Take a Lemon

I had specifically saved my logic homework to work on when Jeremy and I got together, figuring that as an engineer it would be easy for him. Of course, I didn’t actually need help with it; I was repeating the course I had started as Marshall, but which Marsha hadn’t taken. I had done the work, and figured that I might as well get credit for it.

Jeremy came over to our dorm to pick me up shortly after dinner. I had told my roommates of our plans, and they had told some of the other girls and, well… when he got there, there were seven of us in the living room, waiting for him. I’d explained that it wasn’t really a date, but that he’d arranged to pick me up just so I wouldn’t get lost trying to find his dorm in the dark, but the girls were very eager.

“I’m really sorry,” I said as I opened the door. “My friends just all wanted to meet you. Um, Lee Ann, Terry, Lisa, Chandra, Sheila and Susie, this is Jeremy. Jeremy, you sort of saw them a couple of days ago, but these are my roommates Lee Ann and Terry, and our friends Chandra, Lisa, Sheila and Susie.”

I could see he was overwhelmed, but he shook hands with everybody and didn’t seem too phased by the whispers and giggles in the background. As we left, he said, “Do you mind if I say that that was kind of strange? I hope I’m not supposed to remember all of those names.”

I shook my head. “The important ones are my roommates. Lee Ann is the blonde in the green top and jeans; Terry is the tall brunette.”

“Tall?” he asked, looking amused.

“To me, she’s tall,” I retorted, elbowing him in the ribs.

He snickered. “To you, everybody is tall.”

A few months ago, I would have been really annoyed by a comment like that. Now, I tried not to grin and failed. “This is a side of you I haven’t seen,” I observed. “You sound really… comfortable.”

He shrugged. “I guess I am, a bit. Being back at school, and now that we’ve been seeing each other for a while… and accepting the idea that you really do want to be with me. It makes a difference. Plus, getting together for something as low-key as studying together…”

“We’re really just going to be studying?” I asked, trying to put just a hint of seductiveness in my voice. I wasn’t sure I succeeded, because he gave me a really innocent look and I couldn’t tell if it was feigned.

We reached his dorm, which wasn’t all that far from mine; he hadn’t really needed to come get me, although it was more fun this way. We took the elevator to the third floor and I followed him to his dorm room, which turned out to be a fairly utilitarian single. His bed was placed at the end of a shoebox-shaped room that actually seemed to deemphasize its odd dimensions, with his desk along one wall and his closet and dresser along the other. I didn’t see a gaming console, which suggested that he either didn’t game, or just used his computer. His room was actually a bit tidier than most guys’ rooms in my experience – certainly, it was tidier than mine had been.

He only had the one chair and there was nowhere else really to sit, other than the bed, which made me suspect that I had been wrong – this wasn’t just a study session. But I hadn’t had much time to process that thought before he grabbed some books and led me back out, saying, “OK, this way.”

We walked down the hallway to a small lounge that was already occupied by several people sitting at tables. Well, that certainly answered my question. He helped me off with my coat and introduced me around, but I was a bit off balance, and didn’t actually remember any of the names. I think there was a Jon and a Michelle and a Grady or Gary in the crowd, but I couldn’t be sure. It was pretty obvious, though, that they were as intrigued about Jeremy having a girlfriend as my roommates were about Marsha having a boyfriend.

We sat at a table that was already occupied by another guy and a girl; I couldn’t tell if they were a couple or just friends, but they were softly discussing what I think was a history reading assignment. Jeremy took out an engineering text of some kind and I took out my logic notes. I had intended to do the ‘helpless girl’ bit, remembering how well that used to work on me, but I didn’t think that would work with somebody else at the same table.

To my surprise, though, I found that I didn’t actually remember all that much of the subject. True, it had been close to three months since I had looked at it, but surely it should have seemed more familiar than this; even worse, I was having trouble making sense of some of my notes. I know I remember it being pretty easy. Had I just discovered a case of memory loss?

On the other hand, it did give me a clear excuse to ask for help. I didn’t have to pretend to be confused at all. “Jeremy,” I said quietly, leaning my head near his. “Can you explain what an ‘exclusive disjunction’ is?”

He looked surprised. “Do you understand the difference between Boolean ‘and’ and ‘or’?”

I nodded. “’And’ just means that it’s true if all the parts are true, but ‘or’ means that any of them is true. Right?” It is a measure of my confusion that I wasn’t even completely sure I had that right.

“Well, ‘disjunction’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘or,’ but an exclusive ‘or’ is one that is only defined for two inputs, and is true if exactly one of the inputs is true, but false if they are either both true or both false.”

I blinked. I felt stupid. I still didn’t understand it.

He must have realized that, because he tried again. “Let me put it another way. It compares two inputs and is true whenever they’re different. So it’s like a ‘not equals’ operator. It means ‘one or the other, but not both.’”

“OK,” I said slowly, still feeling stupid. I know I hadn’t had this much trouble last semester. “Thank you.” Why didn’t I remember any of it? Now that he had explained it, it was easy – the problem had been the stupid name. If they had just called it a ‘not equals’ operator, I’d have gotten it easily.

Doing the problems after that was fairly easy. I only needed to ask for help on one more problem, but I asked him to check over my answers anyway. To my embarrassment, he found a few mistakes and it took several minutes of explanations before I thought I understood what I had done wrong.

“Don’t worry about it,” he soothed me. “Logic is one of those funny classes, where some people grasp it immediately, and some people have a lot of problems with it. Chances are, for what you’re studying, you won’t ever really need it.”

I nodded gratefully, but my mood was pretty dark. Last semester I had been in the ‘grasp it immediately’ group. What had happened to me?

I moved on to some Spanish review after that, and wound up actually getting ahead of the night’s assignment. After my problems with logic, I was relieved to see that I could at least do well with Spanish and hadn’t forgotten large parts of it. So my brain still seemed to work – except for that one course.

I was more than ready then when Jeremy suggested we call it a night. “Let me drop off my books and I’ll walk you home,” he said. Home seemed like a good idea to me. Even though we were going back to his room on the way, just now I wasn’t in the mood to cuddle. The idea that I was not only forgetting my old life, but also losing some of my abilities was terrifying. I didn’t want to lose everything I had been, however much fun some parts of my current reality might be. I really needed to hear from Nikki whether her brother was experiencing something similar. Vicky probably wouldn’t be a help here, since her reality hadn’t changed so much, but Ben’s change was pretty significant, even if much less so than my own.

As we walked back in the cold, Jeremy put his arm around me, which I really appreciated, for both the warmth and the comfort. “Don’t feel so bad about having trouble with Boolean logic, Marsh. Some people’s brains just don’t seem right for it. And I’m not say you’re not logical or anything, but if you haven’t spent much of your life doing puzzles and logic games, you can’t expect this to come easy.”

“I’m a science major,” I pointed out. “I’m supposed to be able to do this kind of reasoning. What if I can’t even do science any more?”

“Well, how did you do last semester?”

“I got pretty much straight A’s,” I admitted.

“So you’re clearly capable of doing this kind. You just need practice. Look how quickly you got it once I explained it to you. You’re a smart girl, Marsh. I’ll help you, and you’ll be fine.”

“Thanks,” I said, a bit mollified. “It’s just kind of a bit humiliating.”

“Well, look at it this way,” he continued, giving me a squeeze. “You’re letting me have a chance to look out for you. A guy should be able to look out for his girl, right? And I’m hardly going to be able to help you with your Bio class.”

I nodded, and a smile worked its way to my face. Maybe he was right. I was trying to think with Marsha’s brain, and maybe she’d just had a lot different experiences than I’d had. For example, I knew that I was – or had been, at any rate – a better musician than she, since she was just a singer, while I had been an instrumentalist. Pure singers almost never seemed to develop the same grasp for rhythm and music theory that instrumentalists do, and both of these can correlate well with mathematical logic. I used to love to do logic puzzles; maybe Marsha hadn’t. I knew that she hadn’t been into science fiction. So maybe I just needed to pick up some of my old habits and I could train this brain I was using.

By the time we got back to my dorm, I was in a much better mood. If I had to go through this, at least I had a guy who would be watching out for me. A rather cute and sexy guy, at that.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see my roommates waiting for me, although they acted surprised.

“Oh! I thought you were already in bed–” Terry said, and got kicked in the ankle by Lee Ann. “I mean, I thought you were in your room!”

“Yeah, we didn’t expect to see you up,” Lee Ann chorused.

I snickered. “It really wasn’t a date, guys. All we did was study, in a room full of his friends.”

“We weren’t expecting…” Lee Ann said, but trailed off as I looked at her impatiently.

I turned to Jeremy. “Come say good night to me,” I suggested, wishing he weren’t so averse to kissing me in front of the girls. I really wouldn’t have minded letting them titter over me sharing a long passionate kiss with him.

As soon as we were in my bedroom with the door closed he took me in his arms and gave me exactly that sort of kiss. We broke and just stared at each other, lips as close as I could get without standing on my tiptoes.

“They’re still out there, you know,” he whispered.

“I know,” I whispered back. “They’re probably making bets on how long you’re going to be in here.”

“And how long am I going to be in here?” he teased.

I raised my eyebrows. “Are you in a hurry?”

“I just hate to make them wait…”

“Really?”

“Not a bit,” he chuckled, and kissed me again, longer this time.

We went for a third kiss and this time he surprised me by picking me up and sitting on the bed with me on his lap. I didn’t exactly protest, although I got a bit giggly at the thought that my roommates might be listening at the door. We kissed for a while more, and this time he even got a bit daring – for him – and starting kissing me on my neck and even lower.

After a few moments, I whispered, “Do you think they’re still there?”

When he whispered back, “I have no idea,” I jumped off his lap and ran to my door and pulled it open. I startled Terry, who was just outside the door, while Lee Ann was still sitting on the couch, looking amused.

“Hear anything you didn’t expect?” I joked, and then all three of us laughed. But Terry looked really embarrassed, said goodnight, and walked more quickly than absolutely necessary to her own bedroom.

“I think I’ll head off to bed, too,” Lee Ann said, hastily, picking up her book.

Once they were both gone, I closed my bedroom door and climbed back onto Jeremy’s lap. “The coast’s clear,” I giggled.

“Oh, are you trying to get rid of me?” he murmured, nibbling on my chin.

“No, you can’t leave,” I said. “I’m sitting on you to keep you here.”

“You think that’s going to do it?” he shot back. And then he started tickling me! Now, I am very ticklish, so there wasn’t a lot I could do – but I could tickle back. It turned out that he was ticklish, too, and in less then a minute, the two of us were lying side by side on my bed, exhausted with laughter.

We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and then he started kissing me again, up and down my neck. He reached across my body and started stroking my side, and I held my breath, because I knew what was coming next. His fingers were working closer and closer to my breast as though he was uncertain that I would accept the touch, uncertain that he would have the courage to offer the touch.

So far, we had mostly only kissed and hugged. Having my breast touched by a boy, though; I could imagine that was a whole different thing. It was a type of virginity for me, a uniquely feminine experience, and I was both nervous and eager. All of my sexual experiences as Marshall – they didn’t count, just now. Anything Marsha had done with Dirk or anybody else – I didn’t remember them, so they didn’t count, either. This was me, Marsh, girl Marsh, about to experience something brand new and exciting and scary.

Slowly, he dragged his fingers up my breast, not quite touching my nipple. And I really wanted him to. I wanted him to touch me more and more. I melted closer against him, catching his mouth with mine every so often as he continued kissing me all over my neck and face.

And then he rubbed his nose against mine and I jumped in shock. Such a simple, innocent gesture – but Vicky used to do that, and so did Maddy, and I had a sudden image of myself male and in bed with Jeremy – and I tensed.

He obviously noticed and pulled up in alarm. “Marsh? What’s wrong?”

I tried to speak, but nothing was coming out.

“Are you OK?” he asked, urgently. “Did I go too fast for you? Do you want to stop?”

I shook my head, but I was still making whimpering noises in my throat; he sat up and pulled me up next to him. He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to get me to look and him, but I couldn’t. “Oh my gosh, Marsh; I’m sorry. I didn’t think… I didn’t mean…”

“Alright,” I choked out. “It’s alright. I just…”

It’s not alright,” he contradicted me. “You’re white as a ghost and you’re trembling. Marsh, I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“Not that… I’m just… just… having a panic attack… I…” I took deep breaths and tried to calm myself. I remembered the breathing exercises Mr. Condrin had taught us to combat stage fright. I’m a girl, I told myself firmly. It was another reality in which I was a boy. I’m not going to change back while with Jeremy.

It was no good. I was too rattled. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. It’s not your fault. I’ll be OK.”

“But maybe I should leave,” he suggested.

“I don’t want you to,” I said, earnestly, “but that’s probably for the best.”

He pulled me to my feet. “Do you want to end this? Or maybe just take things more slowly?”

“I don’t want to end it, and we weren’t going too fast,” I insisted. “Something just struck me the wrong way and it all fell apart. I hope you don’t think me too crazy to go out with.”

He leaned down to put his forehead against mine, and I managed not to flinch. “Sometimes a bit of crazy can be a good thing. Are you OK with going to a movie with me on Friday?”

“Yes, please,” I nodded.

“Good. Then I don’t mine leaving, as long as I can come back.” We walked together to the outer door.

“May I kiss you good night?” he asked.

I nodded again, and he kissed me – a very chaste kiss, this time, lasting only a few seconds, but I trembled as he did; I don’t know if it was from fear or eagerness.

“Good night,” he said, opening the door.

“Good night,” I whispered, and closed it after him. Then I collapsed against the door, hugging myself. How was I supposed to be a girl for Jeremy if I started thinking of myself as a boy while we were together?

I was going to have to drop my camera off with Eric, to make the whole spy cam thing work. That meant that I wouldn’t have it to record video messages for Grandma, which was the reason she had bought it for me in the first place. I therefore recorded one more message before going to bed. Who knew when I’d get it back to do another?

