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Mrs. Cooper Changed Me Into A Young Girl - Ch 2
🕑 Added 2024-02-16 14:28:20 +0000 UTCOTHER CHAPTER | ALL STORY LIST
He awoke, feeling as though he had slept through the year. He correctly assessed it as only fourteen hours, but unsatisfied with that, he slept for another six before getting up. And getting up meant something more along the lines of sitting up in bed. He was not going to get far, feeling as he did. His headache had now annexed most of his sinuses and was starting to make his hair hurt. Or at least, that's what it felt like.
After swigging down another batch of painkillers, he felt brave enough to feel his face a bit. It was odd, but he could have sworn that his bandages had changed. These seemed a little tighter. And they were bigger. There was more padding in there, he thought. But he chalked it up to his memory being altered by vast amounts of medication. Further attempts to feel the damage were cut short by waves of paralyzing pain.
He was serious because he was in mortal danger in his new room, having been there for two days and suffering two serious injuries during that time. At this rate, he would be dead by Halloween. Twice over. A very timid knock came from the door. "Hello?" said the door. "Yeah" was enough to let the voice enter.
"Hi, Evelyn."
"Good morning, John. I brought you some soup," said Mrs. Cooper. "Thanks. I guess I am kind of hungry," said John Doe. John woke again in the morning, not nearly as irritated as he had been previously. To him, he saw it as another day with slightly less pain than yesterday. He liked the idea of one day living without the torment of this busted nose.
The surgeon had told him it would be about a week until he could take the bandages off, and then he'd need to return to get the stitches out and to make sure the nose was straight. They would have to re-break it and set it again if it wasn't healing right.
He would occasionally run his fingers along the bridge of what he thought was his nose to make sure it was still straight. occasionally, read that to mean every thirty seconds or so. Over on the dresser was a note from Evelyn, letting John know that she had washed all his clothes and put them away for him. She was doing some serious guilt work for him, but John let it happen.
Freshly laundered clothes would be kind of a kick. And though John was aware that he was a deep sleeper, he thought for sure he'd wake up if someone was putting his clothes in those creaky drawers only two feet from his head.
The medication must be working. He'd have to remember to get more of this stuff. He absently ran his hand through his hair and realized he hadn't had the opportunity to keep up the spikes. And the sides had grown in a bit. It felt like velveteen.
Whatever. He'd get back to that when he was on his feet and back at school. Which was his biggest problem.
By the time he could attend classes, three weeks would have passed. He knew he could let the registrar's office know he was sick and he could wait until next month to enroll, but what would that do to his grants and scholarships? He could see that the rest of his day was going to be spent on the phone. Picking out his only decent jeans and a big T-shirt, John went down the stairs to get it over with.
The phone would be his bitch. Hopefully, Mr. Cooper wasn't still angry at him. That would be pretty tough to deal with again. It's hard to stand your ground and look angry when you've got a mummy face. John was awakened the next day by a leaf blower. It wasn't unusual in the suburbs, but this was the first time it had happened to him.
He jumped up like a shot out of bed, again out of instinct. Looking through the drapes, he saw some guy blowing around leaves in the front yard. He wasn't really trying to do anything but blow them onto the neighbor's yard, which seemed like the lazy way out. John liked the guy's style.
He continued to watch for a little while as the blond-haired, well-built guy would do about two minutes worth of work and then take a smoke break.
He repeated this pattern three times before John finally decided to get on with his day. A lot of people get into habits and never seem to be able to break them. Like some sort of opiate, the routine one develops over time becomes a drug, controlling your actions and regulating your free will.
Many well-educated experts believe more evils have been perpetrated by people unwilling to break their routine than any disease or war ever known. Habits are tough to break. And as was John's habit, he put on the same sort of clothes he had put on every day for the last ten years. His jeans and his t-shirt—this time his tank top.
His hair neatly combed into place, John slipped on his tennies and went down for breakfast with the Coopers. One day, he told himself he'd break out of these nasty habits. Through a little bit of friendly interrogation, John was able to find out who the guy doing yard work was. A high schooler from down the block. His name was Wade, and he was just picking up some money to fix up his car. He had also been all-state in basketball last year, according to Mr. Cooper.
