Chapter 6: Hot-Shot
In the span of a single day, a hundred things and more had changed in the life of the girl now known as Holly Owen, but one of the best things, as far as she could see, was how absolutely ginormous her bed seemed to have become. Harry’s old body had long outgrown a single-sized mattress, and he often ended the night with arms or legs spaghettied out half a foot off the bedframe. Now though, with her much smaller size, Holly found herself submerged under the covers in a way that made her feel a bit like a cat ensconced in a big fluffy cloud. Still, she could hardly stay here all day, and so with a dozy yawn she peeped up from under her duvet, grumbling against the unwelcome intrusion of the midmorning sunshine, and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.
The bed wasn’t quite so oversized in reality, she admitted, and part of the cosy, fluffy feeling was likely due to how tired she had been and how deeply she had slept, but it was still a marked improvement to have so much room to spare. She pulled herself up, made a cursory attempt to ftten the wild mass of yellow hair on her head and swung her legs over the side.
‘This was it,’ she thought, resting her forehead in her hands and taking a deep breath to steady her resolve. She had made her choice, and for the next six weeks she would live every day as Holly Jane. Not that it was much of a choice, in the end, since that was exactly who she was – for now at least. It was only that she had decided that she wouldn’t try to force herself to py the role of Harry, or how she imagined Harry ought to be anyway, and for that she couldn’t really feel regret. It was exhausting.
She told Kate as much on the bus ride home, and by the end of the trip both had agreed that for the next six weeks it would be as though Harry himself had ceased to be. They had called over to Matt as well, from his unspoken exile several seats back, but he had only gred at them peevishly and affirmed that his name was Matthias, which she supposed was fair enough. Georgie had of course remained at home with her mother, for which Holly couldn’t help but find herself a little grateful. Though the girl had been contrite and apologetic, and really had done as much as she could to help, once her inability to actually fix her mistake became clear it was hard for Holly to escape a growing bitterness whenever she thought of Georgie and the havoc she had wrought on both her and Kate’s lives.
What all of this meant for their retionship, God (or perhaps Gods) only knew. Though the issue had loomed over them on the bus ride, neither had had the courage to actually bring it up. Of course she cared a lot about Kate, and obviously she wanted them to be together, but she honestly had no idea if or how that was supposed to work now. For starters, she didn’t have any idea if Kate even thought about girls in that way, and if Holly were honest, far from sharing this new body with another person, it was enough of a challenge to be getting on with to meet her own face in the mirror. But that, she mused as she pulled herself to her feet and tiptoed shyly into the bathroom, that at least was a challenge that it was high time she met.
She was alright to look at, Holly realised as she inspected her reflection with a little surge of satisfaction, or at least she would be once the early morning puffiness had gone from around her eyes, and her straw-blonde hair had been cajoled into something a little less resembling a haystack. The girl in the mirror wasn’t breathtakingly beautiful like Gwen Stafford (and who was?), nor did she have Kate’s exotic good looks and long legs, but she was more than a little pretty, in her own tomboyish sort of way. She tried a smile, and a pair of blue eyes twinkled back as they returned a cheeky, scampish grin, the sort that might have made her feel ungainly during her awkward teenage years, but by now only gave her mature face a pleasingly impish aspect.
It could have been worse, Holly thought to herself. She was attractive enough, but not in a way that made her seem a delicate flower. Instead, she was rough-and-tumble, and though short in stature there was a sort of pluckiness to her that well suited a girl who had spent many a cold afternoon braving the hardships of the soccer field. Even her pyjamas were doing their part. Though she had been too shattered to give it a second thought the night before, she appeared to have instinctively found her way into a pair of comfy red bottoms, with tiny white cannons, symbol of her Arsenal football team, stamped up and down the leg.
The bck vest had in the end proven a woefully inadequate substitute and she swore a little as she tugged it up and over her head and tried to massage a little of the soreness out of her breasts. Today would have to be different, she conceded. Truthfully the sense of embarrassment she would feel at putting on an actual bra had been falling away with every hour she lived as Holly, and the miserable time she had had slogging around for hours without the protection and support she needed was affirmation, if she needed it, of how futile it would be to try and pretend that her body and its needs weren’t different now.
She turned on the shower, letting the water run a moment as she climbed out of her pyjama bottoms and slipped under the cascade with a sigh of contentment. It was actually so refreshing, standing there amidst the steam and the piping hot water that she found herself closing her eyes and forgetting to feel properly self-conscious. Not that it didn’t feel strange, even downright eerie, as for the first time Holly was completely exposed to the changes that had overtaken her. It was just that, as her hands rubbed vender soap over the unfamiliar curves of her hips and breasts, as she felt the smoothness of her skin and the small frame of her shoulders, and even as she looked down at the countless rivers of water that ran down her ft stomach and through the tawny tuft of hair between her legs, to fall with tiny spshes upon her little feet, she couldn’t bring herself to let it unsettle her.
A little bristle of hair had appeared on her leg. Holly had once heard it said that blonde women were lucky that they needed to shave less often. The problem was that even if her hair might be less noticeable from where another person might stand, Holly herself had noticed it and to be frank it was annoying her. Harry of course had thought nothing of his old hairy shins, but her skin was smooth and soft now, or ought to be at least, and that little bristle of hair had become as irritating to her as a smudge of dirt on an otherwise immacute windowpane. She relented after a moment or so and nicked it off with the bde of a pink Gillette razor she found behind the shampoo, but of course no sooner had she done so than another little bristle caught her eye, and then a third.
