It wasn’t until I was at track practice with Elizabeth later that week that I had any ideas about how to reach Adam. Apparently, Elizabeth had been trying to convince him to come and practice with the team, and it had finally worked. So there I sat, waiting for people to come, when Adam snuck up behind me.

"Greetings Molly." Came his voice from behind a post.

"Hey," I replied as he came into plain view. He was wearing light khaki pants and a dark blue polo shirt. "You can change over there." I pointed to the locker room.

"Oh, I’m going like this," he said as though it was obvious. "It’s cold outside. I don’t need a longer shirt."

The strange thing about Adam is that he never questioned his wardrobe. People spent all of practice giving him grief about his clothes, but he said that it was too much of a hassle to change. He was the first person I ever knew to think that convenience is more important than usefulness. It was from his choice of clothing that gave me the idea of how to loosen him up. While running with Elizabeth, I brought up the thought of getting Adam into very different things than he normally wore.

"What type of thing are you thinking? A pair of jeans or something? That’s not going to do anything." Was Elizabeth’s first reaction.

"No, no," I promised. "I mean getting him into something that would sort of scare him a bit. A medievil outfit might do it. It’d have to be something he would never wear for any reason."

"Molls, that’s just not going to work. First, where the hell are we going to get medievil stuff, and second, if we do, think about how expensive it would be. And third, he’d never do it. You’d need a reason for him to even concider it."

"Costume party, Elizabeth. Think about it, we’ve got to do something to scare him out." I whined to my running partner. Her only response was to roll her eyes and bolt up ahead, leaving me to think about how to get Adam into strange attire. At the end of my last lap, Elizabeth grabbed my shoulders, laughing hysterically.

"Rocky Horror! We should bring him to Rocky Horror. He can dress in drag!" She panted. I had never felt so invigorated about a project before in my life.

Adam tapped nervously on the calculator in his pocket. He was sitting on the train making his way to Elizabeth’s apartment to get ready for Rocky Horror, and he was worried. It’s not as though he’d never been, in fact he had gone only a month or so earlier for the first time and liked it quite a bit, but he had gone in his regular attire then, and this time he was dressing up. A large majority of his friends thought that this was something that could never be done. We approached Elizabeth’s door. He slowed his walk to a near crawl.

"Okay, Mr. Khakis and Polo Shirt, ready to do this?" I asked as we reached the steps. With nothing coming from Adam, I walked into the apartment building. Twenty minutes later, we left Elizabeth’s apartment. She and I had dominatrix outfits on, and Adam, on the other hand, looked like a beautiful lady. We dressed him in an emerald green ball gown with a pearl necklace, pearl clip-on earrings, and a deep brown wig. He didn’t look completely like a woman, but he was close enough. Walking to the theater, he looked very uncomfortable, but smiled the whole time. He was enjoying himself.

During the movie, we all joked around about how he seemed like a daredevil now, though he was usually frightened of anything out of the ordinary. When it was over, we walked out of the theater onto the alley way with all of the other Rocky people. Adam seemed to have gotten used to the dress feeling, and was walking more easily.

"What did’ya think?" Elizabeth asked.

"Doing the Time Warp in a dress that constricts shoulder movement was difficult, but not bad overall." He replied.

We all began walking towards the main street, but were stopped by shouts from a man heading in our direction.

continue