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Blue Moon 2.2

by Donna Lamb

Outside, the wind from the desert mountains blew down the inner valleys through the passes and into the city, hot as the breath of some ancient baby-eating oven-god. Not six weeks since Christmas and the thermometer would probably peak at a ninety-five sometime the next afternoon. The local gringos call this hot winter wind “the Santa Ana,” thinking it’s named for the nearby city and one of the mountain passes. But they’re misinformed; in Spanish it's called “la Santana,” the Devil.

In the kitchen, Richard took a slug of a cold boutique-brewery beer straight from a longneck to get the gritty taste of the wind out of his mouth. His sinuses always hurt when the desert wind blew; he hated it but he didn't complain about it. Life in Los Angeles had its compensations for a handsome young man getting paid to drive a big car, sometimes carrying famous people but more often just teenagers on a date. Most of the time, the weather lived up to its hype and when it didn't, well, at least it wasn't raining. Richard didn’t like rain; since he drove for a living he knew that no one in L.A. knew how to drive in the rain.

He debated watching television on the big screen in the living room but he could still hear Joel whimpering in the bathroom. He really hadn’t expected it to hit the guy so hard. Joel was skinny and geeky but not really bad-looking; he probably didn’t get dates because of a basic lack of self-confidence. Which having the first date you’ve gotten in months stolen by your roommate probably didn’t help, Richard admitted to himself. How could he make it up to the poor guy?

Hey, he could get poor Joel another date. Maybe with one of the girls he knew? He wandered into his bedroom and booted up his ancient Gateway computer with the Holstein decals on the side. Who could he set up Joel with; it would probably have to be some girl who wasn’t too mad at him, personally. Ouch, thought Richard, that narrows it right down. He was still searching through LiveJournal and MySpace pages looking for prospects who hadn’t banned him from their webspace when Joel wandered in, looking lost and strangely appealing.

* * *

Joel had gotten dressed again in the regular clothes she’d left lying on the bathroom floor. They still fit, but oddly. The shirt seemed miles too big in the shoulders, with the seams hanging halfway down her upper arms and the ends of the too-wide sleeves flapping at her elbows. Putting the underpants back on would have made her cry again, and besides, they just would not fit her new wider butt. The once roomy jeans now felt like a second skin and she just could not get the waistband up properly; it hung on her hips inches below her waist which seemed to have migrated upward.

After discarding her male underpants in the hamper and moaning to herself, “I’m going to have to wear p-p-panties,” she turned to look at herself in the mirror again. “I look like a girl wearing her b-b-boyfriend's clothes,” she complained. The jeans seemed to emphasize her new curves and the ill-fitting polo shirt gave her a waifish air.

She waved a hand above her head, measuring herself against the door frame; her height seemed to be about the same, a fraction of an inch short of five-foot-eleven. But her legs looked longer and her arms shorter, her hips too wide and her eyes too big. Her small breasts hardly showed through the thick fabric of her shirt but she knew they were there; they’d reacted to the coarseness of the shirt pulled over them with tingly, shivery, not-unpleasant messages that went straight to somewhere Joel didn’t want to think about.

She wiped at her mouth, even it looked wrong. Her eyes had red rims from crying and her nose shone red like a clown’s from too vigorous wiping. Well, it would run when she cried; it always had and that hadn’t changed. She sniffled and used another tissue which she discarded in the round little wastebasket by the bowl. Richard always missed though he could throw a beer can straight into the trashcan from clear across the kitchen. She sniffed again, deciding that Richard must have some connection with her predicament.

Before leaving the bathroom, she stepped briefly on the scales. “One twenty-nine?” she whispered, “I’ve lost almost forty p-p-pounds? It doesn’t make any sense!” Just for a moment, her hand drifted to her newly flat crotch, contemplating that more emotional loss.

Distracted, and surely she had reason, she struggled with the bathroom door before remembering that she had locked it to keep Richard out. Thumbing the latch open she wandered left down the hall toward Richard’s room after dithering a moment about going to her own room to fling herself across the bed and start wailing again. Maybe she should call her mother? Shuddering at that thought, she continued on to Richard’s door and knocked lightly on the frame.

Richard looked up, smiling and looking not at all ashamed, which he ought to, thought Joel. “Hey, guy?” said Richard.

“My dinkle’s gone,” said Joel in a voice both higher than before and still somehow sounding husky.

“Sorry to hear that,” said Richard, keeping his face serious. Cellphone? PDA? What the heck was a dinkle? he wondered. “Have you looked in the couch cushions?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s gone, and it’s all your f-fault.”

“Well, I haven’t seen it,” Richard protested. At least Joel didn’t look angry at him, he thought, just sad. “Can you afford a new one?”

Joel frowned. She hadn’t planned this conversation out and it wasn’t going anywhere she expected. “What’s a good thing to get drunk on if you don’t want to be sick in the morning?” she asked suddenly.