reached home. He took a hot shower and fell on the bed in an exhausted stupor. When he awoke next morn- ing, he destroyed all the feminine wardrobe in his closet. He hurt for days, and felt unclean for weeks. He decided he didn't want to be a girl, and thought he would never want to wear feminine garments again.
Before a year had passed, however, he felt the familiar urge to "dress up". He now used his aunt's clothes as he had grown larger. He could use almost anything, though he had to be extra careful of her dresses, for he had no way of explaining if anything happened to them. Lingerie was another matter. He often brought in her wash and folded and put away everything. His thoughtfulness so impressed her that she never noticed that any of her lingerie had been dis- turbed; he had put most of it away in her dresser, any- way. However, he was afraid to dress too frequently, and never left the house when he did...
Again his thoughts were interrupted by the clanging of the hourly warning bell. He noted with surprise that it was eight a.m. The superintendent was late; he'd been arriving in time for them to make the eight o'clock hourly check together. Charlie shrugged, and made the check alone, thinking that the super had been delayed and would soon show. But when 10 o'clock came with no superintendent he became uneasy, and at noon he decided to investigate.
Not
He took the elevator to the surface and looked out the window toward the parking lot. The ground was covered with an unseasonably late snow. The only car he could see was the one the pickets had come in. a human was in sight, and not a track in the thin layer of snow. He ventured outside the building and still saw no one. He unlocked the gate to the parking lot and found the two pickets lying beside the car. Не rushed over and felt them--no heart beat--dead!
With a sinking feeling in his heart Charlie started running down the road toward town about a mile away. The few cars he saw were either parked or had crashed into buildings, curbs, poles. He ran back to the park- ing lot, got the pickets' car and drove to the superin- tendent's home about twenty miles away. Unable to
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