This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe.
It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it
should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters
from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback
on the rough draft.
“Jack, it’s Mindy. Tim has — gone through a Twist. You promised you’d come if — when — it happened...”
“I’ll be there.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
I’d been hiking through the highlands of Papua New Guinea for several weeks, stopping here and there for a few days to get to know people and learn their language. I’d been staying in one village for three days, picking up a decent working knowledge of Wogamusin; the itch to travel was getting stronger, but I thought I’d resist it for a day or two more — until I had a larger vocabulary and a stronger grasp of the verb system.
But then my sat phone rang in the middle of the night. It was an emergency tone; at that time of night the call would have gone to voicemail if it weren’t from one of the small set of people who have the right to interrupt me any time. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and answered it, too bleary yet to read the caller ID.
“Hello?”
“Jack, it’s Mindy. Tim has — gone through a Twist. You promised you’d come if — when — it happened...”
“I’ll be there.”
But getting from the PNG highlands to Austin, Texas — where my ex lives with our son, her new hubby and his kids by his previous — isn’t a short trip no matter how you hurry it. Just getting to the nearest international airport, at Port Moresby, took me most of the following day, and then the next flight I could use wasn’t for several hours. Then I had a three-hour flight to Brisbane and a four-hour layover before I could get on a plane to Houston.
By the time I got to Austin, I’d gotten several worrying messages from Mindy, one brief one from Tim, and one (more reassuring) from my niece Emily, who said she was flying out to Austin to help Tim with his Twist. She’d get there way ahead of me, having a much shorter distance to travel; fortunately Tim’s Twist happened during Emily’s spring break.
Emily offered to pick me up at the airport, but I declined; I wanted to rent a car to use while I was in town. “You know how I am,” I said, “if I get wanderlusty in the middle of the night I don’t want to depend on somebody else for a ride.” Actually, once the crisis with Tim was over, and it looked like I was overstaying my welcome with Mindy and her new guy Steve, I’d probably end up buying a used car and traveling around the States for a while. But I didn’t want to waste time car shopping when Tim needed his dad.
I called Mindy again when I’d finished signing for the car. “I’ll be there in about half an hour.”
“We’re almost finished eating supper,” she apologized, “I wasn’t sure how long you’d take... I can reheat some leftovers when you get here.”
“Maybe, or I can eat on the way. Don’t sweat it.”
“Actually... I think Tim would like you to eat here.”
“...I’ll save my appetite, then.”
I’d heard partial accounts of Tim’s Twist in those messages, but I didn’t get a clear picture of it until I’d been in Austin for a couple of days. Maybe it seems coy or disingenuous, but I think it makes sense to show you how I saw Tim for myself, as though I’d heard hardly anything about his Twist ahead of time, instead of filtering your perceptions through Mindy’s and Emily’s, the way mine were filtered.
Traffic was light and I made good time. I sent Mindy a heads-up message while I was sitting at a stop light near the house, and minutes later I parked on the east side of the driveway. I saw another rental car, probably Emily’s, and one I recognized as Mindy’s; the other one must be Steve’s.
A few moments after I rang the bell, a girl opened the door. She looked about fourteen years old, as indeed she was, with shoulder-length light brown hair done up in a ponytail, and blue eyes, wearing a yellow housedress with a blue apron. I recognized her from a photo Mindy had sent me.
“Tim?”
“Hi, Daddy,” she said, looking shy — as though she weren’t sure I would approve of her. I couldn’t let her doubt that for a moment longer; I enfolded her in a hug.
“It’s so good to see you, Tim. I’ll always be proud to be your dad.” Then I remembered how she’d addressed me, and added: “Or your daddy.”
“It’s okay if I call you that?”
“It’s okay, Tim. Um — last I heard you hadn’t picked a new name?”
“No, I’m still thinking about it. Emily says I should be sure it’s the right one.”
“Your cousin’s a smart girl, you should listen to her.”
“Come on in, Jack.” Mindy stood in the doorway to the kitchen, and didn’t move any closer as Tim moved aside to let me into the living room, then closed the door behind me. “Tim’s kept a plate hot for you.”
“And I didn’t put the cake in the oven until after you left the airport,” Tim added. “It’s apple walnut cake.”
“Your grandma’s recipe?”
“Yes. I messaged her and asked her for it, when I found out when you were going to get here. Mom and Emily helped, but I did most of it.”
So was Tim’s interest in cooking new in the last three days, or something he’d picked up in the months since I’d seen him at Christmas, before his Twist? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want my priorities to look weird; I decided to save it for later. I just said: “Sounds delicious,” and followed them into the kitchen.
Tim took charge, heating up a plate and setting it on the table with a set of silverware. “Do you want sweet tea?” she asked.
“You know me well,” I agreed. She poured a glass and set it next to the plate, and I sat down, more than half expecting her to sit down with me; but instead she went to work putting dishes from the sink into the dishwasher.
“I’m almost done with this,” she said.
“Tim, do try to sit down and talk with your father when you’re done with that,” Mindy said. From what she’d said, and more from Emily’s latest message, I’d gathered that Tim had some compulsions since her Twist, and I realized I was seeing one of them now.
“We can talk while she works, if it makes her feel more comfortable,” I said, and then realized I’d just used female pronouns for Tim. Would Tim like that? Safer to stick to second-person pronouns until I was sure... “Or — you can do the talking at first, Tim, since your mom won’t want me talking with my mouth full.”
Mindy gave the ghost of a smile.
“So, um, I guess you want to know about my Twist?” Tim said, looking over her shoulder as she loaded the dishes. “I turned into a girl, and I care a lot about keeping things neat and clean and organized. Um. That’s about it. I still like collecting arthropods but I’ve been too busy to go out looking for more. And I’d like to keep playing soccer, for a girls' team I guess, but I’m not sure they’ll want me since I’m Twisted. I’m too busy right now anyway, but I’d like to play again, maybe with kids who are just playing for fun and not competing in tournaments...”
I’d been hearing TV noises, and occasional loud comments, from the den; I inferred that Mindy’s husband Steve and her stepson Craig were in there watching something, possibly a basketball game. Just then I heard the muffled sound of rushing water, and the door of the hall bathroom opened; Emily came out.
“Uncle Jack!” she exclaimed, coming into the kitchen. “I won’t hug you while your mouth’s full and my hands are wet. — We need a clean hand towel in the hall bathroom, Aunt Mindy; where do you keep them?”
“In the hall closet, on the lower left shelf,” Mindy started to say, and Tim said: “I’ll take care of it,” stowing a plate in the dishwasher and then heading toward the hall.
“Nuh-uh,” Emily said. “You sit down and visit with your dad, I can find the towels.”
Tim looked torn, and I said: “I won’t be offended if you go and do housework while I’m eating supper. But — just something to think about — you won’t know how strong your compulsions really are unless you try to resist them sometimes.”
“The house will still get clean if you let other people do some of the work,” Emily said. “Sit.”
“Okay,” Tim said, and sat down next to me.
“Where’s your sister? Watching the game in yonder with the boys...?” Lisa was Steve’s daughter, and just a few months older than Tim. They got along pretty well, or such had been my impression when I’d seen them together.
“Sleepover at a friend’s house,” Mindy volunteered. Tim was fidgeting with the stuff in the center of the table, scooting the napkin holder, salt shaker and so forth this way and that until they were symmetrically aligned. I was getting worried about him. About her. Over and above whatever gender confusion Tim might be feeling, a compulsion like that could be crippling if Tim couldn’t find a workaround for it.
“What did the doctors say about you?” I asked.
“Um, our family doctor said I’m a real girl with all the girl parts.” Her tone was matter-of-fact; maybe slightly embarrassed, but not more than I’d expect any girl to be when talking about a medical exam with her father. “But I haven’t seen a Twist doctor yet.”
“There aren’t any Twist specialists in Austin,” Mindy put in apologetically. “I was going to take her to the clinic in Dallas, but it’s such a long drive and Steve or I will have to take the day off work...”
“I can do it,” I said.
“Would you? Thanks. We have a tentative appointment for Friday at one. My boss approved me taking the day off, but he’ll be even more pleased if I don’t have to.”
“I hope I can get things straightened out by Friday,” Tim said. “Would it be okay if I work on some stuff while we visit, the next few days? I need to wash all the windows on the other three sides of the house — I did the front ones today — and I need to finish organizing the cabinets and closets, and clean the den and the other bedrooms besides mine... If I can do all that by Friday I think I’ll be okay to go to Dallas for the day.”
“I’ll help,” Emily said, returning from her towel-mission.
“I’ll help out too, with whatever you need — washing the outside windows, maybe?”
“Thanks, Daddy.” She smiled back at me; but I noticed that Mindy was biting her lip.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
“It’s just... when Steve came home and saw Tim washing the front windows, he told her to stop, and he’d wash the rest of the outside windows himself; she could do the inside ones if she wanted. But he won’t have time until Saturday.”
“Steve needs to learn to accommodate his stepdaughter’s Twist,” I said, with a glance at the hallway and the den; but the TV was still loud enough they couldn’t hear us in there. “Tim, if you feel like you can’t go anywhere unless you’re easy in your mind about the house being in order... is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we’ll try our hardest to make sure the house is in order by Friday, or if necessary, we’ll postpone your clinic appointment until it is. But maybe you should try resisting that compulsion sometimes. Maybe not with a seven or eight hour trip to Dallas, not at first, but we could try going out for lunch tomorrow during a break from cleaning?”
She twitched. “I... I’d rather not, Daddy. I... got kind of weird when we went out yesterday.” She glanced at her mom, and Mindy said:
“Not long after Emily got here we took Tim clothes shopping. But she got so anxious about the state of the house that we had to come home early, we hardly had time to buy anything.”
I involuntarily sucked in a breath. That was bad.
“Well,” I said, “let’s get this place clean, shall we?” I started to push away my plate, which I’d about finished with, but on second thought I picked it up and walked toward the dishwasher with it. I glanced aside at Tim; would she be happy that someone else was helping keep the place clean, or upset at not being able to do the cleaning herself? She seemed okay with it.
Just then an alarm pinged, and Tim said: “The cake should be finished.” She took it out of the oven and poked it with a fork. “Yes! Mom, could you tell them the cake’s ready? Daddy, how big a slice do you want?”
Mindy smiled and went down the hall toward the den.
“So,” I said as Tim served up our slices of cake, “I haven’t had a chance to ask yet; how is grad school treating you, Emily? Are you keeping up with your Mandarin?”
“Yes, Uncle Jack,” she said in Mandarin. “I am practicing with Chinese exchange students, although I am not currently taking any Mandarin classes.”
“Good. — Let’s talk later, privately. I’d like to hear what you think about how Tim is adjusting, especially to the change in gender.” Then in English, “This is some good cake here, Tim. You’ll make your grandma proud.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I hoped I got it right. It’s the first time I’ve made it.”
“Had you ever done any baking before?”
She shrugged. “I helped Mom bake cookies now and then, back when it was just her and me. But not very often.”
Just then Mindy returned with Steve and Craig. “Somebody mentioned cake?” Craig said, and Tim offered him a slice on a small plate.
Steve nodded politely to me. “Jack.”
“Steve,” I said. “Good to see you.”
I didn’t begrudge him Mindy. We’d remained intermittent lovers after we separated for the first time, and we were still friends after the divorce, but I knew I couldn’t be the kind of man she needed, not with my travel-compulsion, and I was glad she’d finally found someone. I just wished Steve would believe that.
“How long do you think you’ll stay in town?” he asked.
“As long as Tim needs me, with maybe a break of a day or two here or there if I find I have to get on the road again for a while. I’ve got a reservation at the Holiday Inn over on Parmer Lane; I’ll head over there in a little while.” They just had one guest bedroom, and Emily was sleeping in it; besides, the one time I’d stayed there since Mindy and Tim moved in with Steve, I’d felt acutely uncomfortable, and since then I’d stayed in a hotel.
“I’ll see you tomorrow after work, then. Have a good visit with Tim.” He took his slice of cake and returned to the den and the TV. Craig paused long enough to compliment Tim on the cake, of which he’d already wolfed down once slice and taken another, before he returned to watch the second half of the game with his dad.
It was only after everyone else had gotten some, and she’d set aside a couple of slices under plastic wrap with a big label saying “THIS CAKE IS FOR LISA”, that Tim sat down with us and ate a slice of it herself.
“I need to get back to work pretty soon,” she said. “I can run the dishwasher after we finish our cake, and then I need to get back to work on the windows...”
“You need to get to bed soon after your father goes back to his hotel,” Mindy said. “You can wash one more window after you finish the dishes.”
Tim sighed. “Okay, Mom.”
Despite how delicious the cake was, and how full of childhood memories of Mom and Grandma baking cakes like it, I made myself slow down and pace myself so I finished my slice just when Tim finished hers. Then I took my plate and fork to the dishwasher and said: “So, what do you want help with? Mindy, is it okay for me to stay another hour?”
“Sure. Maybe until ten? I’ve been letting Tim stay up until midnight when it’s not a school night, but staying up reading or playing games is one thing — working her fingers to the bone is another. She needs to get some rest sometime.”
“Mom, can we wash the windows in you and Steve’s bedroom?”
Mindy pursed her lips. “You’d better ask him... No, tomorrow while we’re at work would be better, even if he’s likely to be watching TV for another hour or two.”
“Okay. What about organizing one of the closets?”
“Not the hall closets, or the ones in the bedrooms. I’m not sure you could finish it before bedtime, and leaving stuff lying around in piles overnight would be inconvenient. What about... um... the cabinets in the living room?”
