Take a Lemon

It was a real relief to get to lunch after my final morning class, which was European Literature. It was the only class that was completely new to me, and I had spent most of the class just taking notes; I wouldn’t say that I had actually understood more than half of what Professor Tipton had said. Lunch was at least partially familiar, as I sat with most of the same people from breakfast, most of whose names I had managed to recall.

So far I had managed to identify Phil and Jay and Susie, Lisa, and Sheila, in addition to my two roommates. I hadn’t seen Sheila at breakfast, and Lisa didn’t join us for lunch, nor did Phil and one other boy and girl. There were also two more boys with us at lunch whose names I had not yet learned. I discovered that Jay was a junior, majoring in Physics, and Sheila seemed to be some kind of language major. I made a mental note to write all of this down after my last class, which was a biology lab.

In the meantime, I wondered what the others had heard about the cause of my problems. I would have expected it to be a prime topic of conversation, students finding their very beings transformed by a rogue experiment, but nobody had even mentioned it at breakfast. Was it possible that it was old news that I had somehow missed before break? So I asked, “Hey, did any of you guys hear about the time-travel experiment that was changing people’s DNA?”

One of the boys snorted.

Jay gave me a disdainful look. “Oh for… Marsh, you didn’t really believe that nonsense, did you?” The rest of the gang looked confused, so he explained. “The Evening Local had an article which said that several Piques students claimed that some scientists went back in time and changed their DNA.” Most of the others snickered.

“What’s funny about that?” I demanded.

“Marsh… in the first place, there’s no such thing as time travel. It’s physically impossible. Haven’t you taken any physics?”

“Not yet,” I admitted.

“Well trust me on this one. In the second place, the alleged victims are just exactly the way everybody remembers. The only ones who are supposed to have remembered anything different are the victims themselves. It’s like the bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the guy claims a witch turned him into a newt, even though he’s clearly not one.”

“Got better…” one of the other boys muttered, showing that he knew the scene Jay meant.

“And in the third place, the article doesn’t even mention any names! There are no specifics of any kind, no way to verify anything. So it’s a hoax, an urban legend. Either the writer got bored and made something up, or a bunch of students snookered him.”

“Well… how can you be sure?” I asked, not sure whether I would have preferred that he believe the story or not.

He exhaled in exasperation.

“What did they say happened?” Sheila asked.

The boy who had snorted chimed in, “One girl claims she’d lost 3 inches from her bust.”

Two of the girls laughed at that, with one commenting, “Gee, I’d be pissed if that happened to me…”

“The bottom line, Marsh,” Jay concluded, “is that there is no supporting evidence for what is certainly an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Q.E.D.”

I shrugged. I had to admit that if I hadn’t experienced it myself, I probably would have been convinced. But, while I happened to know he was wrong, I had no way to argue against him. As he said, I had no evidence that I used to be a guy. Tina and Chad had believed me only because they knew me so well, or rather, because they had known Marsha so well, and were more willing to believe that science worked differently than they had believed it did than believe that Marsha would behave so far out of character. I doubted that any of Marsha’s friends would know her so well as to give me the opportunity to prove this to them, even if I had wanted to, and even if I hadn’t already triggered an argument that had pulled the rug out from any case I might choose to make.

Not that it should really have mattered to me. I certainly didn’t want most of Marsha’s friends knowing about this – not only would it be horribly embarrassing, I wasn’t sure how they would respond to knowing that I wasn’t really Marsha – and I didn’t actually have any friends of my own in this timeline. That was kind of a sobering thought to take back to my dorm room. I didn’t actually exist anymore, except as a passenger in Marsha’s head – a passenger now responsible for flying the airplane, but without the requisite training. So far, I had managed to avoid crashing, but the whole seamstress issue was looming on the horizon.

It was fortunate that my only afternoon class, biology lab, was very familiar to me, as my level of concentration was nowhere near where it should have been. I was worrying about sewing, and excited about the read-through, and of course, I was still in the midst of my first-ever period. We were studying human anatomy and “my” lab partner (Rob Sullivan, according to Marsha’s class notes) and I had to identify bones on the skeletons in the lab. Fortunately, we were concentrating on the arms and legs – the “appendicular skeleton” and most of them were pretty easy, although I had trouble remembering which was the radius and which the ulna.

Returning to my dorm, I collapsed and actually napped for about an hour. Apparently, the stress of playing the role and pretending to know all of the people that Marsha knew was starting to get to me, and my room was the only place I could drop character. It was very fortunate that my sister and Chad knew about it – at least I had somebody I could talk to.

Afternoon study was already a habit with me, and I saw no need to change it. Typically, I would at least review my notes and recopy any that were hard to understand. I hadn’t decided exactly when I was going to do all of the new reading that Marsha’s literature course demanded – not to mention the papers. Most science majors weren’t all that great at writing, and didn’t enjoy it. Apparently, that hadn’t bothered Marsha, or at least she wasn’t afraid of trying it.

The EuroLit notes were the only ones that gave me any real trouble, mostly because I wasn’t as familiar with the material that had come before. The review was supposed to reinforce what I had heard, but since I hadn’t understood the notes when I took them, reviewing them mostly only let me clean up my handwriting and see the same odd explanations. A one-week quick review was certainly not going to be able to make up for the two months or so of classes that I had missed, but I did my best. Getting familiar with the new material was at least worth something, even if I didn’t fully understand it.

The review took me just under an hour. Since I had the read-through for Mousetrap that evening, I decided to devote the remaining hours of the afternoon to getting familiar with the sewing machine. Any solution that Tina devised would undoubtedly require me to do some sewing, and I needed to be ready. Despite my panic of the night before, I really didn’t want to quit this adventure prematurely. Aside from the one-time chance to do a really plum role in an Alvin Tomlinson production, I could see possibilities in learning things about girls by being one that would just have to help me with my relationships once I changed back.

I’d already figured out how to do a basic stitch, so the next step was presumably to sew two pieces of cloth together. I didn’t bother rethreading the machine, since I didn’t really care what the result looked like and the thread that was already in it would be fine. I pulled out some scraps from Marsha’s sewing basket, held them together under the foot, and pushed the pedal. I had expected the feed mechanism to move them together and keep them aligned, but it didn’t. The pieces moved partly together, but the top one slipped, and the seam I got was a complete mess, crooked and uneven.

I didn’t have to be an expert to know that I was missing something yet again. There was obviously a way to keep the pieces together; was it technique? I tried to reason things out. It was possible that it was just a question of my lack of skill, but the machine was pulling kind of hard. It just didn’t seem possible that you were supposed to keep the two pieces pinched together with your fingers and keep up with the machine. If it were pieces of wood I was trying to fasten together, I would have used some sort of a clamp, but I couldn’t find anything in the basket that even resembled one. I tried it a few more times, but had little success. I was going to have to ask Tina when I spoke to her tonight, after the read-through.