A Rock and Family Vacation

[14]

Blair leaned against the counter as her mother recited exactly what they wanted her to do and had her repeat it back. Only then did she seem satisfied that Blair could walk what felt like a handful of steps to a store in full view of the public, grab the most basic items for Lacy, and then hurry back in mere moments. Truly an excursion to the dark zone requiring wilderness preparation. She held her tongue and the full extent of her thoughts and obediently responded in all the ways her mom wanted.

What she considered the truly important part was that she would need to make sure that the clothing they had done guesswork on was even going to fit Lacy. Lazy Lacy barely wanted to come out of her smelly, sweaty robe cave. She got to wallow and whimper while Blair had to be strong. Yeah, this sucked. All this sucked. Most of it anyway. But she was dealing with it.

Once she was out there and mom standing in the doorway was just a wobbly blip between the hills of sand, gravel, dirt, and clinging grasses, Blair slipped on an excited grin.

She swooped towards the water, just like Clare did a few times when they were at a seaside rest stop. Really moving like this felt disorienting. Rather like the ferries that took them to Beaver Island up north. She snickered to herself. But those ferries listed left and right and up and down in slow unsettling directions. Blair felt an echo of nausea just thinking about it. She focused on the Ontario ferries which had arcade games, the best snack machines, and nary a wiggle when the water got choppy.

Blair glanced down at herself as she drew away from the waves. The clothes she borrowed from mom were clearly not meant for her. The top kept shifting and didn’t want to play nice with the sports bra. In contrast, the pants billowed loosely in the breeze. Putting on mom‘s underwear was the one step she considered too far. Instead, she tried a previously slim pair of her boxers.

The distorted curves of her waist and hips made wearing them surreal. She grappled for a clever concise analogies, like trying to put trousers on a watermelon, but a truly eloquent way of thinking about it eluded her. Her dad would probably be able to pop out exactly the right combination of words, but there was no way she would be able to broach the subject with him.

Words in general felt desperately inadequate at expressing what she felt since she woke up on the couch. It was all foreign and yet not. One comparison she grappled with was wearing an intangible costume. The fountain of hair nesting on her shoulder and dancing with every breeze. The twisted, rerouted landmarks of her face reaching from her chin to the swath of her lips, which she couldn’t resist tucking inside her mouth to suck on as though they were welts or ambitious pimples. The simple smoothness of everything invited prodding and poking even without directly addressing the most obvious changes.

Wearing this top was an absolute godsend compared to when she first woke up. The noticeable presence on her muscles didn’t feel quite as suffocating as she imagined it would be. It definitely stretched all the muscles around her shoulders. Several months to years to prepare would’ve been preferable. She hadn’t yet managed a private moment to judge the overall texture but thinking of them like the memory foam pillows on the rental house beds wasn’t far off. Much different than messing around with the netting bag of volleyballs during gym.

She had no idea that messing around with mom‘s bra way back when would portend needing it someday. It made a huge difference but still didn’t quite feel right. She hadn’t even hinted at it to her family, but she had a notion to pick up a few things for herself when over at the clothing store. Just for comfort and she did have some spending money saved. Although the expectation was more towards a fancy kite or a wind up rubber band propeller plane to delight Clare than something to contain her jugs.

She was surprised how much beach counted as territory around the house before angry signs marked it as a different property. Lingering along the ridgeline, she tried to recall last night after the crab shack when they were walking home. She was stuffed, so she drifted towards the back with Clare still energetically bouncing ahead and hunting for rocks. Blair felt, after questioning Clare amidst… horseplay with this silly pole she was hauling (she resolved, if anyone asked, it was a walking stick), this area had to be where Clare found the rock.

It was still within the confines of the beachfront owned by whoever rented out the house. Mom had alluded to it being the vacation property of a generous investor in the Muller Corporation and therefore grandpa managed a discount. Blair had to admit that he was right about how nifty the windows were.

The boardwalk area up ahead looked busier than last night. Blair tried to be discrete about the stick. Skateboarders and surfers mingled with families, groups of college students, and clusters of old ladies without complaints or chaos. She felt distinctly anonymous as she approached them, and yet glaringly conspicuous.

It reminded Blair of that one assassination game with the bald guy that Lacy made her try out once. She wound up trying to see how many corpses she could stuff in a restroom. In the same way though, she felt immensely tense and out of place and like everyone knew. But no one freaked out.

She could tell that people were looking at her and that was the biggest strangeness. Despite how much quiet confidence he had about looking decent, Blair knew he didn’t draw eyes in school. His friend Cynthia would joke about looking and sometimes the Asian girls would look away when he glanced but those were the only real signs.

Nearly to the next sidewalk intersection, a skater pulled up on his board and stopped alongside her. “Hey. How you doing?” He had twisty, dark hair almost as long as her light locks.

Blair was so startled by the question that all she could do was offer up a quick laugh, which felt better than testing out her weird voice. She included quick wave, which was just bending her fingers in the air as though a wind were rattling them. A faint answer of, “Hello”, didn’t sound too weird.

