Copyright 1999, 2002 by Wanda Cunningham. Lainie, Vickie, Rebel, Bashful, and everyone else thanks for the encouragement. There is no actual sex or transformation in this chapter, but I guess it should be rated R for context. So, nobody under 18 should read this, or whatever is the appropriate age in their community. This story deals with transgenderism in children and may be uncomfortable for some readers.

  

Kelly Girl

by Wanda Cunningham

Chapter 7 "Too Pretty for a Boy"

  

Kelly held the pink teddy bear in his lap for a moment, not moving much, just taking a bit of comfort in the soft faux-furriness. After a bit he reached over and picked up his glasses to put them back on and propped the bear against the pillows on the bed. "Stay," he said to the bear, feeling a bit silly. He did like the bear, though, even if it was pink. When he'd been younger, he'd wanted just such a large teddy to keep him company when his mom went to work at night.

"If I were a girl," he said aloud to the toy, "you would be mine and you'd be perfect." He sighed, blushing a little to be expressing such feelings to an inanimate object.

Resoulutely, he turned and sat watching himself in the mirrors of the closet doors for another long moment. It was such an odd picture, the pretty little girl sitting on the big beautiful bed amid her toys and dolls and menagerie of plush. The illusion, if it was an illusion, seemed nearly perfect, the cheap wire rim glasses being the principal jarring note. Kelly fingered the bridge of the glasses and wondered just what sort of eyewear someone who belonged in this room would wear.

Finally, he got up and stripped off the PJ's and laid them on the bed. He stood in the pink, lace-edged panties looking in the mirrors again. The tiny bulge of his boyhood made hardly a wrinkle in his feminine underpants.

He turned left and right, looking at himself and blushing. His soft, slender arms and legs, delicate pixie-like face, mop of dark-blonde hair--even nearly naked he did look like a girl. Probably a lot of boys would, especially ones needing haircuts as badly as he did, though some boys and most girls his age did not look so much like children and had reached a true adolescence. For all of being twelve, Kelly looked like a child and not like someone who would be a teenager in only a bit more than seven months.

He walked around the room again, touching some of the incredibly girlish items, like the ballerina lamp and the kittens-in-a-basket clock. Now and then he checked to see how he looked in the mirror, almost lost in all the feminine abundance.

He realized again what he had already known; it wasn't just his looks, it was also how he moved. The whole mix-up yesterday; even nearly naked it was understandable that some people might think that he was a girl because of how he moved, how he held his head and hands.

"I'm such a sissy," he sighed and fought the urge to cry which would only prove the accusation.

Kelly took off his glasses again and wiped his eyes. He had tried to break himself of girly mannerisms, he didn't really like getting beat up by the boys at school. Or laughed at by the girls.

Yesterday had been so different, he'd been accepted. Accepted as a girl, but still both the boys and the girls had accepted him. He sighed again. It had been weird but he had had fun, though he hated to admit it even to himself. He had never, ever, played Marco Polo before; public swimming pools were simply cauldrons of cruelty for a boy like him and he had frequently gone to the extreme of pretending to be sick to avoid swimming with large groups of other children.

Barbie, though, could swim like a dolphin and had taught him to swim even before he started school. Thinking of her made his heart ache a bit, he missed his blonde, ditzy, cheerful, funny mother. "Stop it," he told himself, trying not to cry again. "I'm supposed to go down for breakfast with Andie."

Back at the mirrored doors of the closet, he stood for a moment, "Now what?" he wondered to himself. "Maybe I should put my boys' clothes back on."

He started to take them out of the plastic grocery bag that Richard had brought them back in. Wendy or Cheryl must have stuffed them in there, but wonderingly, he discovered the bag held two more girl's bathing suits as well. And a note. "These don't fit me anymore, you can have them if you want. I'm giving the ugly one to somebody whose really poor. W-y."

"W-y? Must be Wendy. Am I going to have to think of a cute way to sign my name now?" He giggled, trying to imagine. One thing for sure, he wasn't going to do to his name the same thing Wendy had done to hers.

He sighed and started hunting through the chest of drawers; finding where the swimsuits were, he put the two new gifts with the frilly, flouncy ones bought for the absent Darla. The suit he had worn yesterday was still damp and he hung it on the bar above the shower to dry.

His boy clothes he held in his hand and stared at for a bit. "I ought to just put these back on," he told himself. But it didn't really sound like a good idea. Nor would it likely convince anyone of his true sex or get him out of the curious trap he seemed to be in. He sighed and put the boy stuff back into the grocery bag and put the bag inside Barbie's pink overnighter, and the overnighter on the floor of the closet.

The thing that really stopped him from wearing his old clothes was that he always wore fresh underwear every day. The girl's panties he was wearing qualified as clean since he had only worn them to sleep in. And if he was going to be wearing such girly undies, well, he would feel almost more weird to wear boy clothes on top of them.

Like he was pretending to be a girl but didn't want anyone to know, or--that he was a girl dressing as a boy. He made a face and deliberately shivered to get rid of that thought.

