The opening chapter of a sequel to my novelette 'April Fooled' - but it should be possible to understand and enjoy without having read the first book.

April Schooled

“Hurry, April,” called my new foster-Mum “You don’t want to be late for school on your first day.”

Just like hundreds of seventeen year old girls across the country this morning I ignored the parental voice of doom calling up the stairs to focus on my outfit.

My satin underwear felt chilly, smooth and a little slippery. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to it, but I wanted something stylish in the event of my getting hit by a car or some other emergency which would result in strangers seeing me in my knickers and bra. OK, the car was pretty unlikely, but other emergencies, who knows?

An above the knee skirt swished about my thighs as I posed. Pretty, but not too over the top I decided. A tightish, stretchy top drew attention to my torso in what I fervently hoped was an attractive but non-slutty way. Smooth, bare legs emerged from under the skirt to make their way down to strappy platform heels. I felt draughty, and unsteady with it, but there was no denying, my legs looked good.

I hadn’t touched my clear skin with makeup but it was massively layered around the eyes and lashes, to give that big, blue eyed, deer-caught-in –the headlights effect. Smooth, dark hair was gathered up at the back of my head, with tendrils deliberately allowed to escape and frame my delicate features. Finally, I’d painted my lips a deep red.

It’ll do, for a start I decided. Finally! The first two outfits had respectively suggested that I was setting out for a busy day (a) distributing evangelical tracts or (b) standing on street corners in dubious company, but this looked just right for a teenage girl.

Of course, I wasn’t a teenage girl, I was an adult man, but that really couldn’t be helped. I had a mission to complete and the consequences of failure didn’t bear thinking about. Abduction and literal torture would be the least of it, torture using the unspeakable, inescapable, unblockable Pain whose source I had never been able to determine. That was how the aggressively male and heterosexual Adam had been forced to become April in the first place!

Not, I had to admit, staring at my reflection, that I looked very male at the moment, in fact I blushed at the sight of myself. Manhood, muscle, adulthood and above all, freedom, all had been whipped away by my kidnappers, a brutal organisation known only as the Organisation. No, really.

Their modus operandi was simple. 1 Kidnap a victim, preferably young, healthy and with no family ties 2. Use The Pain to make them co-operate. 3. Train as domestic and sexual slave, give enforced sex change 4. Sell to someone whose personal qualities or sexual proclivities are so vile that even though they’re richer than God they still couldn’t get a girl – trans or original – to stay with them 5. Rinse and repeat. Simple.

The people who’d bought me, however, had a slightly different agenda in mind. That was how I ended up in the foster care system instead of a specialised dungeon and why Mrs Turnbull was now calling me to breakfast with increasing emphasis.

“Coming!” I called. Mrs Turnbull was a nice lady who had no idea who or what I was, or that I was any different from the legions of children she and her husband had fostered. Why should she? All the paperwork to prove that I was April Elizabeth May, seventeen years old, traumatically orphaned at fourteen years old, existed. So did the evidence of her eyes. If anyone was still looking for Adam Bell, top salesman, twenty-one years old, also traumatically orphaned at fourteen and sold to human traffickers by his rivals aged twenty they were on a hiding to nothing. No one would ever find me now.

With a sigh I grabbed my bag and pelted down the stairs.

“Hi Mrs Turnbull, hi Russell, how’s things?”

Mrs Turnbull gave me the hairy eyeball

“Things is me worrying whether you’re going to have time for breakfast is how things is. For goodness sake, get it down you. Not that it’s much, but it’s what you asked for.”

It was indeed. Special K and orange juice. I was going to be starving by mid-morning, but I was on a diet. Not my idea originally but, the Organisation’s, an ideal way to get rid of my unwanted muscle (unwanted by them anyway: I missed it) and introduce me to the joys of being a young woman and starving myself lest I commit the unspeakable crime of becoming a fat girl. Now I was continuing it for reasons of my own. It had been made very, very clear to me that if I failed to meet the tasks that the Dacres, my new owners, had set me I would be reclaimed by The Organisation so fast my feet wouldn’t touch. The next stop might be a specialist brothel for octogenarian rubber fetishists with bad breath. There wasn’t a lot I wouldn’t do to avoid that so I was staying slim, hunger or not.

