by Zoe X Rider
Charlie in a Red Dress
This is a work of fiction, etc. etc. All characters depicted are over the age of 18. Any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
Copyright 2014 by Zoe X. Rider
Published by Hela Press
http://www.helapress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law. To request permission and for all other inquiries, contact Zoe Rider at [email protected].
Cover design by Heather Lackey. Images © Depositphotos.com/MyVector, larisa12, Helioshammer
ISBN: 978-1-940635-13-2
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Summary
When Charlie agrees to go to a Halloween keg party as the “girlfriend” half of a boyfriend-and-girlfriend costume with his best friend, Jeff, he has no idea what he’s signing up for. The night of the party, Jeff’s older sister tweezes, squeezes, and transforms Charlie into Charli, a curvy, curly-haired brunette in a flare-skirted red dress. The shoes are hell, but the attention Charli gets at the party—especially from Jeff—goes straight to her head. When Jeff walks her to her door at the end of the night, neither of them is quite ready to give up the act.
Charlie in a Red Dress
Outside the bathroom in his sister’s apartment, Jeff loaded me down with pink plastic bottles. “This is for your leg and chest hair, this one’s for your beard, and this one’s for…you know.” That one said “Sensitive Bikini Cream.”
“I can’t use all this stuff at once.” I was stripped down to my jeans, self-conscious of my sparse sprigs of manly chest hair. I mean, I knew I’d have to shave for this, but.
“I don’t think a person can smear all these chemicals over 90% of their body and survive,” I said. “It probably says so on the label somewhere.”
“You’ll be fine.” He grasped my shoulders and turned me toward the door.
“Lydia!” I called down the hall. “Tell him I shouldn’t do this!”
“You’ll be fine, Charlie.”
I don’t know why I asked his sister to back me up. After all these years, I should know better.
“Go on,” Jeff said.
The bottles warmed as I hugged them to my stomach. “But why the bikini stuff? It’s a Halloween party, not a strip show.”
“It’s all up here.” Jeff tapped the side of his head with two fingers. “You’re not going to feel like a woman if you’ve got a bush between your legs.”
“Women have bushes. They grow naturally. I’ve seen them.”
“It’s not the trend. Go.”
“The bush isn’t the thing between my legs that’s going to be the problem.” I stopped and turned again, one of the bottles threatening to spill free. “Tell me you do not have a cream to get rid of that too.”
He laughed and pulled the door shut on me.
This had all started when Jeff showed me the Facebook Event invite on his phone. “We should go dressed as boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Yeah? Who gets stuck being the girlfriend?”
He’d cocked an eyebrow. I’d balked. He made the point that he’d make a terrible chick, and I’d be uncomfortable showing up with a date three inches taller than me, sporting the kind of beard that starts growing back before he’s even put the razor away.
I wanted to argue him on that. If I could find a girl I got along with as well as I got along with Jeff, I wouldn’t care if she had five o’clock shadow.
Well, maybe.
“Besides,” he’d said, “I always thought you’d make a smokin’ girl. Not that you’re effeminate or anything. Don’t’ take it that way.”
To prove my manliness, I’d slugged him in the shoulder.
Jeff and I grew up a few blocks from each other, but we didn’t start hanging out until fourth grade, when we wound up in detention on the same day. I know some places they hold it during the week, but our school corralled all the troublemakers together on Saturday, probably to inconvenience our parents so they’d came down hard enough on us to make sure we didn't act up again. Being as he and I lived bike-riding distance from school, none of our parents were inconvenienced. At the end of the detention period, as we were unlocking our bikes, Jeff said, “It’s a shame to waste a nice day. Want to go play some Resident Evil?” My parents didn’t even want me to mention games like that, so naturally I said, “Shit yeah.” We rode off to his house and spent that bright afternoon in a dark basement, eating Cheetos and spilling Vanilla Coke on the floor. And here we were, thirteen or so years later, still hanging out.
