Take a Lemon

I left Nikki’s dorm with my mind starting to function again. While my outlook was still pretty bleak, I had some specific recommendations for action – and that meant that I could focus on the here-and-now and not think too much about the future. I had gotten pretty good at not thinking about things over the past month.

I was standing outside my dorm room, fumbling in my purse for the key, when through the door I heard a voice suddenly raised in anger. It was Lee Ann.

“… cheating on her!”

I hesitated for a moment, and then unlocked the door. I felt nothing but disgust for whomever they were discussing. The guy didn’t even realize how good he had it, still being male, and here he was, cheating on his girlfriend. I may not be perfect, but at least I could console myself that I had never done that. I had never cheated on a girlfriend.

But as I opened the door, an unwelcome memory intruded. According to Vicky, I had lost interest in her when I met Lee Ann. OK, technically, I hadn’t cheated on her, but wasn’t it still a betrayal at the emotional level? I really didn’t need to think that way. Not now. I might start thinking that this turned-into-a-girl thing was a punishment or something, and that I deserved it.

The conversation stopped abruptly as I entered, and after a moment I realized that my roommates were staring at me.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “Go on and discuss the jerk – I’m sure he deserves it.” I was halfway to my room when I realized that they were still not talking, and turned in surprise. “I could hear you out in the hallway,” I explained, taking their silence for embarrassment at being overheard.

But apparently that wasn’t it. “I was just worried about you,” Lee Ann told me.

“Me?” I responded, my curiosity pulling me a bit out of my thoughts. “What does this have to do with me?”

“I told her she was imagining things,” Terry put in, a touch of anger in her voice.

“You didn’t see how miserable she was,” Lee Ann shot back, sounding defensive. I, of course, remained clueless, and I looked back and forth at my roommates, looking for an answer that made sense.

After the two of them stared at each other for another moment, Terry finally started, “Marsh, it’s not that we’d have any objections…”

“… and we really understand…” Lee Ann added.

“Objections to what?” I asked, puzzled.

“Vicky,” Lee Ann said firmly.

“You and Vicky,” Terry added. “And Lee Ann thinks she’s cheating on you.”

“What? Cheating?! But…” In a sense, she was correct. I had felt as though Vicky was cheating on me by agreeing to go out with Kevin. Technically, though, she wasn’t. And technically, I hadn’t cheated on her, either, but it still hurt. Trying to dismiss the thought, I spoke the truth that I thought relevant. “Neither of us is into girls, Lee Ann.”

“I just thought…”

“Lee Ann thought that there was something odd about the way you were reacting this morning. And then there was the way you got really embarrassed when I asked you about Vicky…”

I shrugged and shook my head. At this point, I probably wouldn’t have minded if they were right, but that wasn’t happening.

“Marsh, I’m really sorry,” Lee Ann told me. “I hope you’re not offended.”

I shrugged again. Being thought a lesbian was so far down the list of my problems, I wasn’t sure it was even on the list at this point. Besides, lesbians were almost certainly higher on the scale of social acceptability than whatever I was.

“Well, at least you seem to be in a better mood,” Terry noted.

I nodded. “I had a nice talk with my friend Nikki, and she helped me.”

Lee Ann looked at me expectantly. “Can you tell us what’s bothering you? Is it the House Parties thing?”

I sighed. I had just done the “talk things out” thing with Nikki, and I wasn’t really in the mood to do it again right now. “I guess that’s part of it,” I conceded. Even it wasn’t a particularly big part. “I’m still working things out.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“It’s OK, Marsh,” Terry said when I hesitated. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Lee Ann nodded in agreement, which just made me feel worse. My roommates were being much kinder to me than I deserved. They trusted me, and I was keeping secrets from them, important secrets, secrets that I couldn’t reveal, both for my dignity as well as their peace of mind. I didn’t deserve to be treated so well.

And after all that preparation, they never asked again how I had met Vicky!

After dinner, I called Vicky to figure out our plans for the evening.

“Why don’t you pick me up and we’ll decide then, OK?” she suggested.

I was a bit surprised, and said so. “You don’t think it’s a bit weird, one girl picking another one up?”

“Um, no,” she reassured me. “It’s pretty normal, actually. Unless you’re not comfortable with the idea, seeing as… you know.”

“No, that’s OK. At least I know where your room is. It’s easier than trying to find you outside of wherever we’re going.”

Still, it felt strange, picking her up from her room. Strange because it was so familiar, and so little in my new life was. Strange because I had to pretend not to know her roommates as Vicky introduced us. And strange because the whole idea of picking up Vicky for a date was what I wished I could be doing in earnest, and yet had to pretend that it was just two girls getting together as friends. Somehow, it all just irked me even further than I already was.

“So, where did you want to go?” I asked as we left. “Did you want to check out the movies? What do two girls who are just friends do when they go out, anyway? Should we go get our hair done? Maybe go dress shopping?”

She stopped walking and confronted me, hands on hips. “I think you’re making way too much of this, Marsh. Didn’t you tell me you’d gone out with your roommates and some of the other girls on your hall?”

“‘Too much’?” I echoed. “Oh, sure, since it’s clearly not too much to have your entire identity stripped from you, to lose everything that you cared about, everything you enjoyed. Oh yeah, I’m definitely overreacting here.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it! What’s happened to you is horrible, but that doesn’t mean that you have to make it even worse.”

