“More Variations”
Maxwell Avoi
Copyright 2011 by Maxwell Avoi
Smashwords Edition
More Variations
A collection of short stories by Maxwell Avoi
Copyright 2011 by Maxwell Avoi
Contents
By Maxwell Avoi
Copyright 2011 by Maxwell Avoi
We were given an assignment in Applied Psychology for the last half of the semester. During that time, we were to come up with an experiment, run it according to the university’s guidelines, and then document the whole thing and create a presentation. I felt lucky that I was rooming with my project partner, Owen, but I didn’t realize how difficult that he was to work with until the day that we started coming up with ideas. Owen wanted things in a certain way and any deviation from that meant continual whining and insisting that his way was better. Combine that with an insistence that I do “my share,” and you can see where things started to go sour almost immediately. It quickly got to the point where I was staying away from the room as often as possible.
After a week of us butting heads I came back to the dorm and found that he’d set up a big easel with one of those big yard-by-yard notepads on it. He said, “Ah! Jake, welcome home! We’re going to work on a new plan today!”
I sat on my bed and tried very hard to keep from rolling my eyes. It was a complete failure. Owen frowned and said, “Okay, fine. But we’ve got to get something together or we’re going to fail the class. I’ve got some ideas, anyway.”
He popped the lid of the marker in his hand and started writing across the top. He stopped three letters in and stared at what he’d written. “This is supposed to be black.”
“It’s red.”
“I know that. I’m saying it’s supposed to be black.” He showed me the marker. Both the cap and the barrel were indeed black.
“Dude. They made a mistake. Breathe. Get another marker.” I took it from him and handed him the box; he’d gone out and bought a brand new box of markers for this little presentation. I sat back down while he opened it.
“Okay, I was thinking that…” he trailed off when he saw that the marker (black cap, black barrel) was leaving blue lines this time.
I thought that he was going to lift off and fly through sheer force of annoyance. “This one’s supposed to be black! They’re all supposed to be black!” Yes. This was the sort of thing that he threw a fit over, so you can imagine how well the rest of the project had gone.
I popped the lid off the marker in my hand and looked at it. “Sorry dude. This one’s still red. See?” Unhelpfully, I wrote the word RED on the desk next to me. Washing off the ink, I felt, was worth annoying him.
Owen opened his mouth to flip out at me for defacing the desk but he didn’t say anything. He just stared at what I’d written, his mouth still hanging open.
I looked too. The word on the desk appeared to be melting and spreading, quickly covering the desk. The color spread as if it was ink in water until the entire desk was covered in red. Eventually it stopped, but only because the whole desk was colored.
We stared at it for a while before I looked down at the marker in my hand. It seemed to be a regular marker. The barrel read “Magic Marker. Hour” in red along the barrel but that was it. I dropped it, moving to the other end of my bed without taking my eyes off the desk or the marker.
“Did you see that?” said Owen.
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
“Me either. What the fuck?”
“Where’s the box…” Owen turned and picked up the box while I edged closer and gingerly touched the desk. It felt like desk. It didn’t appear as if it had paint or ink poured over it anymore; it just looked as if it had been red since the time it was made. I could see the same scratches and everything that I was used to. A deep gouge near the top edge told me that even the material of the desk was red. It didn’t rub off on my finger, either.
“Magic Markers,” I heard Owen say, reading from the box. “Make your dreams come true. What the markers write is truth. Note: offer void past a small radius. Only affects item labeled.”
There were seven markers, counting the one in my hand and the blue one Owen had dropped. They all looked alike except for the Magic Marker label down the side of each one in a different color and listed with a different unit of time. Minute, hour, day, week, month, year, forever.
“Okay, this IS crazy,” said Owen. “Is it seriously saying that things come true because they’re written?”
I wanted to snort in derision but the evidence sat there next to me, being red.
“Well, we can test it, right?” I said.
“I…guess? Okay, this is stupid. You must be pranking me somehow. That was REALLY cool on the desk and all, but-“
I grabbed his notebook and flipped to a blank page, which I tore out. I uncapped my marker and wrote, “This is a 100 dollar bill” on it.
Immediately the page began shrinking, and in the space of a few seconds the page had turned itself into a 100-dollar bill. I set it carefully on the bed next to me as if it was going to attack and we both stared at it. The writing was gone.
“Okay,” said Owen. “Okay. But what do the times mean?”
“How the fuck would I know? But I’m guessing time limits, maybe? Give me the one that says Minute on it.”
He sorted through the markers and tossed me one that turned out to be yellow. I tore out another sheet of paper, and I think it says something about Owen that he made a small noise of protest when I did so. I glared at him and then wrote, “This is a brand new iPad” on the sheet.
The paper shivered and morphed in my hand, becoming what looked to me like a brand new iPad. I’d never messed with one before but it seemed to work fine. Owen held his hand out and confirmed that it was a lot like the one that his brother had gotten for his birthday. Halfway through opening a program the iPad shivered in his hand and changed back into a piece of paper. There was nothing written on it and there was no way that it would ever be mistaken for an iPad.