“Oh, yeah! I forgot about them. Come on, Daddy!” She took me by the arm and led me into the living room, where there were several wooden cabinets and shelves. Emily followed us. It looked like the knickknacks and mementos on the open shelves had all been dusted in the last few days, but Tim opened up one of the closed doors to reveal a compact mess of papers, notebooks, envelopes, data cubes, board games, card games, and less identifiable items.
“How do you want to do this?” I asked.
“Just start pulling stuff out,” she said; “we can sort things into piles on the sofa cushions and the easy chairs. Papers there, games there, data cubes there... I’ll go get some organizer trays.”
For a few minutes, we worked on sorting the junk out of the cabinets and didn’t say much besides “Where should this go?” or “What is this thing?” Sometimes Emily asked me, “What do you call this?” and I’d tell her the name for it in Mandarin, if I knew.
After a while I decided I was ready to ask some more questions, and said: “Tim, how do you feel about all this? Being a girl, for instance?”
She didn’t pause in sorting things as she said: “Being a girl is okay. I mean, back when I was a little kid and I heard about how Emily had Twisted, it scared me; I didn’t want to be a girl. But now that it’s happened I wonder what I was afraid of.”
Emily smiled at her. “Have you thought any more about a name?”
“Um, not much. I’ve been kind of busy.”
“But do you want a girl’s name?” I asked. “Do you want me to say ‘he’ or ‘she’ when I’m talking about you? I don’t want to assume too much.”
“Yeah. I’m a girl now, and I know I need a girl’s name... I just haven’t made up my mind yet. Mom said you and her never came up with a girl name for me, because you already knew I was a boy by the time you got serious about names.”
“That’s right. I guess you could look at your grandmothers‘ and aunts’ names — Diane, Karen, Rhoda, Wendy...”
Emily winced when I mentioned her Aunt Wendy, my little sister. She had a self-injury compulsion, even worse than Tim’s obsession with housecleaning, and had to be kept in a straitjacket for her own protection. She’d lived in the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia for her entire adult life. “On second thought, maybe not Wendy.”
“Rhoda’s a pretty name. I’ll think about it... I was sort of leaning toward ‘Elizabeth’ or ‘Anna,’ but I couldn’t make up my mind, and Emily said it’s important to get it right the first time, because changing your name is a lot of hassle.”
“Those are good names, too. What about this... intense focus on keeping things clean?”
“It feels right. It feels important. It’s like how you have to always be going places, right? Shouldn’t I be doing this?” She paused for a moment in her work, and looked at me with the most plaintive expression; I wanted to hug her. After a moment’s thought I did.
“Oh, sweetie, you should do what you think is important, even if other people don’t care about it. But you shouldn’t let one important thing crowd out all the other important things. You remember how we went to Trittsville last summer?”
“Yeah.”
I’d picked up Tim a couple of days after the school session ended, and gone on a road trip with him; we’d meandered around the southeast, never staying in one place for more than one night, until we got to Trittsville, Georgia, where I grew up and where most of our relatives still live.
“And we stayed there for almost half our trip, even though I normally don’t like to stay in one place more than two or three days. Sometimes when the need to travel got too bad I had to get on the road for a few hours, but I came back to your Aunt Rhoda’s house every night, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Because constantly going places is important to me, but family is important too.”
“So... I need to learn how to stop cleaning for a while when I need to be with family?”
“Or anything else that’s important to you. Yes.”
“Okay... I’ll try.” She sifted through the stack of unsorted papers and started separating it into smaller piles. “But it’s nice when I can do both at once.”
“It sure is. — Which stack do you want Lisa’s fourth-grade book reports in?”
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
When we went out clothes-shopping, she didn’t fuss about trying on bras or skirts, or insist on buying only jeans, like some people. And you saw how she was dressed, just now — she picked that out herself. But we didn’t have time to buy very much because she got so anxious about the housework she’d left undone.
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
Mindy came in when we were nearly done and said “Tim, it’s time for bed.”
“We’re almost done,” she pleaded.
“Five more minutes,” Mindy amended. “You’re doing a great job, but it doesn’t all have to be done tonight. I picked the living room because you can leave it a mess overnight and it won’t matter.”
(It looked to me like they did most of their living in the den, and kept the living room looking pretty for visitors. There wasn’t a big console in here, only a couple of small picture-frames rotating photos mostly of Mindy and Steve’s families, with a few of them and their children together.)
So we left several stacks of papers and things spread out on the sofa, while we put other things back in the cabinet in neatly organized trays. I hugged Tim goodnight.
“What time does it suit for me to come over tomorrow?” I asked.
“Eight, maybe eight-thirty? Just before Steve and I leave for work.”
“See y’all then.”
Emily followed me out onto the porch. “She’s really glad to have you here,” she said.
“I’m glad I’m finally here,” I said. “I wish I hadn’t been so far away when he Twisted, but... well, staying in North America for five or six years, during the whole window of time when he might have Twisted, just seemed too claustrophobic.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over that,” she said. “You’ve been coming to see him regularly, and I expect you’ve had to fight your compulsions sometimes to be here when you told them you would, right?”
I nodded curtly. “What do you think? About how she’s doing, I mean?”
She looked thoughtful. “I don’t think she’s just putting a brave face on; she’s really okay with her new gender. When we went out clothes-shopping, she didn’t fuss about trying on bras or skirts, or insist on buying only jeans, like some people. And you saw how she was dressed, just now — she picked that out herself. But we didn’t have time to buy very much because she got so anxious about the housework she’d left undone.”
“What do you think the compulsion is really focused on? Did she try to straighten things out at the store, if there was anything out of order — jeans on the skirt rack or something? Or the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room?”
“No — she just kept talking about stuff back home that she wasn’t satisfied with and wanted to be cleaner or neater. We’d washed and put away all the dishes and clothes before we left the house, and Aunt Mindy tells me the place hasn’t been this clean since Steve hired a cleaning service to get it ready for her to see, back when they were dating. But it’s still not enough for her.”
“So it’s not a general cleaning compulsion — that’s good, I guess.” I sighed. “I hope we can help her. Or the doctors can.”
“You think they’ll put her on anti-compulsion drugs, like Ryan?”
Ryan was my older cousin; he got some nasty compulsions from his Twist, which had been imperfectly controlled by drugs until suddenly they weren’t controlled anymore, and eventually he decided drastic amateur surgery was the only way to suppress them permanently. “I don’t know. I think they’ve improved the drugs since Ryan’s Twist, so there’s fewer side effects. But I don’t think they’ll use them without trying less drastic methods first.”
“Like meditation?”
“Or hypnosis, or more basic techniques. Sometimes you can sort of trick yourself into satisfying your compulsions in one way when your natural impulse would be to satisfy them in another way... for instance, when I go walk or drive around for a few hours and then come back to the same place, instead of just drifting on like part of me wants to do. Or how you play off your socializing compulsion against your studying compulsion to keep them both under control.”
She laughed nervously. “Speaking of which, I need to get some studying in before bed. And I should call Vic now,” she pulled out her phone and speed-dialed, “or I’ll study until I fall asleep and forget to call him... Good night, Uncle Jack.”
“See you tomorrow. Say hi to Vic for me.”
I was worried about Tim, but I was also pretty exhausted from three days of travel, so it didn’t take me long to fall asleep once I got checked in to my hotel. One aspect of my Twist helps me adjust to new time zones quickly, but “quickly” is relative; where other people my age might take a week to adjust to traveling across nine time zones (including the International Dateline), I can usually get over it in a day or so.
In other words, though I fell asleep quickly I didn’t sleep for very long. It was late afternoon in the New Guinea highlands, and very early morning in Austin, when I woke up again and could not get back to sleep. I got up and worked on a translation job for a couple of hours, and then went for a walk around the neighborhood — I pick my hotels for how safe they are to walk around near at night — before returning to get a short nap again just before dawn, hoping that would help me adjust to local time. (I’d called my clients and told them I had to cancel the most urgent jobs, due to a family emergency, but I still had some lower-priority translations to work on when I had time. This one was the latest season of a popular Nigerian vid serial, which I was subtitling in Tagalog.)
I woke up from my nap feeling a little more localized, showered, and ate breakfast at a local diner I’d discovered on one of my earlier visits; then headed over to Mindy and Steve’s house just before eight-thirty. Steve was just about to walk out the door when I arrived.
“Good morning, Jack,” he said, opening the door for me. “Tim’s in the kitchen... See you tonight, I guess. I’m off.” He stepped past me and headed toward his car; I passed through the living room into the kitchen, where Tim and Emily were working on the breakfast dishes.
“Good morning, Uncle Jack,” Emily said, dried off her hands, and came over to hug me. Tim smiled at me, but it seemed to cost her some effort to stop working on the dishes for a few moments so she could get the next hug.
“Good morning, sweetie,” I said. “Did you have a good night’s sleep?” I.e., Were you able to sleep or were you constantly thinking about housework that needed to be done?
“Yeah, I think I got enough sleep,” Tim said, looking evasive. Emily added:
“She got a lot of things accomplished, even if sleep wasn’t one of the things.”
“Hmm?”
“I was only up for a couple of hours,” Tim protested. “Maybe three.”
“I couldn’t sleep through the night either; jet lag, you know. Hopefully tonight will be better.”
Just then Mindy came through the kitchen, dressed for work. “Oh, good, you’re here. Paulina’s supposed to be dropping Lisa off any time now, on her way to work. Sorry I’ve got to rush.”
“Do what you need to do. Anything I need to know?”
She huffed. “Try to keep Tim out of Lisa and Craig’s rooms, okay?” She gave Tim a stern glance; Tim looked sheepish.
When Mindy had rushed out, I asked: “So, who’s Paulina, where’s Craig, and why does your mom think I need to worry about keeping you out of your stepsiblings' rooms?”
“Paulina is Lisa’s friend Joelle’s mom — Lisa spent the night at her house. Craig’s still asleep. And... um... I kind of got in trouble for cleaning Lisa’s room in the middle of the night.”
“Ah... Well, since I was up and going for a walk at three a.m., I can’t throw stones.”
She giggled.
“So... what are our projects for today? I think you said something about washing windows?”
“Yes, and I want to organize some more cabinets and closets...”
A few minutes later, after she’d shown me where the cleaning supplies were, and the stepladder, I was on the east side of the house, mounting the stepladder to wash the outside of one of the living room windows. Tim looked out at me and smiled; she’d already begun washing the inside of it.
“Good work,” I said. I’d dialed her phone and we’d put on headsets before we started, so we could talk as well as see each other through the windows.
“Thanks, Daddy. We can do the living room and den windows, and Steve said it’s okay to do the one in his office but I’m supposed to wait and work with him on cleaning the other stuff in there... I hope I can wait, I don’t want to get in trouble again...”
“Just focus on other stuff that needs doing. Isn’t there something else that needs doing just as badly?”
“Oh, yeah, lots of stuff. Lisa’s room still needs work even after I worked at it until I was sleepy enough to go back to bed, and Craig’s room needs vacuuming and dusting even though he’s not as messy as Lisa, but I’m supposed to ask their permission to clean in there. And the den still needs a lot of work, I dusted and vacuumed but I want to vacuum under the furniture too; can you help move it out of the way?”
“Of course, sweetie.”
We’d moved on to the den window when a car pulled up in the driveway. “Someone’s here,” I said, gesturing toward it. “Do you want me to go say hello to them?”
“It’s probably Paulina with Lisa. I’ll go answer the door.” But she gave the window another good scrub before she put down her washrag and squeegee bottle and left the window.
I waved to the people getting out of the car. Yes, that was Lisa, though she was noticeably taller than when I’d seen her at Christmas, and she’d dyed and cut her hair since then. I didn’t think the black spiky look suited her, but I wasn’t about to say anything.
“Hi, Tim’s dad,” she said, avoiding the front door and coming around to where I was still standing on the ladder. “Tim’s put you to work, too?”
“Is that what she’s doing?” I said in mock dismay. “And she charged me a whole quarter for letting me wash windows! I know I should have taken up that other fellow’s offer to whitewash the fence, he only wanted ten cents.”
Lisa rolled her eyes; the older woman laughed. “You must be, ah, Tim’s father? I’m Paulina Yancey; my daughter Joelle goes to school with Tim and Lisa. Is Mindy home?”
“She’s at work, or on her way. Shall I give her a message?”
“No. Just... I need to get to work. I suppose I may see you again. Have you got everything out of the car, Lisa?”
Lisa silently hefted her duffel bag and nodded. Paulina waved and went back to her car, just as Tim went out the front door — I couldn’t see her from that angle, but I heard over my headset when she said: “Good morning, Mrs. Yancey. Where’s Lisa?”
“Around the side of the house talking to your father. Sorry, I’ve got to run,” and she got in her car and went.
“So what do you think of your new daughter?” Lisa asked.
I paused and thought, knowing that Tim would hear me over her headset. “Tim is a very thoughtful young woman,” I said. “She set aside two slices of cake for you last night — they should still be there even if your dad and brother devoured the rest of it.”
Tim came back to the window then, and opened it a crack so Lisa could hear her. “Hi, Lisa. Did you have fun at Joelle’s house?”
“Yeah. I’ll try to talk her into inviting you next time, if you want.”
Tim had already resumed scrubbing the window, and I went back to work on my side as well. “Thanks. I would have been too busy to come this time, but maybe later... it would be nice. Do you think Joelle’s okay with Twisted?”
“She thinks Twisted are weird, because no offense, you kinda are. But she’ll invite you over if I tell her to.”
“Okay...”
“Well, I’mo go put my stuff away. And don’t think I’m going to spend my spring break washing and sorting stuff even if you managed to talk your cousin and your dad into helping.” She grinned and went around to the back door.
