It was another day of middle school, another generic day of learning and she still hadn't reached her growth spurt that was supposed to change everything for a girl her age. Or rather, most girls who were her age already had gone through that growth spurt and all the gross ways that changed them, but not Margaret Salazar. Or at least that had been the case until a few months ago, and now she was seeing the world from a whole new angle, and not only because she was taller now.

It started with a growth spurt that seemed to happen way more slowly than everyone talked about, but now she was a full two inches taller than she was at the beginning of the year, and while shin splints were no fun, the P.E. teachers didn't seem to care and kept trying to get her to run even faster. So she was stuck on the track, sweating her eyes out and trying not to pay attention to how much her shins hurt.

Apparently her speed had improved by leaps and bounds, cause her P.E. teacher kept trying to convince her to join the track and field team, but she was having none of that nonsense. Who wanted to have MORE pain when they were already going through all the cramps and pains of “finally becoming a woman” as her annoying aunt kept saying it. She just wanted to stay in the background and hide her breakouts of pimples whenever family visited, but no, she was now the center of attention, and quite possibly the only fun thing to do for her aunt.

Staggering to a halt after finally finishing the final lap she was required to run for today, she was sent to the locker room to clean off and get changed. At least her school had a better locker room than the ones her aunt always talked about going to “in her day”. There were actually stalls for the showers at her school, which is why when her hand melted, nobody else saw it. But she did. And while she knew this time was supposed to be a time when her body underwent drastic changes, she didn't think that melting off whole body parts was supposed to be one of them.

She let herself freak out and stare at her melting hand for long enough that the next girl in line started loudly wondering what could be taking her so long. But Margaret, having no ears for listening to that, let the sound of the snobbish girl's snark snap her out of it and tried to pull herself together. Mentally, she was pulling herself together mentally, but as she watched, water flowed back up from the floor and remade itself into her missing hand!Now that was just not right.

But time waits for no man, woman, nor child, and this time was no different, so she quickly finished her shower and got dressed so she could go to the next class before her impatient classmate started coming up with weird rumors for her to dispel. She had no other incidents for the rest of her school day and went home, still a bit on edge from her earlier meltdown.

She had heard that supers had been spotted all over the place on the news lately, but never thought she'd be one of them. In fact she thought it far more likely that the person who really had the powers was just playing a cruel prank on her. Goodness knows that the other girls in her school were more than capable of overdoing their pranks like that. She figured it was just the sort of thing that Stacy would do for a laugh.

But when she got home and relaxed into her favorite chair, she felt herself start literally melting into it. And because it took her a bit to realize just how literally she was melting into the chair, her body was nearly a quarter gone before she freaked out and started pulling herself back together. This time it took a bit longer, and her brother almost noticed she was acting weird before she managed to get up and rush off to her room. And when she glanced back at the comfy chair that almost ate her, she was surprised to see it was completely dry.

Her clothes were a bit wet, but they were slowly drying off as she collected herself behind her room's closed door. When she finally finished gathering herself, she took stock. Her clothes were dry, everything seemed to revert back to how it was supposed to be. Except that she still had her stupid pimples. Of all the things she could have accidentally left behind, she would have been more than happy to have left them behind. Her aunt had all kinds of advice on how to handle them, ranging from makeup cover-ups to eating habits that sounded absolutely gross.

She slowly calmed herself down and took stock of her situation. Whatever happened in the showers at school had now happened at home on a chair. The first time she was wet, the second she was dry – it was a cold fall day, so she wasn't even sweating. The only real similarity seemed to be that both times she was relaxing after something stressful happened. Which she was doing right now, she realized, and she quickly looked down to see if anything was happening to her.

She thought everything was fine, until she got to her shoes, which were melting into the carpet. Pulling them free, she watched in horrified fascination as they slowly glooped up from the carpet and back together into a pair of shoes again. Once they were whole again, she took them off and put them on a plastic lid in the corner of her room farthest from her bed. That was gross and she wanted to never see that ever again. But she also wanted to be able to keep an eye on them in case they did something weird again.

By the time she finished her homework and went to answer the call to dinner her mother was shouting, she had almost forgotten the problems she was having. She even engaged in the conversation once or twice during the meal and made a joke at her little brother's expense. He was always being a twerp to her. But then he came back with a quip that nearly froze her blood solid.

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“At least I don't melt into the furniture like some mutated freak!” He mocked.

“Aaron, be nice to your sister.” her father almost automatically replied.

“I'm sure if you were going through puberty and having shin splints all the time too, you would relax when you got home too, son.” Her mom added in.

And so the conversation continued, nobody else seeming to notice her discomfort was more than it might normally be. She finished dinner, washed the dishes as fast as she could – it was her turn to do the dishes – and ran straight to her room and shut herself in. And as she relaxed into a sitting position against her door, she realized that she was melting again. Her hand only this time, like in the shower.