“‘Make it worse’? How could I make this worse?”

“By pretending that you’re not enjoying anything at all. You’re enjoying the play, aren’t you? At least you were a few days ago. And I knew you were enjoying the sewing – you said you would even want to keep doing it if you changed back.”

“If,” I muttered, but she kept right on going.

“I’ll bet there’s a bunch of other things you’re enjoying about being a girl, that you won’t admit, even to yourself. I saw you with that baby, Marsh. You were definitely enjoying yourself.”

“Will you forget about the baby? I’m embarrassed enough about that.”

“Fine. But don’t tell me that you’ve lost everything you cared about or enjoyed.”

“So you think that I’m better off this way? You prefer me this way?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t. Marsh, you know I want you back, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know why, now that you have Kevin.”

Her tone turned soft. “Oh, Marsh, are you still agonizing about that? Kevin could never replace you in my heart. It’s just… I don’t have a lot of options, right now.” As she said that, she turned her hands over in a gesture of futility, and I noticed a bruise on her right hand.

I grabbed her hand and pulled her under a light. She had a pretty bad welt on her wrist. “What did you do to yourself?”

She looked embarrassed. “Oh, it was just something stupid. Kevin asked me out, you know, so that House Parties wouldn’t be our first date, and I told him I was going out with you, so we got together this afternoon.”

“Why this afternoon? House Parties is four weeks away.”

“Yeah, I told him that, but he sort of insisted. So we drove into town and sort of walked around.”

“He has a car? Terrific. One more thing he does better than me.”

“Will you stop it? This isn’t about you!”

I nodded. “I’m sorry. I just…”

“Anyway,” she continued, ignoring me, “we walked around and… you know how you used to joke about walking on either side of a lamp post and crashing us into it? Well, we were holding hands and I went to the other side of one from him, and he didn’t let go in time. So I wound up with a bruise.”

“What an idiot! How much sense does it take to figure out that you need to let go before running into a lamp post?”

“Yeah, well, I think he was already mad at me.”

“So the ‘something stupid’ was him, not you.”

She nodded. “I think that, no matter how angry you were, you would have made sure to let go.”

“Yeah.”

We had started walking again, even though we hadn’t agreed yet on where.

“I just wish you had some ideas, Marsh. Isn’t there something you can try?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Seems like every idea I have, the Strangers say that they’ve already tried. But you know, now that I’ve lost everything, maybe I’ll feel less pressure to come up with a sensible idea.”

“You haven’t lost – wait. How is that a good thing?”

I stopped and faced her. “My ideas don’t have to be sensible, now. So I can try anything. It can hardly hurt, right?”

“Does that mean that you have an idea?”

I shook my head and starting walking again. “Not really.”

“Oh.”

“Thing is,” I continued. “If we see this as a game, the first thing we do is assume away whatever makes it unwinnable. So the possibility that changing the past might have eliminated the experiment can be ignored. If it happened, we can’t do anything about. The only way to get anywhere is to assume that they’re still around somewhere.”

“Right.”

“Which means that they are in hiding. So how would we find them if they are hiding?”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But maybe there’s another way to go about this. Assume that the administration really did a good job hiding them, and stop trying to find them physically.”

“OK…”

Recasting the problem did seem to be helping me think about it. If my chances of success were pretty much zero, it meant that I could treat it as an intellectual exercise, a puzzle, rather than an emergency. And that was exactly the kind of thing that an aspiring pre-med science major should be able to solve.

“So how else could we find them? Papers, that’s how.”

“But didn’t you already do searches for papers?”

“Sure, using web searches and looking for the name ‘Davis.’ That’s obviously not the way. But scientists do research using papers all the time.”

“How?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “You usually learn that junior or senior year, and we’re all freshman and sophomores.” I looked at her as a sudden thought came into my mind. “You don’t suppose that’s why no upperclassmen were included, do you? So that we wouldn’t be able to find them?”

She shrugged, but I was mostly talking at her at this point. Our outing was turning into a problem-solving session, so when we hit the path that led to the Grill, I took it rather than one that would take us to an on-campus movie.

“You know, maybe looking by name was the mistake. Something like time travel wouldn’t be developed all at once, judging by the way science works. This guy must have published other work that hinted at time travel, or set the stages for it. That’s what we need to find.”

“Marsh, that’s it!” Vicky said enthusiastically. “That’s how to find them!”

“Maybe. I’m not getting too hopeful. Not yet. Thinking it’s just a game seems to be working for me, and I don’t know what the chances are. Besides, I wouldn’t have the first idea of how to actually find such papers. What we really need is an upperclassman who is majoring in physics, and the only one I know is so dismissive of the whole idea that I doubt he’d be willing to spend any time on it. I could ask him, I guess. Nothing to lose, right?”

“What about Allie’s brother?”

“What?”

“Didn’t Allie say that her big brother was a physics major?”

I stopped and stared. “I completely forgot about that.” Maybe there was a chance, after all, however slim. “Do you think he’d help us?”

“I don’t know,” she answered with a smile, “but I think we’ve just figured out what we’re going to be doing, tonight.”