“You know, you don’t have to be slim to be attractive, April.” commented Mrs Turnbull, giving me a worried look. My God, she could read thoughts. I was in trouble!

“Don’t you think, April is skinny enough already, Russell?” Russell swallowed and stirred himself from whatever daydream had held him fixed since I walked in

“I think she looks terrific. I wouldn’t care if she was fat.”

Oh dear. Russell, thirteen years old and fellow foster-child had been unable to look at me without his eyes bulging since I arrived just a few days before. I didn’t know how to deal with this; no one, as far as I knew, had ever had a crush on me before. He was basically a nice kid, who’d come from a truly awful background.

Russell wasn’t here because his parents were dead, he was here because they were such utter bastards that even a social care system awash with guidelines on how to keep dysfunctional families together, while dysfunctional parents tormented their children into dysfunctionality, couldn’t leave them in charge of a child. Every few months the parents were given another chance and sure as fate,within days Russell started turning up to school covered in bruises, hungry and smelling of unwashed clothes and cat pee – or not turning up to school at all. Then he was brought back to the Turnbulls.

So I tried to cut Russell a lot of slack, but I couldn’t help finding it very unnerving that I was clearly the subject of teenage boy fantasies. Maybe regular girls cope with this easily or don’t even think about it, but unlike them I’ve been a thirteen year old boy: I know what those fantasies are – euwwww!!

“Are you cold?” asked Mrs Turnbull, misinterpreting my shiver

“No, no I’m fine thanks. I’ve just got to run if I’m going to make it” I reassured her, scooting to my feet and downing the last of the orange juice.

“Well you make sure you wear a jacket. It may look sunny out there but there’s nothing to stop it turning cold later.”

She was such a Mum: I bet she’d been reminding people to wash behind their ears when she was six.

What sort of mother will you make? A little voice deep inside me said, and I shuddered. The very last thing the Organisation had done to me before planting me here was a piece of experimental surgery. To my knowledge it had been achieved once in the whole world before me – a complete uterus and ovaries transfer.

I had a womb, I could get pregnant, I would have my first period soon. I really, really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. As for the prospect of being a mother, I’d literally had a fit when they first told me it was possible – I’d had to be sedated. Part of me kept reminding myself that I’d lost my testicles, not my eyes: I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t crippled and three billion people coped with being female every single day. Part of me was still screaming.

Enough already I said to myself you have today to cope with before you worry about the future. Suiting words to actions, I headed for the bus stop. (I wasn’t allowed a car; if I wanted a ride, I’d been told, I’d have to persuade a boy to give me one.) School was close enough to walk to but for my first day I didn’t want to have to worry about being lost or late when the bus could drop me off a hundred yards from the gates.

The bus, when it arrived, was an unexpected challenge. I’d wanted to make an impression with my outfit and I clearly did. The bus had at least twenty school children on it aged 11 to 18. This was where I made a discovery. Most school boys don’t really bother to hide it when they’re staring at you, or maybe they haven’t yet learned how. A couple of them barely even bothered to lower their voices while commenting on me. Apparently my body passed muster. How nice. The thing that really got to me because it seemed so unfair was that they were the ones behaving badly but I was the one who got embarrassed. I glanced around surrepititiously to see how other girls (Other girls! Dear Lord how did I get into this situation?!) coped. Mostly by studiously ignoring the boys it seemed. Of course, all of them had got seats, where they could tuck themselves away with a bit of privacy. I was holding on to a pole in the middle of the aisle for everyone to see and my skirt suddenly felt a lot too short. None of the boys checking me out thought to offer me a seat. So much for chivalry! Tomorrow I was walking.

My discomfort was made worse by the fact that the Organisation, for all its terrifying array of brain washing techniques had failed utterly to undermine my heterosexuality by direct attack, so much so that they’d been stumped until someone had a brain wave. Now, due to post-hypnotic suggestion, every time I got embarrassed I got turned on. Since everything about being a girl embarrassed me, from wearing skirts and dresses to smelling my own scent, to the feel of make-up on my face or jewellery on my person and above all, being treated like a girl by other people I was permanently a little turned on. This morning I was starting to be more than a little affected; I wasn’t just a girl, I was a school girl, being openly checked out by half a bus. What could be more embarrassing than that?

