Bx Drops
Chapter II
Jake set the bag of Bx Drops on the kitchen counter, and found two mugs in a tired-looking cabinet. He filled both of them with water, and then grabbed a handful of Drops. The wrapping twisted open, like chocolate truffles, and if you smoothed out the foil you could read the Drop’s effect on the silver interior. This one said Tall, which he wrapped back up, twisting both ends back together. He tried another. Twin.
Twin? Hmm. That seemed ambiguous. Thankfully, the wrappers would explain more, if you asked them, which he did—and the writing shimmered before him, it changed—no, it hadn’t shimmered, it had always been like this—urgh, disorienting—and now it said—Say name at mixing to designate who drinker will be twin of. Hm, sounded fun, but Jake wanted the girls (and himself, for that matter) like they are for now. Nice and distinct and separate. He wrapped the Drop back up, feeling the reality wooziness in his head, a bit like he had spun around a few times.
He was looking forward to Emily arriving. How long had he been perving on her? Since forever, hah, since that first time he saw Hannah, a classmate, get out of that car, and another girl got out, nice legs in tight shorts, not just a girl but a GIRL. Hannah’s little sister, looking around her big blue eyes like an unreal improvement on Hannah.
Hannah was crazy hot in isolation, no disputes there. But when put side by side with Emily… it was like Hannah suddenly became misshapen. Legs wrongly proportioned, hips and ass clearly deficient, at least when compared to how obvious and insanely cute Emily was, with better tits and much, much lovelier eyes, long-lashed doe eyes, fresh-looking skin and perfectly sculpted hips…
Too bad she was such a gunning over-achiever. She wasn’t even that smart, Jake thought angrily—just earnest at it, prioritized it, and helped that people were delighted just to be around her, talking about opening doors. Interviewing for her fancy colleges must have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Oh, he was going to have fun with her.
He looked at the two mugs thoughtfully. But what to mix into Hannah’s glass, though? He hadn’t expected her to be here, just Emily. It was a delightful wrinkle, but a wrinkle all the same. It was too bad he was limited by the Drops he had. They were such a strange fucking collection, and what it even more frustrating was that they were all unorganized. It was slow going, having to unwrap them and re-wrap them, just to see what they did. Why couldn’t they just say what they wanted on the outside?
He would have to take a Drop himself to get her to take her own Drop. He’d have to plop it in the water, where whatever miracle dimensional particles or whatever would mingle with the liquid. He’d handle Emily when she arrived.
He went through the Drops, not entirely sure what he was looking for. Wealth—Pet Owner—pet owner? The hell?—Hair color—Intense erotic love—well, how could he resist that one. He asked the wrapper for more explanation, and it shimmered and said: Say name at mixing to designate who drinker suddenly has intense erotic love for. Jackpot. Let’s go. He dropped the Bx Drop into Hannah’s water, and it started dissolving viciously, like an angry purple dye tablet.
He leaned over the mug. He was about to say ‘Jake,’ but then a better idea suddenly took him. “Emily. Intense erotic love for Emily,” he said. Hehe. That’d throw her for a loop.
What else? Let’s find some good ones. He unwrapped a few more, read the qualities—Foreign Language—Athletic Skill—Ass—Tattoos—hm, that last one seemed interesting. More information, please. The wrapper shimmered.
“Jake?” Hannah called from the room.
“Just a minute!” he said.
Say what tattoos drinker has, and when they received them.
He dropped it into Hannah’s cup. “She has a… a cool sleeve! Got it last week.” Shit, was that specific enough? He shrugged. The Bx Drop started bubbling, this one was red, it bouncing on the bottom of the mug up and down slowly as it dissolved.
He looked back at the door—how much time did he have? He maybe had time for one more. He was getting nervous, he felt a familiar kind of unease and skittishness. Scavenger, his stepmom had called him once when she was drunk, and that had hurt. He just wanted to get this finished before Emily came back. No tripping at the finish line, no reason to risk anything here. That could be bad.
