Julian

Chapter 1
Julian

"And the last problem, I don’t understand that one either."

"Start with, what’s it asking you to find?"

"Um...dee dee dee tee?" Julian had originally planned to give up on tutoring. He could never quite remember why afterwords, but his first two sessions had left him with a vague but unyielding sense of unease.

"Which means what?"

"It’s the change of...um...distance with respect to time?" He’d cancelled the previous session, and intended to cancel this one as well. In between, though, he’d managed to fail yet another quiz, meaning another call from his advisor expressing concern, and then a conversation with his parents lying to them about how well his freshman year was going.

"Right. So that’s what you want to find, and what does the problem tell you about how to find it?"

"I guess I need to use the length of the guy’s shadow?" So Julian had ended up back at Mike’s apartment once more, math book and half finished homework in hand.

"Right. So, can you write down an equation connecting the length of Charmander’s shadow to his distance from the wall?"

"Well, I guess the tangent of theta has to be equal to...Charmander’s shadow?" Julian felt a wave of confusion sweep over him, and then a moment’s panic. This, this, what was happening right now, this is what he’d been avoiding. He looked around, frantically, instinctively seeking an escape.

"Yeah, Julian, Charmander’s shadow. Is something wrong?"

And suddenly, the moment passed. Julian couldn’t remember why he’d been so uncomfortable with the situation; he liked being babysat by Mike, since Mike always helped with his homework, more than his parents did. He must have just missed his parents for a moment.

"Yeah...what’s the question?"

"Just what it says there. If Chamander’s shadow is three feet long, and his shadow is two feet from the wall, how far is Charmander from the wall?"

Julian counted on his fingers. One, two, three feet for the shadow, and four, five feet to the wall. "Five feet!"

"That’s right!" Mike smiled and patted him on the head approvingly. "Go on, write it down."

Julian wrote a large five on the sheet of paper in front of him. When he looked at the rest of the sheet, he couldn’t quite remember writing it, and it seemed to be filled in, in his own handwriting, with line after line of symbols he didn’t even recognize. But he didn’t let that bother him; he didn’t have to worry about it now, and now that his homework was done, he was allowed to do something fun.

"Okay, we get to play a game now."

"Yes, yes we do. Did you decide what game you wanted to play?"

Julian just stared at him for a moment, and Mike sighed loudly. "Yes, of course we can play Operation." Mike went opened his game closet and pulled out the game. The two jointly set it up, and took turns playing. Mike won handily, not only thanks to his better coordination, but because Julian succumbed to temptation more than once, failing on purpose just so he could giggle loudly at the buzzing noise the game rewarded him with.

When Mike finished removing the last piece, Julian retaliated by tapping one of the metal edges repeatedly, and then finally just holding the tweezers against the board, grinning broadly. After a few seconds of this, Mike asked him to stop, and when Julian refused, Mike suddenly lunged at him, tickling his stomach aggressively while Julian giggled even louder than before. At first, Julian relented to the tickling, but after a few seconds of it, he resisted a bit, and was surprised to discover that, unlike most adults, Mike didn’t seem to be infinitely overpowering in size. Once he realized that Mike wasn’t actually any stronger than he was, it wasn’t hard to shove Mike off, roll away, and sit up.

"What are you doing?" Kneeling, and seeing Mike in roughly the same position, it was obvious that they were about the same height. "You’re not any bigger than me. You’re not my babysitter." Julian tried to straighten the situation out in his head. Why had he thought Mike was a grown-up? No, scratch that, why had he felt like a kid?

Mike looked worried, thinking frantically. "No, of course I’m not, I’m your math tutor. I’m helping you with your homework."

Help with his homework. Right, that’s why Julian was here. Had Mike just been tickling him? What did that have to do with homework?

"You were stuck on the problem with the shadow, remember?"

"Right. There was the shadow. And, um...the distance from the wall. Dee dee dee tee." Julian walked back to the couch and sat down in front of his homework again, trying to remember how exactly he’d come to be kneeling half-way across the room. Looking at the problem, all he’d written was a big number five next to the problem, for no apparent reason. "Um...why did I write the number five?"

"Well," Mike walked over and stood over Julian, "you were counting how far Charmander was from the wall..."

Charmander, right. Now this was familiar. "Yeah. And Charmander’s five feet from the wall. One, two, three, four five." Julian counted it out on his fingers for Mike. "Now can I stop doing homework?"