Tim and I finished up the den window and moved on to the window in Steve’s office. I’d just gotten the stepladder in place and started spraying on cleaner fluid when I heard Lisa’s yell, filtered through Tim’s phone and the glass of the window:
“TIM! WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY ROOM?”
“Oops,” Tim said.
“I’ll come on in and help with damage control,” I said, and dismounted the ladder.
By the time I got inside and to the office, Lisa had gotten a lot more shouting in and had apparently grabbed Tim by the arms and shaken her before Emily intervened. (She’d been organizing the dishes and cups in the kitchen cabinets according to Tim’s instructions, and had come running when she heard the altercation.)
“— messed with my stuff, you have no right! I never barged into your room and rummaged through your bugs and your underwear and stuff!”
“Lisa,” I said, “has anybody explained to you about Twist compulsions?”
She took a deep breath and glared at me. “We had a unit about Twisted in health sciences. And I looked it up online, when Dad started dating Mindy and I found out Tim might be Twisted.”
Tim said quietly, “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry, but it was just so messy I couldn’t leave it alone... I hardly threw anything away, and I didn’t really read anything...”
“She couldn’t help it,” Emily pleaded. “We’re trying to help her get better control over it, but it’s going to take time.”
“Tim seems to have a compulsion to keep things clean and organized,” I said. “We’re still figuring out how it works. But... Tim doesn’t have to clean everything herself, as long as it gets done. Right, Tim?”
“Right.”
“So if you clean your own room...” I suggested.
“...Then I won’t have to,” Tim finished.
“You’re not my mom,” Lisa said mulishly. “Keep out of my stuff.” She stomped off to her room and slammed the door.
“That could have gone better,” Emily said with a sigh.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said miserably.
“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I said, and hugged her. “Just keep trying to do better.”
Tim let me hug her for a few more moments, sniffling a little, and then said: “Can we wash some more windows?”
I smiled wanly. “Sure, sweetie.”
But on my way to the front door, I met Craig, who’d woken up after all that commotion, and had come into the kitchen to get something to eat.
“Oh, hey, Jack. What was that hollering about?”
“Lisa’s mad at Tim,” Emily put in, having followed me into the kitchen. “I think she’ll get over it.”
“Hmm.” Craig didn’t sound surprised or upset; maybe he was used to his younger siblings yelling at each other for “little-kid” reasons that seem utterly trivial from the lofty height of seventeen years. “You going to be around all day?”
“I expect so, unless we can coax Tim into going out to lunch with us.”
“I’mo go hang with some friends after I eat and wash up. Dad already knows, he’s cool with it.”
“I’m not here to babysit you, Craig. But — just a word of warning?”
“Hmm?” He was suddenly defensive.
“If there’s something in your room you don’t want Tim to see, if for instance she suddenly got a compulsion to clean up in there... you might want to take it with you. I’ll try to keep Tim out of there, but I can’t promise anything. And if you straighten up a little before you go, maybe vacuum the floor, it might help Tim keep the impulse under control.”
His eyes widened. “Okay.”
“And... is it okay if we wash the window in your room? I’ll make sure Tim doesn’t mess with anything else.”
I've started working on a fourth Valentine Divergence story; it's probably going to be a novella or short novel, as it's already over 11,000 words. I'm also making slow steady progress on the third book in the sequence that began with Wine Can't be Pressed Into Grapes.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
“I’m still mad at you, even if you made cake.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
Emily went back to work on the kitchen cabinets, and Tim and I went back to work on the windows. We had all the windows — except the inside of the one in Lisa’s room — done in another couple of hours. Then we helped Emily finish up the kitchen, and I moved furniture aside to give Tim room to vacuum under things. And so it went until lunchtime.
“I’m getting a little hungry,” I said to Tim as she turned off the vacuum cleaner and unplugged it. “What about you?”
We’d just finished up the den — at least as far as I could tell, though I suspected Tim’s obsession would find more things in there to clean or straighten if she wasn’t distracted by other, messier parts of the house.
“I could make sandwiches,” she said, “unless you’d rather have leftovers from last night? There’s still enough for two or three servings.”
“Either would be fine,” I said, “but what do you think about going out?” At her panicked look I hurried on: “Not far, and not for long. If we go to the nearest fast-food place — that taqueria on Metric Boulevard, for instance, unless you know someplace closer? — it won’t take any longer than eating here.”
“A few minutes longer,” she said.
“We don’t have to do it if you feel like you can’t. But I’d like you to try going out for a few minutes, before we have to spend all day in Dallas.”
“...All right. Maybe so.”
Craig had left to go hang with his friends a couple of hours earlier, and Lisa still hadn’t come out of her room since her fight with Tim. We collected Emily from where she’d been sorting a load of clothes out of the drier, and knocked on Lisa’s bedroom door.
“We’re going out for tacos; you want to come?”
“No,” came her muffled voice.
“There’s cake in the refrigerator with your name on it,” Tim called out.
Lisa opened the door. “I’m still mad at you, even if you made cake.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. You can go without me,” she added, turning to me.
“All right. Your brother’s gone out, too, so you’ll be alone; we’ll lock all the doors.”
Emily, Tim and I all piled into my rental car. Tim seemed okay at first; we chatted about what still needed to be done before Friday during the three-minute drive to the taqueria. We went in and ordered, and stood near the counter waiting for our tacos and enchiladas. But I saw that Tim was getting a little fidgety and glancing out the window at the car.
“So, I haven’t heard yet — what was going on when you Twisted?” (I’d been saving that topic for a moment when she needed a distraction.)
“Oh,” she said, and glanced at Emily. “It’s kind of stupid. I was about to go over to Neal’s house and hang out, but Mom said I had to clean my room first — oh, it was such a horrible mess!” She looked distressed at the memory, and I regretted bringing the subject up when she was already stressed from being away from home. “And I complained about it so much — what was I thinking? — that she said I had to clean the bathroom too, the one I share with Lisa and Craig you know? And so I started to clean up my room, and then I felt all tingly and passed out...”
Just then my name was called, and we picked up our orders.
“Do you feel okay to sit and eat here?” I asked.
“Can we go home now?”
“We could, but we wouldn’t get any more cleaning done while eating tacos in the dining room than if we ate them here.”
“I guess so.”
So we found a table and sat down, and Tim ate intently, not pausing to talk between bites and refusing to talk with her mouth full. Emily and I chatted a little about my recent travels, her experiences in grad school, her husband Vic’s new job, and so forth. Tim finished her taco sooner than we did, naturally, and was impatient to be gone, so we wrapped up our unfinished tacos and went to the car.
“So,” I said as I started the car, “back to your Twist... what happened when you woke up? How long did it take before you noticed your new compulsions?”
“Well, I guess the first thing I noticed was that I was a girl. Mom had found me and put a blanket over me after the Twist burned off my clothes, and she sent everybody else away and sat beside me until I woke up...”
When Mindy had called me, early in the morning PNG time, she’d been sitting by Tim’s bedside, watching her sleep off the effects of the Twist. She’d told me about the physical changes, but she didn’t yet know what mental changes Tim might have experienced.
“...She asked me how I felt, and I said being a girl wasn’t as weird as I thought it might be, but I was really anxious about the big hole I’d burned in the carpet.”
“Guilty about damaging it?” Emily asked. “You know it wasn’t your fault.”
“No, I mean, it bothered me that my carpet had this big hole in it and the part around the hole was burned. I wanted to fix it but I didn’t see how. Mom helped me get dressed and she wanted me to eat something, but I looked at my room and saw how I’d hardly gotten any cleaning done before I passed out, and I wanted to finish it. So I cleaned up until I was too hungry to wait any more, and ate, and kept cleaning until it was done, later in the evening. But it still didn’t look right because of the hole in the carpet. Mom and I moved the rug from the den to my room to cover up the hole, and that was better, but I’d like to get new carpet in there, only Steve says the carpet installing guys can’t do it until next week. — Can you install carpet, Daddy?”
“Um, no, sweetie. At least I’ve never done it before, and me learning how would probably take longer than waiting for the professionals.” I’d learned a lot of obscure skills in my almost thirty years on the road, but installing carpet was not among them.
“What I really wanted was to replace the carpet with tile or laminate or something easier to keep clean, but Steve wouldn’t let me. He said it would look weird to have one room like that and the rest of the house carpeted.”
“Hmm. Would he mind replacing all the carpet with laminate? If the cost is an issue, I can help out, and maybe we can get a grant from the Nia Clarence Foundation, if it’s necessary to accommodate your Twist.” Unfortunately Texas didn’t have a program to help out Twisted with expenses caused by their Twists, like some states, or at least they didn’t when I checked a couple of years ago.
“That would be nice... I’m not sure I can honestly tell them it’s really necessary though.”
“We’ll see. — Here we are.”
Tim hopped out of the car and was unlocking the front door almost before Emily and I had our seatbelts off. By the time we got inside, we found her sweeping the kitchen.
“Didn’t you just sweep in here yesterday?” Emily asked, looking puzzled and worried.
“Yeah, but it looks like Lisa got some crumbs and stuff on the floor when she was fixing her lunch.”
“She finished lunch in the time we spent at the taqueria?”
Tim blushed. “She kind of grabbed her plate and went to her room with it when she saw me come in. I guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”
Then I realized something. “Wait a minute. Did you already know about the crumbs on the floor before you came in? Is that why you were suddenly so anxious to get home, and to get out of the car as fast as you could?” I thought we might have discovered her trick.
“Huh. Not exactly, but I did get kind of anxious there about the kitchen. I didn’t know it was this, though.”
“We need to test this,” I said. “It might not be comfortable for you, but... hmm. What about if you finish this up, and then go out in the back yard, with Emily? Then I’ll make a small mess — small! — somewhere in the house, and clean it up a couple of minutes later, and you tell Emily if you feel a sudden anxiety about a particular room needing work. Deal?”
“Can we not do that right now?”
“Okay, later. But let’s try to do it before we see the Twist specialists.”
“Okay.” She finished sweeping the floor and began wiping down the table, on which Lisa had left a few crumbs and a dollop of mustard.
After we finished the kitchen, we moved on to the bathrooms. Emily cleaned the half-bath in the hall near the kitchen following general directions from Tim, and Tim and I worked on the full bathroom that she shared with Lisa and Craig.
“This looks nearly spic and span to begin with,” I said as we got started. “Did you just clean it recently?”
She nodded and started scrubbing the toilet. “But you aren’t looking close enough. Craig’s aim isn’t that great... until he learns better this toilet’s going to need a wipe-down every day or two. And the floor around it. And as long as we’re in here you might as well wipe down the sink and counter and faucets with disinfectant, and get any hairs out of the shower drain...”
So we worked in silence for a few minutes. Then I asked: “You said you were about to go over to Neal’s house when your Twist happened... did you ever get to go, or have you been too busy cleaning house?”
She sprayed some more disinfectant on the floor and said: “I was so freaked out by how messy my room was, and so focused on cleaning it, that I forgot I’d told Neal I was coming over. Later on Mom told me that he’d called while I was unconscious, and she’d told him I wasn’t feeling well and would talk to him later... I meant to call him back right away but I got distracted, and didn’t call him until Sunday, after Emily got here and we went out shopping. It was while we were driving to the store, and I felt useless like I couldn’t clean the house anymore and I couldn’t buy clothes yet, and I wasn’t old enough to drive... and Mom asked if I’d called Neal yet, so I did. And he didn’t exactly freak out when I told him I was a girl now, and he came over later to hang out, after we got home from the department store. But... he didn’t stay all that long, and he hasn’t come back. I think I bored him talking about all the cleaning I’d done, or maybe he was just too weirded out by me being a girl.”
Neal lived a few blocks to the southwest, and had been Tim’s best friend in the past two and a half years since his mother had married Steve and they’d moved into this house and school district. Tim still had some online connection with friends from the school he’d attended when he and Mindy lived in an apartment, or at least he’d had before his Twist, but he was closer to Neal, who shared a lot of his interests. On my recent visits I’d gotten to know Neal’s family almost as well as Steve and his children, and I’d taken both boys on trips to nearby parks and the natural history museum. Neal had already been an acute observer of nature for someone his age, but it was meeting Tim that got him into collecting insects.
Now, though? Tim had said she was still interested in collecting arthropods (he’d expanded the scope of his collection in the last few years), but it sounded like she hadn’t found any time for that hobby since her Twist. If she no longer shared real interests with Neal, it might be futile to try to maintain the friendship. Still, I thought we should try.
“Neal knew you might be Twisted; I remember we talked about it in the car on the way to Bee Cave, and I mentioned it to his parents and grandmother not long after I met them.”
“Yeah, we talked about it when you weren’t around too. And he promised he’d still be there for me whatever happened, if I turned into a six-armed troll or an invisible bank robber or anything, and I hoped he was right but I wasn’t sure. I mean, if I turned out like Aunt Wendy I wouldn’t expect him to keep visiting me in the hospital every week for the rest of his life.” (I’d taken him to visit his Aunt Wendy for the first time on our last road trip. Not that I was trying to warn him to brace himself about the possibilities of his Twist; no, I just thought he was mature enough to meet her without freaking out, and I was right.)
“Have you gone over to his house since your Twist?”
She scowled. “I haven’t had time! I’ve got so much to do, and you and Mom keep interrupting me to go shop for clothes or see the doctor or eat lunch... Wait. I need to do something.” She threw away the wipe she’d been using, got up and squeezed past me where I was leaning over the sink.
She went to the door of Lisa’s room, down the hall; I couldn’t see her from where I was standing, but I could hear her. She knocked, and Lisa called out: “What is it?”
“Are you done with lunch?”
“What if I am?”
“Can I take your plate to the kitchen?”
“...Okay, if you promise to leave me alone after that.”
