Take a Lemon

I didn’t really pay attention as Lee Ann whispered to our friends at the breakfast table. It was obvious she was telling them something about me, but whether it was to laugh at me, tell everybody to lay off me, or plan a date for me, I just didn’t really care. I had decided that I was going to do only what I needed to do to get by just now. Eat because I needed food to survive, study because I needed to get decent grades, and sew to get money. Rehearsal might be a problem, but I had more than two days before I had to worry about that.

The first thing I had to deal with after breakfast was Geoff, in Organic Chemistry.

“Good morning, Marsha!” he trilled as usual as sat in the seat next to mine.

“Look Geoff,” I snapped. “I’m not in a good mood today, so please don’t talk to me.” The fact that he habitually called me, ‘Marsha,’ rather than ‘Marsh’ didn’t help. He was surprised, of course, but what was the point? He couldn’t imagine what I was going through, still being male. Why did he get to be a guy when I couldn’t? So obviously, nothing he said was going to matter.

His eyes widened, and he sort of leaned away from me, but he didn’t say anything, but through the lecture he looked over at me every so often when he thought I wouldn’t notice. I noticed. I started feeling a bit guilty, but couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it.

I managed to get through the lecture without biting anybody else’s head off, and headed to Spanish class, but as I left the lecture hall, I saw Vicky. She didn’t notice me, as she was talking to a guy I didn’t know. Figures, I thought. Her new boyfriend is also a pre-med student. Couldn’t she at least have the decency not to speak to my replacement in front of me? I turned away from them and started walking out of the building, but she suddenly called my name.

“Marsh!” she yelled from behind me. “Do you have a second?” Reluctantly, I stopped and turned around. Automatically, I sized up my rival as I approached them. Of course, technically we weren’t rivals, since I had been disqualified from the contest.

“Marsh, this is Seth Groner,” she said, indicating him. “Seth, this is my friend, Marsha Steen.” So I was Marsha, now, huh?

The bastard put out his hand and I had to shake it. “Nice to meet you, Marsha.” Then he turned to Vicky and added, “Great running into you, Vicky. I’ll see you in class.”

“See you!” she called after him as he left. Then she turned back to me and saw the question in my eyes. “Seth is in my art class. I had no idea he was also taking Orgo. Do you have a minute?”

“I… sort of have to get to my Spanish class,” I muttered, but I was curious, so I made no effort to leave.

“I’ll walk with you, then. Marsh,” she started as we started walking. “I didn’t want to do this over the phone. Marsh, I’m really sorry.”

I sighed. “It’s not your fault, Vicky. I’ve lost. Fine. You’re not interested and you’re moving on. I can understand that. I just… Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t think I can stand seeing you and your new boyfriend together just now.”

“Seth is not my ‘new boyfriend’ and neither is Kevin. Seth is just a friend, and Kevin… is just a guy who asked me out. I have no idea how far things are going to go between us.”

I shrugged. “It’s really none of my business, I guess.”

“Of course it’s your business, Marsh! We’re still friends, right? And… I really do still hope you can change back. I’d much rather be going with you. I just…”

“You don’t believe it’s going to happen, right?”

She looked away from me. When she turned back, there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes. “I just don’t see a way, Marsh. You were so confident when we met at the Grill; I sort of hoped you had some extra information. I didn’t really believe it, but I wanted to, you know?”

It took me a moment to respond from the dark place my heart had gone. “It’s all so easy for you,” I finally said, bitterly. “Lose one boyfriend, and there’s always another available. But what about me? I’m not even attracted to girls any more – what exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Oh, Marsh, I don’t know. You have no idea how sorry I am. I wish… but that’s not going to help. I hope you’ll still talk to me. I couldn’t bear not having you in my life any more, even if we can’t…”

I sighed once again. I could feel tears welling up in my own eyes and I didn’t want them to come out, but it all hurt so much! “It’s not so easy for me, Vix. But yeah, I don’t want to lose you, either. Even…” I took a deep breath and got myself mostly under control. After all, as an actor, I’m supposed to be in control of my emotions, right? “We’ll keep talking, Vix. I don’t know how much I can stand to hear about you and… well, any guy you’re seeing, but we’ll find something to talk about. OK?”

She exhaled in relief. “OK. Um… you want to go to a movie or something together tonight? Just to be together?”

I nodded. “Sure. Now I really have to get to class. I can…” I had been about to say, I can pick you up, but that seemed phony, now. Guys picked girls up. Girls didn’t… “Why don’t we meet tonight? I’ll give you a call, OK?”

“OK. Great. I’ll talk to you later. Bye”

Well. At least one of us was feeling better. I survived the rest of the morning classes with no real surprises and then had to face my friends for lunch. Terry and Lee Ann positioned themselves on either side of me, as if to protect me, I guess. I didn’t really spend much time looking at them, but I could feel them exchanging glances over my head. Or maybe that’s not exactly fair – Lee Ann wasn’t that much taller than I was.

It was Terry who leaned in first. “How are you feeling, Marsh?”

I shrugged, and then felt guilty about it. One part of me could tell that she was genuinely trying to help, and that part starting kicking the other part that just didn’t really wanted to talk at all. After yet another sigh, I forced myself to say, “I feel horrible. I feel as if everything I care about is now out of reach, and nothing really matters. I feel like I just want to curl up in bed and stay there for the rest of my life.”

Terry leaned in and spoke softly. “That’s terrible. What happened?”

I spread my hands. “I can’t really explain. I just thought everything was going to be all right.”

“It will be, Marsh,” Lee Ann put in. “You’ll see. You’re strong. There will be other chances. And we’re here for you.”

“Other chances,” I muttered. “Right.”

“Hey, what’s wrong with Marsh?” one of the boys suddenly asked, but Lee Ann glared at him and he backed off.

Lee Ann looked at Terry and me. “Look, why don’t we hold off on talking until we get back to the room. This sounds like too serious a talk to have at lunch in front of everybody.”

“I have a lab after lunch,” I protested.

“Then let’s eat quickly. We should really talk this out as soon as possible.” I saw Terry nod, so it was two against one. I pretty much just picked at my food; somehow, I didn’t have much of an appetite. Then I had to put up with my roommates escorting me back to our room, sitting me down, and demanding answers.

“This is worse than I thought, Marsh. I’ve never seen you like this, even before House Parties weekend last year. You need to talk to us. Have you given any thought to what I said this morning? Have you decided yet what you’re going to do?” Lee Ann

“I’m just going to grit my teeth and keep going, I guess,” I told them. “I don’t see what else I can do.”

“You can let us pamper you, is what you can do,” Terry suggested. “Why don’t the three of us go on an ice cream and party binge tonight?”

“I thought you had…” Lee Ann started, but Terry cut her off.

“I’m going to cancel,” Terry shot back.

“Guys, I really appreciate this,” I said. “But I made arrangements to hang out with Vicky tonight.”

Lee Ann stared at me. “Vicky? But wasn’t she sort of part of the problem?”

“No, it’s really all right. We… talked this morning, and we’re OK.” At least, I hope so, I thought. Our relationship is even more complicated than ever.

“I don’t know, Marsh. If she was able to affect you that much…”

“It’s not that – we just used to be really close, and–”

“Do I know this girl?” Terry suddenly asked.

“I… don’t think so,” I told her. “I think she and I stopped talking before I met you.”

“So this is a girl you knew before coming to Piques.”

Uh Oh. Terry’s comment made one thing obvious – she had met Marsha early last year, and would probably have known any really close friends she had had. In the original timeline, I had met Vicky last school year. Now I either had to tell a lie that might sound like the truth, or a partial truth and have it sound like a lie, or tell the full truth and have my roommates reject and fear me. There didn’t seem to be any good answers, here.

An hour later, I was still awake. I was no longer stimulated, just seething, with all that had been done to me. I ran down the list in my mind. Stuck as a girl forever? Check. Vicky going to House Parties with another guy? Check. Grandpa’s guitar and my ability to play it gone? Yup. Unable to be attracted to another human being? Oh boy – and getting turned on by the idea of myself in sexy clothing I wouldn’t be caught dead in was just sick, not to mention frustrating when I couldn’t even bring myself to a climax.

If only I could find something to do with my anger! It would be one thing if we had found the guys responsible and they had refused to help. The Strangers would have been able to pressure them or expose them or… something. But now? For all we could tell, they might no longer even be aware of having harmed us. The whole thing was just so horribly unfair. It was futile. It was… nothing. I could do nothing, none of us could.

I have no idea how I finally managed to fall asleep – probably from sheer exhaustion – but I wasn’t sleeping when the knock came at my door the next morning. I had been awake for a while, and just hadn’t mustered the will to get out of bed, but whoever was on the other side of my door sure seemed in a hurry about something. I couldn’t figure out what could possibly be so important.

After a moment, a voice joined the knocks. It was Lee Ann, and she seemed to be worried about something. “Marsh? Are you all right in there? Marsh?”

After a deep breath or two, I decided that answering her made sense. “I’m coming,” I muttered. And with great effort I forced myself to climb out of bed.

“What’s going on?!” Lee Ann asked as I unlocked and opened the door. “You never sleep this late! You’re missing breakfast! You’re… you’re naked.”

I looked down. “I?! Oh… right.” I hadn’t bothered to put on my nightgown before falling asleep. I went to get it now.

“Um, Marsh?”

I turned and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Breakfast? And then classes? Remember?”

Breakfast. That did seem like something I should be doing. Maybe. Classes were a pain, though. I had no use for classes now. What was the point? I was in the wrong body, in the wrong life. I couldn’t feel love. Couldn’t make music. What did it matter if I went to classes?

Lee Ann sighed at me, even more annoyed than before. “Marsha. Clothes. You need to get dressed.”

And wash. And put on make up. I knew the drill. It was just all too much work.

“Marsha! Say something! And put something on! This is getting a little weird.”

“Oh… good morning, Lee Ann.” I did manage to walk over to my dresser and put on my underwear, although I was a bit dubious about the bra. I should be able to refuse to do that, right? But I saw Lee Ann glare at me when I put it back in the drawer, so I retrieved it and fastened it around myself.

I sort of dithered as to what, if anything, I should do next, but Lee Ann didn’t wait. She dragged me over to the bed, sat me down and set next to me, holding both my hands.

“Now, spill,” she insisted. “What happened last night?”

“Last night?” I echoed. I tried to focus. Concealing the actual truth about myself had become a habit, and I struggled to think of what I could say, even as I wondered if it mattered what I said.

“Marsha. You came in last night, walking funny, and not especially communicative. Now you’re acting as though something is seriously wrong. Were you… molested? Did somebody force you?”

“Huh?” She had it all wrong. I knew I could give her a better answer than that.

“OK, that’s it. Get dressed. I’m taking you to the infirmary.”

That shocked me into action, at least a bit. I needed to take control of the situation. I really did. It was just so hard to be assertive right now.

“Wait… Lee Ann, please. I mean it. There’s nothing wrong with me… medically, that is. I haven’t been physically attacked or… molested, or… anything else like that. I just…” I sighed again. “I’m just feeling really down. I feel like… I don’t know. Like I just don’t…” I shook my head and forced myself to smile. “I think I’ll be all right. I just need to snap out of this mood.”