"Yes, you can. You wrote that down, right?"

"Yeah. I wrote it down before. Why did I have to do this again?" Hadn’t they been done with homework, and onto playing games already?

"Oh, I was just checking. Hey, I’m going to order pizza for us. You like pepperoni, right?"

"Yeah!"

"Okay, I’ve got to go order. Why don’t you put in one of the DVD’s?"

By the time Mike returned, Julian was raptly watching (well, rewatching), Shrek 2, and Mike sat down besides him. The next hour and a half passed quietly (besides Julian’s uproarious laughter); pizza came, and was eaten, and the movie was watched.

When the movie ended, Julian looked up at Mike, prepared to plead. "Can we watch another movie?"

"Nope. It’s 8:30. Bedtime."

"How about part of a movie?"

Mike got up and started putting away the game from earlier. "Nope."

"One more game of Operation?"

"Nope."

"Pleeeeease?"

Mike finished putting the game away. "How about...if you cooperate about getting ready for bed, you’ll be in bed in time for me to read you one chapter, and I’ll tell your mom and dad how good you were?"

Julian knew perfectly well that this wasn’t a concession, but merely a statement of the situation, but he knew well enough that it meant that Mike wasn’t giving in on this.

"Fine." Mike put one hand gently on his shoulder and guided him down the hallway.

Wasn’t it odd that Mike was the same height? He seemed so much taller, but when they were actually standing right next to each other, they were clearly the same height.

Mike interrupted Julian’s thoughts. "So, what was your favorite part of the movie?" Julian began recounting one of the scenes in exquisite, if slightly incoherent, detail. Distracted, he didn’t comment when Mike directed him into the bathroom, turned on the water in the tub, and began undressing him. "Arms up." Without thinking, Julian raised his arms and let Mike pull off his shirt. As Julian continued talking, Mike stripped off his jeans and boxers, and finally one sock at a time ("Lift your leg...okay, now your other leg"), all the while deftly inserting his instructions to preserve the flow of Julian’s exposition.

"I’ll be back in a second." Mike gathered up the clothing and walked out, leaving Julian standing naked in the bathroom. Momentarily alone, Julian’s confusion returned. His body was clear, unquestionable proof that he wasn’t the kid he’d been feeling like, but an adult. Maybe, at eighteen, a young adult, but the scattering of body hair, and the much thicker tuft around his penis left no ambiguity about which side of puberty he was on.

Julian stared down at himself, trying to sort out the situation. Had he really just let his math tutor strip him naked while he babbled about a cartoon? When he heard Mike’s footsteps, he moved to shut and, ideally, lock the door while he sorted things out, but his reaction was too slow, and Mike’s body was already in the way. Julian backed away and covered himself, as best he could, with his hands, preserving what little modesty was available under the circumstances.

"Is something wrong, Julian?" Mike looked down. "Oh, that’s silly. Like you have anything to cover up." To Julian’s surprise, Mike reached down and gently swatted his hands away. Julian felt another wave of confusion, as his actions suddenly did seems silly, and let his hands drop to his sides. As Mike had said, he really hadn’t been covering anything; he could remember that, moments earlier, his penis had been much larger, covered with hair, with a faint line of fuzz stretching up to his belly-button, but that was all gone now. Smooth, pale, with a tiny penis dangling limply. More than that, this looked right, and what had been there before seemed like an absurd fantasy.

Mike turned off the running water. "Okay, in you go." With Mike gently supporting him, Julian felt his way tentatively into the water, making sure the temperature was comfortable before getting in. Once he was in, Mike placed a duck and a toy boat in the bath. The next fifteen minutes were a blur of splashing until Mike returned.

"Okay, time to get out." Julian leaned on Mike again as he stepped out of the bathtub and Mike toweled him off, top to bottom. Then he followed Mike down the hall, oblivious to the fact that he was completely naked, to Mike’s bedroom, where a cot had been set up. It was obvious that the cot was for him, not only from the bright primary-colored bedsheets but from the sleeper on it. Mike helped him into it, one leg at a time, and then zipped it up.

Looking in the mirror next to Mike’s closed, Julian was once more treated to a confusing image. He was standing in a childish, footed sleeper, the entire front of which was taken up by an elaborate scene involving anthropomorphic animals. And standing right next to him, matched in height, was Mike. Julian stared at it for a moment, trying to sort out whether Mike was his peer or his babysitter, until he was distracted once again.

