When we were little, everybody thought it was very cute, our looking so much alike even though we were boy and girl, and our parents even dressed us alike much of the time. But by the time we were adolescents in high school there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I was John and a boy, while my sister was Joan, a girl.
But in many ways we were still very much alike; we were both blondes, we both had almost identical oval faces, and we both were the same height within an inch or less. For a girl, Joan was rather husky, although she had a lovely feminine figure, while I was on the slender side for an active and athletic young fellow. And, as I said, our faces were almost exactly alike in every feature.
Joan was quite athletic, and her senior year in high school she was captain of the girls’ tennis team, and could give any member of the boys’ team a real work-out on the court. That same year I was captain of the swimming team and had an impressive number of wins in the fifty-yard and hundred-yard sprints. After the winter swimming season, I used to play a lot of tennis, some of it with Joan, and I could beat her most of the time if I really worked at it. And this was what got me into the terrible mess I’m going to tell you about.
It was a big weekend, late in the spring of my senior year at high school, and there were lots of sports planned, including a tennis match between our girls’ team and the freshman girls’ team from nearby State College. On the schedule were lots of parties and dances and picnics, as well as the athletic events. Our girls’ tennis team was all psyched up and determined to win their match, and I think my sister, Joan, would have been ready to cut her own throat if she lost her match against the captain of State College’s freshman (or freshgirl) team.
They played the girls doubles on Saturday morning, and Joan and her partner managed to win. During the couple of hours break for lunch, Joan had the accident that got me into the most horrible predicament of my whole life. While running down some steps, Joan tripped and twisted her ankle badly. Immediately the whole side of her foot began to swell up and turn purple. It must have hurt her a lot even as we were carrying her to the girl’s dressing-room in the am, but what upset Joan most was the fact that she obviously would not be able to play in her singles match that afternoon.
While waiting for the doctor to arrive all the girls were talking at once, wondering how they could juggle the matches around so that we would have a chance of winning. As a joke, someone suggested that I should take her place and play her singles match. At least I thought it was a joke, but everyone was studying me seriously, wondering if the deception could be made to work.
I seemed to have no choice in the matter; all the girls went to work on my disguise. Before I could object, I was stripped down to my jockey-shorts, and one of the girls was busy shaving my hairy legs. While I protested, another girl was deftly shaving my armpits. A big girl dove into her locker and came up with a padded bra which would fit me, and then proceeded to fill out the cups even more with extra padding securely taped in. Joan’s tiny gold panties were stripped off her slimly rounded hips and dragged onto me where they fitted my loins too tightly for comfort.
Then I found a short-skirted white tennis dress, almost identical with the one Joan was wearing, that I could get into, and I was almost ready for this prank of substitution before I had agreed to do it. The doctor had taken Joan off to the hospital to have her ankle X-rayed, and the remaining girls went to work completing my disguise.
As I mentioned, Joan and I both have blonde hair. She wears hers fairly short for a girl, so that it won’t get in her way on the tennis court. She always wears a headband to keep her hair under control while playing. My hair was fairly long, the way lots of fellows wear their hair nowadays, so my make-up assistants had some material to work with in their attempted deception. The headband would help, and our faces were almost identical to begin with, as I have said.
Lipstick, face-powder, and eye-shadow were deftly applied by the eager girls, and when they let me see myself in a full-length mirror, I was truly startled at how much ] resembled my twin-sister. The way the extremely short flaring skirt kept swirling and flipping up around my hips, revealing the gaudy little gold panties that so snugly encased my hips distracted and embarrassed me, but my critical audience of helpful girls assured me that everything was perfect and I’d soon get used to this intimate exposure, Just as all girls did.
We still had an hour or so to go until it was time for Joan’s (my) singles match, so I spent the time trying to get accustomed to looking and acting like a girl. I still thought of the whole deal as a sort of prank or harmless hoax, where everybody would soon discover the substitution and we’d all have a good laugh about it. My main worry was hoping that Joan’s ankle was not badly broken so she’d be on crutches and miss a lot of fun over the summer vacation.
Not many people seemed to have heard about Joan’s accident, so when her match was announced and I went out onto the court, there was the usual cheering and encouragement that she would have gotten. The group from State College certainly didn’t suspect anything, I’m sure. At least not then.
Even as I warmed up before starting the match, I Kept feeling the shame and embarrassment of having my legs
exposed so completely. The tiny gold panties clasped my crotch so snugly that I was aware of their grip all the time, but my legs were completely bare all the way up to where they joined my body, a condition that men and boys are not accustomed to, although girls experience this sexual exposure frequently, in tennis, in swimming, in cheerleading, in show business. And I found it distracting to have the ersatz breasts bulging out from my chest where my arms kept brushing against them as I ran and stroked the ball.
