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It was the most exciting spring of my life–either life. I was a mother! Well, technically, I was already the mother of a set of twins, but this was the first time I had given birth. The twins have been and will continue to be the light of my life. I feel as if I bore them even though I remember that they were really two of my fraternity brothers. Now a young boy and a young girl, they have no inkling of their past lives. The same is true of my husband, Jerry.

But as I was saying, in spite of what most people in Ovid believed, I had just borne a baby for the very first time. She was a precious little girl, a little blue-eyed blonde like her mother. We named her Ashley.

It was so strange, I thought as I held little Ashley to my breast. One minute I had been a college student–a male college student–and the next minute, I was changed into a woman. It had taken me time to feel as if I really was a woman. But if there was ever a moment that I felt more like a woman than any other, it was while I fed little Ashley. I had followed the stories of other nursing mothers, but this was my first time to experience it, and I didn’t regret it for a moment.

I had given birth to Ashley in early March, and it was now nearly May. I had returned to work after just three weeks–at least part time. My job was basically to be a living record for the new lives of those people changed by the Judge, the powerful god-cum-magistrate who had created and populated Ovid with the help of other classical gods.

To his credit, the Judge had been most indulgent when Ashley was born. He assured me I could take as much time off as I needed. I had appreciated the offer, but wanted to get back to work quickly. I really enjoyed my job, and there was too much going on in Ovid to miss any of it for long.

The Judge had also showered our new baby with gifts–nearly everything we could need with a newborn. As a result, we had not needed to buy a crib, a stroller, or a car seat, as well as several baby outfits and toys. To make the Judge seem even more magnanimous, I should point out that he did the same thing for Susan Jager, my best friend and the one lawyer who practiced before the Judge. Susan had given birth to her baby boy Joshua, within an hour of Ashley’s birth.

But the most thoughtful gift of all in my opinion had been the gold identity bracelets he had given each child. They were far too large for the babies, but he told us to give them their bracelets on their sixteenth birthday, and we agreed. The bracelets were beautiful, formed from hand-shaped gold. Inside each bracelet was the child’s name in ancient Greek characters.

“Is she asleep?” Susan whispered from the couch across my den.

“Almost,” I replied. “How about yours?”

Susan nodded, pulling the sleeping baby away from her own breast. “Where shall I put him down?”

“Just use Ashley’s crib,” I told her. “Ashley likes to sleep in her stroller.”

When both babies were tucked in, Susan and I retired to the kitchen for coffee. Jerry had taken the twins to the park, and Stephen, Susan’s husband, had tagged along to keep Jerry company. They had done it to let Susan and I have a little time together. It was the first time we had done so in weeks.

“So do you think she’ll show up?” Susan asked, sipping her coffee.

“Diana? Of course,” I giggled. “She seems to know when just the two of us are here. She’ll want to catch up on the Judge’s latest cases.”

“What story do you think she’ll pick?” Susan asked.

I thought for a moment. “Probably Patricia.”

“Damn!” Susan said. “That was going to be my choice, too. I thought we could make a bet on it or something.”

“A bet on what?” There had been a faint pop as air was displaced. Suddenly sitting at the table with us was an extremely beautiful woman. She was dressed like us, in T-shirts and shorts–but her body was exotic–a cross of Middle Eastern dusky skin and dark blond hair. Circasian was I believe the name of such a mixture. Whatever the name, she was beautiful. The goddess Diana had joined us.

“So what name are you using today?” I asked her, sliding a cup of coffee laced with cream and sugar–just the way she liked it–in front of her.

“Oh, what’s in a name?” she sighed glibly. “You may call me Di today. It seems to fit for some reason.”

“You seem very mellow today,” I commented as I watched her daintily sip her coffee.

“Oh, it’s just such a relaxing day,” she said dreamily. “And after a lovely evening at a new club in Rome, I decided I’d better wind down in Ovid before going to bed.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. I hadn’t known the gods slept. Of course, come to think of it, she hadn’t said anything about sleeping.

“I assume you wanted me to relate a bedtime story,” I laughed.

“Well, it might get me in the proper mood,” she replied in a sensual tone. “How about the case with the two prejudiced men?”

Susan and I looked at each other and together said, “Patricia.”

“So who won the bet?” Di asked wickedly.

“We both did,” I told her as I began to slip into my trance...

“Life would be a damned sight better if it wasn’t for the lousy Japs.”

It was Brooks who said it, but I had to agree. “Amen, brother.”

Brooks lit up another cigarette from the tip of his last one. I never could figure out how he could smoke that much. A pack a day was all I could handle, but Brooks smoked at least twice that. And even when I smoked, I often left a half-spent cigarette in the ashtray. Brooks smoked his cigarettes right down to the filter. I think he’d smoke the filter, too, if he could keep it lit. Then about half the time, he’d light another one off the spent cigarette. When Hertz got its rental car back after we turned it in back in Tulsa, it would take them a week to fumigate it.

“I mean, we build a hell of a car right here in America,” he went on, settling back in the passenger seat of the rented Ford Contour since I had volunteered to drive. “Why the hell would anybody consider a Honda Civic over a Ford Taurus?”

I shook my head as I kept my eye on the road. “Beats the shit out of me. Seems like people have short memories.”

Brooks grunted in agreement. I didn’t have to give him the whole tirade. People have short memories, I would tell men like Brooks. They forget about how the Japs sneaked up on us at Pearl Harbor. Hell, my grandfather even lost a leg when a sneaky Jap shot him at Iwo Jima. I learned to have a distrust for the Japanese sitting on my grandfather’s remaining knee. He’d tell me all about them, about how they were mindless little monkeys, and I believed every word. Why shouldn’t I? Hadn’t those sneaky slant-eyed bastards cost my father his job as an electrical engineer for RCA? With all the Sony and Panasonic TVs being dumped in the United States at cheaper prices than the Japs could buy them at home, how could an electrical engineer in the United States who specialized in consumer electronics hope to keep his job?

“Buchanan’s the answer,” Brooks went on confidently. How he could go on like that with the hangover he had to have was beyond me. “We get him in the White House, we won’t have to worry about any more of this ‘one world’ shit.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I told him, feeling a sudden painful jolt in my head from my own hangover. How the hell could we have gotten so drunk the night before?

Then I remembered exactly how. Brooks and I had just finished a day of training for the staff of the largest Ford dealer in Tulsa. That was what we did–we travelled around the country training the Ford dealers’ service departments and evaluating them for the home office. It was the kind of stuff the zone offices did most of the time, but Dearborn was getting a little nervous about the service reputation at the car stores and thought a home office team needed to check up on the field every now and then. In a way, we were checking up on the local zone offices as much as on the dealerships. Had the reps gotten too buddy-buddy with the dealers? Were they letting things slide? With Honda and others challenging Ford every year for leadership in the mid-sized car market, we were an important part of the team.

Anyhow, we had gotten to know the service manager at the dealership pretty well. A muscular guy, he looked like he could pick up an F-150 truck in his bare hands. Tony–that was his name–was divorced and liked to party. Well, Brooks was divorced and so was I–and come to think of it, we both liked to party. At closing time, we said ‘the hell with dinner’ and headed for a bar Tony knew.

“What’s the action like here?” Brooks asked him as we stood at the bar, long neck beer bottles in hand. He reached for another handful of pretzels–our dinner that evening.

Tony shrugged. “Not bad.” He nodded at three girls sitting together at a nearby table. All were dressed for action. There was a blonde, a brunette, and an Oriental girl. “Three of us–three of them. It looks like a plan.”

Tony started to move, but I stopped him with my hand on his arm. “Wait a minute, Tony. Who gets stuck with the Jap?”

Tony’s brow furrowed and he looked down at my hand as if a bird had shit on his sleeve. “Jap? Oh... you mean Jodie. She’s not Japanese–she’s Chinese.”

Brooks snorted, “See? She’s a Chink–not a Jap.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. There was an unpleasant note in his voice. “Jodie Chang. She works for the Pontiac store next to us. What’s the problem?”

Hell, I had started it. Me and my big mouth. I had been hanging around with Brooks so long I had forgotten how to be politically correct. But I wasn’t so drunk yet that I didn’t realize I had offended Tony somehow. “No problem,” I told him. “You know how it is, Tony. We work out of Dearborn. Japs–uh, Japanese aren’t too popular back there in the auto community.”

“Yeah,” Tony mumbled, “And those guys in Dearborn can all go piss up a rope. My brother’s married to a Japanese girl. She’s good folks.”

“Yeah, right.” That was from Brooks.

I silently groaned. Tony and I had been busy talking, and I hadn’t realized just how drunk Brooks was getting. When he drank, he had to watch it or he’d start getting belligerent. I had made no secret to guys like Brooks that I didn’t like Japs very much, but I kept my mouth shut the rest of the time. Too many people were ‘politically correct’ these days. Unfortunately, we had just run afoul of one of those people, and it looked like we might be headed for a fight.

Brooks was too drunk to sense the danger. I could see it in his eyes. He was about to bait Tony, and I could see Tony wasn’t going to take it lying down.

“Japs, Chinks, Nips, Slant-eyes, Gooks, it’s all the same,” Brooks commented with an evil little grin. “All the slant-eyes in the world aren’t worth one American job and you know it!”

“Okay, big mouth!” Tony yelled and lunged for Brooks.

I was in no position to stop him. I had been leaning back in my bar stool and couldn’t have jumped in the middle of them if I had wanted to–and to be honest, I didn’t want to. Tony made two of me. Besides, I’ve never been much of a fighter.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to step in. Before the first punch could be thrown, a tall blonde guy stepped in between them. Tony was bigger than the guy, but he held his punch. It was almost as if he couldn’t throw the punch for some reason, his fist hovering in midair without moving forward.

Then the blonde guy smiled. “No need for this,” he said in a voice that while calm, brooked no argument.

Now it was Brooks’ turn to play the macho game. He tapped the big blonde on the shoulder and demanded, “Just who are you to break up a private conversation?”

The blonde smiled even wider. “The name’s Apollo, and the management pays me to keep conversations from getting out of hand.”

Apollo, huh? It sounded like a phony name–like a stage name. I had seen him before, though, and it wasn’t in a bar. But I couldn’t quite place him. He looked like the sort of guy you see in those sleazy flicks on Cinemax late at night–the kind that have bimbos in bikinis and guys in Speedos who end up screwing all over the beach. Well, if he ever had been in one of those flicks, maybe being a bouncer in a bar was a step up in the world.

Then he looked at me. “You know, friend, I think your pal has had a bit too much to drink. Do you suppose you could take him back to your motel so he can sleep it off?”

I nodded. “Good idea.”

I wasn’t sure quite how I was going to accomplish that, though, but for some reason, the fight seemed to have gone out of Brooks. We left Tony behind and I got Brooks back to the motel without further incident. It wasn’t until I was in bed myself that I started to wonder how the bouncer knew we were staying in a motel.

“Where the hell are we going anyhow?” Brooks asked suddenly, bringing me back to the present. He had been dozing and I had been driving without really thinking. I looked around. When had I turned off the Interstate? I looked ahead for highway markers. We were on a good two-lane blacktop road, but I didn’t see any markers.

“I’m not sure,” I muttered.

“Where the hell is the Interstate?” Brooks muttered. “How the fuck did you manage to get us lost?”

The hangover pain in my head took away any answer I might have formulated. Then I saw a sign ahead. It was a familiar-looking blue and white sign, a little faded, and it looked as if it had been there for years. At least it might be advertising something in the next town. That would help me get my bearings.

“Forester Ford,” Brooks read, proving his vision was a little better than mine. “Then it says Ovid–Five Miles. You ever hear of Ovid?”

I shook my head. “Not as a town. I think we studied an Ovid back in college. He was some sort of a Roman poet. And I’ve never heard of Forester Ford. Is it on our list?”

We had a list of all the Ford dealers in the country with us. Brooks scanned the list. “Nope. It’s probably an old sign. Most of the dealerships in these little tank towns have been closed for years.” Then he looked at the map. “I don’t see any Ovid listed either. It must just be a wide spot in the road.”

But it wasn’t. We drove over a hill and found ourselves in a valley surrounded by rolling hills. Farmland stretched out before us, crops just pushing up in the early spring sun. And in the center of it all was a town. It looked to be fairly good-sized–maybe ten or fifteen thousand people. Towns that size in the Midwest usually depended on agriculture and maybe some light manufacturing to support themselves. This town looked like no exception.

“It’s big enough to have a Ford dealer,” Brooks commented. “In fact, I’d be surprised if a town that size didn’t have a Ford dealer.”

“Yeah,” I agreed as we approached the town. “So why don’t we have it on our list? And why isn’t this town on the map?”

Brooks didn’t bother with an answer. It was just as well. We both knew the chances of both the map and our list being wrong were slim. The sign had said there was a Ford dealer in Ovid. Well, I had a funny feeling the sign was right. I had another funny feeling that there was something odd about Ovid. Just driving toward the town made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. If we were smart, I thought, we’d turn around and head back toward the Interstate.

As we got closer still, Ovid appeared–to my relief–to be a typical Midwestern town. The road widened to four lanes with the usual collection of gas stations, farm implement dealers and other roadside businesses. There was nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was how neat, well groomed and prosperous everything looked. Many farm towns have fallen on hard times, what with the price of many farm products low. That affects the communities that depend upon agriculture. That being the case, the town looked just a little too prosperous.

“Look! Did you see that?” Brooks pointed at a man filling up his car at a self-serve pump.

I turned to see what he was talking about and nearly ran off the road staring. The man pumping gas appeared perfectly normal if you glanced at him, but there was something about him that made him seem almost transparent, like a double-exposed picture.

“You see it, too?” I asked.

Brooks nodded. Then he pointed ahead. “There’s another one!”

There was an attractive woman standing on a street corner, a pretty little girl of maybe four or five holding onto her hand. Both were wearing shorts, and the little girl’s blonde hair matched her mother’s in color. The strange thing was that while the little girl looked perfectly normal, her mother had that same transparent look. A ghost? No, the woman wasn’t as transparent as that. It was as if I tried very hard, I could see through her. The little girl noticed nothing odd. She even smiled at her mother.

“Maybe it’s a trick of the light,” I suggested.

Brooks took a long hard look at me. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

I glanced over at him and shook my head.

“So what do we do now?” I asked as I stopped for a red light. If we were smart, I thought, we’d just scoot right out of town and forget that we ever heard of Ovid, Oklahoma. But curiosity doesn’t just kill cats. I had worked with Brooks long enough to know that he was a curious person. So was I for that matter. But even curiosity has its limits. When surrounded by something as strange as Ovid, you tend to seek out the familiar.

“Where’s that Ford dealer?” Brooks asked. It was the same place I would have sought.

“Well,” I speculated, “it’s a small town. I’d say it’s either out here on this highway strip or it’s downtown.”

“Let’s find out,” Brooks said, pushing the rented car further into Ovid.

The Ford dealer wasn’t on the highway. We went from one end to the other and found nothing but bars, fast food, motels and gas stations, plus a few other local businesses. That left downtown. We followed the signs directing us to the business district.

I couldn’t speak for Brooks, but I was wondering if the transparent people weren’t just the aftermath of the previous night’s drinking. I saw a few other people, and they looked normal enough. In fact, the whole town looked normal. It looked like it ought to have one of those banners you used to see flying from a light post declaring the town to be an All-American City.

As we drove into the business district, I noticed not everyone had that transparent appearance. Frankly, most of them did, but not all. The interesting thing was that no one seemed to notice if the person he passed on the street had that aura of transparency. I saw a teenage couple holding hands–the boy was transparent and the girl not. It was the same with another mother and child. Only this time it was the mother who appeared solid.

I was about to suggest to Brooks that we drive out of town as quickly as we could when he called out, “There it is!”

There was a typical blue and white sign on the corner at the far end of the business district. ‘Forester Ford’ it said. Behind it was a modest salesroom and a number of bays stretched out along the back of the building. The whole lot took up half of the block. In front, a row of gleaming F-150 pickup trucks sat proudly, looking like rugged sentries protecting the colorful rows of Contours and Tauruses behind. It wasn’t a huge store, but it was impressive for the apparent size of the town.

“When we get back to Dearborn, I’m going to have a long talk with the people who maintain our database,” Brooks growled as he scanned our dealer list. “I’ve checked this three times and still can’t find a listing for this place.”

I pulled into a visitor’s parking spot and watched with amusement as two salesmen jumped up from their desks in the showroom and raced each other to greet us as we got out of the car. The winner of the little contest to see who could wait on us smirked at his co-worker, then turned back to us, his hand extended.

“Hi, welcome to Forester Ford,” he said with practiced ease. “I’m Jim Carlsbad.”

I took his hand in spite of the fact that Jim was one of the transparent people. So was the other salesman for that matter. I was surprised to feel Jim’s hand. It was as solid as my own. “Allen Ripley,” I said. Then with a nod at Brooks, “And this is Dan Brooks.”

“Just call me Brooks,” he said, reluctantly extending his own hand. I could tell from his expression that he had been as surprised as I had been to find the salesman’s hand solid.

“So what can I do for you?”

I explained, “Brooks and I are with Ford out of Dearborn. Is Mr. Forester around?”

I could see the disappointment on the salesman’s face. There might be something odd about his appearance, but he acted just like almost every other salesman I had met. His visions of a live prospect evaporated.

“We weren’t expecting you,” Jim said apologetically.

“Well, there was a little mix-up,” I replied vaguely. “As long as we’re here though, is Mr. Forester available?”

“What? Oh, yes... sorry. He’s out in the service bay. Come on, I’ll take you there.”

I was impressed with Forester Ford. The showroom was immaculate and the cars displayed simply but effectively. The staff were neat and dressed more formally than I would have expected in a small town–coats and ties for the men and skirts and heels on the women. It was almost as if someone was getting ready to shoot a TV commercial there. It looked like the showrooms in our ads.

The Service Department smelled of oil, rubber and exhaust, as all auto service departments do, but it, too, was neat and clean. The mechanics moved about with a professional air of NASA technicians, their neatly pressed blue work shirts and pants a tribute to their professional demeanor. It was almost too good to be true. Hell, it really was too good to be true.

“This place looks like its bucking for an award,” Brooks muttered to me.

I agreed. Most dealerships didn’t look this sharp even when they knew we were coming. Many dealers tried to impress us, but most fell short. We had seen the best and we had seen the worst. Forester Ford was impressing us without even trying. Oh sure, there was an oil spill here and there or something out of place, but lot-boys seemed to be everywhere, cleaning up spills and replacing tools as fast as possible.

“So you boys are from the Home Office!” a booming voice called out. Brooks and I had been so busy admiring the service area that we hadn’t noticed when Jim had left us to find the boss. We turned to see a large overweight man of perhaps forty-five. He wore a tasteful gray suit and sincere tie around his thick neck. His thinning blond hair was well-trimmed and the smile on his round face was friendly. If he hadn’t had that unsettling air of transparency about him, he would have looked like any of a thousand Ford dealers around the country. “Bill Forester,” he announced, extending a large hand.

With what I hoped was no hesitation, I took the proffered hand. It was as solid as I now expected it to be. Brooks followed suit.

“You boys should have let us know you were coming,” Bill Forester told us. “We would have rolled out the red carpet for you.”

It was a little bit of a joke. Ford’s leasing program was known as a Red Carpet Lease, so we had heard it before. We chuckled anyway.

“So what are you two boys doing here?” he asked in a friendly tone. There was no suspicion in his voice–only curiosity.

Brooks scratched nervously at his moustache, an obvious sign that he expected me to come up with the answer. We had worked together so long that we knew each other’s mannerisms by heart. I was up to the task. “We’re making an unannounced tour of Ford stores in Oklahoma and Arkansas,” I said glibly. I hoped my face wasn’t red. I didn’t want him to know how screwed up our database was.

He smiled. “Well, always happy to have folks from the Home Office show up. We don’t get folks out here from Dearborn very often.”

Well, I supposed since they weren’t even in the database, that wasn’t too surprising. I wondered how they even managed to get new cars in. Production had to be on a different database. When I got back home, I was going to have serious words with the people who maintained our data.

Bill Forester spent the rest of the morning showing us around. Brooks and I felt pretty honored by the attention. Usually, we got shunted off to the care of some flunky while the dealer did more important things–like setting up his tee time. Bill seemed rightly proud of his operation though, and was anxious to show it off personally. By the time the tour was done, I had practically forgotten that most of the employees I had met had had that odd transparent quality.

“You don’t suppose it was something in the drinks that caused us to see these people so funny, do you?” Brooks asked when we were alone for a few minutes. The look on his face indicated he didn’t really believe that himself.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If you hadn’t noticed it too, I might have written it off as some sort of trouble with my eyes. I mean, I can’t really see through them.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean. If I don’t think about it, they all look perfectly normal. Then, if I concentrate, it’s as if I can see what’s directly behind them–sort of like a double exposure.”

We didn’t get a chance to say more. Bill hurried back to join us. “You boys must be hungry. I’ll tell you what–let’s go get ourselves some burgers and talk about any training you want to do.”

Bill promised us the best burgers in the state for lunch, and I have every reason to believe he made good on his promise. Rusty’s Burger Barn wasn’t fancy. It was one of those places with plastic upholstering on the booths and chairs and linoleum on the floors. In fact, it looked like something out of the past–the sort of places you went for a good burger before McDonald’s sprung up everywhere. The neon sign in front declared ‘Rusty’s Best Burgers.” And they were the best.

“You want to bring me another choc malt, Michelle?” Bill called out to the cute waitress in the institutional pink dress.

“You bet, Bill,” she called back, practically yelling in the ear of a customer sitting at the lunch counter. “How about your friends?”

“Nothing for me,” Brooks groaned. “I’m stuffed.”

“I’d take another Coke,” I called back in what I hoped was as folksy a tone as Bill had used. After all, I had grown up in the Midwest myself. I could be folksy when I wanted to be.

“On its way,” she called back.

When our drinks were delivered, we all settled back in the booth. Bill stared across at us with a big friendly grin. “So what do you think of our little operation?”

Talk during lunch had been confined to baseball and the weather. Now it was time to get down to business. “To be honest, Bill,” I began, “you’ve got about the sharpest operation I’ve ever seen–especially for a small town like Ovid.”

Bill grinned happily.

“I’ve got to level with you though,” I went on. “There’s a glitch in our database. We found you by accident.”

Bill chuckled, “You aren’t the first folks to tell me that.”

“We aren’t?” Brooks blurted out.

Bill shook his head. “Nope. It seems like mapmakers are always forgetting about us. You buy an atlas–one of those nice Gousha jobs–and we’re not in there. It used to kind of bother us, but nowadays, we just think it’s kind of funny.”

“But doesn’t the Chamber of Commerce get a little upset?” I asked.

“Not really,” he answered.

Brooks and I waited for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. It wasn’t as if Bill was being coy with us. Rather, it was as if he saw nothing particularly unusual about a thriving town that simply wasn’t on the map. It didn’t make a lot of sense.

But then again, I was starting to notice a number of things about Ovid that didn’t make sense. Ovid was almost too good to be true. Oh, it was normal I supposed, but it was somehow on the plus side of normal. Things were a little too good. For example, Bill’s dealership was not run like a small town operation. Salespeople in small town operations wore open shirts and–often as not–wrinkled pants. Bill’s salespeople wore neatly pressed sport coats and ties, and their shoes were shined as if they were going to a military inspection. The building was modest but it was spotless. The landscaping was a little greener than I might have expected so early in the spring. Come to think of it, Ovid seemed a little warmer and more pleasant than I would have expected on such an early spring day.

“Your service people don’t look as if they need much from us,” Brooks told Bill. “Frankly, they look as if they could teach what we have to give them all by themselves. Probably the best we could do is give them a little update on what’s coming out this fall and a little look at future products.”

“I should do the same for your sales force,” I added.

Bill nodded, obviously pleased. “We’ll set everybody down right after work today,” he resolved. “You both don’t mind if I invite somebody from the paper over, do you? This would be good press for us.”

We agreed. There was nothing we had to say that was company confidential. The odd thing, I thought, was here was a man who wanted press attention and yet wasn’t concerned that his town wasn’t even on the map.

