Quentin and Larry

Quentin and Larry were the best of friends, right up to the point everything fell apart, and in the end, nobody was ever quite the same.

Both boys were very similar in body type. They were both slender, with soft, almost feminine faces. This lead them to be the targets of local bullies, and so they only really had each other for friends for a long time.

If boys tended to treat Quentin and Larry like punching bags, the reaction of girls was a little more complicated. Some girls laughed at them, and encouraged bullies to beat them up. But others felt compassion for the the two boys, and two girls in particular fell into this group, and their names were Roberta and Connie.

They noticed that the two boys were gentler, kinder, and actually a lot of fun compared to the big bruising types, and so tried to include the two boys in everything they did. As a result, the two boys probably knew more about how girls thought and felt than most boys did at that age.

But then the two girls got an idea, and that idea would change everything for all of them.

They decided one Halloween that the boys should dress as girls, and since by then the two boys were totally in love with the girls, it didn’t take a huge amount of persuasion to get the two boys in skirts for the night.

But once they got dressed up, they had totally different reactions to how they looked. Larry looked at the pretty girl in the reflection, and it was like a key fit into a lock. He realized that this was his (her, really) true self, and that she would do whatever it took to look like this every day.

Quentin had the opposite reaction, however. It made him feel almost physically ill to see a pretty girl staring back at him in the mirror. But, because he was in love with Connie, and because he appreciated the hard work she and Roberta had gone through to make his costume, he stuffed that feeling deep inside himself, and pretended to have a good time at the Halloween party.

Things only got worse for Quentin after the party. Once everyone had seen how good a girl he and Larry made, it seemed like everyone tried to encourage them to do it again, and seeing how happy that made Larry, Quentin went along more often than not, but the damage to his sense of self got worse with every occasion.

Finally, filled with self-loathing, Quentin started taking illegal steroids in a hope of bulking up. Unfortunately, it turned out that Quentin had a form of androgen insensitivity, and the male hormones nearly killed him. To make things worse, everyone came to the conclusion he was simply in denial of his feminine self, and so worked even harder to get him in dresses and skirts.

His confidence ruined, his options limited, and his best friend becoming a girl, Quentin gave in, and started to be a girl named Rose, just as Larry was becoming Lora. However, he faltered when he realized that Lora intended to start female hormones and even have surgery as soon as allowed. He couldn’t take it anymore, and suffered a breakdown that ended with him being hospitalized, a condition that would repeat on and off for the remainder of his life.

There’s probably a moral to this story, but it has escaped the writer’s mind.