“You’re not answering the question, Marsh. Something obviously happened. Who were you with last night?”

“Nobody! I mean… just Vicky.”

“No boys? Did a boy touch you?”

“No!” I insisted. “There were no boys involved.”

“Just you and Vicky, hmm?”

“Yes, just the two of us.”

She thought for a moment and peered at me as though she was trying to see through me, and I started to feel just a bit self-conscious about wearing nothing but a bra and panties.

“So what did Vicky do?”

“Nothing! She just told me that she had a date for House Parties, is all.”

At that, Lee Ann sat back with a knowing expression. “Ah… House Parties. We’re back to that again.”

“I…”

“Why? Why do you do this to yourself? Marsh, if you want to go, find a date. Some of the guys still haven’t asked anybody.”

“I don’t–”

“You don’t what? Are you going to sit here and tell me that you’re not going to be miserable when Terry and I are partying with our boyfriends and you’re by yourself?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her that. I didn’t want to be miserable. I just didn’t see any alternative.

“Look, let me fix you up. I’m not saying that you have to fall in love with the boy. Just have somebody to party with and dance with.”

I shook my head even more vigorously. “I’m not interested. Really. I don’t want to–”

“I know, I know,” she said impatiently. “You don’t want a date, but you’re miserable that you don’t have a date.”

I cringed. I couldn’t really explain it to her, now could I? There simply wasn’t any solution that I could see. House Parties this year was going to be horrible for me. I sort of sensed that this situation should be funny, or ironic, or something, given that Lee Ann was both way off the mark and right on it at the same time. Too bad I wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it.

“Can you get dressed and ready for class, and…” she peered closely at me. “Oh boy, you’re really in a bad way, aren’t you? You didn’t even take off your make up last night.”

My hand went to my face. Usually I was pretty good about nighttime rituals, but considering how I had been feeling, I suppose I had forgotten.

“OK, to the bathroom. Let’s go. I’m going to take care of you; we’ll get the old make up off and I think you’d better tone down the makeup this morning. It’s probably not too bad a problem, but you should give your skin some time to recover before putting on more.”

At my blank look, she took my hand and led me into the bathroom, where she applied make up remover, washed my face, and then applied some make up in a fashion Tina hadn’t taught me. I recognized the moisturizer, but then she put on powder instead of my usual foundation, lip balm instead of lipstick, and then lined my eyes. Her skill was evident, and I wound up looking (to my as-yet-inexpert eyes) much the same as I usually did, and maybe better.

She also picked out my clothing and handed me my shoes, which I thought a bit much, but somehow it just didn’t seem worth complaining about it.

“Are you planning on kissing me good bye and packing me a lunch, ‘Mommy’?” I said as we left the dorm.

She rewarded me with a smirk. “Well at least you still have some kind of sense of humor left. But Marsh, you really need to decide what you want here. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but it seems to me that either you’re afraid of being out with any boy, or else you’re mooning over one particular boy and agonizing because he hasn’t asked you. Let us help you, Marsh. Terry and I care about you and hate to see you tormenting yourself. Whenever you’re ready to talk about it, we’re ready to listen. OK?”

I nodded, grateful for the support, even if the suggestions weren’t very helpful. “Let me think about it,” I muttered. What was I going to do? She was right about one thing. I was going to have to figure out how I was going to cope, now that changing back had been taken from me. But just not yet; I wasn’t ready.

For now, all I could do was go through the motions. Get dressed. Go to class. Eat meals. Earn money and do the show. I had plenty of things on my plate already, and most of them didn’t require me to feel, just act. Anything more was asking too much.

I am a pervert.

I am a pervert and I’m not even sure if I should feel guilty about it, given all that has happened to me. I mean, a guy’s got to take whatever– a guy. Yeah, right.

I had been so enthusiastic about meeting other people who had been trying to figure this out for longer than I had, and they were no closer to an answer than I was, despite having explored ideas I hadn’t even thought of. Their answer, those of them that were even trying for answers, was, “just accept it.” It may yet come to that, but… how am I supposed to accept this?

And Vicky… finding her had been like a dream. Not only was there somebody who remembered me, and remembered me fondly, but there had even been the promise that we could go back to what we used to have, at least once I went back to what I was.

So I was totally unprepared for the way the conversation went after dinner on Thursday. The previous two days had been ones of ups and downs for me. The plus sides were the play, which was coming together nicely, and my sewing which was clearly improving, even to the point where I was making progress on Terry’s gown. Searching the physics building, on the other hand, was beginning to feel futile, and every web search I did came up empty. It certainly did not pass my notice that all of my successes were in my more feminine activities, while those intended to restore or at least bolster my masculinity were falling flat. About the only thing I could rely on was my relationship with Vicky, in which we both made it a point to remember what I had been.

And yet… Vicky could tell that I was still bothered by something, and unsurprisingly wormed it out of me.

“I cannot believe that you are still obsessing over the baby thing, Marsh,” she said as we sat together on her bed.

“I can’t help it,” I replied, hugging my knees to my chest. “It was so not me. I can’t figure out why I did it.”

“Don’t you remember the argument we had about my cousin’s baby last summer? And how you dismissed my feelings as thoughtless biological urges?”

“OK. Fine, so I was wrong.”

“Not necessarily, Marsh. There’s probably a lot in female biology that leads to the mothering instinct. You’re just feeling it now, is all.”

“Vix, I will never dismiss your feelings like that again,” I promised her. “This was just kind of an extreme way to have it rubbed in my face. I guess I shouldn’t have griped. There’s got to be something that makes girls willing to cuddle up next to a hairy guy.”

She laughed. “You’re really funny, Marsh. Sometimes you are so sophisticated, and other times you come off as so naïve.”

“What do mean?” I asked, stretching out to look at her.

“All the time we were together and you never realized that I found you physically attractive and sexy? I have a harder time figuring out why guys find us attractive.”

“Huh?” I asked, surprised. “Girls are…” I stopped, a bit confused. “Well, I know I used to find girls sexy. Because after all, girls are… well, they’re shaped, you know, sexy and curvy and…”

“Yes?”

“Huh. So, what exactly do you find attractive about guys?”

She looked a bit embarrassed. “I’m not sure I want to say, but I really thought your neck was… wow!”

“My neck?”

“Yes,” she answered quite definitely. “Your neck. It was so strong and… manly.”

I stared at her, incredulous. “Oh boy. Guys and girls really do think about things differently, don’t they? I mean, I can’t even imagine wanting to look at a guy that way, but if I did, I expect that I’d be looking at… You know, let’s just not go there.”

She shrugged. “The point is, most girls like the way boys look. You don’t have to want a baby to think that a boy is cute, or that you’d enjoy being with him. Um…” She looked uncomfortably nervous all of a sudden. “That reminds me…”

“Hmmm?”

“I… that is… it’s not as if there’s a real alternative, anyway…”

“What?” I knew her well enough to recognize when she was on the verge of telling me something I wasn’t going to like, and I tensed.

She took a deep breath. “Thing is, Kevin Perez sort of asked me. To go to House Parties with him.”

If she had simply stood up and kicked me in the stomach, she probably couldn’t have given me a worse jolt. I tried to say something, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was “Wha…? Bu…!”

She spoke quickly and nervously. “I mean, it’s not as if you and I were planning to go together, right? We’re not even attracted to each other right now, and…”

“Stop. Wait.” I managed. It was just so wrong. She was my girl, wasn’t she? How could she even consider…?

“Marsh…” she pleaded. “I’m really sorry about this. I- I really wanted to go. I mean, we had a great time last year, didn’t we? And I’d want to go with you, if… well…”

“…If I weren’t female.”

“And if you changed back, it would probably turn out that we had gone together, after all, right? So It’s not as if you’re really losing out. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“’If’?”

“If what?”

“You said, ‘if.’ ‘If you changed back.’”

“Oh. I meant, ‘when.’ ‘When you change back.’”

“No, no you didn’t,” I said shakily. You meant, ‘if.’ You don’t really think it’s going to happen, do you?”

She answered reluctantly. “Well… I want you to change back. I really do, Marsh. I can’t imagine any boyfriend as great you were. I just… I just don’t see how it’s possible, now.”

I tried to keep the whining out of my voice, but it was so hard – so very unfair. “I… I just thought…” I shook my head, ignoring the way my long hair flew against my face. “No, I guess I really didn’t think. I want… Oh foo.” I’d worked so hard not to curse, that now when I really needed to, I couldn’t. “You know,” I started to say. “I think… I just remembered that I need to…”

And that was as far as I got because in the next moment I was running without looking back. Running out of her room so that she couldn’t see the tears flowing down my cheeks. I mean, I had to keep my dignity somehow. A guy shouldn’t let his girlfriend see him cry like that. It’s not manly, it’s not…”

I hadn’t gotten very far before I ran out of steam, sat on the steps outside my dorm, and just cried my heart out. I’d been so proud of my guitar playing and my acting, and the progress I was making in sewing, but it was pretty clear that my absolute best skill par excellance, was self-deception. Who was I kidding? Even Vicky didn’t think I could change back, not really. I looked down at my girly body and my girly clothing and just cried like a girl. Because that’s pretty much what I was, now. Whether Davis had gone into hiding, or had changed his own history so that he never did the experiment didn’t really matter. If I couldn’t find him, it didn’t matter why.

After I ran down, I decided that there was one vestige on my masculinity I could salvage. I could – maybe for the last time – be a big brother to my sister. My last call had upset her, and she had been brave, all for me. Well, now it was my turn. My turn to be brave for her and make her feel better.

I was fortunate that she answered the phone. I didn’t think I could handle talking to Mom just now.

“Hey, Teen…” I started, trying to sound positive, and failing.

She spoke quickly to cut me off. “Marsh, it’s OK. I’ve got it all planned. When you come home for Christmas, we’re going to take a trip together, and we’re going to do projects together, and just spend lots and lots of time together. It won’t be so bad, I guess… not if I know that you’ll remember me. I know that I was sort of not even supposed to have a chance – that the other Tina was here first. And it’s only right that she come back. I’ve really… I’ve really enjoyed having you as my big sister, and I wish–”

“Tina,” I interrupted her. “It’s not going to happen.”

“Of course it is, Marsh. We’ll make it happen. You and I, together, we can–“

“Tina. Listen to me. I’m not changing back. You’re not going away. We’re staying the way we are. Do you understand me? There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Wait, you’re… hold on, let me make sure Mom and Dad aren’t listening.” There was a pause before she came back. “OK, are you telling me that you’re going to stay a girl, Marsh?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Teen. I’m not changing back.”

“But… I don’t understand. Just a few days ago you were all excited about changing back. You said that Vicky wanted you to. What happened?”

I sighed. If I could at least pretend this had been my decision, maybe I wouldn’t feel so horrible.

“We can’t find them, Teen. There’s a whole group of people who went through this, the ones who went to the newspaper. They’ve been searching for the guys who did this to us for longer than I have, and… nothing. Whether Chad was right about the experiment wiping itself or something else, they’re as good as gone. So… I’m stuck.”

“Oh, Marsh. I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” I told her. “I’m sort of in shock here, but at least I wanted you to know, so that you could stop worrying. I love you, Teen. And it looks as though you’re stuck with me now. No more big brother for you, young lady!”