The door opened. Then Tim said: “I think you got some crumbs on the carpet... is it okay if I vacuum in here?”
“No! Leave me ALONE!” The door slammed.
I stopped working on the sink for a moment and stepped into the hall. Tim stood there looking at Lisa’s door, then said: “That could have gone better.”
“It could have, yeah.”
She went to put the plate in the dishwasher, then returned to finish up the bathroom.
“Did you actually see the crumbs on the carpet?” I asked.
“I — no, I don’t think so. But I know they’re there.”
I nodded. “I think we know a little more about your trick, now. Do you want to test it out some more?”
“Let me finish this first,” she said, but when we finished cleaning the bathroom she wanted to organize the closets, and we were still working on the hall closet when Mindy came home from work. I didn’t push; I could see Tim was still upset about the quarrel with Lisa.
“Mom!” Tim said when she walked in, without greeting her, “can you get Lisa to vacuum her room, or let me do it? She ate lunch in her room and she got crumbs on the carpet and she wouldn’t let me —”
“Slow down,” Mindy said, putting down her handbag. “I want to hear from Lisa too. Jack, do you know what this is about?”
“Lisa got mad about Tim cleaning her room while she was away; she got mad again when Tim intuitively figured out that she got crumbs on the carpet. I think we’ve discovered Tim’s trick, by the way, though we need some more tests to be sure.”
“Wait, what? Is it...” she hesitated. “Dangerous?”
“No. She seems to know when part of the house gets messed up and needs cleaning. She knew about the crumbs on the carpet even though Lisa had been in her room with the door closed the whole time.”
“Do we know there really are crumbs on the carpet? Tim, are you sure you aren’t just guessing because she ate in her room?”
“I know. I don’t know how — I guess it might be my trick.”
Mindy sighed. “Let me go talk to her, and have a discreet look around. And I need to get supper started...”
“Oh!” Tim said, “I’m sorry, I should have done that. I can work on it while you talk to Lisa.”
“Let’s work on it together — after we talk to her.”
Tim gulped.
“Lisa?” Mindy called out, knocking at her door. “We need to talk.”
“Just a minute.” Lisa opened the door. “What’s up?”
“I hear you and Tim have been fighting. I’d like to hear your side of it before I decide anything.”
“She went in my room and messed with my stuff! I got home and everything was all moved around and I couldn’t find anything, and I think she was looking at stuff on my console —”
“No, I didn’t!” Tim said. She and I were still working on sorting out the stuff we’d pulled out of the hall closet, prior to putting it back in a more orderly arrangement. (Emily was taking a study break.)
“Not now, Tim,” Mindy said. “Let Lisa finish talking first. — You were saying?”
“So she messed with my stuff, and I guess I yelled at her about it, when I found out. And I told her to stay out, and she said she would, but then she started bugging me about coming in to vacuum the floor.”
“She said you were eating in your room?”
“It’s kind of hard to relax and eat in the kitchen when she’s hovering around cleaning stuff up as soon as you turn your back!” Lisa scowled at Tim.
“Well, if you’re going to eat in your room you need to make sure to clean up afterwards.”
“Do I have to do it right after I finish eating? Every single time?”
Mindy sighed. “It used to be we’d sometimes let things slide... let dishes or clothes pile up until the weekend, wait for a not-very-busy weekend to do the vacuuming and stuff. But now... we all need to make adjustments. Tim gets upset when things aren’t clean.”
“She can clean her own room as obsessively as she wants, but it’s none of her business how often I clean mine.”
“The crumbs will attract bugs if we don’t clean them up soon,” Tim fretted, and Mindy shot her a warning look. Lisa responded:
“I thought you liked bugs!”
“Let’s not change the subject,” Mindy said. “Lisa, this isn’t about whether or when, it’s about how. Promise you’ll vacuum your room sometime before bed tonight, or let Tim do it right now.”
“She can do it,” Lisa said after a moment, and to Tim: “I’ll be watching and making sure you don’t mess with anything else.”
“Okay,” Tim said. “I’ll go get the vacuum cleaner.”
I finished putting away the towels, cleaning supplies and so forth from the hall closet.
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
“The usual punishments don’t work,” Steve said. “No sense giving her extra chores when she’s already doing way more than her share, or grounding her when she doesn’t want to go anywhere and she’s quit playing games or watching TV on her own. I said we should stop her from cleaning something, but —”
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
Steve got home a few minutes later, and Craig not long after. Emily emerged from her guest room and her study break in time to help set the dining table for supper.
Supper was tense, with Lisa glaring at Tim, Mindy and me, after having angrily appealed to her father, who’d glanced at Mindy and said: “Let’s talk about it after supper.”
“So,” Mindy said after a few minutes, “how was your day, Craig?”
He told us in vague terms about hanging out with certain friends, playing games and watching movies.
“Is Tim still working you hard?” she asked Emily. “I feel bad about having you come visit and making you work all the time —”
“It’s cool,” Emily replied. “I’m taking breaks when I need to, but I feel good helping Tim out. You know Uncle Jack helped me a lot right after my Twist, and I like to pay it forward.”
Steve and Craig shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, glancing briefly at Emily and me and back down at their plates.
“I’d like to do something nice for you before you go home,” Mindy continued. “I’d say we’d take you out to a nice restaurant, but I’m not sure Tim could...”
“We went out for tacos today,” Tim said. “Dad said I should try going out for a little while, and it was okay at first.”
“You’ll have to be gone a lot longer than that on Friday,” Mindy said. “Jack, do you think she’s ready?”
“She says she thinks she can do it if we get the place clean enough by then. Tonight and tomorrow should be enough time — if Tim doesn’t have to do all the work herself. If she has enough help.”
Steve swallowed a bite and said: “I said I’d wash the outside windows this weekend, but —”
“Dad washed them today,” Tim said. “I did the insides and he did the outsides.”
“Oh.” Steve was taken aback. “Ah... thanks, Jack. So what else needs to be done before you leave for this clinic Friday morning?”
“The other closets,” Tim said; “the one in the den for instance... and, um, the ones in your bedroom and Craig’s. I mean, Craig’s room is okay mostly, but his closet...!”
“My messy closet is the secret of my clean room,” Craig said. “Don’t mess with success.”
“But it’s not right,” Tim said, frustration evident on her face.
“I think we need to set some new ground rules,” Mindy said. “We all,” (she looked significantly at Steve as she said this) “need to keep our rooms cleaner and neater than before, to avoid causing Tim unnecessary distress. But Tim, you need to not go in other people’s bedrooms without permission.”
“I know,” she said, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
“Craig, can you work with Tim on cleaning your room after supper? Or would you rather do it yourself? Your father and I will be working on our room.”
Steve looked for a moment like he wanted to protest, but closed his mouth without saying anything. Craig looked bemused for a moment, and said:
“Okay, squirt, you can help me.”
“What are you going to do about Tim going in my room without permission?” Lisa asked Mindy.
“Your father and I will discuss that in private,” Mindy said, frowning.
Now that she had permission to help Craig clean his room, Tim was eager to finish dinner, and didn’t waste any more time talking. But when she finished eating, she seemed torn between starting in on cleaning Craig’s room, or staying to clear the table and work on the dishes. Emily saw this and said: “You go ahead as soon as Craig’s done — I can get the dishes tonight.”
“You’re sure?”
“Go ahead.”
Craig finished about then and he and Tim went down the hall toward his room, already talking about what needed to be done.
Steve and Mindy disappeared into their room, and Lisa into hers. I helped Emily with the dishes, and we talked in Mandarin.
“Do you think we can really get the place so clean that Tim’s compulsion doesn’t affect her?” she asked.
“We’ll have to try. It depends — it doesn’t seem to be a compulsion to clean, so much as a compulsion to have her home be clean. That’s how she describes it, and it’s consistent with the way she’s happy to have help, or have other people clean parts of the house while she cleans others.”
“But still — I don’t think she’s taken any time off from cleaning except to eat and sleep and, um, stuff like that. Except when we made her go out to shop for clothes, or see the doctor.”
“Could be it’s just because the house isn’t clean yet. Could be she’ll never be satisfied with it, that she’ll keep finding things that could be better... maybe once all the clutter and dirt is eliminated she’ll start wanting to redecorate or renovate. But no sense borrowing trouble. Let’s hope it’s just focused on getting the house clean enough, and try to help her do that before Friday morning.”
When we’d gotten the dishwasher loaded, the table wiped off, the floor swept, and the salt-shakers and so forth arranged symmetrically the way Tim liked them, I said: “I’m getting a little restless — I can help with some more cleaning later, but right now I need to go for a walk. I should let Mindy know... and Tim.”
“Yes...” She glanced toward the hall.
I went first to Mindy and Steve’s door, planning to knock, but I heard raised voices. I could make out a couple of phrases here and there — “if you hadn’t,” “you can’t just,” “not her fault” — and part of me wanted to stand there and see how much I could learn that way, but I suppressed it. I went further down the hall to Craig’s bedroom door, which was standing open.
Tim was wiping dust off the shelves and desk with a damp washcloth, while Craig pulled stuff out of the closet preparatory to reorganizing it.
“I need to go for a walk,” I said. “You know how it is, right?”
Tim nodded, though Craig looked puzzled. “Are you coming back tonight?”
“Yes, as soon as I can satisfy the compulsion — see something new. I’m getting too familiar with this neighborhood, so I might have to walk twenty or thirty minutes to get to a street I haven’t walked on before.”
Tim smiled. “You could sneak into somebody’s backyard, you’ve never been there before. Craig, isn’t Enrique’s family on vacation this week?”
“Yeah, but — are you serious?”
“No,” I said, “bad idea. Urban exploring is one thing, when it’s an abandoned building and you’ve got a buddy and the right equipment to do it safely. But not when people live there and just happen to be away.” Maybe it had been a mistake to take Tim with me on that late-night walk around Trittsville. But... it had turned out okay, and with the way her Twist was turning out, we’d never have a chance to do that again. I resolved not to regret it. “I’ll help out with whatever I can as soon as I get back.”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
I passed by Mindy and Steve’s door. If anything the voices coming through it were louder. I decided to just go, and talk to Mindy when I got back; if she came out in the next while and wanted to know where I was, Emily or Tim could tell her.
When I got back, almost an hour later, Steve was hauling a bag of garbage out to the curb.
“Should have thrown some of this stuff out years ago,” he remarked, nodding a hello as I walked up. “It would have sat around for another ten years if your daughter hadn’t given us a nudge.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve traveled light and kept possessions to a minimum since I was a teenager.” There’d been a time, shortly after I Twisted, when I hauled around a big backpack and a duffel bag full of everything I could imagine needing on the road. Over time I’d learned to improvise and do without, and pared it down to the essentials. When I was traveling by car for a few months I might acquire a little more stuff, but I’d always get rid of most of it when it was time to travel on foot again.
“Hmm. That’s good, I guess.” He went back into the house and I followed him.
Emily was working on the den closet, Craig and Tim were still at work on Craig’s bedroom closet, and Mindy was still working on cleaning her and Steve’s bedroom; their door was open. Steve went in and I poked my head in.
“I’m back. What do you need help with next?”
“Actually,” Mindy said, “I want to talk. Come on in and close the door?”
Steve looked tense, but didn’t say anything. I did as she asked.
“We talked, earlier, about Tim. About how to punish her for going in and cleaning Lisa’s room without permission.”
“The usual stuff doesn’t work,” Steve said. “No sense giving her extra chores when she’s already doing way more than her share, or grounding her when she doesn’t want to go anywhere and she’s quit playing games or watching TV on her own. I said we should stop her from cleaning something, but —”
“I wasn’t sure it was a good idea,” Mindy said. “Blocking her compulsion by force — it might make it worse, right?”
“Yeah, it could. You remember, I told you about that one time I was in jail, a year or so before I met you?” I’d told Mindy, but never Steve, and I wasn’t sure if she’d told him. His expression said she hadn’t, and I regretted giving him more ammunition against me. But this needed to be said.
“Yeah,” Mindy said softly. “You were crawling the walls after a couple of days, weren’t you?”
“You were in jail? What for?” Steve asked, but I didn’t answer. I said:
“After four days unable to go anywhere I was nervous, on edge, jumping at the slightest noise, pleading with the guards every time I saw them... They were about ready to transfer me to a mental hospital when the Nia Clarence Foundation lawyer got me out. I might be in worse shape than Wendy if they’d stuck me there. But the lawyer arranged for me to serve the rest of my sentence walking around the county picking up trash off the sides of the roads, with a locator device on my ankle. I eventually recovered, but I was twitchy and nervous for months afterward.”
“So that’s a no. But if not that, then what?”
I was at a loss. I’d never really had to do this — Mindy and I had separated when Tim was a toddler, before he was old enough to really understand complex punishments or the reasons for them. And I’d never presumed to interfere with the way Mindy was raising him, not when I couldn’t be around for more than a few weeks a year at most. I followed her lead, for the sake of consistency, when Tim started coming on short trips with me when he was older.
“What about cooking?” I said finally. “Is that a compulsion, or just something she likes doing now?”
“I’m not sure,” Mindy said.
“I don’t think it is; she didn’t object to going out to eat because she would rather cook her own meal, but because it would take a few minutes away from cleaning... Try that. Don’t let her help you with breakfast tomorrow, and if she doesn’t get too anxious about that, keep it up at other meals for a day or three — however long you think is fair for cleaning Lisa’s room without permission.”
“Something’s wrong when you’re giving yourself extra work to punish your daughter,” Steve said, more to Mindy than to me.
“Maybe we can figure out something better,” I said, “but that’s all I’ve got for now.”