That guy did look the type, thought John. He asked to be excused, and he put his dishes in the sink. Back up in his room, John was annoyed to find that his tape player had conked out.
Permanently. It was a vital part of his strategy to kill a whole day stuck inside. Without this, he might have to resort to reading something. He prided himself on being able to avoid that sort of unpleasant duty. When Evelyn came in with today's laundry, John relayed his difficulty with his player.
Mrs. Cooper told him to wait there, as she would be right back. Moments later, she returned with a small box with a CD player and a number of CDs in it. It was obvious that the player had come from that girl's room downstairs by its pink, translucent casing. The CDs were a selection of boy bands from two years ago. Although this gesture was more along the lines of making the problem worse, John thanked Evelyn for her kindness. "But don't let Mr. Cooper find it; he'd never forgive me for disturbing Amy's room," she said. Amy.
So that was her name. When Mrs. Cooper left, John picked through the CDs. Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, Boys II Men, and a ton of Mariah Carey CDs.
Not only old stuff, but bad old stuff. It really didn't do much for him. John didn't really have any particular taste in music, so long as the guitars and screaming vocals were loud enough to obliterate any trace of rhythm or melody.
But he did turn on a Tupac record so that Evelyn would think that he was grateful. John was killing more time by trying to figure out how the hell Evelyn got his bedspread so tightly made. Possibly she had an extra limb she hadn't let on about. How else could you grab the side and tuck and fold at the same time?
Freakish stuff, he thought. Digging into Amy's box for more CDs, John noticed that the bottom of the box seemed to be made out of leather. Despite the innovations made by the corrugated paper board industry in their never-ending quest for excellence, John doubted that cardboard boxes had leather bottoms. Prying at the edge, John discovered that the leather bottom was in fact a book cover, almost exactly the same size as the box. It was the same light brown as the box, so it was pretty easy to figure out that Evelyn hadn't noticed it before putting the CDs in there. Pulling it free, he turned it over to discover the gold-leafed lettering that read "Diary."
5/3/98 Dear Diary, Am I the only one in the world who hates frozen yogurt? How can something that tastes so bad fool so many people? Whatever. I'm going out for cheerleading. I know. Kill me. But it's really the only opportunity to do anything, even vaguely related to dancing. Which is enough, I guess. I'm not really sure, okay? Leave me alone.
I'm worried in the back of my mind that I'll suffer some sort of spontaneous lobotomy, but being blonde and a cheerleader doesn't guarantee I have to be stupid, right? Like I said, kill me. When I've married and remarried six times, sold my internet company for billions, and I'm living in that villa in Rome, it will make an amusing anecdote. Yeah. Luvs, Amy. Typical dumb girl stuff, John thought.
He placed the book back in the box and decided to forget about it. It was the best morning yet for John. Today was the day the bandages came off. Since Evelyn was a registered nurse, John let her do it rather than trudge back into the hospital again.
After a nice light breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, and pastries, John was as eager as a puppy dog to get the damn wrappings off. Mrs. Cooper had put on what must have been her nurse's outfit back when she was working. She even had a red cross on her tiny hat thing. She had John sit down on the toilet in the bathroom as she slowly unwrapped the bandages with special tongs. With very delicate care, she removed them like an expert. One might have thought that she had applied them herself; she did it so well.
And when they were off, John saw the result.
A sickening scab went up the bridge of his nose and was decorated with five stitches. The ugly yellow and purple bruising extended all the way to his cheeks and down to his lips. And it was still quite swollen. It was a mess. But the nose was straight, and that meant he wasn't going to have it re-set. "Now, I can remove those stitches as well, dear; would you like that?" said nurse Evelyn. John readily agreed. As a boy who had withstood multiple piercings, he could easily take the stitch removal. Mrs. Cooper swabbed the nose with alcohol and something that numbed it a bit.