The situation made me feel annoyingly helpless. I knew it was illogical. Eric and Martin were used to building things in the metal shop, and had ready access to the physics building at night; I didn’t. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that it was two guys taking over for me because I was a girl. Even though I had more to gain or lose from this operation than anybody else, I was being deprived of the chance to control it.

I’d told Vicky that we just had to stop worrying about things we couldn’t control, and that was what I was going to do. I had an idea of something that I could control; something that I could do to make our lives better in the interim.

I had to wait until the next morning to put my idea into operation. As we left the Orgo lecture, I pulled Geoff aside. “Can I talk to you a moment?” I asked.

He looked surprised, but I was pretty sure he’d like my idea. A guy should watch out for his girl and make sure she doesn’t get hurt. I couldn’t be a guy for Vicky the way she wanted, but there was something I could do. She was only with Kevin because she didn’t have an alternative and didn’t want to be alone, and I knew Geoff would be much better for her. Geoff, on the other hand, had been looking for ‘somebody special’ and I knew better than anybody how special Vicky was. And there was no reason for me to be jealous, because if I changed back, Geoff and Vicky would never have dated, but in the meantime, I could make them both happy.

My own romance with a boy who treated me well and never tried to hurt me made me feel a bit guilty. But… if I could be a guy for Vicky in this one thing, I’d be free to be a girl for Jeremy.

Things never seem to be easy, though. “Doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?” Geoff asked when I suggested it.

“Sure,” I admitted, “but he’s a jerk. She’ll be much better off with you.”

“Marsha,” he said, “no. Are you forgetting about Lee Ann and me? Remember how Chandra tried to use me to break her up from her old boyfriend? Do you really think I want to go there again?”

“But this is different!” I protested.

“Really? How? Did Vicky say she wanted to dump the guy I saw her with? The one she promised to ‘make it worth his while’? I don’t think so. There are plenty of girls around with no entanglements. Try somebody else. I’m out of the substitute boyfriend business.” And he started to walk off, presumably toward his next class.

I ran after him. I wasn’t proud, not about this. “Wait, Geoff!” I called.

He stopped and looked at me impatiently.

“I really think this would be good for both of you. Can’t you give me a chance to make it work?”

He looked incredulous. “Don’t you think the two of us are grown up enough to make our own choices?”

“I don’t think either of you are doing very well about it,” I explained.

He sighed heavily. “Much as I like you, Marsha – I hate this impulse you girls have to manage other peoples’ lives.” And he walked off, leaving me with egg on my face.

At least things were still going well with Jeremy. He called me a bit after lunch, suggesting that we get together to study tonight. If it had been any other guy, including the old me, I’d have expected it to be an excuse for a make out session, but with Jeremy, I was pretty sure he actually meant studying. Not that I would have minded a make-out session, of course. As long as I was a girl, I saw no reason not to enjoy it.

Since I needed to save at least some studying for this evening, that left me with a bit of free time, which meant that I could start on Celeste’s outfits, certainly a serious challenge. I had found the receipt for her first outfit in Marsha’s notes, and the amount encouraged me. I could easily justify spending about fifteen or twenty hours on each of the ones she’d dropped off, and it would put me well on the way to reaching the amount my parents expected me to contribute.

But after studying the dress Marsha had made, and the two I was supposed to work with, I realized that I was stuck. I had an amateur’s perspective on how things might look, and outsider’s view of fashion, and a general insecurity when it came to major clothing alterations. Obviously, I was going to need to ask Nikki for help.

“Oh, I’d love to, Marsh,” she said when I called and explained my request, “but I’m spending time with Alvin, now. Can we do it tonight?”

I explained my own plans for the evening, and she checked with Alvin, and decided that she might be free around five o’clock, so if I was willing to eat dinner a bit late… I did think of maybe waiting until the next day, but we hadn’t spoken face-to-face in a couple of weeks, so I decided to do some bio homework and then knock off some simple sewing jobs in the meantime.

I arrived at Nikki’s apartment at a bit before five, carrying Celeste’s clothing in plastic bags to protect them from the snow. I was taken a bit aback when Alvin answered the door. “I’m sorry, Alvin,” I said. “I don’t want to rush you.”

He laughed. “It’s OK. Nikki said you were coming over. You don’t mind talking with me here, do you?”

I hesitated, since there were things about me that Nikki knew and Alvin didn’t, and if he was there, we’d have to be careful about what we said.

But he only laughed again. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to intrude on any private girl talk. I’m going to be in the corner, listening to the Sweeney Todd soundtrack on my headphones. Believe me, I’m not going to be listening to you guys!”

I looked past him and caught Nikki’s eyes and saw her shrug, so I went to sit in her sewing area while she made some tea for the three of us. She came in and asked, “so how does it feel, being back at school with a boyfriend?”

It wasn’t the question I had been expecting, but… “It’s pretty neat, actually. I’m still dealing with the weirdness, and I haven’t actually seen him in almost two days, but it is really nice to be in a relationship again.”

“Just any relationship?” she teased.

I flushed. “OK, I admit I am sort of… stuck on him.” I couldn’t help giggling. “It’s really gotten me in trouble with Vicky.”

“I can imagine.”

“I just don’t know what to do for her,” I whined. “She seems really lost without me, sometimes.”

“Why do you have to do anything? You’re not her boyfriend any more.”

“Well, I know that, but she’s my friend, and I feel…”

“Marsh,” Nikki said, putting down her cup. “I’ve figured out what you are to her, but what is she to you?”

“What do you mean? I told you – she’s my friend.”

“And that’s all?”

I sighed. “And my past, and… maybe my future.”

“Even though you’re ‘stuck on’ Jeremy?”

“It’s super confusing,” I admitted. “But after all, you know that a year from now, you’re still going to be a girl. I don’t. So… It’s not so easy for me to just focus one way and ignore everything else.” She opened her mouth to respond, but I stopped her with a gesture. “But it’s getting late, and I came over for some help. Why don’t we take care of that first, and then try to solve my problems with Vicky?”

She nodded and put aside our mostly empty cups. “OK, so show me this project that has you baffled.”

I took Celeste’s finished dress out of the bag and held it up, and she exclaimed. “Oh! I remember that piece! I told you that you were crazy when you said what you were going to do, but it turned out well.” She glanced over at Alvin, who wasn’t paying us any attention. “I mean, I told Marsha.”

“And that’s the problem,” I said. “Marsha did it and I have no idea how, and Celeste wants me to do it to these as well.” And I pulled out the others.

“Oooh, I’m not sure I can help much,” Nikki admitted. “I got the idea, generally how she did it, but…”

“You’re not saying Marsha was a better seamstress than you?” I asked, now concerned.

“No, only that she had her own way of doing things, and in this case, she was willing to try something that I wouldn’t have. But you have her skill, you should be able to figure this out.”

“I have her dexterity, apparently,” I corrected her. “My hands seem to know what to do, but my brain is lost. I never knew how to do anything until you told me – and then I found that I had the skill. But this looks like something that needs to be figured out. And if you can’t help me, I don’t know where to turn.”

“Your mother?”

I considered that. “Maybe. Marsha might have asked her… “

“Too bad you don’t have some of Marsha’s memories,” Nikki commented.

I nearly choked.

“What…” she asked.

“Actually… I think some of her memories are leaking through,” I told her. “That was something I needed to talk out.”

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“Well, yeah… I mean, what if her memories are replacing mine? What if I start forgetting who I was? What if I turn into Marsha?”

Nikki opened her mouth and then closed it, evidently thinking better of her first response. She looked at me for a few seconds and then said, “I can see how that would bother you.”

I said, “Yeah, seriously. All that I have left of myself are my memories. I don’t want to lose those. I don’t want to lose me.”

“Right.”

“Problem is,” I continued, “I don’t know if I’ve already forgotten some things. What if I don’t remember something important and don’t remember that I once knew it?”

“Hmm.”

“I think… maybe I need to start writing things down – you know, everything important that I can think of in my life. My old life, that is.”

Nikki blinked. “And exactly how are you going to do that?”

I sagged. “Obviously, I can’t. Not thoroughly. The best I can do is write down some really important things that I did that Marsha didn’t; at least that way I might have some idea if it’s happening to me.”

Nikki stood up suddenly, and as I watched her, she picked up one of Celeste’s finished dress and spread it out to examine it. Then she dropped it and went over to her sewing basket and started rummaging around. Finally, she pulled her hands back up, and while facing away from me, said softly, “Maybe… maybe it would be better if you didn’t know.”

I felt a chill run through my chest. “What do you mean?” I asked cautiously.

“I was just thinking,” she continued, her back still toward me, “that if you can’t do anything about it… maybe it’s kinder not to know it’s happening. Sort of like the way you didn’t want to tell your sister about the chance of your changing back.” She turned and looked me straight in the eye. “I’m not saying that’s what I want for you, Marsh. I’ve gotten to know the you you. The one who remembers…” she looked over her shoulder at Alvin again and lowered her voice so that she couldn’t be heard over his earphones. “… the one who remembers a very different life. But if there’s no way to avoid it, is there any reason to make yourself miserable while waiting for it to happen?”

My jaw dropped. I mean, I could see the logic, sort of, but to have her say it like that? It didn’t seem like her. At least… I had expected her always to say what I would have been thinking, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking that. Unless… was she tweaking me for having been insensitive to Tina?

“I can’t accept that,” I said. “I can’t. I have to fight this, no matter what. And… if I do figure out a way to know if I’m forgetting, at least I’ll know if I’m not, right? So I do want to know. I would want to know, if only to make sure I don’t have to worry if it’s not happening. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Sure,” she agreed. “Either way, it’s your choice. Nobody but you can decide something like this. But what makes you think you’re losing your memory in the first place?”

“I don’t know I am,” I admitted. “I just don’t like having somebody else’s memories in my head. And it just makes me wonder, what if?”

“Could I make a suggestion?” Alvin said. We turned; he still had his earphones on, but it suddenly struck me that I had no way of knowing whether there was actually music coming from them, or how much he had heard. I tried to think if we had said anything specific about me being a boy in my old life.

“If Marsh is having memory issues, shouldn’t Ben as well?” Alvin continued when we didn’t stop him. “Nik, can’t you ask him? He’s even less comfortable than Marsh is with this whole thing; if he were suddenly remembering his current life, don’t you think he’d be all angsty about it?”

“I haven’t noticed anything from him beside sullen, lately,” Nikki said, “but I’ll ask.” Alvin nodded, pushed a button on his iPod, and turned away from us. Nikki and I looked at each other again, but Alvin had definitely broken the mood.

“Well, anyway,” I said, standing up, and feeling a bit awkward. “I should probably get going… I’ll ask Mom for advice on the dresses; thanks for the suggestion. And thanks for talking with me about the other thing.”

“No problem,” she said, standing as well.  “Um, I’ll let you know what I find out from Ben.”

We hugged good-bye, I waved to Alvin, and left for dinner, and tried to focus instead on my upcoming study session with Jeremy.

Finally, Martin stopped outside a door marked only ‘317.’ “This is the lab,” he said, gesturing. “Or at least it’s the one that matches the address on that package we received. Obviously, I have no idea what’s inside.”

“Well, let’s fix that right now,” Stan said confidently, striding to the door and pulling out a bag from his pocket. Kneeling, he studied the lock for a moment, and then whispered, “Hey, cool!” Then he stood up. “Um… I guess you guys might not think so, but… it’s a Sargent Keso lock! I’ve heard of them, but never got a chance to see one, before.” He pulled a couple of flat tools out of his bag.

“What does that mean in terms of opening the door?” I asked.

“Well, you can forget what I said about bumping. These locks aren’t bumpable. This is going to be a challenge.”

“What do you mean?” Vicky asked.

“Well,” he said, “these aren’t the cheap locks I was telling you about. Keso locks are specifically designed to be hard to pick. In fact, I don’t think I know anybody who’s picked this model. But there’s always a first time, right?”

“Wait,” I said. “Are you saying that you can’t open this door?”

“Well, I would say rather that I don’t know if I can get the door open; it certainly won’t be quick.” At Vicky’s groan, he added, “look on the bright side. These locks are kind of pricey and you don’t put one on an empty room. If somebody felt the need for a Keso lock, there’s something in here they don’t want seen.” And with that, he inserted a flat piece of metal into the lock and started moving it around.

“This is going to be really annoying if it turns out to be the wrong room,” I muttered.

Suddenly, Vicky grabbed my arm. “It’s not the wrong room,” she hissed, excitedly. “Look!” She pointed to a fire extinguisher on the wall opposite the door. “See the half-torn label? I remember staring at that while I was waiting for them to open the door. This is the lab, Marsh!”

I looked; I hadn’t especially noticed the fire extinguisher myself, but she seemed pretty excited about it, so I was willing to believe that she had just found an additional confirmation that room 317 was indeed the right lab. If so, we had just taken a major step forward, or were about to. It was starting to feel real – I could really become a guy again!

Eric pointed out that it could be really bad if somebody happened on Stan while he was trying to break in, so he suggested that we split up and act as sentries. He and Martin headed one way down the hall, and Vicky and I headed the other, far enough away that we couldn’t be heard, but close enough that we could watch Stan.

From time to time, Stan would look into his bag and pull out a new tool, try it for a few minutes stare at it and put it back into his bag. Watching him got boring quickly, though. “So what are you going to do about Kevin?” I finally asked, my voice low.

“Why do I need to do anything?” she responded blithely.

“Oh come on, Vixy, you can’t stay with a guy who hits you.”

“He hasn’t done it a lot,” she insisted, “and he’s really sorry, and promises not to do it again. I just need to stop provoking him.”

“Vicky!” I hissed.

“Besides, you hurt me a lot more,” she added, and at my astonished expression, she explained, “ when you dumped me for Lee Ann.”

“I didn’t–”

“Besides, like I said, I don’t have any better options – but maybe I will once wonder boy gets through that door?”

“Of course,” I said, and I’m pretty sure I believed it, but I was still more than a bit thrown by the whole abuse thing. Shouldn’t I have noticed something?

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

“Huh?”