The truth was, I didn’t mind being the girl. It sounded like fun, sashaying up to guys and girls alike, batting my eyelashes. Maybe I could drive us there and get the chance to flirt my way out of a ticket. Hey—I could score a date and have lesbian sex, right?
In reality, I’d probably twist my foot on the way out the door and spend the night hanging onto Jeff’s shoulder while my ankle swelled around the strappy pumps that waited for me in Lydia’s bedroom.
To make up for the fact that he didn’t really have to dress up at all—being the “boyfriend” was the easy half—Jeff had footed the bill for most of the stuff we’d need. Stuff I hadn’t even thought of. I figured we’d borrow a dress and some panty hose and hit the Halloween shop for a cheap wig, but we went through web page after web page, him determined to make me not look like a closet transvestite. “Let’s really fuck with people’s heads,” he’d said, his face lit by the glow of breast forms, of wigs, of cute little dresses. “Think Claudia Charriez, not Eddie Izzard.”
I wasn’t even sure I could pull off Eddie Izzard, but I could probably be a little fabulous if I had enough to drink. And didn’t wind up with my leg in a cast.
“Who’s Claudia Charriez?” I’d asked.
“Never mind,” he’d said quietly, and clicked on a site that sold high heels for men.
The hair-removal creams smelled like burning hair before I even slathered them on.
Lydia yelled through the door, “Make sure you read the directions. Do you need something to time it with? Because you don’t want to fuck up and leave that stuff on too long.”
I was already naked, so no way was I opening the door for Jeff’s sister to hand me a timer. I pulled up the Alarm app on my phone. “I’m good!”
I started with my legs—they’re easy to reach, and I was less worried about losing them to chemical burns. The cream went on cool, but by the time I was slathering my second leg, the first tingled with a vaguely itchy warmth.
I was going to have to do this in three goes, because no way was I putting the bikini stuff on my balls without finding out how much damage the full-strength did to the rest of me first.
I played Angry Birds while the timer counted down, then I rinsed off all my hair in the shower, watching it swirl and pile up on the drain like a soggy bird’s nest. After wiping it up with Kleenex and dropping the sopping wads in the trash, I braved the face cream, slathering my cheeks, jaw, and nearly down to my throat, where the edges of my beard reached. I’d shaved this morning, so there wasn’t much to remove, but as I looked at my creamy beard of hair removal lotion, I realized I had sideburns. I mean, I knew I had sideburns; they just hadn’t been a consideration before. Like, ever.
Of course I have sideburns. I’m a guy. So I slathered those too and went back to Angry Birds to wait it out.
The timer beeped off, and back into the shower I went.
I was going to be the cleanest girl at the party.
The bikini cream waited on the sink. I really didn’t have to do it—I mean, who would know? On the other hand, I’d seen the little red panties I’d be wearing. And Jeff had a point: walking around with a bush sproinging out the sides of that scrap of fabric would make it hard to get into character, even if no one but Jeff and Lydia knew about it.
The other creams hadn’t been too irritating—even the vaguely sunburny feel was fading already—and I assumed the bikini cream was even less harsh. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Or, well, lost, in this case. I kept one eye closed as I applied the cream to all my delicate areas—right up to and including my ass crack.
I perched carefully on the toilet with the lid up and watched the clock on the phone. It was such a girl bathroom. There was toilet paper on the holder, instead of on the floor. Spares were neatly arranged in a basket. The reading material on the toilet tank was Cosmo, something Lydia would claim she just read for the eyerolls.
Glass shelves next to the bathroom mirror were stacked with cosmetics. A blow dryer sat on the counter, plugged into the GFCI outlet. A ceramic jar—the kind my mom might keep spatulas and wooden spoons in—held hair irons that looked like torture devices. I clamped my butthole shut as too-intimate thoughts involving the metal rod with the spiral curling around it flashed into my brain.
The cream tingled. Not in an entirely bad way.
