinting.
“Sick,” he managed, hunched over as if with stomach pain. It wasn’t entirely a lie. A wave of dizziness washed over him, accompanied by a strange, full-bodied tingling. His jeans felt wrong. The denum was looser, then tighter in entirely new places. The structural engineering of his wardrobe was undergoing a rapid, hostile takeover.
He half-ran, half-stumbled up the sloped aisle towards the exit. Every step was a negotiation with a body that was less and less his own. His center of gravity was shifting, tipping forward. His shoulders felt narrower. The hallway outside the lecture hall was brutally bright and empty.
Not the main stairs, Amy commanded. Too many people. Find a utility closet. A single-stall bathroom. Anything.
He veered right, towards a narrower corridor lined with faculty offices. His breath came in short, sharp gasps. The tingling was now a hum, a vibration in his very bones. He fumbled for a door handle. Locked. Another. Also locked.
A pressure was building in his skull, behind his eyes. Colors seemed sharper. The hum of the fluorescent lights was a deafening roar.
At the end of the hall was a nondescript door marked ‘CUSTODIAL’. He slammed into it, turned the handle. It gave.
He fell into a small, dark room that smelled of bleach and wet mops. He kicked the door shut behind him, plunging himself into near-darkness save for a sliver of light under the door. He collapsed against a rolling bucket, the metal clanging.
It was too late to stop it. He could feel it happening, a tidal wave of alteration crashing over him. There was no ribboning silk this time. It was a direct, brutal transmutation. His clothes melted into his skin, which was itself shimmering and reforming. He felt his jawline soften, his hair spill and grow heavy down his back. His hips realigned with a series of faint, internal pops.
The worst was the sound. The soft, whispery rush of fabric appearing from nowhere—the sleek slide of nylon stockings up his… her… legs, the restrictive embrace of a corset-like garment cinching around a new, narrower waist, the delicate scratch of lace at the… top.
When it was over, he—she—lay on the cold linoleum, breathing in the stink of disinfectant. She was wearing heels. Of course she was wearing heels.
A jagged sob escaped her throat. It was a higher, clearer sound than John’s.
Get up, Amy said, but her tone lacked its usual edge. It was almost… weary. Before someone needs a mop.
She pushed herself up, the movement unfamiliar and unsteady. The heels were a nightmare. She braced a hand against a shelf of cleaning supplies, her fingers—slimmer, meticulously manicured—brushing against bottles of blue liquid.
The full-length mirror on the back of the door was a shadowy oblong in the dark. She didn’t need to look. She could feel the outline of the body, the weight distribution, the strange, insistent pull of the lingerie Amy had so cheerfully named. SexiWoman. It was absurd. It was horrifying.
A key rattled in the lock.
Her blood went cold.
“Hello?” a man’s voice called, puzzled. “Who’s in there?”
The door began to open, flooding the closet with light from the hall. She was cornered, a six-foot-something vision of fishnets and panic in a room full of mops, with nowhere to run.