"…just call me. Okay Cait? I feel like I'm going crazy. I just want to talk."

Maureen waited a few moments before ending the call. She stared at the screen as the saved cellphone picture of Caitlin looking her characteristically bitter self at her own birthday party changed back to her cell phone wallpaper, a picture of the herself, Alexis, and Caitlin posing together at homecoming game: Maureen wearing her royalty sash, Alexis still in a cheer uniform, and Caitlin rolling her eyes and cracking a smile barely perceptible on the tiny, lo-res cell phone screen.

"Alex, am I going crazy?"

"Huh?" As per her normal routine, Alexis was immersing herself in the most recent issue of Cosmo.

"Am I losing it? Seriously, I feel like I am."

"Caitlin was the one who got in a fight in art class. Not you."

Maureen sighed frustratedly. "Alex. Did Caitlin grow, like, half a foot in the last few weeks?"

"I dunno, but her boobs look…"

"Alex!" Maureen blurted, snapping Alexis to attention. "Did she get taller or not?"

"Yes!" Alexis finally resigned. "She got taller! What's your problem?"

"That's just it Alex!" Maureen began pacing about her room. "She's the medical phenomenon and I'm the one going nuts. Doesn't anyone else find the fact that she's done practically three years of adolescent growth in three weeks in her late teens at all unusual?" Alexis furrowed, alerting Maureen that she had used a word Alexis wasn't familiar with. "Alex. People don't grow six inches taller and three cup sizes bigger in three weeks."

"Caitlin did."

"I know! But nobody is saying anything!"

"Should they be?"

"Alex, I called Caitlin's mom to ask how Caitlin was doing. She said she was completely fine! Better than ever!"

"Isn't she?"

"No! She's not! She's…well…"

"Really tall?" Alexis finished.

"Yes!" Maureen exclaimed, before suddenly deflating. "And she hasn't talked to me about it. She talked to you. Hell, she even probably confided in that crazy Nicole Ryder."

"Now you've really gone crazy," Alexis said, scoffing at the idea. "Why would Caitlin ever go to Nicole Ryder for advice?"

*****
"Okay, let me get this straight. You want to rub carpet with some chick from the coffee shop and you come to me for advice? Yeah, I'm hanging up on you."

"Nicole! Wait!" Caitlin pleaded into her phone. "I don't want to rub… whatever you said with her. I've just never…"

"...felt this way before?"

"No! I just …"

"...burn to feel the warm, sensual touch of a woman?"

"Stop it! I've never been hit on by a girl before."

"And I have? FYI, I'm not into girls. I made out with one while tripping my proverbial balls off at a rave, but that's not quite the same thing. And before you ask, no, I won't let you practice playing the field with me."

"Nicole, I just need someone to talk to." Caitlin was more accustomed to Maureen's near-involuntary spouting of solutions at almost no prompting. Nicole, on the other hand, seemed otherwise preoccupied and entirely unwilling to offer any insight whatsoever. Lord knows what this girl is doing as we speak, Caitlin thought to herself. "Can't you just hear me out?"

"You want advice? Call one of your loser friends. I've got artistic ground to break and a shoebox full of psychedelics to help me break it. Take your girl problems elsewhere."

Caitlin was surprised to have her unasked question answered so directly, but was preoccupied with Nicole's insinuation. "I don't have fucking girl problems! And anyways, I can't talk to anyone else."

"I'm sure you're quite physically capable of speaking to another human being."

"No, I mean. Alexis would never understand."

"Then call the homecoming princess. I'm sure she'd be receptive to your lesbian issues."

"I can't call Maureen, and I don't have lesbian issues."

Nicole paused and took a breath, before asking slowly and clearly. "Why can't you call you're best friend about your personal crisis?"

"I...she…I just can't talk to her right now."

"What, did you two sleep together and now it's awkward?"

"You are the worst listener ever."

"And you're the worst explainer ever. You've wasted five valuable minutes of my art-making time telling me, essentially, how you can't do anything or tell anyone anything. Yet you want to tell me all about your problems?

"Shut up." Caitlin seethed. "You're no help at all."

"Caitlin, I'm going hang up this phone and eat some hallucinogenic mushrooms, and perhaps, subsequently and inadvertently, poison myself with acrylic paint. You, however, are going to call your loser homecoming princess friend and explain to her, in small, carefully chosen words, each and every one of your woman-on-woman problems. You will then kiss, make up, and invite her over for a raucous muff-diving party."