“So the times are a time limit,” I said, setting it straight in my mind. Owen rolled his eyes at me but I didn’t care. We’d stumbled onto something incredible and he didn’t have the ability to take my wonder away with an eyeroll.
“What could we do with these? Where did you get them?” I said.
“Office Max,” said Owen. “I just grabbed the first pack of markers I saw while I was getting supplies.”
“I’m guessing we would have heard of it by now if there were others,” I said “But what can we do with them?”
“…anything?”
It was my turn to roll my eyes at him. “Yes, I know, but I mean, what should we do first? I know for sure we don’t have to go to school anymore, if that permanent marker will let us turn pencils into gold or whatever.”
“What if they let us change people?”
For such an innocent question it led to a lot of complication in our lives. “Like how? What would you suggest?” I said. I was intrigued at the idea though it was too big to wrap my head around right away.
“Dude. Girls.”
I blinked. “Ooookay, I’m a big fan of girls, but what do these markers have to do with them?”
“It’s easy. We find one, take the hour or the day marker and write something like ‘slut’ on her hand. You know! It’ll be perfect!”
“I’m sort of impressed that your brain went there so fast, actually.”
“Oh, shut up. It’s a great plan.”
“It’s not a great plan, it’s like…like a roofie. I mean, what’s the difference between that and date rape?”
Owen was quiet for a while, considering. “Okay, fine. Fine! You’re right. But look, there’s got to be something we can do with them.”
I was staring at the giant notepad and letting my mind drift when something occurred to me. “We could do something for class.”
“Which class?”
“For psych, doofus. We could…I don’t know, we could make it part of our project.”
“How do you plan to do that? Hey prof, found some magic markers, we’ll let you know what happens! I thought you were all set to leave anyway.”
“Nah, forget that. This is gonna be great, and I like it here. But look, we could say that our real project was…I don’t know, that we pretended to be a different race or something for a week and-I got it! We could do something a friend of mine did once. He would dress up in different costumes and go visit stores and stuff to see how people reacted.”
“That’s not a bad idea.” I could see that I had Owen’s attention.
“I mean, sure, he almost got arrested that one time, but still.”
“Your brother is an idiot, though. We won’t get arrested. How do you want to do this?”
We talked a lot about the situation and how to set up the experiment, and we finally decided that the best thing to try would be for one of use to change somehow and the other one to document how people reacted to us. We would pick a spot, a store or something, and visit the same place each night for a week in different forms to see how reactions changed.
I lost the coin toss, meaning that I was the first to be changed for a week. It also meant that I was to pick the place so I chose a nearby club called Chains. I’d been in there a few times and despite the name it was a pretty ordinary night club for a college town.
Monday night came and we headed in. I wasn’t sure if Owen had ever been to a club before, though from his reaction I was pretty sure that he’d never been to a place like Chains. He looked very uncomfortable sitting there on his stool, nursing a beer while keeping track of my social interactions.
It was a pretty normal night for me. I danced a little, drank a little, and asked a few girls out and got rejected by them. The bartender largely ignored me except when I was ordering, and I was jostled and pushed around by pretty much everyone; I was the classic non-entity.
Owen’s notes reflected that, in brutal honesty. I read through them and protested a couple of times, though I subsided once he explained what he’d seen. It was fair enough and I consoled myself by making a mental note to be just as brutal when the time came for my observations.
Part of the plan we’d come up with included the idea that neither of us would know how the other planned to change them. It meant a much more honest reaction from the changed person if they weren’t sure what had been done to them, leading to more useful data. So that next night when I sat on the bed with Owen writing on my back with the blue marker, I didn’t know quite what he was doing.
He started by writing just a couple words and then sitting back. We still weren’t sure what the pens would do to humans, so it was probably best to start slowly. I felt the marker tickle my back a little and then I felt the ink spread and sink into me. It was a cooling sensation, one that spread through my body. The changes didn’t take long and when they were over I stood up and went to the mirror over the sink.
The only serious change that I could see was that I was taller. I turned to Owen. “That’s it? Taller?”
He shrugged. “It’s a good start, right? We don’t want to skew the results too much.”
“Fine. Let’s go.”
Being taller was something that took a lot of adjusting to. I wasn’t just a little taller; Owen had added nearly a foot, and I towered over most people. I constantly felt like I was falling and that night at the club I had a really hard time maintaining my balance while doing everything else. The alcohol didn’t help, either. As I had on Monday night, I drank just enough to be buzzed, and it was a lot different thanks to my new height.
Owen’s notes were even more disparaging, which again was fair.
We started putting our results together. I think I knew even then that there was no way that we could use the data but it had turned from an experiment for class to an answer to the question of how far the markers would go. Either way, I was fine with trading back and forth for a week.
Wednesday night, the writing was much more extensive on my back. He had a larger canvas thank to me being taller, but still it felt a little excessive. When the ink soaked in and changed me, the changes felt more extensive too. But by the time they were over I didn’t care. I felt amazing.