You know, if I liked the way this looked, I could keep doing it. ‘Hairless’ seemed to be the trend for guys these days too. Well, guy models at least. No one would confuse me for one of those.
The alarm went off. I headed in for my third shower of the evening.
After cleaning the latest bird’s nest out of the drain, I toweled off and looked at myself in the mirror.
I was ten years old again, just taller and a little more filled out. Up till I was thirteen or so, I thought was going to grow up like the Dawson side of the family: lean and tall. Then I blossomed into a Hauer. Except for a period around fourteen and fifteen, I haven’t been overweight, or even near the top of my weight range, but even when I’ve slimmed down, I’m still “soft”—a little bit of overhang at the lip of waistband, a hint of moob under my T-shirt. I hoped Jeff liked curvy girls.
But, then, this was his idea. If he’d wanted a skinny date, he could have asked John.
I pulled my jeans back on and headed out of the bathroom, wondering if I looked that much different from the waist up.
Jeff, his arm thrown across the back of Lydia’s couch, said, “Finally,” when I walked in. He rolled his head toward Lydia, “You’re up.”
She had a leg hooked over the arm of the chair, her bunny-slippered foot jiggling. Her gaze appraised me. I wondered if she was hiding the impossibility of the task behind that passive expression.
Sliding lock of dark hair behind a gauged ear, she said, “We can work with this.”
Well. Good. I guess.
Back into the bathroom I went, with her black-and-white zig-zagged nails pinching my arm.
“We’re going for a classic look. That’s always the safest bet.”
“I was hoping to be Jeff’s smart-ass punk girlfriend,” I said as she flipped down the toilet lid before steering me onto it.
“What’s you’re name going to be?” she asked.
That I hadn’t thought of.
Jeff had come to lean against the doorjamb, looking me over as she fingered through her cosmetics.
“You can go with something similar to your real name,” she said, gathering a clutch of brushes. “Charlene, maybe.”
Ugh. It made me think of Charlene Piper from sixth grade, who always raised her hand when the teacher asked a question, and always said, “Should you really be doing that?” whenever she caught me doing something I probably shouldn’t really be doing.
“‘Charlie’ can be a girl’s name too,” Jeff said. “Like Charlie’s Angels.”
“Seriously?” Lydia shot him a look as she arranged make-up on the floor in front of my bare toes. “There’s always Charlize.”
“Charleasy. Charleaze the sleaze. Oh yeah, that’ll be great,” Jeff said. “How about just drop the ‘e.’ She can be ‘Charli with an i.’”
“That’d be easier to remember to answer to.” I scratched my arm. It itched, and it hadn’t even been doused in hair removal cream.
“Whatever floats your boat, Charli-with-an-I,” Lydia said. She rubbed a pad in a beige compact and started dabbing my face.
My nose wrinkled at the smell. Like kissing my mother on the cheek.
“We’re going to need to do something about those eyebrows. I should have started with that.” She traded the compact for tweezers.
“Ow.” I flinched as she yanked hairs out of my skin.
“Beauty is pain,” she said, and I said, “Ouch—how many more?” as I gripped the toilet seat.
“Don’t worry. We’re going for the Brooke Shields look instead of the Gwen Stefani look.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means it’ll be over in a few minutes instead of an hour.”
“Oh. Good. Ouch.”
She rubbed lotion over the angry areas. I didn’t blame them for being angry. If someone ripped me out by the root, I’d be cranky as shit. When she picked the compact back up, I relaxed.
As she layered the creams and powders on, tilting my head so she could brush and blend under my jaw, I began to feel like I was being painted into a mask.
She had me look upward and tickled my lashes with the wand of a brush. I blinked uncontrollably, which just made her tighten her grip on my chin and say, “Will you hold still?”
When she was satisfied, and my eyelashes were heavy with the gunk she’d brushed on them, she traded the wand in for a lip pencil and grasped my chin again. It tugged as she drew around the edge of my mouth. Then she colored my lips with a red stick that swirled up from a tube.