“Have you noticed something funny?” Brooks asked me as we waited in one of the offices while the staff prepared for our little talk.

I looked up from the notes I had been reviewing. Bill had given us the Sales Manager’s office to work out of, so I had plenty of room to spread my notes all over his desk. “I’ve noticed a lot of funny somethings,” I told him. “What did you have in mind?”

“There’s something funny about Bill and most of the others,” he began.

I nodded. “Yeah, we can almost see through them.”

“So why aren’t we worried about that?” Brooks asked.

“Worried?”

He leaned on the desk, facing me. “Yeah. Why didn’t we just turn tail and run the first time we saw somebody who looked transparent?”

“But they’re not really transparent,” I argued. “It must just be the hangover or the heat in the car or...”

“It’s not the hangover, pal,” he interrupted. “You’ve had hangovers before and didn’t start seeing through people. And as for the heat in the car, we aren’t in the car now. Besides, this is the most comfortable day of any season I’ve ever spent in this damned state. Yet we aren’t upset about all this.”

“You’re upset,” I pointed out.

He shook his head. “Nope. I’m curious. There’s a big difference. Something’s going on here, and I think the company may have something to do with it.”

“Ford has something to do with people being transparent?” I asked, my voice spilling into nervous laughter. “Now where did you come up with that one?”

Brooks looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “There’s a company here in town called Vulman Industries.”

“I know,” I told him. “I overheard the receptionist talking about it. Her husband works there. It’s some kind of defense contractor.”

“That it is. But did you know Vulman also makes parts for Ford?”

That I didn’t know. Brooks correctly interpreted my silence. “So Ford knows all about Ovid, but they won’t admit it.”

“What do you mean they won’t admit it?”

“I called up a friend of mine in Purchasing,” he explained. “Vulman is a supplier for Ford. The company makes fuel pumps for some of our vehicles. But Purchasing says the company is in Tulsa.”

“Maybe it is,” I argued. “Maybe the headquarters are there and Ovid is just a manufacturing plant. You need to take it easy, buddy. The next thing you know you’ll be telling me that there really is a face on Mars and the CIA put it there.”

“I’m just saying we need to be careful,” Brooks clarified. “Let’s just do our presentation and get the hell out of town before sundown.”

“You think they all turn into bats and drink blood after dark?” I teased, laughing.

To my surprise, Brooks didn’t join me in my laughter. “I don’t know what I think,” he said ominously. “I just know what I know, and I know there’s something weird about Ovid.”

Yes, there was, I admitted to myself. I returned to my notes and tried hard not to think about it.

The presentation went well. Of course it did. Bill’s staff were model employees. Like everything else in the dealership, they were almost too good to be true. They listened attentively, asked just the right questions–politely of course–and displayed remarkable intelligence. And there wasn’t a solid person in the crowd. As I finished my presentation, I was beginning to think that Ovid was a town populated by space aliens or something.

“Great job, guys,” Bill said, patting us on the back as his employees drifted off to wherever seemingly transparent people went every evening. “Everybody really enjoyed it.”

I nodded in agreement. The smiles had been genuine and the applause warm. I could see Brooks nodding, too.

“Now I’ve got you boys a couple of rooms over at the Ovid Inn for the evening,” he went on.

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” I said, beating Brooks to the punch. “We’ll just head out this evening and get back to Tulsa.”

“Nonsense!” Bill said with a stage frown. “It’ll be dark soon and some of these roads around here are a little tricky at night. You can get a good night’s sleep and start out fresh in the morning. Try Nellie’s Grill out on the highway for breakfast. She makes some fine biscuits.”

Our next round of protests were weaker. To tell the truth, it had been a long day, and hangover days always seemed twice as long. I was tired and getting a little hungry again, and I had worked with Brooks long enough to know he was in the same boat. Now, part of me wanted to get out of Ovid quickly, but part of me wasn’t looking forward to dark roads in my exhausted condition. Besides, maybe the locals really did turn into bats at night, and I sure didn’t want to meet them on the road.

Just joking.

The Ovid Inn wasn’t exactly the Hilton, but it was pleasant enough. It was situated on the main highway through town, surrounded by gas stations, convenience stores, fast food joints, and a lesser motel or two. The lobby was clean but plain–probably a preview of the rest of the place. It consisted of a bulletin board with the names of local restaurants and attractions, a couple of cheap chairs that I thought at first were only folding chairs, and a reception desk sporting a pen, a bell, and a nameplate that read ‘Z Proctor, Proprietor.’

Z Proctor was a slim man who appeared to be approaching his mid forties with little grace. His hair was graying and thinning at the same time, and his small bushy mustache added at least five years to his apparent age. “Folks call me Zee,” he told us as we filled out the registration cards. “Been runnin’ hostelries for... well, seems like forever.”

“Uh-uh,” I muttered, not really listening as I filled in the blanks on the registration card.

“Now if there’s anything wrong with the bed, you let me know,” he said with measured concern.

“Sure,” I responded, picking up the key while thinking he was really a weird old duck. Now why had I called him old? I was just a few years over thirty, and Brooks was closer to forty. Yet there was something about Zee that made him seem almost ancient.

“Looks like we’re side-by-side,” Brooks commented, looking at the numbers on the doors. “Want to clean up and see what kind of night life Ovid’s got?”

I felt my head throb just a little. “How can you talk about partying after last night?”

“You ever hear of the hair of the dog that bit you?” he asked with a grin.

“Yeah, right,” I groaned. “I’ll tell you what–I’d settle for a burger and a beer. Give me a few minutes to clean up first.”

This was not going to be a night of drinking and debauchery, I told myself as I washed my face and lathered it up to shave. Last night in Tulsa had been a near thing. We had been lucky we hadn’t gotten ourselves in a nasty fight. If that big bouncer hadn’t stepped in, we’d probably be in either jail or a hospital by now. Dearborn wouldn’t look favorably on that at all. This was going to be a one-beer night. Period.

I really liked Brooks. He and I had been travelling together for the better part of a year. Although I always suspected he had a private side he never allowed me to see, we had become almost like brothers, seeing eye-to-eye as we did about so many things. We both had the same view of the world, and had our dislike of the Japanese extended to other races, we would probably have grabbed a couple of guns and headed for the northwest with the white supremacists. But we didn’t really think that way. Blacks and even Mexicans were okay with us. But Orientals? Well, to be honest, we had both been raised to think of them as sneaky little foreign bastards. Don’t like it? So sue me. Sue us.

But it was more than that that held the two of us together. We enjoyed the same things. We liked cars and hated our ex-wives. We liked women though, with Brooks preferring brunettes and I blondes–which meant we seldom went after the same girl. And we both liked to toss down a few brews.

The only difference was that Brooks could toss down a lot more than I could. Three or four beers and I was wasted. Brooks had twenty pounds on me though, and a seemingly unlimited capacity for beer. So far, that twenty pounds had stayed off his waist, but that was coming, I was sure. He undoubtedly had a long evening planned in a local watering hole. So okay, I’d have one with him while I ate and take the car back to the motel, leaving him to take a cab.

But could I really do that? I thought as I finished shaving. He had nearly gotten himself beaten up the night before. I didn’t want him to get in any trouble. So okay, I’d stay with him, but I’d just nurse my beer. Or maybe I’d turn to (shudder) soda pop or something.

My thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. “You ready, Allen?”

“Coming.”

We ended up at a place with the unlikely name of Randy Andy’s. We had both expected a strip club but were disappointed to find it was just a local tavern. It seemed like a popular joint though. The place consisted of two rooms. The first sported a long bar with typical bar stools padded in dark blue or black plastic–with the dim lighting I couldn’t tell which. There were few tables along the opposite wall, leaving a wide aisle in between. The second room was actually a little larger than the bar. It consisted of more tables uniformly arranged, some booths along the far wall, and a large pool table lit by a fancy pool table light advertising Coors Beer.

I can’t say the joint was jumping, but business looked fairly good for a week night. A Shania Twain song was rocking along in the background, but not so loud as to mask the din of conversation or the clicking of pool balls. Brooks and I chose a table near the pool table determined to play a couple of games when the two would-be cowboys at the table finished their game.

Things started looking up when the waitress came swivelling over to us. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was damned attractive, her long dark hair and evenly tanned skin made her look as if she’d be more at home on a warm beach somewhere rather than a small town like Ovid. She wore a short white minidress that did little to disguise her full breasts and long trim legs, and the way she walked easily on her high heels was enough to make a married man leave home.

“What’ll it be, guys?” she asked with a sultry voice.

“How are the burgers?” Brooks asked, his eyes resting on her cleavage.

“Good,” she replied, watching Brooks with amusement. “Want one?”

“With cheese and whatever’s on tap,” Brooks responded. Then, “What’s your name?”

“Sly,” she said, not missing a beat. From the casual way she responded, I could see she was used to being hit on. I could also tell she was choosy about her men.

“I’m Brooks. What are you doing after you get off?”

So okay, it wasn’t the best pickup line in the world, but I had seen it work for Brooks more than once. Not this time, though.

“Well, after my boyfriend picks me up, I thought I’d go home and see how my son was doing,” she said blithely. Then she turned to me, a mischievous twinkle in her eye, without giving Brooks another thought.

“I’ll take the same,” I said meekly.

“Damn!” Brooks muttered as she walked away. “I’d like to be her boyfriend. I’ll bet she drains him dry every night.”

I nodded in agreement. This was the way Brooks and I had spent many an evening on the road. We had become connoisseurs of barroom burgers and big-chested waitresses in a couple of dozen states. I suppose looking back on it that it wasn’t much of a social life, but it seemed to satisfy us at the time.

“So what do you think?” he asked after Sly had delivered our drinks.

“About what?”

Brooks snorted, “About what? Look around here, Allen. We’re sitting in the middle of a town that isn’t on the map calling on a Ford dealer that isn’t in our database surrounded by transparent people.”

“They aren’t really transparent,” I pointed out. “They’re...”

He waved away my comment with his hand. “I know–you can’t really see through them. It’s more like...”

His voice trailed off as Sly placed two platters heaped with a sizzling burger and a mountain of golden fries in front of us.

“You guys need anything else?”

I smiled. “We’re doing fine.”

Sly surprised us by hanging around to talk. The way she had rebuffed Brooks, I figured she’d give us a wide berth. “So what do you think of Ovid?”

“How do you know we’re not from around here?” I asked, taking a sip of my beer.

She laughed at that. “Ovid is a small town. Everybody pretty much knows everybody. Besides, my boyfriend is a salesman at Forester Ford. He told me all about the two of you.”

Brooks looked at me as he munched a bite of his burger. I could see he was thinking the same thing I was. Sly seemed willing to talk, so maybe she could answer some of the questions we had.

“So how long have you been living in Ovid?” I asked casually.

Her answer was cryptic at best. With a shrug, she told us, “I guess you could say I’ve kind of lived here all my life.”

“Kind of?” I prompted.

“You’ll find out what I mean eventually,” she replied with a smile. “It’s a little hard to explain though.”

“It seems like a nice town,” Brooks said laconically.

“Oh it is,” she agreed. “It’s like Disneyland.” When she saw the confusion on our faces, she laughed again. “You know what they call Disneyland–‘the Happiest Place on Earth.’ Well, I think maybe that could describe Ovid, too. Although you might not think so at first.”

My God, I thought, we’re talking with a crazy woman. What was she talking about? I wanted to ask her more, but my thoughts were interrupted by shrill feminine laughter.

Brooks and I looked up to see two young women–twins–walking into the room. They were not the most attractive women I had ever seen with their dull blonde hair and sharp features, but their identical short pink dresses showed very memorable figures. I could feel a little interest between my legs.

Sly looked over her shoulder. “Like them?”

I must have nodded without thinking about it.

“They’re the Borland twins,” she told us. “Jean and Tina. You want me to introduce you?”

And introduce us she did. Jean and Tina–I never could figure out which was which–were poster children for dumb blonde jokes. Between the two of them, they had about enough brainpower to be a low-grade moron. But what they lacked in intelligence, they made up for in... other things.

So okay, taking to bed two ignorant farm girls who weren’t smart enough to charge for their services might not be something to be proud of. I mean, I hardly felt as if I had proven my romantic prowess by bedding a girl who practically ripped my clothes off on the drive back to the motel. Those girls were bound and determined to get screwed that night–and probably every night for all I knew. Still, when you’re a road warrior like Brooks and I, you take sex where you can find it.

“I feel like shit,” Brooks mumbled over breakfast coffee. On Bill Forester’s suggestion, we had hunkered down for breakfast the next morning at Nellie’s Grill. The girls had left after they had drained us, leaving Bill and I to toast to our success with a bottle of bourbon Brooks kept at all times. We may have had a few too many, because morning came far too early.

We had checked out of the motel already and tried to reach Dearborn. Unfortunately, there was something haywire with both our phones. “A cell must be out somewhere,” Brooks muttered.

“Or a satellite,” I suggested when he had tried again at Nellie’s.

“That’s okay,” he sighed. “We’ve got open tickets, so we can either head off to where we were going yesterday or go back to Tulsa.”

“I vote for Tulsa,” I said. That was the good thing about our jobs. We planned our own routes and were left pretty much alone by headquarters, communicating mostly by phone or e-mail. “I’m ready to get out of Oklahoma and rest up for a few days.”

Brooks nodded, his eyes so tired I thought his eyeballs might fall out. “Me, too. Tulsa it is.”

At least Nellie’s biscuits put us back together again. Or maybe it wasn’t just the biscuits. We each had a big country breakfast with ham, bacon, eggs, and that Southern delicacy known as grits. Brooks ate my grits, too. I never could stomach those things.

“On the road again,” Brooks muttered. Then he looked a little puzzled, as if there was some ritual he hadn’t performed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“It’s funny,” he mused, “I couldn’t find my cigarettes yesterday. Nobody seemed to have a light anyhow.”

And the lighter in the car wasn’t working, I noted to myself. I had tried it before we went to Randy Andy’s and couldn’t get it to light.

“Come to think of it,” he continued, “I haven’t had a cigarette since we got to Ovid. It’s almost as if I didn’t have the urge to smoke one.”

“I know what you mean,” I told him, suddenly uneasy. How could two men who had smoked since they were teens suddenly lose all desire for a cigarette? But I felt the same way. It was as if I had no urge to light up.

Brooks and I had worked together long enough that some things could go unsaid. He was thinking the same thing. What was it Sly had said? Something comparing Ovid to Disneyland... Oh yes–the Happiest Place on Earth. So did that mean the Happiest Place on Earth suppressed desires like smoking?

“And I haven’t seen a single cigarette machine, have you?”

I shook my head. “Maybe selling cigarettes is against the rules around here.”

“Whose rules?” he snorted. “I’ve bought cigarettes out in little tank towns in Utah. Utah, for God’s sake! Even the Mormons sell cigarettes.”

“I don’t know the answer,” I admitted, “but I think the sooner we get out of this town, the better I’ll like it.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

It was Brooks’ turn to drive. I was just as glad. The way my head felt, I didn’t think I could concentrate on the road. As we started down the highway through town, I think we both had feelings of trepidation. There was something very wrong with Ovid–something not natural. And I kept thinking about some of the things Sly had said. She kept saying we’d find out things eventually, talking as if we wouldn’t be leaving Ovid any time real soon. Maybe she was telling us not that we wouldn’t leave Ovid, but rather that we couldn’t leave.

Well, I thought, she was wrong about that. The last outpost of Ovid, a tiny service station, was now behind us. Brooks put the pedal to the metal and...

My heart was somewhere around my back molars when I heard the sudden wail of a police siren.

“Oh shit!” Brooks muttered. I turned around to see what he had already seen in his mirror–a police car.

No one likes to see the flashing red and blue lights of a police car behind them, and Brooks was no exception, but there was something in his eyes that denoted more alarm than usual at the sight. I’m sure I had the same look in my eyes as well. My mind reeled back to a story I read in high school where a strange town–I think it was supposed to be in New England–barbecued speeders. Surely I didn’t expect to be barbecued, but I had a strange premonition that the faceless cop just getting out of the police car wasn’t just going to issue us a ticket.

The familiar mantra wasn’t long in coming. “Step out of your vehicle please.” The cop was tall and lean. He looked like he ran marathons to work up a light sweat. I couldn’t see much of his face, though. In the brief time that he had leaned over to talk to Brooks, his eyes had been masked by a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

Brooks stepped out with a resigned sigh, carrying his driver’s license and the rental agreement for the car with him. I slumped down in the seat of the car, making myself small. It didn’t work though. The cop leaned over to address me as well, managing to keep an eye on Brooks as he did so.

“Step out of the car please.”

My hand shaking, I opened the car door and slowly slid out of the car. The cop motioned with his head that I was to come around and stand next to Brooks. Now I’ve watched a lot of cop shows, and I have to say that considering he had no backup, he didn’t seem to be terribly concerned about facing two mean in the prime of their lives. Something told me he didn’t have to worry about what we might do though.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he asked Brooks, not bothering to look up from the license.

Brooks shrugged nervously. “I’m not sure. Fifty? Fifty-five?”

“Fifty two,” the cop confirmed, then added, “In a twenty-five mile per hour zone.”

“Twenty-five!” I blurted out. “But we’re a mile out of town.”

“Not really,” the cop replied laconically. “City limits extend out a little beyond here. It’s twenty-five to the city limits.”

“It’s a damned speed trap,” I muttered while Brooks tried with a small headshake to quiet me down. Yeah, I was out of line, but I knew a speed trap when I saw one.

“Follow me to the City Hall,” the cop told Brooks, ignoring my outburst.

“Officer, will this take long?” Brooks asked politely.

I thought I saw a thin smile cross the cop’s lips. “Not long–not long at all.”

“Damn you, Allen,” Brooks growled as he pulled out behind the cop. “Are you trying to get us thrown in jail?”

“Sorry,” I said, meaning it. “He just pissed me off. I mean, we were a mile out of town–or at least a mile away from any buildings. He was waiting for us–or somebody like us. He knows damned good and well that strangers wouldn’t know where the town speed limit ended.”

“Well, there’s no sense in bitching about it,” Brooks told me as we re-entered Ovid. “Let’s just hope we can run through this process quickly and get back on the road. Have you tried to call Dearborn again?”

“Just tried,” I replied. “I still can’t get anything on the phone.”

“They probably think we’ve run off to join Toyota or something.”

“Fat chance of that,” I laughed.

We turned off the highway and headed toward the business district. A block west of the main drag, we came upon a gray granite building with impressive columns in front. The words ‘City Hall’ were carved into the granite above the columns. As small town city halls went, it was a decent looking building with the Oklahoma flag flying next to the US flag in the grassy area in front of the building. Except for the state flag, it could have been the city hall of almost any small town in America.

We pulled in next to the cop in a part of the lot labelled ‘Police Business Only.’ The cop didn’t even bother to turn around to see if we were following him. We were though, until he came to a stop at a desk at the entrance of the police department. The desk was manned by a very attractive black woman dressed in a police uniform. I could see the name Hazleton on her nametag.

“Good morning, Officer Mercer,” she said primly. In spite of her formality with him, there was a friendly smile on her face.

“Good morning, Wanda,” he replied in his deadpan voice. I thought though that I detected a little friendly warmth in his voice–just a little that is. “Book these two please while I see the Judge.”

“Wait a minute!” I demanded. “What am I being booked for? I wasn’t driving.”

Officer Mercer just shrugged and walked away without answering me.

“You’ll be booked pending charges,” the black officer explained. “And your friend here will be booked for speeding.”

Brooks and I looked at each other. Again, the unspoken communication between the two of us kicked in. The expression on Brooks’ face said we were in deep doo-doo. I couldn’t have agreed more.

“Look,” the woman said, “the Judge will probably see you in just a few minutes. Just relax and stay calm. It will all be over in a few minutes.”

Her words were meant to be comforting, but somehow they carried a warning in them. Part of my mind was telling me this was just another small town speed trap. We’d just pay the fine and move on, sadder but wiser with a vow never to return to this strange little town. Part of my mind was telling me there was something else going on. Oh, I didn’t really think we’d be barbecued or anything like that, but I had an odd premonition that my life–and Brooks’ life–would soon change radically.

“You boys want some coffee?” Officer Hazleton asked as she strolled over to the coffee pot to pour herself a cup.

“Please,” we both said in unison. Coffee might calm my nerves a little, I thought.

“Anything in it?”

“Black for both of us,” Brooks volunteered.

The conversation was so mundane that it was practically surrealistic.

“Here you go, boys,” she said, handing us each a cup.

The coffee was good, and it calmed my nerves enough to ask, “Officer Hazleton...”

“Call me Wanda.”

“Wanda,” I began again, “what’s going on here?”

“Going on?”

“He means this town,” Brooks said. “What’s going on here? This town isn’t on the map. There are people running around that you can almost see through–not you, but others. The Ford dealer here isn’t in any Ford database. And now, we get picked up for speeding–almost as if somebody doesn’t want us leaving town.”

If I was expecting her to look at us as if we had just lost a load of brain cells, I would have been surprised. Instead, she just smiled and said, “It’s sure a mystery, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” I agreed.

“Well, just let me give you a little advice,” she said as she leaned back on a desk and sipped at her own coffee. “When you see the Judge, be respectful. If you’re real careful, this will all come out a lot better than you think.”

It was cryptic advice. If it wasn’t for the color of her skin, she and Sly at the bar could have been sisters the way they talked in riddles. I didn’t have time to ask her anything else though. Officer Mercer had returned.

“The Judge will see you now,” he intoned, almost as if it was a mantra.

I now know how condemned prisoners feel. We were led down an institutional hallway toward the courtroom. I had this odd feeling that we weren’t going to end up with just a fine and a strong admonition from the magistrate. It’s funny how those feelings can hit you. There was no basis in fact for the feeling. By all rights, I should have expected a mundane court appearance. Maybe it was the day Brooks and I had spent in Ovid that gave me the feeling. If we had just been picked up sailing through town, we wouldn’t know about the transparent residents and the women who spoke in riddles. We wouldn’t have had a full day to let our imaginations get carried away. We wouldn’t be wondering why we had lost the urge to smoke and why our phones didn’t seem to work. We wouldn’t both be as weak-kneed as we were when we were led into the well-appointed courtroom and directed to a table before an imposing bench.

An attractive brunette woman awaited us at the table. Her gray business suit and tailored jacket and skirt identified her as a lawyer. She turned as we approached, sparing a moment to smile at an attractive blonde woman in the gallery–the only spectator in the room–before turning to us.

“Susan Jager,” she said, holding out her hand. I took it, surprised at how firm her handshake was. Most women never seemed to be able to manage a firm handshake. After Brooks and I had introduced ourselves, she explained, “I’m your court-appointed attorney for this case.”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Brooks began, “but do we really need an attorney for a traffic case? I mean, I thought we’d just pay the fine and move on.”

“There are... special circumstances in this case,” she replied. Great. Just what we needed–another woman who spoke in riddles.

“Look, Ms. Jager,” I began in an exasperated tone, “we know there’s something... different about Ovid. We need to know what the hell is going on here so we can deal with it. All we want is just to leave this town.”

She favored me with a small smile. She was a very attractive woman when she smiled. “Well, Mr. Ripley, your appearance here today will go quite a ways toward telling you what’s going on. As for leaving Ovid, that’s another matter entirely.” I started to tell her I was tired of answers that weren’t really answers when she stopped me by continuing, “I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear, but believe me, you two, the Judge is very upset about this case.”

“Upset?” I asked. “Over a speeding charge?”

“No,” she replied. “Over your recent conduct. He thinks you both have a lot to learn, and he plans to teach you. Now, if you’re smart, you’ll take my advice. Answer his questions honestly and completely–even if you don’t think they have any bearing on your case. If you wise off or defend any unsuitable conduct, you’ll find yourself in more trouble than you can handle. I know you don’t understand why I’m saying this to you, but believe me, the rest of your life is in the balance.”

It was a sobering lecture. She was right. I had no idea why she was telling us all of that, but I had a sneaky hunch it was good advice. Brooks looked equally serious. Neither of us said a word. Susan nodded at us and said, “Good, you’re learning. Maybe there’s some hope for you.”

