The Natural Sissy and the Gang

Mixed Girls

"Can you actually believe this?" Ryan Hooper sighed, as his friend Darren Baxter joined him at the bus stop, hitching his leather satchel higher up on his shoulder with a rueful smile. It was quite early and no one else was there yet, as they had planned, because neither boy was looking forward to meeting any of their old mates. Both knew it would happen, and sooner rather than later, but getting an earlier bus was intended to delay the inevitable. It was the one advantage of needing to get over to the other side of town to reach their new school.

"I've been dreading it," Darren admitted, pulling irritably at the elastic chinstrap holding his straw boater in place. Ryan nodded, understanding that feeling as he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dark red hooded school coat, cursing the weather. He was not sure that he would have felt much better without the coat, because his school blazer was the same colour and his tunic was still visible just above his knee socks, but it just felt really childish to him, the sort of warm winter garment that little girls wear to primary schools. It would still have been awful being educationally petticoated in an ordinary uniform, but he felt like a character from Malory Towers or something. It was not raining too hard, it was really just drizzle, but his Mum had insisted on the coat, of course. Like she was insisting on him following all of the other school rules. "I begged Mum and Dad to change their minds...but they said if I don't really knuckle down and make a real go of this, they would actually consider...you know...really actually consider going further?"

"Yeah...I know what you mean...it could be worse?" Ryan suggested, knowing full well that his parents would consider doing the same if he did not do well at Meadvale Mixed Girls School and improve his grades. Sending him to the brand-new school for year ten was pretty much his last chance saloon, as far as his parents were concerned, because his last report had been bloody dire. He had never been a troublemaker but he had been messing around quite a lot, and his old school had predicted that he would never get any decent GCSE results unless his attitude and his application improved radically. And that made him an absolutely perfect candidate for the new government initiative involving educational petticoating, which naturally exposed him to the danger of his parents changing his routine at home. "We went to lunch at my uncle's house yesterday...you know my cousin is going to be in year seven...and he was wearing what they called his Sunday dress?"

"Shit...part-petticoating?" Darren groaned, well-aware of the terminology as his mother was extremely interested in the principles of petticoating. His grades were all right, so much better than Ryan's, but he had been getting bullied and got into a couple of fights as a result, standing up for himself. Meadvale Mixed was about getting him well out of harm's way and giving him a better chance to concentrate on his studies, as far as his father was concerned, at any rate, but he was a bit worried that his mother really was considering going just a little further. Because it was all the rage. Educational petticoating dramatically improved academic performance and behaviour, according to the government, and Meadvale Mixed was just one of a number of new schools designed to put the theories into practise.

"Sort of...but my aunt is more into this gender-neutrality claptrap...she says that it is really fashionable...and when we got this uniform last week, there were dresses...for boys...right there on display in the bloody shop?" Ryan said, still appalled by the truly horrible things he had seen, and the uniform that he had to wear to Meadvale. He checked his watch, wanting the bus to come, and then looked down the road, hoping for a sight of it, where he saw four more dark red coats walking towards them at quite a pace, as if they were late. "Look out...we have got company?"

"Alright?" Darren said to the two girls and two boys, in an effort to be polite. They would all be catching the same bus every day, after all, and they were all obviously new to the new school as well, so saying hello seemed sensible.