“Are you really dating a boy? Or was that just something to throw in my face?”

“Well…” I guess I was thinking that I’d find some way to downplay it, especially in light of our current efforts to change me back, but I thought better of it. “Yeah, I am dating Jeremy. I just didn’t think it should be that much of a big deal.” She raised an eyebrow and I flushed. “Like you said, if we change back, it won’t have happened, and… I guess I don’t want to be alone, either. But… I suppose I did sort of throw it in your face. I was really bothered about the whole Kevin thing.”

“OK,” she said.

“OK?”

“I guess you understand, then.”

Actually, I wasn’t sure I did, but I smiled and nodded. “So… what are you going to do about Kevin?”

“If we get this worked out, he’s history,” she replied. “Why would I date him if I could date you?”

“Thank you,” I said quietly, feeling more than a little pleased. Take that, Kevin I thought. There didn’t seem to be anything to add right then, so instead we talked about her schoolwork and the courses she was taking now. She was taking several art classes, and she was pretty excited about them. She was just telling me about the techniques she was going to try when Stan straightened up.

“OK, this is not working,” he said. “I’m going to have to do a bit of research and what people have tried and what they think should be tried.”

“You’re not saying you can’t get the door open, are you?” Vicky asked sharply, as we headed back towards him.

“Well, it’s going to take some time.” He looked at Eric, who was returning from the opposite direction. “Would you be able to get me in a few more times to try things?”

“But you can get in for sure, right?” I demanded.

Stan looked uncomfortable. “Well… I think there’s a good chance. I mean, eventually, somebody’s gotta figure out how to get through this lock. Why not me?”

“I don’t believe this,” she shrilled. “You said you could pick any lock Piques was likely to use!” She turned to Eric. “Can we just smash this door in or something?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Martin exclaimed, putting out his hands as if to stop Vicky physically. “Nobody is breaking any doors! I don’t want to get tossed out of my program or out of school. That wasn’t in the plan,”

“He’s right, Vicky,” I said. “We’re just going to have to think of something else.”

“Something else?” she snapped. “Like what?”

“Well… the lock means that the lab is probably not empty, right?” I pointed out. “And so that must mean that they’re going to come back for the stuff. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Not necessarily,” Eric started. I gave him a look and he hurriedly changed whatever he was going to say. “I mean… sure that makes sense. Um, probably.”

Vicky was not mollified. “And if they come back before we get the door open? And take it away? What then?” She whispered in my ear, “What about your manhood then, Marsh?”

I turned crimson. What if the boys had overheard? They were looking at us curiously, but didn’t seem surprised at anything, so maybe they were just reacting to the fact that she had whispered rather than what she’d said. To cover my embarrassment, I suggested, “Maybe we could film whatever was going on when they came to open the door? At least that way we might get some idea of what’s inside.”

“What, like a spy camera?” Stan scoffed.

“Actually, I meant…” I started, but then concluded, “Wait! Why not? I have one of those pocket camcorders. Isn’t there some way we could hook it up so it would go off the door was opened?” I saw blank looks for a moment. “They do this in spy movies, right? We attach a thread to the door, and… somehow that triggers the camera. It’s pretty simple to operate: just press power and then press the big red button to shoot.”

Martin and Eric looked at each other. “Think we could build something in the metal shop?” Martin suggested.

Eric looked up. “There’s a drop ceiling, so it might be possible to hide the camera up there. If we aimed it right, that would cover a fair bit into the room.” He nodded. “I think it’s a good idea, Marsh, and worth a try. If you want to bring your camera to my room, Martin and I will see about setting it up.”

“Wait a minute. I want to be in on this,” I said. “What can I do?”

They looked at each other again. “Well, it’s your camera, and your idea,” Martin acknowledged. “But I think we’re going to have to be the ones to make it happen. You haven’t done any metalworking, have you?”

“I’ve… done some woodworking,” I said, tentatively. I might well discover that what skill I’d built up there was gone, along with my skill with the guitar.

Not that it mattered. The guys had decided that it was going to be metal, not wood, and they were probably right. Martin said, soothingly, “We’ll keep you up-to-date Marsh. If we get any pictures, we’ll let you know.”

“Well, that was kind of annoying,” I told Vicky, as we walked back to her room. “I thought this was going to be the easy part.”

“It’s not going to happen, is it?” she replied, sounding more subdued than I’d heard her in a long while. “I’d almost rather we hadn’t found the lab in the first place. It feels like somebody’s teasing us.”

“Come on, Vix,” I said. “We did take a major step, and now we have two chances to find out what’s going on.”

“Yeah, right. And what happens if they never come back? Or they find your camera? Or… what if you do get pictures and it’s just them taking all the stuff away?”

“Then we’ll at least be no worse off than we are, right?”

We walked on in silence for a few minutes before she commented again. “You really are accepting this, aren’t you? That’s why you’re so intent on breaking me up from Kevin. You don’t expect ever to be Marshall again. If you did… well, it wouldn’t matter, since I’d never have been dating him in the first place.”

She stopped and faced me. “And that’s why you’re dating a boy. It’s not just physical needs. You’re really thinking of yourself as a girl, now.”

I thought for a bit before answering. I hadn’t told her about my memory issues, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to. “Vicky,” I said, “I really don’t know. I’ve been trying to get used to the idea that I might be stuck. Trying to find some way to be happy with the idea… in case I have no choice. Is that really so wrong? I’m sure I’ve been telling you this all along.

“And I want you to stop seeing Kevin because I care about you. I… care about you a lot and I hate to see you hurt.”

“Really?” she said, skeptically. “How much? I’ll break up with Kevin if you break up with Jeremy.”

“Vicky! That’s not fair! Jeremy is good to me – he’s never hurt me. Not on purpose, anyway.”

She turned and started walking again, and I hurried to catch up with her. I said, “You can’t be serious, Vix. I’m just trying to do what’s best for you.”

“That was a test, Marsh, and you failed. You don’t want to be alone? Well, neither do I. Kevin may hurt me sometimes, but he’s at least there for me when I need him.”

“And haven’t I always…?”

She stopped again, but didn’t turn. “I don’t think that came out right. I’m not saying you’re not there, but… I really like having a boyfriend. And Kevin isn’t seeing anybody else, and he’s there. What’s that saying? He may not be Mr. Right, but at least he’s Mr. Right Here and Now. I’m not asking a lot… I don’t think you know what dating you meant to me. It meant there was actually a guy who thought enough of me, who respected me enough never to hit me. I don’t know if you remember… I used to do things, say things, just to see if I could provoke you. But you never hit me.”

She turned, and I saw the tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to believe this is the end for us. I want to believe that it can all be the same, be what it was.”

I didn’t even think. I just put my arms around her. “I’m not giving up, Vix. I’m just doing what I can do. I’m trying to make the best of things. And I mean to watch out for you, whatever happens.

And meanwhile, I was getting an idea.

The second semester of Organic Chemistry was in the same lecture hall at the same time, and when I took my usual seat, Geoff was already there. He took my news better than I had expected.

“Jeremy?” he asked, his face falling. Then he shook his head and smiled. “Well… that’s just great. I mean it, Marsha. I remember how unhappy you were at the dance. I’m glad that things worked out for you.”

“Thank you, Geoff. I’m sorry that–”

“Not a problem,” he forestalled me. “I’m learning my lesson, and I’ll just look elsewhere.”

If only all of my relationships could be so easy! Vicky, at least, seemed to be in a good mood. I called her after Spanish class to tell her about the midnight meeting and suggest that she come over to my dorm a bit early so we could walk to Eric’s room together. She not only agreed, but also suggested meeting in the early afternoon after classes, just to catch up without time pressures.

When she sat down next to me at the Grill, she was positively gushing. “I just can’t believe we’re this close!”

“Well, all we know is – probably – the location of the lab,” I pointed out. “We have no idea what we’ll find inside.”

“I know,” she agreed, “but even that is so much closer than any of the Strangers had gotten. And even more important,” she said, placing her hand on my arm, “is that you’re working to make it happen.” She shook her head. “I should have known you wouldn’t want to stay like this, that you could never be comfortable like this. I’m really sorry, Marsh.”

“Don’t mention it,” I told her quietly, wondering how I was going to explain Jeremy now.

“I have to,” she insisted. “I really gave you a hard time last year. But after you called me and told me about the lab, I realized how wrong I’d been. I mean, really. I should have known better.”

Suddenly, I wished I weren’t wearing the pin Jeremy had made for me. I must have tried to cover it up surreptitiously, because she suddenly did notice it.

“Is that new?” she asked, pointing to it. When I nodded, she persisted. “That’s kind of unique. Where did you get it?”

“It was a present,” I answered, vaguely. I should have known it wouldn’t put her off.

“… From?”

I hesitated before answering. “Jeremy.”

“Jeremy?” she repeated, confused. “I don’t remember…” Then her face went white. “Wait. Jeremy? That’s not… are you dating a boy, Marsh?”

I started to look away, but changed my mind and looked her in the eye. “Yes, I am. As you said last month, I have needs – and they weren’t being met.”

She stared back at me for a moment before sneering, “That’s disgusting. I cannot believe that you’re sleeping with a boy.”

“I’m not! At least… we’ve only had three dates so far.”

“You and I slept together on our second date,” she reminded me, acerbically.

I squirmed. “Well, Jeremy isn’t as forward as I was – and I’m not as forward as you were.”

“So how far did you go?” she demanded.

This was definitely getting out of comfortable ground for me, but I didn’t know how to forestall her. “Well… I sat on his lap and we kissed.”

This time, her stare seemed to go on for ages. “That’s it?” Embarrassed, I nodded. “And that’s what you call, ‘getting your needs met’?” She exclaimed. I cringed in response. “You’re in love with this boy, aren’t you?” she asked. “Or at least you think you are.” She shook her head. “Oh, Marsh, I see what’s going on. It’s the hormones. You’re not used to them and this… it’s really not your fault. But we need to get you back to your real self fast, or who knows what will happen?”

Before I could reply, her phone rang. “Hey, babe!” she said. “No, I’m with my girlfriend… well I figured a few minutes would be OK… no, of course not… I suppose… OK…” I saw her wince and add in a more subdued tone, “I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

“Kevin?” I asked.

She nodded. “I need to go. I was supposed to see him right after my classes were over, but I didn’t think it would be a problem to talk with you first.” She laughed, but it sounded forced. “Sometimes he’s just so needy!”

If she hadn’t run out so quickly, I would have… what? She wanted to believe that I couldn’t really be attracted to boys, that I was just being buffeted my hormonal responses, but was it really more true for me than anybody else?  I didn’t think so. I wasn’t really sure what I would have said; besides, if it made her happy to think that my feelings for Jeremy weren’t real, it was probably better to let her believe that for now. It would only be better for our relationship if I changed back, after all.

I shrugged and finished my soda, then called Jeremy as I left. The way my heart pounded when I talked to him – even though we weren’t together or discussing anything important – felt just as real as the feelings I’d had for Vicky. That was something else I wasn’t about to share.

By eleven-thirty that evening, I had finished all of my homework and made good progress on my sewing jobs, so I went into the living room with a book to wait for Vicky. Lee Ann looked up in surprise when I sat down on the couch.

“Well this is new. Did you want a turn?” she asked, indicating the Wii attached to the TV?

“No,” I told her. “I’m actually going out in a bit with Vicky, and I’m just waiting for her.”

“Vicky? Oh.” She put down the controller. “What’s her problem, anyway? I can’t think of anything I might have done to her, but she sure doesn’t seem to like me much.”

I almost choked. For some reason, I had assumed Lee Ann wouldn’t notice, and Vicky’s problem had nothing to do with this time line, anyway. “She… blames you for being too friendly with a boy she liked,” was the best I could come up with.

Lee Ann furrowed her brow. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “This is over me being friendly with a boy?”

“Well… it was really the boy’s fault for neglecting her. But she blames you.”

She sighed. “Well, no offense, but that’s really dumb.”

She returned to her game, and I started getting into my book – or, I should say, one of Marsha’s romance novels. I’d underestimated them; they were a lot more enjoyable than I had realized. Of course, they were a bit silly, but sometimes silly could be fun, too. In any event, it wasn’t a big deal to put it down and answer the door when Vicky knocked.

“Ready to go, Marsh?” she asked.

“It’s a bit early, yet,” I told her. “Come sit down for a few minutes. I don’t want to get to Eric’s place too soon.”

She came in and took off her coat but then stopped when she saw Lee Ann, and looked tentatively toward me.

“Sit,” I insisted, sliding over and patting the couch between me and my roommate, who had put down her game controller again.

“I’m not going to bite, you know,” Lee Ann promised.

Vicky sat very tentatively, and suddenly I noticed that she was holding her head in a very odd position, tilted so that so almost seemed to be looking at Lee Ann’s feet, but with her neck very stiff.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No,” Vicky answered, sounding a bit strained. “Um… I need to use the bathroom!” and she jumped right back up and ran there.

“What happened to her?” Lee Ann asked, looking concerned.

“What do you mean?” I responded, a bit confused.

“Her eye, Marsh. Her left eye. The one she was trying to hide? Take a close look when she comes back.”

So I watched carefully when Vicky came back from the bathroom, still holding her face oddly, and now I could tell that she was indeed turning so that her left eye was away from me. “Why don’t we just go now?” she suggested, looking away from Lee Ann. “I’m sure Eric won’t mind.”

Well, making peace between my friend and my roommate was obviously going to wait. Besides, now I had a minor mystery to explore. What was going on with Vicky? I grabbed my coat and followed her out the door, saying good bye to Lee Ann. Vicky, I noticed, made it a point to walk to my left down the hallway, making it hard for me to see the eye in question.

I had a suspicion about what she was hiding, and waited until we were on a path, about to pass an overhead light before asking, “What’s wrong, Vicky?”

Surprised, she stopped and started to face me, but snapped her face forward again. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”

I reach up with my right hand and turned her chin toward me. “Because you’re hiding something,” I said. When she tried to pull away, I grabbed the top of her head with my other hand. She freed herself after a few seconds, but I saw what I had expected.