“All rise!” a voice called out. I turned to see Officer Mercer had entered the courtroom and was the acting bailiff. “The Municipal Court of the City of Ovid, Oklahoma, is now in session, the Honorable Judge presiding.”

My knees trembling, I rose to my feet with Brooks and Susan flanking me. I nearly passed out from relief when I saw the Judge. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was relieved at how... normal he looked. Imposing–but normal. He appeared to be middle aged–perhaps fifty or so–with dark hair had only a tiny hint of graying that was still to come. He had a neatly trimmed beard which was still dark but flecked with bits of gray giving him a rather distinguished look. He wore gold-rimmed glasses which somehow made him look more like a college professor than a magistrate. His black robe was impeccably neat and pressed as if he had taken it right out of the dry cleaner’s bag.

It was then as I was just deciding that things were pretty normal after all that I realized Officer Mercer had not mentioned his name. Instead, he had simply called him “the Honorable Judge” as if that was sufficient. ‘Well, chalk it up to one more oddity about Ovid,’ I told myself. With any luck at all, we’d pay a substantial fine but be allowed to leave town without further ado. Sure.

“Be seated,” he intoned, taking his own seat at the bench. “First case.”

“The City of Ovid versus Daniel Brooks and Allen Ripley,” Officer Mercer declared formally.

The Judge looked down at a report set before him. He read it slowly, grunting occasionally. Then, looking at our attorney, he asked, “Ms. Jager, how will your clients plead?”

I suddenly realized she hadn’t even bothered to ask us how we wanted to plead. For that matter, I didn’t even know what I was charged with. Now I knew how Alice must have felt when brought before the Red Queen. I wanted to jump up and protest, but I remembered what Susan had told us. What was going to happen was going to happen, and no lame protest from either Brooks or me was going to make it any better–and it just might make it worse.

“In the matter of speeding, guilty, Your Honor,” she said. “In the additional matter, I have had the opportunity to review their files and find their conduct to be less than ideal but hardly reprehensible enough to warrant extreme measures.”

What in God’s name was she talking about? What conduct? What extreme measures? ‘This whole affair was taking a nasty turn,’ I told myself.

“Mr. Brooks!” the Judge boomed, causing Brooks to jump nervously to his feet.

“Yes, Your Honor?”

“Isn’t it true that you were nearly involved in a fight in a bar two nights ago?”

Now how did he know about that?

“Uh... yes, Your Honor.”

The Judge’s eyes narrowed as he leaned forward. “And are you aware of what the outcome of that fight should have been?”

“Should have been, Your Honor?”

The Judge didn’t bother to speak. Instead, he waived his hand and the entire courtroom suddenly disappeared. Somehow, I was no longer sitting. Instead, I was standing, a bottle of beer in my hand. Behind me, a Faith Hill song blared through loudspeakers. I gasped and was assailed by cigarette smoke–something I hadn’t smelled since my arrival in Ovid. I looked around, realizing I was back in the bar in Tulsa that Brooks and I had gone to with Tony.

And yes, Tony and Brooks were both there. Tony looked just as he had before our near fight. Brooks on the other hand looked as startled as I. Then, Brooks seemed to lurch to attention as he asked mechanically, “What’s the action like here?” Then, as if forced, his hand reached out for a handful of pretzels.

This wasn’t like the dream sequences you see on television. There were no echoing voices or people moving in slow motion. When I turned my head, I saw solid walls–not the out-of-focus stuff from some television director’s attempts to be arty. This was real–or at least it felt real. Had the whole Ovid thing been some sort of a dream? Had I tripped out from too many nights of drinking and smoking into some sort of little pocket mental universe?

Tony was shrugging–just like before. “Not bad.” He nodded at the same three girls sitting together at a nearby table. There they were again–a blonde, a brunette, and an Oriental girl. “Three of us–three of them. It looks like a plan.”

Tony started to move, but I stopped him. I tried to stop myself first, but I couldn’t. I was about to utter the same stupid comment that had started the whole altercation. “Wait a minute, Tony. Who gets stuck with the Jap?” There it was. It came out of my lips even as I tried to stop it. It was as if I was nothing more than a passenger in my own body.

It’s funny, but although I had never liked Orientals–particularly Japanese–the comment I had just made sounded... stupid. At the time I had originally made it, it had seemed like a perfectly logical comment. After all, I knew some guys who didn’t like, for example, redheads. If the third girl had been a redhead, one of those guys might have said, “Who gets stuck with the redhead?” Now though, there was something wrong with the remark. I parsed it in my mind in that moment between my comment and Tony’s response. Stuck. That was a bad word to use. It implied the Oriental girl was inferior goods. Jap. Well, okay. A lot of my ancestry was Irish. What would I have thought if someone had called me a Mick? Like I said, in retrospect, the comment sounded stupid.

Tony’s brow furrowed. “Jap? Oh... you mean Jodie. She’s not Japanese–she’s Chinese.”

Brooks snorted, “See? She’s a Chink–not a Jap.”

Please, Brooks, I thought to myself. Let up. I know I started this, but it’ll just get worse if you don’t shut up. But I knew he had the same problem I did. The Brooks inside the one I saw had been standing next to me in an Ovid courtroom only moments before. He, too, had been sent back to relive this time. But why?

“Yeah,” Tony said. There was that unpleasant note in his voice again. “Jodie Chang. She works for the Pontiac store next to us. What’s the problem?”

“No problem,” I told him. Please, somebody back down this time, I thought to myself. I had a premonition that we hadn’t just been sent back to relive this moment. Something different was about to happen. “You know how it is, Tony. We work out of Dearborn. Japs–uh, Japanese aren’t too popular back there in the auto community.”

“Yeah,” Tony mumbled. “And those guys in Dearborn can all go piss up a rope. My brother’s married to a Japanese girl. She’s good folks.”

“Yeah, right.” There was Brooks right on cue.

This time, I watched Tony rather than waiting for Brooks to deliver his next line. If Brooks hadn’t been so drunk the first time around, he might have seen the intense anger in Tony’s eyes. He might have held back on his next comment if he had noticed Tony clenching his fist.

“Japs, Chinks, Nips, Slant-eyes, Gooks, it’s all the same,” Brooks commented with that evil little grin. “All the slant-eyes in the world aren’t worth one American job and you know it!”

“Okay, big mouth!” Tony yelled just like before and lunged for Brooks.

I was again in no position to stop him. I had been leaning back against the bar before and was again.

I was waiting for the big blonde guy again–the bouncer. What was his name? Oh yeah–Apollo. I was waiting for him to make his move just as he has before. I could see him standing across the room, but to my consternation, he wasn’t coming toward us.

I felt sorry for Brooks as I saw Tony’s punch coming toward him. That big ham hock at the end of Tony’s arm would do serious rearrangement to Brooks’ jaw. And I was sure Brooks was remembering what had happened before as well, or maybe he just didn’t have the ability to move. In any case, he was doing nothing to defend himself. He wouldn’t be prepared for the blow. I had to do something to help my friend.

“Tony!” I yelled jumping into his first. I hadn’t exactly meant to do that. I was trying to hold his arm back but I had miscalculated the arc of his swing. As I’ve pointed out before, I was never much of a fighter. Tony’s fist caught me high on my arm, sending a sharp pain through my whole shoulder.

Then I saw Brooks jump Tony, yelling something about laying off his friend. It all went downhill from there. I could see Tony’ face, red with anger. I could see a couple of other guys–presumably friends of Tony’s–enter the fray. Punches were thrown and bodies were flying when I heard several loud pops. At first, I thought it was something in the sound system, but then I realized it was coming from the gaggle of men we were fighting.

I felt a sudden sting in my chest. Something told me I didn’t really want to know what it was, but I had to know. I looked down and watched in fascinated horror as a red blotch spread over my shirt. I took a breath–or at least I tried to. I suddenly felt light-headed and tried to steady myself on the bar, but I nearly tripped over something. Looking down, I realized I had nearly tripped on Brooks. He was lying on the floor, a pool of red seeping out from under his prone body. I felt myself falling, and then...

...I was standing before the Judge. I looked to my right and nearly giggled with relief as I saw Brooks standing there, ashen-faced. I looked down at myself. There was no bloodstain. I sucked in a deep breath, revelling in the fact that I could still breathe at all.

“What... what...” I managed to gasp.

The Judge knew what I was trying to say. “What happened? You have just had the opportunity to see what would have happened had Apollo not intervened. You chose a very popular man to pick a fight with.”

I wanted to tell him we weren’t picking a fight, but I realized in that moment that it would have been a lie. We had indeed provoked the man, teasing him without realizing how deep his convictions were.

“He had friends,” the Judge continued. “And one of those friends had a gun. Alcohol, bigotry, and guns–I can’t think of a better formula for disaster, can you?”

We couldn’t speak. It wasn’t that we were being restrained from speaking. We could just not think of anything to say in our own defense.

“And the spark that lit the fire was pure mindless bigotry,” he went on in a most menacing tone.

“Uh... Your Honor,” I said nervously, “we–Brooks and I–we aren’t bigots.”

“Oh of course you’re not,” the Judge replied in a disgusted tone. “You don’t mind blacks or Jews or anything like that. You just don’t like Orientals–particularly Japanese. Selective bigotry is no less bigotry. And close your mouth. Don’t start telling me about what they did at Pearl Harbor. What they did then was no better or worse than any other nation at war. And they certainly paid for their mistakes on dozens of islands in the Pacific, not to mention at Hiroshima.”

He continued to glare at us as our attorney slowly rose to her feet. “Your Honor, before you pass judgement, I would like to say something.”

“Choose your words carefully,” he warned.

Susan nodded, then continued, “While there is no doubt that you have in the past handed down deservedly harsh sentences to bigoted individuals, such as those two clansmen who came through town last month, I would submit to you that these men have committed no crimes of bigotry of that magnitude.”

Reluctantly, the Judge nodded. Susan took that as permission to continue.

“I would submit that there may be a better solution in this case–one which would be of benefit to the town.”

The Judge leaned forward. “Do you have a specific solution in mind?”

She shook her head. “No Your Honor. I would leave that up to you. My clients would like to throw themselves on the mercy of the court.”

I nearly shook my own head. I never thought I would hear that phrase actually used. I was just glad she had said it, though. The whole scenario was so unreal–but I knew it was real. And I knew that the Judge was no ordinary magistrate. He was... something else–something I could never have imagined existed until I fell under his power. Now something was going to happen–something unimaginable.

The Judge was silent for a moment, staring first at out attorney, then shifting his gaze to Brooks and me. Brooks seemed to understand the same thing I did–that we were in deep, deep trouble, and that the next few moments would have a profound effect on the rest of our lives. I suspect that Brooks, like me, had no idea of how profound an effect it would be.

“Very well,” the Judge said at last. The relieved sagging of Susan’s shoulders told me we had just dodged a bullet. No–not a bullet; more like an artillery shell. “Mr. Brooks and Mr. Ripley, you are hereby found guilty.”

Of what? I wondered. Were we guilty of a traffic violation or bigotry? It didn’t seem to be a good time to ask, though.

“However,” he continued, “on pleas of your counsel, I have decided to be lenient. However, I must warn you that your sentence is in a manner of speaking a form of probation. Should you violate this probation in any manner, you will find yourselves dealt with more harshly. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” we said in unison, as respectfully as we could.

I expected sentence to be passed upon us, and considering what happened, that was what he did. However, I didn’t realize it at the time. I watched in surprise as the Judge closed his eyes and began to speak in a language that sounded like Latin. Whatever language it was, its inflections were unlike any Latin I had ever heard spoken before.

I didn’t have much time to speculate on it though. As he spoke, there was a strange feeling washing over me, almost as if every part of my body–inside and out–had begun to tingle. It was almost like the feeling I once had when I had touched the pole of a battery while in a Ford training session, sending an electric current throughout my body. It caused me to gasp, and at the same time I heard Brooks gasp as well.

The Judge’s eyes opened and his steel-blue eyes bored into us. “As you leave this courtroom today, be aware that there are many forms of prejudice and bigotry. In spite of what some people think, no one is immune from being bigoted. But continue your bigotry at your own peril.”

I don’t even remember leaving the courtroom. I think we thanked Susan for her help, turned and left without a look back, but I’m not certain. My next coherent memory was standing outside the courtroom with Brooks watching as a white Honda Odyssey van pulled up into the parking space in front of us. The engine stayed on, and I remember looking into the tinted glass to see the driver. He was a man of about medium height with short hair and was wearing sunglasses. For some reason, I walked to the van, opening the passenger door behind the driver and wordlessly stepped inside, feeling a little odd–almost smaller–as I did so.

Looking to my right, I saw for the first time that there was another passenger in the seat. He was an Oriental boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, wearing a San Francisco Forty-Niners T-shirt and denim shorts. He was one of the semi-transparent people. He seemed engrossed in a book; he hadn’t even noticed my presence.

The driver–another semi-transparent person–seemed oblivious as well, not speaking or shifting his head as... someone stepped in the vehicle next to him. I had expected it to be Brooks, but it wasn’t. It was an Oriental woman, dressed in shorts and an aqua tank top. She had long, nearly black hair hanging down her back, and she moved with feminine grace. Her face, while pretty, wore a look of near panic as she numbly belted herself in. She looked back at me with pleading eyes, causing me to look down at what she was seeing.

Oh God.

I looked down in horror. I was wearing a white tank top very similar in style to the one the woman wore. But there were no mature breasts jutting out from it–yet. That was subject to change, however. I could feel the skin beneath and top swelling, filling the cups of a bra I now sensed there. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take my eyes away as breasts began to form. Please, I begged silently in hopes that whatever agency was doing this could hear me, don’t let them grow any larger. I was almost giddy when they stopped short of the woman’s breasts. My relief was short-lived though, as I watched my pants had become short denim shorts exposing legs that were slim, golden and hairless–and undeniably feminine. I could feel myself flush as I noticed the red nails on my small toes, peeking through feminine sandals.

I was finally able to move a hand to touch the breasts. I wasn’t surprised to find the hand slender and feminine, with longish red nails at the ends of the small, slim fingers.

“This is City Hall,” the driver’s voice said suddenly. As the driver turned, I realized that he, too, was Oriental. Undoubtedly I was too, I suddenly thought.

“Rachel, you’ll get your driver’s license here and Trish will have to come down here to get her Oklahoma learner’s permit.”

My mind was working overtime. In an instant, I realized that the driver had no idea there was anything out of sorts. So, I was Trish–or at least he thought I was. To make matters worse, I was now too young even to have a driver’s license. But I could get a learner’s permit. That made me probably fifteen, which was something of a relief. From my perspective, my changed body had looked almost small enough to belong to a child of no more than twelve or so.

“Now I imagine you’re both anxious to see the new house your mother and I found for us,” the driver said cheerily.

Mother?

Wait a minute–where was Brooks? I looked again at the Oriental woman while she looked back at me. “Brooks?” I mouthed silently. I was rewarded with a nervous nod of her head.

If someone had asked me what I would do if ever faced with such an incredible situation, I would probably tell them I would be screaming bloody murder. I would say that I would hop out of the van and go back to the Judge, demanding that he change me back into my real self. Yes, that’s what I would have said my actions would have been. They weren’t though. Instead, finding myself sitting in the van, obviously changed into a young Oriental girl, I did nothing at all. I sat meekly looking at the woman who had been Brooks hoping maybe he–she–would make the first move. But she didn’t. She just sat there in shock just like me.

Our driver–who obviously thought himself to be my father and the woman’s husband–prattled on about what a great little town Ovid was and how we would all be very happy here. “I know you’ll miss the Bay Area,” he said cheerfully, “but you’ll like Ovid. It’s a friendly little town. There’s practically no crime. And we were able to get a much nicer house here than we had in California–for less money!”

I wasn’t really listening all that closely. Instead, I was looking out the window of the van trying to make some sense of what was happening to me. Little more than a day ago, I had never heard of Ovid. Now, it appeared I was doomed to become one of its residents. Was that why some of the population of Ovid seemed a little transparent while others weren’t? Were the ones like Brooks and me the prisoners and the transparent ones the jailers? No, that didn’t make any sense either. The jailers were beings like the Judge and maybe that Officer Mercer.

But what about people like Susan, our attorney? She seemed content with her lot in Ovid, but she lacked the arrogance of a Judge or the self-righteousness of Officer Mercer. Extending the jail analogy one step further, maybe she was like a trustee.

So how had we fallen under Ovid’s spell? It must have happened as a result of the near barroom brawl. Maybe a brush with death was all that was needed to remand us to the custody of Ovid. Our lives were then forfeit. Perhaps we really had died in that bar and Ovid was some sort of strange afterlife. If so, it was a hell.

It was bad enough that I found myself in the body of a girl, but an Oriental girl made it all the worse. So what was I? Chinese? Korean? Worse yet–Japanese? I sighed. I supposed I would find out soon enough. Whatever I was, I had no doubt that I was stuck this way for as long as the Judge wanted me here. It would do me no good to rant and rave. I’d just have to do what Brooks appeared to be doing–sit back and take it.

In minutes, we had turned onto a quiet residential street. The houses, while hardly palatial, were nice semi-custom homes, most with two floors and plenty of brick trim. None looked brand new, as if the neighborhood had been built slowly over time. Judging from the size of the trees and shrubs, the oldest homes were perhaps ten years old while the newer ones were only a couple of years old.

We pulled into the driveway of a particularly nice one, freshly painted with blossoming trees in the front yard.

“Well, what do you think?” our driver asked.

The boy who I assumed was now my brother looked up from his book long enough to grunt noncommittally. The woman who had been Brooks remained silent with a forced smile on her pretty face. I suddenly realized they were all waiting for me to say something.

“Come on, Trish,” the driver urged. “What do you think?”

“It’s... nice,” I managed to say rather stupidly.

It seemed to be enough though. He opened his door, calling out to me, “If you think it’s nice now, just wait until you see your room.”

Oh I could just hardly wait.

I got out of the van, feeling for the first time all the sensations girls grow up knowing. My breasts shifted as I did and my hips felt a mile wide. Long hair blew in my face in the light breeze and my bare legs, denuded of any hair felt a chill. And although I had not been a huge man, I felt absolutely miniscule. Judging from the approximate height of the van, I was now no more than an inch or two over five feet. As he walked around to my side of the van, I could see that the boy who was now my apparent brother topped me by a couple of inches. Shit! I was practically a fucking midget!

It made me feel perversely better to see that Brooks was not a whole lot taller than I was. The woman he had become was no more than five-four or so if that. And our driver–dear old ‘dad’–was only about five-eight or so. Terrific. We were a stereotypical short Oriental family. The next thing I knew I would be bowing and saying “Ah-so!”

On the plus side–if there was one–the house was the nicest one I had ever had the opportunity to live in. When my father lost his job, we had been living in a much more modest ranch house that we were barely able to hang onto with mother’s smaller salary. Then, when I had married, I had moved into my wife’s apartment. After the divorce, I had gotten a smaller apartment where I had lived ever since. As much as I travelled, I hadn’t needed much of a place.

Now though, I was about to live in the American Dream. There was no furniture yet, but drapes were an indication that someone had lived here before us. Thick carpets and hardwood hallways greeted my eyes, and up the stairs, I could see doors leading to what appeared to be four large bedrooms.

“You’ll get the bedroom on the right down the hall,” my ‘father’ told me. “It’s the biggest one next to ours.”

“Why does she get the big room?” the boy whined speaking for the first time since I had seen him.

“Because girls need more room,” my new father said with an indulgent smile at me. “You know that, Ralph. Trish had the bigger room in California, too.”

“Just because she’s a dumb girl...” Ralph muttered, his voice trailing off. Great. Just what I needed–an obnoxious little brother. What else could go wrong?

Some day, I thought, I’ll learn not to ask that question, for the next thing my ‘father’ said was, “We need to get over to the high school today, too. That way, you two kids can get back into school right away.”

‘Back into school?’ Oh my God, he said high school. Been there–done that. But there could be no convincing him of that. I was a girl–probably a sophomore or junior–who would be expected to go to high school.

“Come on, Ralph,” my surrogate father said with a grin. “Let me show you your room. Your mom can show Trish her room.”

Dutifully, Brooks and I walked down to my assigned room. Safely inside the sunny room, Brooks closed the door. “Allen, that is you, right?” Her voice was soft and feminine–nothing like the raspy cigarette voice of Brooks.

“It’s me,” I replied, almost feeling tears well up in my eyes, so happy was I to be called by my true name. “What’s happened to us?”

“I guess that Judge is some sort of magician,” Brooks offered.

“Magician!” I sneered. “Magicians saw people in half and pull rabbits out of hats. Look at me! Look at us! Look at this whole town! Magician?”

She nodded. “Okay, whatever. We can discuss that later. Right now, we have to figure out what to do.”

“There’s not much we can do,” I sighed. “We’re going to have to play along until we can get back in to see that Judge and make him change us back.”

Brooks suddenly looked frightened. “Face him again? I don’t know about you, pal, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. He was pretty pissed at us before. He might do something even worse to us if we bother him.”

“Worse?” I spat, indicating my feminine curves with a wave of my hands. “How much worse than this can it get?”

“A lot, I suspect,” Brooks shot back.

“Oh sure,” I growled–or tried to growl. In this body, it was more of a purr. “You at least get to be an adult. I have to go back to high school. High school for God sakes, Brooks. As a girl!”

“So? You think I’ve got it any better? Sure, I’m an adult, but I’m a married adult woman. You at least get some time to get used to the idea before... before...”

Oh shit. I saw her point. What was it going to be like for her when dear old dad decided it was time to play hide the sausage? She could hardly say demurely that she wasn’t that kind of girl. Two kids that were supposedly hers were a pretty good indication that she had played in the hay before.

“Oh God, Brooks, I’m sorry,” I said, fighting back a sudden urge to go over and hug her. “I didn’t think about that.”

There were tears in her eyes. She tried to give me a brave smile, though. “That’s all right. I’ll figure out something. For now, though, we’ve got to fake it. I’m going to have to pretend to be a wife and mother and you’re going to have to pretend to be my daughter. Otherwise, we’ll just make things worse. I think what’s happened here is that your ‘father’ has gotten himself a new job here in Ovid. The rest of the ‘family’ doesn’t want to be here.”

“I don’t need to fake that,” I snorted. “I really don’t want to be here–particularly like this.”

“Stuff it, Allen. Our men folk could be back any minute.”

“Okay.” Since there was no furniture to sit on, I plopped down on the floor. “Give it to me straight, ‘Mom’.”

She ignored the comment. “Let’s just try to act normal. I’m... what was that he called me?”

“Rachel.”

She nodded. “Rachel. Mom to you. But what’s our last name?”

“It’s probably in your wallet.”

She looked back at her feminine ass. “Damn! I guess I have a purse out in the car. I’m going to have to get used to carrying one. You, too... Trish.”

I winced at the new name.

“So that’s all settled,” my new father said, bursting into the room with Ralph. Ralph looked reasonably happy, so apparently he found his room acceptable.

“Let’s go get some lunch and get you two registered for school,” ‘Dad’ said with a smile.

For the second day in a row, I ate at Rusty’s Burger Barn, only this time it was as Patricia Sue Yamamoto. Yes, that was my new name. I had discovered it when I looked in my own purse back in the car. There it was on my California learner’s permit. I was fifteen–closing in on sixteen at the first of the summer–and the picture showed an attractive Oriental girl with a friendly smile. Or I guess I should say she was attractive if you like Oriental girls.

‘Dad’ and Ralph scarfed down the burgers and fries as if they hadn’t eaten in a week. Then, they washed them down with thick malts. I had taken my cue from Brooks, who had ordered a small sandwich–no fries–and a Diet Pepsi. She seemed to know what she was doing, and to be honest, I was upset enough over my transformation to have only a limited appetite. The result: I couldn’t even eat all of the smaller burger. Of course, I had a lot smaller body to keep fuelled than I had had the previous day at Rusty’s.

The next stop was Ovid High School. I felt as if I was being sent to prison as we walked into the building. Don’t get me wrong. I liked high school when I was a teenage boy. I was active in sports and reasonably popular with the girls. But that was as a boy. I remembered when I was in high school how the girls were treated and how they treated each other. They were cliquish, boy crazy, and very concerned about things like hair and makeup. Now I would be expected to act that way, wouldn’t I?

