Lee considered this. There was a mass of unarticu-lated memories to be negotiated. She had never spoken to anyone of this.
"At first," she said, "I thought everyone could change. Even before I found out what changing was, I knew there was something that no one was telling me about. There was some force all around us that was powerful and frightening, and you could joke about it, or halfway suppress it, or fall into it with a vengeance and never crawl back out. When I found myself controlling where my muscles and bones went, I assumed that changing was the something that adults wouldn't talk about in front of us children."
Bonita looked at her quizzically.
"Turned out I was wrong. My parents were Reform Catholic. Sex was the hidden thing. It took me a couple of years to sort out that sex and changing were even different. Maybe I never really did learn to distinguish the two. So anyway, I spent my childhood thinking that changing was something only adults did, that it was part of experimenting with your body, like fucking or drinking or smoking, that kids weren't supposed to do, or even know about.
"The big surprise was when I started experimenting with other kids. One by one the hidden things became unhidden. I smoked a joint, drank a six-pack and puked, blew a guy off, felt up another girl. But those experiments somehow never led to talk about changing. I kept waiting for some older kid to say, 'So, can you turn your cunt into a dick?' "
Bonita laughed, leaned in a little closer. Her hands were warm on Lee's wet back. Lee's throat was a little hoarse from talking over the music, but she continued.
"Then I made friends with a kid called Jose. He was a pretty boy, and all the girls liked him. I thought I was in love with him. He was one of those kids who likes to play with his body. You know: burns his own skin with a lighter, puts a straight pin through the webs between his fingers, likes to show you his dick. He liked me because I could outdo all the other kids at the things close to his heart. I had double-jointed elbows, I could bend my fingers all the way back, and could curl my tongue like the devil, literally. So one day he came over and we spent an hour in the closet, trading secret knowledge by flashlight. I guess I went a little too far. I showed him one of my scariest face changes, which I used to practice in the mirror. He screamed bloody murder, ran like hell, and never came over again."
Lee stopped. She had wanted Bonita to do the telling. It was new and strange to say all this out loud. As she spoke, the memories came to her as fresh as yesterday's. She had never spoken them, had even been afraid to write them down. Never before articulated, they came forward in whole cloth, pure and unretouched.
Bonita jumped into the pause. "So, you finally figured out that you were a freak."
"I wasn't sure right away. But I started to get the general picture. I figured that Jose would tell his parents, or the police, or someone, and that I was in deep shit. When no one came to haul my freak ass away, I vowed to keep my power under my hat. Having made a fool of myself, I went totally underground."
"How very human," said Bonita. "You made a mistake, so you adopted a position on the opposite extreme. Since everyone else was not a changer, no one else was. You went from Condom Catholic to existentialist." She laughed.
Lee didn't like the way Bonita italicized words at her. She realized she had said too much. She wanted to make Bonita talk. She decided to go on the offensive.
"How did you know me?" she asked. If she was going to find more polymorphs, that was the key.
Bonita smiled and grasped Lee's ankle firmly, pulling her leg from the water. She felt the sole of Lee's foot for a few seconds, concentrating.
"As I thought. The hands give you away, of course. Mother Nature did not come up with those mutations. But I wasn't sure. The brace was a good idea. I almost bought it poor crippled girl. But you didn't hide them, like a cripple would. You seem to enjoy the shock effect your hands have. Even in this rather . . ." Bonita looked around at the revelry with cool eyes, ". . . accepting crowd, there's always the childhood imperative in the back of a disabled person's mind telling her that she's bad and should hide. You didn't grow up with those hands, and you sure wouldn't have paid a surgeon for them. So I watched you. When you got into the pool, you took off your shoes. I looked hard, and your feet didn't have any calluses. Surprise, surprise. It's a typical mistake, one I've made myself. I was doppelganging this guy's wife, and I thought I had her perfect. But then he noticed that I was way too smooth; no writer's hump on my middle finger, no calluses on my heel, no cuticles - "
"You were what?" Lee strained to replay in her mind what Bonita had said. The music, her confusion, and the alcohol in her system made the last words too hard to process.
Bonita had stopped suddenly, seeming to realize she'd revealed too much. She smiled and kissed Lee's ear. With the license still heavy around them, it was exciting enough to be distracting. Lee pulled away to clear her head.
"When you watched me getting into the pool, I didn't see you," Lee said.
"You just didn't recognize me."
Shit, Lee thought. Bonita had made herself invisible by changing, almost as if it were as easy as combing her hair. Lee had felt the word "cripple" as Bonita had said it. It was directed at her. Compared to Bonita, her changing was slow and faulty. She shook her head.
She was tired as hell, and her beer drunk was turning sloppy. Having discovered another of her kind, she felt more alienated than ever. Her underlying fear of Bonita had settled into a measured dislike. There was something about Bonita that was too sharp and mean, especially in the warm and free environment of the Glory Hole. Bonita kissed her ear again. The advances were still enticing amid the newness of discovery, but there was something odd about them. Lee held Bonita close and gave in to them, trying to place it.
Around them, the pool had turned orgiastic. There were hands in pants, and pants that were off. The few boys had retreated out of sight. In the corner of the pool bounded by the club's walls, Kathy was going down on Wendy, dental dam gone to hell in the struggle to stay above water. Bonita's hands reached under Lee's shirt, and the lush feeling between her legs, which had never really gone away, expanded again. Lee relaxed. She had gone home with worse bitches than Bonita. She let herself sink down into the pool.
As her thoughts unwound from the tight knot of questions she wanted answered, they were reshuffled by the inane logic of her subconscious. Images from the past two days flew up in synch with her body's sexual response. Bonita penetrated her with a pair of fingers that gradually fused and smoothened, fingernails replaced by a cartilaginous ridge of bumps around the head of the new digit. Lee held on to Bonita's muscular shoulders and leaned back. She locked the muscles in her hands, so that her weight hung from Bonita without effort. Bonita's fused fingers splintered into a complex flower that probed Lee purposefully. Each offshoot inside her seemed self-directed, each wonderfully aware of her responses to its explorations. She drew in breath, expanding her vagina, and felt Bonita add another finger.