He didn't even feel it. It took the fun out of it for John. In no time at all, he had another smaller bandage applied to his nose, and he was feeling much better.
He thanked Mrs. Cooper and just couldn't wipe the smile off his face. This meant more to him than he thought it would. Mr. Cooper even seemed pleased with the result, as he was monitoring the proceedings from the bathroom doorway. Mr. Cooper nodded and smiled a broad smile.
But when John tried to make eye contact, Mr. Cooper's expression quickly deadened, and he briskly walked away. "Don't let Edgar get to you, dear. He's really just a big teddy bear," insisted Mrs. Cooper. "He's just a little guilty about the accident still. He doesn't know how to apologize."
"I don't care who you are, where you're from, what you did, as long as you love me. Who you are, where you're from..." said the CD player. "I don't care what you did, as long as you love me," continued John. He took the opportunity between songs to ruminate on why he had ignored these bands in the past. BSB had it going on. Was he really so stupid as to have ignored the obvious for so long?
Was he out of touch? Before he could work out another theorem on this, up came the next track. "Everybody, everybody, yeah, rock your body, yeah! Everybody, everybody, yeah, rock your body right! Backstreet's back alight!"
It was pure drivel, but it made perfect sense to John. In front of the mirror the Coopers had given him to check his face, John found that his hairbrush was an unusually effective substitute for a microphone and that those dance steps he saw in the video weren't as hard as they looked. What he also found was something that sent a quick chill through him. His piercings had healed up, and he could see his face unobscured. The bruises and scars had now faded away over the last few days, and now the scars were a deep pink. It was now obvious what shape his face had taken. And that shape wasn't right. It was very different. Why hadn't he noticed this earlier?
His nose was maybe half as big as it used to be. A nub compared to its previous size. It seemed to be slightly upturned. His cheeks seemed larger under his eyes, and even his lips seemed a bit puffier than they had been. Whatever that surgeon had done, he got it all wrong. He barely resembled the person he used to be. Anger welled up inside him. His rage rose and blew up into the rabid animal fury he had felt so often on the street. Then it subsided. John couldn't do anything about this. There was no one to find, no one to hurt. It was beyond his control.
He was a victim. He was the one who was being hurt. He was in trouble. Terrible trouble. Panicking, John threw on his sweats and fled in fear.
He scrambled down the stairs, ran from room to room, and found Evelyn. She was at her sewing table, darning John's socks, when he found her. "M-m-my face! Look at my face! What did they do to my face?"
"Calm down now, dear, calm down now," Mrs. Cooper pleaded. "Just breathe deeply, dear, and sit down. Tell me all about it."
Evelyn tenderly grasped John's hand as she led him to a chair. She didn't let go because John wouldn't let her. For a moment, John was even more confused when his eyesight suddenly started to fail.
A quick swipe at them with his hand revealed them to be something he hadn't done in over a decade. He was tearing up.
"They messed up! They got my face all wrong!" John whimpered.
"It's all sc-sc-screwed up!" John was out of his wits with panic. He couldn't understand what had happened. It was inconceivable that his face had reshaped itself into this monstrosity.
John fought through the heavy breaths and runny nose he had developed in his current state of hysteria. He should be filled with rage and anger. Instead, he was confused.
He was afraid. Slowly, Evelyn calmed the boy down and threw in generous dosages of hugging as she steered the boy back up to his room. "Just lie down, dear; you'll feel better after you rest."
John knew she was right. He always felt better after a rest. Awash in a fever of anguish, John tried to reconcile what had happened. Images flooded his head of the person he used to be. The person he was supposed to be. He couldn't keep them in focus for long. They would appear and vanish. He believed himself to be in a room full of people he knew. People he had known through his hard-luck days. The tough faces are worn and rugged.
Tense people, hunched and nervous, slowly milled about. John entered a room, and the door closed behind him. Fighting with the knob, he couldn't budge it. John was trapped. Then, after a moment, the door opened by itself. John exited and found that everyone had changed. People in nice clothes and friendly smiles. They were going about their business and seemed surprised to see him. They all turned. I was startled at first. Then John heard a snicker. Then a man chuckled. And then they all laughed at John. They laughed and laughed.