Fortunately, we walked into the office while classes were in session. I say ‘fortunately’ because the few students who were in the halls were looking at the four of us as if we had just landed from another planet. What was their problem? Then I realized that small towns in the Midwest didn’t have much of an Oriental population. As far as they were concerned, we really were from another planet.

A friendly if somewhat transparent secretary got us registered for school. She kept looking to Brooks for answers regarding what level of classes we should be in. I guess mothers are expected to know those things. A combination of our transcripts which had been sent to the school and some great bluffing on the part of Brooks got us through the meeting. In fact, I marvelled at how well Brooks was taking this whole situation. I was quaking in my shoes and she was calmly playing her part as if born to it. Apparently, I was a sophomore. That was a little bit of a break. That would give me a little status around the school–and it meant one less year I would have to repeat if Brooks and I were unable to figure out a way out of this mess. God, what a thought!

“Okay,” my new dad said with his ever-present smile. “Now that we have that out of the way, I need to go out to Vulman and get a look at my office. I’ll get all of you checked into the motel first.”

“But I want to go with you!” Ralph whined. “Mom and Trish will just be doing girl stuff.”

The only girl stuff I wanted to do at that moment was to stuff my ‘little brother’ in the nearest trash can. He was going to be the bane of my new existence.

‘Dad’ agreed. After getting us checked in, he took Ralph and left Brooks and me alone in the room.

“Did you see the way that Proctor guy in the motel office looked at us?” Brooks asked as soon as we were alone.

“No,” I admitted. I was already starting to become uncomfortable with the way men were looking at me. I had tried to ignore the innkeeper entirely.

“He knows who we are,” Brooks said a little fearfully. “He’s one of them.”

“One of who?” I asked, plopping down on one of the two queen-sized beds.

Brooks looked out the window, as if to see if we were being watched. “One of the ones like the Judge. The town must be full of them.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, laughing for the first time since my change. “Feminine intuition?”

“Maybe,” Brooks allowed to my surprise. “Who knows what I picked up with this body.”

I leaned forward as Brooks sat down on the bed next to me. “How are we going to get through this?”

She shrugged. “The same way everybody else does–one day at a time.”

“I know,” I replied, “but I mean how are we going to convince everyone that we’re really girls? I don’t even know how to get this damned bra off–let alone dress and act like a girl.”

“I’ll help you,” she said, surprising me again.

“You?” My eyes narrowed. “You weren’t some kind of a transvestite, were you?”

“No!” she laughed, but her face was flushed. It was a natural, feminine laugh that I found both comforting and unsettling at the same time. “I was just raised with three older sisters. I was the only boy. I learned more about women and women’s clothing just growing up around them than I did in five years of marriage.”

I saw his point. I had grown up with two brothers, and my brief marriage had been a real eye opener for me as far as women’s apparel and grooming had been concerned. To make matters worse, my wife had been rather modest, preferring not to talk about many things she considered too personal. I began to realize I had no idea how to act like a girl. Hell, I had even been too timid to go to the bathroom, knowing it would mean exposing my new genitals.

“What’s wrong?” Brooks asked, noting the strained look on my face.

“I just realized I have to go to the bathroom,” I replied, surprised at how insistent the urge was.

“Then go?”

“Like this?”

Brooks sighed. “If you’re waiting for your penis to grow back so you can stand up to go, you may have a long wait.”

“Very funny,” I muttered, but it was enough to get me to stand and head for the bathroom.

“And don’t forget to wipe!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, slamming the door.

I was actually a little proud of myself when I finished. It hadn’t been nearly as bad as I had thought it would be. And I felt a lot more comfortable.

“Did you wipe?” Brooks asked, not bothering to look up at me. She had been hanging up clothes from our suitcases in the small closet.

“Yes, Mother,” I replied as sarcastically as I could.

Instead of getting mad, Brooks looked at me with a smile. “You sound just like my sister, Mary.”

That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Help me put things in drawers,” she said, going back to her work.

“Why?” I asked. Like most men, I had always literally lived out of a suitcase, not bothering to put things in drawers. I was always more concerned about leaving things behind than I was about putting them in their proper place. Brooks had always been the same way. The ‘why’ was more a question of why the change rather than why put things in the drawer.

Brooks didn’t seem to notice, though. “It keeps things neater,” she explained. “I sort of think it’s expected of us.”

This was getting spooky. “What do you mean by that?”

She stopped and looked at me. “While you were in the bathroom, I just decided to relax and let my mind wander. The next thing I knew, I was doing this–just the way my mother used to do when we’d go on a trip. I think it may be part of the transformation spell. When we don’t think about it, we just act natural.”

“Like natural females you mean.”

“Have you looked at yourself lately?”

Actually, I had. I had spent a few minutes looking at my new face and body in the bathroom mirror. What I saw was a cosmic joke. I had grown up hearing about ‘those sneaky Japs.’ Now I was one–and a female one at that. Oh, I was cute. I might not have liked the Japanese, but I could appreciate feminine beauty no matter what the race. Of course, I had all the expected Oriental features. My skin had a nearly golden quality, but not exactly yellow. It was more like a warm tan. I had practically no body hair on my arms and legs. Of course, I had felt some hair down below when I had wiped, and the hair on my head was a luxurious mane of ebony. My eyes had the typical Oriental ‘slant’ to them–which of course wasn’t really a slant at all, but rather the way bones and skin shaped the eyes.

I hadn’t bothered to remove my top, but I could see that my breasts while not huge were well proportioned, and my waist was small without looking too thin. As for my hips... well, let’s just say they were the hips of a girl. I knew I’d never walk again without feeling them moving with a girlish swing. Given my short stature, I was certainly... well, petite.

“Well, have you looked at yourself?” Brooks asked again.

“I thought it was a rhetorical question,” I returned.

“Well, it wasn’t. It’s time you realized you really aren’t the man you used to be.”

“I realize that,” I said with a sigh, returning to the bed. “But you sound as if you’re a lot more resigned to it than I am.”

“Don’t let this act fool you,” she said, sitting back down on the bed. I suddenly realized how much alike we appeared. She was just an older version of me. “I want to get back to my life as much as you do. But it isn’t going to happen right now. We’ve got to come up with a plan. I figure by Monday...”

“Monday!” I screamed. “It’s only Thursday. That means being like... like this for four whole days.”

“At least,” she agreed. “But tomorrow, your ‘father’ will be taking the day off to be with me while the movers get us into the house. Then, the courts will be closed on the weekend, I would think. That makes Monday the first day I can pull you out of school over the lunch hour and try to see the Judge.”

“Maybe our attorney can help,” I suggested.

“Good idea!” Brooks said cheerfully. “I’ll try to get away tomorrow and call her.”

So I felt a little better after that. We had a plan. It wouldn’t be so hard to play the girl for a few days. Of course, I’d have to go to school and be seen as a girl–a Japanese one at that–but then Monday, we’d see the Judge. Maybe he would accept our apologies and let us continue our real lives.

Dear old Dad got back a short time later with Ralph in tow. “So,” he asked, “did you girls have a good time without the men around?”

I almost cringed at the question, but Brooks coolly replied, “Oh yes. We just had a nice girl talk.”

I hoped she didn’t see me cringe again. How could she be taking this so calmly? I wondered. Maybe it was because although suddenly finding herself female, she was still an adult. As a teenage girl, I would find it very hard to get anyone to take me seriously. I’d be expected to act like a teenage girl and think with my emotions. To make matters worse, I was short and cute, so who in the world would take me seriously even as I got older? And then there was the fact that I was Japanese...

“One of the guys at work told me about a great steakhouse here in town called Winston’s. I thought after the movers leave tomorrow, we’d go there–you know, get dressed up and celebrate.”

Oh, that was just what I wanted–to get dressed up in a dress and heels and go eat a petite filet while stopping every few minutes to freshen my lipstick. Please, ‘Mom,’ tell him to settle for burgers on the grill. Of course, I’d be exposing my smooth legs in jeans shorts just like not but at least nobody outside my ‘family’ would see me.

“That sounds wonderful... dear,” Brooks said to my disgust. Why had she called him ‘dear’? Then I realized the hesitation had come because she didn’t even know his name. Great. Here she was–married to a guy whose name she didn’t even know. At least I could get by with calling him ‘Dad,’ but if he called me something like ‘princess,’ I’d have to kill him.

We both managed to make it through the evening without too much trouble. For dinner, we selected a little place in downtown Ovid called The Greenhouse. It was a pleasant little place, and the chef’s salad that had for some reason sounded good to me was excellent. The only problem with the place was that it was that I noticed people staring at us. Oh, I had noticed it at lunch, too, but it seemed as if people had been more rushed at lunch, favoring us only with a curious glance. Dinner was a more leisurely meal though, and Ovid’s citizens–both solid and not-so-solid–seemed to have more time to rudely stare.

Maybe I was just being oversensitive, I thought. Maybe they just noticed strangers since the town was so small. But maybe–just maybe–it was the fact that we were Oriental that caused them to stare. How many of them thought as I always had–that the Japanese had no business here? And how many were just curious?

I think I began for the first time to realize that I had been made into someone who was different. What I mean to say is that if I had been changed into a white girl, I would have been noticed for being attractive, but not different. There were plenty of attractive white girls in Ovid, I was sure. But I hadn’t seen any other Orientals. That made me and my new family by definition different. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

Thankfully, dinner ended and our time on public display was over for the evening. I think we all noticed it. It wasn’t as if people were hostile, but it made us all feel uncomfortable. Brooks had been in the same boat with me, but ‘Dad’ and Ralph apparently had no inkling of any other existence–if they had ever had one. I had begun to think of them as real people in spite of the transparent aspect. It wasn’t as if I could actually see through them anyway, so they were very real to me. Whatever their origins compared to ours, they were also a little unsettled by the attention we had garnered.

Strangely enough though, we didn’t talk about it. Brooks and I were at a disadvantage since we had only been who we now were for a few hours. I think Ralph was a little young to have picked up on how much attention was paid to us. As for ‘Dad,’ he looked uncomfortable but had said nothing. I could understand that. More than likely, it was his decision to come to Ovid–or so he believed. That meant he would want the rest of us to feel comfortable in our new home. He would scarcely want to point out to us that we were potentially the subject of potential prejudice.

I slipped into bed quickly so as not to be seen very long in the short pink and white gingham pajamas I had been forced to wear. It had taken me an ungodly amount of time to get ready for bed, but I had discovered something in the process. By just relaxing and going with the flow, my body seemed to know just what to do, washing off the day’s makeup, removing the earrings from my ears, and wiping after peeing. It was a trick I’d have to remember in the morning. Brooks took an equal amount of time before crawling into bed next to me, but Ralph and his father spent only moments getting ready for bed.

Once the lights were off and everyone had settled down for the night, I reflected how much my life had changed in just a few hours. There I was, in bed with an attractive woman in a motel room–a situation I would have loved under different circumstances. The problem was that the woman was really my best friend, and the body I was now in was not exactly the one I would have chosen to take advantage of the situation.

Still, my mind had drifted to thoughts of sex. It was unavoidable, I supposed, since lying there quietly not having to speak had freed up my senses to explore the body I was now in. I was used to sleeping on my side, feeling my male organs drooping down as I did, carefully arranging my legs to give them room. Not now, though. Now, there was nothing but a void between my legs. Oh, I was plenty sensitive in that region, but there was nothing tugging at me as before.

The tug I felt was on my chest. While I realized intellectually that my breasts were actually a little on the small side, their presence was new, causing me to be a bit more comfortable when lying on my back, forcing them to spread a little more evenly across my chest.

The sheets felt a bit rougher, as if my skin was somewhat smoother and sensitive. I suppose, too, that the absence of most of my body hair meant more of my skin was exposed to the sheets. Perhaps this was why women’s clothing seemed to be made mostly of softer fabrics.

Then there was my hair. As I moved my head, the long dark hair ebbed and flowed along the pillow, carrying with it a sensation that at once tickled and caressed. I found as I began to drift off a little that I had to keep pushing it away from my face. Tomorrow night, I resolved, I would tie it back to keep it from doing all that.

On the whole, I had to admit that the sensations of my new body were not all that unpleasant. In fact, had I given in to the occasional impulse I felt to explore the body with my hands, I was sure that I would have found the sensations quite pleasant. But all that notwithstanding, I recognized that I had no desire to be a girl–particularly an Oriental girl. It was an insidious punishment that the Judge had devised. And as I drifted off to sleep, I realized that in the morning, it would be even worse.

I would be forced to go to school...

“Trish!”

Who the hell was Trish and why was a woman calling for her in my room?

“Trish!”

A cavalcade of sensations hit my wakening body. Long hair. Boobs. The rest.

Oh shit! It wasn’t just a dream.

“Trish!”

My eyes opened. The woman who had been Brooks was looking down at me. She was already dressed in shorts and a top like the day before.

“Get up!” she ordered. “You need to get ready for school.”

“School?” I repeated stupidly.

“It’s your father’s idea,” she explained. “He thinks you and Ralph should go to school today. It will give you a chance to meet some of the local kids and keep you out of the way while we get moved in. He’s already taken Ralph out for a big greasy breakfast. Do you need any help getting ready?”

“No,” I mumbled, crawling out of bed to the unpleasant feel of breasts shifting on my chest. “I’ll just put it on automatic–if you know what I mean.”

She nodded. It was obvious she had experienced the little trick of going with the flow. “Give a call if you need anything.”

Sleepily, I grabbed what I would need out of my suitcase and trudged off for the bathroom. It wasn’t until I got in there that I realized Brooks had referred to my ‘father’ without making it sound sarcastic. Wasn’t he–she–getting into playing the part just a little too well?

Of course she had already experienced something that I was just then experiencing–seeing my body naked for its shower. There was no denying that I was all girl–and an attractive one at that. I cringed at the thought of going to school. I’d be driving all the little boys wild.

Or would I? I wondered as I turned on the water. I never had any interest in Oriental girls when I was in high school or college. Oh, I could appreciate that many of them were quite attractive, but my dislike of all things and people Japanese seemed to extend to my sexual preferences as well. With so many nice looking white girls in the world, why go Oriental? Let them stick to their own kind, I had always said.

But now, I realized as I soaped my delicately golden skin, I was Oriental. I was a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by the whites I had always been comfortable with. Now I was different. Would I have felt any more comfortable back in the California I had supposedly come from? Probably. I would have still felt uncomfortable to be in the body of a girl, but I wouldn’t have felt nearly as conspicuous.

Well, I realized resolutely, I might be an Oriental girl, but it wasn’t as if I was a Japanese exchange student. I spoke flawless English and I had seen enough of the clothing provided for me to know I would be dressed just like all the other teenage girls in the high school. Maybe they’d just ignore me. That would be fine with me.

“Not bad,” Brooks said approvingly as I stepped out of the bathroom. I had managed to make myself look like a typical teenage girl. It hadn’t been that difficult. I just retreated into my own mind and let the body do the rest. Oh, there had been a little temptation to fondle myself in the shower, but I had resisted it. As for fixing my hair and makeup, I just pulled back into something resembling an Alpha state and observed. I did try to exert a little control to get my body to lighten up on the eyeliner but to no avail.

As for clothes, I wore jeans shorts again and a white knit top. I opted for tennis shoes with white socks. I discovered too late that the socks had a lacy little top, but what the hell. It wasn’t like I was wearing pantyhose and heels or something.

“You need earrings,” Brooks observed.

“Oh please.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But remember, you want to fit in today. Girls wear bracelets and necklaces and earrings–you know that.”

“Okay,” I finally agreed with a sigh. After all, I had been wearing them the day before. “I’ll put in earrings. But forget about the other stuff. I don’t want to look like a walking jewelry store.”

I had just gotten them in my ears when the door opened. Ralph and ‘Dad’ looked well satisfied. I imagined that they had just gone out and enjoyed a big cholesterol-loaded breakfast and done a little male bonding. I could remember doing the same thing with my father when I was a boy. I found myself getting envious. I had the sudden thought that I could have handled all of this transformation crap if I had been made a male–even a young Japanese male like Ralph.

I will still brooding about that when we were dropped off at school. I had three strikes against me. I was a girl, an Oriental, and a juvenile. Even Brooks had only gotten two strikes. He–oops, she–was at least an adult. And if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was actually starting to enjoy lording it over me as if she actually was my mother. But what could I do about it? In the eyes of everyone who counted, she was my mother. If I gave her any lip, I’d probably just have ‘Dad’ down on me. Resolutely I slung the purse Brooks had insisted I take over my shoulder and followed Ralph us the steps of Ovid High School.

Maybe Brooks was right, I thought as I entered the high school to the curious looks of the other teens. Maybe the best course of action was to act as normal as possible. The more inconspicuous I acted, the less embarrassing this whole experience might be. Then, after a weekend in hell, Brooks and I would demand to see the Judge on Monday as planned. Yes, that was how it would be.

So until then, I would just have to be Patricia Sue Yamamoto. Shit.

Ralph and I reported to the Counsellor’s Office to get our class schedules. He was a freshman, so he and I would be in entirely different courses. I found I was actually a little disturbed to lose Ralph’s companionship. True, he was one of the transparent people, but I had touched him and knew he was solid enough. And although I hardly thought of him as a brother like my two real ones, I did feel somehow close to him. For one thing, he seemed as nervous as I about being in a new school. Maybe he wondered how he would be accepted? I hadn’t noticed any other Orientals in town, so we were obviously different.

As I waited for the counsellor to return from taking Ralph to his first class, I thought for a moment about the whole racial thing. I had never liked the Japanese–or Orientals in general for that matter. Yet now I was one. It was a rather heavy-handed punishment in my opinion–one that was completely undeserved. For one thing, I had never been cruel to someone just because he or she was Japanese. I just avoided them. It wasn’t as if I walked around mumbling about how we should kill all the slant-eyes, was it? Since when was it a crime not to like the Japanese?

Yet unavoidably, I was now Japanese. Well, I mean my ancestry was Japanese. I was an American. My whole ‘family’ was American. I didn’t speak a world of Japanese or have any idea who the Prime Minister of Japan was. I spoke English with a California accent (or rather a California lack of accent) and could sing the Star Spangled Banner. I just hoped everyone in the high school would see it that way. I just hoped...

...I just hoped I wouldn’t run into someone who felt the same way about the Japanese that I always did.

“Are you ready, Patricia?” the counsellor asked. Ms. Phelps was the typical high school counsellor. She reminded me of the one in my high school years ago. She was dressed in business attire consisting of a pastel green dress covered with a white business jacket. Her heels were only an inch high and sensibly wide and her jewelry and makeup were a little understated. I found myself a little disturbed that I would have taken the time to first examine her clothing before noticing that she was a very attractive brunette with rather prominent breasts. So what if she was a little transparent?

“I guess so,” I replied, sounding much more like a typical teenager than I cared to. I felt like a condemned prisoner as I walked down the corridor with Ms. Phelps. She tried to be friendly, looking down on me from her lofty five foot seven height, asking me how I liked Ovid. I gave her a teenage “okay” followed by yes and no answers to other questions. I know she was trying to make me feel at ease, but unfortunately, her efforts had just the opposite effect because she was treating me just like a teenage girl.

By the time I approached the classroom, I was almost terrified. She had told me that I’d make lots of new friends and that I was so pretty I’d have no trouble ‘attracting boys just like flies.’ I’d rather attract flies, I thought to myself.

I don’t know exactly what I expected. Maybe I thought everyone in the classroom would laugh at me. No one did, though. In fact, as the teacher came over to meet me, only a few of the students even bothered to look at me. The others were too busy working or whispering to each other while the teacher was distracted.

Most of the class I noticed had that strange transparent look, but a few were real. One in particular caught my eye–mostly because she was looking intently at me. She had blonde hair, about medium length and the face of an angel. I immediately pegged her as the typical stuck-up little cheerleader type. She was everything I wasn’t–or had no desire to be: feminine, attractive, wearing all the right things with all the right labels. I was sure in my mind that the captain of the football team had broken her cherry right after the last homecoming game. In short, I hated her.

I expected a return look of hatred from her, but to my surprise, she looked merely curious. I thought maybe growing up out in a small Oklahoma town, she had never seen an Oriental before. But no, the look was more than that. It was then that I really realized for the first time that Brooks and I weren’t alone. The girl’s look almost seemed to be one of speculation as to what my former identity had been. She–and probably others in Ovid–must be like me, I thought. We were all victims of that self-righteous sorcerer who called himself the Judge.

“Patricia,” Ms. Phelps began, breaking into my thoughts, “this is Ms. Dunlap, your English teacher.”

I found myself nodding to a woman of perhaps forty. She was solid and rather pretty, with dark red hair styled short with a subtle curl. She smiled at me. “Welcome to Ovid, Patricia. There’s an empty seat over in the far row. I’ve put a book out for you and an assignment sheet.”

Then, turning to the class, she said, “Class this is Patricia Yamamoto. Her family has just moved here from California. So please take a moment after class to introduce yourself.”

I remember having that occasional dream everyone has where you find yourself back in high school–usually wearing either your pajamas or nothing at all–and you haven’t the foggiest notion why you’re even there. Well, that was how I felt at that moment. I even glanced down to make sure my breasts weren’t exposed or something. I could feel my face redden as I was introduced to the class as a girl. I hoped they didn’t notice. Maybe with my skin color nobody would.

As quickly as decorum would permit, I slinked over to the empty seat and slid in. Just my luck. I was sitting right next to the blonde. She gave me an infuriatingly warm smile. I ignored it and pretended to review my assignment sheet.

Class went by miserably slowly. I kept getting the feeling that everyone in the room was watching me, sizing me up. When I would dare an occasional glance around, I got confirmation of this. A girl’s head would duck down here and there. The girls were at least subtle about it. I could imagine they were just sizing me up to determine if I was up to their standards. The guys though... oh God.

Hey, I used to be a guy. I knew how they operated when a new girl showed up in class. If the girl was cute–and I knew I was, Oriental or not–he would entertain a little fantasy. What would it be like to have those golden legs wrapped around my back? What would it be like to have those full lips sucking on my cock? Then “what if” would become “I wonder.” I wonder if she goes down. I wonder if she’s a virgin. I wonder. Oh shit.

Mercifully, the bell rang. I rushed to get all my things together before anyone could introduce themselves. To my surprise though, no one did–with one exception.

“Hi, Patricia,” the blonde I had sworn would be my mortal enemy said with a friendly smile.

I was forced to look at her. To my surprise, I saw warm intelligence behind her lovely blue eyes. Her smile was genuine. There was something about her that made it hard to dislike her. I felt my defenses weakening and even managed a weak, “Hi.”

“I’m Jennifer Tilton,” she said, extending her slender, feminine hand.

Good, I thought. Jennifer–not Jenny. Somehow, that made her less ‘cutesy.’ Maybe she wasn’t a cheerleader after all. With only a moment of hesitation, I took her hand. Again I was pleasantly surprised. She had a firm handshake. If I had ignored the feminine shape of her fingernails with their pink polish, I might have thought it was the hand of a small man.

“P... Trish...” I stumbled over my own new name.

She looked me directly in the eye. “Have you met the Judge?”

It was an odd and unexpected question. The look in Jennifer’s eyes was not the look of a fifteen-year-old girl. I already suspected that there were many more transformed citizens in Ovid, but it was the first time someone had confirmed my suspicions.

“I have,” I admitted, realizing that in spite of my first impression, I was forming a bond of conspiratorial friendship with this girl.

Jennifer favored me with a grin. “Good. You remember. I thought you did. What’s your next class?”

“Oh, uh... Biology,” I replied, fumbling with my schedule.

“Bummer. I’ve got Spanish. Tell you what though–I’ll meet you at your locker before lunch period and we’ll talk. Where’s your locker?”

“My locker?”

Jennifer sighed, rifling through the sheaf of papers the counsellor had given me until she found a sheet with a small envelope attached to it. “It says here you’ve got locker 301. Good. I’ve got 315 so we’re close.” She gave me directions to the locker as well as my next class and hurried off for her own class.

