Signed Up and Stripped Down

Gary's third period was a spare, which used to be one of the quietest, safest parts of his day — a warm academic bubble where he could sit in the library, crack open a textbook, and feel vaguely superior to everyone who had to actually attend class.

That was before his life had become a slow-moving lingerie tornado.

He had tried the library that morning. He lasted nine minutes. By minute two, a senior from the football team asked if he "wanted to study together sometime." By minute five, two juniors sat at his table and started arguing over which one of them should be the one to ask him out. By minute nine, they were both kneeling next to his chair, pleading their cases like two medieval knights swearing fealty to a particularly busty monarch.

He left.

Now he wandered the hallways in his scandalously click-clacking heels, the short black pleated skirt swinging around his upper thighs in a way that felt engineered in a lab for maximum breeziness. Every few steps the thigh-high stockings tugged ever so slightly downward, reminding him that they existed.

He passed the school's main entrance and immediately spotted the cheerleaders setting up a folding table, a banner, and a donation-bucket of glitter.

Recruitment season.

Gary rolled his eyes so hard he worried they'd lodge somewhere behind his skull.

Girls wearing tiny skirts to jump around and shake their bodies to get people excited about sports. Sports! Sure, Gary had enjoyed watching the girls walk down the hallways in their tiny skirts over the years. What red-blooded Shermer boy didn't? But to waste such beauty on the celebration of a bunch of muscle-bound peacocks was perverse. The whole thing was ridiculous. Objectification packaged as school spirit. Honestly embarrassing.

He kept moving.

Eventually he found a quiet alcove near the west stairwell — a pocket of relative silence where only the distant sounds of hallway chaos filtered through like muffled white noise. He leaned back against the wall, adjusted the blazer whose rolled-up sleeves made him look like he'd walked out of a 90s music video, and breathed.

He needed a moment. A moment to consider his situation. A moment to collect himself.

A moment to think about Wyatt.

The thought slipped in uninvited, like steam under a door. Wyatt in that leather dress this morning — the glossy red hugging every curve, the impossible heels, the way she'd flustered when the bus jerked and they almost touched…

Gary swallowed.

He'd had crushes on women before. He'd lusted after celebrities. He wasn't new to wanting someone.

But this?

This felt like a fever.

Like the air around him warmed every time he let himself think her name.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

No. This was wrong. Wyatt was his friend. His best friend. Even if she... looked different now. Even if being near her made his pulse go low and hot behind his ribs. Even if his imagination kept replaying how her lips had looked this morning — soft, shiny, parted just barely when she'd laughed at something he'd said.

And despite what he desperately wanted to do, they couldn't touch. Not without sparking again. Not without whatever impossible thing had happened last time happening...more.

The craving in his stomach didn't care.

Gary drifted into the daydream without noticing the moment it took over.

Wyatt in that silk robe from the other night. But this time, instead of answering the door, she was walking into his bedroom, a look on her face that told him that she wasn't planning on wearing that robe for long.

The air was warm and the scent of lavender clung to her skin. With each step she took, the robe slipped off her shoulder a little more, revealing bare skin, smooth and glowing in the dim lamplight.

She came to the edge of his bed.

Smiled down at him. Lowered herself, lips parting—

"—and you look incredible!"

That voice wasn't Wyatt's.

Gary blinked and shook his head. He'd fallen into a daydream, allowed himself to get distracted, to lose concentration.

The first thing he noticed was that he no longer was leaning against the wall. He wasn't even near the wall. He was standing directly in front of the cheerleading recruitment table.

And he was wearing something...wrong.

Very, very wrong.

A ripple of cold shot through him as awareness caught up to sensation — the unfamiliar cling of stretchy poly-spandex around his ribs, the sway of an absurdly tiny pleated skirt brushing the tops of his stockings, the weightless swish of something fluffy in his hands.

He looked down.

He was holding pompoms.

He was dressed in the school's cheer uniform.

A blue-and-silver crop top tightened across his chest like it had been engineered specifically to weaponize the male gaze. The matching skirt barely reached mid-thigh and flared with every tiny movement, scandalously short even compared to what he normally found himself trapped in. His high heels had somehow transformed into the cheer squad’s blue wedge sneakers, but even those managed to look suggestively dainty on him.

Gary made a small, strangled noise.

He curled one pompom against his chest as if it could restore morality to the universe.

"Thank you so much for signing up, Lisa!" one of the cheerleaders squealed, clasping her hands under her chin.

Lisa.

"We're so excited to have someone as hot as you joining the team!" another girl said, giving him a once-over so appreciative it should have come with a tip jar. "The boys are going to go nuts with you out on the field."

Gary blinked rapidly.

His new name — Lisa Wallace — was visible on the sign-up sheet. In his handwriting. Which had apparently decided to become bubbly and round, with...yes...a heart over the i.

"Practice is after school!" the captain beamed. "Your flexibility is going to be such an asset."

He didn't want to know why she assumed he was flexible. To be honest, he didn't want to know anything anymore.

Gary turned and shuffled away from the table, pompoms limp at his sides, skirt bouncing traitorously with every step. He had no idea what happened to the clothes he'd been wearing before, not that they were much of an improvement on his current outfit, but at least he had chosen them. The cheerleader outfit felt different, like he'd been tricked, or **** to wear it. Students glanced at him and smiled — not mockingly, but appreciatively, like of course he'd be a cheerleader, like this was simply the natural order of things.

His face felt hot enough to power the school's entire heating system.

"I really, really hope Wyatt's having a better morning than me," he muttered, wandering off in no particular direction.