Could I hear the wistful smile in her voice, or was I just imagining it? “Marsh, I promise you, I am going to do everything I can to make you happy about this. I know you can learn to like it. I remember you being very happy to be a girl. And I love you, Marsh. Um… do you want me to avoid calling you, ‘Marsha’? Would that… make you upset?”

“Teen, I don’t know. I don’t know anything, right now. I just wanted to make sure you were OK. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to think about. I’ll call you again in a few days, OK?”

“OK,” she said. “Bye. Marsh.”

“Bye, Teen,” I answered, and hung up. I sighed. That was about the last manly act I could think of to do. And now… since I was already acting the role of ‘Marsha,’ it looked as though I was going to have to do that for the rest of my life. Of course, I was free to change the role now – my boast was pretty much meaningless at this point – but I couldn’t think of what I would change. I was used to being Marsha the way I was.

And all in all, I suppose I could have had worse fates. My biggest problem was being asexual. I had always treasured my relationships; even I hadn’t been any good at sustaining them. The closeness, the physical and the emotional, the cuddling, the kissing, the companionship – all were denied to me, now. The closest I had now was imagining my encounter with Jeremy and kissing ‘Giles’ in character. It was no substitute for the real thing. I was fated to spend the rest of my life alone. I could see myself, a couple of decades hence, as a maiden aunt, fussing over Tina’s children. I shuddered.

And suddenly, returning to my room, Marsha’s room, was unbearable. It felt a prison. So I sat on the steps for a while, and while I sat, I enviously watched one happy couple after another, strolling with the arms around each other. Those boys didn’t even realize how precious the gift they had – to be able to admire their girlfriends, to find them attractive, to enjoy intimacy with them.

And the girls, with their skimpy short skirts and low-cut tops, vainly secure in their attractiveness, knowing that they could enjoy cuddling and kissing, and being admired. How could they bear to dress that way, with their tops and bottoms hanging out? I tried to imagine myself wearing such clothing, showing off my permanently female body, the tops of my breasts visible to the world, my thighs immodestly exposed…

And suddenly, to my surprise, I felt something: something at once completely new and maddeningly familiar. I was turned on! I was sexually stimulated! Not by looking at a sexy girl, not by caresses, but by imagining myself in revealing clothing! It was sick. It was perverted. It was… interesting. I could feel my nipples suddenly hardening and rubbing against the inside of my bra. I could feel dampness between my legs. I was horribly embarrassed to be stimulated like this in full view of everyone who might be passing by. My only saving grace was that, unlike similar situations when I was a boy, nobody could tell – at least I thought they couldn’t.

Gingerly, I stood up, trying to act casual, and walked slowly and as calmly as I could to my room. Naturally, both of my roommates were in our living room.

“Marsh, is something wrong?” Lee Ann asked, no doubt misinterpreting the shock and embarrassment on my face.

“You’ve been avoiding us for days, is something going on?” Terry chimed in.

“No really,” I gasped. “I’m just…” and then I realized something else. If I was permanently Marsha, these girls were going to be my roommates for the rest of the year. To my surprise, the idea made my heart leap.

“I’m just feeling a bit… queasy,” I lied, unwilling to admit the truth. I suspected that the real Marsha might have been comfortable being more forthcoming, but I was way too embarrassed.

“Oh, well, then go lie down,” Lee Ann said hurriedly. Can I get you something?”

“No thanks, I’ll be fine. I just need to lie down,” I told them. And I quickly slipped into my room and shut the door. I was still quite stimulated, and it had occurred to that this was an opportunity I shouldn’t pass up. With the exception of my not-actually-a-dream reaction to Jeremy on my first day as a girl, I had not felt any kind of sexual excitement, and that had been more in my heart and less in my… feminine parts.

I had avoided touching myself intimately, refusing to accept that what was between my legs was actually mine; that self-deception was no longer tenable, and no longer necessary. It was time to “try out the equipment.”

But first, I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to imagine myself in skimpy clothing. I unbuttoned my blouse and pulled it out of the top of my skirt so that I could manipulate it to look like a midriff-baring, low-cut blouse. I rolled up my skirt to pull the hem above my knees. I was… more than pleased with the results. Not that I would ever want anyone to see me that way, but I was definitely finding the result to be exciting.

I took off all my clothing and looked at myself in the mirror again. I didn’t find my naked body particularly exciting, but it did serve as a very visible reminder of my permanent reality. It was time to get into bed and see what I could manage.

Just before I started, though, I had a thought. Some of my girlfriends had been rather… vocal when they had climaxed. I didn’t want to broadcast what I was doing to my roommates, so I pulled down the winter quilt from my closet, pulled it over my face, and got to work.

Touching myself down there was… interesting. My hand was encountering familiar territory, of course, but I had never felt this kind of touch from the inside, as it were. At first, my excitement rose in response, both from the actual touch and the anticipation of what I was about to experience. But after a few minutes, I seemed to have reached a plateau. The feeling wasn’t getting any more intense, and even worse, my hand was getting sore.

After nearly fifteen frustrating minutes, I gave up. My wrist was killing me, and my body was on the verge and on the verge, but I couldn’t get any relief. I was exhausted and couldn’t think of anything to do but get some sleep; however, Mother Nature had one more trick to play on me.

There had been times when Vicky and I had had sex, and after I was done, she had only been getting started, but I had been too tired to continue. She had told me that she was too stimulated too sleep, but I had never understand that, or, I’m sorry to say, been all that understanding, feeling nothing but the need to sleep myself. I now understood in spades.

Payback is such a bitch.

“So…” I said to Vicki as we left Allie’s dorm room.

“So…” she replied. We walked on toward her room in silence for a moment before she added, “Marsh, I’m sorry. I really thought he might have a better answer.”

“I’m not thinking about that now,” I answered, tightly. “I’m trying to stay positive. I have something to do, even though I don’t see how it’s going to help. The more we know, the better my chances, right?”

She nodded. “I hadn’t been to meetings in a while. I didn’t realize that he had decided that just living with it was the answer.”

“Well, for him, and most of you, it probably is the answer. Chad and I discussed this a month ago. If you’re hoping to get back to exactly the same place, that’s not too likely. But I would be happy with looking even close to what I did, as long as I could be male again.”

“That would make me happy, too. I really liked dating you, Marsh. I can’t imagine finding another guy who’d be so right for me.”

I broke the next silence after about a minute. “Um, I’m a bit embarrassed about the whole baby incident, though. I’d just never seen a baby so cute. I’m surprised you didn’t want to hold him.”

She laughed. “I’m used to finding babies cute, Marsh. If we hadn’t been in a rush, I absolutely would have made a fuss over him, but I thought getting you to that meeting was kind of critical. I guess it was a new experience for you, and you weren’t ready for it.

“Oh… and speaking of new experiences,” she added, “are you getting your period?”

I flushed a bit. “Yeah, were you able to tell?”

“I had a hunch. I’ll bet that was a shock for you, getting to experience what I’ve been going through all this time. I mean, I remember my first period. I’m still getting used to them after five years, and I expected to have them. For you… I can’t even imagine what it must be like.”

“I’ll say. This is actually my second time. The first was a total disaster: I bled all over my sheets and kind of panicked. So I took precautions this time. Rather than be surprised, I set an alert on my calendar, and put in a tampon ahead of time, just in case.”

She winced and stopped walking. “That’s really not a great idea, Marsh. The tampon absorbs whatever there is to absorb, and if you don’t have a flow, it’s going to absorb stuff it shouldn’t and you could end up with toxic shock syndrome. People die from that, Marsh.”

I’d stopped when she did, and now I stared at her. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“Did you read the package carefully? You sort of have a habit of not reading directions, but it’s all there. Don’t insert a tampon early. If you want to do something early, a pad is much safer.”

“I… I’m not sure if I have any. Why does this have to be so complicated?”

“Complicated? Try weird,” she observed, as we started walking again. “I never thought I’d be giving my ex-boyfriend instructions on feminine hygiene.”

“Yeah, there is that,” I admitted, a bit chagrined.

Finally, we reached her door. Automatically, I started to reach for her, but stopped in confusion. “What are we…?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I guess, sometimes when we’re just talking and not actually looking at each other, I can ignore your higher voice and imagine you’re still Marshall. I wish…”

“Yeah.”

“Marsh… if there’s anything I can do…”

“I know, Vix. I appreciate it.”

She went in alone, closing the door after herself, and leaving me outside alone. I sighed and walked back to my own room.

Nikki and I had arranged for me to come over for another attempt at my lesson in alterations, so I headed there in the early afternoon, after my regular fruitless search of the physics building. It’s not that I really expected to find the lab any more – I just didn’t have any better ideas yet, and I had to do something.

The lesson followed the somewhat predictable pattern. Nikki showed me what to do, and I picked it up quickly, as though my hands had been doing it for years. In a sense, they had, since they were Marsha’s hands, which was very convenient for me in my need to earn money, even if it had cost me my skill with the guitar. I probably wouldn’t have made the trade if given the choice, but just now it was necessary.

While we were taking turns at the sewing machine, I raised the question of the night before. “So, if no upperclassmen volunteered for the experiment,” I said, “we suspected that they might have known something that the rest of us didn’t. Can you think of something that might have served as a warning from two years ago?”

Nikki thought for a moment, and then shook her head. “I don’t remember anything, If I had wanted to volunteer for experiments, I can’t think of any reason I would have avoided that one. Besides, if there were something I’d known, don’t you think I would have warned Ben?”

I conceded the point. “There has to be some other explanation, then. Maybe the experimenters specifically rejected any junior or senior volunteers. Or…” and I suddenly had another thought. “Maybe it was just easier to use the older students as some kind of a control, and they did a different type of experiment on them, one that didn’t change their pasts.”

“Or they might had advertised someplace that only freshman and sophomores would look,” Nikki suggested. “Do you remember how you found out about it?”

“I think I saw it on a college web site,” I said, after thinking a bit. “I don’t remember exactly where. Or maybe it was a mailing list? It’s hard to remember, since I signed up for a bunch of them, mostly in the Psych department. This is the only one I remember being Physics, and that’s what intrigued me.”

“Well, if it was a mailing list, maybe they only sent it to underclassmen?”

“That’s possible. I’ll have to ask the others what they remember. Does your brother ever talk about the experiment?”

She shuddered. “A lot, actually. But I don’t remember him saying how he found out about it. He’s been spending time outside the gymnasium where the team practices, trying to get a glimpse, trying to talk the coach into giving him another tryout. The problem is, he’s not anything close to athletic enough.”

“Yeah, I guess in one sense I’m lucky that my passion was something I did alone, and I wasn’t playing in a band. That would have hurt even more if I was, and I saw them jamming without me.”

“I really admire your attitude, Marsh. You’re always so positive about things.”

I laughed bitterly. “No, I just haven’t had a meltdown in front of you, that’s all. It’s getting a lot harder, now. Every chance I thought I had to change back isn’t panning out. I’m crazy about Vicky, but she made me face something I really would rather not have, that I’m not really in control of this, that I might be stuck. You think I’m positive? Maybe I’ve just been putting the crash off again and again. If it comes, you might not really want to be around me. I… I just want to get through the show. If I can make it through the performance without falling apart, at least I’ll have that as a positive. I’m not sure how much else I’ll have.”