Fine, it appeared that Holly was especially particur about keeping her legs smooth. Rolling her eyes a little at this realisation, she picked up a small cannister of shaving cream and rubbed the ther gently along the length of her leg. She hesitated a moment at the thought of how stupid she must look, and briefly she had the sense that he was still Harry, and this was some kind of daft forfeit the ds had made him do for losing a bet. She could abandon the attempt, of course, she could probably even go another couple of days without anyone noticing anything amiss, but apparently shaving her legs was something she’d have been especially fussy about, if she’d been a girl, and doing without made her feel a bit like if she’d decided not to bother brushing her teeth.
It helped that her legs were now very obviously petite and feminine, and once she set to work then the whole thing was quick and effortless - a little to her surprise. Her wrist seemed to know instinctively the best paths for her razor to take, making short work of even the niggly bony bits on her knees and ankles, and as long as she didn’t stop to think about what she was doing, her instincts made the whole thing seem like second nature.
Nor was this the limit of Holly’s new understanding of womanly arts, as she discovered when she reached for the shampoo and felt a little jolt in her stomach that told her to stop. Washing her hair would be foolish, she knew immediately, it’d take ages to dry, and she’d need to be at football practice in a couple of hours. It was hard not to feel just a little bemused as she touched her fingers to her scalp, noting that a simir sort of intuition had all the while kept her hair just about out of the water.
Most probably Apollo-Artemis had gifted her with these little proprioceptive conveniences, she mused to herself as she let her little autopilot towel herself off and apply some sort of lotion to her legs. A little concession from the almighty Lord-and-Lady to prevent her from going completely mad. Perhaps she ought to send Them a thank-you card.
She let herself back into the main room, clenching her teeth a little against the sudden cold, and scurried over to the wardrobe. The underwear drawer was the one on top, of course, and she rummaged around a moment before settling on a pin, practical set in matching grey. The top looked snug and robust at least and, judging by the little Nike swoosh, was probably some sort of a sports bra. She wiggled into it, thankful that the garment wasn’t some diabolic mass of frilly ce and back csps (although judging by the rest of her drawer, she’d have to deal with that sooner or ter). Still, the top fit well, and she was immediately aware that her breasts now had a much better level of support.
“Oh…”
Holly gnced down at herself, suddenly aware that, in a thoughtless, completely mundane sort of way, she had found herself stood alone in her dorm room wearing nothing more than a set of women’s underwear. And in an instant that awareness was colder by far than the winter morning, and she trembled, tried to force the shame and guilt and all of it away, down into some deep forgotten pce.
She wasn’t doing anything wrong. Holly needed to wear a bra, that much was clear from yesterday, and the outfit was hardly Victoria’s Secret, rather it was just practical gear for pying sports in. Yet the way the briefs clung to the curve of her hips, that the top forced her chest together into a cleavage, and the distinctively feminine bareness of her midriff made one thing utterly and unavoidably clear. She was not, as she had allowed herself to pretend the day before, a sort of titchy, long-haired version of Harry. She was a girl, an actual woman, and though her instincts and her subconscious only told her that of course she was, that nothing could be more natural, the thinking, rational part of Harry’s mind span in terror as he felt the truth of it.
He gripped the cabinet door tight, so tightly that his fingertips turned white, and tried to steady himself.
It was alright. He – It was just that she had to be Holly now, and even Kate had agreed that there was nothing else he could do but embrace it, and that she would help him and not think him any less of a man, once the curse was lifted. And it was only for these six weeks, and then everything would be back to normal, and nobody would ever know that he, Harry Owen, had pranced through campus in sports bras or shaved his legs or… whatever else he found himself needing to do.
It was alright. Holly exhaled and set herself against the nervous fluttering in her chest. She could do this.
Her hand ghosted through the wardrobe, until at st it csped tightly around the familiar red of her beloved Arsenal. She had two t-shirts actually, just as Harry did, though in this reality both were much smaller and pulled in a little at the waist like an hourgss. The first shirt was this year’s design, still brand new and better saved for daywear and at the pub. Instead, it was the older of the pair, faded and weather-worn, that she slipped over her head, complementing it with a pair of dark blue gym shorts and a sports headband that she found in her kitbag.
Ridiculously – or perhaps understandably – the next thought that went through Holly’s head was, ‘Can I even still py football?’ Her eye nded on an old leather ball under her desk, and she couldn’t help but tiptoe over and take it in her hands. It felt familiar still, good to hold, and she let it drop to the floor. Then, as it bounced, she stuck out her foot and let it fall for the second time on her bare toes. She mastered it immediately, juggling from her left to her right, then up to her knees, each bounce perfectly controlled, the ball moving exactly how she wanted, as though it were on a puppeteer’s string.
She let out an enormous sigh of relief as she realised that she had lost none of her old skill. Whatever other changes she had undergone, whatever weird girly nonsense had been impnted in her head, she still had her football, and somehow that made all the rest seem that little bit more manageable. It begged the question of course, with Holly’s talent, what sort of pce she had on the woman’s team in this strange new world. The purple team jacket half-hanging out of her kitbag offered an immediate answer and with curiosity she held the garment up to inspect the name on the back.
“’Hot-Shot’ Holly Owen,” she read aloud with a little smile. That was actually a decent nickname, to be fair - It was better than ‘Boy Wonder,’ at any rate and, all being well, it would only ever be for a few short weeks. The little bit of football had helped, she realised, as she cloaked herself in the jacket and finished off getting ready. Apart from stopping her from feeling that she had lost herself entirely, it was encouraging as well to think on what it meant for the team. Harry had been as good as anyone else on the men’s team, maybe even the star pyer. And Kate was good as well, for a girl, and Gwen had pyed county-level hockey, and the girls seemed to win more often than not. Surely with all that together, the University Cup would be within their grasp.
That was the pn anyway, she thought, shrugging haplessly at the girl in the mirror as she picked up her bag and made her way out of the front door.