His hands shook as he unwrapped more. Sadistic—Brilliant—No hands—“what the fuck?” Jake muttered—then finally Jealous. Here we go. A story was appearing. More information, he asked of the wrapper, and he felt a small twinge in his eye as he looked over the new wrapper—it said Say what/who taker is jealous off at mixing. Jake plopped it into Hannah’s mug. “Hannah is jealous of Emily,” he said. This would be fun.
He wanted to have fun.
Into his own mug, he put the Ass drop. He considered the Brilliant drop, but wasn’t entirely certain yet what that would do to him. Probably it was best to take things slow. In any case, he was already pretty damn confident of his own intelligence.
He grabbed the mugs by the handles and took them back into the somewhat cramped living room, carpet on the floor, an old framed Catholic painting of Jesus on the wall that looked like it was from 1930. Hannah was on the futon, her legs curled underneath her worriedly. She had a pillow in an unconscious kind of Teddy Bear grip, and looked deep in thought. She did kind of look like an angel, Jake thought. The two sisters cherished across the small town. He handed her her mug of new reality.
She took it with both hands and looked into it nervously.
“I’m not sure I… like this,” she said tentatively.
“Definitely don’t do it if you don’t want too!” he said supportively, with a kind cheerfulness. “You can watch me, and see if this works.” He put his mug to his lips, and let a sip enter his mouth. It touched his tongue and stung with sweetness. This was his second time trying a Bx Drip—as before, he felt a kind of compulsion for it, like he was desperately thirsty for it, he started gulping it down involuntarily, tilting the mug back, drinking drinking until it was gone. Hannah watched him wide-eyed. His stomach gurgled oddly.
“There’s just… a better rump in these?” she asked.
“I hope so!” he joked. “New rear, here I come.” He thought about how he’d be able to alter their lives, anyway he wanted, practically, and felt a warm glow. A new them. Hannah 2.0. Mmm. He felt a strange kind of twinge below his waist, like a muscle spasm.
“Is anything… happening,” Hannah asked.
Ass.
He could feel the word, it came to mind almost like an intention, a growing ripple that passed through him. It was followed by another twinge, it was like a stomach rumble, only originating behind his pelvis. He looked stupidly over his shoulder to try to see if anything was happening. This was gonna be a weird experience, he had always been a skinny kid, constantly eating more to try to gain weight, hours and hours in his dad’s basement with the free weights, trying to get some heft to him, and when at his mom’s house, staring frustratedly at the mirror at his twig-like stature, but…
Ass.
He wiped his brow. Was he sweating? He hadn’t remembered that correctly, that was odd. At his mom’s, at the mirror—hadn’t he always focused on his ass? Like, what else was he going to look at? It was his one slightly redeeming feature outside of his face with his nice eyes—a butt that looked pretty good. It had an obvious kind of well-formed aestheticness to it. Not the macho feature he had wanted, he would have traded it at a pound for an ounce of biceps or abs. But the girls seemed to appreciate it, so who was he to… Wait.
Ass.
He shivered. He could feel something warping, but he didn’t want to fight it. Let it all go. Why fight it? He felt a memory come over his horizon, like something he couldn’t have recalled before seeing an unexpected memento. His man-butt. Of course. No, don’t fight it. His ass had always been his one true gift. A truly stand out feature, a post-me-on-Reddit kind of feature.
He felt a tension in his stomach, and a sort of rearranging feeling below, behind his pelvis, a soreness, a tingling along the edges followed by a sense of swelling, reshaping, a hardening.
Remember how red he felt in seventh grade? Came back from summer and the tall girls all giggled at him when he walked to his desk, and they kept doing it, it was like an obsession all year. Jake blushed, just remembering it.
God, he had hated it, he had thought he had looked stupid. But he had eventually come to love it, hadn’t he? It was athletic, ample, firm, perfect—adjectives were easy, the eyes followed him as he walked away, everywhere he went. Jake’s blush turned to a glow of pleasure. He felt a pushing against the fabric of his underwear, his shorts. All these memories.