The mirror told me that I was just as tall but that I hardly resembled myself at all. I looked like a movie star from the fifties, all even teeth and hewn lines under wavy blond hair. I grinned at the mirror and winked.
That night was different. My good looks were awesome, and the confidence with which I wielded them was even better. I got a dozen phone numbers and danced with every girl that caught my eye. I only paid for a couple of drinks, getting the rest through charm and giving attention to the right girls. I know that I could have ended up with any one of a half dozen that night, no questions asked, but I decided that it would be better to go home and collate the data we’d gathered. We still had the markers; there would be plenty of time for using them to bag all the girls we wanted.
The next day I didn’t go to class; I looked nothing like my real self so there was no way that I was going to make it in the classroom unless it was one of the big ones with two hundred students. I entertained myself wandering around campus, flirting with the girls I ran into. I even saw a couple of the girls that I’d met in the club the night before, and they certainly remembered me.
I was all set for the changes that night. Owen would just have to make do on his own if I had another night like Wednesday’s, I decided. We sat on my bed and I pulled my tight shirt up so that he could write on me. It was becoming something of a nightly ritual, one which I was starting to see the benefits of.
This time he didn’t write very long. He said, “This should be interesting.” I closed my eyes as the ink soaked in and the changes began, but I frowned. They felt different. It felt as if I was shrinking.
By the time I opened my eyes the alterations were done. My clothes had changed as well, including some new underwear. I’d gained a bra thanks to the marker, and because of the changes, I needed one.
I stood and went to the mirror again. I didn’t need a bra very badly, but it was definitely there for a reason. I was sort of a cute girl, though I wasn’t going to make the covers of any magazines. I felt myself up, still staring at the mirror. I had short hair in my color and my face was recognizable. My body was pretty much average and I was closer to my normal height, but it felt very strange. I ran a hand down between my legs, feeling nothing but the empty space that I was expecting. I turned and gaped at Owen, who smiled apologetically and shrugged. “Like I said. Should be interesting.”
A deal was a deal, and I had agreed to the changes for the week. I was hesitant about going outside that way, but no one looked twice at me. It was a co-ed dorm so no one worried about whether I should be there. On a campus like ours they assumed that I was a girl that they hadn’t seen before. A few of the guys did look twice but when they saw that I seemed to be with Owen they just shrugged and moved on to the next halfway presentable girl.
At Chains it was like Monday night again. I got more attention than that first night but not much more. It might have just been a bigger crowd. I wasn’t treated like a non-entity, though, which I thought was interesting; people didn’t run into me or crush me against the bar without noticing as they had when I was a guy. They paid at least enough attention to keep from stepping on me.
Owen’s review was dispassionate and again a little harsh. I was really looking forward to next week, and not only because I was going to re-enact the changes on him. I’d felt vaguely embarrassed the whole night, as if I was wearing a bad costume and everyone was going to realize it. No one had, of course, but the feeling had remained.
That night I had strange dreams. Can you blame me? I was surprised that I didn’t have nightmares but they were just regular strange dreams about showing up at class naked (though female) and not being ready for tests and the like. Anxiety dreams. I woke up several times, feeling a little panic when my hands felt the unfamiliar contours where my body used to be, but a few moments of remembering the day before was enough to fall asleep again.
The next day went by slowly. There was no way that I could go to class, of course, so I passed the time in the school library, deep in the stacks. I didn’t find anything interesting about markers (shocker), though there was a lot of information about proto-religions and things like magic wands. The Internet gave me more of the same, though it tended more toward advertising and porn.
I was pretty apprehensive about that evening. Friday night was a big night for Chains and I wasn’t sure what Owen was planning. Before I sat on the bed and gave him access to my back I said, “Nothing too extreme, right?”
Owen gave me a pious look and said, “Please. It’s all for science.”
“Riiiight. So nothing too extreme, then, because I’m going to remember it next week?”
Silence for a moment and then, “Fair enough. I think you’ll find this interesting, though.”
“I’m already interesting, if I remember what you said correctly.”
“Sure, but you could be interesting in other ways. Come on, it’ll be a learning experience.”
I sighed and sat down. Truth was, I had never seriously thought about not letting him change me again. It was a strange feeling but it was sort of addictive as well. I was excited about the change itself rather than the final product, though I’d had fun as the super-enhanced version of myself. Even girl form was sort of interesting though I was looking forward to trying something else.
I lifted the back of my shirt to my bra strap and Owen started writing. He wrote for a while, though not as long as the night he’d turned me into the ideal version of myself. The ink started soaking in and then when he finished I could feel myself growing taller again. I sighed in relief.
Because I was taller, I was surprised to find that I still had breasts when I opened my eyes. They were much bigger than they had been, each easily more than a handful. Speaking of, my hands were a lot smaller than they had been. They were tipped with longer nails, delicately green. I said, “Owen, what the hell did you do?” The tone of my voice surprised me. It was low for a woman, soft and smoky.