She was wearing shorts, too, just like mine. Her top was pink though, and she wore her femininity well. I wondered who she had been before the Judge got hold of her. Obviously she had always been a girl. No man even so completely transformed as I could have walked with such a confident feminine wiggle. Watching her leave the room, I had another reason to regret my transformation. I would have really enjoyed getting hard as I watched her wiggle away.

The funny thing was, that thought was more intellectual than physical. I realized as I walked to my next class that watching all the little teen honeys did nothing for me. In fact, my main concern in watching the girls was to make sure I looked and acted like they did. Being Japanese was different enough for me–I didn’t want to look any more out of place than just my race.

I found myself noticing the guys, too, but not in the same way. The guys were... well they were guys. I found myself intimidated by their size. I seemed to be shorter than any of them. And I felt so weak, watching them all move with what could best be called a swagger, their muscles in evidence. Even the wimpy ones looked like they could take me two falls out of three. It isn’t that I had been a particularly large man, but I had been larger than average, and being athletic all my life, I had worked to keep my body fit and trim. Had I moved like that? Maybe not. Or maybe I had moved like that in high school when I still had the world on a string.

The entire morning was something of a drag. About the only exception had been the biology class. I had been a decent student in high school and college, so most of the morning had been like watching a rerun on TV. Sure, a few things changed, but not many. But biology had changed a lot since my high school days when I had last taken the course. I had always been interested in science, but my dad had discouraged it. He used to say that Americans did all the basic research and then the damned Japs stole it and made all the money from American inventions. I guess that discouraged me from even trying. But now, with all the advances in genetics, I found biology was more than just memorizing phylums. I’d have a lot of catching up to do in that class, but it promised to be an interesting experience.

On the social side, I was either ignored or the subject of curious glances. No one took the time to talk to me, instead spending the brief moments between class chatting with friends or trying to impress a member of the opposite sex. I noticed the ones who were sort of transparent acted no different from the completely solid ones. They all just acted like normal teenagers, making me wonder if I had been right about how many were actually transformed.

I was fumbling about in my locker just before lunch, pretending to be doing something important when Jennifer showed up.

“You’ll need a mirror in your locker.”

“Why?”

“So you can fix your hair and your makeup whenever you get the chance,” she said with an evil grin. “In fact, you could do with a trip to the little girl’s room right now.”

“Oh, I went before my last class,” I told her stupidly.

“Just my luck,” she said with a mock sigh as she rolled her eyes. “I get stuck trying to help Forrest Gump.”

She practically dragged me to the nearest restroom where she proceeded to fuss with my hair. “You’ve got to pay a little more attention to how you look,” she said after looking around to make sure we were alone. “You’ve got nice hair, but you’ve got to keep it looking nice. And as for your lipstick, quit chewing on your lip. You’ve got some on your teeth now and none on your lower lip. Give me your lipstick.”

I numbly produced a tube of lipstick from my purse. She snatched it and began to work on me.

“You know I’m not...”

“I know you’re not really a girl,” she said, completing my sentence for me. “Don’t move. It’s tough enough putting this stuff on somebody else as it is.”

When she had finished, she inspected me critically. “There. Not bad. The eyes could use a little work, but it’ll do. Let’s go to lunch.”

“But...”

“We’ll talk at lunch,” she said, hustling me out of the restroom.

Lunch was everything I feared it would be and more. Whoever first thought to mix macaroni with chilli should be shot. And the meal planner who decided to serve a cinnamon roll with it should at least be in line for a long prison sentence.

“Not much, is it?” Jennifer said as we sat down at a small table as far away as possible from the other students.

“Not really,” I agreed, opening my carton of milk. At least they couldn’t ruin that.

“I remember back when I was in college,” Jennifer began, toying with her food. “Training tables always meant good food. This junk wouldn’t have even been good enough to start a food fight with.”

“Training tables?” I muttered. “College?”

Jennifer nodded with a grin. “I’ll tell you all about me later. Right now, let’s talk about you. What are you in for?”

“In for?”

Jennifer gave another mock sigh. “Haven’t you ever watched prison movies?”

“Oh! Oh, I see what you mean.” I looked down. What was I going to say? That the Judge had made me like this because I didn’t like Orientals? Somehow, that didn’t seem like a good answer.

Jennifer just laughed. “Never mind. I don’t think any of us know why the Judge does what he does. Some of us think he has a master plan. Others of us just think he’s a randy bastard who gets his jollies out of changing us–you know, swapping sexes and what all.”

“Wait a minute,” I interjected. “You mean you were a... No! You’ve always been a girl, right?”

“Wrong.” There was that grin again. “There’s no real pattern, but most of the real girls you meet here used to be male. Not all, of course. My boyfriend, Barry–he was male before. But my guess is that most men who come to Ovid end up with tits and a slit.”

“I’m really confused.”

“You’ll learn,” she said with a shrug.

I noted a few people would wave at Jennifer but no one bothered us at the table. I asked her about that.

“Well,” she began, “most of my friends are seniors. We get together after school but not much during the day. Barry sits with me most of the time, but I asked him not to join us for lunch so I could talk to you alone.”

I must have looked a little stricken. “Oh, you mean so you can tell me about periods and that sort of stuff.”

She chuckled, “No, but I suppose it wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you want, we can discuss that at another time. My period is coming up in a few days and I don’t like to be reminded of it over lunch.

“The reason we’re talking one-on-one is that that is the only way we can discuss your transformation. If there are more than two of us in the conversation, we can’t talk about any of the magical elements of Ovid. We have to act like normal teenagers in a normal town or we can’t talk at all.”

That unsettled me. Everything I learned about Ovid seemed to show me that the magic behind the town was even greater than I had imagined when I had been transformed. “The... the Judge did all of this?”

She nodded. “Most of it. Of course, he has... associates. They’re pretty powerful in their own right. I can’t tell you much about that though.”

“Another taboo?”

Another nod. “Exactly. You’ll figure that one out, though. We all do eventually.”

I was silent for a moment and then asked, “Has anyone ever gotten out of Ovid?”

“By getting out I assume you mean getting changed back into their old selves and blowing this wide spot in the road?”

It was my turn to nod.

“Then the answer is no. Or at least I don’t think anyone has. People come and go all the time–once they’re trusted. I’m not one of the trustees though. The Judge definitely doesn’t trust me. Right after Daddy got me a car, I tried to leave town–just for the heck of it you understand.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “I went south past the airport and out of the valley. But when I crested the last hill out of this valley, I found myself approaching Ovid from the north. It was as if space had looped back on itself. I think they’re playing tricks with time, too, but I can’t be sure on that one.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant about ‘tricks with time,’ but several students sat down at the table behind us. Since they were within earshot, Jennifer indicated with a shake of her head that we’d have to continue our conversation later. “Look, I have to go see Barry before class. Why don’t we get together tomorrow? Since it’s Saturday, we can do something together.”

“Like go to the mall and try on clothes?” I asked wryly.

Ignoring the sarcasm, she replied with a grin, “Sorry, but there’s no mall in Ovid. We’ll find something to do though.”

With that she was gone. I had never felt so alone as I did then, sitting by myself at that table surrounded by hundreds of students. I quickly policed my area and picked up my tray, my meal only half-eaten. I really wasn’t very hungry.

I didn’t get far though. As I turned, a lanky kid with an animal look in his eyes was blocking my way. He had just gotten up from a table in my path. A look down at his half-eaten meal told me he had just gotten up specifically to block my way.

He grinned an absolutely feral grin. “Hey, you must be new here.”

I didn’t reply. There was no way around him. My heart was pounding. Settle down, I told myself. He isn’t going to hit you. You’re a girl now. He may be a bully, but he wouldn’t dare hit a girl in the student cafeteria.

“My name’s Duck. You know, it rhymes with...”

“I know what it rhymes with,” I interrupted nervously.

The grin got wider. “So what’s your name, honey?”

“P... Patricia. Patricia Yamamoto.”

I was suddenly aware that two more Neanderthal clones had come up to join their friend. I was effectively surrounded.

“Hey, Duck,” one of them said, “wasn’t Yamamoto the dude who did us at Pearl Harbor?”

My God, the thing was capable of learning something in a history class?

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Duck said. I began to realize this was a setup. They must have overheard someone far smarter than they mentioning the name of the famous Japanese admiral. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I supposed it was a name some might take offense to. Thanks, Judge.

“It’s a common Japanese name,” a more intelligent voice said from behind me. I turned to see a teen about my present age. He was fairly tall and slender and wore glasses over his blue eyes. He was as solid as I was while his three potential opponents had that transparent look. I was shocked at his bravery, approaching those three morons. He looked as if he wouldn’t even be a good match for one of them.

“Yama means mountain in Japanese,” he explained, ignoring the scowls from the Three Stooges. “And moto means formerly. Put them together and they mean ‘formerly from the mountains.’ Given that Japan is a rather mountainous country, it’s a pretty common name.”

“So what makes you so damned smart, Meecham?” Duck asked. It was far less of a challenge than I would have expected from him.

“I read, Duck,” the teen–Meecham–said calmly. “You know–books? Those things with words on them?”

“Watch it, Meecham,” Duck growled, but there was something I wouldn’t have expected in his voice. Was it fear?

Meecham just answered with a little smile, setting his empty tray down as if to show he was ready to meet any challenge.

To my surprise, the three apes slunk away without another word. There was suddenly animated conversation in the room. I had been too occupied to notice that everyone had gotten quiet to watch the confrontation.

The teen–Meecham–just smiled at me. “Hi,” he said. Then, extending a hand, “Luke Meecham.”

Reflexively, I extended my own hand, discovering for the first time how small it was as it was enveloped by Luke’s much larger one. “Trish Yamamoto.” Then I added, “How did you know what my name meant?”

His smile got wider. “Oh, just one of those things you pick up. I’ve always been interested in Japan. I’d love to go there someday.”

Not me. I had no desire to ever set foot in Japan, but I didn’t tell him that. After all, I was supposed to be Japanese–by ancestry at least.

“Well,” I began after a silent pause, “thanks for helping me out there.”

Now the smile became a laugh. “Don’t worry about Duck and the boys. They think they’re tough, but it’s mostly just bluster.”

That was fine for him to say. He wasn’t just a shade over five feet tall and female to boot. “So how did he end up with a name like Duck?”

“His real name is Terrence,” Luke explained, “but anybody who calls him that really is asking for it. He used to be part of a little unofficial gang of toughs that called themselves ‘The Animals.’ There was Bull–he was their leader then–and Horse and... well, you get the idea.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” I pointed out, noting the sly look on his face.

“Well... Duck used to be called Panther. Then there was a little fight with some of the guys on the basketball team one night. He didn’t see a punch coming, but one of his pals did, and...”

“...and he yelled ‘Duck’ and the name stuck,” I finished for him with a smile of my own. I had a pretty good hunch that it was Luke who had thrown that punch. So he was smart and an athlete. And he wasn’t bad looking... Don’t go there.

“Something like that,” he agreed.

There was that silence again.

“Well,” I began, “I guess I’d better get to my next class...”

“Can I walk you there?” he asked, a hopeful look on his face. “I mean, since you’re new to the school and all, I thought maybe...”

I managed to favor him with a small smile. “That’s okay. I know where it is.”

“Well...uh... maybe I’ll see you around?”

“Sure.”

I left him there, sort of staring out into space. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what was going on. I had been on the other side of such an exchange many times in my life. I did owe Luke for getting me off the hook with Duck and the boys, but I didn’t want him to take the knight in shining armor role too far. I had been a girl for only a day, and I had no intention of being on some guy’s arm then or ever.

But ever was a long, long time, I told myself as I sat in a rather boring social studies class. As much as I wanted to see the Judge and try to get out of this new life, I knew even then that my chances were slim at best. Odds were that I was going to be Patricia Yamamoto for the rest of my life. That meant either life without sex or pick some sort of sexual identity as a woman.

The idea of being a lesbian didn’t appeal much to me. Take Jennifer, for example. She was cute, vivacious, and, judging from the labels on her clothing, probably from an affluent family. Still, sexually she did nothing at all for me. That was probably just as well since she had said something about a boyfriend.

But on the other hand, did boys do anything for me? I recognized Luke as an attractive boy. But I would have recognized that even in my real life. It isn’t that I was into guys, but I could recognize a particularly good-looking guy as well as anyone. So did Luke do anything for me? Was there some faint stirring in my nipples or my new crotch? I didn’t think so. I just couldn’t imagine his arm around me or–worse yet–his lips on mine or... Now there was a little twinge down there. Think of something else I told myself. Think of how much you’d like to wring that bastard Judge’s neck.

The afternoon dragged on. At least it was punctuated by a gym class. It would be good to burn off a few calories and a lot of frustration, I thought. I didn’t even have to worry about gym clothes since the school provided them. It was just a T-shirt with an eagle in black on the front and white shorts, but at least it made me look just like all the other girls. I was grateful that I had worn sneakers that day.

It felt so odd to get undressed in front of a bunch of girls. At least I didn’t have to think about it too much. Some of them had used the informality of gym period to ask me questions. Oh, they were innocent enough questions, but they did ruffle my feathers a little. Some of the girls had been surprised that I spoke English “so well.” Others wanted to know what it was like to wear a kimono or eat raw fish. Well, I had eaten raw fish before in a sushi bar back in Detroit, but they seemed to think because I looked Japanese that I was really from there.

I seemed doomed to be thought of as different. I doubted if they all thought the several Indians in the school lived in tepees, or if they thought the black girls wore lion skins and hunted in the jungle. Certainly they wouldn’t have thought Nancy White was from England or Debbie Brandt was from Germany just because of their last names. What gave them the right to think I was really from Japan? I was from California–or at least I was supposed to be.

At least Jennifer was in the gym class with me. Somehow, it helped to have the one person I was already starting to think of as a friend in there with me. Of course, she would have to pull a devilish little stunt. While we were disrobing to get in our gym gear, she caught me looking at her well-formed breasts. When she was sure no one was watching, she put her hands underneath them to give them a little heft and then grinned wickedly at me.

I felt my face redden and hoped no one else had noticed. That’s all I would need–to have some of the other girls decide I was a lesbian. But the really strange thing was that my thoughts about Jennifer’s breasts hadn’t included the ‘nice set of knockers’ thought that I might have normally had. Actually, I had been thinking that she was a little larger in that department than me, and I found myself... curious. All right, so curiosity wasn’t exactly right. More like... envy? No, surely not!

Gym class was fairly easy for me. I had always stayed in pretty good shape as a male, so I knew all the right moves for limbering up. Even though my new body was weaker than my male one, it was in pretty good shape. Of course, it was considerably younger and had probably never been weakened by smoking.

I saw some of the girls limbering up. Jennifer seemed to be particularly agile, twisting her body with ease. Her muscles were feminine in shape but visible. She kept herself in great physical shape; that much was obvious.

Before we started an intramural game of volleyball, I just had to satisfy my curiosity. As a male, I had never been able to do the splits. Like most guys, I had tried, but like most guys, I had practically ruptured myself. This new body seemed so incredibly limber, I wondered if I could do it.

My first attempt was a failure. I stopped myself before I had to really commit, stumbling rather clumsily. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice. We were getting about ready to start our game, so it was now or never. I remembered my experiences in getting ready for school. If my body knew how to get dressed for the day as a female, did it know how to do the splits?

It was almost like going into an Alpha state. I just relaxed my body and told it what to do. Maybe I should have given my body more specific instructions, for I suddenly felt myself diving down on one of the mats, rolling expertly, and coming out of the roll into a perfect split.

This time, everyone noticed.

There was such an uproar that at first I thought I had done something wrong. Then, I realized it was just girlish squeals of delight. Even Jennifer was yelling, “Wow, Trish, that was fantastic!”

Fantastic? I had thought all girls could do the splits with ease. Without all the heavy equipment between the legs, it seemed as if it should be simple enough. But apparently I was wrong. Or maybe it was just the way I had done it–with the roll and all.

Once the other girls had had a chance to congratulate me, the coach called for us to choose sides and start to play volleyball. I was very surprised to be picked fairly early for a team. Given my short stature and unknown abilities, it seemed almost an honor not to be chosen last. Perhaps my little trick had been the difference, I thought.

I’m sure the captain of my team wondered if her confidence had been badly misplaced–at least early in the game. I simply wasn’t used to my female muscles and wasn’t willing to go on automatic to play the game, assuming that was possible. So when it came my turn to serve, my weaker arms weren’t able to get the ball over the net. My smaller body caused me to miss saves that my old body would have found child’s play. But I had played a lot of volleyball back in college, and it wasn’t long before I was able to adjust to my new size and strength. I wasn’t at my best, but I thought I played fairly well–well enough to pull my own weight, as modest as that was.

Jennifer thought so, too. She had been on the opposing team, and my final shot of the game–the winning shot, I might add–had dropped right at her feet. “Good game,” she told me when we were alone.

“What?” I asked. I hadn’t really been listening. I was still overcoming the shock of taking a shower with twenty other girls. I was in a boy’s paradise. It was a shame I had to be a girl to get there.

“I said good game.” She was using a towel to pat her breasts as she spoke. In that moment, standing there looking at her as I patted my own breasts, I would have given my very soul to have my male equipment back.

“Uh... thanks.”

“You really impressed everyone with your little gymnastics display,” she continued. “I don’t think I would have had the guts to do that when I first got here.”

“Have you tried it since?” I asked as I stepped into my panties.

“Sure,” she laughed. “Hey, I used to play football. You know–once a jock always a jock.”

“So are you on any of the girl’s teams?” Damn bra was a pain to put on.

“No,” she said, a little wistfully I thought. As she dressed, she continued, “When I first got changed, I was so upset about what had been done to me that I didn’t do much of anything. Oh, I studied and did okay in school, but that was because if I didn’t, I’d just be limiting my own future. I didn’t date, though, and I tried to be as unfeminine as I could. The idea of playing on a sissy girl’s team was too much for a former college football player like me.”

“You could still go out for a team,” I pointed out.

She shook her head. “No, not really. The girl’s coach is a little bit of a tight ass when it comes to latecomers. She thinks if you didn’t play as a freshman, you’ve got no business being on the team. You just aren’t committed enough for her.”

“Pretty short-sighted of her,” I observed.

“I can live with it,” Jennifer replied, but I could tell she was really bothered by it. She had been a football player at one time. That meant that like me, she had been male. I didn’t know if she had played high school ball or maybe even college or professional ball, but she was an athlete at heart.

I got the right school bus to my new home on the first try. I practically ran to the school bus when the day was over. I was so tired of being stared at–of being different. It was with relief that I saw Ralph sitting alone near the back of the bus. There wasn’t another student within four rows of him. I plopped down in very unladylike fashion next to him. Even though he had that ghostly transparency about him, I felt closer to him than anyone else on the bus.

“So how was your day?” I asked him quietly.

“It sucked,” he replied, looking out the window with an expression of disgust.

I could relate to that, but in ways he’d never understand. “So what happened?”

“They’re all a bunch of hicks,” he muttered, being careful not to say it too loudly. “They’ve never even seen an Oriental before. They wanted to know if I was actually from Japan.”

“They asked me the same thing,” I said with a sigh.

“I said, ‘hell no, I’m an American.’ You know what they did then? They laughed! Like I was making a joke or something.” Ralph slumped down in his seat as best he could, his arms folded.

I knew how he felt. None of the teens had been malicious–except maybe for Duck and his friends. They had all been curious about us, but they hadn’t taunted us or anything. What they had done was try to classify us. In their minds, we were as alien as if we had come from another planet. Had we been white–normal by their measure–we would probably been treated differently.

I grimly had to admire the Judge for his sense of irony if not punishment. Had I been my old self, reduced to the age of a high school student again, I might have treated Patricia and Ralph the same way that these teens did–or maybe worse.

The odd thing was that it had taken this transformation to make me see what I had been. I had never considered myself prejudiced before. I had grown up around blacks and Jews and honestly did number some of them as my friends. Japanese folks have never been terribly popular in a city like Detroit where they’re a visible reminder of successful foreign competition. I had always avoided them, looked down on them. Now the tables were turned and how did I feel?

Well, I felt as if I was the aggrieved party now. I had done nothing to deserve being set apart. If I was forced to spend the rest of my life as Patricia Yamamoto, I would just want the same things every other American wanted. I would have no unfair advantage which might fuel hatred or envy. There would be nothing about me which would make me different–except the color of my skin.

I picked a damned fine time to figure all of that out, I thought as I slumped down in my own seat, hoping Ralph didn’t notice the tears in my eyes.

And I was in for a rude shock when we got home. Of course, our new house was in an uproar, with most of the furniture in place but boxes and paper everywhere. The moving truck had already left, so I was spared being ogled by imagined beefy moving men. The shock was finding Brooks and ‘Dad’ in an embrace amidst the chaos.

“Get a room, guys,” Ralph said with a mischievous grin. ‘Dad’ laughed, but Brooks positively giggled. Me? I guess I just stood there with my mouth open. I knew Brooks and I had no choice but to play our roles, but Brooks actually seemed to enjoy the part. I had a sudden thought that perhaps Brooks had been homosexual and I just hadn’t known it. Jeez, and we had actually shared a bed once in some little town in Missouri. But no, I reminded myself, Brooks was as big a skirt chaser as I was. More than once we had scored in the same motel room with a couple of local girls. He had to be as normal as me.

“What the hell were you doing?” I asked her when we were finally alone, sorting out the stuff still boxed in my room. I had barely been able to contain myself waiting for her to peel herself off dear old Dad and come into my room where I was waiting for her, still fuming.

“When?” she asked innocently.

“Downstairs, when Ralph and I came in. You had your arms around that... that...”

“Just try to think of him as your father,” Brooks said primly. There was something she wasn’t telling me, I realized.

“Are you kidding?” I gasped, plopping down on the bed with my arms folded. “My father? My father’s been dead for five years. That... creature isn’t my father and never will be.”

Brooks sat beside me. She put an arm around me, which I shrugged off. With a sigh, she began, “I’ve been here all day with Don–that’s his name by the way. He’s really a nice guy.”

“He’s not even real,” I pointed out.

She shook her head. “You’re wrong about that. He’s as real as you or me. He and Ralph are just... different. He feels solid...”

“You should know,” I grumbled. “It didn’t take you very long to turn into the Japanese Donna Reed. I’m surprised you’re still in shorts. I’d expect you to be wearing a dress and heels while you polish the silver.”

“All right, that’s enough!” She jumped to her feet. I had almost expected her to add ‘young lady’ but she didn’t. “So what did you do today? Hang out with the guys? Talk about cars? Maybe go out for football?”

She had me there. I could feel my face flush. I had spent the entire day acting like the girl I had become. “No... I...”

“No, you hung around with the girls. You were shy around boys. You touched up your lipstick a couple of times. You looked at some guy’s tight buns and giggled with the other girls. You blushed a few times.”

Damn, she was good! I had done all of those things. “Yeah, but I didn’t...”

“You didn’t kiss and hug a guy.”

“Well...”

“Look, Trish–and don’t try to correct me. That’s your name now–Trish. You acted like a girl today because that’s what everyone thinks you are. If you’d acted any differently, it would only have caused problems.”

I didn’t say anything. She was right, of course. Seeing she had my attention, she continued, “I’ve been here most of the day with Don getting us moved in. I’ve had to act the part of the loving wife, and I can assure you, whatever Don is, he loves his wife–me! If I didn’t act the part, he’d think something was wrong, and that might cause problems.”

“So you’re just acting as if you love him,” I said slowly.

“Of course.”

Was it my imagination, or was her reply a little hollow? What was she hiding? I looked up into her pretty brown eyes. “So you still want to go with me Monday to see the Judge and get him to change us back?”

“I promised I’d go with you,” she confirmed.

I was so relieved, I jumped up and hugged her before I realized what I was doing. I quickly dropped my arms to my side and lowered my eyes in embarrassment.

Brooks smiled at me. “It’s sort of hard not to act the part, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I said softly, realizing how much I must have sounded like a typical teenaged girl.

“Look,” Brooks said brightly, “go ahead and get ready. We’ll leave in about an hour.”

I looked up, puzzled. “Leave for where?”