"So, we’re reading Good Night Moon again, right?"

"Yeah!" As Julian turned away from the mirror, he didn’t notice how the words on his sleeper seemed to suddenly blur into unintelligible symbols. He lay down on the bed and Mike sat down next to him and read the story while Julian looked at the pictures, proud that he could even recognize some of the words. By the time the story was over, Julian was almost asleep, just aware enough to enjoy Mike tucking him in before he drifted off.

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The next morning, Julian woke up in his own bed feeling refreshed and in a good mood, with the vague sense that he’d had unusually pleasant dreams, but unable to remember even a shred of the content. Glancing at his alarm clock, he saw that he’d somehow woken up exactly a few minutes before he needed to before his first class; this would be the first time in weeks he hadn’t hit sleep and rolled back over to grab a few extra hours at the expense of organic chem. He lay in bed for a few minutes, trying to recall those nice dreams, and, when that failed, to remember the day before.

He remembered going to Mike’s, and working through most of his homework assignment, but somewhere around the last problem, it seemed to blend into his dreams. For a moment, he wasn’t even sure he’d really gone to see Mike, and that perhaps that was just one of those dreams, so he got out of bed to check his desk. Sure enough, his homework was there, completed through the end.

His alarm started beeping, and he quickly shut it off before it bothered his roommate, and then went to shower. Not many people had classes this early, so there was only one other person in the showers that morning, and, with the modesty typical of college boys, Julian wore his pajamas into the shower and his towel back to the room, so the other person had no chance to notice that Julian’s body was no longer quite that of a college student. All his body hair, every last bit of it, was gone, and his penis remained the size of a small child’s.

Julian saw all this, and thought nothing of it. It seemed to him his body had been this way the day before, and the day before that, forever. And after he returned to his room and got dressed, the differences were entirely hidden.

Over the next week, however, the small differences began to bother Julian. Mostly, it was shaving: when he saw people shaving in the dorm’s bathroom, it occurred to him that he, too, ought to be shaving, and he could even remember having done it before. He had the tools for it, but he couldn’t begin to recall how it was actually done, and, more importantly, there seemed to be no need for it.

There were other differences, but they went largely unnoticed. None of his friends were perceptive enough to notice that Julian’s eyes no longer followed attractive girls through the dining hall, and it never occurred to Julian that he should care a bit about girls. His porn folder went unexplored, but again, the thought of it never crossed his mind--it wasn’t that he’d forgotten about it, but rather, without the urges that encouraged its use, he simply didn’t think about it.

The one thing that did stand out was that Julian got tired early. Quite early. As soon as it hit eight thirty, Julian felt a mischievous sense of accomplishment, like he was getting away with something, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was. But by the time it was an hour later, he was yawning and unable to follow the thread of a conversation well, eventually forcing him to bed. This did occasion some comments--a college student, in bed well before midnight? Unthinkable.

When his roommate finally asked him, in a somewhat mocking tone, whether he had an early bedtime now, Julian defensively responded that it was so he could get up for his morning classes (and it was true that he was finally well-rested and alert when he went to them), but in truth, it bothered him a bit. Somehow, the thought formed that Mike would know something about this, so Julian looked forward to his next tutoring session, hoping for some explanation.

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The day of his next tutoring session, Julian was surprised to discover that half his boxer shorts had been replaced by plain white briefs. The main difficulty was that he couldn’t remember which underwear was really his and which had mysteriously appeared. His memories seemed to be a confused, fuzzy mix. The thought of going to Mike to ask for help, though, suddenly made it crystal clear that he should be wearing briefs.

That afternoon, Julian stood impatiently at Mike’s door, waiting for him to answer the knock. He’d brought his books, but as he’d walked over, thoughts of calculus tutoring had slowly been replaced by fantasies about playing games, and by the time he’d reached the door, he was thinking of Mike entirely as a babysitter.

Mike opened the door. "Hey, Julian!" He reached over and mussed Julian’s hair while Julian grinned.

"Hi Mike!" Impulsively, Julian hugged Mike. "Can we play Operation?"

Mike rolled his eyes. "Yes, of course we can play Operation."