Stop panicking I told myself You’re a girl now, whether you like it or not, so be glad that people find you attractive. If everyone thought you were ugly you’d still be just as stuck and life would be a lot harder. You sure as heck couldn’t carry out your mission. So be proud of being pretty.

I tried to listen to my own good advice, but all the same I was relieved when the school gates hove into view. I was starting to see why girls would voluntarily choose to wear a burka. (I’d always known why men favoured them – they’re exactly what every father of teenage girls would like his daughter to wear.)

I managed to be first off the bus and then came to a standstill in front of the school gates. I had left school at sixteen and glad to get out. I’d hated school, not the academic side but the stupidity, the childish cliques, the mindless bullying. Being orphaned and then dumped in a frankly lousy school to rebuild my life from scratch had traumatised me. Physical bullying had stopped after I’d gone coldly, clinically berserk and used my rudimentary martial arts skills to flatten a boy who’d been happily rubbing my face into a pebbledash wall. The verbal bullying, the hatred, the exclusion had, if anything, only got worse. Now here I was, back again, a friendless orphan but smaller, weaker and female. I felt a little shiver of fear, before pulling out my map and timetable, squaring my shoulders and marching firmly in.

I got all of five yards before a voice shouted

“Hey,you. New girl.”

I looked round to see a girl of about my own (official) age bearing down on me brandishing a clip board. As she came closer I could see she also had a badge marked ‘Prefect’. I couldn’t be in trouble yet, surely? I’d only just arrived.

“Um, yes? What’s up?”

“Don’t look so worried. I just wanted to tell you’re heading the wrong way. Since you’re the only new pupil in your form, you need to go to the reception office over there. They’ll whistle somebody up to be a native guide for you until you get used to the place.”

“Oh, um, thanks?”

“No problem. My name’s Shelley. If you run into any problems with bullying or the like, just let me know.”

I headed in the direction Shelley had indicated, feeling just a tiny bit reassured. Maybe this place wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

The office made me think again. On the first morning of the first term there were already two goons of the sort I remembered from the first time round waiting to be dealt with along with a scatty looking girl who’d probably lost her gym kit or something. On the other hand the goons WERE waiting to be dealt with instead of roaming the corridors spreading havoc. That had to be a plus.

“Uh, hi. Mrs Routledge?” I said to the formidable looking lady on reception with the name plate on her desk “I’m April May. I’m new. Mrs Thistlewood, the Headmistress, knows about me, but I was told to come here before classes start?”

Maybe she was the hard nut with the soft centre because she gave me a dazzling smile.

“That’s right, dear. Mrs Thistlewood wanted to make sure you had someone to help you settle in. Maddy, this is April.”

The scatty looking girl rose from her chair, scattering books and instantly dropped to her knees to collect them – whereupon her long wavy hair made a successful escape attempt from her silver clasp and she ran out of hands.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. This doesn’t normally happen. Um, Madelaine, but everyone calls me Maddy, pleased to meet you.” She managed an embarrassed beam at me.

“April, and likewise.” I replied, slipping to my knees to help her gather up her belongings. “If you just hold still a minute, I think I can sort out the clasp, it hasn’t fallen out just come unclasped – ow, Ok that’s got it.”

Great going! You’ve been back in school two minutes and you’re already in deep girly mode. At this rate we’ll be braiding each other’s hair by lunch time.

I ignored my inner voice. The more girl I was the better my chance of succeeding in my mission. Besides, where did my inner monologue get off bullying me, anyway?

“You have great hair,” I added “I think you’ve just got more of it than any clasp can cope with. I wish I had this much volume.”

“Thank you. I can’t bear to cut it, but if I don’t use a clasp it falls all over my books every time I try to read and write. I don’t think you need to envy my hair though – or anyone’s.” Maddy added looking at my hairstyle. I couldn’t help it, I preened, just a little. I wouldn’t have chosen to be a girl, but since I am it’s nice to know I’m doing it properly.

“Come on, let me show you to the form room. We’re with Mrs Kerr; she’s nice but we still don’t want to be late.”

“Lead on MacDuff” I misquoted and we departed down the corridor.