“Do this.” She rounded her lips in, pressing them together. I did it. The lipstick made my lips tacky.
“Do I look like a meth-addicted hooker?” I asked.
The corner of her mouth twitched as she covered my lips with gloss. “You’re fine. You have naturally thick eyelashes. The eyeliner really brings out your to-kill-for green eyes. And your lips are pretty plump for a white guy. I wish I had a better lipstick shade for your coloring, but I hardly ever wear the stuff. You’ll be fine, though. Red is classic.”
The gloss smelled like sugar-drenched strawberries.
“Now that you don’t have caveman eyebrows anymore, your features look softer.” She closed the container. “This might actually work.”
“Yeah, that’s not bad at all,” Jeff said from the doorway, his hands in his back pockets.
I started to get up to have a look, and Jeff intervened, swinging me away from the mirror and dragging me out before I could catch a glimpse. “Wait for the full transformation. Otherwise all you’ll be thinking is that you look weird.”
‘Ridiculous’ was probably more like it. Lydia was good with make-up—I mean, judging from the way she puts herself together. But I doubted she could work miracles.
He led me into her bedroom, where we had my outfit laid out. Lydia’s personal space looked pretty much the same as it had when she was a teenager. Clothes hung from the corners of things, shoes spilled from the closet, books sat piled by the bed, the top one open and flipped over to keep her place. The standing mirror in the corner was half obscured by scarves. Before I could get a glimpse of myself in it, Jeff draped a pea coat over it. Damn. I chewed my bottom lip, tasted fake strawberries, and made myself stop before I scraped it all off.
“Do you want to do this?” Jeff asked, his voice going right over my shoulder. My bra, black with satiny cups, dangled from his fingers.
“Let Charli do it,” Lydia said. “She has to learn sometime.”
“You know,
I don’t really plan on getting in and out of my bra a bunch at the party,” I said.
“Even so, it’s good to know.” She grasped the front of the bra. When she let go, the cups fell apart from each other. “We got a front clasp to make it easier. Try it on.”
I let Jeff slip it on my arms like he was helping me into a coat. Once it reached my shoulders, with the cups hanging loose, it felt more like a double holster. I could have a pistol in each armpit. Ba-bang!
“Just hook the clasp together,” Lydia said. She drank from a can of Diet Coke that had been sitting on the nightstand when we’d walked in. I wondered how long it had been there. She was a grazer when it came to drinks, leaving them like oases in every room.
I stretched the band of the bra to pull the flimsy little plastic pieces into reach of each other. I wasn’t sure how they fit together, but I gave it a try or two, the bra cutting into my skin as I pulled to get more slack.
“You’re going to stretch it all out,” Jeff said. “Here.” He stepped in with his head bent, his fingers taking over from mine. The band loosened a little, then pulled tight, then relaxed again as the fastener clicked into place. He tugged the band down, straightening it, shifting it side to side to get all my chest fat more or less in the cups.
When he stepped back, I cradled the cups so my moobs spilled into them, and said, “I don’t even need the implants.”
“For the zillionth time,” Lydia said, “they’re not ‘implants.’ We’re not performing surgery here, though if you use that word one more time, I might be tempted to get out an X-acto knife and make your wish come true.”
I clasped the bra closer to my chest.
“At any rate, the breast forms will make a huge difference.” She fingered one of the cups away to look inside. “You’re not even an A, darling, and we bought Cs to offset your shoulders.”
She’d been harping on my shoulders. They were rounded, she gave me that, but broad enough that it would ‘ruin the illusion’ if we didn’t ‘fool the eye.’ Hence the V-necked dress. I’d wanted to go with something sleek, like a torch singer—or Claire Underwood’s sheaf dresses in House of Cards. “That’s ‘classic,’ right?” I’d said. But the issue of telltale bulges had come up.