Evelyn was there with a cup of tea for the poor boy when he awoke a short time later. He gratefully accepted the tea and sipped it slowly, allowing it to calm his nerves.
"Now you were worried about your face, dear," said Evelyn, and another burst of panic swept through John. But this time, he steadied himself. "Yes. My face. The surgeons must have done something wrong," he said.
"Look at this; I brought you the pictures I took when you first came to apply for the room. Take a look at them, dear."
John looked at them. It's exactly how he used to look. His old face.
"Now look in my compact mirror, honey," Evelyn continued. John compared the two. It wasn't as different as he had thought. In fact, now taking a look at the picture and his face side-by-side, they seem identical. His nose might even be cuter now. That was good. "I'm sorry, Evelyn. I guess I don't know what I was thinking. I honestly can't see the difference now," apologized John. "But I was so sure that something was wrong.
I can't.
I don't..."
"Here, now," Evelyn interrupted, gently taking John's chin in her hand. "I bet you were worried about those scars. They'll clear up in a month or two, and you'll never even know they were there. But let me show you a trick for right now."
Evelyn flipped to another compartment on her compact and took out a brush. She dabbed it with some gunk and then applied it to John's face. "Wow! That's great!" said John. The scars were now completely invisible. "Show me that again!" John was standing at the mirror, getting the shade exactly right to cover his scar. It would only be a few more weeks, and he wouldn't need to worry about it anymore. He had already gone through two of Evelyn's compacts and was starting his third.
If it weren't for this make-up, he'd never get out of this house. But so far, he has only taken two excursions. One, a trip to the college registrar's office to sign up for the next term. After two full weeks of telephone tag, John had managed to keep possession of the lucrative windfall of money he had gotten as a grant. That is, if you count an educational grant as lucrative. The second was to a department store to get him some new stuff to wear. Slowly but surely, he had misplaced most of his stuff and was now down to a couple of shirts and a pair of shorts. With some assistance from the educational grant money, he was able to get a nice haul of stuff. He got new boots, some jogging shoes, and some athletic socks.
He picked up a dozen or so cheap t-shirts and one or two button-downs for a change-up. Adding a few pairs of jeans in blue and black, he was set. Of course, the weather was getting colder outside, and that meant winter wear. So, he procured a nice, puffy blue ski jacket and a ski cap. Adding to that, he got a couple more knit hats, because he rightly figured you could never have enough, and then a pair or two of ski pants.
And, of course, you can't get enough scarves either. Topping it off, he got a pair or two of snow boots, the big puffy kind, in silver.
When John got home, he was eager to show off his newfound consumerism. Years of living in the bad part of town had limited his previous shopping experiences to stores of ill repute and the occasional pharmaceutical spending spree.
This was unlike anything he'd done before. And, as such, he wanted to make sure he'd gotten things right. He remembered when he had gotten home from the shopping trip to find the Coopers sitting in the living room as if they were waiting for him to return.
He displayed what he had purchased and found that Mr. Cooper seemed almost disappointed in what he had selected. Mrs. Cooper was as supportive as she could be, as was her nature, but even she seemed a bit unimpressed. If not just plain dejected.
But now this morning, as he finished up with his concealer, he returned to leaf through his new apparel yet once again. Maybe in the clear calm light of day, he would discover what the Coopers seemed disgruntled with. There was his new pair of booties, a few pairs of kids, and bobby socks. The tank tops and sweatshirts. The jeans and stretchy leggings in blue and black. Nothing "wrong" with that, he decided.
He had the puffy blue ski jacket, the knit hat, the beret, the thermal leggings, and those cute scarves. And those rad snow boots. If the Coopers were having a problem with this, it was obvious that they were projecting their disappointments in life onto him.
These clothes were fine, and he didn't need to explain himself to anybody. So there. A steady repetition of sound from outside John's window signaled that what he had gotten up so early for was now beginning. The sound of a shovel ker-chunking into the show followed by a quick swish of that snow being propelled into the air meant that Wade was clearing the driveway outside. John put his new winter stuff on and headed downstairs. He wanted to meet this kid.