“What about Vicky? Doesn’t finding her count as a positive?”

I nodded. “OK, yes. She’s definitely a positive. She’s my link to the past and – I hope – the future. Sometimes when we talk, it’s as though she still sees the real me. I can almost feel like my old self. She and I – we have at least the memory of our relationship and the hope to resume it, and I can almost pretend in my mind that we’re still dating. But… what happens if she does find somebody else? Somebody who’s actually a guy now?”

“That won’t feel good, will it?”

“No. I keep thinking that I’m just so lucky that the guys here are obviously too stupid to figure out how great she is. But what happens if one of them does? Where will that leave me?”

“Marsh, no matter what happens, you have your friends. Remember that. We love you as you are, and we’ll be here to support you.”

“Thanks,” I murmured. “Thing is, I can’t help thinking that you’re friends with Marsha, though. Sometimes I feel so jealous of her. OK, she didn’t get the guitar and can’t play, but she’s a better singer than I am, probably a better actor… I thought I was really close to my sister, but she seems to have been even closer to Marsha than she was to me. And I was here first! Marsha probably shouldn’t ever have existed, but now she seems to be trying to replace me.”

“Marsh. I’m friends with you. Yes, I remember Marsha, and I liked her. You are more alike than you realize, I think. And I really admire the way you’ve been coping with what must be an unbearable situation, much worse than what Ben is going through, and handling it so much better.

“Whatever Marsha’s reality, you are the one who’s here now. Not Marsha. You are the one who’s replaced her, essentially. Would she cope as well if she were put into your shoes? Who knows? But don’t sell yourself short. You have enormous strength, and that’s what your friends respect. Vicky didn’t even know Marsha, right? And you’re the one who exists now.”

I managed a small smile, got up from the machine and hugged Nikki. “Thanks,” I said. “That really does help. There are times I just want to… I don’t know. I’m not a quitter, but why couldn’t I just wake up and discover that this was all a dream?”

She hugged me tighter, but didn’t say anything, and somehow… somehow that was enough.

After dinner, I got Dan’s name from Vicky and looked him up in the student directory.

“Alright, scratch that idea,” he said when I told him about my conversation with Nikki. “I like her suggestion that they might have used a mailing list only for the younger students.”

“But don’t you remember how you found out about the experiment?” I asked.

“Marsh, do you have any idea how many experiments I volunteered for? I found them in all kinds of different places and made a list. I’m pretty sure the rest of the Strangers did much the same. If you’re trying to raise some cash by being a guinea pig, you assume that the college has checked all of the experiments to make sure they’re safe.”

“And we can’t even check with whoever would have done that, since the administration’s official word is that there was no such experiment.”

“Exactly.”

“OK,” I asked, “what’s next? Do you have any more ideas on how we track these guys down? Does anybody have instruction sheets from the experiment that we can look at?”

“I’m pretty sure they didn’t hand anything out. I remember signing something, and they told me to take notes and come back for an interview, but that’s it.”

“I don’t suppose anybody remembers doing the interview?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Why?”

He looked at me as though I were stupid. “After you woke up like this, was your first thought, ‘Gee, I should go for an interview with these guys’?”

“Oh.” His assessment was right. Boy did I feel dumb. “I didn’t even give it a thought.”

“Yeah, well, I think two people did try to go in for the interview, but couldn’t find them. About half of the rest tried to find them to change back or get an explanation – also no luck. The rest did pretty much as you did. I mean, when you find your body physically changed, helping somebody with a lab experiment doesn’t see very important, does it?”

I nodded. “So it’s just one dead end after another.”

“I know, right? I’ve been racking my brains, trying to figure out what else we can use, but as I said, so far I cannot think of anything at all to distinguish between time travel wiping out the experiment and the experimenters just going into hiding. Marsh, seriously. If I come up with anything, I’ll give you a call. I just don’t know what else to tell you right now.”

I stared in shock. “Why shouldn’t there be a way back?”

“Marsh,” he said, gently, “I don’t think you’ve thought this through. What exactly happened to us, here?”

“Well, they must have gone back in time and interfered with our conceptions so that a different sperm…” Then I remembered. “Oh. You mean that even if we find the experimenters, all they could do would be to interfere again and we would wind up different from what we are now.”

“Exactly. The chances of going back to what we were are pretty much miniscule. It makes much more sense simply to accept it. Now,” he added hurriedly, “I’m not saying give up. That’s what a lot of these guys think I mean. Some of them just come here to commiserate. But it’s better, I think, to see this as just another change that happens. Imagine that you were in an auto accident or something, and needed reconstructive surgery. Now I don’t know what you used to look like, but you’re very attractive now.”

Allie cleared her throat, warningly.

Dan laughed. “I’m not flirting, Als. I’m just being honest.”

She laughed. “I know.” Then she turned to me. “You can even get some positives out of this, Marsh. If it weren’t for the experiment and the Strangers, Dan and I wouldn’t have met. Trying for a different result now is taking a real chance.”

“And in fact,” Dan added, “I think that there’s sort of an object lesson here. That guitarist. In the new reality, he apparently never came to Piques, or maybe didn’t learn to play or to play as well. Nobody knows what happened to him, and I understand Vicky’s been looking. We could wind up like him, and I don’t think that’s something that any of us want.”

Vicky and I exchanged glances. When we were dating, she often used to believe that she knew what I was thinking, and usually she was wrong, but this time I was pretty sure that she did know. After a moment, she nodded to indicate that she approved of what I intended. “Um… I have some important additional information for you,” I told Dan and Allie.

“Yes?”

“It’s kind of personal, and I’ve maybe told more people than I should have, but I think you need to know this. Only… I don’t want it to be public knowledge.”

“We won’t spread it around,” Allie assured me.

“I mean, not even,” and I nodded my head toward the others in the room, “them.”

Dan’s eyes followed my gesture, and nodded. “Why don’t we get some fresh air?”

A minute later, the four of us had made our excuses and were walking in the brisk night air outside of Christie Hall. I had donned a heavier sweater this time, but found myself still shivering, with my arms wrapped around myself. Vicky, I noticed, was in much the same situation. Dan and Allie, on the other hand, had their arms around each other, and seemed to be handling the cold just fine.

We had reached the middle of the adjoining quadrangle before Dan prompted me. “So… what is this ‘important information’ you have?”

“I know what happened to the guitarist.”

“You do? How?”

I smirked and caught Vicky’s eye before continuing. “Well, we’re kind of close. There’s probably nobody who knew him better than I.”

I glanced at Vicky again, but she looked more annoyed than amused. “Marsh, just tell them.” Then she turned to the two of them and told them herself. “Marsh was the guitarist. The experiment turned him into a girl, and ‘she’ didn’t learn to play the guitar. That’s why he wasn’t in the concert.”

The news had its effect, although I think I could have gotten a better reaction if Vicky hadn’t interfered. “Wait. You were…?” Allie started even as Dan sputtered, “Turned him into…?”

“Hold it.” Dan let go of Allie and held up his hands in surprise. “Wait. Are you saying that you changed sex?”

“I don’t look much like a guy anymore, do I?” I asked, striking a dramatic pose.

“But that’s… ” Dan said before interrupting himself. “I don’t believe it. How did I miss this? Logically, half of the Strangers should have changed sex, and yet you’re the first one I’ve heard of who did.”

“For all you know, half of them did,” Vicky suggested, “You didn’t know that Marsh had until he– I mean, she, told you.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. But somehow I can’t believe that none of them would have said something. Hmm. Let’s think about this.”

“And can we please keep walking while we do?” Vicky pleaded. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

“My dorm is just ahead,” Allie said.

“OK, so let’s think of the possibilities,” Dan said as we walked.

“Well, the first is that half of the Strangers did change sex and nobody wants to admit it,” I said.

“Right. I think that there are some problems with that idea, but let’s list them all, first. An obvious second is that for some reason, sex changes are unlikely in this experiment.”

“Well, there are some biological factors which can influence sex selection. According to my Human Bio prof, timing and Ph balance and a few other things can make a difference.”

“So that’s explained?”

“I don’t know. I sort of had the impression that it just tilted the odds. So it might be 60% likely that you would have a boy under certain conditions.”

We had reached Allie’s dorm by this point, and being inside was a real relief. I had never appreciated how my old size had insulated me against the cold. Seeing how Vicky had been shivering just now, I wondered if I had been insensitive to her about the cold. Then I realized that we had only dated during warm months, so the subject wouldn’t have come up. Maybe I was just looking for reasons to beat myself up.

“Oh, Cindy!” Allie said, as she ushered us into a typical freshman dorm room, with two beds. “This is Marsh and Vicky, and you know Dan.”

“Sure, hi.”

We exchanged greetings and then Allie added, “Cindy, we need to have sort of a private discussion for a bit. Would you mind…?”

Cindy shrugged. “No problem. I can hang out in the lounge for a few. How much time do you need?”

We looked at each other, and Dan suggested, “how about fifteen minutes?”

“Fine.”

“You’re taking this rather in stride,” I observed to Dan, after Cindy had left. “I expected you to be weirded out by me or something.”

“Well I am, a bit. I mean…”

“So I’m really the exception. Yeah, I understand about not wanting to throw the dice, and maybe get an even worse result. But I would love to throw the dice again, and again, until I wind up male again.”

“So it really does matter if we can find Professor Davis,” Vicky added.

“If that’s even his name,” I added. “There’s a Professor Davidson in the department, too. Could he be the one?”

“Davidson’s a solid state guy, Marsh,” Allie commented. “According to my brother, we wouldn’t have anything to do with this kind of work.”

“But it was a good thought, Marsh,” Dan said kindly. “We’ve just already been through the whole department and came up empty, and of course we stopped, since it didn’t seem to matter. Your case is a bit different, though. Give me a sec. I think I’m just a bit off-balance, here. I mean, I feel really stupid for not expecting something like this, and I have to believe that if something like that had happened to me, I wouldn’t be as calm as you seem to be.”

I laughed. “You should have seen me when I realized what had happened to me. Calm is not the word that applied. I’ve been living with this for a while now, and as long as I know there’s a way back I’ll be fine.” I held up my hand to ward off his objection. “And I know that I probably can’t go back to what I was, exactly. I just want to be a guy again. That should be possible, right?”

He started to answer, but Allie tugged on his arm and the two of them whispered back and forth for a short while, while Vicky and I looked at each other. Surely that shouldn’t have been such a difficult question?

Finally, Dan faced us and answered. “I don’t honestly know, Marsh. We’ve been so focused on learning to accept this and move on. I can see that’s not so simple for you. But the problem is, we haven’t been able to find Professor Davis, and we don’t know if it would even do any good. There’s all kinds of traps inherent in a time travel manipulation – at least all the stories say so. Assuming that this is the first time it’s ever be done, there might not have been any past lessons to rely on, and they could well have wiped out all the research needed for it. So even if you managed to find him, he might have no idea of the experiment any more.”

“But didn’t you say that the lack of upperclassmen suggests that something might have happened two years ago on campus? Wouldn’t the most likely explanation be that he ran the same experiment then?”

