The bus up to the mall was more crowded, and we got quite a few stares from the other passengers. I felt much more uncomfortable now; it was one thing being out in public like this when the "public" was across the street or the room, but being within speaking distance of a whole variety of people... What was I to them? Why did they look at me that way, and what did their expressions mean? I kept going back to what I'd wondered at the diner earlier; was I an unusual young woman, in their eyes, or a disturbing simulacrum? An object of desire, or of fear and loathing? And what did I want the answer to be?

Of course, I wasn't comfortable with the idea of people seeing me as a woman at all, when I arguably wasn't one on any level other than external appearance, and I certainly didn't want to be. But somehow, the thought of being seen as less than human - an object trying to pass as a person - felt even worse. It rubbed some deeply-buried but extremely raw nerve in my psyche, a feeling I was already intimately familiar with, but I couldn't put my finger on; not here, surrounded by people, unable to focus on that instead of worrying what everyone around me was thinking.

But the trip was short, we got nothing but some funny looks, and soon we were piling back out of the bus. The mall was interchangeable with any other mall in the nation, set in the middle of a parking lot large enough to land passenger planes on. The sky was gray and overcast; the rain had let up, but it'd be back before long. And, I realized, I hadn't brought my umbrella - mostly because I hadn't thought to, but also because it had changed from a plain pop-out compact job into a lace-trimmed black parasol. Like the dress, it wasn't too overtly frilly - fairly tasteful, on its own merits - but it wasn't my style.

I'd conceded on the need for the purse, though; these jeans were so tight and the pockets so tiny that I simply could not fit either the new wallet or my phone into them, even separately. It drove me crazy; I couldn't even comfortably slip my hands into them! They might as well not have bothered adding them at all...! Well, hopefully we'd find a solution here; I didn't know if they even made normal-fitting jeans for women, but I'd settle for baggy cargo pants, if I could just move around comfortably.

Tammy immediately and assertively took the lead as we entered, just as Emma was pausing at the directory/map kiosk. After this morning, it seemed like she was trying to keep this from turning into a dress-up expedition, which I greatly appreciated. I followed behind, and she kept a modest pace so I could keep up; I was still getting used to my altered proportions. As Emma caught up with us, Tammy charted a course decisively past the main lingerie outlet, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

It still seemed odd that I could do that despite not breathing. Probably, like Emma's new habit of mimicking normal head-gestures with the use of her hands, it helped facilitate relations with the rest of humanity; this was a common pattern seen in many other cases. (I wondered if that explained other oddities like still being able to smell, but that could be a survival feature, too - I really didn't know.)

And I wasn't sure why I felt relieved. I didn't normally feel prudish or shy about women's underwear; really, I didn't think about it much at all. And it wasn't so much that I felt super awkward about the idea of wearing women's clothing, specifically, as that it just fed into the general massive awkwardness of this whole experience...I thought...? But that still didn't quite explain what I was feeling.

Really, it was the idea of Emma making a game out of it that bothered me. It didn't feel malicious when she weighed in on what I should wear earlier, but there was no mistaking that she enjoyed teasing me about it at least a little - and I didn't need that right now; I was still trying not to get mad at her for this catastrophe in the first place. But for now, she kept quiet and didn't try to drag me out of my comfort zone.

The mall was filled with an echoing clamor, tile floors and glass ceilings turning the babble of human voices into a continuous, almost industrial kind of sound. Tammy led us down one wing to a department store that took up the whole end, one of those national chains that once dominated retail: a broad range of mostly store-brand merchandise at affordable-but-not-great prices. Which was fine - I didn't want anything fancy, just something that fit comfortably and didn't stand out. And so we ended up in the women's section, looking for just that.

To my mind, pants that fit were the first order of business. I rifled through the rack of jeans as peppy Muzak chimed out of a distant overhead speaker; after a minute, I turned to Tammy. "Um...what size should I be looking for?"

She laughed. "Honestly? You can pick a number out of a hat; it won't help."

"So they weren't kidding with all those articles about this a few years ago."

Emma shook her head as she browsed through the options herself. "Nope. All the manufacturers wanted to sell the same product at the same actual size with a more flattering number than the competition year after year, but they also had to keep the numbering scheme for their own lines vaguely ordinal, so by this point it's all just anybody's guess."

