by TAMMY, Alternate Reality Kidz News Service Life is so Unfair Writer
Timmey Asterisk was pretty sure he didn’t have breasts. Pretty sure.
Then, he saw a photo of himself on TokTok in swimming trunks with watermelons stuck to his chest. He immediately ran to the bathroom on his floor of the house and took off his shirt. No, whatever those things were in the photograph, he did not have them.
Being only seven years old, Timmey was aware of those large, round, pink objects – his mother and her suburban mah jongg ring all seemed to have them – but he wasn’t entirely sure what were supposed to be. Extra storage space for when a girl’s purse got full? He couldn’t see a way to open them (unless the nipples which he had seen once in an outing with his dad that his mother would later refer to as “that unpleasant movie theatre misadventure” – were some kind of handle). Perhaps they had something to do with baseball? (When his older brothers talked about them, they talked about “getting to first base.”) Maybe they were flesh-coloured globs of Play-Dough that were just plopped onto girls’ chests for no good reason?
Timmey didn’t spend too much time wondering about that. He was too busy trying to find out who had created the photo and posted it on social media. The obvious suspect was Jimmey Jammey, the W. K. Okefenokee Elementary School bully who had patented the Atomic Wedgy and sold his technique to bullies in schools all over the city; but, although he had a certain animal cunning (and apparently an awesome attorney), he didn’t know how to turn on a computer, much less use it to create fake images and post them online.
Timmey might have had to just accept the humiliation (he was a seven year-old toothpick; he was used to it), except one lunchtime he saw Jimmey Jammey talking to Lionel “Four Eyes and a Mole” Mandrake, the smartest kid in their grade. Jimmy Jammey didn’t knock Four Eyes and a Mole’s glasses off his face. Jimmy Jammey didn’t force him to turn around for a ritual wedgying. Hunh. Weird.
Three days later, in the middle of a particularly difficult math problem (seven times seven? Please! When is anybody gonna need to know that in their adult lives?) Timmey realized that it could be because Jimmy Jamey had convinced Four Eyes and a Mole to do the tech dirty work for him. (Having neither animal cunning nor good lawyers, Timmey could be a little slow.) Furious, Timmey decided to confront Four Eyes and a Mole at the first opportunity!
…Which was three days later, as it was already Friday night.
“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!” Four Eyes and a Mole pleaded when Timmey confronted him at recess. “My glasses – oh, my poor glasses! – have already suffered enough!”
Timmey assured him that he didn’t want to harm Odysseus – that’s what Four Eyes and a Mole had named his glasses – I know, I know, but his first choice, Laertes, died an ignoble death when he stuck his head out of the car and they were blown off his face onto the highway – he will never get the crunching sound out of his head although, technically, he had been too far away to hear it when Laertes was crushed under an eleven-wheeler – that he just wanted to know what happened. So Four Eyes and a Mole told him how he used YakTNT to create the fake image and posted it on TokTok, pride breaking through his fear like sunshine momentarily breaking through smog.
Unfortunately, Timmey hadn’t considered what he would do with this knowledge. (Strategic planning came about as easily to him as math.) He couldn’t complain to an adult; Jimmy Jammey would know and plan even more horrible tortures. Four Eyes and a Mole said turning the tables on the bully was an interesting thought experiment, but since he started helping Jimmy Jammey he had been able to use his lunch money to buy an actual lunch for the first time in months, and he wasn’t about to jeopardize that!
Timmey had reconciled himself to humiliation when a miracle happened: the girls in his class were sympathetic to his desire to be one of them. Even the boys, who had had to endure sensitivity classes, punched him in the shoulder, then rubbed it and apologized and said they would be better at respecting his life choices in the future.
Okay, technically, it wasn’t true. But if it gave him a respite from the humiliation…
“Ooh, I wish whoever is doing this would give me breasts!” a girl in a boy’s body who asked to be referred to as Ayre U. P. Thayer cooed to Timmey one recess. “I’m not old enough to transition, but that would be the next best thing!”
“Sorry,” Jimmey Jammey said, “but I don’t do requests.”