He looked through the closet. The selection leaned heavily toward party clothes, sweet little dresses with lace and bows, even one with little bells. Bells? Kelly shook his head, some guy had picked out this wardrobe, surely, someone with an exaggerated sense of just what it meant to be a little girl.

In spite of himself, he giggled a bit, trying to imagine wearing some of these things. A few were probably too small, it had been a wardrobe for an eight-year-old, after all, but Kelly was thin and short and had been the smallest, skinniest kid, boy or girl, in his class ever since pre-school.

He pulled a few items out to look at them; why weren't there any pants or slacks? Well, there was one set, but that was almost more of a costume--pink jeans with white leather sewn-on pockets and patches, a pink gingham shirt and red and white bandanna--a cowgirl costume.

"I'm not going to wear that," he said aloud. Besides, that was one of the few things that did look as if it might be too small.

He held a red party dress up against his chest and stepped sideways to stand in front of the mirror. He felt the hair on his neck stand up, it was just too perfect of a look for him, or rather for the sweet little girl he would seem to be if he wore it.

"Gah," he said and put the party dress back, realizing as he did though, that it had probably cost more than anything in Barbie's wardrobe back in the apartment. "Is it silk?" he murmured wonderingly. It sure felt like silk and the thought of damaging such a valuable thing compelled him to be extra careful.

He stepped back from the closet and shivered. The silk had felt so nice.

He thought about all the times he had watched Barbie getting dressed and the times, not really that often, he had played dress-up with her clothes. Yesterday wasn't the first time he had ever worn girl's clothes if you counted Barbie as a girl rather than a woman.

He frowned, remembering. Amanda, his grandmother, who he and Barbie had lived with off and on for his first nine years, had caught him at that shameful behavior more than once. The first few times she'd spanked him but one time she caught him, she'd threatened to have his penis cut off.

After that, she made the same threat every time she caught him. Once, when he was seven and home sick from school, Amanda caught him playing with Barbie's makeup. She made him wash his face and took him to the doctor for the bad cold but told him she had finally decided to have him turned into a girl and the doctor would do it with a big knife that had notches in it.

Kelly remembered sitting in the doctor's waiting room, his face scrubbed until it stung, wondering how bad the operation would hurt, but sitting quietly and waiting. Of course, the doctor had done nothing except listen to his chest, prescribe Tylenol, fluids and bed rest.

Amanda had complained later to Barbie that she had meant to talk to the doctor about Kelly's 'disgusting' behavior but had been too ashamed. Barbie had laughed about it when they were alone and told Kelly not to play with her things when she was gone. When asked why, Barbie had said only that it upset Amanda.

After they moved out of Amanda's place for good, three years ago, he had had Barbie's cooperation in playing with her clothes. She had set a few aside, warning him that she needed them to work in and he shouldn't mess them up. The rest of her wardrobe, she told him, he was free to play with. A few times, they'd even made a sort of game of it. Once she had painted his fingernails for him.

Not that he had done that sort of thing a lot, he told himself, his cheeks burning slightly. Not with his mother's help or even by himself. Just, once in a while, when he was bored, or really sad or wanting to feel close to his Mom when she was at work. If she was gone all night he would sometimes wear something of hers to bed, his favorite thing to do that with being a very short robe that always smelled like Barbie.

The games had been fun and the other times had been comforting but he'd never gone out in public dressed as a girl until yesterday. He hadn't really even considered it. He had been told many times that he was pretty enough to be a girl, sometimes even that he was too pretty to be a boy. The most admirable adult in his young life had always been his mother and often he had wished that he could be just like her. Not that he wished to be a girl, but that he could be Barbie.

Kind, generous, hard-working and fun-loving Barbie seemed to him to be what a person should be. He'd always had his doubts about her taste in men, though; some of her boyfriends had been violent. Once they had to leave in the middle of the night while the abuser was drunk. They had stayed at a friend's house until "the prick" as Barbie had called him, had finished trashing their stuff and left town.

The friend had wanted Barbie to call the police but Barbie had refused. For fear, he knew, that involvement with the police might give Amanda a chance to get custody of Kelly. An exotic dancer who brings home violent men just doesn't sound like someone who would be a good mom to most social workers.

Another time, he remembered, one of Barbie's boyfriend's had caught Kelly playing with Barbie's cheap jewelry and slapped him, calling him "a little queer." Barbie had thrown the boyfriend out, or really, chased him out with a pan of hot grease, after threatening to castrate him if he ever touched Kelly again.

The man had been mystified by Barbie's reaction. "That kid needs a man around or he's going to grow up to be a faggot," he'd warned.

But Barbie had been unmoved, "You're not the man," she had told him in a chillingly mean voice so very unlike her normal bedroom coo. Barbie had been much madder about Kelly being threatened than she had been at the guy who had thrown their refrigerator out the window.

Thinking about Barbie's protectiveness made Kelly feel oddly comforted. They had moved twice to get Kelly into schools where he might not be picked on so much by bullies. It hadn't really worked, he reflected, it seldom took much longer than an hour in a new school before the bullies discovered him.