The next morning, I made a detour on the way to Mindy and Steve’s house. I stopped by the McFarlands' house, a mile west of my hotel; I remembered how to find the house, but couldn’t find them in my phone contacts. I hoped I would find them at home, and I did.
“Good morning, Leyla,” I said to the dark-haired woman who answered the door. “I’m not sure if you remember me — I’m Jack Harper, Tim Harper’s father?”
“Oh, yes. You took Neal and Tim to the museum last summer, didn’t you?... What brings you here?”
“I’d like to speak with Neal, if I may.”
“Sure... come on in and have a seat. Neal!” she called out, “someone’s here to see you.”
I entered the house and sat down at the kitchen table at Leyla’s invitation. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“A glass of water, maybe.”
Neal came in a minute later. “Oh, hi, Mr. Harper. Is this about Tim? Is he okay? I mean, uh...”
“Tim’s dealing with her Twist,” I said. “It’s rarely easy, and Tim’s having a worse time than average, I think. Can I ask you a favor?”
“What is it?”
“Keep going to visit Tim, even if she seems busy and distracted. Some parts of her Twist might make it hard for her to be the friend you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean she needs a friend any less.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. I mean, I’ll keep going to see — her. If she’s still wants to see me...”
“I think she does. Another thing: I’m not going to ask you to keep this secret, but you might decide it’s better if she doesn’t know I asked you this.”
He was quiet for a moment, digesting that. “Yeah, I guess so. Mom, can I go over and see Tim this afternoon?”
“Of course, honey.”
“I’ll be going, then. Thanks, Neal. Thanks, Leyla.”
“You’re welcome. I hope everything goes well for Tim.”
From the McFarlands' I had a short zig-zaggy drive northeast to Mindy and Steve’s place. I found Tim sweeping the pollen off the front porch.
“Good morning, Daddy,” she said, leaning the broom against the porch rail and giving me a hug. “Mom made pancakes. But she wouldn’t let me help make them, and she says I can’t start cleaning up the kitchen until everybody’s done eating.”
“So you found something else to occupy you? Good. Anything I can help with here?”
“No, I guess not. Go ahead and eat, and we can work on Mom and Steve’s bedroom later... they didn’t get it all done last night, and Mom said I could finish it after they left for work.”
I went on in, and found Emily, Lisa and Craig eating at the dining table. Steve’s car had already been gone from the driveway, and I guessed that Mindy was finishing getting ready for work, a guess that was confirmed when she emerged from her bedroom with briefcase in hand.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’ll try to get off early tonight if I can, to work on the last-minute cleaning push.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I hope we’ll have most of it done by the time you get back.” I glanced at Lisa and Craig, who didn’t meet my eyes; Emily nodded enthusiastically.
Mindy nodded distractedly and walked out the door. I helped myself to pancakes and bacon from the platters on the kitchen counter and sat down to eat.
Tim came in from the porch a few minutes later, and seeing we weren’t done eating, went to work on the bathrooms some more — they never stayed clean enough for her, not for long. I finished my pancakes as quickly as I could; by the time I was done, Emily and the others had already finished, and Emily at least was starting to clear the table. She managed to shame Lisa into helping, and I joined in after I took my last bite. We had the table mostly clear and the dishwasher almost loaded by the time Tim returned from cleaning the bathrooms.
“We’re about done with this,” Emily said, and I added:
“You ready to start on your mom’s room?”
“Sure,” Tim said. But she put a couple more things into the dishwasher before she went down the hall to Mindy and Steve’s room. (Craig had disappeared into his room after taking his own plate and fork to the sink.)
It looked pretty clean to me, though maybe not as neat as Tim might wish. But Tim had a more discerning eye, and saw what more needed doing — at least according to her Twist-obsession.
“This stuff on Mom’s dresser needs to be organized better,” she fretted. “The loose change isn’t sorted and the earrings and necklaces are a jumble. And we need to dust everything, and vacuum the floor. Can you move or lift up some of the furniture so I can vacuum under it?”
“Sure can, sweetie. Do you want me to start with dusting while you organize the stuff on the dresser?”
We’d finished that and had started vacuuming when Lisa stuck her head in, speaking up loud over the noise of the vacuum cleaner.
“Hey Tim, Neal’s here.”
“Oh, hey,” I said, trying to act surprised.
Tim turned off the vacuum cleaner for a moment and said: “Tell him to come in,” then turned the vacuum cleaner back on. Lisa rolled her eyes and left. Moments later, Neal walked into Steve and Mindy’s bedroom and looked around.
“Hi, Tim,” he said loudly.
“Hi yourself,” she replied. “I’m almost done with this, then we can talk.”
I had been working on moving Mindy’s chest of drawers aside so Tim could vacuum under it. When she’d done that, I asked Neal: “Give me a hand putting this back?” He nodded and put his back into it; then we put the drawers back in, and started taking out the drawers of Steve’s bureau so we could move it. Tim turned off the vacuum cleaner and helped us with that.
“So why is your mom making you clean her room?” Neal asked.
“She’s not making me, she’s letting me,” Tim said. “I guess it seems kind of weird —” (Neal nodded, then looked guilty, but Tim didn’t seem to have noticed) “— but I really need the house to be clean, and Mom and Steve don’t have enough time to clean it, so if I want it clean I have to do some of the work myself. They cleaned up a lot last night but they said I could finish today.” Once all the drawers were sitting on the bed, we moved Steve’s bureau aside and Tim vacuumed under it; then we put those drawers back and Neal said: “So... have you had time to do anything but clean since I saw you last?”
“Not really. Well, I did some cooking too, and went to the doctor. Maybe once I get the house really clean I can go do something more fun.”
“I hope so.”
We had to take the bed apart in order to vacuum under it; Neal and I manhandled the mattress off and into the hallway, then detached the headboard and footboard from the box springs and moved them all aside while Tim moved the various boxes of stuff that Mindy and Steve had stored under the bed. Finally Tim could vacuum. When the conversation between Neal and Tim faltered, I asked Neal a couple of questions about what he’d been doing lately, whether he’d acquired any neat insects for his collection, and that got them started again. I was pleased to see that Tim could still take an interest in talking about insects, even if she wasn’t going out looking for specimens right now.
After vacuuming under the bed, we took a break for lunch. Tim wanted to make us all grilled cheese sandwiches, but I reminded her: “Your mother said no cooking for three days, remember?”
“Grilling a sandwich isn’t cooking,” she insisted, with a pout that almost made me give in. But not quite.
“You can grill or toast your own sandwich, if you want,” I said, “but Neal and Emily and I will make our own. You can cook for Neal when you’re not being punished.”
“What are you being punished for?” I heard Neal ask as I left to go to the restroom a few minutes later. Tim started to explain but I closed the bathroom door and didn’t hear all of it. When I came back they were talking about other things.
After lunch I suggested to Tim that we test out her trick some more. She was reluctant.
“You’ve got a trick?” Neal asked. “What can you do?”
She looked down at the dishwasher, where she was loading her plate and Neal’s. “It’s really lame — not like Dad’s tricks, or Aunt Rhoda’s. I sort of know when the house needs cleaning, and where the mess is.”
“Oh.” Neal fell silent.
“Or that’s what we think,” I said. “We need to test it; and if it’s what we think, the people at the Twist clinic can’t really help us with testing, though they might can suggest some ideas.”
“I’m sure Lisa’s going to test it for me sometime in the next day whether I want her to or not,” Tim said sourly, wetting a paper towel and starting to wipe down the counter where we’d made our sandwiches. “The house is messy enough without deliberately making a mess to test my trick with.”
Neal looked around at the spotless kitchen and then at me. I shrugged.
“Just a small mess we can clean up in a couple of minutes,” I urged.
“All right,” she said after a pause. “What do you want to do?”
A couple of minutes later Tim and Neal went out to the back yard; Emily went with them. I waited a minute, then went to the living room and dug through the trash can, picking out four or five pieces of waste paper, and scattered them on the floor. Then I went out on the back porch.
Tim was already walking up the back steps when I stepped out the back door; Neal followed her.
“The living room,” she said, “something on the floor that shouldn’t be.”
“Bingo,” I said. “You relax — visit with Neal some more — I’ll clean up my own mess.”
“I want to get back to work on Mom and Dad’s room,” she said. “I need to finish before they come home, and then we need to clean up the basement, and maybe I’ll be able to leave the house alone long enough to go to clinic.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll join you in a minute.”
I put the trash back in the can and returned to Mindy and Steve’s bedroom, where Tim was straightening out things on the tops of the dressers that had gotten jostled when we moved the furniture. Neal was dusting the books and knick-knacks on the shelf.
“Anything else I can help with here?”
“Maybe not; we’re almost done. Could you start running a load of laundry? There are several things in the bathroom hampers. And ask Lisa if she’s got anything to wash — I don’t think she wants to talk to me.”
“All right.”
I gathered up all the dirty clothes and towels I could find and went down into the basement to wash them. It wasn’t a full load; somebody — I could guess who — must have washed stuff just a couple of days ago. Tim and Neal came downstairs while I was working.
“The upstairs is pretty much done,” Tim said, “except the window in Lisa’s room. And I should give the toilets another scrub tomorrow morning before we leave for clinic. Now it’s just this area.”
I looked around at the half-basement. It wasn’t dirty or dusty — probably Tim had swept or mopped sometime since her Twist — but it was pretty cluttery. “Well,” I said, “let’s see how much we can get done. Do you think you can go to clinic if the basement isn’t perfect?”
Tim scowled. “Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“Let’s start, then.”
Neal helped us for several hours, and Emily joined us after her post-lunch study break. Around five or five-thirty, not long before Mindy got home, Neal’s mom called and said she wanted him home for supper, so he left.
“Thanks for coming over and helping,” Tim said. “I really appreciate it.”
“No problem,” he said. “I hope we can do something more fun next time, but — if you need help with something, I’m there.”
They stood there awkwardly looking at each other for a few moments, while I stood in a corner sorting a stack of old magazines by title and date, and then Neal went upstairs to let himself out.
“Neal’s a good friend,” I said when he’d been gone a couple of minutes. “Not many guys would have spent a day of their spring break helping a friend clean house.”
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t like to spend all day cleaning when Neal was over, but I couldn’t help myself. There’s just so much to do before tomorrow morning. What time do we have to leave?”
“It’s about three hours to Dallas, and your appointment’s at one... so let’s try to leave by nine-thirty, in case the traffic’s heavier than we expect or something.”
Tim nodded. We continued working as Mindy and Steve got home from work; Mindy came down and talked with us briefly, then sent Craig and Steve to help us while she fixed supper. It was well meant, but five people trying to work in that small space weren’t very efficient, and after a while we sent Craig and Steve back upstairs to work on Steve’s office. We kept working until Mindy called us to supper, and went right back to work on the basement afterward. (Tim was torn for a few moments between doing the dishes and finishing the basement, but Emily volunteered to do the dishes, and Mindy told Craig to help her.)
About ten, Mindy came downstairs and said: “Tim, it’s about bedtime.”
“We’re almost done,” Tim pleaded, “and I have to get this done or I can’t leave the house tomorrow.”
“You need your sleep — you’ve been working nonstop today, it sounds like. Don’t wear yourself out!”
“I can nap in the car tomorrow on the way to the clinic.”
Mindy gave in. “All right. Jack, what about you? You’re the one who’ll have to drive, and you’ve been working pretty hard too, haven’t you?”
“I’d better go back to my hotel pretty soon,” I said. “Another hour, maybe. You think we can finish up by then, Tim?”
“I hope so.”
When I left, Tim and Steve were still working on the basement, tidying up a last few things.
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
“This name origin stuff isn’t as helpful as I thought it might be. About half of the names seem to mean ‘good’ or ‘pretty’ and it’s one thing for parents to name their precious newborn something like that, but it would be arrogant for me to call myself ‘Agatha’ or ‘Jolie’ or whatever. Not that I like the sound of ‘Agatha’ anyway, but, you know.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
I got over to Mindy and Steve’s house just after eight the next morning, before either of them had left for work, but after they’d showered.
“Good morning,” I said, as Lisa let me in. “Where’s Tim?”
“Cleaning Dad and Mindy’s bathroom,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t she just clean it yesterday?”
“Be patient with her,” I said, and went down the hall to Steve and Mindy’s room. “Knock knock?”
“Door’s open,” Tim called out, and I went in. The door of the bathroom was open too, and Tim was on her knees scrubbing the underside of the toilet seat.
“Anything I can help with?”
“You could take those towels down to the washing machine,” she said speculatively; “but I guess you don’t have to. They’ve only been used once.”
“I’ll do it if it helps you feel better about the trip.”
“Okay, thanks. Can you get Mom and Steve’s dirty underwear out of the hamper while you’re at it? I already took my underwear and towel downstairs after my shower.”
When I’d taken care of that, I went to the kitchen and said hello to Mindy, Steve, and Emily, who were all eating breakfast. Tim came in while we were chatting.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I think I’m ready to go. — As soon as the breakfast things are washed up,” she added, looking around anxiously.
“We’ll load the dishwasher before we leave for work,” Mindy said, with a meaningful glance at Steve, who nodded (his mouth being full).
“And I’ll wipe down the table and counter,” Emily said. “You rest — you’ve been working yourself too hard and you’ve got a long day ahead of you.”
So Tim sat down next to me, and we chatted while I ate a bite; but as soon as Steve put his plate and utensils in the dishwasher and left for work, she said: “Oh, I thought of something else,” jumped up and ran out. Moments later she was back with a mop, and she insisted on mopping the floor before we left.
Mindy left for work a few minutes later. “Give me a call at work if the doctors tell you anything new, will you?” she said to me in a quiet voice while Tim was busy mopping.
“Will do,” I said. “Have a good day.”