One of his Tinder photos was just a picture of him in well-tailored pants. “I usually don’t even care about men below the waist until it’s too late haha” a gorgeous girl had messaged him… last Thursday “but DAMN.”
A wave of dizziness passed over him, and he fell back onto the comfy chair. He landed funny, it didn’t feel write, like someone had put an extra pad on the chair.
“Oof,” he said.
“Jake, are you okay?” Hannah asked him. There was real concern in her voice. She half-got up, her slender fingers tugging on her ponytail in concern. Her blue eyes seemed large. Then she gave a funny wobble, like she was dizzy too. Was she having memory changes too?
Ass.
“I’m… fine,” he said. He felt different sitting, a feeling that was both intensely familiar, natural—but also strange. Remember that dance as a freshman at college? Some girl had actually groped him! A senior girl, it turned out, she had been tipsy, and Jake leveraged it to strike up a conversation with her, told her lots of charming lies—god, lies were easy for him—likes that his parents were rich, that he liked the same hobbies she did. The started making out in the corner, her hands relentlessly gripping his ass, constantly, like it was something so wonderful it couldn’t quite be contained. Perfectly muscled, girls found it fascinated to touch.
His LAN friends mocked him for it. “America’s ass,” they called him.
Were these memories… real? They had felt somewhat distant at first, but they were feeling closer and closer to him, the sensory experiences realer and realer. He felt like he could push against these changes, if he wanted too. But he didn’t. He just wanted to lean into it. If there was a thread leading to the old reality, the old normal, it was slowly withering and disappeared. Spooling back into itself, into nothingness, never happened—just let go and embrace the new—the thought came, and he shuddered ad the power of the thought.
Okay, he thought. Okay. And then it was done. He knew. He just knew. This was him now. Jake the Ass Man. He could feel a set of distorted memories in him, they were parallel memories, like crumpled photographs, of an alternate self, somewhere else, existing like a well-imagined scenario. Or a dream one was waking from, maybe.
Okay. He looked at Hannah. “I think it… worked,” he said, feeling a bit exhausted. She was perched on her knees, looking at him. Her mug was still in her hand.
“Really?” she said. “Can I, um… see it?” She wanted to know if it worked. Like, did it really? She suddenly felt ravenously curious. After all, it was always fun seeing his ass, it… Wait. She hadn’t seen it before… had she? No, never. Or had she, like just seen it ago? Minutes ago, stared at it while he went into the kitchen. This was confusion.
Jake stood up, pulled down his pants to show is under where, and gave a practiced little butt shimmy. The cheeks clenched and flexed. Perfect dimples.
“Haha,” he said good-humoredly, turning, as if chasing his tail. Hannah eyes widened at it—a surprise reaction that almost made him laugh. Women were often surprised at how delighted they were by it, he knew that, from experience.
“Shit!” Hannah breathed. The word just slipped out. “It worked. I mean, it worked. And it’s...” she blushed. She was going to say gorgeous. Her mind went back to her quite distinct memories of masturbating to it in the past. Many times, actually, with her little vibrating egg at night. That one time she had seen him, leaning against a railing at school…
But for some reason, there was something about the thought of playing with herself fantasizing about Jake was horrible, horrible, but she couldn’t remember why. Maybe he seemed like too much of a nice guy for her fantasies of… Well. She blushed again.
She was surprised that the Bx Drops were changing her, changing her memories, her life. Should she push back against this? Something was off. But Jake was trustworthy, wasn’t he? He sure seemed to be. But what if…?
Jake had been one of her first crushes, in seventh grade, hadn’t he? She remembered being so much taller than everyone, such a distinct memory. She remembered him blushing that first day at school, she and her friend Kenna had laughed about it together later. And at college, she had been shameless too, in that one Gen Ed they took together, she sometimes came in right before class started, in order to be sure to sit behind him. It was one of her idle games, thinking about flute and hoping he’d stand up and go the bathroom. Stand up, go the bathroom, stand up, go the bathroom.
