Dreamer's Disease

Chapter One

"Blake, I want to be a girl."

Those seven simple words would have seemed just that - simple - if they had been said in any other order, and if said by any other person. But coming from Elliot Stevenson? One of the most popular guys in school, the captain of the soccer team, straight-A student, all set up for a soccer scholarship by the end of the year, who had dated almost every girl in their year and had had enough encounters in the bedroom for girls to spread around the school like wildfire...? It was something outrageous, something scandalous, something that made Blake spit out his milkshake right across the wooden table, spraying just a few inches shy of Elliot's arms, which were folded across the tabletop.

"A girl?!" Blake spluttered, strawberry milkshake dripping from his chin in little pink droplets. Elliot screwed up his face in distaste at his older friend, but Blake made no move to wipe the liquid from his face. Instead, he found himself gawking, completely dumbfounded, at his best friend.

A chick?! Why on earth would Elliot have ever thought up such a ridiculous notion?! Why would anyone want to be the opposite sex? Especially if they looked like Elliot. With his thin, tanned face, sporting high cheekbones, a pair of yellow-green eyes so wide he looked as though he'd been ripped right from a Japanese cartoon, a pair of lips so red that people had started to suspect that he wore makeup, and a figure as perfectly toned and muscular as his own, it was certainly beyond Blake why he would ever want to be a girl. Especially looking like that! Elliot was too all-American-boy-next-door to ever pull off being a girl. Why would he ever want to be one?!

"Yes, Blake. I want to be female-"

"Don't say it out loud!" Blake exclaimed then, his voice a low hiss as he patted his friend's face over the table insistently, in some half-assed attempt to make him quieten down. "Someone might hear!"

"And so what if they did? It's not like it's wrong or anything." Elliot frowned, then, his yellow-green eyes narrowing, like a cat's eyes might as it studied its prey.

"But... A chick?!"

"Yes. A female."

It just wouldn't sink into Blake's confused mind. Why, though? And when did he come up with such an idea? There were so many questions he wanted to ask his friend, the guy he'd known since elementary school, the guy that had most certainly been fine as a guy for all the years Blake had known him. But he knew there was no use in asking Elliot any of them, because he knew Elliot was kidding. He had to be, right? No guy just randomly hit out with something like that one day in the cafeteria in school. "I want to be a girl." He almost scoffed at the thought.

"Wait. So... You can't still be into chicks, then, right?" Blake found himself asking, trying to tread as carefully as possible. He didn't know what he should have been asking, whether he should have been holding back on the questions or not, whether he should have just laughed in Elliot's face and accepted his words as a joke.

Five minutes ago, they had just been talking about the new foreign exchange student in their chemistry class, a girl from Spain with a rack so huge Blake reckoned he could stick his face right in there and get lost for days, and an ass so big it put Nicki Minaj to shame... But now, here was Elliot, saying he wanted to be one of them, too? It just didn't bear thinking about.

"I mean, you won't get any chicks at all, if you're one." Blake went on. "A chick, I mean." Then, he wiped his chin sloppily with the sleeve of his hoodie, taking another gulp of his milkshake from its bottle.

"Who says I was ever into girls either, Blake?" Elliot mused quietly, studying a purple grape speared on the end of the plastic fork in his hand. Blake spluttered again, thumping the milkshake bottle down against the tabletop and spitting more milkshake across the table. "Jesus, Blake! Calm down!"