“You too.” She interrupted Tim’s mopping long enough to hug her and whisper something in her ear, then left.
Emily and I wiped down the counters and table while Tim finished mopping the floor. When we’d finished all that, I asked Tim: “Are you sure there’s nothing else you need to do before we leave? We’ve still got half an hour, but if we leave now and have good luck with the traffic we might can have a sit-down lunch instead of getting fast food to go.”
Tim looked around and poked her head into the den and her mom’s bedroom, then glanced down the hall toward Lisa’s room, into which she’d vanished as soon as she put her plate in the dishwasher. “I guess it’s all pretty much clean,” she said, sounding surprised. “For now.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way for a while.” I knocked on Craig’s door — he’d been sleeping late, but he answered.
“Whassup?”
“We’re fixing to go,” I said, opening the door just a crack. “You and Lisa will be by yourselves for a few hours; your parents may be home from work before we are.”
“Okay.”
“And be sure to clean up after lunch, and make sure Lisa does.”
“...All right.”
A couple of minutes later we were on the road. It was a good thing, too, because I’d been in Austin for four days and if I hadn’t had to take Tim to clinic, I would have needed to get on the road for a few hours anyway. The interstate between Austin and Dallas wasn’t the most interesting stretch of road in America by any means, but it wasn’t totally boring either, and it satisfied my need to be in motion. Once we got into Dallas, I could detour a bit off the GPS-recommended route and satisfy my compulsion to see new places. Tim sat beside me, and Emily in the seat behind me, where she could lean over and talk with Tim more easily.
“Have you thought any more about your new name?” Emily asked, after Tim had woken up from her nap.
“A little,” Tim said. “I was thinking about ‘Marissa’ but now I’m not as sure. Maybe ‘Caitlin’ or ‘Amanda’... or after Aunt Rhoda, like Dad suggested.”
“Any of those would be good names,” I put in. “Think about it some more, and if you make up your mind by the time we get to clinic, we can check you in under the new name. But no pressure; they can use your old name and update the records later after you decide.”
“I’ll try to come up with something before we get there,” she said, and was quiet for a while. Emily settled back in her seat and started studying, and I kept my eyes on the road. Tim looked up baby name sites on her tablet, and from time to time she’d share some of what she was reading: “How about ‘Renata’ or ‘Renee’? They both mean ‘reborn’.”
“Either would suit you,” I said; “I think ‘Renata’ is more distinctive, though,” and Emily looked up from her book and said: “Hmm? Were you talking to me?”
“Just thinking out loud,” Tim said. “This name origin stuff isn’t as helpful as I thought it might be. About half of the names seem to mean ‘good’ or ‘pretty’ and it’s one thing for parents to name their precious newborn something like that, but it would be arrogant for me to call myself ‘Agatha’ or ‘Jolie’ or whatever. Not that I like the sound of ‘Agatha’ anyway, but, you know.”
“You could just pick a name based on how it sounds,” Emily suggested. “I think most parents do that with their babies, really.”
“How did you pick the name ‘Emily’?”
“Actually... I got it from a dream I had a few days after my Twist.”
“Oh. I haven’t dreamed anything recently. At least I can’t remember any dreams.”
As we were coming into the suburbs of Dallas, Tim finally said: “Okay, I think I’ve got it. ‘Melissa’ means ‘bee’, which ties in to my arthropod collection, and it’s also related to Mom’s name, which is nice.”
“And bees work really hard, just like you do,” Emily put in.
“And it sounds pretty,” I said. “Hmm. That’s from Greek, right? I think it’s probably related to the word for ‘honey’, too.”
“Let me check,” she said, and was quiet for a while. Then: “It means ‘honey’ too. That sounds like it would be confusing, having the same word for ‘honey’ and ‘bee’.”
“Context,” I said. “You wouldn’t ask a waiter for a jar of bees, or tell a doctor you got stung by honey.” Actually, it had been a number of years since I was in Greece, so my Greek was a little rusty, and I don’t think the subject of bees or honey ever came up. But I had a lot of experience in various languages with words Americans would think are ambiguous and really aren’t.
We arrived in Dallas with time to spare before Tim’s — or rather Melissa’s — appointment, so after exploring the neighborhood around the clinic and negotiating over our tastes, we ate lunch at a Cambodian restaurant. Melissa said she hadn’t had Cambodian since our road trip last summer, and wanted to try it again; Emily wasn’t as enthusiastic but she found something she liked well enough.
And then on to the clinic, a couple of blocks north of the restaurant. Emily and Melissa found seats while I got Melissa checked in; Mindy had given me her insurance cards to use, along with a letter to the clinic.
“I’m here with my daughter, Timothy Darren Harper; she just went through her Twist... we have an appointment at one?”
The receptionist looked Tim up on her console and said: “Yes. Have a seat and a nurse will call you in a few minutes.”
“All right. We haven’t filed the official name change paperwork yet, but she’s going by Melissa now — you might want to make a note of it.”
“Got it,” she said, unfazed. I’m not sure how many Twisted change gender — something like one or two percent, I think — but obviously she’d dealt with cases like Melissa’s before.
I sat down next to Melissa and said: “Have you thought about a middle name yet?”
She groaned. “You mean I have to go through all that again?”
“You don’t have to overthink it,” Emily said. “You don’t actually have to have a middle name, even; not everybody does. But it might help sometimes.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do that,” I said. “And what about this clinic visit? Do you want me to come back with you for all of it, or just for part of it? I expect they’ll need you to be alone with the psychologist at some point, but I think for the rest of it you could have me or Emily with you if you want.”
She considered that. “I think I want you with me for all except the psychologist. — And the physical exam.”
“Do you want me there for the physical?” Emily asked.
“Umm... maybe not.”
The nurse called us a few minutes later. Emily stayed in the waiting room while Melissa and I followed the nurse to an exam room.
“Your father can wait here,” the nurse said to Melissa. “Come on down the hall and we’ll get your imaging and blood tests done.”
“Have fun,” I said. They returned about ten minutes later, and the nurse started asking a bunch of questions about Melissa’s Twist. Melissa told her how it had happened, and something about her compulsions and changes in her habits; I added what I’d observed, and told her about our impromptu trick testing.
“Huh,” she said, when I described the test we’d done and Melissa tried to describe the feeling she got when I spilled the wastepaper on the living room floor, or when Lisa spilled crumbs on her carpet. “I’m not sure how to classify that...” She typed something on her console and said “You’ll have to talk to the thaumatologist about it.”
“Sure.”
The nurse then had Melissa take a series of psychological tests on the console, while I went back out to the waiting room. She called me back again over an hour later.
“I don’t remember the tests I took being that long,” I said as I entered the exam room, “but that was a long time ago.”
“The tests were over a while ago,” Melissa said, “but then the psychologist came and talked to me. Dr. Schaeffer. He said he’d be back in a few minutes, he wanted to talk to you too.”
“All right. What do you think of him?”
“He seems okay. He asked me how I felt about being a girl, and about wanting to keep the house really clean, and stuff like that.”
“Did he have any advice about keeping your compulsions under control?”
“Not a lot. He said he’d talk more about it when he came back.”
Dr. Schaeffer came in in a few minutes later; we shook hands, and he asked: “You’re Melissa’s father?”
“Yes; she lives with her mother, and I come to visit as often as I can. I’m taking her to clinic because my work schedule is more flexible than Mindy’s.”
“I see. Well, I’m glad to have a chance to speak with you, but I think I need to speak with Melissa’s mother as well, if she’s the custodial parent. I’m concerned about her apparent compulsion to keep her home clean.”
“So am I. I was hoping you would have some advice about keeping it under control or working around it.”
“Well, I’m afraid I don’t have any easy answers. I do have some ideas, but you — or rather Melissa’s mother — may not like them.”
“Fire away.”
“Melissa is fixated on keeping the entire house clean. But she doesn’t seem to transfer that compulsion to other places she visits, at least so far. I think we need to find out if she permanently imprinted on that house when she Twisted, or if the compulsion will transfer to wherever else she might live, and if so, under what conditions — how long might it take for the new place to start feeling like home, for her to feel she no longer has to keep the old place clean?”
“You think we should move to another house?” Melissa asked. She glanced at me. “Steve won’t like that.”
“Hmm,” I said. “That is something we need to find out eventually, but I’m not sure why it has to be done before Melissa goes off to college. Maybe if we rent her an apartment for the summer between high school and college, we can test whether she can stand living in a dorm or if she’d have to keep going home to clean.”
“What I had in mind — it’s just an idea, and I realize there may be a number of reasons why it’s not feasible — is that if Melissa lived in a smaller home, perhaps an apartment, with less furniture and fewer possessions in general, she could keep it clean with considerably fewer hours of labor each week. That would leave her more time for schoolwork and more enjoyable things. Based on her account of the week since her Twist, I’m afraid she won’t do well in school if she’s compelled to spend every minute she’s home keeping the place clean.”
“What do you think, Melissa?” I asked.
She shrank back in her chair. “I don’t want to make Mom and Steve give up a bunch of stuff so we can move into a little apartment. And Lisa and Craig won’t stand for it even if Mom talks Steve into it.”
“Never mind whether it’s feasible to do it right now or not,” I said. “We can figure that out later. First, do you think Dr. Schaeffer’s right, that if you live in a smaller home with less furniture and stuff you’d be able to spend less time cleaning? And is that something you’d want?”
“Maybe? I mean, cleaning the house isn’t a hardship like it would have been before my Twist, I enjoy it, but I’d like to have time for other things too.”
I turned to Dr. Schaeffer. “We think her compulsion is to have the house be clean — not necessarily to do the cleaning herself. Do you agree?”
“That seems to be the case, from what I’ve heard. Of course you’re better positioned to tell than I am.”
“Maybe we could get a cleaning service in to do some of the work, to give Melissa some time off.”
“Try that and see how much it helps,” Dr. Schaeffer agreed. “And I realize that moving, even temporarily, may be a hardship; but I think it would be wise to test how strong Melissa’s fixation on that particular house is well before she reaches college age.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe in the summer we could rent a beach house for two weeks, or a cabin in the mountains, or something? Two weeks might be long enough for you to switch your focus from keeping Steve and Mindy’s house clean to keeping the cabin clean.”
“Could you stay at the house for two weeks at a time?” Melissa asked anxiously, and Dr. Schaeffer looked inquiringly at me.
“I have a travel compulsion,” I explained to him; “it’s hard for me to stay in one place for more than two or three days. I can work around it by taking a break to travel for a few hours and then coming back to where I’m staying. If the cabin’s small and doesn’t have a lot of furniture,” I said to Melissa, “we could get it clean enough to suit you, and then we could go on a road trip or a long hike and come back in the evening, every third day or so.”
“Let’s try that.” She smiled.
Dr. Schaeffer cleared his throat. “Well. Aside from this compulsion, your daughter seems to be adjusting well to her Twist, particularly to her change in gender. As far as I can tell from a short interview, she’s had a full change of gender identity, not just a change of biological sex, which is rarer but can be difficult.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “My niece had one without the other; she’s okay now, but it was rough for a while at first.”
“She’s helped me out a lot,” Melissa said.
“That’s good,” Dr. Schaeffer said. “Has she put you in touch with others like you?”
“She gave me the address of a forum for people like me, but I haven’t had time to sign up and read messages, much less post anything. Too busy.”
“Well, hopefully that won’t last, if we can get a handle on your compulsions. The simplest way to control them would be, as I said, to reduce their scope directly — by having a smaller home with less furniture and clutter. If that’s not an option, and we find that your compulsions are causing you a lot of problems — keeping you from focusing on school, for instance — there are medicines we can use to try to keep them under control.”
“I hope you won’t try those drugs except as last resort,” I said, worried. “Wouldn’t they cause Melissa to lose focus on school as much as the compulsion itself? Maybe more?”
“Not necessarily. What drugs are you referring to?”
“I don’t remember the names, but one of my cousins had a dangerous compulsion that they gave him drugs to control. He failed a bunch of classes and had to drop out of college because of the side-effects. And he still isn’t allowed to drive because of them.”
“Was that recent?”
“It was — hmm — when I was in middle school, so almost thirty years ago.”
“We have better drugs now — not perfect, of course, we still don’t use them unless other techniques don’t work. But the side effects are less severe than those your cousin experienced.”
I wasn’t satisfied, and I decided to do my own research about the current drugs used for controlling Twist compulsions.
“What about other techniques?” I asked. “I’ve heard from some Twisted that they’re able to control their compulsions with meditation. It didn’t work that well for me, but it might work better for Melissa.”
“It is a possibility,” Dr. Schaeffer allowed. “It takes significant time to learn, and for whatever reason, there are many Twisted for whom it doesn’t seem to work, or gives only slight benefit. If Melissa’s compulsions cause her serious problems with school, I think we should try the appropriate drugs first, and see how they work while Melissa is learning self-hypnosis or meditation. At worst she could fail a grade in the time it takes her to learn those disciplines well enough to control her compulsions — if they can be controlled that way.”
“Let’s see how things turn out,” I said.
A few minutes later Dr. Schaeffer left, and I took out my tablet and looked him up on the clinic’s site. It seemed he wasn’t purely a Twist specialist; he worked with the Twist clinic on Fridays, and saw other patients in a general clinical psychology clinic the other days of the week. That eroded my trust in him further, and in the Dallas Twist clinic generally — apparently there weren’t enough Twisted in Texas to support a full-time Twist clinic with a full range of specialists, like in Spiral or Atlanta or Chicago. But I didn’t share my concerns with Melissa. She was stuck with him, as far as I could tell, and undermining her trust in her doctor couldn’t do any good unless I knew something really bad about him and had to warn her — and Mindy — about him. The worst I saw so far was that he was (in my opinion) too quick to prescribe drugs.
