Take a Lemon

Terry and I were sitting on her bed after classes on Monday, watching reruns of Heroes on her computer, while I tried vainly to ignore the fact that the most comfortable position for sitting on a bed was with my legs tucked under me, a clearly feminine posture. The problem was, my legs were too short to reach the floor and just letting them hang was tiring. Terry, of course, had no such problem; her feet were resting comfortably on the floor where they belonged.

Lee Ann poked her head in about fifteen minutes into the second episode. “Hey, I picked up the mail. This looks pretty official.” And she tossed a small envelope onto my lap.

I looked down and my heart froze.

“What is it?” Terry asked, pausing the show.

“It’s from the Dean’s office,” I replied, tearing it open, although I was pretty sure I already knew what it said.

“What’d you do?” Lee Ann asked.

I shook my head as I unfolded the note inside:

Marsha,

I was delighted to speak with your father, who is an old friend of mine, 
about you. I am eager to meet with you to set your mind at ease regarding
the pranks played by some of your friends. I hope you can make time for me
this week.

R. Peterson, Assoc. Dean of Students

There wasn’t anything revealing in it, so I handed it over to my roommates to goggle over.

Of course, I wasn’t fooled; this wasn’t a friendly note. The question was, what was I going to do about it? What if he was going to try pumping me for information on the Strangers? I really should tell Vicky about it, but she had told me not to contact her just now. I hoped that after she spoke with Ian and Luke, she would find a way for us to talk, but in the mean time…

“He’s a family friend?” Lee Ann asked.

“I think Dad went to school with him, that’s all, and now he’s decided to keep on eye on me, or something.”

“What’s this about pranks?”

“He means that time travel story; you know, the one that Jay keeps yelling at me about?”

“Why does a Dean care about that?” Terry wondered.

“I told my parents about it, and that I knew some of the people mentioned in the article, and Dad called this guy to find out the real story. So now he’s got to ‘reassure’ me.” I sighed. “This really isn’t great timing. We’re in Tech Week, and I’m already starting to get stressed out. This is the biggest role I’ve ever done, plus my EuroLit and Bio profs both announced that we’re behind schedule and we need to step up the amount of material we’re covering to get it all in before finals, and now this.”

“That really sucks,” Lee Ann said sympathetically, sitting next to me on the bed.

“Well, I know my lines, but there’s a lot of them, and that means a lot of things that can go wrong; a lot of chances for me to embarrass myself.”

“I don’t know how you do it; I’d die if I had to stand up in front of a whole bunch of strangers like that.” She started rubbing my back. “You are tense.”

Terry, sitting on my other side, nodded, “I know, I get that feeling all the time during games. There’s all those people watching, and half the time they’re hoping that I’ll mess us. You just have to keep focused.”

“Right,” I laughed. “At least people who come see me aren’t rooting against me. Thanks for the perspective, Terry.” My tension was definitely easing.

“So why do you need to have your mind set at ease?” Lee Ann asked. “Hey, you have to relax if this going to do you any good,” she added as I tensed up again at the question. I hadn’t thought of an explanation that I could give my roommates, and suddenly I had to think quickly of something that would be true but not revealing.

Fortunately, Ian and Luke’s behavior when I met them was enough. “Well, I met them and they seemed pretty worried that the college was going to come down hard on them.”

Terry scoffed. “For a hoax? Why?”

“I don’t know; maybe because the guy who wrote the story said that the administration was pestering him for their names.”

“That’s stupid. It was inept and nobody believed it even for a second.”

“I know, but still…”

“Look, Marsh, he used your first name,” Lee Ann pointed out. “That means that he’s being casual and just speaking as a friend of the family, right? If it were something official, he’d have called you Ms. Steen or something.”

“Yeah, I suppose…”

I tried to relax and just continue with the conversation, and Terry un-paused the show so we could watch the rest of the episode, but I was really worried. Peterson had to be intending to pump me for information. How was I going to handle that?

After we went back to our own bedrooms to study, I decided that Chad would be my best bet, but he wouldn’t be home from work until almost dinnertime. The problem was, I was really starting to worry about this; I couldn’t think of what an associate dean could realistically do to me, but my concentration just wasn’t there. I kept checking the time every few minutes, until I realized that studying just wasn’t going to happen.

To de-stress, I looked over my sewing jobs, looking for something I could get into. I was almost done with Terry’s gown, but I really wanted to have Nikki check what I had done so far before doing more. I found a couple of simple repair jobs, a broken zipper and a torn seam, and threw myself into them.

By the time I was finished, it was a quarter to six, so I picked up my phone and called Chad’s home.

“Jennifer!” his mother answered. “How are you?”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. I really didn’t want to spend time talking with her just now. “I’m fine, Mrs. Barnes. Is Chad home?”

“Yes, he just came in. How is your play going?”

“Well, we’re in tech week,” I explained, “and it’s really intense. They’re keeping us very busy.”

“Busy is good,” she continued, completely ignoring my hint. “Are you excited?”

“Very much so. It’s a great opportunity for me.”

“I hope you have a great time. Break a leg!”

“Thanks!”

