Little Maddie was confused by her older brother's behavior at the beach. Usually he'd be having fun with the rest of the family, but this time he seemed to be more occupied with looking around and averting his gaze, and, on occasion, moping. When she asked her mother about it, she was told that her brother had begun to notice girls and had neither the nerve nor the experience to know what to do.

    She didn't understand the explanation as intended. Instead she wondered how dumb boys could be to not notice girls for so long. Had he thought her a boy all along? Other than that, to her it seemed that he was afraid because girls were new. He'd probably begin to think that girls were icky, like the rest of the boys did! She couldn't allow her brother to be that way!

    So she decided that she would give him some protection, in order to allay his silly fear. She went up to him and offered to give him a cootie shot, received a strange look, then got the permission that she had expected from him. He had always been agreeable like that, although she had no idea that he did such things for her to appease their parents.

    She said, "circle, circle, dot, dot," as she unabashedly drew circles around her brother's nipples before poking them, in turn, with her index finger. "Now you've got your cootie shot!"

    She was surprised when her index finger was pushed back by pliant flesh, the kind that she was more familiar with being on her mother. Her brother seemed equally surprised, if not more so: because he soon fainted dead away.

    She felt confused as she looked down at her brother. Had he been a girl all along? But her mother had never said anything about girls starting out as boys, and she was pretty sure that she was a girl herself. Did her brother grow up, then? Was that how it worked? Her mother occasionally told her that she would have to wait until she grew up, after all. It was all very confusing.

    But little did she know that the cootie shot was the modern incarnation of an old witch's spell that had gone by a different name, and that she had the potential to tap into the same mystical forces of the universe as a witch. The original intention of the spell was to make men immune to charm spells, which they ofttimes tended to fall for. But such charm spells had no effect on females, so... It had been handy for the male witches that ever got into conflicts with female witches, and thus why witches were renowned for being primarily female.

    All that she knew, however, was that she was drawing unwanted attention, and that the last thing that she wanted was for her parents to notice and punish her. So she reasoned that giving another cootie shot would reverse what she had done, seeing as she knew of no wards against boys for girls.

    However, as she was about to apply the last "dot", she had no idea that she was about to make the current problem "develop" into something more problematic.