“Maybe. And it probably got a lot of attention on campus, and gained him some kind of a bad rep, but not bad enough to get the administration to hide him. That does make sense.”

“So… have you tried asking a junior or senior about it?”

“Not yet,” he admitted. “As I say, we’ve been focused elsewhere. But you’re right – you really do need more answers. Asking an upperclassman seems like an easy and obvious place to start. Why don’t you look into that, and tell us what you find out at the next meeting?”

I nodded. At the very least, I could ask Nikki. I was tempted to ask Jay as well; could his reactions to the time travel idea have had anything to do with something that had happened two years ago?

Monday after classes I went back to search the Physics building. With the meeting of the Strangers coming up, I was inspired. I wanted to come in with some evidence that everyone else had overlooked, somehow. Of course, what I found was pretty much more of the same – but now I had a name. Davis. I already knew that Morton Davis wasn’t my target, but I kept my eyes out for another one who might somehow have been overlooked. In particular, I was looking for signs of an erasure, for indications that there had been another Davis in the building, and that the evidence of his existence hadn’t been erased as completely as intended.

Well, I didn’t exactly find one, but I did find a Phillip Davidson. That seemed pretty close, and I wondered if people had misremembered his name. I didn’t see a lab specifically assigned to him, just an office.

I knocked at his door. I didn’t expect to recognize him, of course. I didn’t remember any professor at all when I went in for the time travel experiment. For that matter, I didn’t remember professors at most of the experiments I had signed up for; they seemed mostly to be student-run things. Still, if I could just learn what kind of research he was doing, I might be able to get some clues.

There had been no answer, so I knocked again. Again, there was no response, so I tried the door. It was locked. At this point, I did something that was probably not very smart. The upsides of finding out something about Professor Davidson seemed so strong, and my need was so great, that I decided to break in.

Now, I have no particular skill with locks, but I remembered somebody who did. He had lived down the hall from me Freshman year, and had shown off one day for a few of us, boasting that he could get into any dorm room he pleased. We made a bet that he couldn’t, and he took all of our money when he managed to unlock, not only all of our rooms, but two offices in the next building. The trick would be to persuade him to come to my aid.

He didn’t know Marsha, of course, and I was going to have to come up with a good story. I knew a price that any guy would have accepted, of course, but paying with my body was something I was not willing to do, not even for this, not when it was only for a slim chance.

Back at my dorm room, I looked him up in the student directory and called.

“Hello?” he answered, or somebody did. I wasn’t sure I recognized his voice.

“Is this Stan Warrik?”

“Yeah, do I know you?”

“No, you don’t. My name is Marsha Steen, and some friends tell me you’re pretty good with locks.”

He laughed. “’Pretty good’? I’m amazing. Your friends don’t know me very well, I’d say.”

“Well, I have a lock I need opened.”

“No problem,” he said confidently. “What did you do, lock a key in your trunk or something?”

“Um… actually, I sort of left something in my professor’s office and he’s gone for the day, and I really need it back tonight.”

I wanted for what seemed like forever before he replied. “A prof’’s office? That’s kind of difficult.”

“The locks are too hard for you?” I suggested.

“No,” he protested. “The locks are no problem. It’s the getting kicked out of school I’m not crazy about. You get caught breaking into a prof’s office, that could be kind of serious. Look, why don’t you call your prof? I’m sure the department has a key. All you have to do is get him to call the department office or the janitor and they’ll let you in.”

That was obviously not going to work, so I tried again. “You’re afraid, huh?”

“Um, yeah. I’m hoping for a career as a lawyer, helping keep people out of jail, not winding up in jail myself. Good bye, and don’t bother calling again.” And he hung up on me. Apparently, a girl’s ability to manipulate boys comes with practice, ‘cause I sure didn’t seem to have it.

Well, I could at least mention the name to the Strangers. Maybe they would have an idea.

I gave myself a severe talking-to before rehearsal. I was not going to fall short again. I was a professional, I told myself – and I was going to show it. I was acting better than I ever had, had a plum role and a great director, and there were no excuses. Even the anticipated meeting with the Strangers was not going to be a distraction this time, I told myself – I was going to be focused like a laser beam.

Alvin didn’t make it easy for me, although perhaps I shouldn’t blame him. When I got to rehearsal, he pulled me aside. “I just wanted to give you a heads up, Marsh. We have a visitor.” And he pointed to the seats on the stage left side of the room, where the girls were all crowded around a girl I didn’t know and fussing over something. “Sylvia played Mrs. Loman in Death of a Salesman, so she would expect you to know her. She graduated in January.”

Naturally, I had to go over to be polite and say hello, while noting curiously that all of the boys seemed to be on the other side of the room, laughing about something. When I reached the crowd, I saw the reason. The girls were taking turns holding a tiny baby and generally going crazy over it.

“Marsh!” said the girl who was obviously Sylvia. “Congratulations on Mollie! I hear you’re doing a great job with it!”

“Oh… thanks. Sylvia,” I stammered, staring at the baby.

She smiled. “This is Tyler. Did you want to hold him?” And she held him up to me.

It would have been rude to refuse, so I took him. It was… strange. I hadn’t held a baby since I was four or five, fussing over my new baby sister, and dealing with the conflicting feelings of pride at being a big brother and some resentment at no longer being an only child, as Chad still was. But the perspective of a five-year-old boy is a bit different from what I was feeling now.

The kid was cute. It was only with firm determination that I handed him back after the very briefest of squeezes. “He’s beautiful, Sylvia,” I told the obviously proud mother. “But I am really trying to stay focused for this rehearsal right now.”

She nodded and took him back, smiling. “I understand. I’m going to watch the rehearsal, so you can hold him after you’re done, OK?”

“Um… sure,” I managed, and then very firmly wrestled my attention away to focus on getting into character. Like a laser beam, I reminded myself. Like a laser beam.

The rehearsal itself went well. My energy was back, my lines were flowing more smoothly, and when I needed a line, I asked for it without dropping character and got right back into the scene. All in all, I felt pretty good about my performance.

Alvin’s notes were generally complimentary, for me at least, although he had some suggestions about timing in my argument with ‘Giles.’ And I kept my attention on him until he was done.

It was only afterwards that I went over to hold Tyler again, since Sylvia expected me to. And it was while I was holding him that Vicky arrived to walk me over to the meeting.

“Marsh?” she said, interrupting my conversation with the baby, “what are you doing?”

“Hmm?” I said, looking up in surprise, “Oh, did you want to hold him?”

“No, I just want to get to the meeting. We’re late, remember?”

“Oh, right! The meeting.” Out of politeness, I said good-bye to Tyler and handed him back to his mother. “Sylvia, it was great to see you again,” I told her. “And your son is adorable.”

“Nice seeing you again, too, Marsh. Take care.”

As Vicky and I left, I noticed that once again she had eschewed her usual jeans and shirt, this time for a skirt and a blouse that I would have found a lot more interesting a month ago.

“What was that all about?” she asked sharply.

“What do you mean? That was Sylvia; we did a show together last year. Or at least,” I corrected myself, “she and Marsha did. And I guess she must have gotten married right out of college.”

“I mean you, Marsh. You were cooing to that baby. You looked like you were really enjoying yourself. I’ve never seen you do anything like that before.”

“Well, that baby was cute, you have to admit.”

“Marsh, to a girl, most babies are cute. To guys our age? Not so much.”

“What… what are you talking about?”

“Marsh, all the boys were about as far away from that baby as it was possible to get. What were you doing?”

“I… “ I had no answer. I hadn’t been thinking, not really. I had just reacted.

“This body is getting to you, Marsh. You’re starting to act like a girl.”

“No!” I insisted, now very uncomfortable with my actions. “It was just… I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world.”

She sighed. “Just try to stay focused, OK, Marsh? We’ve got to get you out of that body. I just hope there’s a way.”

“I know, right? One of the Strangers had better have an answer.”

“Just don’t get your hopes up too high, OK?”

We were now within view of Christie Hall, where Ian and Luke lived. But to my surprise, Vicky turned in the opposite direction.

“Wait,” I said. “Isn’t the meeting at Ian and Luke’s place?”

“Oh – yes, it is, but it’s sort of a tradition for us to take some kind of a detour before going there. You know, to pretend that we’re trying to ‘lose anybody following us.’”

“You’re not saying that you actually think the administration is trying to find you?”

“No, pretty much only Ian and Luke take that seriously. The rest of us just do it as a group tradition. Seriously, if they wanted to find us, Prof. Davis probably already has all of our names, Marsh. If they could make him disappear, they could get his records, right?”

So I didn’t comment as we looped around the building next to Christie Hall and approached it from the back. At least we weren’t wading through a creek. We quickly reached the door and Vicky knocked: three times quickly, then a pause and another three, and then a pause and one more. At my questioning look, she nodded. Another “group tradition.”

The door opened a crack, and I heard Luke whisper, “Where you followed?” Once Vicky answered in the negative, he opened it all the way and greeted like old friends.

“Vicky! Haven’t seen you in a while! You look great!”

“Thank you,” she answered while I waited impatiently.

“And Marsha! Glad you found us again! Come in!”

He ushered us into the room, where about a dozen students seemed to be having some kind of a subdued party. Several were gathered around a Wii, taking turns with some game I didn’t recognize. A few more were playing a board game on the floor in one corner, and a boy and a girl were sitting together and talking earnestly on a couch in another corner.

“Oh, did we miss the meeting?” I asked, a bit disappointed.

Luke gave me an odd look, but Vicky quietly explained, while leading me toward the couple on the couch, “This is the meeting, Marsh.” Then she introduced us. “Dan and Allie, this is my friend Marsh. She’s one of us.”

The boy, Dan, stood and offered his hand. “Now that you know where we are, Marsh, be a stranger.”

I stared at him for a moment, even more confused, before realizing that he had actually said, “be a Stranger” and groaned in appreciation of the pun.

“We started out more formal,” Dan explained, “but over time most people gave up on the chance for finding anything about the experiment, and it turned into just a social gathering for people who all went through the same experience. There are only a few of us, like Allie and me, who are still trying to figure things out.”

“We think the professor in charge has to be studying either astrophysics or relativity or maybe chaos theory,” Allie said, as Vicky and I sat on the couch at Dan’s invitation. “My brother’s a physics major, and he says that he’s never heard of anybody trying to study time travel seriously, but that if anybody were, most of their research would probably be in one of those areas.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to tell what a physics prof was studying,” I admitted. I searched the physics building and did a web search, and that’s about it. I guess you guys have covered that ground already. Are there are any physics majors in the group?”

“No, most of the group haven’t even picked their majors, yet, Marsh, but I don’t remember anyone saying that they were interested in physics.”

“They haven’t picked their majors?” I echoed. “The group is mostly underclassmen?”

“It’s all underclassmen, Marsh,” Dan put in. “We don’t have a single junior or senior in the Strangers.”

“What?! That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s data, Marsh, so it has to make sense. We just aren’t certain what it means.” He ticked off the possibilities on his fingers. “It could be that no upperclassmen volunteered for the experiment, or that they were immune to its effects, or that they didn’t see the flyer organizing us, or they just didn’t want to join us.”