The corridor distinctly reminded me of the bus but I was doing fine, taking in my new companion and trying to take note of where we were so I could find my way around later, when I let out a squeal of shock and outrage and almost hit the ceiling. Someone had just grabbed my bottom and squeezed me, hard!

“Hey! Who did that?” I was glaring around wide-eyed but there was a such a river of people going by it could have been anyone. Maddy had turned to look with me and an instant later we did a synchronised squeak as someone ahead of us in the corridor squeezed us both.

This time I whirled round in time to narrow the suspects down to three or four smirking youths who turned under my gaze and sniggered their way up the corridor.

“Them!” said Maddy in exasperation. “Honestly, they never grow up! Did you see which one it was, April? Mrs Thistlewood will throw the book at them if we can identify the culprit, but there isn’t much she can do otherwise.”

“I..er...uh!” I managed to reply

“Oh my goodness. Are you all right?”

No, was the answer to that one, but I wasn’t sure I could articulate any more. Maddy turned out to be a lot more practical than I had given her credit for. She grabbed me by one arm and bustled me into the ladies toilets. Wow. I’d finally penetrated the inner sanctum of school age womanhood. It was a lot cleaner than the boys’ bathrooms had ever been which was handy because I collapsed in a heap almost as soon as we were through the door.

“April, you’ve gone white as a sheet!”

“I just can’t do this! I can’t cope with being stared at and groped and leched after and – and I don’t want to be a – a school girl!” And with that, having had just enough presence of mind to insert the word ‘school’ so Maddy wouldn’t guess my secret or think I was mad, I completely lost it and burst into tears. Stupid hormones!

“Shh! It’ll be OK, I promise,” Maddy crouched down beside me and put a hand on my knee “We’ll tell Mrs Thistlewood. She can’t suspend anyone because we don’t know which one it was but I’m sure she’ll scare the life out of them. They’ve got to grow up sooner or later. They aren’t even that bad, once you get to know them. It’s just boys, you know? Once they know you they start realising you aren’t just a –a –a “

“Sex object?”

“I was going to say ‘transport system for a pair of breasts’, but sex object works just as well.”

Little do you know, Maddy, I thought, I AM a sex object. The only reason those rude, immature, sexist, adolescent, little scumbags can’t bend me over this washbasin and take me is because they haven’t paid my captors the fee. Someone else bought me first. Someone who placed me in this school to seduce their son, marry him and use my feminine wiles to push him into a high powered career instead of wasting his time on his band and smoking pot and generally be his sloe-eyed helpmeet, adoring wife and lifelong support system. Of all the dangers in life that could have happened to me I never, never dreamed that becoming a hausfrau was one of them!

More tears flowed, quieter now. “I’m sorry Maddy, I must look like such an idiot. On my first day, too.”

“Don’t be silly,” she smiled at me “No one likes being felt up by perfect strangers. We’ve still got time before registration; I’ll help you clean up your make up and no one will even know.”
I hiccupped and smiled at her, getting up off the floor.

“I look like a panda!” My mascara had run in great streaks down my face while I was crying.

“Don’t worry,” Maddy said, handing me a facial wipe from somewhere in the depths of her capacious ethnic bag “It happens to all of us; I don’t care what they say, tear proof mascara is a myth.”

At that precise moment the door opened and two more girls breezed in

“Hey Maddy – oh. What happened to your friend?”

“She met the Grope Patrol on her first day. April, this is Jenny and Tori.”

“Those creeps. This is ridiculous. I don’t care what Mrs Thistlewood says about identification and individual responsibility. If she doesn’t do something about it this year I’m going to get my father to. What’s the point of having a parent who’s a barrister if you don’t take advantage of it occasionally?”

It looked like I could count on sympathy at least – but then sheep are probably sympathetic to the one that gets chased by a dog – doesn’t mean they’ll help.

“Why waste time?” asked Tori “Just do what I did.”

“Get your boyfriend and his mates to threaten them you mean? It’s a solution, I suppose.” Replied Maddy doubtfully
Is it really? I wondered Protect yourself from men treating you like a possession by getting one to mark you as his territory. Is that still where women are in the twenty-first century?