Tammy nodded. "Yup. Just grab stuff that looks right and try it on. You can get a rough idea holding it up to yourself, but it's all trial-and-error in the end."

I sighed. "Guh."

Emma chuckled. "Welcome to our world. I've honestly thought about trying to start a service to cut the BS out of this. There's gotta be a million-dollar idea in there somewhere."

Tammy thought for a minute, while I looked through the variously distressed, skinny, flared, distressed-and-skinny, distressed-and-flared, skinny-and-flared, distressed-and-skinny-and-flared, etc. jeans on offer, in search of something normal. "How d'ya mean?" she asked. "Like some kind of wiki for manufacturer size conversions, or...?"

Emma grabbed a pair of slacks with one hand, holding it up to her head for closer inspection. "I hadn't thought of that, but it's probably more doable, isn't it? I was thinking of a shop that would keep your measurements on file and compare them against the actual measurements for whatever they got in, and text you if they got something with a good fit in the styles you like. But that's got all the usual problems for a startup, plus trying to make it in retail in the 21st century."

"Ooh," Tammy said. "I mean, you're not wrong about the viability, but I'd kill for that."

"Same," Emma replied dryly. "Now if only I had any expertise in business, instead of all this science stuff, right?"

Tammy laughed, and I couldn't help but chuckle as well. A moment later, I finally happened across a pair of jeans that looked fairly normal; holding them up to my waist, they weren't obviously the wrong size. "Hey," I said, "can we look for any more of these? They seem pretty okay."

Tammy shrugged and began looking; Emma gazed at them with mild distaste. "If by 'pretty okay' you mean 'generic and bland,' sure."

I felt my tempo picking up again and tried not to get irritated. "Look, I'm not trying to draw attention here."

She shifted her head further up into her armpit, raising her shoulder to bring herself a little closer to eye level. It was oddly effective, considering that this was still a head shorter than me. "There's plenty of reasons besides drawing attention, Stu. Looking good makes you feel better - science fact. And you could use a mood-lifter right now, right?"

I couldn't figure out if spinning her game of dress-up as an act of compassion was sincere, or a ploy to get me to play along. No, she probably did mean it; Emma might be a schemer, but she wasn't really duplicitous. But then, she was prone to projecting her obsessions onto others and trying to rope them in, which was why we were in this mess to begin with...

"Honestly," I said, feeling frazzled as I tried to play nice and engage her argument sincerely, "it doesn't do much for me. I know some people really do care about this stuff; I'm just not one of 'em."

She bit her lip and bobbed her knee impatiently as she tried to come up with a response; a ventilation fan rattled somewhere overhead. "But it's such a waste..." she said, half disappointed and half pouting.

My neck twitched at that, and something inside me skipped a beat. I'd heard that line more times than I ever cared to, and I definitely didn't care to now. I started formulating a comeback, trying in vain to keep myself from getting worked up, but Tammy stepped in. "Okay, seriously, Emma," she said. "If Stu wants to keep it simple, that's h-his decision. You can have plenty of fun dressing up yourself, without badgering other people when they don't want to."

Emma said nothing for a moment, visibly working out some inner conflict. Then she sighed, her shoulders drooping. "Fine," she said. "No, um...sorry. It's just...I can't stop thinking about how to make the key shaft work with an outfit, or turn those seams at the elbows into an accent, or...y'know, stuff like that. It's just begging for a real thematic unity. I'm jealous; this-" - she gestured to her absent neck - "-is pretty neat, but all I can do with it is dress up as Anne Bole-"

She stopped short, and her eyes went wide. "Wait, wait, wait, holy...!" She put the slacks she was holding down, took her head in her hands, and set herself on a nearby shelf. Then she turned around, arching her body this way and that as she observed herself from an entirely new angle. "My God!" she cackled, grinning broadly, "I can actually tell if things make my ass look big!"

We stared at her. "That's your primary concern here?" Tammy asked.

Emma waggled her hand in that universal more-or-less gesture. "Eh, it's more of a spin-off benefit. But seriously! I don't have to awkwardly crane my neck to see in the mirror or ask someone to give me the honest truth anymore!"

"That's, uh...that's great, really," Tammy said, before resuming the search. Emma shrugged and returned to her own explorations, piloting her body around her head to retrieve the slacks she'd set down with only a little stumbling. It was fascinating to watch, but I had my own goal right now.