“Why would they be immune?” I asked. “And why would none of them see the flyer or want to join?”

“I have no idea. I’m just listing the possibilities. Right now, it seems most likely that none of them did the experiment, which might mean that something happened on campus two years ago that warned them away.”

“And they didn’t warn the rest of us?”

“I have no idea. I’m just telling you what I’ve figured out so far. Now, as to what happened to the experiment, we have a few possibilities.” And again, he used his fingers to count them down. “There might be a massive cover-up going on, or the experiment might have wiped itself out of existence, or we might all be deluded.”

“What was that last?”

“Again, I’m just being thorough. But what if we were all hypnotized into believing in different lives? What if we really are who we seem to be now?”

“But that’s–” I protested, but he cut me off.

“The guitarist we remember would be an artifact – something added to all of our memories to distinguish us from people who didn’t go through it, or on whom the experiment failed. It wouldn’t have been a physics experiment, of course; that would be another part of the invented past for us.”

“Do you seriously–?”

“… believe that?” he interrupted me again. “No. First of all, the data requirements would be enormous. For most of us, it would be just false memories of our appearances, but Vicky remembers actually dating the guitarist. She has memories that make no sense in this reality. Where did those come from? And Ben’s memories of playing basketball would have to have been invented, and his memories of playing the guitar would have to have been removed. Thing is, I have never heard of any form of hypnotism that can do all that.”

I exchanged glances with Vicky. My own experience was an even more extreme case, although he didn’t seem to need it.

“But if we rule that out,” he continued, “that leaves either a cover-up or a no-longer existing experiment. And we have no data to distinguish them. That’s why people here argue about it over and over.”

“OK,” I said, impressed by what I had just heard, “How do we use this information? How does this help us undo it and change back?”

He looked at me with impatience. “Change back? I think you’re missing the point, Marsh. There’s no reason to expect that we can.”

It was really hard to believe how much had happened to me since the last rehearsal: the nightmares, the discovery that I couldn’t actually play the guitar, getting to borrow one for practice, and most importantly, discovering that Vicky remembered me and wanted to be with me. It really made me feel that the play wasn’t all that big a deal, after all. And for me, thinking any play wasn’t a big deal was odd, much less one in which I had a lead role.

But I knew that the feeling would pass. The play was a big deal for me, and presumably would feel exciting again soon – and right now I owed it to my fellow actors to keep my enthusiasm and energy up, no matter what else was happening in my life.

I wish I could say that I had succeeded, Jared gave me an odd look the first time we came off stage together. “Marsh, is something wrong? You were much better on Wednesday.”

I shook my head. “I’m really sorry, Jared. I’m a bit distracted. It was kind of a roller coaster week for me.”

“Yeah, but you keep messing up your lines, and you seemed to be somewhere else when we were supposed to be fighting.”

Alvin had noticed, too, and stopped us twice so that I could try to get back into the role. I was messing up seriously, and that had to stop. I wasn’t worried about being kicked out of the cast, not now, but I was better than this – now.

“Look, just focus on one line at a time, OK?” Jared picked up my script. “Do you know your next line?”

“Um… wait. ‘Do you need me now?’”

“Close. It’s ‘Must I come now? It’s very inconvenient.’”

“’Must I come now? It’s very inconvenient.’ ‘Must I come now? It’s very inconvenient.’ Got it. I’m going to be all right, Jared. I’m just bit–“

“Yeah, well you can’t be. Come on, Marsh. We’re all counting on you.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” I admitted. “OK…” I took a deep breath. “Give me the cue.”

“Um… ‘Sit down, Major, Mrs. Ralston…’”

I looked at him impatiently, as Mollie was supposed to. “Must I come now? It’s very inconvenient.”

“Um… blah blah… ” he muttered, as he looked for my next line “… it will only be for a few minutes.”

I pantomimed crossing to Trotter and looking at him. “Have your skis been found, Sergeant?”

“OK, good. Your next line is… about a page later.”

“And I’ll be fine with it,” I said, a bit more impatiently than I should have. “I’m sorry.” I took a breath. “We have a couple of minutes before we go on. Thanks. I’m just going to collect myself and get into the show.” I closed my eyes for a moment, and then looked at him again, more calmly. “Thanks. I just needed… I just needed a moment.”

He looked at me, still a bit concerned. “OK.”

And I was better when we went back on stage, and again when we reran the act. I wasn’t where I should have been, where I had hoped to be, as far as lines and characterization were concerned, but at least I was focusing on the play again. When it came to giving notes, Alvin did point out my initial problems and improvement, and offered some specific comments, as he did for everyone else. He did look a bit worried about me, though.

“OK, people,” he said at the end. “Everybody should now be off-book for the entire show, and we’re going to start running the whole thing at each rehearsal. We’ll still be stopping and starting as needed, and Nikki will be prompting you for the next week only. After that, I’m going to expect you to ad lib your way out of any dropped lines. Good rehearsal, and I’ll see you all tomorrow night.”

He looked over at me and hesitated, but seemed to decide that it was more important to talk to Jack about something. I hadn’t noticed Jack having problems, but then I hadn’t been as aware as I probably should have been in general.

I hurried over the Nikki before I left. “I’ve got lots of stuff to tell you,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe what happened.”

“OK,” she said, very curious. “Call me tonight?”

“Will do.”

And that reminded me that I had promised to call Tina, so I pulled out my phone as I left the rehearsal. Mom answered.

“Marsha, so good to hear from you. I’m sorry I missed you when you called yesterday. How’s the play coming?”

“It’s… well, we’re off-book now and starting run-throughs. It’s challenging, but…”

“But you’ll be fine. “

“Right.”

With Mom on the phone, I found myself wrestling again with the question of what to tell her. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to explain, or how she would react. And of course, she would tell Dad, so it was probably better that I tell them both. And, I reminded myself, once I told them, I couldn’t take it back, whereas, if I put it off, I could always tell them later.

“Marsh? Is something wrong?”

I might have known that she would pick up on something. And possibly if I knew how my parents were with setting rules for Marsha; if I’d been sure that I could predict their reaction, I might not have hesitated so much. But I wasn’t sure. Tina had been safe to tell, since I knew that she would keep my secret and that she had no authority over me. But my parents were different.

And besides, my discovery of the Strangers in the Mirror had changed everything. If we found a way back, Vicky would probably insist that we take it immediately, or at least once the play was over – I’d probably insist on that. And then wouldn’t it be kinder to my parents not to let them know that their memories had been changed and might be changed back?

“How’s Tina doing?” I finally asked. Let Mom think that was my main concern, now.

“She’s doing pretty well, considering. I told her that I would call some of our friends and complain, but she said not to.”

“Yeah, I think that wouldn’t be a great idea, Mom.”

“She told me that you two had had a good talk. It’s nice that my girls are still so close, even though you’re away.”

“Mm hmm. Is Tina around? I promised to call her.”

“Oh, sure. Hold on.” I heard her calling, “Tina! Pick up the phone. It’s your sister.”

Tina came to the phone pretty quickly. “Hey, Marsh. How’s the play going?” But I had no sooner started telling her about my rehearsal than she interrupted me. “OK, Mom’s gone. Is this something about…?”

“Yeah. I found somebody who remembered me. My old girlfriend!”

She took an awfully long time responding.

“Teen? Is something wrong?”

“No, no. It’s OK. I just… Oh this sounds horrible, but I was sort of hoping that you were wrong, that you were just imagining things. That you wouldn’t be able to find anyone and would decide that you were really Marsha, after all. I’m sorry, Marsh. I know how hard this must be for you, and I knew it was wrong to have that hope, but…”

“You didn’t really believe me?” I asked softly, but I felt really crushed.

“No. No, I did believe you. I mean, I do believe you. There’s too much that’s different. You have to be who you say you are, Marsh.” Then she whispered, “I mean, ‘Marshall.’ I didn’t really doubt you. I just… I guess I just sort of hoped that you were kidding yourself, and somehow pulling one over on me.

“So, girlfriend, huh? Would that be Jackie or Vicky?”

“Vicky. The one I broke up with just before…”

“Right. So… what kind of change…?”

“Vicky looks just a little bit different, not too much. And get this. She wants to get back together. Once I change back, of course.”

“Oh. Of course. So… you’re definitely changing back, then? I– I mean, you’re not going to consider staying my sister?” She said it so casually, but I heard the pain in her voice, and yet she was trying so hard to be positive – for me. I had always known that I wasn’t going to give up on changing back, and hadn’t known how to tell her. And now I had told her, and in about the worst way possible.

“Teen…” I sighed. “Teen… I don’t know if we can change back. Vicky’s part of a group of experiment victims, and they’ve been trying to find the guys who did this to all of us. So far, they haven’t been able to find them at all. Vicky’s going to take me to the next meeting to discuss what we can do. But it’s not really sure.”

“Oh. Well, good lu– I mean…”

“I know, Teen. I appreciate it.”

“If you do find them… I mean… If you do change back, you’re still going to wait until after Christmas, right?”

“I’ll try, Teen. Until we find them, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“OK… I guess… Marsh, I guess I just hope that you get what you want… and that… well, that you’ll be happy with your choice. I mean… you’re my sis– my… my sibling, and I love you, no matter what. No matter what, right?”

“Yeah, and… I love you, too, Teen.”

“Well, ‘bye… I mean… take care.”

“Take care, Teen.”

I am such a jerk. I was still pondering her words and trying to see how I was going to find an answer that didn’t give me fits when Vicky called with the news that the Strangers were meeting tomorrow night from eight to ten. I let her think that my measured response was due to the fact that I would have to miss half of it because of rehearsal. But I knew better.

The hug had been comforting to both of us, but the drastic difference in my height and shape was an uncomfortable reminder of the impossibility of resuming our old relationship as it had been – at least for now. Vicky’s comment was at least as much a way of letting us break the embrace without dealing too much with that as it was an actual desire to see me sew – or at least that’s how I took it.

Still, it was a safe change of subject. “Were you serious about wanting to see me sew?” I asked as we parted.

“Um… to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I could handle that right now, Marsh.” She looked around my room. “Wow. This is really a girl’s room, isn’t it? Not exactly what I was expecting.”

“It’s the way I found it, except for the guitar.”

“Oh! So you got a new guitar?” She looked where I had indicated. “It looks different from your old one.”

“Yeah, I’m borrowing it from a friend. Actually,” I added, realizing the connection, “it belongs to Ben Fosberg. He’s sort of turned off by the whole thing and doesn’t even want to see it, and his sister’s a good friend of mine, so she said I could borrow it.”

“Oh, poor Ben. I think he’s had it worse than any of us. Except for you, that is.”

“Except for me? Are you saying that nobody else changed sex?”

She nodded. “As far as I know. At least nobody in the Strangers has admitted to it.”

“Yeah, well I didn’t exactly tell Ian and Luke the whole truth, either. I just told them that I looked like I could be my own sister.”

“So maybe it happened to somebody else. Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that. In fact, until I realized who you were, it hadn’t even occurred to me that some of the volunteers might have changed sex. Ben’s change seemed the most that anyone would have experienced.”