“You’ve got a lot of extra makeup on your left eye, Vix. You have a black eye, don’t you?”

She froze. “I… well, I told you how clumsy I’ve been lately… I sort of fell and hit my eye on a doorknob.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t give me that. I’ve read about that excuse, Vix. Kevin hit you, didn’t he?” She opened her mouth and closed it, and then something clicked. Those times last month when she’d claimed to have injured herself – Kevin had been with her then as well. “And it’s not the first time, either, is it?”

“He… he didn’t mean to,” she protested.

“Didn’t mean to?” I echoed, incredulous.

“I just make him mad, sometimes,” she whined, wringing her hands. “And he can’t help himself. But he always says he’s sorry, after.”

“Vicky, are you out of your mind? He’s abusing you!”

“No… he’s just…”

“Did I ever hit you? Did any of your other boyfriends ever hit you?”

“Not you, no…”

“Well, then…”

“But my other boyfriends…”

“Wait. What?! You never told me that!”

Her shoulders fell. “I was afraid… You were always so nice to me. I was afraid if I said something… you’d start hitting me, too. But you never did.” In the overhead light, I saw her eyes start to tear up. “It’s my fault that he hits me. That all of them hit me. You should have, too.”

I put my arms around her. “Vicky, it’s not your fault. He’s a creep. And any guy who ever hit you was a creep, too.” I moved so I could look into her eyes. “You have to leave him, Vix. You deserve better.”

“I can’t,” she whimpered. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“There are plenty of guys–”

“No, there aren’t,” she insisted. “There’s like four guys for every six girls here, and half of those guys are taken, and half of what’s left are jerks – much worse than Kevin – and then it’s like the four girls are all competing for the one guy… and how did you wind up with him?!”

“Uh–” I stammered.

“So I settle,” she concluded, bitterly. “It’s better than being alone. I had a nice guy, once. One guy in my whole life who was kind and never hurt me… and then she flirted with you and you lost interest. It figures. And now look at you.” She sighed, heavily. “That’s why you have to change back, Marsh. I need you. Jeremy can always find another girl; there’s plenty. But I need you.”

I didn’t really know what to say. Over the past few months, I’d come to see some real problems with myself as a boyfriend, and it had been hard to understand why Vicky had been so positive. We’d never really talked about the guys she’d dated before me. I was outraged on her behalf. She deserved better!

“Vicky,” I said. “If this works… if we really do track down the people in charge of this experiment…” I didn’t think there was any need to say anything more. I hadn’t told her about my memories, but if what I thought was happening… I didn’t really have a choice. I suddenly felt really guilty about enjoying my time as a girl, my time with Jeremy. It was all a lie, really. Jeremy deserved better. Vicky deserved better.

“Well, anyway,” I finished, awkwardly, easing myself out of the embrace. “Let’s go and see what there is to see.”

Eric opened the door when we knocked and introduced us to Stan, who had gotten there before us. Stan was tall and slender, with a wispy beard and a ski jacket that looked as if it had been in his family for at least three generations. Vicky shot me a glance that I interpreted as classing him among the boys simply not dateable; whatever sense girls had that warranted such a judgment, I had clearly not picked up as yet.

I didn’t want him to notice, so as we left Eric’s room, I asked, “Is this going to be hard, do you think? I mean picking the lock?

He laughed. “The school has so many locks, they go cheap. I don’t think they spend more than about $10 on any of them, and they’re all one of three types. Now, technically, most of us don’t actually pick locks most of the time. We bump them.”

“Bump?” Eric echoed.

“Yeah – now you’re a physics major, so you’ll probably find this kind of interesting. You know how locks work, with two sets of pins?”

“I don’t,” put in Vicky.

So he explained some of the basics of locks – or at least the type most of us use. I can’t say that I followed it all, but the point seemed to be that if you could just hit the pins in a certain way, they would clear the region between the cylinder and the body of the lock and allow it to turn.

“To do this,” he concluded, just before we reached the physics building, “you use a specially made bump key, which allows you to impart a force to the pins all at once. I have one for each of the types the buildings authority uses. It shouldn’t take me more than about five minutes to get through the door.”

Eric got us through the front door of the physics building by using his key. “Martin will be meeting us inside,” he said, holding it open for us. “Oh, there he is.” He introduced us. “Martin Chang, this is Marsha Steen, Vicky Gordon, and Stan Warrick.”

We exchanged hellos and Martin led us up the stairs and down a couple of hallways. Now that we had a guide, I was able to convince myself that the path seemed familiar; of course, my weeks of roaming the halls of this building could well have tampered with my recollection. No matter. After more than two months, we were finally going to see the lab!

Mom came back just as I started mixing the flour and baking soda. “Go talk to your sister,” she said.

“She’s not talking to me, Mom,” I pointed out. “I thought you were going to find out what was wrong.”

“Go talk to her,” she repeated. “Or better yet, go listen to her. She’ll talk if you let her, but don’t push.” When I hesitated, she added, “Go now.” So I went.

I knocked on Tina’s door. “Teen? May I come in?”

All I heard in return was a grunt through the door, which I took to mean, “yes,” so I pushed it open to find Tina sitting at her desk with her back to me. She didn’t say anything, so I sat on her bed and waited. And waited.

Finally, she muttered, “It’s like I’m losing my sister all over again.”

“Wh-what?” I managed.

“I thought it was all set,” she said, bitterly. “I thought we’d worked it all out. You couldn’t change back, and it looked like you were OK with that. It was a secret that you and I shared – well, shared with Chad, and maybe one or two of your friends. You were really comfortable as a girl, you had a great boyfriend… as far as Mom and Dad were concerned, you were Marsha. And now this.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, cautiously.

“Well, now Mom and Dad know, and it’s not a secret anymore, and Daddy’s starting to treat you differently. You’re acting differently. And… now apparently there’s this lab thing, after all.”

“Tina…” I started, but she cut me off.

“So I guess one night I’ll just go to sleep and not wake up, is that how it will work?” She wasn’t crying – quite. But she definitely seemed to be on the verge.

“Teen, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t what we’ll find when we get into the lab; if we get into the lab.”

“But you’re still planning on changing back, aren’t you? I mean you did say you were only promising me as far as Christmas, and we’re past that now, so I shouldn’t complain, right?”

I got up and tried to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. “I thought you were happy!” she cried. “I did everything I could do! Why don’t you want to stay this way? Why do you have to change everything?”

“Teen,” I said, unsure where to put my hands now that she wasn’t accepting a hug, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just don’t know.”

“So you might stay this way?” she asked in a little girl voice.

“I…” I started. Then I looked into my sister’s hopeful, trusting eyes. What was the best thing to tell her? Saying I would stay a girl would make her happy, and it might be true – but saying that was what I intended would be a lie. “It’s… not impossible,” I finally told her.

“OK,” she said.

“OK?” I asked.

“OK,” she insisted. I knew what she wanted to believe, and I don’t think either of us wanted to pursue the matter too closely just now. It mean, though, that we sort of agreeing to lie to each other, or at least play make-believe. Or something. It seemed a pretty rotten way to leave things, though. I just didn’t have any better answers. At least she let me hug her at the end.

Then she asked, “Is everything going to be different, now? Are you still going to call me regularly?”

“Of course, Teen,” I answered, a bit surprised. “After all, we are–” then I hesitated before continuing, “we are sisters,” at least for now, “and sisters should talk regularly.”

Tina acted as though that was the end of it. When Jeremy came to pick me up, she greeted him as though nothing was wrong. Mom went along with things, too, but Dad… well… after greeting Jeremy and loading my bags into the car for me, Dad told Jeremy, “Take care of my little…” then he stopped himself, looked at me and then back at Jeremy. “I– I mean, drive carefully.” He looked as though he wanted to kiss me on the forehead, hesitated, and then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, while I put my arms around him and kissed him back.

I didn’t think Jeremy would notice, but a few minutes after we left, he looked over at me and asked, “Is something going on between you and your Dad?”

I shrugged. Fortunately, I had thought about this earlier. “He’s dealing with the idea that I’m no longer his ‘little girl’ is all.”

“Hmm,” he responded. “Phyllis broke my Dad of that idea a few years ago. I guess it was time, for him. It’s really silly that he would still think of you as a little girl, under the circumstances, right?”

And really, how could I disagree?

Jeremy walked me to my dorm room carrying both of our suitcases. I could swear there are two people inside my head, because I found his ability to do that incredibly sexy, even while aware that I could have done the same thing just a few months and one reality change ago.

The hallway wasn’t as busy this time as it had been after midterm break; the only ones I saw were Lisa and Sheila, who stopped talking and stared at us. It embarrassed me to the point that I couldn’t bring myself to introduce Jeremy to them. He looked at me curiously, but I just swept passed them and led him to my door.

When we went in, my roommates were already there in the living room talking with a redheaded girl and they stopped and stared, too. I couldn’t just ignore them, of course, but all I managed was, “Hi, guys. This is Jeremy,” as I fled for the safety of my bedroom before they could react. Jeremy followed and I closed the door after us.

“Is something wrong?” he asked with a wry smile.

“No, I’m just… well, I guess everybody was surprised to see me with a boy. That’s all. Um… I know you’re not going to kiss me in front of the girls.” With the door safely closed, I threw my arms around his neck and give him a long kiss, which he returned, eagerly.

After a moment, he gently pulled himself away. “I really do need to get back to my room,” he said. Disappointed, I opened my bedroom door, and we walked hand-in-hand back past my staring roommates back to the front door.

“Thank you,” I said, really wishing I could kiss him again.

He glanced at the girls, and I hoped he was thinking the same thing. “Um, my pleasure.” He licked his lips, but only turned to them and said, “Nice meeting you” before turning back to me. “Bye, Marsh.” He said, opened the door, and left. I closed the door behind him and turned to face the interrogation.

“What? Who was that?” Terry demanded.

“’Jeremy’?” asked Lee Ann at the same time. “Did you say his name was Jeremy? The one you were crying about a few weeks ago?”

The redhead just looked confused. I glanced at her while I tried to collect my thoughts, and then with a jolt I realized that she looked very familiar. I forced a laugh. “We sort of… well, it was all a big misunderstanding.”

Of course, that just brought more questions. “What kind of misunderstanding?” “What happened to his girlfriend?” “How did you figure it out?”

My head was spinning, and amidst it all, I was increasingly sure I’d seen the redhead before. She might well have stuck in my mind; her hazel eyes hinted at knowledge of some secret, and her smiling lips suggested that it was an amusing one. I could easily have glimpsed her somewhere on campus.

She spoke up before I could answer any of the questions. “I don’t want to get into your private affairs, Marsh. “I was just hoping for a quick fitting. Your roommates said you wouldn’t mind.” She held a navy jumper up against herself. “This turned out so well, and Mom found two more of her old dresses for me, and I was hoping you could do the same thing to them.

“Wait!” Lee Ann exclaimed. “Celeste, that was before we knew she had something we wanted to know about.” She turned to me. “Marsh, you can’t just leave us hanging!”

“I’ll be really fast,” I promised, glad to be able to put off the explanation for another few minutes. “Come on, Celeste!” I led her into my room, trying to calm myself.

But I couldn’t. I’d recognized the jumper, as well. It wasn’t exactly a jumper, at least not the way I had learned to think of them. It was sort of a mini-dress/jumper, and I could imagine how cute Celeste must have looked in it. That had to be why I’d noticed her.

With the door closed, she quickly stripped off her outer garments and donned the first of the dresses. It was obvious why her mother had been willing to surrender them; they were decades out of style. Still, there was something intriguing about their structure, and seeing what Marsha had done for the first one gave me some ideas on how I could update the other two. Some pretty radical surgery would be needed, but I had Marsha’s dexterity, didn’t I? If I got stuck, I could always ask Nikki for help.

“I was so afraid you’d have forgotten me, what with my taking the semester off,” she said as I pinned the second dress on her.”

“How could I forget you?” I temporized. She took the semester off? That’s significant, somehow, I thought.

“Thanks,” she said. “It’ll be the same price as for the first one, right?”

“Um, sure,” I said. Marsha’s bookkeeping had been impeccable, and I’d followed her pattern. That meant that I might be able to find this girl’s information – there couldn’t be that many girls here with the same first name, and this kind of work would be unusual. Still… “But I’ll have to see if I have last year’s records. Why don’t you give me your number again, just in case?”

I walked my customer out past my impatient roommates and said goodbye before returning to face them. “So what did you want to know?” I asked, sitting down on the space on the couch recently vacated by Celeste. Actually, it was kind of exciting to be sharing my news with the girls.

“What happened with his old girlfriend?!” Terry almost shrieked.

“She’s just a friend,” I laughed. “I’d worked myself up for nothing. Not only wasn’t she his girlfriend, she’d been trying to fix him up, and if she’d known who I was when we met in the bathroom, she would have jumped at the chance to push us together.”

And then suddenly something struck me. Jumped reminded me of jumper, and that reminded me of Celeste and the dress Marsha had made for her. I was sure I’d seen her wearing it, but where?

“She sounds almost too nice,” Lee Ann suggested. “Are you sure this guy isn’t just leading you on?”

“I’m sure,” I said confidently, trying to put the question of Celeste aside. “Well, I wasn’t, before my sister forced me to go out with him.”

“She forced you?” Lee Ann asked, jumping on my words.

“Well,” I explained, “it turns out that she and his sister are friends, and they thought we would be good together. It wasn’t just a coincidence, our meeting. And then I sort of promised her that I’d say yes to the next guy who asked me out, and the two of them got Jeremy to call and I had to accept even though I figured he didn’t want to, but we went out and realized what was happening.”

My mouth seemed to be just running off on its own now, because my subconscious wouldn’t let me drop the Celeste issue. There was something wrong with my memory, but I couldn’t figure out what.

“So where did you go on this date?” Terry wanted to know.

“Wait!” Lee Ann said. “Didn’t Geoff ask you out?”