“For dinner, silly. Don’t you remember? Your father is taking us out someplace nice for dinner to celebrate our new home.”

I suddenly realized “someplace nice” meant an unwanted change of clothes. “Now wait a minute, Brooks. I...”

“Not Brooks–Mom. Remember?” she chided me. “We have to act the part.”

Damn! Why did she have to be right all the time? “You want me to wear a skirt, don’t you?”

She gave me a very wicked smile. “I sure don’t plan to wear a dress and heels by myself.”

Double damn!

Before I could answer, she pulled something from my closet. The bad news was that it was a dress. The good news was that it was one of the ankle length summer dresses I had seen many teens wearing. That meant I wasn’t going to be showing off my legs for everyone. “Do you need any help with it?” she asked.

“No,” I replied with a tired sigh. “I think I can figure it out.”

And figure it out I did. I had to admit I looked pretty good in it. The dress had puffy short sleeves and a squared-off front that while modest indicated that I did indeed have breasts. I knew I would be expected to wear jewelry, so I found a small heart-shaped gold locket to wear around my neck. The dress itself was black (to match my mood) but it was accented with a pattern of tiny yellow and white flowers. As much as I hated to admit it, I did look good in it. For shoes, I chose a pair of low black heels. I didn’t really want heels, but they seemed to be the only type of shoe in my closet that would work with the dress. At least I picked the lowest heel. And since my legs were well covered, I saw no reason to wear nylons with the outfit.

The males in my new family wore sport coats and both wore reasonably stylish ties. Brooks wore a nice woman’s suit. It was black with a short skirt, and with the shimmering silk blouse, high heels, and all the right accessories, I had to admit she made a fine looking woman. She looked almost too young to have a couple of teenagers.

To be honest, I was a little unsettled with how great she looked. “How did you manage to look so good?” I whispered to her as we walked to the car.

“I just went on automatic,” she explained. “This is what happened. Not bad, huh?”

“Not bad at all.” I grinned at her. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was trying to get dear old Dad all turned on.

Dinner went pretty well. It turned out we were a little overdressed, but none of the other patrons seemed to mind. Naturally, they were a little curious about what an Oriental family was doing in their midst, but they kept quiet about it.

The restaurant–Winston’s–seemed to specialize in steaks. My mouth watered at the thought of a big, juicy Midwestern steak. They’ve always been, in my opinion, the finest in the world. But before I could order the big Kansas City strip that I had planned on, Brooks ordered for Ralph and me, choosing a smaller filet for me. Later, I had to admit to myself that she had been right. With my smaller size and appetite, I even ended leaving half of the smaller steak on my plate.

Later that night lying in bed, I had to congratulate myself on getting through my first full day as a girl. It hadn’t been exactly enjoyable, but it hadn’t been as difficult as I had thought it would be. Even wearing a dress and being admired by a few young guys–including our waiter–hadn’t been so bad. If I could just get through this until Monday when I saw the Judge, I was sure I’d be all right.

My confidence was shattered by a sudden giggle followed by a deeper chuckle. Oh, Brooks had tried to keep it quiet, but I heard it none-the-less. My “parents’” room was separated from mine by a master bathroom accessible only from their room. While they had closed the door to their room, they had neglected to close the bathroom door, so there was only one wall separating their room from mine.

I quietly got out of bed, tiptoeing over to the wall. I was afraid of what I would discover, but I had to know. Of course Brooks would have to go to bed with ‘Dad’ I realized. Again, it was necessary for her to play her part. Maybe they had just shared a little joke before dropping off to sleep.

I put my ear to the wall, hearing nothing at first. I silently cursed myself for being so suspicious. How could I have possibly thought...?

Then, I heard a creaking sound. Someone is just turning over to sleep, I tried to tell myself. Then, the cherry pie I had enjoyed after dinner turned suddenly sour in my stomach as I began to realize that the creaking was continuing in an almost steady rhythm. Then, at nearly the same moment, I heard a masculine gasp and a feminine moan.

I shook my head in disbelief. How could Brooks do such a thing? This wasn’t just playing a role. This was sick... perverted. Brooks was a man. He might not look like one now, but deep down, he was a man–just like me.

I had to smile ironically at that thought as I looked down at my perky breasts sticking out of the ruffled pink nightie I wore. Somehow, there in the moonlight, they looked even larger than before. No, I certainly wasn’t a man, but that didn’t mean I had forgotten what it meant to be one. Even if I never returned to my original form, I would never allow a man to... to do what ‘Dad’ had just done to Brooks.

As I slipped back into bed though, I remembered an old science fiction movie I had seen on TV. It was called Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I remembered a scene toward the end where the hero left the heroine alone for a few minutes. While he was away, she fell asleep, allowing an alien life form to replace her. I remembered the horror on the hero’s face when she told him that it wasn’t so bad. Was that what Brooks would tell me in the morning? Like the hero in the movie, my friend was gone. In his place was a woman who would be more of a woman each passing day, I supposed.

Then, just before dropping off to sleep, I had one more thought. Brooks had agreed to go with me to see the Judge on Monday when I had pressed her, but she had said nothing about pressing him to change us back. I began to think that when I confronted the Judge, I would be doing so alone. With that dark thought, I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up in a better mood. Maybe it was just the bright spring sunlight spilling into my room. Or maybe it was because I just felt good. I had to admit to myself it was pretty neat to wake up in the morning feeling good. Dean Martin supposedly said he felt sorry for people who didn’t drink since they woke up feeling as good as they’d feel all day. I was beginning to appreciate what he had meant. It actually felt good to wake up without the aftertaste of the previous night’s drinking and smoking in my mouth.

It was odd, but I didn’t miss smoking at all. As for drinking, when my ‘parents’ had enjoyed a glass of wine the night before, I had been envious, but smoking was another matter. Apparently, no one smoked in Ovid, so there wasn’t a visual reminder of what it was like to smoke. And as for the physical need for a cigarette, my new body seemed to be completely free of nicotine. Still, losing my balls seemed far too high a price for giving up smoking.

As I got out of bed and stretched, I began to appreciate how limber my new body was. There were none of the morning creaks and groans of approaching middle age. I didn’t think my old body had ever been as flexible as this one. There seemed to be no limit to the directions I could move.

“Trish!”

My thoughts were interrupted by Brooks’ voice at my closed door. “Yes?”

“Breakfast in five minutes, sleepy head.”

I groaned. She was taking this whole mother thing far too seriously. Without a conscious thought, I slipped my hair into a loose ponytail and threw on a robe.

“I picked up some rolls,” my dad said proudly, holding up a sack as if it were a hunting trophy. I had stumbled into the kitchen to be greeted with a scene of domesticity so normal that I found myself momentarily forgetting that this wasn’t really my natural family. There was even a subtle acceptance of the man sitting at the table, sack of rolls in hand, as my father. He acted as if he were my father, and I suppose I was acting as if I were his daughter.

Ralph was busy being the typical younger brother, ignoring me as he stuffed his face with a frosted cinnamon roll while reading the funnies. Like me, he wore only a robe, but his was plaid unlike the fuzzy pink one I had been forced to don.

As for Brooks–‘Mom’–she was still in her robe as well. Hers was longer than mine and white, but she looked very feminine in it. She looked actually happy as she poured a glass of milk and handed it to me. “We don’t have much this morning. Maybe by tomorrow, we’ll have enough unpacked that I can make us a decent breakfast.”

I gave Brooks a disgusted look I hoped the others didn’t see. What was wrong with her? As a man, Brooks hated to cook. Of course as a man, Brooks would never have ended up in the sack breathing heavily while a man stuck...

“I thought I just heard a car in the driveway,” Dad said, craning around to see.

“Oh! And you’re the only one dressed,” Brooks gasped. This from a person who had greeted me at his door while still in his underwear on numerous occasions.

Dad went to the door. I heard him speaking with someone. It sounded like a girl’s voice. Moments later, Jennifer followed him into the kitchen. She had a friendly smile on her face–the kind of smile only a morning person could have at that time of day. Great. I had made one friend and she had to be a morning person.

Jennifer had picked up that knack many girls have of dressing casually and making it look damned good. Her red top was mildly revealing and set off her long blonde hair. Her denim shorts were just that–short. They fit tightly against her long legs, and with the slight heel on her sandals, she looked plenty hot.

She looked at me in mock surprise. “You’re not even dressed yet!”

To be honest, I had forgotten that I had agreed to get together with her, and I certainly hadn’t realized she had meant morning.

“That’s okay,” she said, not bothering to wait for an answer. She looked at Brooks. “And you must be Trish’s mother. Hi. I’m Jennifer Tipton. I’m in some of Trish’s classes.”

Brooks smiled. “I’m pleased to meet you, Jennifer. I’m glad Trish is already making friends. Would you like a roll?”

“No thanks,” she responded. “I’ve already eaten. I’d better get Trish moving. We’ve got a big day planned.”

“Trish,” Brooks said in a very motherly tone, “you didn’t mention you had anything planned today.”

Uh-oh. ‘Mom’ was not just going to play loving wife. She planned to play concerned mother as well. I supposed I would have to play along. “I sort of forgot,” I explained in my best vacuous teen voice. “Is it okay?”

Brooks smiled. “I suppose so. You have fun. But come by and tell me if you’re going to be any later than five. We won’t have a phone until Monday and your father’s cell phone hasn’t been activated yet.”

Jennifer followed me up to my room and watched me as I closed the door just short of a slam. “Bad morning?” she asked.

“It’s Brooks,” I growled.

“Brooks?”

“The person who thinks she’s my mother,” I told her. I explained shortly who Brooks and I had been. “She’s really been throwing herself into the role. It’s almost as if she’s forgotten who she used to be. Does that happen?”

“Not really,” Jennifer said as she sat on the side of my bed while I paced. “Some people–most people–forget who they were before they were transformed. The rest of us remember who we were. I’ve never heard of someone remembering at first and then forgetting. Besides, that isn’t what’s happening anyway.”

“So what is happening?” I asked, stopping to listen.

“Well, my mom used to be a guy,” she explained. “Then, when she got here and got changed, she seemed to be a lot more comfortable with her change after a few hours than I was after several months.”

“As a guy, was she–he–gay or something?”

“No!” she laughed. “She just accepted what had happened to her and made the best of it. I learned a lot from her.” There was suddenly a serious look on her face. “I think if it hadn’t been for her, I would have gone crazy.”

“Crazy?”

She nodded. “I liked being male. I liked sports. I was a big guy–raised on a farm back in Missouri. All I ever wanted to do was grow up and be a teacher and a coach.”

“So how did you end up in Ovid?” I asked quietly.

“It was a plane crash,” she explained. “It wiped out our entire college team.”

“But I don’t remember anything about a college team being killed in a plane crash in recent years,” I pointed out. “There was that team at Wichita State a long time ago, but Jennifer couldn’t have even been around then–even if you were transformed into a baby.”

The smile was back, but it was thinner. “No, we were from Northwest Missouri State. You don’t remember the crash because it never happened. You see, reality itself changed. Those of us who died never existed. That’s why we can’t go back to our old lives.”

I thought about the fight in the bar that never happened–but should have. I had thought of the Judge as some sort of sorcerer who could make magical changes, but I had never dreamed he could do them on such a scale. If what Jennifer was saying was right, it was likely Allen Ripley and Dan Brooks never existed either. But what kind of being could have such power?

“Anyhow,” Jennifer continued, “I fought the whole thing pretty hard. Mom helped me a lot though.”

“So you like being a girl now?” I asked.

“I guess I do,” she replied slowly. “If I had my choice in the matter, I think I’d still go back and live out my old life, but I like being a girl now, too. Does that make any sense?”

“Not really,” I admitted. I couldn’t understand how she could miss her old life and be enjoying her new one all at the same time. Then I realized that was what she meant when she said her mother had helped her keep her sanity. She had learned to reconcile her past life with her new one, becoming a whole person in the process. “Or maybe it does.”

She gave me a wide smile. “You’re learning then. Now get a shower and get dressed. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

It took me almost an hour to get ready. Fool that I was, I had decided to wash my long, dark hair. If it hadn’t been for Jennifer’s help, it would have probably taken me an hour just to brush out and dry my hair. Embarrassed at having to ask for her help with my hair, I went on automatic to do the rest. When I finished, about the only difference in the way the two of us were dressed was that my top was a white tank top. I had been on automatic when I selected it and almost went back into my closet to find something a little less revealing, but Jennifer assured me that it looked fine.

I had thought that Jennifer had been dropped off at our house, but there was still a car in the driveway–a yellow Mustang GT.

“This is yours?” I gasped.

“For turning sweet sixteen,” she said with a laugh, unlocking the passenger door for me. “It’s used–a ’96–but the insurance alone on it must be costing Daddy a fortune.”

“What does your Dad do?” I asked, admiring the car. In my previous life, I had rated a company car, but it was always something like a cheaper Taurus. I would have killed for this car.

“He’s president of a bank,” she said. When she saw my expression, she grinned. “That’s right–I’m a rich bitch.”

“I didn’t mean...”

“Don’t worry,” she said, still grinning as she got in the car, “just kidding.”

I didn’t ask where we were going. Jennifer obviously had a plan of action in mind though. Well, I thought, Ovid was a small town. Wherever we were going, it wouldn’t take long. I was right. Minutes later, we pulled up in front of a small but neat building which billed itself as the Ovid Public Library.

“What are we doing here?” I asked as we got out. Jennifer hadn’t said anything about studying together. I had several assignments to do but had planned to work on them later.

“You plan to see the Judge again next week.” It was a statement–not a question.

“Did I tell you that?” I blurted out.

She shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t know if you did or not. But once the shock wears off, that seems to be everybody’s first impulse. We’re here so you can learn for yourself why that isn’t a very good idea.”

“But I won’t be going alone,” I pointed out. “Brooks is going with me.”

“Brooks? You mean your mom?”

“She’s not really my mom. You know that.”

“I’d say in her present frame of mind, she’d probably side with the Judge.”

I didn’t reply, but I knew she was probably right. Brooks was becoming more and more a woman with each passing hour. Why I couldn’t say, but the change seemed to agree with her. Her. It was hard to remember that she had been a man and my best friend. I had sneaked a look at her driver’s license. Rachel Hiroshi Yamamoto was her full name. She was thirty-seven–about four years younger than she had been as a man. And she seemed to be satisfied with all of that–being a wife and a mother. My mother, I thought with a shudder.

“Come on,” Jennifer said, motioning me to follow her. “You need to get some answers.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?” I asked, following her nonetheless.

“It’s not allowed,” was her answer. “Remember the taboos?”

Maybe it wasn’t allowed, but she nodded for me to walk down one of the brightly lit aisles. Looking at the shelves, I saw they were filled with books on mythology–mostly Greek and Roman myths. Sighing, I picked up a book at random and began to leaf through it.

I wasn’t particularly slow, but I’ll admit that like many people, I hadn’t read mythological tales since I was a boy. After an hour, I was putting most of the pieces of the puzzle together. When Jennifer joined me, I asked quietly, “Do you mean to tell me that the Judge is really J... J...”

“Save your breath,” she told me. “You can’t say it. It just isn’t allowed. And as I told you, you can’t even talk about the nature of Ovid with more than one other person. That isn’t allowed either. But I wanted you to know what you’d be up against if you see the Judge again.”

I was quiet as we walked out together. Once outside, I sat down on a bench. I knew when I was licked. It was one thing to try to face down a sorcerer, as I had thought the Judge to be. That would have made him at least human. But if the Judge was really Jupiter, that was another matter entirely. In the library, I had read many stories about Jupiter. In them, he turned people into nearly everything imaginable–animals, plants, whatever. Sometimes, he did it as a punishment, and other times, he did it to escape discovery of one of his many affairs. Occasionally, I think he did it just for the hell of it. There weren’t many tales where he changed his victim back though.

I guessed I fell in the punishment category. I had never considered myself a bad person. I couldn’t help it if I was uncomfortable around Japanese people. I might not have liked them, but I didn’t wish them ill. I never hit one or insulted one to his or her face. I simply avoided them. Was that so bad? Was that so evil?

But of course, what was bad or evil to a god? From what I had read, Jupiter and his clan had done a few unsavory things themselves during their long lives. The concept of evil probably didn’t enter into their thinking. Instead, Brooks and I had proved to be subjects of our transformation not because of our prejudices as much as because of our folly in flaunting them. If left unchecked, our own stupidity would have cost us our lives. Those lives were now forfeit.

So here I was, sitting on a bench in front of a small town library, breasts on my chest and a vagina between my legs because of my own stupidity. I felt a tear trickle down my cheek. It was a tear of mourning–mourning for the death of Allen Ripley, a foolish man who had never existed–except in my mind. I was going to be a girl–an Oriental girl no less–for the rest of my life. I was going to grow to womanhood in skirts and heels. If I wanted children, I would have to bear them. If I wanted sex, I would have to...

No, wait. That wasn’t true. I could be a lesbian, couldn’t I? No, I thought, looking at Jennifer. If a girl as beautiful as Jennifer couldn’t get my motor running, I was not going to be much of a lesbian. But that didn’t mean I was going to spread my legs for the first boy who asked–or even for the hundred and first. Just because I was stuck being a girl didn’t mean I was interested in boys... was I?

My thoughts went back to Friday at school. While talking with other girls, I was part of their boy watching exercises and evaluation discussions. It hadn’t been that hard to participate. I had even found that I could admire a boy’s butt. Oh, a certain amount of it was pretending, just to seem like one of the girls, but I had noticed a couple of boys...

Then there was... what was his name.

“Luke!”

That’s right, I thought–Luke Meecham. But why was Jennifer calling his name?

“Hi, Jennifer. Hi, Trish,” a familiar male voice called.

I looked up quickly, wiping my eye in embarrassment as Luke strode up to us.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking at me in concern.

“I... I’m fine,” I told him, jumping to my feet. “I just got something in my eye.”

“Oh... oh, okay,” Luke mumbled. The poor guy was so nervous around me that he didn’t know what to do. In spite of my funk, I was almost tempted to laugh. I knew what he was going through. When I was a boy in high school, I managed to get tongue-tied every time I talked with a cute girl. And that’s what I was, I reminded myself grimly–a cute girl.

“Hey Luke,” Jennifer said impulsively, “Barry and I are going to the movies tonight. Would you and Trish like to come along with us?”

“Huh?” Luke and I said at the same time.

“Well,” Jennifer said as innocently as she could to me, “I thought since you were new here, you might want to meet some nice boys. Luke here is as nice as they come. Why, if I weren’t dating Barry...”

Luke looked at me hopefully. “Would you... would you like to go to the movies with me?”

No. I had to wash my hair. I had to feed some goldfish–after I bought them. My mother didn’t like me to date boys she hadn’t met. Aw, shit! “I... I guess I could.”

Luke’s face brightened. “Great! I’ll see you tonight then.”

As he walked away, I thought he would trip over his own feet, but then I realized he was probably floating an inch or two above the sidewalk. The poor klutz hadn’t even bothered to find out what time to pick me up. Oh well, Barry and Jennifer probably had the details. Speaking of Jennifer...

“What possessed you to match us up?” I said between clinched teeth when Luke was out of earshot.

Jennifer gave me one of her wicked grins. “What possessed you to say ‘yes’?”

I blinked, startled. What had possessed me to say ‘yes?’ Every conscious fiber of my being told me it was gay to be dating a boy. I wasn’t a girl–at least not a real girl. I mean, I was a girl, but I wasn’t... oh what the hell!

“You have to start some time, kid,” Jennifer told me with a dainty pat on my shoulder. “Looking back on things, I wish I hadn’t fought against it so hard. Since I started dating Barry, life’s been a lot more tolerable for me. I wish somebody had done for me what I just did for you.”

I thought about Brooks. Was that what he had decided on his own? Maybe it did make sense just to roll with the punches. Ovid was in some ways like a prison, and Patricia Yamamoto was my personal cell. It could be a cold, harsh prison if I made it that way or it could be a velvet-lined one if I cooperated and became the good little girl the gods wanted me to be.

“So you’re saying I’m stuck here and I might as well learn to like it?” I said softly as I sat back down on the bench.

“Something like that,” Jennifer said with a more sympathetic smile as she sat down next to me. “Trish, you remind me of me. You have that same fire. Maybe it’s because we were both in competitive sports. Or maybe it’s because I suspect the Judge set you up to fail and this is my way to get back at him.”

“Get back at him?” I repeated. “You mean for changing you into Jennifer?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she sighed. For the next few minutes, she told me her story. She told me all about their averted plane crash and the Jennifer she had originally been. She had been older when first transformed–she and Barry both. But they had helped lead an abortive rebellion against the Judge–one which had permanently changed some of the rules in Ovid and left her and Barry too young to be of much consequence.

“I’d probably still be a rebel if it hadn’t been for Mom,” she concluded. “She taught me there could be joy in this new life as well as frustration. Even though she had been a man before, she showed me it was possible to take charge of my life–not by rebelling but by coping. To be honest with you, I’m still more comfortable in jeans than I am a dress, but I suspect that’s true of a lot of women.”

“Yet you wear makeup and lean on Barry’s arm,” I pointed out.

“Yes I do,” she agreed. “That’s because I’m a young woman. I may not always like that, but I’ve learned to live with it. That’s why I don’t have a lot of girl friends, I suppose. I may have to look and act like a girl, but I guess I don’t always think like one. And as for Barry... well, in some things, the body rules the mind. I’m... well, let’s just say I’m very attracted to Barry.”

“So how is helping me part of all of this?” I asked her bluntly. “It seems that by befriending the new girl–a Japanese girl at that–you’re setting yourself apart from a lot of your contemporaries.”

“Oh, they’ll come around,” she assured me.

“I don’t know about that. They all seem to look at me as if I just arrived from another planet,” I argued.

“And you think that’s because they’re prejudiced?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Trish, have you ever lived in a small town?” she asked, looking directly into my eyes.

I shook my head.

“Well, let me explain something to you,” she began. “Most of the kids in our school grew up together–or at least they think they did. They believe they’ve known each other since they were just out of diapers. You could have come in here as a blonde beauty queen and they would still treat you the same way–until they got to know you.”

“Guys aren’t that way,” I pointed out.

“Yes they are,” she replied. “They just have other ways of breaking into the crowd. They have sports. If they’re good enough, they’re accepted almost at once. Of course, there are girls’ sports here, but as I’ve told you, the coach doesn’t want anything to do with any girl who didn’t start under her as a freshman. So you’re stuck. I think that’s why the Judge did this to you. He wanted you to feel isolated. He wanted you to feel as if people were prejudiced against you because of your race. That’s what I meant when I said he set you up to fail.”

I saw where she was coming from. It was a subtle punishment if ever there was one. Sending me into Ovid as a stranger of a race which the denizens of Ovid had only limited contact with was designed to make me feel an outcast. It had certainly worked. If it hadn’t been for Jennifer... well, I didn’t even want to think what the last couple of days would have been like without her.

“So you still haven’t told me why you’re helping me,” I said.

“Let’s just say I don’t like to see the Judge get away with this,” she replied. “I know I can’t openly defy him. And I know I’m going to be female for the rest of my life. But I’m not going to do it on his terms; I’m going to do it on mine. And I don’t like what he’s doing to you. For that matter, why did he do this to you? Do you have any idea?”

Uh-oh. Here it was. I’d have to tell my story. When I was finished, she’d know I was Japanese just because I didn’t like them. She’d think I was some sort of a bigot. Well, wasn’t I? In the short time I’d been Trish, I had come to realize that all I wanted was to be treated like a normal American girl. But everyone wanted to treat me as if I was a foreigner due to the color of my skin. Yet I had always treated people of Japanese ancestry to not really be Americans. How downright stupid of me.

“Jennifer,” I began, “you may not like this, but here it is.” I told her my story, leaving out nothing. I plowed ahead as I saw her brow furl and her head shake. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was about to lose my one and only friend in Ovid. Still, I looked at her hopefully as I finished my tale. I was trying hard not to cry.

“You poor kid,” Jennifer whispered.

“Poor kid?” I echoed. “Jennifer, I just told you I was a bigot. That’s why this was done to me. It’s probably what I deserve.”