She looked around some more. “So you really do have a sewing machine, huh. And I guess all those,” she said, indicating my garment rack, “are things you’re supposed to sew. For money. Wow. I mean… wow. I’m seriously freaking out a bit, Marsh. I don’t understand how you can be so calm. I mean… you’re a girl, Marshall!”

“I’m calm, now. I certainly wasn’t when this first happened, but I’ve had a bit of time to get used to it – and of course, I still refuse to accept it as permanent,” and I looked stubbornly at her, daring her to gainsay me on that point.

But she just nodded.

“Out of curiosity, Vix,” I asked, “is there any particular reason you’re dressed up like that?”

She looked embarrassed. “I guess I just really felt funny about my ex-boyfriend dressing more girlishly than I was. It’s bad enough that I’m taller than you, without also being the only one who’s wearing pants. If you can wear a dress… so can I. Besides, the more feminine I look, maybe the more it’ll be easier for you to… I don’t know. I’m very skeptical that there’s any way back, but I want to give you as much of an incentive as I can.”

“Believe me, Vixy, I have plenty of incentive,” I laughed. “But I’m worried that I could be just going over old ground. What kind of things did the group try?”

“Well, we looked in the physics building, of course. I think we were pretty thorough, but I suppose we could have missed something. And we did web searches, but Davis is kind of a common name, and if you look for physics papers written by a Professor Davis at Piques in the past decade, the only one you find is the guy we know about, who is not the one in charge of this experiment.”

I sighed. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I found. Anything else?”

“I think some of the guys had more ideas, but nothing seems to have panned out. That’s why we’re pretty much all convinced that there’s no way back.’

“So why all the secrecy, then?”

“Secrecy?”

“I spoke with Ian and Luke and they took me on this incredible obstacle course to get to their dorm.”

She grimaced. “Oh, right. I didn’t realize that you had met them. Well, they’re just paranoid. Some of the group are convinced that there’s this massive cover-up, and that the administration is trying to find the people who went to the Messenger and do… I don’t know what to them. Others are convinced that the experiment wrote itself out of existence. Something to do with a grandfather paradox.”

“That’s what Chad thought might have happened.”

“Oh, you told Chad? That doesn’t really surprise me.”

“Yeah, and I told Tina and Alvin and Nikki, too.”

“Alvin – your director? And who’s Nikki?”

“Nikki is Ben’s sister. She’s also Alvin’s girlfriend, our costume mistress, and the one who’s been teaching me to sew and just generally been a really good friend.”

“Which is why you have his guitar. OK, now it all makes sense. But… that’s a lot of people, Marsh. I’ve told Christine, and that’s it, outside the Strangers. And my secret isn’t nearly as big as yours.”

I shrugged. “I only told people I thought I needed to. I needed more help than you did, remember.”

“True.”

“So…”

“So.”

“Um… the Strangers in the Mirror…”

“Please, Marsh. I don’t want to talk about them right now. Can’t we try to forget about this whole thing for just a while?”

We sort of stared at each other for a moment; I assumed she was thinking mostly the same kind of thing that I was. It was great to be here together, but we certainly weren’t together in the way we used to be. There had been a fair number of things we used to do when we were dating, like dancing and skating – but those sort of required me to be a guy, or probably wouldn’t be much fun this way, even if we were willing to risk being viewed as a gay couple. She also used to love listening to me play song after song, but I was hardly going to inflict on her what I could manage now. Making out was definitely not happening.

That left talking, which we were already doing. We had always been able to talk for hours, and now we had plenty of things to catch up on, even if we sort of had to waltz around the question of whether there was a way back. So we just talked about stuff. We had over a month to catch up on, and despite her earlier reluctance, she was intrigued to see me actually use the sewing machine, so I worked on a couple of patch jobs that I had. I still wasn’t ready to try altering Terry’s gown, of course, but I felt comfortable enough with the simple work that I didn’t mind doing it in front of her. What was particularly odd was that it was almost easier to do when she was there, talking to me than when I was alone.

She laughed about how I had had to avoid Carl’s attempts to flirt with me, tsk’ed about the way I had given Nikki enough information to figure out the truth about me, and was scandalized about my having to kiss Jared for the play. But it was my admission about having been attracted to Jeremy that shocked her the most.

“A boy, Marsh? Seriously? You were attracted to a boy?”

“I was playing a role, Vicky,” I protested. “I figured that the girl I was portraying would be attracted, that’s all. So it seemed right that I should actually be attracted. Since I thought it was a dream, right? It doesn’t mean anything. If I ran into him today, I wouldn’t be attracted at all. I was just a bit confused.”

“Hmm.”

“So… what’s happened with you, since…?”

“Hmm. Well… it made me sort of re-evaluate things. Like our relationship, and… well, I’ve been looking at my drawings, and I’m thinking that maybe art shouldn’t just be a hobby after all. I mean, when you lose things you thought you never could, it sort of puts things into perspective.”

“Trust me. I know that very well.”

“Yeah, well… I’m sort of leaning towards making Art my major.”

“Really? What happened to the psych and sociology?”

“Oh, I still like those, but… I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting a bit selfish…”

“You’re entitled,” I assured her. “You have to do what you enjoy.”

“Yeah, well, it was kind of late to change my classes, but… remember that drawing class I dithered over? I asked the instructor if I could sort of audit it.”

“Great!”

“Yeah, well… he wasn’t too crazy about the idea, especially since the term was almost half over, but I showed him some of my sketches and he let me sit in.”

“Good. I’d love to see what you come up with.”

“I really wish I’d brought some of my latest work. I think I’m really improving, Marsh.”

“I’ll have to come over to your place, next time, so you can show me.”

“Yeah…” She looked around my room again. “Talk about putting things into perspective. I was really upset when I saw what had happened to me, but you… I mean, just about my whole life is really unchanged by comparison. I have the same roommates, the same friends, the same clothes, even my body isn’t really all that different.”

“And your face isn’t really changed all that much, either, Vix. Besides us two, nobody else would probably have noticed, even if they remembered the old you.”

“I guess so.” She sat silently, looking down and thinking for a few minutes. Then she looked at me, and said decisively, “We have to get you back, Marsh. I’m not sure I believe it’s possible, but at least we have to try.

“The Strangers meet once or twice a week, and I’ve sort of stopped going. I mean it’s kind of depressing. Everybody looks so normal, and we all sort of look at each other and think, ‘what happened to her isn’t so bad – why is she upset?’ And most of us have pretty much given up. But there’s some who haven’t, and it’s probably worth you meeting them. I don’t know if there’s any hope, but… I’ve never been so motivated as I am now. I want you back, Marsh. I want Marshall back.”

The next morning, I called Vicky right after breakfast, agonizing when she didn’t answer until the third ring. After all, she hadn’t exactly responded trustingly to my suggestion that we were going to be a couple again. And she’d said that she’d been “in the middle of something.” What if she had had a date last night? What if she was, even now, in some other guy’s bed?

“Hi, Marsh,” she greeted me, evidently recognizing my number.

“Hi, Vix… Um… I just wondered if you’d like to hang out for a bit.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “You sound a bit nervous.”

“No!” I said hurriedly. “It’s really none of my business if you were out with somebody last night.”

“I was, actually,” she said, sounding a bit puzzled. “Christine, Mandy, and I went to a movie. Why?”

“Nothing,” I admitted, feeling a bit foolish. “Anyway, do you want to come over?”

“Will you be sewing?” she asked.

“Well, I have a few simple repairs that people dropped on me this week, but I was planning on doing them tonight after rehearsal. Spending time with you is much more important.”

She laughed. “No, I mean that I would love to watch. I’m trying to get my mind around the idea of you sitting at a sewing machine. When I think of ‘Marsh Steen’ that’s just not the image that comes to mind!”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “I’m getting good at it, anyway. It’s another way for me to be creative. I’m thinking of sticking with it after I change back.”

“After you… right. So, when should I come over?”

“Anytime. I’ll probably be practicing the guitar for most of the morning, and you probably don’t want to be here for that. I’m really bad, Vix.”

“That’s… going to take some getting used to.”

“I’m just hoping that it doesn’t carry over to after I change back.”

Yeah… right. I mean, that would be really horrible. So… I have some things to do and then I’ll be over. What’s your room address?”

“208 Laramie.”

“OK, see you in a bit.”

Automatically, I looked around my room as soon as I hung up, figuring out how I could make my room presentable enough for a girl to come over. That’s when I noticed for the first time: my room was spotless! I’d never been able to keep it clean; despite my best efforts, underwear and socks seemed just naturally to gravitate to the floor beside my bed and all around my laundry bag. But not now. I had somehow kept my room tidy without even thinking about it. I checked under the bed and behind the desk and sewing machine and even inside the wardrobe. Nothing. Not a single thing on the floor that didn’t belong there. What had happened? To be sure, the clothes I was wearing now were different, most especially the underwear – and underwear had always been the biggest problem. Maybe there was just something about girl’s underwear that didn’t feel right tossing on the floor? Even if it was my own?

I hooked up the guitar and went back to practicing the chord changes. It was definitely getting easier; I could do them properly about half the time now. I imagine that this must be what physical therapy after an accident feels like for a jock – knowing that you used to be able to do something with ease, and having your body betray you, and yet trying again and again. I remember when I first tried to learn chord changes, about eight years ago – it was exciting, back then, thinking about what it would be like when I learned. Just being able to make the right sounds come out of the guitar had been a thrilling accomplishment. Now, it was more of a need – a hunger. It was a way to restore me to my rightful self, even just one part of me.

With the beginnings of calluses on my fingers, I was able to practice for about twenty minutes before it became too painful, and I could feel the improvement. A few more days of this and I’d have these chords down. Then I could add a few more to my repertoire, probably the C, A, and F. There were a number of songs that I could play with just those six basic chords, and managing whole songs would be a major milestone.

I shook out the pain in my left hand. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sewing until it subsided, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything that required a time commitment or concentration with Vicky on her way over. In my old room, I would have gone for a science fiction book, but Marsha didn’t have any; her light reading had been trashy romance novels, which I had so far avoided. It was possible that I would eventually become desperate enough to read one of them, but I wasn’t there yet – quite.

I heard the knock on the outer door and hurried to open it, getting there just in time to see Lee Ann opening it for Vicky. I surprised to see her in a dress; she had always been more of a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl.

“Vicky,” I said, introducing them “this is my roommate, Lee Ann Taylor. Lee Ann, this is my friend, Vicky Gordon.”

“Nice to meet you, Vicky,” Lee Ann said politely. “Marsh mentioned you.”

“Um, Likewise,” Vicky replied. But when Lee excused herself and headed back to her bedroom, the gaze with which Vicky followed her was pure poison.

I ushered Vicky into my own room and closed the door before asking about it.

“Well, how do you expect me to feel about her, Marsh? She’s the one who broke us up.”

“What? That’s not the way I remember it,” I countered. “I mean, I started flirting with her after we broke up.”

She rolled her eyes. “You are so naïve, Marsh. We were having problems, and I think we could have worked things out, but Miss Kissy-lips out there starting batting her eyes at you, and that’s when you told me that you thought we had fallen out of love with each other, and we might just as well break up while we still liked each other.”