“Um, technically, no. He sort of got close to asking, but never actually asked.” Fortunately. “We actually went dancing, Terry. Swing dancing! And he’s really good at it.”

Dancing, I realized. I had a clear picture of Celeste dancing in that jumper/mini-dress thing. So why did it feel wrong?

“And afterwards?” Terry insisted.

Afterwards? I don’t remember seeing Celeste after the dance… Wait, I’m getting confused. “Oh! Um, well, we went dancing at a restaurant and ran into a bunch of my friends.  And they liked him and were happy for me.”

“And afterwards?” Terry repeated.

“Oh.” I turned red as I realized what she was actually asking. “Um, we kissed.” I saw Terry roll her eyes. “It was very nice… and it got better on our second date,” I added hurriedly. “And, on our third date we made out in the back seat of his car.” I remembered what that had been like, my first as a girl actually cuddling with a guy. I had no complaints, even if it had been a bit tame by my old standards.

And then it hit me what was wrong with my memory of Celeste. She hadn’t been here last semester, so I had to have seen her freshman year, when I was still Marshall. But how could I, as Marshall, remember her wearing something that Marsha had sewn? That was impossible!

“So you’ve been out a few times, then?” Lee Ann observed. “What’s he like?” And looking at Terry, she added, “and I don’t mean just physically.”

“Oh!” I said, now seriously distracted by the impossibility of my memory. “Um, well, he’s an engineer, and he’s extremely logical, but kind of shy… and he’s artistic. He made me this pin. And he was really sweet about giving it to me…”

Terry was rolling her eyes again. “Omigosh, he sounds like he’s still in middle school. He made you jewelry? Didn’t get past kissing until the third date?”

“He sounds very nice, Marsh,” Lee Ann said, glaring at Terry. “And just your speed. Some of us have things other than sex on our minds.”

Yeah, and what is on my mind at the moment is impossible memories. What was worrying me was that there actually was an explanation – I just didn’t like it.

“I’m sure he’s interested in me… that way,” I protested. “It’s just… we’re taking it slowly. I… don’t think he’s actually dated a lot. But he’s a fast learner! I’m not complaining. Um… in acting, we say, ‘always leave them wanting more.’ And he does. That’s better than me being bored with him, isn’t it? Or him with me?”

“Marsh, you don’t need to defend yourself – or him. Terry and I are very happy for you. You’re glowing, girl! I think he really is good for you. Right, Terry?”

Terry smiled. “Yeah, I didn’t mean to run him down, Marsh. I’m glad you found somebody.”

They did pry for more details, which I tried to supply, even as I tried to deal with the implications of my memory of Celeste. It couldn’t be mine; it had to be Marsha’s memory, which I really really didn’t want to believe. Maybe… maybe in the old time line, Celeste had gone to Nikki for the work instead? And Nikki had just happened to do it exactly the way Marsha did in this time line? Then I could have seen Celeste in it while I was Marshall. It was a real stretch, and I was having a hard time convincing myself that it was possible.

Firmly, I resolved not to think of it, while distracting myself with the details of how I was going to proceed with Celeste’s alterations. I’d come up with what I thought was a reasonable plan when my phone rang.

“Eric!” I answered, seeing his name on the display. “When are we going to see the lab?” That was a much safer thing to focus on just now.

“Well, Martin won’t be getting in until late, so we figured we’d meet tomorrow evening, around midnight at my dorm room and then head over to the Physics building.  It should be pretty empty by then, since it’s the start of the semester. I assume you and Vicky will both be coming?”

“Yes. Does Martin have a key?”

“No,” Eric said. “He said he was going to see if there’s any way to get one, but for now, all we may be able to do is see where the lab is – or was. One of us is going to need to learn how to pick locks, probably.”

“Actually, I think I know somebody who can help. You don’t mind if I bring somebody else in, do you?”

“If it’ll get us in sooner, no problem. That’ll be five of us, which is probably still manageable.”

“OK, great.” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

So that was one step closer to figuring this whole thing out – and now I needed to get it figured out even more urgently. The alternative explanation – that Nikki or somebody else had done the same alterations as Marsha had – made no sense; clearly, I now had a memory in my head that wasn’t mine, and didn’t belong there. And if Marsha’s memories were suddenly in my head… what if they started replacing my own? I’d lost my body in favor of hers, my skills, my history – all that was left of me was my memories. If I lost those…

I found Dad alone in his study the next day, watching the Bowl games. This time, he hadn’t even tried to ask me to join him, but I waited for a commercial and then sat on the arm of his chair and said, “Hi!”

Sadly, he flinched. He’d been doing that for most of the week since I’d told him my secret. “Marsh! Um… you didn’t… I mean, did you want to watch the game with me?”

“Would you like me to, Dad?” I asked, watching him carefully. Over the past few months, it had become normal for me to call him, “Daddy,” but that was one of those things that really seemed to bother him now, so I’d stopped.

“Um, well… you’ve never… I mean, of course, Pr – I mean, Marsh.” The pain in his voice tore at my heart. “I don’t know what to think, anymore… Marsh. I feel as though a giant hole has been torn in my heart and I can’t even do anything about it. You’re suddenly a stranger to me, and, well…”

“That’s why I came in, Dad. I think we need to talk.”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “Of course, M– Marsh. We really do.”

“Would you like to wait until half time?”

“No.” Suddenly decisive, he picked up the remote and switched off the TV. “This is much more important than which college is going to be able to boast about having the best record.” He stood and gestured to the armchair in which he had been sitting. “Sit down, M– Sit down.” And pulled over his desk chair to face me as I sat down.

“I suppose I’ve been avoiding you,” he continued, “and I’m sorry. You’ve been dealing with this for, what, three months now?” I nodded. “Then it’s about time I started to deal with it as well. I don’t want to ‘take over’ again. You tell me what you want to tell me. And… tell me what you want me to call you.”

Mom and I had talked about this a lot. It might have been easiest for Dad to pretend he didn’t know about me and go on calling me his ‘princess,’ and I’d gotten really comfortable with that. I’d decided that it was silly for me to worry about my masculinity being threatened, under the circumstances, and to tell the truth, I’d really grown to like the closeness Marsha had had with him. But I didn’t see any way to go back to that.

“You can just call me, ‘Marsh,’ Dad. It was my nickname as Marshall as well. Um… what would you like to know?”

He chuckled. “Neither one of us wants to go first, I see. OK, tell me what you… what Marshall was like. What kinds of things did you enjoy? Um… how were you… socially?”

“I had a lot of girlfriends, if that’s what you wanted to know, Dad.” He protested that it wasn’t what he was asking, but I saw him relax. “Um… and I was intimate with a number of them.”

“I see.”

“I guess that’s something very different between me and Marsha.”

“Um… yeah.”

“I was a bit taller then you, and not really athletic. But girls really seem to like a guy who plays the guitar, and I play – or rather played – very well. A lot better than I showed you the other day.”

“I see.”

“And I really can’t complain about you as a Dad – you’ve always been the greatest Dad a guy could ask for,” I told him.

“Well, I wasn’t trying to–”

“I just want you to remember something. I am a girl, now. I might not be the girl you remember, but I’m still… well, I’m not your son, now. I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m… I’m your daughter. It’s taken me a lot of time to come to terms with it, and I’m not saying that I like it, but that’s the way things are right now.”

“I see that. I’m sorry, Marsh. It’s just been a real surprise for me. And… I’ve been remembering that the last time I took you to the train, you asked me if I missed having a son. I’m afraid that I didn’t realize then why you were asking.”

“It’s OK, Dad. You gave the answer that Marsha would have wanted to hear. And… I couldn’t really expect you to miss me, when you never knew me.”

He nodded again.

“But now… I don’t know if I can change back, but as long as I’m a girl, I’ll be acting like one.”

“So it’s an act?”

I squirmed a bit. “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, I really do feel the things a girl in my position would feel, and that includes liking boys. It doesn’t mean anything about what I was like as a boy.”

“Ah, I see. I guess you might think your Dad’s being a bit overly emotional. It’s just a bit difficult to keep treating you as ‘my little girl’ given…”

“Yeah, I see. I just want you to know, that I’m OK with it. It’s actually easier for me. If you see what I mean. And I didn’t mean that I don’t need your help. I know that there are lots of things you can do for me that I can’t do for myself, including dealing with some aspects of this situation.”

“You seem to have managed pretty well,” he acknowledged. “You’re clearly a big girl now – I mean, a… well, you’re very mature.”

I laughed. “’Big girl’ is fine, Dad.”

He stood and pulled me into an embrace. “You know,” he said. “Children do change as they grow up, but this isn’t quite what I was expecting!”

We both laughed at that. With his arms around me and his chin nuzzling the top of my head, I felt a real urge to snuggle against him and call him, ‘Daddy’ again, but I resisted, because he really seemed uncomfortable with it.

“So, would you like to talk over the plan of action now, or when I take you to the train station?” he asked after a moment.

“Um, Dad…” I said. “Actually, I’m going to drive up with Jeremy.”

He held me at arms length and stared at me in surprise. “You’re…?” He shook his head. “OK, I need to get used to this. I should just think of you as Marsha and forget what you told me? Do a bit of doublethink?”

I look up at him, a bit red-faced. “I guess so… sometimes that’s what I do. I feel like I’m ‘Marsh’ when I interact with my friends and… boys, and ‘Marshall’ when I’m working on the problem of changing back. So, seriously… if you wanted to pretend that I was Marsha and treat me the way you did until last Saturday, that would be OK. I mean it, Dad. Daddy.”

He flinched again, only not so much.

“Let me think about that, Marsh. Um…” He sat down and gestured me back to my seat. “Let me talk to Marshall for a few minutes, then.”

I grinned. “Ok, here’s where we stand. I told you my friend heard where the lab probably is. When we all get back to school, we’re going to go and see if we can get in.”

“And then? What do you expect to find? People? Equipment?”

I sat back. “I really hadn’t thought that far ahead,” I admitted. “I just figured we’d find out and go from there. I guess… we’re probably not going to find any people, but maybe we’ll find something that they forgot which will lead us to them.”

“OK, anything you can find… if you can figure out where they’re hiding, I might be able to do something. With all of the secrecy, the ‘reputation of the college’ excuse doesn’t make sense to me. It’s possible, of course, but I’m betting that there’s some kind of lawsuit being threatened.”

“Really?”

He sounded comfortable now, back in his own element. “There could be a lawsuit from one of the victims’ relative forcing them to keep it all quiet, or possibly one threatening damages. If it were the latter, I’d expect somebody to try a class-action lawsuit and advertise a lot. Since I haven’t heard of any such thing, that seems less likely. So I’m going to assume that somebody outside of the college wants this all hushed up for some reason.”

“I don’t follow you,” I admitted. “How does that help?”

“Well, if I’m right, and we can get some evidence, we may be able to make the whole thing moot – and get the school to help us out here. But in the mean time, we can expect them to conceal and deny and make it as hard as possible to figure things out. And they might be able to put some pressure on people they think know more than they should. But if they were trying to get you to out your friends, that suggests that the guy who did the experiment isn’t cooperating, and they don’t know who the victims are.”

“And Dean Patterson…?” I asked.

“He knows that you’re part of this group. What he isn’t sure of, I think, is whether you actually know that the experiment is real. I certainly didn’t know when I spoke with him, after all. Sorry about calling him, by the way. I did what I thought made the most sense at the time.”

I nodded. “I know. If I had told you earlier… I’ve told Chad about this, too. Can he be in on the conversation?”

Dad raised his eyebrows. “Really? OK. Chad seems pretty level-headed.”

I told him about my agreement with Chad, and he said that he would discuss it with Chad, and maybe agree to call me together. That way we could all talk at once. Dad asked again if I wanted to watch the game with him, and I accepted. I think he was still trying to figure out whether to treat me as a boy or a girl, because at one point he started to explain the game to me and then caught himself and apologized. This was clearly going to be complicated.

And then, the one person that I had thought was supposed to be easy to relate to – my sister – suddenly turned on me. I’d asked her for her opinion on the dress I was going to be wearing back to school.

“Since when are you worried about what dress you’re wearing, Marsh?” she’d snapped.

My eyes bulged. “Haven’t I been asking your advice all along – well, the last two times I went out with Jeremy?” I countered. “We’ll be driving back together, and I thought it would make sense to look appropriate for the trip. This isn’t a date, but he’ll see me, and I don’t know how to dress for something like that. Is there a problem?”

“Just wear the green and blue,” she said, starting to close her door on me, but I stuck my foot in the way.

“Is there a problem here, Teen?”

“Why should there be a problem? Mom and Dad know everything, so we don’t have to keep secrets from them, right?”

“So what’s the issue?”

“There is no issue. Do you mind? I think I’m going to get a snack,” she said, and suddenly pushed past me.

She ran down the stairs and I almost stumbled, trying to keep up with her. She got to the kitchen ahead of me, and was already talking with Mom about something else and not looking at me. But whatever game she was playing, Mom didn’t seem to be in on it.

“Hi, Marsh,” Mom said. “Tina and I were about to make some cookies. Did you want to join us? You can bring some back to school with you.”

“Oh,” Tina said. “You know what, Mom? I just remembered that I have a report to write.” And she started to push past me again.

I guess she must have been a bit too obvious, because Mom snapped. “Tina!” and then when she didn’t stopped, called “Come back here!”

Tina didn’t stop, and Mom and I exchanged looks of surprise.

“Marsh, you get out the ingredients,” Mom said. “I’m going to go talk to your sister.”

“Wait, wait,” he said. “I’m not saying that I buy this whole experiment thing, you know.”

“My parents do,” I told him. “I played the guitar for them, and that’s something Marsha definitely couldn’t do.”

He looked surprised. “Seriously? You can actually play?”

I nodded, a bit smug. “I told you I could. You can even come over tomorrow and I’ll show you.” I didn’t think it necessary to explain that I wasn’t really all that good, now.