Nicole's imagery was making Caitlin queasy. "Can you cool it with the lesbian thing? And as for Maureen, I can't talk to her like…like this."

Nicole sifted through a few bottles of pills. "Like what? Do you need to gussy up or something?"

Caitlin was silently seething. Is this girl always this difficult? "You know…" She had no idea how to articulate what she was very obviously referring to. "All, growth spurted and shit."

Nicole shifted her phone from one shoulder to the other. Is this girl always this pathetic? "Oh no, no, no. I'm not going to dissect the subplot of your sci-fi B-movie of a life." She debated between her Ziploc bag of mushrooms and a tab of LSD Tristan scored her at community college cast party a few weeks back.

Caitlin was running out of patience and cut to the chase. "You know why this is happening! You said so yourself! So tell me! Why is this happening to me? Why do I keep getting bigger? Is it a disease? A disorder? A curse? What?"

Nicole was already behind schedule for her weekly artistic routine and not in the mood to spell things out, so she opted for a more direct method. "You're an idiot," Nicole stated evenly. "You're a brainless, useless, talentless, moron incapable of figuring out even the simplest of your stupid life issues. You and all of your thick-headed friends can kiss my inordinately decorated white ass. Do yourself a favor and tattoo sorority letters on your head and start exercising your gag reflex to prepare for your glorious college years most of which will be spent on your knees with your mouth hanging open, begging for the intramural lacrosse team to feed you your nightly dose of protein."

Caitlin could barely fathom rational thought following Nicole's impeccably worded, yet unsettlingly graphic declaration. "You stupid fucking cunt! What's wrong with you?"

"Am I wrong?"

"You're a psychotic bitch. I never should have called you."

"Thanks, I'm here all week." Nicole chimed, opting to start her night with a tab of grade-A LSD which she placed onto her tongue. "Call me when your head hits the ceiling. Literally, not figuratively."

"I hope you die of lead poisoning and choke on your own…!"

"Mmmhmm. Good night. Tristan says hi." With that she snapped her phone closed, lay back on her bed, cranked her music, and waited for "inspiration" to kick in. Any thoughts or concerns for Caitlin quickly dissipated as she stared at the stucco in the ceiling. "That girl is a bad trip waiting to happen."

*****

"SHIT!!!" Caitlin shrieked aloud. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" She threw her phone across the room and it shattered on the opposite wall, knocking over a myriad of picture frames and candles and chipping a chunk of plaster from the wall. She screamed again, this time at no one in particular. If anything, she screamed at herself and her inability to help herself and fear of going to her friends. She flopped onto her bed and cried, because she couldn't do anything else. Her body convulsed with sobs until she could barely catch her breath.

Then it started again. It began with a numbness in her extremities, which shot through her body like lightning. Right to the pit of her stomach. As the numbness subsided, it seemed to morph into a painful hunger. It came so powerfully, she could no longer cry, and she shot up to a seated position and scanned her room for something, anything to eat. Her survey of the room only reiterated what she already knew. There was nothing there and she would have to go downstairs. Caitlin knew that her parents would be downstairs, and going down there and eating like a ravenous beast would probably not be wise if she were trying not to arouse any suspicion about her condition. Another hunger pang bit at her and she found herself out the door halfway down the stairs before she even realized what she was doing.

She made a beeline for the kitchen, searching for items that she could take to her room. Immediately she grabbed a few unopened large bags of chips, since she could hold those in one hand. She looked about wildly and discovered a substantial portion of leftover casserole that her parents must have left out for her. She grabbed the entire dish under her arm, nearly dropping the serving spoon, and used her thumb and index finger to snatch the remnants of a bottle of cranberry juice from the fridge.

"Honey?"

Caitlin whirled around, food in hands, to see her parents seated at the counter in the kitchen. Her mother was completing a sudoku puzzle and doing her best to maintain an even expression. Her father, in contrast, absorbed in magazine article drafts, paid her no mind. Caitlin froze briefly, painting a surreal picture for her mother, before bounding out of the kitchen and up the stairs and shutting her door with a slam.

Caitlin's mother turned to her husband, whose body language indicated he'd rather not get involved. Compared to Caitlin's vehicular destruction habits, some manic stress eating didn't set off any alarm bells in his head. "I'll check on her in a few minutes." Caitlin's mother sighed.

Back in her room, Caitlin greedily dug into a cold casserole with a serving spoon. She finished in record time and tore open a bag of chips, which sent them flying about her bed. She ate the chips on her bed before dumping the remainder of the bag into her mouth. She tossed back a swig of cranberry juice, spilling a decent amount on herself, before reaching for more food.