Kelly knew also that Barbie danced naked, or nearly so, in front of strange men--that it was in fact her preferred method of earning a living. "Anything's easier than waiting tables," she explained when he asked. He could sort of understand that after watching his tiny mom race around a big restaurant carrying heavily loaded trays, and taking only short breaks during an eight-hour shift. Cocktail waitressing paid better tips and dancing better still.

He had even faced the fact that his mother had slept with men for money when he and she had most needed it. Just that, in fact, had been the precipitating event that had led to their leaving Amanda's.

"No whore is any daughter of mine," Amanda had said in one of her drunken, self-pitying rages.

It was no virtue but Barbie had managed to keep her amateur status, lying with men for money only when she had needed to pay utilities, get her car fixed or pay a doctor bill. Once she had earned $500 for a private afternoon on a boat, she'd needed a new transmission for her car. He thought he had been setting up such an assignment yesterday for the unbelievable sum of $5000. "I didn't think you'd want to marry him!" he exclaimed to the absent Barbie.

He wiped his eyes again, this time using a pink tissue from a dispenser that looked like a pony. Barbie had done a few things that society would definitely frown on but she drew the line at full-time prostitution.

Was it the ultimate prostitution, to marry for money? He felt sure that she did not love Harold Mann, that in fact, she had never loved any of her boyfriends. She simply felt the need for a man in her life from time to time. Perhaps she had decided that Harold Mann's proposal was an acceptable long time answer to a recurring problem.

He was not sure she had not conceived of it as being something she was doing for both of them. Barbie had her own integrity, a rigid code of conduct as strict as any religious orthodoxy in its own way. Had she realized what was going to happen to him? He wanted desperately to talk to her, to find out what she wanted him to do.

"Kelly," Andie's voice startled him by coming from the wall. "Kel-lee-ee." An intercom, there was an intercom by the door. "Kelly, get your cute little butt down here or I'm going to come up there and paddle you. That ish all."

Kelly smiled, ruefully. "I'd better get dressed." Everyone in the house felt sure that he would come downstairs dressed as a girl. Why should he disappoint them?

He had a choice though, he could go through Barbie's things in the pink overnight bag that had been mistakenly brought in from the car. His own stuff, except what he had been wearing yesterday, had gone to Las Vegas with Barbie in the magenta bag.

He rather hoped that Dr. Mann would spend money on new things for his Mom. She deserved them.

But for himself, he decided to go along with the gag and wear something that had been bought for the vanished Darla. It made him blush to think about it but it seemed like a funny sort of thing to do. Humorous, not odd. Well, odd, too, but the whole situation was odd.

He looked through the closet again, a jumper skort, similar to the jumper Barbie had worn Friday, seemed a good answer. Of course, it had a pink flower print pattern with little yellow bows at the shoulders and waist, but it wasn't actually a skirt and seemed a little more casual than some of the choices in the closet.

He pulled on a yellow t-shirt he found in a drawer, it had French-style cuffs and a pink bias neckline. No one would see the silly mouse in petticoats, on the chest--that would be covered by the bib yoke of the jumper.

Still, Kelly blushed as he stepped into the skort and settled it around him. In the mirror he looked like a cute little girl, not a twelve-year-old but a much younger little girl. One in great need of a hairbrush.

He grabbed a brush off the dresser, the handle looked like Minnie Mouse, and ran it through his hair a few times. Better, but what was he going to do about his hair. He thought about taking Andie up on her offer of a buzz cut and got the giggles thinking about how silly that would look with what he was wearing.

What he was wearing. Kelly looked at himself again, turning this way and that, thinking about how much dressing like this made him look even more like his mom. "I don't know why I'm doing this," he said aloud and shook his head.

The shoes in the closet included a pair of white sandals that seemed a fair fit. Kelly slipped the girly shoes on and stepped out into the hall with one last glance in the mirrors at the pretty little girl.

Pete, the older Mann brother, half the size of a moose, looked up from where he sat on the floor eating Cheerios from a bowl as big as his head. "Hey, Skipper, you look cute."

Kelly giggled, he couldn't help it. I know I look cute, he thought, I guess that's the idea.

Richard peered around the couch, "Babe alert!" he called out.

Kelly turned his back on the teasing boys and headed toward the stairs, "You guys!" he protested. At least they were both dressed this time.

They laughed. Not mean laughter but pleasant amusement, enjoyment of the silliness of their comments. Kelly felt a brief stab of fear, though. Boys very much like the two large, athletic, confident Manns had frequently caused him grief and pain. Boys whose cruel laughter had made Kelly feel sick with terror all too often.

Pausing at the top of the stairs for a moment he looked back toward the TV room, still apprehensive. The two idiots waved at him enthusiastically.

"Bye, Kelly," called Pete, using the tablespoon in his hand to wave with.

"Bye, Aunt Skipper," added Richard.

Kelly rolled his eyes and giggled, those two made it difficult to stay afraid of them. At least, as long as they still thought that he was a girl. Kelly bit his lip to stop the nervous giggles and started down the stairs where Andie waited with breakfast.

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Copyright 1999, 2002 by Wanda Cunningham

More of my stories appear at http://bigcloset.ateros.com/newstuff

  

  

  

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