At my shocked expression, she looked directly at me and added, “You might have fallen out of love, but I hadn’t. But I loved you enough to let you go, because I thought you would be happier that way.”

“Vicky… I don’t know what to say. I must have seemed a selfish…”

“…jerk? Yes, you were.”

I cringed at the judgment; how could I have been so stupid?

“And I was an idiot for letting you go,” she continued. “At least we could have had a few more weeks together before…” She broke off and started crying. I reached for her and she shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I thought I was over this. I thought you were gone, somehow. Just never existed any more for some reason, like some say happened to the whole experiment. And then you called and said you knew where Marshall was and I thought we could try again, and then you showed up like this…”

“We can, Vixy. We can,” I promised her. “In January we’ll start all over again. And I won’t leave this time. I promise.”

“January?!” she stared at me through her tears. “What does January have to do with anything? What’s supposed to happen in January?”

“I…” I hesitated. “Well… my plan was to ask to be changed back in January. I mean, once I find those guys.”

“But… why January? Why wouldn’t you…?” Then her expression suddenly changed to one of understanding and impatience. “Marsh, tell me this isn’t another garlic boast.”

“’Garlic boast’?” I repeated.

“Don’t pretend you don’t remember. I mean the time your roommates were making fun of you because you were avoiding garlic, and Geoff sneaked some into your dinner one night–”

“We never proved that it was Geoff,” I pointed out.

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you claimed that you didn’t mind, and boasted that you would eat garlic with every dinner for the next three weeks, remember? Just to show that you didn’t really mind?”

“I made it for three weeks, didn’t I?” I insisted, looking away from her.

“Yes, and who was still expected to kiss you, garlic breath and all? Who was expected still to embrace you, with garlic coming out of your every pore?”

“I’m sorry, Vicky. I just had to prove–”

“… that you were really in control, right?”

I nodded.

“Even though everybody knew perfectly well that you hated it? And is that what happened here? Whom did you boast to this time, Marsh? What on earth would prompt you to agree to stay this way if you actually had a chance to change back?”

“They took my guitar, Vix,” I explained, “on top of everything else. Joey got it and sold it.”

“Your guitar? What does your guitar have to do with this?!”

“It’s gone. And I was really upset about that, so…”

“It wouldn’t be gone if you changed back, Marshall!” she thundered at me. “I don’t really believe that there’s a way back, but are you seriously telling me that if we found one tomorrow, that you would wait until January to use it?!”

“But, the play, Vix…,” I explained, cringing again in the face of her anger. “If I change back earlier, I’ll be doing the role of Paravicini, and I haven’t rehearsed it at all. I don’t even know the lines, and we’re supposed to be off-book for the whole show today, and…”

Oh boy. The look in her eyes was not good.

I tried to explain; explain to her what I had pretty much not admitted to myself. “I have to think this way, Vix. If… As long as January hasn’t come, well, I’m still a girl because I promised that I wouldn’t change back before then. I promised Tina. She doesn’t want me to change back at all, and I promised that I would wait.

“But without that promise… that means that every day I’m still a girl, it’s because I have no choice… I don’t think I can face that.”

Her voice turned soft and calming, and she took my hands in hers, looked down at me from her greater height, and looked at me with sympathetic eyes. “But it isn’t your choice, is it Marsh? We’re stuck. They’re gone.”

“I can’t accept that, Vicky,” I insisted. “I just can’t. Because it would mean that I’m going to be like this the rest of my life. And that just can’t be. This… this isn’t me. Not the real me. I can’t face that, Vix. I can’t face the real me being gone forever.”

Somehow, we had wound up in each other’s arms, were holding on to each other as though our lives depended on it.

“I can’t face that, either, Marsh,” she said. “I’ve never had a boyfriend who made me feel as good as you did. Who made me think I was beautiful–“

“You are, Vixy. Any guy who can’t see that is blind.”

“Thank you, Marsh. Nobody ever managed to say all the right things to me, the way you did, was there for me the way you were…”

“… except for leaving you, when you wanted me to stay, apparently.”

She nodded, her head pressed against mine. “Except for that.”

We stood there, clutching one another, trying to hold on to what we’d once had somehow, for way too few minutes before she finally pushed me away, wiped her eyes, and said with a forced smile. “So. I understand that there’s some sewing to be done here, today.”

Vicky was back in my life! I almost felt like singing. And she had actively looked for me, even before I had realized how I felt about her. That meant that… in the original time line, she would have found me – me as Marshall, that is. And when I changed back, we’d probably have been dating again for a couple of months. That is, if I – that is, Marshall – hmm… this was confusing to talk about. I would come back to Marshallhood only in January, so who exactly would have been acting as me in the meantime? I’d really have to think of him in the third person. OK, Marshall, I told him in my mind, you’d better not blow this for me… us. Lucky bastard, he’d have two more months with Vicky than I would.

It was Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t really thought things through. Vicky and I could have… gone to a movie together or something similar. Of course, maybe she had a date – she hadn’t been able to find me, after all, and it stood to reason that some guy on campus would have figured out how great she was. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought, but I didn’t have anything to offer her as an alternative. Dating had been an important part of my life for years, so if I were a girl, I’d – well, a girl who liked boys, I mean – I’d certainly go on a date with a guy I liked rather than hanging around with another girl, no matter how much I liked her. And face it, at present, that’s all I was – another girl to hang out with when there were no guys available. Yeah, changing back would fix this, and I’d just have to be patient.

In the meantime, I had a phone call to make; I had real news for Chad. Boy was he going to be surprised. I was in such a good mood, that I didn’t even mind the brief interrogation his mother put me through.

“Hey, Marsh, what’s up?” Chad greeted me when she finally handed over the phone.

“You are never going to guess whom I just found, Chad” I chortled.

“You’re kidding me! You found them? The guys who ran the experiment? They really exist?”

“No, no, no. I mean, yes they exist, but no I didn’t find them. But I did run into the people who gave the guy from the Messenger the information for the article, and they remembered me playing the guitar at the beginning of the school year.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup, and even better than that – I found Vicky! And she remembered me, too!”

“Um, who’s Vicky?”

“My last girlfriend. The girl I dated for six months up until a few weeks before break. And she did the experiment, too, and she not only remembered me, she had been looking for me!”

“Wow!”

“She wants me to change back so we can date again.” She hadn’t quite said that, but she had made her preferences known, in my opinion. She also didn’t believe that it was possible for me to do so, but I didn’t need to tell Chad that.

“I am floored, Marsh. So this is real. I mean, unless you’re bullshitting me now, and doing one hell of a job of it, I might add, this is real. This really happened.”

I was incredulous. “You mean, after all we’ve talked, you still didn’t believe me?”

“I’m not saying I didn’t believe you, Marsh; just that I wouldn’t have been totally surprised if it was an incredible joke. And I suppose it’s still possible – I just don’t think I can believe that any more.

“Well, good, Chad, ‘cause believe me, if this is a joke, it’s on me and it’s not funny at all.”

“Right. So… this girl – is she hot?”

I chuckled. “Oh, you have no idea, Chad.”

“Got pictures?”

“Sorry, pal. I left my pictures of her in my other timeline.”

He laughed. “Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. So you seem to be feeling pretty good, now.”

“I am over the moon. We’re back together – or rather, we will be when I change back.”

“Yeah… as far as that… how’s the search coming?”

I tensed a bit. It wasn’t going well, and Luke and Ian and Vicky had all said that it was impossible, but I refused to accept that. “I… well, I’ve been through the building twice, but there’s still some offices and labs I haven’t been able to check. And there’s probably something else I could try. I guess. And it was really a great idea of yours for me to start looking now, since it’s obviously going to take a while.

“Hey, you know, Chad,” I added quickly. “I have a lot of stuff to work on, here. So… it was really great talking with you, and… If you have any more ideas, let me know, OK? See you.”

I hung up before he could say anything, and then I wondered why I had. Was he really going to be able to say anything that would bring me down, now? Vicky was back in my life – I shouldn’t be down at all. Everybody just kept telling me there was no way back, but that just couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.

It didn’t take me long after I hung up, though, before my exuberance over reconnecting with Vicky wiped out the bad feelings. It would be different this time, I promised myself. This might even work out really well for us. Without the physical attraction element, we’d have to connect on a deeper level, and when I changed back – well, then we’d be able to add the physical on top of everything else. Maybe now we’d be able to keep our relationship going. The fact that she had gone looking for me was just incredible.

My mood must have been really obvious, as Lee Ann commented on it as we walked to dinner.

“Did something really good happen today, Marsh? Maybe… Jeremy called?”

I laughed. “No, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t spoken with in a while, and I realized how much I had missed her. I think we’re going to start spending some time together.”

“Oh, that’s great! Do I know her?”

Did she? I had no idea, but Vicky had known about Lee Ann and my interest in her, and it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder how.

“Vicky Gordon,” I told her.

Lee Ann shook her head. “No, the name’s not familiar. Who is she?”

Now how was I supposed to answer that one?

“Just a girl I met last year, and we hung out for a while, and then sort of drifted apart.” I mean, technically that was true, but it felt like a lie, and I couldn’t exactly tell the full truth.

“What’s wrong?” Lee Ann asked, evidently picking up on something.

“Nothing is wrong!” I almost snapped. Then I caught myself and repeated in a friendlier tone, “Nothing is wrong.”

She gave me a considering look, but only said, “OK…”

That made twice in the past hour that I had been abrupt with a close friend, and I wasn’t quite sure why. It must be the pressure. Everybody kept telling me that I was stuck. Why did they have to do that? Lee Ann was supposed to be comforting me, making me feel better. Isn’t that what friends do? And Chad was supposed to be my idea guy; he should have shown me an easy way to find this… Professor Davis guy.

Lee Ann invited me to go out with the girls again that night after dinner, but I told her I had to study; I had an idea I wanted to follow. Since I had a name, maybe some kind of internet search would help? That seemed a much better use of my time just now. If I had mentioned the fact that Vicky had known his name to Chad, maybe he would have suggested something. I almost called him back, but decided that this was something I could do on my own.

The university web site was no real help. It showed a Professor Morton Davis in the Physics department, but Vicky had claimed that he was the wrong one. Maybe I could verify that.

I did a search for articles by Morton Davis, and got totally confused. All I found were titles and abstracts, and they were heavy in physics jargon and meant nothing to me. Could Dynamical Computations of a Non-Classical Integral have something to do with time travel? How was I supposed to tell? Jay would have been able to tell me for sure, but asking him was totally out of the question – he’d just declare that he wasn’t going to give credence to my fantasies. And it wasn’t as if I could prove it to him; he just didn’t know me well enough to tell that something was wrong.

I wasn’t getting very far and it was really annoying me. Stupid professors! Aren’t they supposed to be communicating something to the rest of us? Why do they have to make it so hard?

I searched next for any combination of “Piques” and “Physics” and “Davis” and came up totally empty of references that were not to the same Morton Davis I already knew about. If there was another Professor Davis in the department, shouldn’t he have published something? How could they possibly have covered all of this up? How could the administration have hacked Google?

The whole thing was proving to be a massive waste of time, and I angrily pushed myself away from the keyboard. At least when I searched the building I knew that he either had to be in a room or not. How was I supposed to find somebody who might not even exist?