This was now, of course. He had been different before, she knew intellectually, she searched back for it. It was like an old memory that had to be jogged to occur, it wasn’t a memory that seemed particularly relevant. Jake. Old Jake. Nice face, nice guy, underwhelming body, if she was being honest. She blushed again.
“Well?” Jake said, pulling up his pants. “What do you think?”
She tugged on her ponytail.”
“How… How does it feel? To you? I have all these… memories…”
“Me too. Honestly, it feels great.” He rubbed his palm over jeans, and clenched his rear again experimentally. Hannah watched and blushed. What was she missing here? What was it? Was it Emily? Emily had mentioned this too, hadn’t she? When she told her about Jake’s weirdly obsessive messages to her (not the only guy to do that unfortunately.) I’m not interested or anything, Emily had told Hannah, but that ASS and she had a funny look in her eye that made Hannah laugh… Honestly, if Jake ever asked, she probably would have made out with him. What did it look like, outside of its underwear?
This was all wrong. … Or was it right? And more importantly—was this all something she wanted? What would be altered in her life, in his memory?
He had both hands on himself now, it was pretty shamelessly, but she was fascinated by it too—it had a sheen of newness to it, visually, as she saw it, and also the creeping normalcy, familiarity. The cut of those jeans really was vain of him, on any one else it would have been kind of ludicrous, but here… she had to stop her hand from reaching out to put a finger on it, like she was a little kid at a museum, desperate to put a finger on the marbles.
“It is kind of amazing,” she admitted.
“Could be yours too,” he said. “I mean, you’d be the Goddess of Desire herself with an amazing ass like this!” Then he looked up worried. “I mean—gosh, I didn’t mean it like that, you’re so amazing right now, I’ve always been so shy at how cool and talented you are…”
“But if I drank it,” she said. “It would be forever.” But Jake saw she had a funny kind of look on her face. It really was a beautiful face, Jake thought. And she had a wonderful aesthetic about her, always had, casual girl, light-colored tops, perfect arms and a good sense of accessories (she had worn an armband once, blew his mind)… But really, not much of an ass at all. Funny, before this last Bx Drop, he knew he had pegged her at a solid 9/10, with Emily a 12/10. Now? Hannah seemed like a 7. An 8 on a good day. He laughed, feeling his standards changed.
The new memories were solidifying in Hannah, he could see. Adjusting to the new reality. He had read on that crackpot forum that the mixer of the Drops seemed to keep the most recall. What was this like for her?
Hannah imagined what it would be like, drinking the drop. She was imagining going forward in her new kind of life, it would be her but… just prettier. More aesthetic. Everyone, since forever, commenting on her looks, how pretty she was, both she and Emily, creating this endless march to aesthetic attention and comparison that just seemed to undermine things. It was habitualized, it was exhausting, and here was a chance to just… climb up that ladder. How easy it would be. No more buying padded underwear and sheepish wearing it. It would just… be. Be fleshier, rounded, maybe heartshaped, or something—but something that would advance her flute career. In a glamorous way, in a way that was wrong, that the other musicians already envied her for. The looks she’d get, from guys. How shameless to drink the mug. Forever.
“Well. Why the hell not,” she said. “You only live once. Right?”
Jake watched her stand up. She raised her mug with a toast, which he returned. She put a hand reflexively on her thin rear, as if it might explode, and she brought the mug to her lips and took a sip before her moment of inhibition passed by. Jake saw her eyes open slightly at the taste. Then she threw her head back and chugged it, big swallows. For a moment she stood there, eyes bright and aware, before she shuddered, a whole body shudder, and her eyes closed and glazed slightly, the mug falling from her hands onto the carpet. It clunked once.
“Oof,” she said, falling down onto the sofa, hands at her sides in surprise. Jake remembered what he put in it—Intense erotic love for Emily; Cool sleeve; Jealous of Emily.
Hannah felt her mind swirling, there was kind of a dark beckoning she couldn’t quite make out. Instinctively felt she had to resist. Suddenly, she felt overmatched. Just a flutist. A girl.
“You’ll be changing now,” Jake said, grinning supportively.