“Huh. So you actually do…” he shook his head, and narrowed his eyes at me. “Then explain to me… hmm… so you’re not really a girl, but you’re getting used to this being-a-girl thing, right? No more play-acting? You figure you’re stuck so you might as well start dating boys?”

I squirmed a bit. “I told you, it was a real surprise to me, but, yeah… dating boys seems perfectly reasonable for now.”

“’For now’?” he echoed.

“Well, I might not actually be stuck, after all. I think we found the lab.”

“You found the…?!” He gaped at me. “And you went out with this guy, knowing that?”

“No. I didn’t know before our first date,” I said, defensively. Then I had to look away. “But… I knew before the second… and tonight…”

“And you’re just leading this guy on now, huh?”

“No! I’m not! I… Chad I don’t know that I can change back. All we seem to know is where the lab is. But it seems to be locked up and abandoned. It might just be a dead end. I still might spend the rest of my life this way.”

“Is that a fear? Or a hope?” Chad’s voice was sharp. “What are you going to do when this guy finds out that his supposed ‘girlfriend’ is a fraud?”

“How am I a fraud?! I’m a girl, Chad!” I saw him compress his lips and flare his nostrils, so I stopped again. “I’m physically female in every way, Chad. I have the body, the periods, the hormones… I find boys attractive and not girls. The only thing left of the male me is my memories. I can’t … It’s not easy, Chad.” I stopped yet again because I could hear myself whining. “Besides, we’re just dating. It’s no big deal. And if I do manage to change back, he’ll never have met the female me, anyway.”

“Maybe, but you will. What’s that going to be like? And what if you can’t change back and he starts getting serious about you and you aren’t ready for it? Did you think this through at all?”

“I… I don’t think that’s likely. I mean… I don’t know how to flirt the way girls do, or primp or anything. Jeremy is really nice, but I don’t see him getting serious about me. Not really. This is just sort of having fun together for us.” I could feel my face getting hot, remembering how much I was crushing on him, and for how long. But that was me, not him. “Um, look, your lips are turning blue, Chad. We should really go inside.”

“Good idea,” he nodded. “But this isn’t over, Marsh. You expect us to be close buddies, right? Then I expect regular reports on what’s going on. Like every week, whether you think it’s significant or not.”

“I promise,” I said. “But can you arrange for me not to have to go through your Mom, every time? Actually, why don’t you call me? Say… Sunday nights around 11:00? That way I won’t forget, either.”

“Deal,” he said, extending his hand, which I shook. “OK, let’s go in.”

There were only a few people left in the living room when we came back in. “Where is everybody?” I asked Kathy as Chad went finally to put away his coat.

“Well, everybody got tired of the party games,” she said, “so they’re mostly in the kitchen and the TV room. What were you guys talking about out there for so long?”

“Oh, some things that are going on at school,” I shrugged, trying to be extra casual. I pretty much only knew Kathy as Chad’s girlfriend, and I wasn’t willing to let her in on my secret. “Chad was helping me, and I sort of forgot to keep him up-to-date on things.”

“I wondered about that. I hadn’t seen him that annoyed with you since the beach thing.”

“Yeah,” I grinned, wondering what ‘the beach thing’ might have been. “Anyway, do you know where my date is?”

She shrugged. “Not my day to watch him.”

I peeked into the TV room, but it was pretty dark, the only light coming from the wide-screen TV on the wall. It was tuned to one of those ‘getting ready for the ball to drop’ shows, but it didn’t look as though anybody was actually paying attention. The girls were sitting on their boyfriends’ laps and taking advantage of the partial privacy afforded by the darkness to get in some quiet cuddling. I’d done that before, of course, but never as the girl, and I was suddenly curious. Now, if I could just find Jeremy…

He was in the kitchen, talking with Cherise, who was looking a bit too interested in what he had to say. “There you are,” I said, planting a very possessive kiss on his lips in front of her. “Come on.” And I led him back out into the hallway and into the TV room.

Actors often have to make their way onto or off of a darkened stage without stumbling, and Mr. Condrin had taught us a little trick. If you close your eyes for a few seconds, they get used to the dark fairly quickly. As a result, I was able to lead Jeremy to an empty spot I had seen on one of couches while he was still trying to see what everybody else was doing. As soon as he was seated, I plopped myself onto his lap – and almost as quickly found myself on the floor, with Jeremy striding out of the room.

It took me a few seconds to recover, as the nearby couples stared at me, but I picked myself up and ran after him. I found him alone in the front hallway, the tension in his arms and back echoed by the look of shock on his face.

“What happened?” I cried.

“I… um… I…” he choked. “I guess… I might have… Look, Marsh, maybe… maybe this is wrong. I mean… I’m just… not comfortable with public displays of affection. I mean… I just really didn’t expect… O boy. I really… look, maybe I sort of… I think I expected you to be more… you know… um, conservative in your…”

He stopped and tried again. “I’m saying this all wrong. Maybe we’re just not right for each other. I think maybe…”

“Not right?” I wailed. “Because I sat on your lap?”

“Um… no, it wasn’t that, it’s just that… well, I could see that everybody else was… maybe your crowd is just…”

“You’re wrong,” I insisted. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I just… I just wanted to see what it was like. I didn’t imagine that you…”

He stared at me. “You’ve never sat on a guy’s lap?”

I shook my head. Marsha had probably sat on Dirk’s lap lots of times, but that was her, not me. “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal for you, or I never– ”

“Um…” he stammered, his face turning red. “Do you… do you have a handkerchief or something?”

“A handkerchief?”

“Yeah, I think I need to wipe this egg off my face. Oh boy. I’m sorry… I don’t know what I was doing. Look, can we start again and just pretend I didn’t open my mouth and say all that stuff?”

“But you’re not comfortable with me sitting on your lap.”

“In public,” he corrected me. “I mean, if you really need to, I guess…”

“But you’d rather not.”

He nodded, ruefully. “I guess I’m kind of a prude.” He cringed a little, as he asked hopefully, “Is that OK?”

“It’s OK,” I agreed. “I just didn’t know. It was, actually kind of daring for me to do that in the first place, but if makes you uncomfortable, I won’t.” Well, I laughed to myself, this is going to be a very interesting, and possibly very chaste relationship – and that’s probably OK. At least I didn’t have to worry about him trying to make me do things I wasn’t ready for.

Well, maybe not all that chaste, I discovered later. Jeremy kissed me very satisfactorily at midnight – he was clearly getting much more comfortable with that. And when he left the party, he found a nice quiet street and I did sit on his lap in the back seat and cuddled with him. Oh, there’s no question but that it felt a lot different from when I was the boy. I don’t know that I’d say better, or worse, just different. I definitely had no complaints, there. My mind might not quite have caught up to my body in its desires, at least beyond curiosity, but I was emotionally exhausted by the time he pulled up in front of my house.

Then he surprised me. “Marsh, I hope this is OK… I felt bad that I didn’t get a chance to give you a present, so I made this for you.” He handed me a tissue paper wrapped something, and what I had unwrapped it, I found a beautiful little M-shaped pin, decorated with gorgeous stones. “See, these are all local. I told you about those, remember? I got out my rock tumbler and found a bunch of the smaller ones, ‘cause I knew they’d fit really nicely. I mean, I don’t want you to think I spent a lot of money on your or anything.”

“No, just a lot of time,” I breathed. “What about the base? It looks like silver.”

“Oh,” he shrugged. Just some old metal from something broken. I sort of worked it into that shape, and soldered pieces together and filed things down. You know. It’s not as if it’s anything really special, or anything.”

But it clearly was. I couldn’t imagine where he’d found the time. He must have worked on it over his family vacation.

“Jeremy,” I told him, “this is really beautiful. You’re an artist. I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, I just really wanted to give you something, and…”

“Thank you,” I said, kissing him passionately. “Nobody’s ever… I mean… thank you.” But at the same time, I couldn’t help hearing Chad’s voice in my head. What if he starts getting serious about you and you aren’t ready for it? What if, indeed?

“Stop it, Tina!” I yelped, coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. “I’m not dressed! Do you want me to tell Grandma what you’re doing with the Flip cam she gave you?” I was getting really annoyed, now, since it was the fourth time in two days that she’d snuck up on me like that and just started shooting.

“I’m just collecting something for Jeremy,” she teased, sticking out her tongue at me and pulling away the camera when I reached for it. “I’m sure he’s missing you by now.” But at least she turned it off before our struggles caused me to lose the towel.

I was already in a bit of a sour mood. I hadn’t seen Jeremy in several days, and I was missing him terribly. With very little in the way of scheduled obligations, I had expected to spend a lot of time with him, but his family had scheduled a trip for the week, and all we’d been able to do so far was email back and forth. I’d used my own new Flip cam to record myself for him, but it wasn’t at all the same as actually being together. He was going to be back in time for the New Year’s Eve party, but that was still a couple of days away. It didn’t help my mood that Mom and Dad had suggested that, “given my mental state,” the separation would be good for me.

What was particularly aggravating was discovering that they had been right. My brain had seemed to switch off when I was with Jeremy, and having several days in a row away from him was letting me think. I’d pretty much ignored everything except my relationship with Jeremy, and I needed to fix that. I need to pay attention to other things, and one of those things was repairing my relationship with Chad, as soon as I could.

That was easier said than done, though. I called, and after chatting with me, his mother simply said, “I’m sorry, Jennifer. Chad says he doesn’t want to talk to you, but won’t tell me why. What happened?”

Of course, I had no answer, and when I went to his house and managed to get him to open the door, he slammed it in my face. “Why won’t you talk to me?” I shouted through the closed door, but he didn’t answer.

I checked with Dinah, though, and she confirmed that he was going to be at the party, so decided that I wasn’t going to let him avoid me there. The key was, I didn’t understand exactly what I had done that annoyed him so much.

Part of it was obvious. He’d given me that speech about keeping a buddy up-to-date on things when he helping you, and I hadn’t. I needed to apologize for that, certainly. But was there something else? I mean, he was clearly livid, and his reaction seemed way out of proportion to my offense.

Tina wasn’t any help, either. Her recommendation was that I simply give him time to cool down. “Who knows how boys think, anyway?” was her comment, and when I pointed out that I should know, she blithely suggested that since I was a girl now, I’d probably forgotten, and if not, I should.

I know I should have come back with something clever, only her comment had left me gasping. It wasn’t until she left that it occurred to me to say, “Well, I think it’s pretty useful to know, don’t you?” Only as a comeback, it sounded pretty flat, even to me.

Of course, that wasn’t the only relationship I’d messed up. “I’m starting to think that I shouldn’t have said anything to you and Dad about the experiment,” I told Mom later while sitting in her sewing room.

“Oh?” she said, not looking up from her work.

“Well, I mean I think you’ve pretty much treated me the same, but Dad… well, he hasn’t called me ‘Princess’ since then, and he keeps looking like he wants to say something to me and then changes his mind. He looked really disappointed that I didn’t want to watch the game on TV with him. I’m really worried that he doesn’t know how to talk to me any more.”

Mom stopped her machine. “That’s just it, Honey, he doesn’t. He’s never regretted not having had a son, but now you’ve told him that he should have had one, that his little girl is supposed to be a boy and that he isn’t to do anything about it. He’s stuck between trying to learn to be a father to a boy and trying to hold on to you as his princess. He doesn’t want to insult you by treating you the wrong way and he realizes that he has no idea what your relationship with him should be, now. Things that used to fit into neat little boxes no longer do.”

“What about you? You’re not treating me any differently.”

“Well,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “I’m not really sure what to think. The whole idea is just so strange to me. So I’m just going along the way I have, assuming that you’ll tell me if you want me to change anything.”

I nodded, and waited for her to go on, but she just looked at me, expectantly.

“I guess it would be easier for me if you didn’t,” I said. “I mean… as long as I’m a girl, what’s the point of pretending that I’m not? I… well, it was really weird at first, but I think on the whole, I’d rather you and Dad just sort of… ignored what I said.”

“That’s not so easy…” She answered, shaking her head. “You told us that you were really a boy – and then you put on a dress and went out on a date. It’s definitely not what your father would have expected of a son, and now he’s wondering if he did something… in your old, um, life? I mean, you’ve mostly been acting like the girl we remember, and that just seems wrong. If you’re a boy, you shouldn’t be dating boys, you shouldn’t be wearing dresses, you should be watching games with your father… but you’re not.

“It would be so easy to dismiss the whole thing,” she continued, “and assume that it’s just part of the prank we thought it was over Thanksgiving, but even that isn’t making a lot of sense. So I’m trying to ignore it, since you don’t seem to want us to do anything about it, and your father is badly confused, and a bit hurt. He won’t let on, but I know him.”

Mom did understand, of course, when I explained that it was actually less embarrassing for me to act as though I had been Marsha all along. She understood about playing roles, but that didn’t make things easier for Dad.

I didn’t have any answers. I’d told my parents the truth, and I had to live with it unless I could change back. Changing back would solve everything, and if I couldn’t, I’d just have to hope that things would work out. As for Chad, I kept thinking about what I could do, but hadn’t reached a solution by the evening of the party. And then, I tried to forget about my problems for a while and just focus on seeing Jeremy again, and dressing up for him, and being with him. I hadn’t gotten the hang of all the primping that girls were supposed to do before dates; fortunately, Tina was more than willing to help me. She also expected me to help her when she got ready to go out with her own boyfriend, but at least understood when I got confused.

And then it was time, and Jeremy showed up, and my heart pushed itself ahead of my brain again. I’m pretty sure he told me about his week and I must have said something intelligible in response, but I was doing a lot more feeling than thinking. It wasn’t until we were almost to the house that I remembered to apologize for making him go early.

“No problem,” he assured me. “If they’re your friends and they expect you to help set up, you need to be there. I brought a book.” And he showed me a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach that he had in the car with him.

“You– you’re not planning on reading that at the party, are you?” I asked, surprised. At the same time I was a bit intrigued, since he had mentioned the book when we first met and I had meant to look it up.

“I just figured I’d bring it in and read it if there wasn’t anybody to talk to.”