“Maybe,” she allowed, “but if the Judge changed everybody who felt like you into another race, I don’t think very many people would be the same color. Take me. When I first got to college, I was still telling racial jokes. I grew up in a town so white I don’t think I’d ever said more than a few words to a black person in my life. Suddenly, it seemed like half the guys I was playing football with were black. I can tell you that my attitude changed in a hurry. A couple of the blacks became good friends of mine. And you know what the funny thing was?”

I shook my head.

“Once I got to know them, I found out they had gone to predominantly black high schools where they told white jokes.”

I came out of my funk long enough to laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. So maybe you needed a little whack along the side of the head, but I don’t think you deserve to be miserable for the rest of your life.”

“Then I guess I’m going to have to make the best of it as Trish,” I concluded. “But what can I do to get everyone to accept me as just another American girl instead of some sort of illegal alien?”

“I need to think on that,” Jennifer told me, rising to her feet. “And when I think, I need to shoot hoops. Come on.”

In a matter of minutes, we were in the driveway of Jennifer’s impressive house, shooting baskets. Jennifer was pretty good at it, but it took me about twenty shots before I got a feel for how strong–or rather how weak–my new arms were. Once I got the hang of it though, I wasn’t all that bad. It had been a long time since I had played high school basketball, so it wasn’t as if I had to unlearn a lot of recently used techniques.

“Not bad,” Jennifer commented as I sunk one from about twenty-five feet out. “Nothing but net.”

“Thanks,” I replied with a grin. It was actually fun to shoot baskets with Jennifer. I felt almost normal again.

“In fact, you’re probably a pretty decent athlete,” Jennifer said, sinking a shot of her own. “You were pretty good in gym yesterday and...”

She stopped at once, a wide grin on her face. “I’ve got an idea!”

I hadn’t even heard her idea and already I had an uncomfortable feeling. She was so into her idea that she let the basketball bounce off the concrete drive and into the grass.

“Trish, how would you like to be a cheerleader?”

I laughed nervously, but when I saw that Jennifer wasn’t laughing with me, I asked, “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, listen!” she began enthusiastically. “Cheerleader tryouts are next week. Not very many girls signed up this year, so you’d have a good chance.”

“First, I’m not interested in being a cheerleader,” I told her, having a sudden unsettling vision of my new body in a cheerleader’s outfit. Besides, why would I want to become a juvenile male’s fantasy girl? Isn’t that what cheerleaders were? “And even if I were, those cheerleader selections are always just popularity contests.”

“Maybe when you were in school,” she allowed, “but there’s more to it now. A committee made up of parents, students and teachers selects now.”

Jennifer went on to explain the process. Apparently, only juniors and seniors could be cheerleaders, so the competition would be among sophomore girls who would replace the outgoing seniors. Four girls would be selected. And apparently, things had changed from my high school days. Oh, attractive girls were still the chosen few, but they had to have some athletic talent as well. And with more sports opportunities available for girls in modern high schools, there were fewer candidates for cheerleaders–particularly when some athletic talent was required for the job.

“Don’t you see?” Jennifer asked, barely able to contain herself. “This is the answer to your problem of fitting in. Once they see how athletic you are–and how cute you are–you’ll be a shoe-in. And you have to admit, as a cheerleader, you’ll fit in. What’s more American than a cheerleader?”

She had some good points, but I still said ‘no.’ I wasn’t about to don a skirt so short that my panties would show on every whirl. I wasn’t about to stand out in front of a crowd cocking my head and waving pom-poms with a stupid smile on my face. The whole idea was ludicrous, and I told her so.

“At least think it over?”

“All right,” I agreed, but I had no intention of thinking about it any further.

Jennifer let the subject drop. It was just as well. I was getting a little steamed about the whole idea. We shot a few more baskets and then she drove me home so I could eat dinner and get ready for my date with Luke.

“Just wear something casual tonight,” she advised me. “I’m wearing shorts. The guys will, too. And don’t worry about tonight. It’s just a movie and a coke afterwards. Nothing to worry about.”

It was easy for her to say, I thought to myself as I forced a happy wave and headed into my house. Jennifer had had plenty of time to get used to the idea of dating. By her own admission, she had fended off every boy in the school during her first months as a girl. Now she was expecting me to start dating only a couple of days after my transformation.

What had possessed me to go along anyway? Deep down I was still male–at least in my thoughts. But those thoughts were mainly memories, I realized grimly. The fact of the matter was that I had just spent the better part of the day with a very attractive girl, watching her breasts and hips move around as we shot baskets and noticing her slim legs as she walked her sexy walk. The problem was that while I could recognize things like that for what they were, they failed to turn me on.

Now that isn’t to say that the converse was true. Watching guys walk around with their natural swagger hadn’t done much for me either–yet. The problem was that I was beginning to notice little things about guys that I had never noticed before: the jut of their chins, the gleam in their eyes, the movement of their muscles under their shirts...

Stop that!

“Did you have a nice time, dear?”

Those words greeted me as I walked in the door. Why oh why was she taking this Donna Reed role so seriously?

“Fine... Mom.”

She smiled at me from the kitchen entrance. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

I looked around. “Are we alone?”

“Ralph is still with his new friends,” she explained, “and your father had to go to the hardware store to get some picture hangers and shelf paper. I’m afraid dinner tonight will have to be pretty simple since I haven’t found everything I need for the kitchen yet.”

“Look, Brooks...”

“Mom–call me Mom.” She turned back to the kitchen counter where she was chopping some vegetables. “I found a nice supermarket here. It’s called Duggan’s. It’s not a huge store like back in Detroit, but it’s nice. And guess what! Remember that attractive blonde who was sitting in the courtroom? She lives right down the street. Her name is Cindy Patton and her husband manages Duggan’s!”

“Brooks–‘Mom’–will you stop playing happy housewife for a few minutes? We need to talk.”

She turned and gave me a look that was so motherly I found it downright chilling. “Certainly, dear. Is there a problem?”

I waited until we were sitting together on the living room sofa before beginning. I hardly knew where to start, so I just blurted out the ultimate question. “You don’t want to change back, do you?”

She gave me a wan smile. “No dear, I don’t. I never thought I’d say this, but I like being a woman. I guess like a lot of guys, I’ve always been curious about what it would be like to be a woman. Oh, I was upset at first. What normal guy wouldn’t be?”

“But you sound as if you just said you had some sort of repressed desire to be a woman,” I pointed out, scarcely believing what I was hearing.

“I don’t mean it in that way,” she explained. “I never wanted to dress in women’s clothes or have a sex change. But I will admit I’ve always been curious. Women always seem to know themselves better than men do. When I was a man, I wasn’t particularly happy. It’s hard to explain, really. I don’t mean I didn’t enjoy being a man. It’s just I felt as if there was something missing.”

“It seems like there’s something missing now,” I commented wryly. “Have you looked between your legs lately?”

“Trish!”

“Sorry.”

“Anyhow,” she went on, “when I was changed, I was as upset as you were. All I wanted was to be changed back into myself–my old self–again. Then I got to know Don. I was so wrong about Orientals. I always thought they were cold and calculating. But Don isn’t anything like that. He really loves me. I mean, he loves all of us, but he loves me. I never felt that much love before–even when I was married. My wife and I started yelling at each other practically before the wedding was over. But Don is just... well, he’s... you know what I’m trying to say.”

A real lover? Great in bed? A tiger between the sheets?

She sighed. “I guess he’s just a great guy.” She looked up at me. “I think I can be happy here. So can you if you just let it happen.”

To my dismay, I actually understood what Brooks was telling me. It really wasn’t so bad in some ways. I had my youth to live again. There was no ugly divorce and a pack a day habit in Trish’s life. There were no aches of approaching middle age, no getting up every morning wondering what city I was in. But I was a girl, damn it! And a Japanese girl at that. Well... Japanese by ancestry at least.

“So you won’t see the Judge with me.”

She shook her head. “I don’t see what good it would do. Do you?”

“Because you’ve decided you like your new life,” I concluded.

“That’s part of it,” she admitted. Then she went to a bookshelf and pulled down a book for me to see. It was the Edith Hamilton book on mythology. I had just read part of it at the library. “I assume you know what’s in this?”

I nodded silently.

“Then you know we’re up against great power here. If Ju... if the Judge wants us to be who we are now, I’d say we’re stuck.”

“All right,” I agreed reluctantly. Actually, I had already come to the same conclusion. It just bothered me to see Bro... Mom revelling in her new life. Maybe I would be better off if I learned to do the same. “I’ll play it your way... Mom.”

She smiled happily. “Oh Trish, it will be fun. I know you don’t think so now, but it will. Now, what would you like for dinner? I’ve started a salad.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Just something simple. I have a... I mean, I’m going out to the movies with some friends.”

There was a sly look in her eyes. “A boy?”

“Well, Jennifer and I are going to the movies with a couple of her friends. And yes, they’re boys,” I replied, trying everything I could to make that night not sound like a date.

She grabbed my hands. “Trish, that’s great! See? You’re learning how it should be here.”

Actually, I felt like crying. This was my best friend–or at least she had been my best friend. Now, she wanted to be my mother. It was as if Brooks was dead. Well, I suppose in a way that he was. We both were. We should have died back in that bar fight that never happened.

“Look... Mom... don’t get carried away. It’s just a movie. It’s not as if I’m going to... well, you know. I’m not going to be doing anything.”

She gave me that knowing mother smile I remembered from my real mother in my previous life. “Fine,” she said, as if she really hadn’t heard me. “Why don’t you go ahead and get ready? I’ll make dinner without your help tonight.”

Something told me I’d be spending a lot of time in the kitchen in the future.

I was picked up at a few minutes before seven. Seven had been the agreed-upon time, but I was glad they were early. I had been getting progressively more nervous about the evening with each passing moment. I kept trying to tell myself this wasn’t really a date. It was just four teens going to the movies together. What could be more innocuous?

The problem was I knew Jennifer and Barry were an item. Jennifer tried to downplay it as much as possible. She had told me that she and Barry were friends in their original lives, and since Barry remembered who he had been, that made them still “just friends.” That might have been true from Jennifer’s viewpoint–although I doubted even that–but Barry was certainly in love with Jennifer. I could tell it just from the way he looked at her and the way he gently put his arm around her every moment he could. Jennifer, I noted, never protested, and I could tell from the contented smile she got when Barry touched her that he had become more than just a friend. I don’t think they were sleeping together, though. I suspected someday the two of them would go the altar together with at least a fifty-fifty shot at being virgins–in their current bodies, that is.

So that left me with Luke. What were we supposed to do while the two lovebirds gazed into each other’s eyes? I could remember a double date or two back in high school or college where the other couple got downright embarrassing. And I could think about a few where my date and I were the couple trying to get it on. Would I just sit there uncomfortably with Luke while Barry and Jennifer made out right in front of us? Would Luke try to put the moves on me?

I had tried not to look too sexy for the date. I even considered wearing jeans even though I knew the others would be wearing shorts. The problem was that it was actually quite warm for a spring evening, and I knew I’d be too hot and look odd in jeans. That was the last thing I wanted–to look odd. So I wore shorts, but the loosest pair I could find. Then I changed them. Somehow, they made my hips look too big. So I went on automatic.

Big mistake.

When I finished, I was one hot looking little thing. There I was in a lemon-yellow tank top, jeans shorts, and a pair of wedge sandals that arched my heel up displaying my slim, golden legs. I had laid on the makeup a little thick, giving me a little of the Dragon Lady look. Framed by my dark hair, I looked like a real Oriental flower. In fact, I looked too good. I thought about changing, but knew I wouldn’t have time to wash off all the makeup and start over with my clothes. I would just have to be beautiful but unapproachable.

“You look fantastic!” Luke said as I met him at the door.

“Thanks,” I replied, trying to look pleased. The odd thing was that I really was pleased–at least a little bit. “You look great, too.” That just sort of spilled out of my mouth. Of course, it was the natural thing to say, and besides, he really did look great. Like most boys in high school, he had been a little grungier, a little baggy really in his attire at school. As the old saying goes, he cleaned up real nice. He was wearing a polo shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals, and he looked as if he had just stepped out of the pages of an Eddie Bauer catalogue. I found him strangely... attractive.

Barry was driving Jennifer’s car, so Luke and I had to squeeze into the back seat of the Mustang. It wasn’t too difficult for me with my newer, more diminutive size, but Luke with his basketball player’s height had a hard time contorting himself in a seat that had obviously been designed for double amputees. I found his arm loosely draped around me but said nothing. Where else was he supposed to put it? He even had to duck his head a little. Again, what could I say if he had to be staring down a little at my breasts?

I have to admit I had fun. The movie was okay but not terribly memorable. It was a typical Julia Roberts romantic comedy. I had taken my own dates to a number of them over the years, but I found I still preferred action films. I did realize that I was projecting myself into the character Julia Roberts was playing instead of one of the male characters. Somehow, that made the film more enjoyable. I wondered to myself if that was why women preferred romantic comedies to action films. There were so seldom strong women to project into in action films. Mostly, I began to realize, women in action films were there to be dragged out of danger by the virile hero. They were seldom well-developed characters.

And yes, Luke had his arm around me. I just thought it would make more of a scene to protest. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was gripping me possessively. I actually found it a little comforting in a different sort of way. I suppose I didn’t have to snuggle up against him, but it just felt right.

After the movie, we went out for a coke. Apparently, Rusty’s Burger Barn was the biggest teen hangout in town, for there were twenty or so teens doing the same thing we were doing. I got some curious stares as I walked in. I looked down instinctively to see if my fly was closed–as if that was an issue now. Why were they staring at me?

Then I realized why. Sure, I was new in town–that was part of it. But looking into the Caucasian faces of my friends, I had forgotten for a while that I was now seen as a foreigner by many of the town’s residents. I don’t think they meant it in a bad way, but I think they were wondering why a clean-cut American boy like Luke would be walking in holding hands with that Japanese girl. I felt like yelling out to them that I was every bit as American as they were, but I didn’t.

With nothing more than a perfunctory wave to the other teens, we took a table near the back of the room. Luke sat very close to me–closer than he needed to–but that was all right with me. It gave me more of a sense of belonging.

“That’s a neat car your dad got you, Jennifer,” Luke said to start the conversation after we had given our drink orders. “But why did he get you a yellow one?”

Before Jennifer could answer, I told him, “That yellow was a special color for the GTs in 1995.”

“So that’s the only color they came in?” Barry asked.

I shook my head. “No, you could get them in any of the Mustang colors, but that yellow and a sort of purplish blue were the two exclusive GT colors.”

“So that’s got the 4.6 liter engine,” Luke concluded.

“Not in ’95,” I told him. “The ’95 models had a 5.0 liter engine. I actually like it better than the...”

Luke was staring at me. “How come you know so much about Fords?”

My eyes narrowed, giving them I’m sure a particularly Oriental look. “Oh. You think I should just know about Hondas and Toyotas because I’m Japanese?”

Luke reddened. “Oh God no, Trish. I just meant how come you know so much about cars?”

“You mean how come a girl knows so much about cars,” Jennifer clarified sweetly.

Luke turned even redder. “Man, I stuck my foot in it that time.”

Actually, I was about as embarrassed as he was. I had taken an innocent–if sexual–comment and construed it into a racial comment. Any boy who treated me the way Luke had treated me was hardly a racist. “Oh. Well, I’ve just always liked cars,” I told him, ignoring the other remarks.

“Really?” he said brightly. “Me, too. I’ve just... well, sorry, Trish. I’ve just never known a girl who could talk about cars.”

Things went pretty smoothly for the rest of the evening. The only other blemish on the night was as we walked out. Duck and his friends had staked out a table near the entrance. Under his breath, I could hear Duck muttering, “Oh so solly! Me new here.” His half-wit friends chuckled but the four of us just ignored him. I had to gently nudge Luke ahead though, because he stiffened as if he wanted to defend my honor.

“Assholes,” he muttered when we were safely outside.

“It’s okay,” I told him as I squeezed his hand. I was a little afraid he’d get steamed up and go back in and confront Duck and his pals. I didn’t want to see Luke get hurt on my account. Even with Barry’s help, they’d be outnumbered since Jennifer and I wouldn’t be much help.

“Duck’s mostly just talk,” Jennifer explained as we got in the car.

“But it hasn’t always been that way,” Barry pointed out. “Before Bull got hurt in that game, dropped out of school and had to get married, that was a pretty tough bunch.”

“I’ve taken Duck down before,” Luke said defiantly.

“True,” Barry allowed. “But he was alone then. And I wouldn’t be much help to you against two of his friends. Besides...” He looked at Jennifer with a grin. “... I’m a lover–not a fighter.”

Jennifer giggled and playfully punched his arm. “Barry!”

To my relief, there was no long make-out session in the country. Barry’s little joke had gotten me very concerned that the next stop might be a dark country road. Instead, it looked as if the evening was over as we pulled up in front of my house.

Luke helped me out of the car. There we were, touching again. What was I supposed to do now? Did every girl worry about that as she was dropped off on a first date? Probably, I realized. To kiss or not to kiss–that was the question. I knew from my own high school experience that boys went through the same trauma. But a fair number of years had gone by since I was in high school. Was I expected to kiss him? Part of me hoped not, but part of me was curious about what it would be like.

“I had a great time tonight, Trish,” Luke said shyly at the door.

“Me, too,” I replied, equally shy.

Luke finally made his move. He leaned down and at the same time put his arm gently around me. Our lips met–softly, almost chastely. I could smell his after-shave and wondered what my lips tasted like to him. I could feel a faint quiver between my legs and wondered if he felt a stirring I would have found more familiar. I even closed my eyes.

Then, in a moment, it was over. Our lips parted and his arm was no longer around me.

“Well, good night,” he whispered.

“Good night,” I whispered back with a smile.

As I turned, he asked, “Uh... can I call you tomorrow?”

Of course you can, you big dummy. I just let you kiss me–remember? “Sure.”

I closed the door behind me with a sigh, but whether the sigh was one of relief or contentment, I really couldn’t tell. What was happening to me?

“He looked nice.”

It was Brooks–Mom–sitting there on the couch in the dark.

“You’re still up?” I asked softly.

“Sure. It’s not that late. Besides, I had to see how you made out–no pun intended.”

I sat down next to her so we could keep our voices low enough to not wake Dad or Ralph. “It was... different.”

“But fun?”

I thought for a moment before answering. “Fun? Yeah, I suppose it was.”

“He kissed you.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was more of an amused statement.

“Just a little one.”

“Did you kiss him back?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose I did.” Damn! She was really enjoying this. After the crap I gave her about the way she was acting around Dad.

“Good,” she said, surprising me by not rubbing it in. She put a motherly hand on my knee. “Then go ahead and get to bed. Your father wants us to go to church tomorrow.”

“Church!” I groaned. I hadn’t been to church in years.

“Yes, church. It’s a small town, and people go to church on Sundays. Now goodnight, young lady.”

Somehow, the ‘young lady’ didn’t gall me as much as it had earlier. “Goodnight, Mom.”

There was something almost natural about getting ready for bed. I hadn’t felt it on either previous night, but as I slipped on a set of rather feminine pajamas, I didn’t seem to find anything particularly odd about them. In fact, I noted to myself as I slipped under the covers, even in a short period of time, being Trish had begun to feel almost natural. Oh, I still missed being the real me, but I was already starting to ignore the sway of my breasts and the tickle of my long hair. Was that part of the magic of this place? I wasn’t sure. All I was sure of was that I was warm and comfortable and I had had a very nice evening, even if it had been marred by Duck’s racial comments. I fell asleep with the image of Luke’s face in my mind.

I woke up the next morning–Sunday–without being called. It was the first morning since my transformation that I awakened with the full realization of who I now was. There was no half-asleep confusion as to why there was hair in my face or why my chest felt so funny–or why I seemed to lack any sensation in my penis.

“Good–you’re awake.” Mom smiled at me from an open door. “Don’t forget–we’re going to church today. Will you need any help with your pantyhose?”

“My what?”

“Pantyhose. You’ll need to wear a dress. There’s a pretty lemon-yellow dress in your closet. Try that with white pantyhose and shoes.”

I sighed as she closed the door. I might be able to wake up without confusion, but a dress? Well, I had worn one Friday, I told myself. But the dress Mom had picked out for me had a very short skirt. I supposed I had to dress like that some time, I rationalized. I was sure she had picked it out for me just because it was short and would require pantyhose. At least I had made it nearly three days into my new girlhood without wearing the damned things.

Again, having been married once, putting on pantyhose proved to not be too much of a problem. I did it very slowly just to make sure I didn’t get a run. The rest of the outfit was no problem either. I even picked out jewelry and did my makeup with a minimum of going on automatic.

“You look very nice, dear,” Mom commented when she saw me at the breakfast table. I had to admit, it was getting easier and easier to think of her as ‘Mom.’ The way she acted, it was as if Brooks had somehow checked out, leaving only this attractive woman behind.

Was the same thing happening to me? I wondered as I ate my breakfast. This girl stuff was getting to be second nature to me. I still thought about being a man and I still would have given everything I owned (or rather that Allen had owned) to get my masculine identity back. But I was growing more and more comfortable with my new identity with each passing hour.

Jennifer had certainly been a big help with my level of comfort. And I had to admit that Luke had helped, too, although he had no idea of it. I found my growing attraction to him both natural and pleasant. I had expected to have guilty feelings of being gay or something, but when I looked like I did and Luke looked like he did, who could call what I felt for him gay?

Church, however, was something of a disaster. It was the same old story. While everyone was pleasant and friendly, several people asked at least one of us how we liked the United States. A couple expressed surprise that we were Christian, as if to be a Baptist, you had to have round eyes and any color skin but yellow. All of us were in a little bit of a funk as we headed home.

“I wouldn’t mind it so much,” Dad said, “if it wasn’t for the fact that you kids are the fifth generation of our family to be born in the United States.”

“Fifth?” I asked, surprised.

He went on to explain that the first generation of our family to come to the United States had left Japan at a time when the Japanese government had declared that no one who left the country could ever return–upon pain of death. It hadn’t been easy for them. They were farmers, and although the valleys of Central California could support crops they were familiar with, they had not been welcomed by their new neighbors. At last, the family had moved off the farm, settling in Fresno where they ran a grocery store.

“That was your great grandfather’s idea,” Dad explained to us. “There was a growing population of Japanese in Fresno, and he thought the family would be more comfortable surrounded by other Americans of Japanese ancestry.”

Things had gone well for the family until the Second World War.

“I found your grandfather’s scrapbook,” Dad said to us. “It was stuffed into one of the boxes I was unpacking yesterday. I want to show it to you.”

When we got home, we gathered around the kitchen table while Dad reverently spread the aging scrapbook in front of us. The book told a tale of the trials the Yamamoto family went through during the war. I knew, of course, that the history was fabricated by the same magical forces that had created Ovid, but it was nonetheless compelling. Even if the events hadn’t actually happened to my imaginary ancestors, I had little doubt that similar things had happened to others.

“This is your grandfather when he was about six.” Dad pointed at a black and white picture of two young Oriental boys in front of a store. Both were handsome, happy boys, although one was apparently quite a bit older than the other. Painted on the glass of the store were the words ‘Yamamoto’s Market.’ He was a handsome, happy little boy. “That’s the store your great grandfather ran until the war. This next picture is him at ten.”

The boy in that picture was still a handsome lad, but there was a more sombre look on his face. In the background were buildings that looked like barracks, and beyond them a vast, open plain.

“This is the camp our family was sent to after Pearl Harbor,” Dad explained. “It was in Wyoming. That’s where your grandfather met your grandmother.”

“Who was the other boy in the first picture?” Ralph asked.

“That was your grandfather’s brother, Yoshi,” Dad told him. “When it was finally allowed, he joined an all-Japanese division that fought in Italy. He was killed at Anzio Beach.”

Mom and I had said nothing as Dad told the history of the Yamamoto family. I don’t know about Mom, but I was beginning to think the Judge had let us off rather lightly. We had been ‘punished’ by being made a part of a proud family–a proud American family. Sure, we were both female. Mom seemed more at ease with that than I was. But the point was that we were as American as any family that had ever come from Europe. Or Africa, I thought. No one asked American blacks if they had just come from Africa. So why did so many assume that most Asians weren’t native Americans?