“Or we could just do something nasty with a stiletto heel and pretend it was an accident” said Jenny. That was more like it. OK, I was starting to feel better.

I finished repairing my face, put my make up away and zipped up the bag.

“Ready to go?” asked Maddy sympathetically.

“Absolutely” I smiled at her

“We’ll join you,” said Jenny “Any trouble in the corridors and we can have a synchronised high heel accident.” I giggled, wincing a little internally at how easily a giggle came to my lips now and we headed for class.

Class had an assortment of people scattered around several rows of desks, and, fortunately, a teacher just arriving, presumably Miss Kerr herself. I got a few stares going in but not really any more than you’d expect being the new girl. I followed Maddy to a pair of desks at the back of the room. Thank goodness, now I would be able to see everything, but people wouldn’t be able to stare at me without craning their necks and making it really obvious. Score!
“Settle down now class,” began the teacher, with an air of cheery energy “We have a new student starting today, who I’m sure would like to introduce herself to you. April – it is April, isn’t it? – would you come up here please?”
What could I do? I’d never been shy before – it was part of what made me a good salesman – but that was when the audience didn’t consist of teenage boys mentally undressing me while teenage girls made comparisons and awarded points for my hairstyle and outfit. Slowly I made my way to the front of the class.

“Alright April, tell us a bit about yourself.”

“My name is April May-“

“April may – so ask her.” said a clear, carrying voice

Smothered laughter ran through the class and I went pink as I realised what the Organisation had done to me, giving me the name I had. Those words would be on the wall of the boys’ locker room in hours I was sure.
I composed myself and looked steadily at one of those laughing loudest, who by coincidence happened to be one of the four from the corridor earlier, though his loathsome little friends were nowhere to be seen.

“April May,” I repeated softly, once the silence had begun to grate “But not with you.” That got a much louder round of laughter. From the corner of my eye I could see Miss Kerr bridling but she said nothing.

“I’m seventeen years old. I’ve just moved here to stay with foster parents. My own parents died three years ago in a car accident.” That stopped the laughter. Smiles faded away into looks of shock and sympathy.

“I study English Literature, Art, Music, Drama and Domestic Science.” All true, all selected for me as either things my ‘target’ studies or suitably feminine accomplishments for me to have. Never mind the massive workload, no one cares if ‘April May’ leaves school with any qualifications, so long as she gets her man.

“I like all sorts of music, Victorian novels, parties, chocolate, swimming and sunbathing. My idea of Heaven would be a pool party in a Victorian mansion with a live band nearby.” Not strictly true; my idea of Heaven would be waking up to find I’d dreamt the last few months, but what the heck.

I scanned the class. OK, no one looked hostile, some looked interested and – Oh my goodness, there he was. Vincent Dacre, my future Lord and Master. If I was lucky. This was the first time I’d seen him in the flesh since his parents had bought me to be his ideal woman. (Parents choosing a teenager’s ideal partner; there was a flaw in this plan somewhere). Tall, dark, imperfectly shaven and clad in battered jeans, leather jacket and heavy boots he was obviously going for the urban rebel look and pulled it off as well as any seventeen year old schoolboy could hope to. He was gazing at me with what looked like a friendly expression – at least, it was certainly an interested one and I could see what looked like a smile turning up the corners of his lips, so I smiled back as I concluded

“That’s pretty much all I have to say, so if you want to know more, ask me.”

“Thank you April,” said Miss Kerr as I resumed my seat “That was very enlightening.” She looked a little bit shaken – obviously no one had warned her I was an orphan, but then it serves her right for being cheery first thing in the morning on a school day! I resumed my seat, noting from the corner of my eye that Vincent Dacre’s eyes followed me as I did so, apparently lingering a little on certain areas. It looked like I had chosen the right outfit.

“That was sooo cool, the way you handled that thing about your name.” whispered Maddy, as I slid back into my seat “Have you done this before?”

“Nah,” I whispered back smugly “I’m just spontaneously witty. On a good day.” Maybe this was going to be a good day after all.

Chapter Two: Fourteen girls grabbing balls

I tried to hold on to that thought as I made my way to my first class – PE, or physical exercise. Yes, English schools let you drop out of this at sixteen but I wasn’t working to school rules but those set by The Organisation and the Dacres and for some reason one or other had decreed that I was going to play sport as a girl. Of course, my new school held that rugby, soccer or even hockey just weren’t ladylike enough. I was about to open my school girl sporting career by playing my first ever game of netball.