I winced. It was so inappropriate, and yet at the same time I found it adorable. But I do know something about parties, so I said, “The other girls’ boyfriends will be there. Please leave the book in the car.”

I walked into the party on his arm – and without the book – as though I was used to such things. We weren’t the first to arrive, and I was relieved to see Timmy sitting in the living room. He and Jeremy had met at the restaurant, so I left the two of them to talk and followed Dinah and Maddy into the kitchen.

It didn’t really take us all that long to set up. Dinah already had the soda and we’d each brought homemade snacks in addition to store-bought pretzels and chips. I’d used Mom’s recipe for stuffed mushrooms, since Tina had said that Marsha had made it for a party, once. I had to take my turn to put it into the oven, though, as Dinah had pizza wedges already baking. Working with Marsha’s friends was really easy and natural, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was because they knew Marsha so well. I didn’t want to believe that it was another case where Marsha’s memories might be leaking through.

It wasn’t until almost eleven that Chad and Kathy showed up. Jeremy had whispered that he needed to use the bathroom and I was trying to remember where it was when Chad and Kathy came in the front door. Given how elusive he had been, I decided that I needed to confront him right then and there.

“Kathy,” I said, after doing the necessary introductions, “I need to talk to Chad. Can you show Jeremy where the bathroom is?”

“You need to talk to Chad?” she echoed, looking puzzled. I suppose that wasn’t usual for Marsha, but I didn’t have time to role-play right then. I nodded, and she led Jeremy off, leaving Chad and me alone.

“I’m not talking to you right now, Marsh,” Chad said, trying to walk past me to get rid of his coat, but I stood in his way.

“You weren’t talking to me all week,” I said. “Now we need to talk. It’s important, Chad.”

He crossed his arms. “Important. Really? Just how important is it, Marsha? Seems to me, anything important you had to say, you should have said a little while ago.”

I looked around, but nobody else seemed to be in the front hall. “I’m really sorry, Chad. I know I messed up. Now can we please talk? Someplace where we won’t be overheard?”

He glared at me for a moment. “You really want to talk? OK.” And he opened the front door and pulled me outside.

“Chad are you crazy?” I yelped, wrapping my arms around my chest. “It’s freezing out here!”

“Not for me it isn’t,” he retorted, putting his coat back on. “This way you’ll talk really fast and I can get back to the party.”

I stared at him, shivering. “What did I do?” I wailed. “I mean, I know I should have told you about… about things, but aren’t you sort of overreacting?”

“Overreacting?” he retorted. “You lied to me, Marsh. You got me to talk to you the way I’d never talk to a girl. Ever. You really had me going, there. You and Tina must have had a real laugh at simple-minded Chad. Did you get your kicks, hearing me use bad words when talking to you?

“And then I guess the joke got old, and you found a new guy to date. Or were you seeing him all along? No wonder you were willing to call your old boyfriend a jerk!” And he started back towards the house.

“I didn’t lie to you, Chad!” I cried, grabbing on to his arm. “I never lied. And I don’t think you’re simple at all. I mean it, Chad. I mean it.” He glared again and I let go.

“I didn’t lie to you,” I repeated. “I… was just embarrassed about… well, about liking boys after I’d told you how I wasn’t attracted to anybody and we talked man-to-man about girl-watching. You have no idea what it was like for me, Chad!” He didn’t say anything, so I persisted. “I probably should have known. I mean, it’s normal for girls to like boys, and… well, right now, I’m a girl. I probably should have been more surprised if I wasn’t attracted to boys. Chad, can we please talk someplace warm? I’m freezing my ba– I mean, I’m really, really cold. I don’t have nearly the muscle mass I’m used to. You can stand the cold a lot better than I can.”

He frowned at me for a moment, but seemed slightly less hostile. Then he shook his head and took off his coat. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “Put this on.”

“But…” I started.

“As you say, I can stand the cold better than you can, and I’m the one who made you come out without a coat, so put it on.”

“Does this mean that you believe me?” I said, wrapping it around me. It was too big for me, of course, so I overlapped the front and held it closed with my arms.

“Let’s just say that I’m open. I want to know how you could go from agonizing about not liking girls to getting yourself all gussied up to date a boy.”

“Because I didn’t want to believe it, Chad! I mean, you know what it’s like. The whole of liking boys was… well… not something I was comfortable with. I guess I had convinced myself that since I didn’t want to like boys, I didn’t. So I just refused to recognize it. I think I must have decided I was being nervous instead of being attracted, or something. But… Jeremy was different. It was too obvious that I liked him. So… now I know. It’s still weird, but… yeah. Just being near Jeremy does something to me.”

“And why aren’t you attracted to Dirk, then? You were pretty crazy about him for a long time.”

“Oh. Well… actually it was Marsha who was crazy about him, not me, but…” I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure he was going to believe this. “He’s changed, Chad. The Dirk I remember was a lot nerdier looking. He was shorter and skinnier, and, well, now that I’ve seen the Dirk you know, I understand why she liked him.”

“What do you mean, changed?”

“I mean that it looks like it’s not just people who did the experiment who got changed, Chad. It’s like my cousin never being born. I think the experiment got out of hand. Things are happening, and I don’t know where it’s going to stop.”

I remembered after lunch that I had made a promise to meet Dirk for ice cream, to “talk about our relationship.” After what had happened with Jeremy, though, it didn’t seem fair to him to go through with it, especially if he expected to pay for me. I therefore excused myself from the table to call him.

I found his number in the history on my phone. “Hey, Mel,” he said, answering on the second ring. “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to be honest with you,” I explained. “My date last night went really well, and I’m seeing him again tonight, so…”

“Oh.” I could hear the disappointment in his voice, and I could almost feel sorry for him. I don’t remember him having had a lot of dating success, and losing one of the few girls who had actually wanted to be with him must hurt.

“So I just wanted to be fair,” I concluded.

“You know, Mel,” he persisted. “I still value you as a friend. We’ve barely spoken since we broke up…”

“Since you dumped me,” I corrected him, remembering what Tina and Chad had said.

“Uh, yeah. I’m going to have to keep apologizing for that. Still, it’s been about nine months, and I’d still like to meet up, just to talk. Is that all right?”

I figured I could give him that, at least, so I said, “Sure. Just to talk? That’ll be fine. See you then.”

It wasn’t until we’d hung up that I remembered that with my lack of memory of Marsha’s life, I wasn’t going to be able to reminisce along with him. Maybe I could just say that I didn’t really want to talk about the past? Calling back at this point to change my mind didn’t seem fair, so I decided that I would just have to bluff my way through it.

I borrowed the car to head back to the Mall, arriving a bit early. Walking through the crowds without any urgent need to get anywhere, I realized one interesting benefit of my starting to get comfortable being attracted to boys – I could boy-watch! It wasn’t quite the same as my old pastime of girl-watching; for one thing, I didn’t know the rules. I definitely didn’t want to be caught looking and have some guy think I was flirting with him. Not only that, but I seemed to be more selective now. It used to be that I could find well over half of girls attractive, although of course I had focused on the most beautiful. With boys, though, it seemed as though no more than about one in ten was worth looking at, at all.

I got to the Häagen-Daz early, and didn’t see Dirk, so grabbed a small table to wait. There was only one boy there really worth looking at, and he was with a girl, and the way the two of them were looking at each other, I was pretty sure that it would not do to have her catch me looking. I shrugged and pulled out a book to read while I was waiting. It was one of Marsha’s romances, and I was prepared to hate it, but I found it surprisingly engrossing – so much so that I didn’t notice when a boy sat down opposite me.

“Hey, Melanie! How long have you been here?”

I looked up and gasped. “Dirk?!” He was gorgeous. That’s not Dirk! I thought, but who else would have called me, “Melanie”?

“Um, yeah. Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Um… no…” I choked out. “I’d just… forgotten how… I mean… you startled me.”

I couldn’t help staring. Looking closely, I could see a family resemblance, ruling out the likelihood that this was just a different boy with the same first name. They’d changed him, too! “Um… I… uh… d-did… did you sign up for a time travel experiment at school?”

“Did I what?!”

“J-just… I… never mind… I’m just a little bit…”

“Time travel? What? Did you say, ‘time travel’?”

“I’m just a little… you know what? Forget it. I was just reading, um…” I hurriedly jammed the book into my purse so that he wouldn’t see that it wasn’t science fiction.

“OK…”

“You know… I think I need some fresh air,” I suggested. I was definitely having some trouble breathing. I could see why Marsha had dated him; I was attracted to him, despite my memories of the old Dirk.

“OK, we’ll take a walk. Um, if we’re going outside, you’re probably not going to want ice cream. Why don’t I get us some hot chocolate, instead?”

As I waited, something else occurred to me. Dirk and Marsha had dated for two years. It had not hit me until now what that implied. Dirk seemed extremely comfortable talking to me, probably because he thought I was the girl he had known so well and so long. There was none of the first date nervousness that I had felt from Jeremy. Plus, Marsha had been seriously interested in Dirk, and whatever part of her remained in me seemed to be feeling the pull, and I didn’t like it.

I thanked Dirk when he handed me my drink, and walked alongside of him. Hormones. It had to be hormones. I had been in denial, and now I was finding myself attracted to whatever guys Marsha would have liked. She’d definitely liked Phil and Dirk, and Tina had picked out Jeremy, not for me, but for her. It was bad enough that I was in her life, why couldn’t I at least have my own preference for what boys I liked?

“That came out pretty weird, didn’t it? I mean… what would you say if I actually had meant to ask you if you’d done an experiment like that?”

“I’d tell you that you were talking to somebody in the wrong department. If anybody ever comes up with a serious time travel experiment it would be some in physics, not chemistry. Or…” he added, nodding at me, “biology.”

“Yeah,” I answered, still a bit shaky. “And probably wouldn’t be an undergrad, either.”

“Yeah… take your time,” Dirk encouraged me. “You really do look a bit out of it.”

“Uh huh. Thanks.”

We walked a bit in silence before he decided to try restarting the conversation. “So… what have you been up to? Aside from dating this new guy, just when I’m trying to get back together with you…?”

“Well, you know, theater stuff. I had the lead in a school production of Mousetrap.”

“Mmhmm?”

“And, um… I did a small role in Come Blow Your Horn last spring, or did I tell you about that one?”

He nodded. “You were rehearsing for that when we… well, I don’t know how many more times I can apologize, but I will, if it will help.”

“Forget it,” I said magnanimously. He held the outside door open for me, and then followed me outside. “So, what have you been up to?” I asked.

It turned out that he was at Penn, planning to major in chemistry, and that he was into fencing, although not good enough for the team. I had never known this about him, had never really cared to know. I wondered if these had all been true in the previous timeline as well. If not, the change seemed to have done him a fair bit of good. And… I had to admit, he did seem to be a pretty nice guy. Chad’s assessment had been accurate. If I ever got things back the way they had been, I promised myself, I would make a point of looking Dirk up. It appeared that I was the one who would really need to apologize.

He didn’t push me to reminisce about what had been, so I didn’t have to explain away gaps in my knowledge, nor did he press me on the reason for my idiotic-sounding question. Obviously, he hadn’t been listening to the radio show that had joked about the experiment.

He wound up walking me to my car, and was surprisingly decent about the whole situation. But he’d left me with an interesting mystery. Vicky was probably in the best position to help me think about it, so I called her on the way home.

She seemed a bit surprised to hear from me, and a bit nervous. “You’re… not calling me for dating advice or something like that, are you?”

I laughed. “No, actually I had some news for you. Eric called. He says he thinks he’s found the lab.” I explained about the grad student and the misdelivered package.

“Marsh, that’s fantastic! And here I was thinking you’d given up!”

“Well, I can’t take the credit. This is Eric’s doing, but it looks as though we actually have something to work on when we get back to school.”

“You have just made my day, Marsh. We’re going to get this taken care of, I just know it!”

“And I have some other news for you, Vixy,” I added. “Take a look at this picture I’m sending you.” I’d taken the picture of Dirk before saying good-bye. He’d been surprised that I wanted it, and had taken one of me in return.

“Oooh, he’s really…” she started, then cut herself of, suspicious. “Wait a minute. Who is this?”

“Marsha’s ex-boyfriend, actually. He wanted to talk to me about ‘getting back together.’”

I could hear the tension in her voice. “And you told him…?”

“I told him I wasn’t interested.”

She let out a breath. “Whew! I guess if you could say no to a guy like this, maybe you’re not as interested in boys as I was afraid you might be.”

I thought it better not to explain why I’d said no. Why spoil her break? “That’s not the point, Vicky. Do you remember when you stayed here last summer, and we went out with a group of my friends?”

“Yeah…?”

“Do you remember a guy named Dirk Simon?”

“Um, wait… nerdy guy, showed up out of nowhere when we were at the Mall? I seem to remember you being particular annoyed about that.”

“Right. That’s him.”

“What?” she gasped. “Marsh, there’s no way I’d forget meeting a guy who looked like this. I mean I was crazy about you, but I’d still have noticed.”

“That’s him now,” I explained.

It only took her a moment to get it. “You mean he was changed. He doesn’t go to Piques, does he?”

“No, and he has no recollection of doing an experiment anything like ours.”

“Then how… somebody else doing the same experiment, only without keeping his memory?”

“Maybe,” I conceded. I hadn’t actually thought of that possibility. “Or somehow the same people who changed us got him, too. I mean, with my cousin, I thought I could concoct an explanation. Maybe me being a boy rather than a girl made my aunt and uncle decide for some reason to have another child; it’s a stretch, but at least I can imagine a way for it to happen. But this? Dirk’s the same age as or older than all the victims we know about, and his parents didn’t even live in town when he was born.”

“This sounds like a problem,” she said, slowly. “If they could have changed people who didn’t even volunteer…”

“Exactly. Can you try looking really closely at all the people you know at home and see if anybody else was changed? The more information we can get, the better.”

She promised to look around and we hung up. She also promised to ‘reconsider something’ but wouldn’t explain what it was, only that I would understand next year.

