“Uh…” I said.

It was kind of a funny story, actually. And I meant “funny” in the ironic, unfunny sense. My dad taught me to drive a stick—or tried to teach me, I should say—last summer. This was the result of the ’63 Corvette Stingray he randomly decided to buy me for my sixteenth birthday. (Seriously, so random. I didn’t even know what a Stingray was before he bought me one!) But alas, now I had one, and boy oh boy, how lucky was I? So now I had to learn how to drive a stick.

Little did Dad know, we were embarking on an impossible, absurdist quest in the vein of Don Quixote.

By August, our collective blood pressure was hypertensive at best. When it became obvious that I would learn to accept my own mortality and death before I learned to operate a manual transmission, he silently admitted defeat. Sold the Stingray and got me a Subaru instead.

I think, deep down, the Stingray was the car he always wanted—probably since he was sixteen years old—but he felt silly or vain buying and/or keeping it for himself. I think, by getting it for me, he thought he was fulfilling all my wildest dreams. And not sending me to an early grave in a cherry-red casket made by Chevrolet.

So, in answer to Wynonna’s question: No. I could not drive a stick. It was a hard no. Harder than space diamond.

“Uh, well, I mean,” I said, moronically. “It depends on your definition of ‘drive.’”

“Oh god, never mind,” said Wynezra. “Do you have a car?”

“I have a Subaru?” I said, like I wasn’t sure if it was a car or not.

“In the driveway?”

“In the garage.”

“Keys?”

“Uh, they’re on my dresser upstairs. My bedroom is just past the door with the Adventure Time poster.”

“Cool,” she said. “Meet me outside.” And then, as an afterthought, “Don’t do anything weird with my body.”

She hung up.

I pulled myself out of my bed/nightstand nook, kicked my legs out of the sheets, and staggered to my feet. The entire mechanics of my body felt off. For starters, the hips. They were very much… there. But the subtle differences in the way I moved were only a slight distraction from the fact that I wasn’t wearing any pants.

Wynonna’s body wasn’t wearing any pants.

Just a pair of soft black panties that hardly felt like they were there. They hugged the bizarre curves of my body, emphasized the fact that my bulge had been hijacked, and were neatly tucked into my butt.