Mike pulled out Julian’s favorite game, and they started in on it. Things went well enough until they took a break half way through to order pizza. Just as Mike was no longer being put on hold, it occurred to Julian that he could trigger the buzzer without penalty during the break; naturally, he did so. Repeatedly.

Mike asked the clerk to wait a moment, and asked Julian to stop, but Julian just giggled and held the tweezers against the metal for a long sustained burst.

"Julian, enough, I need to hear the man to place the order." The buzzing kept going. "Julian, stop that." And going. "Julian, STOP" Mike shouted, now genuinely annoyed.

And Julian burst into tears. Torn, Mike sighed, apologized to the person on the other end of the line, and hung up. "I’m sorry, Julian. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings."

"You yelled at me!" Julian gasped out through sobs.

Mike put his arm around Julian to comfort him. "I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you."

Slowly, Julian calmed down. "I’m sorry for making the buzzer noise," he finally offered by way of compromise. With that and a hug, the matter was settled, but a new thought bothered Julian. Once again, he was struck by the fact that Mike was no bigger than he was, even though Mike was supposed to be much older and more mature.

Julian screwed up his face. It wasn’t fair that Mike could do so many things Julian couldn’t if he wasn’t really any bigger. "I want to order the pizza," Julian announced.

"What?"

"I can do it. I’ll call the pizza place and tell them the order. I can do it."

Not particularly caring, and not wanting another fight Mike consented (not to mention being fully aware that, as a college student in actuality, Julian was perfectly capable of placing the order, at least in his usual state).

Julian called the place (Mike read out the number for him) and placed the order (with some help from Mike on the address). Julian felt proud and mature for having fulfilled one of the tasks traditionally handled by his babysitter. It made him want to experiment further with his new found sense of maturity relative to Mike.

And, combined with a slightly silly mood, Julian decided to start tickling Mike. Mike was caught entirely unprepared, and Julian was, if anything, slightly bigger than Mike, not to mention in better shape, so Mike ended up entirely the victim, laughing uncontrollably, begging Julian to stop.

When Julian finally did stop, as Mike lay on the ground panting, Julian tried to work through his confusion out loud. "You’re not any bigger than me. You like to be so mature, but you’re no more mature than me." For a moment, Julian considered the possibility that he, like Mike, was actually an adult, and through all the fuzziness in his head, that seemed oddly right.

And then Mike reminded him. "That’s silly. You’re just a little kid." Which was true, of course. Julian’s sense of being a little kid came back even stronger, and with it, a new resolution to the conundrum: "Uh-huh, but you are too."

Within a span of seconds, Mike looked confused, and then terrified. "No!" Then, scared, "No..." And then, annoyed and confused. "Nuh-uh. I’m not a little kid." By then, though, Julian knew with certainty that it was true. That Mike liked to pretend to be so mature, but that he was just Julian’s friend, a kid like he was.

"Then admit I’m not a little kid. Or I’ll tickle you again."

"Fine. We’re both big kids." Julian grinned, pleased to have won the dispute.

All argument resolved, the game of Operation was resumed, this time with ample intentional triggering of the buzzer on both sides. When pizza arrived and the two paid for it, there was a moment of oddness--shouldn’t there be an adult in charge? Somehow, though, a common idea formed: they were kids, but kids who got to live alone, a special situation that didn’t merit further investigation, because thinking about it too hard made them feel strange.

And so the boys passed the evening playing games. Eventually, as the evening worse on, Julian remembered that, at some point, they were supposed to have a bath. He couldn’t recall why, but it seemed essential that they do so--part of their special situation. Mike was less pleased with the idea, and made a face. "But I don’t wanna take a bath."

Julian tried to explain. "We have to take a bath. Otherwise...otherwise grown-ups will come and make us."

Mike made the face again, but nodded. He understood that there was something strange about their situation which demanded care. And Julian, now a bit bigger than him, suddenly seemed so authoritative that Mike was reluctant to contradict him when he seemed so certain.

So the two boys went to the bathroom to get undressed. Julian, now quite comfortable as a kid, stripped naked quickly, not the least bit concerned about modesty in front of his friend. Mike felt more awkward, however, and got his shirt off before hesitating at his pants.

Julian saw Mike’s reluctance, and tried to imagine why his friend was so slow, before realizing that he just needed help. Julian reached over and unbuttoned the pants and pulled them down for Mike. "Lift up your leg," he commanded. "Now the other one." Mike was taken aback by Julian’s newfound confidence, and, still feeling confused and scared by the strangeness of the situation, obeyed reflexively.