Understand, huh? That was something that I was having a lot of trouble doing right now. I felt like one of those split-personality folks. When I talked about tracking down Professor Davis and company, I felt like my old male self, but… when I got home and headed back to my bedroom, and saw the outfit I had picked out for tonight’s movie date, the girl in me came out again, and I started really looking forward to seeing Jeremy. That was something I was really not ready to share with Vicky, even though I had warned her about it before exams.

The movie was fantastic, and I cannot honestly say how much of it was the movie and how much was spending three hours with Jeremy’s arm around me. He took me out for coffee afterwards, just so we could talk – and have an excuse to spend more time together.

“So,” he said, setting a mocha latte in front of me. “Phyllis says that you were excessively modest when you told me that your sister was the singer in the family.”

How had he remembered that? Of course, I had been talking about my old self, and before I had learned of Marsha’s singing prowess. “Well, she is doing more singing than I am these days. I’m not even in a choir at school,” I told him.

He nodded. “And… will I have a chance to hear you sing this semester?”

His eagerness both pleased and embarrassed me. “I’m going to audition for Sweeney Todd,” I told him, “but I’m probably just going to be in the chorus.”

In his place, I would probably have suggested something like a private recital, next. I waited in vain for him to say it. He even opened his mouth as though he was on the verge on asking, but closed it without saying anything, to my disappointment.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” I finally said. “I told you I was pre-med, right?” He nodded. “And you know about my acting, and… I do some sewing, too. You know, to help pay for college.”

“That’s unusual, isn’t it? I mean, not a lot of girls do it… um, do they?” He seemed so nervous! I found it kind of cute that he was having trouble talking to me.

“I don’t think a lot of girls do,” I responded, “but I know at least one other on campus. There are probably more. It’s a pretty useful skill to know, but I probably couldn’t make too much if everybody… did it.” I tried to make those last words suggestive and to my delight, he actually blushed slightly in response.

After a moment, I asked, “What about you? I know that you’re an electrical engineer, and Tina says you’re into geology?”

He nodded. “It’s my minor. It started as a hobby; I mean, every little boy likes rocks, right?” He grinned, and I melted. I had to find a way to get him to smile at me like that a lot more. “When I was younger, I got into rock polishing as a hobby. Did you know that there are some very attractive semi-precious stones found in this area?”

Talking about his hobby made him sound a lot more comfortable and confident – and charming. He told me that he’d tried to make jewelry for his mother and his sister from his polished rocks, and how his mother had pretended to be pleased. At some point, I stopped paying careful attention to his words and just enjoyed looking at him and hearing him talk. I think he mentioned a part-time job off campus, although I didn’t catch what he was doing.

He took me home and this time he didn’t hesitate in kissing me good night, and it was a lot better than our first time, but still not what I thought it could be. It didn’t really matter, though. I was feeling decidedly starry-eyed.

I waited in my room while Mom spoke with Dad when he got back from taking Tina to choir. Boy, had I messed up now. I had blabbed, and things were no longer in my hands. If my parents made the wrong decision, my life could be over – and they would think they were doing it ‘for my own good.’

I called the only person that I thought would understand.

“Hello?” Nikki said.

“Hi, Nikki. Got a few minutes?”

“Marsh! You sound terrible! What’s wrong?”

“I think I just messed up badly,” I admitted. “Um… I told Mom the truth, and now she’s telling Dad.”

“And… didn’t we discuss this? I thought you had agreed that you should tell them.”

“I suppose… but Nikki, what if they don’t believe me? When I told Tina, she really freaked out. Chad at least seemed really surprised. Mom seemed to think I was overworked or something. I played something for her, and that impressed her, but… I can’t tell what she’s decided happened. And now she’s talking to Dad, and… I don’t know what they’re going to do. I’m really worried that they won’t let me go back to Piques.”

“If they decide you’re overworked and overstressed, you mean?”

“Exactly.” She’d gone right to the heart of it. “If Dad thinks this is all the product of stress, he’ll think that a semester off, where the family can keep an eye on me, could be just what I need.”

“Well…” she said thoughtfully, “that might not be the worst of things. You’ve got Eric looking for the lab; he’ll still be here. And maybe it will give you a chance to, you know, get used to your new body without the pressure of school.”

“But he found the lab!” I exclaimed. I wasn’t explaining this well. “Or rather a grad student did and told him about it. He just called and Mom overheard me, and that’s why I told her. It was either that or lie.”

“He found it? That’s great!”

“Yeah, not so great if I’m still here when he gets to see it. And what good would it do me if they can fix things and I’m still here? And this is Jeremy’s last year and I won’t get to see him all year, and – oh, I forgot to tell you, he took me dancing last night and we’re going to a movie tonight. Or we were supposed to…”

“Wait. Wait. Wait. Jeremy? The boy you were crying about? And why are you…? Marsh, back up a bit. Are you planning to be a boy again or a girl?”

“I…” It was as though I hadn’t really thought it through. No, I hadn’t at all, actually. This had all happened too fast. “I definitely want to be a boy again. I do. Only…”

“Yes?” she prompted when I hesitated?

“Jeremy and I got talking and it turned out that he didn’t actually have a girlfriend and he really liked me, and…”

“And as a boy, that disgusts you and you don’t want to have anything to do with him.”

“Right. No! I mean… I don’t know… I mean…”

“You sound really confused, Marsh. Let’s take this one step at a time. You said he took you dancing?”

So I explained one more time about the arranged date and our soap-opera-like conversation in the car, and the good night kiss, and agreeing to another date tonight.

“So, you really like this guy?” she observed when I had finished.

“A lot,” I agreed. “Like with weak knees and floating on the ceiling and all. I haven’t felt like this in… well, a long time.”

“MmmHmm. Sounds to me as if somebody’s in love again. From what you’ve told me, that seems to be a pattern with you. Do you think you’re in love with him, or with the idea of being in love?”

“What? It’s not love. We’ve only had one date!”

“And now that you think you can be a boy again, you’re going to call the whole thing off, right? Cancel your date tonight?”

I felt my chest constrict. “Um… I don’t know. Do you think I need to?”

She laughed. “No, I’m not making that decision for you. I just wanted to see how you would react to the idea. You are one confused little puppy, aren’t you, Marsh?”

“Seriously,” I admitted. “I guess what I want is to change back… but maybe not just quite yet. I mean, I really like Jeremy a lot, and I know he likes me, and that will have to end if I… I mean, when I change back – if I can. I’m just not ready to give him up just yet.”

“And what happens when you do?”

“Oh, man. Well, he won’t remember having met me, and… I guess the best thing for him will be to find another girl… only I’ll remember and probably still be a little bit in love with him, even though I won’t be attracted to him any more. At least I hope I won’t. So it’ll be almost like with Vicky, where I can remember loving her, but I’m definitely not interested in her right now.”

“And I think you were jealous of the guy she is dating now?”

I sighed “Yeah, and I’ll probably be jealous of his new girlfriend, too, only it won’t be quite the same. With Vicky… I know that she wants me back and I want to be her boyfriend again, and…”

“Still? After all the fights you’ve had?”

“Yeah. There’s just something between us. So the real difference will be that if I see him again afterwards, it’ll hurt me, but not him, and I’ll just have to live with it.”

“It’ll hurt even worse if you keep going out with him, you know.”

“I know. But it’s going to hurt even more if I just stop now, and… well, I still don’t know that I can change back.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I guess… I want to go out with him again, and see… and then I’ll worry about it after I change back, if I can change back, and that depends on whether Mom and Dad let me go back to school.”

“Which you don’t think you can control.”

“I can’t! If they decide that I’m inventing the whole thing, they’ll decide that I need to be under a doctor’s care – Mom already suggested that – or that I need to stay home and rest.”

“That would really suck.”

“Yeah. Mom promised that they wouldn’t do anything that made me uncomfortable, so maybe I’m just worrying for nothing.”

“Will your Dad go along with that?”

“I have no idea. I don’t remember her saying anything… Oh, I have to go. I hear them coming.”

“Talk to you later, Marsh. Let me know what happens.”

“I will. Thanks!” And I hung up, about ten seconds before I heard them knock at my door.

“Marsh?” called Dad. “May we come in?”

“Come in!” I called, sitting up on my bed. At some point in the telephone conversation, I seem to have lain down on it.

The door opened and my parents came in, first Dad, looking at me as though I were a stranger, then Mom, looking very worried. I think Dad’s expression hurt more. There was none of the fondness I was used to, and depended on. I had been afraid that this would happen if he ever found out, and now here it was.

Mom took the desk chair, the only chair in the room, and Dad stood halfway from the door to the bed. “So,” he said. “I assume this is the truth that we weren’t supposed to believe?”

“I know it’s hard to believe,” I told them quietly, “but it’s the truth. It’s not a hoax, Daddy. They really did change us.”

“Well, your mother seemed pretty impressed with your guitar playing, and I admit that I don’t have a good explanation for how you might have learned to play as well as she claims, nor would I be able to judge just how good you are. So I have to admit that there is something going on here. But… I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a story of people going back in time just to change other people. Usually there’s something else they’re trying to do, and then people wind up changed as a result. Going back in time only to make other people miserable seems gratuitously cruel.”

“I don’t know, Daddy. I didn’t pay as much attention to the details as I probably should have. They asked a bunch of questions about our family, though, and said that we should imagine how small changes could lead to big changes.”

“Now, on Thanksgiving, you made a lot of claims, which you later agreed were lies. How many of them are you now saying are true?”

“I… don’t remember everything I said, then. I was pretty upset.”

“About this cousin.”

“Tyler. Yes.”

“So that’s one of the things you say was not part of the hoax.”

I sighed in frustration. “It’s not…” I took a breath. “Tyler did exist. His disappearance was one of the changes as a result of the experiment.”

“Which means that it was not only the volunteers who were changed; supposedly a lot of people were changed.”

I nodded.

“So why did Bob Peterson say it was a hoax?”

“The Strangers in the Mirror say that it’s a cover-up; for some reason the College doesn’t want people to know about it.”

“And neither did you, apparently. So if it’s a cover-up, you went along with it.”

“I did tell you at Thanksgiving,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but you also said you were a boy. I saw you last night, Princess. That was not the reaction of a boy.”

I turned red. “I… It was a very nice date.”

“And you reacted just the way I’d seen you react on dates with your last boyfriend.” He sat next to me on the bed and put his arm around me. “Marsh, I realize that somebody must have happened, and I promise that I’m going to do whatever it takes to fix this and make whoever did this to you, pay. But it seems to me that we have an awful lot of questions and not very many answers. We have a few clues: your claims and those of your friends, this lab that your friend found, and the insistence by Piques College that it’s a hoax.”

“How is that last a clue?”

“Well, let’s take stipulate that there really was an experiment. It was clearly conducted with school approval, right? I mean, you didn’t hear about it through some back channels?”

“No, they posted an ad on the school’s internal website.”

“And now they’re denying that it even happened. I don’t suppose the ad’s still around? Or that anybody made a copy of it?”

I shook my head. “They only usually run for a couple of weeks.”

“The fact that they are claiming it’s a hoax suggests that something went wrong. That it didn’t work the way the College expected. So talking to the people who did it might be useful.”

“If we could find them. We’ve been looking for a long time.”

“But now your friend knows where the lab is, right, Honey?” Mom put in.

“We think so,” I said, although I wasn’t quite as excited about it as I had been.

“So we need to see that lab,” Dad concluded. “And we need somebody who will understand what we’re seeing. That means that we need a physicist, right? One who is not connected with Piques College. I’m going to have to ask around to see who might owe me a favor.”

“Isn’t Sylvia Shimmer’s husband a physicist?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know,” Dad responded. “Ask her. Just don’t get too specific yet about why. We might also need to see if there is a legal angle here; if we can get in touch with the parents of the other victims, maybe a class action lawsuit will work. Marsh, do you have a way to reach the others?”

“Um… I’m not sure. And I’m pretty sure that most of them won’t be willing. They’re pretty frightened of even being found out.” And I had already lost control. I really wasn’t too crazy about the way Dad was taking over. This was my life we were talking about. I should have just come up with an excuse for Mom.

“Well, work on them. Call them and try to make them see reason. I’m sure they’ll make the right decision.” I shivered. That was too much like the way Dean Peterson had spoken.

“Marsha, what’s wrong?” Mom asked. It was as though she could read my mind.

“It’s just… It feels like Daddy’s trying to bring in all the big guns and it’s going to bring all kinds of attention on us, and… it makes me wish I hadn’t told you.”

Mom and Dad looked at each other. “OK, Princess,” Dad said after a moment. “We don’t have to do it that way. What did you have in mind?”

“I guess…” I squirmed a bit. “I sort of thought we could start by seeing what’s in the lab and go from there.”

“And maybe, Art, what she really needs now is support, not solutions,” Mom explained. And then she came over and set on my other side and put her arms around me.

“OK. OK,” Dad said, watching me rest my head on Mom’s shoulder. “I just… feel like I want to do something about this. If what you’re saying is true, Marsh, that means that you and all of your friends… had their lives violated. I’m your father, Princess. Nobody should be able to do that to my little girl and get away with it.”

“Let us know what you want from us, Honey,” Mom said. “If you want lawyers, we’ll get lawyers. If you want scientists or commandos, or whatever, we’ll figure out a way.”

“Commandos?” I asked, picking up my head.

She grinned. “I’m just being dramatic. The point is, while this is very strange for us, you are our daughter and we are on your side.”

I nodded.

“Seriously strange,” Dad agreed. “Um… I can’t help feeling as though this is just a dream or something.”

“It’s been a nightmare for me,” I said.

“I get that, and I’m going to try not to ‘take over.’ But I do hate feeling as though I can’t do anything.”

“I’ll let you know, Daddy,” I said, and I kissed him on the cheek.

Then he stood up and pulled Mom and me to our feet. “OK. So if we can’t solve this, can we solve something else? Why don’t we all pick up Tina and then go out to lunch? Sort of just to celebrate Marsh being home – whichever version of her she happens to be.”