Springing back up and backing away from the door, she watched in horror as he hands reformed themselves by pulling the melted section off of the door, across the room, and back onto themselves. Now certain she wasn't making any of it up, and that something weird really was happening, she sat down in shock in the middle of her room, still staring at her own hands as if they were going to do something terrible to her. Apparently she was zoned out for a long time like that, because she was still there when her mother came in to check on her a while later.

She was deep enough in shock that she didn't even notice her mother's entrance until she spoke up in a worried tone, asking her what was wrong. Margaret started, jumping nearly a foot into the air, and losing her balance, which then caused her to fall backwards into her bed. She passed it off by saying she thought she saw a wart on one of her fingers and her mother carefully examined each one, almost teasingly, before leaving her with an offer to talk more if she wanted to.

After her mother left, she spent another half an hour thinking it over, and decided it was time to get things under control. Or in other words, she needed to start her training montage! That was an exciting concept, and she latched onto it, coming up with a plan. Tomorrow was Friday, and after she got through that, there was a three day weekend ahead that she could spend working on getting control of herself.

Little did she know how optimistic she was being, but she was only ten years old, who could blame her for being a bit short sighted. Armed with a plan, and sure she would be OK, she got ready for bed, finished what she had left to do that night, and went to sleep.

The next morning, as while she was still waking up, she slapped her alarm to turn it off, and heard an ominous squishing sound. Her eyes sprung open in a panic, and she took stock of her situation. She was more than halfway melted, dripping onto the floor and seeping deep into her mattress, pillow, and blanket. And that wasn't the worst of it, most of her hand was missing, and only part of it was stuck to her alarm, which she had thankfully managed to turn off successfully.

This time pulling herself back together was much harder, and took much longer. Longer than even pulling herself out of that chair had. And, it was also really gross. She had to watch in horror as, bit by gloopy, globby bit, her hand flowed off of her alarm and across her bed to rejoin the rest of herself. At least it looked more like clear putty that was slowly gaining the color of her pinkish skin tone, and didn't make her watch her body slowly reconstitute itself like it did in that one horror movie she had snuck into with her friends last year.

That was really the only thing that kept her from losing her mind completely. Once she managed to get her hands back, she worked on pulling herself out of her bedding and back into one piece. Well, she was technically still connected to all of herself, but she was partially melted into them, so she still thought it counted, though she wasn't certain who she was defending her thoughts against, as she wasn't even able to talk; her mouth was still melted into her pillow.

And when she realized that was when she made another rather panic inducing realization. She had no mouth, and she wasn't breathing. She wasn't breathing! That jolt of panic helped her focus, oddly enough, and soon she had pulled herself out of her bedding entirely and was just pooling on her bed, slowly pulling herself back together.

Once she finally finished, she was exhausted, and she must have been quite sickly looking, because her mother took one look at her as she entered the kitchen for breakfast, and sat her down with a thermometer in her mouth. She wasn't even slightly surprised that she was running a fever, she felt icky and hot and sweaty from all her earlier efforts.

Pronounced sick, fed and sent back to her room, she waited for her mother to finish sending her siblings off before coming back to check on her. Being still freaked out by how it had tried to eat her, she was not laying in bed as her mother likely expected her to be, but sitting in her plastic chair at her desk, trying not to melt again. She now had her mother's full attention, and it did not take very long for her mother to pry the whole story out of her about what was going on.

Unconvinced, but still practical, her mother brought her back to the kitchen with its linoleum flooring, cleared an area around her, and had her try to relax. She even brought out a spare shower curtain and wrapped a pillow in shopping bags to give her something to lay on while she recovered. Few are the little girls who can truly stay awake when exhausted and being comforted by their mothers, and soon Margaret was fully asleep.

It didn't take long for her to start melting in her sleep, and her mother saw it happening. Despite taking precautions, her mother hadn't thought Margaret was being entirely accurate in her portrayal of events, and had thought something more mundane and easily explained had been going on, so when her daughter started melting right before her eyes, she scrambled to set up a barrier of sorts to keep her from spreading too far, and then moved far enough away to no awaken her sleeping daughter before calling her husband back from work to help her figure out what to do.

They had heard stories of children disappearing to camps for months, and didn't want their daughter taken away, so they came up with alternative options. They fashioned a waterproof pool-like bed, and helped their daughter as best they could, but it still took a while. Margaret was washing the dishes one day, when she realized one of her hands was missing, and had to call it back from the drain of the sink. Another time she was taking a bath and almost completely melted before her mother noticed.

But slowly she gained enough control that she didn't start melting unless she actually tried to, and she was allowed to go back to school. She had been temporarily homeschooling with her parents until then, so she didn't have months of make-up work to do, and was able to go back to school with relatively little fanfare. And as she slowly brought her life back to normal, she carefully created journal of the things she went through, and kept it on her computer in a folder that wasn't supposed to get backed up on the internet. She really didn't want anyone to find the record she was making, this record. But, that's just how the cookie crumbles, or, as her case might be, that's just how the puddle pools.