To Julian’s surprise (and, really, Mike’s as well), Mike was wearing boxers, which seemed rather silly, but he soon wasn’t wearing them, so the matter was forgotten. More confusing was the obvious contrast between their private areas.

Mike, looking down at his naked, but clearly adult, body, began slowly sorting out the strange backfiring of his spell, remembering now that he’d once been an adult. Julian, too, found the situation familiar, and struggled to remember the solution that had once been used to fix a similar problem. Finally, just as Mike, a look of panic in his eyes, was reaching down to pull his underwear back on, Julian waved a hand in front of Mike’s groin.

And, like magic (which, after all, it was), Mike had the same hairless, shrunken penis that Julian did. Mike felt a wave of relief as his panic subsided, and gratitude towards Julian for fixing him in a way he didn’t quite understand. Julian was seeming less a coequal friend and more a wise, older figure.

Now, both naked, they realized that no one had run the bath water for them. Solemnly, Julian reached over and turned it on. With nothing to do but wait, the two returned to the living room to play a bit longer. (Fortunately, Mike had his window shades drawn, so no one looked in to see the two naked college students playing on his living room floor.)

Julian remembered to check on the water just in time, since the bathtub by then was almost full. When the two of them got in, it was full enough to overflow, splashing water onto the bathroom floor, but neither noticed that, nor the plentiful amounts of water that joined it after a bathtime full of splashing.

The two got out and Julian dried himself off and then helped dry Mike off. The two boys then marched to Mike’s bedroom, where Julian found two sleepers laid out. He pulled his own on, with some difficulty (he had to sit down to do it, finding it too hard to balance), and then helped Mike, who had absentmindedly begun sucking his thumb, into the other.

Julian looked at the two beds in the room and tried to remember the sensible sleeping arrangement. For some reason, he remembered the larger bed as being Mike’s, but it made no sense for his little brother to have a bigger bed.

"Can I sleep with you tonight?" Mike asked.

Well, that avoided the issue well enough. "Sure."

The two boys climbed into the bed and went to sleep.

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The next morning, both boys woke up in their own beds feeling rested and relaxed. For Julian, the day was normal enough, or at least, what had become normal. He was wearing ordinary flannel pajamas that merited no comment from his roommate. His underwear drawer no longer bespoke anything odd: it was filled with nothing but plain white briefs, and Julian couldn’t imagine wearing anything else. No one commented on the smattering of freckles that now decorated the bridge of his nose, and he went about his life much as before.

Mike, living along, woke up wearing a sleeper under Mickey Mouse bedsheets. It didn’t cross his mind as the least bit unusual for a college junior. His underwear drawer, too, was filled with plain white briefs, which he put on without a second thought, and he pulled jeans and a striped t-shirt on above. After getting dressed, he cleaned up the apartment from the night before, turning off lights, emptying the tub, and so on. He vaguely remembered Julian coming over, but couldn’t quite focus on any of the details. He should, of course, have recognized that as a symptom of having his own spell turned against him, but, naturally, the spell prevented him from thinking of that, as well. The only change he noticed was the way his hairline un-receded over the course of a few days, but he never thought very hard about why, and accepted it as a pleasant surprise.

The boys continued their weekly meetings, and by the end of the year, when Julian had to leave the dorm, it seemed obvious that he should move in with Mike.

Each morning, they would wake up in their own beds feeling normal enough. They’d ignore the children’s sheets and sleepers and go about their business normally, perhaps tidying up a bit from the night before. They’d go off to their internships (in the summer), or to school (once the fall came again), then come back, do any work that needed to be done, and make dinner.

Each night, some time after dinner, though, something would happen. Perhaps Julian, flipping through television channels to find something to watch, would find himself stopping at a cartoon. Or perhaps Mike would suddenly remember a knock-knock joke he just had to tell. Or sometimes a friendly pat on the back would turn into a tickling contest. But, one way or another, the boys would soon be goofing around, giggling and playing.

Little Julian took his role as older brother seriously, making sure they took baths often enough and helping little Mike into his sleeper for bedtime. And if sometimes they stayed up for one extra cartoon and fell asleep cuddling on the couch, at least it wasn’t too often.

 

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