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It didn’t take long for a couple other guys to join him. The one towards the front displayed his board accusingly, spinning the wheels at the front and dropping terms that puzzled Blair. Behind him stood an absolutely ripped fella with a poof of fire-red hair and a pair of rollerblades on.

Blair quickly glanced down for no particular reason at all, except to remind herself that she still looked like a girl wearing this loaner outfit from her mom. The stains and blemishes that encouraged her to select this outfit so that her mom wouldn’t be losing anything she really wanted to wear felt like gleaming lights that everyone else could see.

The one at the front did most of the talking as she shifted around to continue on her way, and they drifted behind. Where ya headed? What’s with the stick? She hated herself for the conspicuous lull of trying to articulate a good reason for the stick and that she was picking up a clothing order. It ultimately just became that she was “shopping”, with a lot of muddled noises and shrugs in between.

A presence passed between her nose and the roof of her mouth. It was like a smell but also a feeling. As a boy, something like it wafted through the air when he was seated next to an especially pretty girl. They would be so casual and relaxed and he’d be sweating. Her mind grasped for the concept of pheromones, even though that was shaky ground mostly bolstered by random scenes from movies and vague internet comments. The feeling was nice. At the same time, it felt like ocean waves suddenly up close and personal. There was too much to think about.

She still had her old cadence and way of speaking but briskly smiling brought a sunny energy. It wasn’t quite talking like a girl as Lacy mysteriously managed just with dour pity and glum pouting. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to sound totally like a girl, but she just figured it came part and parcel with the territory. The nuance was fascinating and terrifying.

If they thought she was somehow fake, the scrutiny wasn’t apparent just to look at them. The one in the front seemed more concerned that she was a possible tourist than that her voice may have sounded odd. When he asked where she went to college, Blair had to take a moment to process that. They thought she was older.

It wasn’t a foreign assumption. He was rather stocky but not thick. Despite the working out, everyone knew he was inconsistent and hadn’t made much progress in building up good muscle. But his immense face had the presence of a more mature adult. Did she look older just because she was wearing something her mom liked?

She bought herself some time appearing distracted by the guy cradling his skateboard and still lamenting something about the wheels. Like answering in class when she didn’t know the solution, she tried to appear contemplative. “I’m still working out college. Not in it at the moment. Torn between design and marketing study.” She then gently alluded to the whole origami thing.

The rollerblader had plenty to say about business study and marketing. He was apparently a fourth-generation tailor who wanted to open up a shop that sold custom comfort clothes rather than stiff formal ones. The other loved writing and sketching all sorts of birds but understood there was no real money in that, especially to help his parents with his wheelchair-bound sister. The guy leading the group assumed she was taking something called a “gap year” and thought that was cool.

He was currently training to be a physical therapist with a focus on sports medicine. The little snippets of kinesiology he laid out fascinated Blair. Between all that, they learned each other’s names. His was Dylan. She let him text her phone even though she had no idea what she was going to do with the text. When he mentioned that they were heading down to a club by the wharf, and if she wanted to come along he promised to buy her a drink, Blair had to pull back, especially since the clothing store was coming up on her left.

She made it clear that she wasn’t able to drink and the group started talking about alcoholic intolerance and such. Dylan shrugged and smiled lightly. “We can still have some fun without drinks. Don't even need a big stick.”

Those ocean waves were clearly far over her head. She chuckled and thanked them for a fun chat, but she had chores and had to meet up and…a bunch of other things. But she promised to text later without a specific time in mind.

The sense of disappointment from Dylan was palpable and part of her definitely wanted to go along just to restore his warm smile. Once the group moved on, Blair had to take a moment to lean against a small wall and collect her thoughts. Did she like boys now? Perhaps it wasn’t worth dwelling on, given a magic rock that totally changed how she looked. Not a stretch to assume it could change how she felt as well as all the stuff going on in her brain.

She didn’t feel that different though. It could’ve simply been part of the craziness of being a new person out in the world, playing that anonymous figure, and really getting into it. Or it was totally the female estrogen hive mind turning her into another one of the girls, the joke Lacy and she shared.

Not that she took a notion like that seriously, but Blair did have concerns about things the rock might do to her and her family. Clare seemed exactly the same with her plucky tenacity and curious charm. She also fretted just as much about what her siblings thought of her. Blair regretted making such a fuss earlier on the level of “ew cooties”, but he was following Lacy‘s lead and had his reasons.

There were things he kept to himself. Stuff he said and stuff he didn’t say. Like the real reason their names were Blair Posie, Lacy Anastasia, and Clare Rose. The real reason she knew mom and dad kept it secret. Not because they were trying to be subversive or because they had only girl names picked out and couldn’t change them. She’d known the truth for years but never bothered to pry, even while Lacy spun her chaotic theories. The solemn, exhausted resignation in her mother‘s eyes whenever the topic came up always made her wish that things could be different.