Max had slept in his chambers for nearly a week, stricken with crippling seasickness. His family's expedition vessel had forayed forty miles off the coast of Bermuda and bumped into choppy waters mixed with torrential winds. Waves smashed into his window in time with the creaking floor and he swore a few drops managed to splash on him despite the "impenetrable steel skeleton" advertised by the ship makers; "skeleton" was an unfriendly word anyway, and it conjured in Max images of impending doom.
His parents spent most of their time trying to keep the ship on course, leaving him the only child to rot away below deck with his face green and throat trembling under the strain of rising vomit. He had regretted this vacation from the first day. In his more coherent moments he remembered his friend Sam back in Ann Arbor, playing Gears of War, hanging out with their other friends. Max didn't care if staying home meant going to school and facing the horrors of high school, freshman year; if it meant escaping this Godawful water ride he'd fly there.
On the last night of a two-day storm Max dreamed of standing on stage at an underwater opera house. Fish slouched their dorsal fins into the 1,000+ chairs and watched Max through binoculars they gripped in their mouths like fishing hooks. He sang a plangent, tremulous melody for them in a shrill soprano a 4'7'' body like his shouldn't be capable of. But his body wasn't the same, was it? He tried to look down while he sang against his will but his eyes forced themselves forward, and his arms motioned across the stage in time with his wordless crooning, and his toes tiptoed in place with balletic grace. Max thought it would be a relief to wake up and see his bone-white ceiling, made darker by shadows and his own nausea, with control over his limbs again. Instead he woke up to fog wrapped around him, obscuring an endless stretch of white caps crashing and foaming against sharp rocks.
Max awoke slouched on a rock instead of lying in bed, cradling a lyre under his left arm. He had drifted off in The Walking Dead boxers and a ratty t-shirt, but currently, the wind beat against a nude body reshaped by a more feminine touch. Looking down he saw it all: thicker, baby-fat thighs and feet speckled with silver fish scales; further up a crotch with hair and little else; further up a pleasant potbelly as soft to touch as, reaching back, his plumper butt; even further up breasts like he imagined under Natalia Hayworth's shirt in P.E; and right before his eyes a cascade of hazelnut hair combed perfectly to his right, bound in place by a clam-shell hairband.
At least, he was no longer nauseous.
I'm a girl? he tried to say, but instead his vocal chords resonated with an airy singing too beautiful for words. Max touched his throat, shocked. A few days ago in a sick daze he'd picked up a book on nautical mythology, and inside he'd seen a picture of a Siren. It had looked much like he did now. Was he stranded on a strange island, far from his parents in a strange form, because he read a book?
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