“Let me go get Chad,” she finally said.

He picked up after a moment. “Hi, Marsh. Hey, where were you this weekend? I figured you’d be home for Thanksgiving.”

“We went to my Grandmother’s for Thanksgiving,” I explained. “The reason I –“

He cut me off. “I had a thought about your situation, Marsh.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you remember that I said you were being too passive?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, it occurred to me that you were assuming that there’s a conspiracy going on. You know, to hide the experiment.”

“Uh huh…”

“But a conspiracy requires a whole lot of people to agree to keep a secret. In this case, you’re talking about everybody who knew about this experiment or this professor or his students. That just seems like an awful lot of people not to talk about something really strange happening, doesn’t it?”

“Wait,” I said, my heart sinking. “You’re saying that… that if anybody really knew about the guys who did the experiment, that it couldn’t be kept a secret? So that means that they’re definitely not around any more?”

“Well, maybe. But on the other hand, if they are still around, it should be possible to get somebody to talk.”

I considered that. “But you don’t really think that they are.”

“I didn’t say that. In fact, I think they almost have to be.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I protested. “Which way are you arguing? I thought you just said that they couldn’t be, since if they were, it would be impossible to keep it a secret.”

“No, I’m saying that, assuming that they are around, which I think is almost certain, it should be possible to find them.”

“And why do they almost certainly still have to be around?”

“Because when you found yourself turned into Marsha, there was already a newspaper article that explained what had happened,” he said, as if that explained everything.

When I didn’t say anything, he prompted me, “Come on, Marsh. Think about it.”

“OK,” I said, “Let me see. The article was there, which means that other people had changed before I had.”

“Right. And…?”

“So the changes didn’t happen all at once. But if I’m right about how they did it, I wouldn’t have expected that anyway. Um… your idea was that maybe one of the changes affected whether they got funding to do the experiment, right?”

“Or something else.”

“So all of the previous changes couldn’t have had that effect, because if they had, I wouldn’t have been changed.”

“Exactly!”

“Oh!” Now I finally got it. “So unless my change was what made them disappear, or else they did even more changes later, they must still be around.”

“Bingo. And there’s no reason that your being a girl instead of a boy should have changed whether the experiment happened. So they must still be there, unless it was a later change that did it.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“What do you mean, ‘maybe?’” he asked, astounded that I wasn’t buying his proof. “What’s wrong with it? I mean, your family thinks you’re special, and you’re my friend, but that doesn’t make you important to a bunch of strangers.”

I sighed. I really wanted to believe his argument. “The problem, Chad, is the whole situation doesn’t seem to work logically at all! Why should me being a girl have caused my cousin not to be born? Why wasn’t Tina affected at all, as far as I can tell? That would have made a lot more sense.” I told him about what I had learned over Thanksgiving break, about Tyler being gone.

“Huh” was all he said at the revelation, although he said it more than once as I explained how I had reacted to the news, and how my parents had reacted to me reacting. Then I told him about the note from Dean Peterson.

“So, if Tyler’s disappearance doesn’t make sense, that means that the experiment still could have vanished, and it seems the simplest explanation now of why we haven’t found out anything,” I concluded.

“Yeah…” he said reluctantly, “although I still think they’re probably there.”

“Well, I think you just hate to give up a nice theory.”

“I don’t get you, Marsh,” he said. “Don’t you want to be able to change back? Don’t you need them still to be there?”

“Of course I do!” I exclaimed. “I’m just… I don’t know… I’m trying to be realistic. It was hard enough to try to accept this, without suddenly believing that I have a chance and then finding out that I really don’t.”

“So you’re giving up.”

“No… I mean… Dad’s friend wants to see me. Maybe… maybe I’ll find out something from him, assuming that there is something to think about. And if so, he’ll be trying to find out something from me.” I blinked to clear my head. This was getting really complex.

“And if he thinks it’s a hoax, he still might be trying to find out who did it.”

“Oh, nuts.” Chad was right. He could be pressing me for information whether he believed in the experiment or not, and he might not actually believe in it even if there had been a coverup.

“Come on, Dude, you can’t give up now,” Chad chided me. “You want your manhood back, you’re gonna have to work for it. Right? Right?”

I had to chuckle at his attempt at a pep talk. “Yeah, you’re right,” I acknowledged. “Thanks.”

“No problem. So what you need to do is find somebody that you can talk to; somebody who knew this professor and maybe isn’t all that crazy about them making him vanish. I mean, there’s got to be somebody who knows it’s genuine and thinks that all of you got a raw deal.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. That’s something you need to figure out.”

I nodded, and then said, “Yeah, you’re right. I know somebody I could ask for ideas, if he hasn’t already just given up on the whole plan.” And I needed to get in touch with Eric anyway.

“So what are you going to do about this Dean guy?”

“I guess I’ll just drop in on him, you know, and pretend that I think it really is all a hoax, and that I don’t really know the group all that well.”

“He’s probably going to want names. Tell him that you can’t give him any, because you don’t want your friends to get into trouble. That’s pretty normal, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks again, Chad. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Cool. Talk to you later, Marsh. And good luck.”