It had been a long time since he had actually talked to anybody who was on his side of the closer-to-birth-than-death age barrier. John was actually a little nervous to be trudging out in the six-inch deep snow, knowing there was no real excuse he could think of for going out there and "accidentally" talking to the guy.
He was going to look pretty obvious. That is until Mrs. Cooper placed a thermos in John's hand and asked him to bring it out to poor freezing Wade.
Excuse covered. Coolness retained. He tried to look unconcerned with Wade's welfare as he handed over the thermos to Wade, limply offering it and saying:
"Mrs. Cooper's idea."
"Hi. Thanks. Wade," Said Wade.
"My name's Wade."
He redundantly continued.
"Yeah," was John's contribution. Wade had looked a lot taller from above, John thought. He was actually only eye-high on John. Well, a lot of people were. John was six-two. "You're the renter, right?" Wade ventured.
"Yeah," John confirmed.
"Cold day," Wade added after a minute or so.
"Doesn't usually snow 'til December," said John. "Not round here."
Wade stated. "Nope," concluded John. After another ten minutes of watching Wade smoke, shovel, and sip, John headed back in with the drained thermos.
He was so relieved to be back in touch with his peers. Conversation like this was going to do a world of good for him.
John developed a routine of bringing the thermos out to Wade every morning. It was really the only appointment he had in his life, and he was making it into a bit of a production. He would lay his clothes out in the evening so he'd be ready in the morning. Not letting Mrs. Cooper have all the fun, John started making the hot chocolate for Wade himself.
And he would add a little bit of cinnamon some days, others nutmeg, and even sometimes he snuck a little "bite" into it.
That had led to John chipping in on making breakfast with Mrs. Cooper in the morning. Evelyn was much less lucid at 5 am, and that made for a far more interesting conversation. Mr. Cooper had become quite used to the smell of coffee combined with the chatter of the two as he awoke every morning. Even Edgar seemed a little more agreeable in the morning, but that may have had more to do with a table full of food put before him.
Under John's influence, he started to gently steer Cooper's calorie-loaded breakfast a little more towards the fresh fruit and fiber end of the spectrum, but with limited success. It resembled a continental breakfast, in the sense that it could conceivably feed an entire continent. Conversely, John found his own appetite wither over time, so that he was down to just carrying an orange back up to his room after cooking, rather than sitting down with the folks.
Besides, his attempts to try and get on Mr. Cooper's good side were meeting with the most frigid of cold shoulders. After waiting in his room for a while, John would return downstairs to help Evelyn out a little with the housework, while Mr. Cooper was working in the basement. The basement door was always locked, using an oddly modern code-lock keypad thing. She had express instructions not to get near the door.
Ever. It was during one average afternoon that John learned the history of Mr. Cooper from Evelyn. Evidently, he had been a two-star general in the Army only up until a few years ago when he retired. Evelyn wasn't altogether clear with John on what he did in the Army, but John was led to believe it was research-related rather than combat-related.
They had met back in the final days of the Vietnam War, both twenty years old, and headed back home on a plane to Hawaii. And before they had left Honolulu for San Francisco, they had married.
Only 36 hours after the meeting. They had a daughter named Jane, but that's John he could get.
This 'Jane' subject was a closed matter. Using his devious nature in the subtlest way, John tried to let Evelyn escape the Jane question by asking her about the equally mysterious Amy question. The ploy worked.
Amy was Jane's daughter and had come to live with them, for undisclosed reasons. And to what must have been total heartbreak, she then ran away about a year ago. But as Evelyn got choked up, she quickly steered the conversation off a cliff, talking about her troubles with lime deposits on the shower head and the unseasonable weather. Regardless of her cunning subterfuge, John now had a clue as to why they had rented a room for free. They just wanted someone around.
Comments
Amanda
Progressing nicely. Has the tempo of possibly being a substantial story.😂💁♀️