I wondered what else their trick specialist did on their other days if they only saw Twisted patients one or two days a week. Soon enough, a tall Hispanic woman came in and introduced herself as Dr. Martinez.
“I’m a thaumatologist,” she said; “I specialize in the tricks some of us Twisted have. Ms. Varney told me you’ve already discovered your trick, Melissa?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of lame. I know when something is messed up and needs cleaning, even if I can’t see it.”
“Can you explain further?”
We did, and told her about the testing we’d done.
“Fascinating! Have you felt this anywhere else besides your home?”
“I think maybe I felt it at the taqueria on Wednesday? I’m not sure, maybe it was just general anxiety about the house not being clean enough yet. But when I got home and we were sitting in the driveway I definitely felt like the kitchen needed work, and I saw what was wrong as soon as I walked in.”
“Hmm. I mean, have you felt that feeling about the other places you’ve visited? Like the kitchen or restroom at the restaurant weren’t clean enough, or that anything is amiss here at the clinic, or anywhere else?”
“No, just at home.”
“Hmm. And this ties into your compulsion, doesn’t it — your home is the only place you feel compelled to keep clean?”
“That’s right.”
“Fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trick like yours, a sensory trick focused on one particular place, though I’ve have read about one or two that were similar. There was a boy who could read the emotions of his family members, but not anyone else, for instance. And since your home is two hundred miles from the clinic, doing further testing may be difficult... but... hmm...” She was silent for a moment. Then: “Mr. Harper, could I speak with you alone for a moment?”
“Sure,” I said uncertainly, glancing at Melissa. I followed Dr. Martinez out of the room.
“Is anyone at home? I mean, at Melissa’s mother and stepfather’s house?”
“Her step-siblings Lisa and Craig were home when we left, but they might have gone out. I could call them and check... I think I see what you’re going for.”
“Yes, I want them to help us test Melissa’s trick if they’re home. Will it work when she’s hundreds of miles from home?”
I called Lisa’s phone, and got her.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Lisa, this is Jack. You remember how, a couple of days ago, Melissa somehow knew you’d gotten crumbs on the carpet? — Tim’s decided on a new name, by the way, she’s going by Melissa now —”
“What is it this time?” she burst out. “I swear I cleaned everything up after lunch, and I haven’t done anything else that Tim could complain about.”
“No, don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong. Melissa’s not been having that feeling like something’s wrong at home. No, we’d like your help testing her trick, to see if it still works at this distance. Do what I did yesterday, pick a room of the house at random and dump some waste paper on the floor, then ten minutes later pick it up. We’ll see if Melissa can sense that or not.”
“Oh, okay. Um, how about the den?”
“That’s fine. Message me after you clean it up, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks — bye.” I hung up, and Dr. Martinez and I rejoined Melissa in the exam room.
“I’d like to suggest some other tests you could do when you get home,” Dr. Martinez said, not mentioning my conversation with Lisa. “Your earlier tests involved crumbs on the floor in one room, and waste paper on the floor in another, correct?”
“Right,” Melissa said, “except the first one wasn’t really a test, it’s just how we figured out I had a trick.”
“Let’s try some tests with tiny amounts of other kinds of debris — just a single bread crumb on the kitchen floor or counter, for instance. And let’s try introducing some small disorder into the collections of things you’ve been organizing — putting a whisk in the knife drawer or a pillowcase in the towel closet, for instance...”
While she was talking, Melissa started fidgeting. She looked distracted, and I thought I could figure out why.
“Are you okay, honey?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s just — I think Lisa or Craig must have dropped or spilled something in the den.” Then her eyes got wide, and she asked: “Did you tell them to do it?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Don’t worry, she’ll clean it up again in a few minutes.”
“Okay... I guess. Um, what were you saying, Doctor?”
Dr. Martinez resumed talking about disorganizing things and seeing if Melissa could detect that. But Melissa couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying until Lisa cleaned up her mess a few minutes later.
“Well,” Dr. Martinez said, “we know that your trick works at a distance of two hundred miles. Next time you travel, if anyone in your family is staying at home, or if you have a neighbor you can trust with a house key, you should test it at greater distances and find out what the range is. Meanwhile, try those other tests I suggested.”
“What about getting her trick, and her compulsion, to focus on a different place?” I asked. “A vacation cabin or an apartment or a dorm room?”
“That’s something you should test when you can,” she said. “I don’t expect you to be able to test for it right away.”
“I mean, do you have any advice about how to get her trick to focus on where she’s living — permanently or temporarily — instead of where she was living when she went through her Twist?”
“Hmm. No, I’m not sure I do. I suppose it might hinge on where you think of as ‘home’, Melissa — and I remember, when I moved out of my parents' house, how long it took before it stopped feeling like home. It wasn’t until I was out of the dorms and had my own apartment, my third year in college, probably.”
“Oh,” Melissa said. “Thanks anyway.”
“Maybe this is an area where meditation can help,” I said. “I’m not the one to teach you — I’ve tried learning it, and I just don’t have the patience for it — but I’m sure your mother or I can find somebody local.”
“That’s a good idea,” Dr. Martinez said. “Do you have any other questions?”
Melissa and I looked at each other. “You said this was a new sense,” Melissa said, “like seeing or hearing? Could I learn to like close my eyes on it, or put my fingers in my ears, so I can’t tell when the house gets messed up?”
“Ah. Perhaps so. Most sensory tricks are always-on, at least by default, and don’t seem to come with ‘eyelids’. But it’s worth a try. Let’s try that. Relax, close your eyes; imagine that you’re looking down at your house, but the walls are transparent. You can see everything inside, you can see whether everything is in place; it’s all just as it should be, isn’t it...? Relax and keep looking at the house for a few more moments. Now imagine you have a second set of eyelids; you close them, and now the house isn’t transparent. You have a third set of eyelids; close them, and you can’t see the house at all.”
Melissa sat back in her chair, her eyes closed. Dr. Martinez beckoned me out into the hall, and we left the room quietly.
“Call your stepdaughter again, and have her make a small mess like she did before,” she whispered. I messaged Lisa and Craig, instead of phoning, and went back into the room with Melissa.
She sat quietly for a while, and Dr. Martinez and I did our best not to disturb her; I didn’t look at her straight on, but out of the corner of my eye. Then Melissa started fidgeting, and squirmed a bit, and opened her eyes.
“It didn’t work,” she said. “It’s — it’s not like I’m really seeing the mess Lisa made in her room, it’s like her room is an extra arm or leg and it’s suddenly started itching.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Martinez said, making notes on her tablet. “Don’t give up after one try. Keep trying that exercise from time to time at home, especially after you start learning meditation and self-hypnosis. And feel free to vary it to fit the way you perceive your new sense — maybe you could imagine your extra arms and legs, the various rooms of the house, all going to sleep?”
“I’ll try that. Thanks.”
“If you have no more questions, I’ve got one for you. Would you be interested in participating in a study? It would involve coming to the clinic once or twice more in the next few months, and exercising your trick while you’re under a specialized scanner — we can’t do it today, I need to schedule time on the equipment in advance.”
“I’ll talk to Melissa’s mother about it,” I said. “Can you send me the information about the study?”
“Of course. And please keep me informed of Melissa’s progress in getting control of her trick. Anything else...? Then I’ll leave you for now, and someone else will be with you shortly.”
A while later Mr. Isherwood, the social worker, came in; after making delicate inquiries about mine and Mindy’s income (I had to guess at Mindy’s), he gave us advice about applying for a grant from the Nia Clarence Foundation to help pay for Melissa’s new wardrobe and any renovations to the house needed to accommodate her Twist compulsion. Then we left the clinic, rejoined Emily in the waiting room, and walked back to my rental car.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
“Mom said supper’s almost ready, but I think I’ve got time to scrub the toilets...”
“Already?”
She shrugged. “They’ve been used several times since this morning. And Craig has terrible aim.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
In the last half-hour or so of our drive home, Melissa started getting a little fidgety. “Someone’s making a mess in Mom and Steve’s bedroom,” she said. “Probably Steve.”
“We’ll tell him to clean it up when we get home,” I said. “Try to practice that exercise Dr. Martinez gave you, pretending your leg is going to sleep and that it’s the bedroom, so you can’t feel it anymore...”
“I’ll try.” But she kept fidgeting and shifting in her seat, even with her eyes closed.
It turned out that Steve had tossed his work clothes across the back of a chair when he was changing after work, instead of putting them into a hamper or hanging them up properly. Melissa didn’t wait or ask Steve to clean it up, she went in and did it while he was in the den watching TV — before she said hello to her mother or anyone.
Then she came into the kitchen and said hi to her mother and Lisa, who were fixing supper. Emily and I had just come in too. I’d called Mindy just as we left the clinic, telling her some of what the doctors had said and mentioning Melissa’s new name, too: she said “Hi, Melissa. Did you have a good day?”
“It was okay,” Melissa said. “The doctors had some ideas about fixing my compulsion but it’s going to be hard.”
“Your father told me some of that on the phone. Let’s talk more about it during supper.”
“Can I help?”
“No. Not until Sunday.” Lisa smirked at Melissa behind Mindy’s back; I thought about saying something, but didn’t.
Emily disappeared into her room to do some studying — she’d been talking with me and Melissa most of the way back, as we tried to figure out ways to implement Dr. Schaeffer’s suggestion without disrupting Mindy and Steve’s lives too much, and about whether we ought to let Dr. Schaeffer give her compulsion-suppressing drugs. Emily was firmly against it, and I didn’t like the idea either, though I wanted to do more research before I talked much with Mindy about it.
Melissa and I did some of the trick testing Dr. Martinez had recommended. She went to her room while I went down to the basement and took one magazine from the top of a stack I’d sorted by title and date, and put it in the middle of another stack — sticking out slightly so I could find it again quickly. Melissa joined me moments later and pointed to the stacks of magazines; I put the misplaced one back where it belonged. “So it works on minor disorder, not just trash and dirt,” I noted. “Good to know.”
“Right,” she said, turning to go back up the stairs. “Mom said supper’s almost ready, but I think I’ve got time to scrub the toilets...”
“Already?”
She shrugged. “They’ve been used several times since this morning. And Craig has terrible aim.”
During supper, Mindy asked me and Melissa to talk about what Dr. Schaeffer had said about working around her compulsion.
“Well...” Melissa began, looking to me for help, and I decided I’d take the heat off her.
“He had a couple of suggestions,” I said. “We could hire a cleaning service so Melissa doesn’t have to do so much of the cleaning work. I can help with that, and maybe the Nia Clarence Foundation can help too, if necessary. And... you could move into a smaller place. Or keep this house, but get rid of some things, so there’s not so much for Melissa and the cleaning service to have to clean and keep in order.”
Steve was taken aback — apparently Mindy hadn’t yet told him what I’d told her on the phone. Great, make me the bearer of bad news. He didn’t say anything right away, but I could tell he didn’t like it, and I didn’t blame him. Lisa, though, spoke right up:
“That’s ridiculous! Why should we move out of our house or get rid of stuff we need just because Tim is obsessed with keeping things clean?”
“My name’s Melissa now,” Melissa said quietly.
“I don’t think we’ll need to do that,” Steve said. “Let’s try a cleaning service first. And — I guess we can all stand to get rid of a few things we don’t need or want anymore, I’ve already done some of that in the last few days, and maybe we could do more. We don’t need to move.”
“I don’t like the idea,” Craig said, “but if, um, Melissa needs us to move, I guess I’m okay with it. I’ll be moving out of here soon enough anyway — if you wait until I go off to college you won’t need as many bedrooms in the new place.”
I’d lived for so many years with no more possessions than I could carry on my back that I had a hard time empathizing with them in their attachment to this house and the stuff in it. But I tried. Lisa had lived here her whole life, and Craig since he was a toddler — they had all kinds of memories tied up with it, memories of their mother.
“You need to keep the possibility in mind, and try to get used to it,” I said, “but it might turn out not to be necessary. We need to try other things first — the cleaning service, obviously, but we also need to find someone to teach Melissa meditation and self-hypnosis, to see if that can control her compulsions or help redirect them. Maybe that can weaken them to where she can easily resist them, or help re-focus them so she only has to keep her room clean and not the whole house.”
“But Dr. Schaeffer said it takes a long time to learn meditation well enough to control a Twist compulsion,” Melissa said. “And some people can’t control their compulsions that way. Most people, I think.”
“True. But it’s still the thing to try first, even if it’s not the most likely to succeed, because it would have the fewest disadvantages.”
“We’ll start looking for someone to teach you starting Monday,” Mindy said.
Later in the evening, I told Mindy I wanted to speak with her alone, or maybe with Steve. A few minutes later I was with Mindy and Steve in Steve’s office; there weren’t enough chairs for all of us, and Mindy offered me the second chair, but I stayed standing.
“There’s another thing Dr. Schaeffer mentioned that you need to know about. It’s a last resort, not something to consider unless meditation and moving into a smaller place don’t help, but there are prescription drugs that can be used to control Twist compulsions.”
“Why is that a last resort compared to moving into a smaller house or condo?” Steve asked. “It seems a lot simpler.”
“Because of the side-effects,” I said, and I told them something about Ryan. “...Supposedly the side-effects of the latest generation of Twist-compulsion drugs are less severe, but Ryan still can’t drive or operate heavy machinery because of the medicines he’s taking.”
“That’s not good,” Mindy said. “But not being able to drive seems like less of a disability than some Twist compulsions — like Melissa’s.”
“She’s too young to drive anyway,” Steve put in. “And Austin has decent public transportation, if she needs it when she’s older.”