She was relieved to feel somewhat satisfied on her way through the second bag of chips, when she heard her mother's footsteps coming up the stairs. Caitlin looked at the food wreckage around her and at her juice-stained shirt. Knowing full well how pathetic she looked, she attempted to minimize the damage by haphazardly pulling up a folded quilt over herself and the wreckage that was her meal. It was then she was met by a familiar numbness in her limbs, coupled with a full-body tingling that she knew all too well. I guess I should have seen this coming, she thought.

"Honey?" Her mother knocked on the door. "I realize it may seem silly to ask this, but, is everything okay?" Caitlin ignored her mother, but kept eating her chips which she held in her lap underneath the blanket. She could also feel the fabric of her t-shirt shift about her torso. She clutched the blanket tightly to herself and tried to curl herself into a crouched sitting position. She was thankful that she had changed into a long skirt and was spared the painful constriction of her pants around her thighs.

"Dear. Maureen called the house today."

"I know," Caitlin said, her mouth full of chips. She fidgeted with her shirt between bites. I just bought this damn thing...

"She called three times, honey. That poor girls sounds awful. When's the last time you two talked?"

Caitlin's mother paused to crack open the door and survey the wreckage of her daughter's most recent emotional crisis. Caitlin looked up at her mother with an expression akin to a raccoon caught sifting through the garbage cans. Food scraps, broken glass, chipped plaster on the walls, destroyed cell phone. At least the windows are still intact this time, her mother thought with a relieved sigh. She then looked to her daughter sitting on the bed, awkwardly wrapped underneath a blanket and hypnotically devouring a bag of tortilla chips.

"Caitlin, I know you've been changing recently." Hearing this, Caitlin stopped eating, and did her best to minimize the space her slowly lengthening legs were taking up on the bed. Come on, stop. Please stop.

"I'm not blind Caitlin." Caitlin wasn't sure what to say, so she just waited and let her mother continue. "Obviously, everyone goes through this, it just seems overwhelming because it's happening to you all at once in a really short time. I didn't notice at first, but your father clued me in. Honestly, I don't know how I missed it."

Caitlin slouched a bit in an attempt to hide her rising perspective. Her mother, however, was not looking directly at her, but around the room in general as if she were talking to someone else.

"…I guess I just didn't know how to deal with it. I couldn't believe I didn't notice. It's obvious now that I look at it. The new clothes, the hair, now the eating…"

Caitlin was wincing on the inside, anxious to figure out whether her parents were going to donate her to science, alert the local news, call the exorcist, or all of the above. The bunched shirt under her arms was starting to pinch and she tried her best to fold her legs into a more compact sitting position. Maybe, she's already called the CDC and is just stalling until they get here.

"…the makeup, the fight at school, the problems with your friends."

"…?" Caitlin was no longer sure where her mother was going with this, and was partly distracted with the feeling of the underside of her breasts rubbing against her lower rib cage as they expanded.

"…you're finally growing into yourself dear."

Caitlin's ears perked up at this statement. For the first time she gave her mother her full attention.

"You're becoming who you really are meant to be." Her mother continued. "Sure, your friends may not recognize you while you're changing, you may not either. I hope you know that your father and I are always here for you, and I'm sure your friends are too."

Caitlin was surprised to find herself actually taking her mother's words to heart. She also was thankful to feel the tingling in her body begin to wane.

"…just don't let anyone make you feel small, including yourself." Her mother took another moment before tossing the cordless phone onto the bed. "If I know that sound I heard a few minutes ago, you probably need this. Please call Maureen." She paused to look at the wreckage in the room. "This isn't good for either of you, especially you."

Caitlin's mother smiled and left, closing the door behind her. Caitlin waited a moment, realizing that her latest growth spurt had passed. She eyed the phone on the bed next to her.

"And hon?" Came her mother's voice from behind the door.

"Yeah mom?" Caitlin replied.

"You may want to comb the potato chips out of your hair before she comes over."

"Thanks mom," Caitlin responded earnestly, before looking down at herself underneath the blanket. I think the potato chips are the least of my worries though. Grabbing the phone, she dialed Maureen's number, the phone feeling oddly misshapen in her lengthened hands.

"Hey Maureen," Caitlin began. "You think you could come over?" She straightened up and grimaced at the cool breeze ever-so-slightly exposed midriff. "I think we need to get caught up on some things." She patted her hand at her newly expanded breasts which pushed emphatically against the fabric of her shirt. "You think you could convince Alex to sit out this visit though?"