Netball, for the uninitiated, is played by two teams of seven, each member of which is allocated to a specific area of the court, which she (and it is a she, mens’ netball is about as popular as mens’ embroidery classes) is not allowed to leave.
No one is allowed to tackle – it’s a completely non-contact sport – but that doesn’t matter because you aren’t allowed to keep the ball once you’ve got it either, you have to pass almost immediately or it counts as a foul. At either end of the court is a hoop, set considerably lower than a basketball hoop, into which you make ladylike throws from a short distance to score a goal. Slam-dunks are NOT allowed. Netball is also habitually played in little pleated gym skirts and matching T-shirts like the ones I had in my bag.

Netball teams do not usually have names the way American high school teams do, but for some strange reason the school had overturned that tradition, so now our school team was the St Blasius of Cappadocia Academy Tigercats. Fortunately I wasn’t going to make the team; I’d seen the uniforms and they looked like they’d been designed by a cheerleader on a sugar high.

I was already going red as I wended my way down the corridor, keeping a careful eye out for any boys sneaking up on my butt. I was just about to go into a girls’ changing room. Regardless of what I looked like, I defy anyone to spend a lifetime as a man and then feel relaxed about that. Add in the fact that I was really twenty-one and it just felt inappropriate. Maddy, the only person I knew in the whole place, unless being groped counts as an introduction, had abandoned me, having given up sport the year before. So much for my native guide! Still, she had promised to meet me in the library later.

“Who are you?” blared a leathery, angry looking woman of maybe forty as I came through the changing room door. On top of the thoughts I’d just been having this was almost enough to make me turn and run.

“I er um”

“New girl?”

“I, um”

“Don’t say ‘um’. I detest people saying ‘um’? Are you any good at netball?”

“I er”

“Don’t say ‘er’ either. You must know if you’re any good or not. Just don’t be one of those deferential girls. ‘Oh, I don’t know Mrs Davidson, I don’t like to admit to being good, people might not like me. In fact I don’t even like to get sweaty in case it puts the boys off’ “ She rolled her eyes exasperatedly “So are you any good or not?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never played.”

“Oh. What have you played?”

“Soccer.”

“God help us. Right you’re with Kirsty’s team. Try not to commit too many fouls.”
Kirsty was presumably the tall girl now making a ‘don’t panic’ face at me from behind the woman’s shoulder.

“Hi, there...?”

“April.”

“Hi there, April. As you haven’t played before I’ll put you in defence. All you have to do is try to catch any balls going by and pass them to someone else on our team. We’re red today, so don’t forget to grab an armband.” She leaned close and whispered “Don’t worry about Mrs Davidson. She just likes to keep people on their toes.”

And with that she began to strip off. I was in a room full of healthy teenage girls unconcernedly taking their clothes off and you know what? Nothing. Alright, not nothing, twenty-one years as a heterosexual male doesn’t go away all at once, but between embarrassment, a deep desire not to be anything like the boys from the corridor and having had my system flooded with massive doses of female hormones for months it wasn’t a problem.

Sadly I realised that it wasn’t inappropriate for me to be in a girls’ locker room at all. I really was a girl and a pretty one too. My knickers lay snug and flat over my pubic mound, my full breasts invited the gaze of the passerby, my hips and bottom curved enticingly. I wasn’t even the tallest girl in the room, or the heaviest built. Nobody could tell I wasn’t born this way. I was going to be the ravishee, not the ravisher. My new role in life was as a girlfriend, wife and arrgh!

I shook myself. There was no sense getting maudlin. I’d known for a while now there was no escape from my female status, and I’d promised myself to be the one thing no Organisation, no brainwashing, threat or blackmail could ever take away from me. I was going to be a good person, to give friendship and love, whether I received it or not. I was going to be nice to people, make the world a better place and the first step to that was to get changed, get out there and stop moping. Go Tigercats!

Besides, I reminded myself as we filed out to the netball court, there were far worse things I could be. Better a girl than one of the Grope Patrol!