“Not being able to drive is just an example,” I said. “There might be other side effects that I can’t recall at the moment. I think we should do some independent research on whatever drug regimen Dr. Schaeffer recommends before we take his word and put Melissa on them. And let’s not try them until and unless she’s tried for several months to learn meditation and hasn’t made enough progress to control her compulsions.”
They looked at each other. “I’ll think about it, and do some research,” Mindy said. “If you find out anything more, let me know, okay?”
“Sure.”
The next day, Saturday, Emily had to fly back to Atlanta. I drove over to Mindy and Steve’s in plenty of time to see her off; she left soon after breakfast.
“Tell Vic I said hey,” I told her, and gave her a hug. “I might come see y’all sometime in the next month or two, if it suits.”
“That will be cool. Give us a call when you’re on the way to Atlanta.” She turned to Melissa. “It’s been a fun visit. I wish I could stay for the shopping trip, but, well. Airplanes wait for nobody.” They hugged, and Emily whispered something to Melissa which made her smile.
After Emily left, Melissa said she had to do some more cleaning before she could go out shopping. So we scrubbed the toilets again, cleaned a few hairs out of the bathtub drains, swept the kitchen and wiped down the table and counter, as well as loading and running the dishwasher with the breakfast dishes.
Then Melissa, Mindy and Lisa went out shopping. I asked if they wanted me to come with them to help tote packages, but they said they didn’t need me, and I heaved a private sigh of relief. “I’ll see you later in the evening, then,” and I left about the same time they did, going for a long drive through several small towns north and west of Austin, stopping for lunch at a barbecue place, and going for a walk in a park I found along the way. I got back to the house about suppertime, after calling Melissa to make sure they were home.
After supper, Melissa wanted to show me some of the new things she’d bought, and she modeled several outfits for me while I made admiring noises. I was glad she’d adjusted so easily to being a girl; she had enough hardship just with her compulsion.
Sunday morning, Melissa had some basic maintenance cleaning to do, and Mindy and I helped with it. I started to feel more hopeful about her chances of doing well in school if she could keep the house clean enough to suit her with just an hour or two a day. Then Steve, Craig and I moved some of Melissa’s stuff to the guest bedroom, and the rest of it to the basement, so the carpet installers could replace the carpet in her room that had been burnt by her Twist. They were supposed to come and do the work on Monday, while everybody was at work or school. (I tried to talk Steve into letting Melissa get laminate flooring in her room instead of carpet, but he was adamant that it had to match the rest of the house. Twisted have no monopoly on obsessions.)
Monday morning, I took Melissa to school and met with the principal to talk about her Twist. She said they’d had another Twisted student a few years ago, who’d needed similar accommodations for his Twist-compulsion.
In the afternoon, I picked Melissa up and took her to the courthouse to file her name change. “How was your first day back?” I asked as she got into the car.
“Not good,” she said, making a face. “A bunch of kids were weird about me turning into a girl. And once the carpet guys got started back home, I couldn’t concentrate on anything until they were finished. I guess they had to mess things up before they could make them better. At least my trick distracted me from the other kids‘ teasing as well as the teachers’ lectures.”
“Do you think it would help if your mother or I were to talk to the teachers about the way the other kids are acting? What exactly were they saying or doing?”
“Nobody really messed with me, but several people were saying mean things about me, and some others were asking really personal questions. I tried to ignore them.” She was blushing; I could guess what kind of “personal questions” those were, and I wanted to wring somebody’s neck.
“Well, I’ll come by the school again tomorrow and talk to somebody about it. Did the teachers take notice of what was going on?”
“Mr. Weddell sent Ulrich to the office when he heard him talking about me, but most of it I don’t think the teachers heard. It was mostly in the halls between classes, or at lunch.”
“All right. But you shouldn’t have to put up with that. Let’s do something about it.”
It took us an hour and a half to finish our business at the courthouse, and by the end of it Melissa was getting antsy; she needed to get home and clean up whatever mess Lisa or Craig had made when they got home from school. As soon as I parked, she jumped out and rushed into the house ahead of me; I found her talking to Lisa through Lisa’s closed bedroom door.
“Come on, Lisa, either clean it up or let me do it. I won’t be able to concentrate on my homework until it’s right.”
“Not my fault,” Lisa called back. “And there’s nothing messed up in here either. If it’s not organized the way you like it, that’s not my problem.”
We had a few minutes left until Mindy or Steve would get home, and I was reluctant to interfere in this, but after a few moments I decided I needed to. “Lisa, open up. We need to talk.”
She opened the door a few moments later. “You’re not my dad. And I haven’t done anything wrong.”
There wasn’t any obvious mess I could see in the room behind her — whatever disorder Melissa was reacting to must be fairly minor, like the magazine I’d put out of order.
“We’ll find a better solution for this at some point, Lisa. But for right now, we need to figure out what’s triggering Melissa’s trick, and fix it. I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for you, but it’s worse than inconvenient for her.”
“Look around, Jack,” she said. “See how clean it is? What’s your problem, Melissa?”
“The bedspread is all rumpled up — look,” Melissa said, pointing.
I sighed. “Lisa, were you taking a nap after school or something?”
“No, just laying in bed reading. Not that it’s any of your business.”
I thought about it. “And did you get up around, um, four-fifteen or four-thirty?” That was about when I’d noticed Melissa getting nervous.
“I guess so.”
Apparently she didn’t have a problem with the bedclothes being rumpled if people were actually using the bed, but if they got up and didn’t make the bed right away... had her trick been this sensitive to begin with or was it getting worse?
“Melissa, sometimes you’re going to have to resist your compulsions, or at least try. Lisa and Craig and Steve are having to make a lot of accommodation for your Twist; it’s not fair for all the accommodation to be on their side.”
Lisa looked surprised and didn’t say anything. Melissa pouted. “Sorry to bother you, Lisa,” I said.
“Thanks,” and she closed the door.
Melissa glared at me. “Why’d you take her side?” she asked.
“Try for a minute to see it the way you would have before your Twist,” I said. “Remember how annoyed you were when your mom made you clean your room?”
“Yeah. That was dumb.”
“That’s how Lisa is feeling toward you the last few days. You used to get along so well; with you being a girl now, you could get to be even closer — if you don’t mess it up.”
“But it... it’s like it itches, or like a staticky noise, when she messes stuff up and leaves it! How can I concentrate on homework or anything if she’s always spilling crumbs on the carpet or not making her bed and stuff?”
“People who live near fire stations or railroad crossings learn to sleep through sirens or train whistles. I think you’re going to have to learn to ignore the low-level itches or noises from your trick, and only bother Lisa and the others about it when it’s something so big you can’t ignore. It might be hard, it might take several months to get used to it, but try.”
She glared at me for a few moments longer, and said grudgingly, “Okay, Dad. I’ll try. But don’t blame me if I get D’s and F’s on all my homework for the next few weeks.”
“Let me know if you need any help. Maybe it will be easier to concentrate on it if we’re talking it over together.”
So we went to the guest bedroom, where much of her stuff still was, and started going over her homework. Mindy and Steve came home from work a little later, and Mindy let Melissa help with supper; she seemed a little less distracted by her trick while she was cooking.
During supper, I mentioned to Mindy and Steve what Melissa had told me about her problems at school, which led to Melissa reluctantly telling us a few more details of what had happened.
“There were kids calling me a Twisted freak,” she said, her eyes focused on her plate, “and boys calling me a sissy and girls saying I wasn’t a real girl... mostly real quiet where the teachers couldn’t overhear them. And some of the guys — even guys I thought were cool — were asking really personal questions, like what it’s like to — um. Anyway. The first couple I told them it was none of their business, then I started ignoring them...”
“We need to talk to your teachers about this,” Mindy said.
“Want me to stop by the school again tomorrow morning?” I asked.
“No; I think I’d better do it. You’ve helped a lot lately but this is something I need to do.”
After supper, Steve, Craig, and I moved Melissa’s furniture and stuff back into her bedroom. She wanted to arrange things a little differently, to make it easier to keep things clean; we put her bed and dresser up on blocks so she could vacuum under them easily, for instance, and didn’t put her furniture flush to the wall so she could easily clean on all sides of it.
Mindy took Melissa to school the next morning, and talked to the principal and several of the teachers about the bullying Melissa had reported. Things got better after that, Melissa told us, though not perfect — Neal was sticking with her and supporting her, but she’d lost several of her male friends, and wasn’t quickly making friends among girls the way Emily did after her Twist. I worried about her, but there wasn’t a lot I could do at that point.
Once Melissa got settled in at school, more or less, I went back to work and got back on the road. I messaged my clients saying the family crisis was over and I was available again, and soon I had all the translation jobs I could handle. I bought a cheap used car and turned in my rental car, and got into a pattern of driving for a few hours each morning after breakfast, then finding a motel and translating for a few hours, and moving on again the next day. I’d travel in a big loop, sometimes as far afield as Spiral or Trittsville, and come back to Steve and Mindy’s house each weekend to see how Melissa was doing.
Mindy got her into yoga classes by the end of the second week after her Twist, and they seemed to be helping some. But the techniques Dr. Martinez had suggested to try turning off her trick when it wasn’t convenient weren’t doing any good, at least not yet. Her grades were slipping, though not as badly as Melissa or Dr. Schaeffer had feared.
Steve had hired a cleaning service to come in twice a week, but they weren’t up to Melissa’s exacting standards, and didn’t actually save her that much time. I think it helped some, though; most weekends when I visited, Melissa was able to catch up with the cleaning she’d missed during the week on Saturday morning, with help from me and usually other family members, and then we could go on a short road trip together Sunday. Sometimes Neal came with us; we invited Lisa to come a couple of times, but she always refused.
One Friday a few weeks after Melissa’s Twist I took her to the clinic to participate in the trick study Dr. Martinez had mentioned. I picked her up from school at lunchtime, and got to the clinic in time for them to have her under a scanner just when Lisa got home from school and started making a mess in the kitchen.
The months between spring break and summer vacation went by; Melissa got better at meditation, better at ignoring her compulsion for a few hours when necessary, and her grades picked up a little toward the end of the school year. One Thursday in May I called her and she asked, “Is it okay if we don’t go on a road trip this weekend? Paulynn invited me to her birthday party on Sunday afternoon, and I told her I might go to the sleepover the night before too if I get the cleaning done early enough on Saturday.”
“That’s great, honey. Do you want me to come by for a few hours on Saturday and help clean, like usual?”
“I don’t want you to come all this way just to clean,” she said anxiously, “not when we won’t have time to do fun stuff together.”
“Well, maybe we’ll do something extra special the weekend after next, then.”
I took advantage of the longer time between visits to spend several days in Georgia, visiting kinfolks in Trittsville, Atlanta and Milledgeville, and returning to Texas the weekend after the sleepover. It was time I started doing research on cabins and cottages that could be a temporary home for me and Melissa during our summer vacation. I visited several towns on the Gulf and looked at different beach houses for rent, trying to find the smallest with the least furniture that still had decent beds and looked livable. But then another idea occurred to me, and I got more and more excited. How flexible was Melissa’s trick? We didn’t know yet if it could even be focused on a different house than the one where she Twisted; maybe my idea was foolish, or at least premature. But if it worked... it could be ideal. The only way, maybe, to really satisfy her compulsion and mine at the same time, instead of compromising by satisfying each only partially. I resolved to try it first, and rent the beach house if it didn’t work.
So, on the third day of Melissa’s summer vacation, after she’d had time to enjoy an end-of-school party with Paulynn and some other new friends, and to catch up with house-cleaning, I rolled into Austin and made the final arrangements. I parked on the north side of the street and knocked on the door; Craig answered it.
“Hey, Jack. Melissa’s in her room, packing.”
I walked in; on my way to Melissa’s room I passed by the den, where Mindy, Steve and Lisa were watching a movie. “Hi, all.”
“Good morning, Jack,” Mindy said. “I haven’t told Melissa what you’ve got planned. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, making it a surprise, but I didn’t tell her.”
“We’ll see. I’ve got backup plans in case it doesn’t work out. And we’ll be back here in a few days if the backup plan doesn’t work either. Just try to keep things as clean as you can for the first few days we’re gone, until she refocuses on the new home.”
“I hope it works.”
Melissa heard me talking and came out of her room. “Hi, Dad. I’m almost ready.”
“Good. How have you been?”
“Well, I passed all my courses this semester. Just barely made it in algebra, though.”
“I’m sure you’ll do better next year. You’ve been getting better at controlling and working around your compulsion, and you’ve got all summer to get better at meditation.”
A few minutes later, after saying goodbye to everyone, we walked out the door, Melissa towing one suitcase and me carrying her other one. She stopped at the top of the porch steps and stared.
“I thought you were going to rent a cabin,” she said. “For me to try to focus my trick on.”
“We can still do that if this doesn’t work,” I assured her. “But do you think you can focus your trick and your compulsion on an RV?”
She stared thoughtfully at it for a few more moments, then gave me a wild grin. “I don’t see why not. Let’s go, Daddy!”
That's all — for now. I've considered writing a brief epilogue or chapter seven, but when I finished the first draft of this story, continuing farther seemed anticlimactic. Let me know what you think; does the story have good closure as it is? Or do you want to read a little more about Jack and Melissa even if there's good closure as is?
I'm currently working on another Valentine Divergence novel, and a Twisted novel or novella; they're currently at 46,000 and 24,000 words. I'm serializing a rough draft of the Valentine Divergence novel on the tg_fiction mailing list; I'll probably post the final draft here on BC later in the year, after revisions based on comments from tg_fiction.
If you've read this far, please leave a comment, so I can learn what I should keep doing and what I should do differently. Kudo button clicks are nice but they don't tell me which parts of the story people liked or in what way.
And thanks for reading.
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)