I changed into shorts, still pondering what I had learned. The family had been left practically destitute after the war. The store was gone–expropriated after the forced move to Wyoming. So apparently, my great grandfather had started a new business from scratch. He moved the family to San Francisco since there was a larger concentration of Japanese-Americans there. Apparently, the hatred of everything Japanese was still intense right after the war, so there was safety in numbers.

And in my previous life, I had helped perpetuate that hatred in my own small way. I looked at myself in the mirror. There was the face of a pretty girl–a pretty American girl no matter where her ancestors had come from. Wasn’t that what they had taught us back in school? That America was a melting pot. That it didn’t make any difference where you came from or what you believed in, once you put down stakes here, you were an American.

It was then that I felt tears forming in my eyes. I don’t know if they were tears of frustration or if I was just feeling sorry for myself. Whatever the cause, I had to do something and do it quickly or I was going to be ‘that Japanese girl’ for a long, long time.

Fortunately, I had a plan.

Jennifer was curious. She had dropped by, as people in small towns tend to do. We had ended up over at her house. I finally met her mother. Like Brooks, she was very confident in her womanhood. The subject of her transformation never even came up. I found myself very comfortable around her. It was easy to see how she had been able to help Jennifer accept her new life. Shortly, we found ourselves laughing and talking as we drank Diet Cokes on her back deck.

“So what was it you told me on the way over that you wanted to talk about?” she asked when her mother had retreated to the house.

“Answer this for me, Jennifer,” I began. “No matter what I say or do, I’m stuck here in Ovid as who I am now. Is that correct?”

“As far as I can tell,” she answered, eyeing me curiously. “Every now and then the Judge modifies people who piss him off–like making me younger. But you can’t even leave Ovid unless you accept who you are. If you leave, you’ll just wind up coming into the other end of town. I know; I tried.”

“So I’m Patricia Yamamoto until I die.”

She grinned. “Or get married. If Luke asks you, you can be Patricia Meecham.”

If looks could kill...

“Okay, sorry. And yes, you will be Patricia Yamamoto for the rest of your life.”

I sighed. “Okay then Jennifer, you win. I’m going to try out for cheerleading.”

Jennifer’s mouth dropped open. “Wait a minute Trish, I thought about what you said. You’re right. Being a cheerleader isn’t such a hot idea.”

“Sure it is,” I argued. “Okay, so you wear a skirt so short your butt shows. So you’re every pimple-faced boy’s sex fantasy. It’s still a form of athletics, and it’s still an easy road to popularity.”

“Since when have you been worried about being popular?”

“Since I’ve gotten real tired of being considered some kind of alien life form,” I replied. “If I’ve got to look like this, I want to be treated like a normal high school girl. I want a little respect. I don’t want to have to keep explaining why I’m not Buddhist or what the weather is like in Tokyo or where my grandfather was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If I’m a cheerleader, I’m one-hundred percent certified American in everyone’s eyes.”

Jennifer was silent for a moment. Then: “Okay. I see your point. And I’ve seen you in action in gym class, so I know you can do it. You just need to learn a few cheers for your audition.”

“Do you know any of them?”

“Hey, I go to all the games,” she laughed. “Here, let me show you.”

We spent the next two hours practicing Ovid High School cheers. We even modified a couple of them to display my gymnastic talent. I hadn’t been too sure of myself at first, but after two hours of intensive cheers, I was well aware of what my new body was capable of doing.

I collapsed in a heap, exhausted and my throat a little rough from the cheers. “God, I don’t know if I’d last through an entire game.”

“Don’t worry,” Jennifer laughed, collapsing beside me. “What we were doing was a lot more intense than what cheerleaders do. They take a lot of breaks, you know. I don’t think any of them could do as many strenuous routines as we have.”

It was my turn to grin. I had another bright idea. “Jennifer, come out for cheerleading with me.”

“Right,” she snorted. “The rich bitch cheerleader. I don’t think so.”

I grabbed her by the shoulders. “No, I’m serious. Think about it. You’ve always regretted not being able to play for one of the girl’s teams. And you love athletics. Together, we can turn the cheerleading squad into something any gymnast would be proud to be on.”

“But I’ve never wanted to be a cheerleader,” she protested, but I could see she was starting to consider the idea.

“Do you think I have?” I returned.

“Good point.”

“So what do you say?” Years of practice negotiating had taught me one thing. If you keep asking for the result you want, the person on the other side of the table can say no fifty times, but that’s all wiped out when they say yes once.

“I don’t know...”

She was weakening. I could sense it. “Hey look, you told me yourself how some of the people here think you’re just a rich bitch. Isn’t this a way to prove them wrong?”

“How?”

“Well,” I reasoned, “you said yourself there’s nothing that says All-American girl like a cheerleader.” Actually, that isn’t exactly what she said, but I was counting on her not remembering exactly what she had said. It was close enough that it struck home. “Wouldn’t being a cheerleader change you from rich bitch to All-American girl?”

“I...”

“Jennifer, we’re wasting time we could spend practicing. Just say yes.”

She never said it, but she managed a small nervous smile and a nod of her head.

So we spent the rest of the day practicing. Jennifer had a fairly good knowledge of the high school cheers. And what high school student who had attended the games wouldn’t? It was helpful to me though, because I had never heard those particular cheers before. Suddenly, we really got into it. We were inventing new, complex routines that would blow them away at the auditions. After three more hours, we were exhausted but happy.

“Even I didn’t know I could do cartwheels,” Jennifer laughed as we rested on the grass of her backyard.

“Double cartwheels, no less,” I noted.

“I still think your twist and flip is more impressive,” she laughed. “I can’t see myself ever being able to do that.”

I sobered up for a moment. “Jennifer, do you think we can do it? I mean, I still can’t believe this isn’t a big popularity contest.”

“Normally, you might be right,” she agreed. “But as I told you, not many girls are going out for cheerleading this year.”

“Why is that?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? As I told you, a lot of girls are in sports now. And I do have to admit I’ve never seen a girl picked for cheerleader who wasn’t pretty darned cute. That cuts the field, too.”

She dropped me off at my house after agreeing to pick me up in the morning. We were going to sign up for cheerleader auditions the first thing since the cut-off was Monday at noon.

I spent the rest of the evening studying. Well, I did take a break to talk on the phone with Luke. But that was just for a few minutes. Well, half an hour or so, really... or more like forty-five minutes. He was actually excited that I was going out for cheerleading. He reminded me that since he was on the basketball team, the football team and the track team, that meant we’d be able to see each other at all the games. Somehow, that seemed all right with me.

By the time I went to bed, I was actually looking forward to going to school on Monday. What a change from Friday when I couldn’t wait to get out of school. Maybe this new life wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

So when I got up Monday morning, it was as if I had come to terms with my new life. I showered and dressed quickly, even putting on my makeup with little help from the magical automatic mode. I was cheerful at breakfast, laughing and talking with Mom as if she had been my mother all my life. I was even nice to Ralph, in a sisterly sort of way, giving him a little kiss on the cheek as I left the table. Of course, that was more to annoy him than anything else.

As I was gathering my homework for school, Mom came into my room. “Trish, did the fairies come by overnight and replace you?”

“That’s called a changeling,” I laughed. “And no, although I suppose that would be a good term for all of us when we meet the Judge. I just decided if I have to be a girl for the rest of my life, I’m going to do it on my terms.”

I told her all about Jennifer and what we had decided to do. Needless to say, she was surprised.

“Cheerleaders?”

“Is there something wrong with that?” I asked, putting my book bag down on my bed.

“Well, no,” she chuckled, “I suppose there isn’t. But from what I know about you and what you’ve told me about Jennifer, it sounds a little out of character for both of you. I can’t imagine you wanting to twirl around in short skirts. Do you remember back in our male days the idea of cheerleader fantasies?”

“Oh, Mom!”

“No, I’m serious,” she continued. “Are you sure you aren’t just playing out some leftover male fantasy?”

“There’s more to be a cheerleader now than there was when we were in school,” I argued. “It’s not just bouncing around with pom-poms. It’s the only way for Jennifer and me to do anything athletic at the school since the women’s coach only wants incoming freshmen to join the teams. Besides, what better way to fit in here? I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life being ‘that little Japanese girl’.”

She leaned over and gave me a hug. “In that case, Trish, I hope you get selected–you and Jennifer both.”

“Oops! There’s Jennifer. Got to go!” I gave her a little kiss on the cheek and scrambled out of the room, still attaching my book bag.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Jennifer asked as I closed the car door. She was obviously having second thoughts.

“Don’t think we’re good enough?” I asked innocently.

Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, we’re good enough. In fact, we’ll probably be the best ones there. It’s just...”

I looked at my new friend. “It’s just that after fighting this girlhood thing for so long, becoming a cheerleader looks like the ultimate surrender.”

“Well... yes.”

“I would have thought the same thing a few days ago,” I told her. “But I honestly believe that success is the best revenge. If we sit back and just act like part of the pack, then the Judge and his cronies have won. We’ve been punished. I don’t think that it’s any act of whimsy that keeps the women’s coach from considering upperclassmen as new team members. If she isn’t one of the Judge’s people, she’s been programmed to act that way. It’s to make sure people like us are frustrated.”

“You may have a point,” Jennifer acknowledged. “I’ve often thought at least some of the shades are programmed to act in ways that challenge us.”

“Shades?”

“Oh–the transparent people,” she explained. “I guess an obscure meaning of the word is ‘phantom,’ although that isn’t really what they are.”

“Just like we’re changelings,” I muttered.

“Us? Changelings? I like the sound of that,” she said with a smile.

I explained to her what a changeling really was, but that didn’t deter her from liking the word. I suppose just as the shades aren’t really shades in the strictest sense, we could be considered changelings. I had a hunch I had just coined a new term in Ovid.

In spite of my resolve, I almost backed out when it came time to sign the list. It was posted on the school’s main bulletin board–a location that was always busy. I lost count of the number of guys who kept looking over my body, concentrating on my breasts and legs. I was beginning to regret wearing a tight top and shorts. This was the way it would be for me if I became a cheerleader, I realized. I would be on display.

Then I realized that I would be on display no matter what. I was an attractive girl, and my Oriental features only served to make me more exotic. Unless I bundled up in unattractive clothing and covered my attractive face with a ski mask, I would always be on display. It was something I supposed all attractive girls just learned to live with.

“You first,” Jennifer said, handing me the pen.

“Nope. After you.” I handed the pen back. I half expected her to back out if I signed first. She sighed and signed, muttering, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“What we’re doing,” I corrected her, taking the pen and signing my own name.

“Well, well, look who wants to be a cheerleader.”

I didn’t have to turn around to realize it was Duck. But I did turn around, facing his sneering expression. “Maybe you and your friends should sign up, too,” I told him sarcastically with the full knowledge that all of Ovid High’s cheerleaders were female.

To my satisfaction, Duck’s face became red. His two friends turned red, too. Score one for my side.

“You think just because you’re a girl, I won’t pound on you?”

“It wouldn’t be good for your image,” I pointed out confidently. I suppose that was one advantage of being a girl.

“Maybe not, but I don’t think either you or your rich bitch friend have any business being cheerleaders. You might want to reconsider your decision or...”

“Or what, Duck?” Jennifer chimed in.

“Well,” he said with a malicious grin, “I might not be able to give either of you the lesson you deserve, but your little Jap friend here has a brother who might learn it for you. And it would be a shame if that pretty car of yours had any problems.”

“You’re threatening us?” I asked incredulously.

“So what are you going to do about it? Go tell the principal? A fat lot of good that would do you.”

I suspected he was probably right. High schools were a jungle in their own way. Threats were made all the time, but the authorities were reluctant to act on a threat alone. Something could happen to Jennifer’s car and Duck and his friends would have an alibi to prove they were nowhere near the car. Ralph could end up getting a beating but it would be chalked up as a typical dispute between two boys.

I was beginning to wonder if Duck had something to do with how few girls were trying out for cheerleader. I had noticed that on the already-short list, two girls had scratched out their names. For some reason, he wanted the list kept short.

Duck and his friends turned and left without another word. They had made their point so there was nothing left to be said.

“Assholes,” Jennifer muttered, but I noticed she said it too quietly for them to hear.

“Do you think they meant what they said?” I asked her, suddenly worried for Ralph.

“Yes, and now I can tell you why,” she said. She pointed to a name on the list: Millie Adams.

“So? Who is Millie Adams?” I asked. “His girlfriend?”

“No such luck,” Jennifer said. “Adams is Duck’s last name. Millie is his younger sister. In her own way, she’s meaner than Duck. And I guess her mother is the Queen Bitch of Ovid. She’s probably pushing Millie to be a cheerleader and told Duck to keep the competition under control.”

“Oh surely not,” I protested. “It can’t be that important for them.”

Jennifer shook her head. “You must not read the papers. Stuff like this happens all the time. Remember that mother in Texas who plotted to kill a girl who was competing against her daughter to be a cheerleader? They even made a TV movie about that.”

“Sure, but those were real people,” I insisted. “These are shades.”

“Shades like your dad or your brother?” Jennifer shot back. “Look, if you haven’t figured it out already, the shades are as real as us. I don’t know if they have free will or are programmed to be assholes like Duck, but whatever the reason, they act like real people. And you know they’re as solid as real people. That also means they can be just as dangerous as real people.”

I didn’t take her seriously at that moment, but as I waited the next couple of days for cheerleader tryouts, I began to see what she meant. Since most of the people I came into contact with were shades, it didn’t take long for me to realize that programmed or not, they were really people. In fact, I really stopped noticing their slight transparency after a while.

Teachers, students, family and friends–each group contained shades. And of course, there were shade enemies as well. Dad and Ralph were certainly the shades I came into contact with the most. I was beginning to feel as if Dad really was my father. And Ralph? Well, he was the typical little brother. Sometimes I felt as if I could kill him, and other times I loved him. Even at his worst, I hated to think what would happen to him if Duck decided to get back at me through him. It was almost enough to make me back out of the whole idea of trying out.

And speaking of Duck, he and his friends were making it a point to intimidate Jennifer and me. When we’d come out of school, Duck and his friends would be leaning against Jennifer’s car. Duck would pretend to polish up the door with his sleeve before moving away from the car to let us in. Even worse, Duck or one of his friends would often stop and talk to Ralph. The conversations were innocent, as Ralph told me, but the idea was there–namely that they could get their hands on him whenever they felt like it. I didn’t tell Ralph what was going on. I was afraid it could frighten him.

I saw a lot of Luke over those two days. I even invited him to come and watch me try out for cheerleader, but he and Barry had a track meet that day. How they were able to leave town and participate in a track meet was beyond me. Jennifer told me that according to Barry, the Ovid team participated in events normally, but after the meet was over and everyone had gone home, none of the other teams or their fans had any memory of the Ovid team. All I could do was shake my head. The magic of Ovid was so immense that I was happy I hadn’t confronted the Judge after all.

I was nervous from the moment I got up on Wednesday. It was time for tryouts, and I was as nervous as a turkey on Thanksgiving morning.

“Quit worrying,” Jennifer said as we were limbering up for our turn. “Nine girls have signed up. I figure you and I will have no trouble with the competition.”

“So how do you rate Duck’s sister?” I asked, stretching out a leg muscle that was cramped up from sitting in class all day.

She shrugged. “Fifth or sixth out of nine.”

“Slim chance?”

“No chance,” she replied. “Dana Porter and Marsha Hammond are both a lot better than her. And then, there’s us.”

I peeked out onto the stage to catch a glimpse of the judges. I recognized a couple of my teachers, and the attractive fortyish woman sitting next to them had to be Dr. Miner, the Superintendent of Ovid Schools. Jennifer had told me that she was one of the Judge’s associates–probably Minerva I reasoned.

There were a few students sitting with the teachers, and I figured they had to be the upperclassmen designated to vote on the new cheerleaders. And then there were the parents. I couldn’t recognize any of them, but I was sure that was who they were. But suddenly I noticed another figure sitting next to Dr. Miner. It was the Judge!

Now what the hell was that bastard doing there? I wondered. Maybe he was there to gloat. Here I was, a former man who had a strong dislike for Orientals in general and Japanese in particular. Only now, I was an attractive, diminutive girl of Japanese ancestry who was trying to become every red-blooded American boy’s fantasy–a cheerleader. How he must be laughing inside!

But maybe he had figured out why I wanted to be a cheerleader. Maybe he wanted me to remain forever an outsider. Maybe he was there to influence the vote away from me. “Is this the image we want for our high school?” he might be saying. “A little foreign girl–a Japanese girl no less representing our American school?” No, he wouldn’t be that blunt (although the old me might have been); he’d be subtle, but the results would be the same.

So which was it? To vote me down or to gloat? Vote: gloat. How ironic that they rhymed.

Perhaps another person might have gotten frightened; I just got mad. His presence increased my resolve. If he was there to gloat, I’d show him that his punishment had failed. I might not have wanted this new life as an Oriental girl, but I damned well planned to make the most of it. And if he tried to stop me? Well, I’d just have to be so good during the tryouts that the selection committee wouldn’t dare turn me down.

“Places, everyone!”

That was from Mrs. Lovelace. Although a shade, she was supposedly a former cheerleader and professional dancer. Since she had two sons and no daughters, she relived her youth by volunteering to be the volunteer coach/den mother for the cheerleaders.

We all formed up on stage in a single line. Dressed as we were in an assortment of spandex, sports bras, and leotards, we looked like escapees from an exercise video. My own black leotard looked pretty sexy against my golden skin. Come to think of it, black and gold were the Ovid High colors. Maybe it was a fortuitous choice.

Mrs. Lovelace put us through several group routines that were standard cheering fare. They were the same cheers Jennifer and I had practiced, so I knew them well. Unfortunately, I didn’t do as well as I would have liked. The girl on my right was a little clumsy. She was cute enough with her long brown hair swinging back and forth and her spandex shorts displaying a firm body, but she wasn’t terribly well coordinated. A couple of times, she moved at the wrong moment or started to turn the wrong way. Unfortunately, this threw my timing off a little.

I still felt I had a good chance, though. One girl had actually slipped and fallen while another was having trouble remembering the routines. And those were just the ones I managed to notice on my turns. Besides, it was the individual performance that I felt would put me over the top.

“Did you see Dana Porter?” Jennifer asked me in a whisper as we waited for our turn.

“No. Which one was she?”

“She was the redhead on my left,” Jennifer said in awe. “She was poetry in motion. She does her individual routine next.”

“I’ll have to watch,” I promised. “Who was the brunette on my right?”

“Oh, that was Millie Adams,” Jennifer told me. “She did okay. She might have had a chance if it wasn’t for us.” She gave me a confident grin. That was just for my benefit, I realized.

They took us in the order of the signup sheet, so Jennifer and I were last. There was some stiff competition, I realized as Jennifer went out on stage. Dana Porter had wowed the committee, and Marsha Hammond looked like a natural. Even Millie Adams had turned in a pretty decent individual performance. But Jennifer and I were competing for what would be effectively two spots since Dana and Marsha were obvious choices–and Millie would have to be better than us. Barring a serious mistake on my part or Jennifer’s, Millie would be out of the running.

Jennifer’s athletic talent came through. She wasn’t as graceful as Dana or Marsha, but the routine she showed the panel was a more difficult one, requiring considerably more agility than either of the frontrunners had shown. She got a big hand as she left the stage. I had no doubts about Jennifer–she was in.

“Knock ’em dead, kid,” she said to me as I checked myself over. I thought I looked pretty good. I had taken special care with my makeup, enlisting Jennifer’s help. My lips were full and red and my eyes had been outlined to make them look if anything even more Oriental. I was shooting for the Mysterious East look. When first changed, I had been almost ashamed of the shape of my eyes, but now I had accentuated them and was actually surprised at how lovely they were. My long dark hair was clipped back into a loose ponytail–tight enough to stay out of my face but loose enough to swirl seductively as I moved. I sighed. It was now or never.

“And our last candidate is new to our school–Patricia Yamamoto,” Mrs. Lovelace announced, almost tripping over my last name.

I had designed my routine to emphasize both grace and athletic ability. Maybe it came from being a man before, but I knew what looked good and I emphasized those moves. The challenge for our individual routines had been to rework an existing cheer into a new and complex routine. It would demonstrate both our original thinking and talent at the same time.

I carefully checked my footing on the tumbling mats that had been laid out for this portion of the tryouts. They were a little uneven, but I could work with them. It was a simple routine really, but it took advantage of the flexibility of my body. It was one of those inane chants of “Who’s gonna win? Who’s gonna win? Who’s gonna win this game?” For that part of the routine, I just made the standard moves any cheerleader would make. But then...

“O!”

As I yelled out the letter as loud as I could, I tucked and rolled, leaving my body rigid enough as I rolled to form the letter “O.”

“V!” I yelled, dropping on my ass and lifting my legs and torso in one fluid motion until they formed a straight-line “V.”

“I!” I belted out next as I jumped to my feet arms extended straight up.

“D!” With that letter, I dropped to the floor, torso straight with my legs bent back and my head and arms arched back as well, hands touching feet from the back in an effective letter “D.”

Before rising, I twisted at a ninety degree angle facing my audience, jumped to a crouching position, rolled while springing into the air and came down in a perfect split.

“Ovid!”

For just a fraction of a second, there was stunned silence. But then, the audience broke into a loud cheer as they clapped for my performance. It was the most boisterous ovation of the day. The grin on my face was genuine. I knew that barring any interference from the Judge, I had made cheerleader.

“That was incredible!” Jennifer said when I got backstage.

“Oh, you saw me do it at your house,” I said modestly.

“True, but you gave it an extra effort today,” she gushed. “I don’t know if I made it, but I know you did.”

I smiled at her. “We both made it–I’m sure.”

All the other girls were quick to congratulate me as well–all except Millie. She just gave me a cold, hard stare and stormed off. She might have been a bitch, but she knew when she was beaten.

Our joy was short lived though. When Jennifer and I got back to her car, Duck and his friends were waiting for us. They were standing next to Jennifer’s car which now sported a long, deep scratch in the yellow paint.

“What have you done to my car?” Jennifer screamed.

“Us?” Duck said in mock innocence. “It was this way when we got here.”

There was a snicker from the Stupid Twins behind him.

“You bastard!” she growled, raising a fist as she approached Duck. “I know you did this.”

Her fist did no damage. Duck caught it, enveloping it in his own massive paw. For emphasis, he twisted it backward.

“Ow!” Jennifer screamed as he released her. I could see the frustration in her eyes. In her former life, she could have probably handled Duck easily. Now, for all her athletic ability, she still had the strength of a girl.

“My sister tells me you two did pretty good today,” Duck said conversationally. Then he moved menacingly close to me. “I thought I warned the two of you to forget about being cheerleaders.” He was close enough to be that I could smell his foul breath. “Especially you, Jap. You got no business being a cheerleader. You need to go back to Japan where you belong. Maybe I oughta go talk to that kid brother of yours.”

“You mean me?”

We all turned to see Ralph standing beside a nearby tree. Ralph had apparently seen us talking and came over to join us. He had no idea what was going on.

“Ralph, run!” I had visions of what they would do to my poor brother. And yes, I had come to think of him as my brother.

It was too late though. Duck’s two friends each grabbed an arm on the surprised boy as Duke approached, fists ready. I knew I would fare no better than Jennifer had if I tried to stop him. She was nursing a sprained wrist now and showed no interest in being given another lesson about how weak she was. But Ralph was my brother–or at least he was supposed to be. I found I actually had feelings for the little twerp and I had to do something to help.

So I jumped Duck from behind, grabbing to hold his arms back, but he shucked me off as if I had been a loose cape, throwing me to the ground. For the first time in my life, I was happy to have a little more padding on my butt, but it still stung. I tried to get up, but I knew I’d never manage it before Duck had buried his fists in my brother’s stomach.

Then, the unexpected happened. As I looked at Ralph, I saw the surprise in his eyes had turned to determination. He seemed to be steeling his body for something. At first, I thought he was trying to break loose–a worthless effort given the size of his two captors. Then I saw he wasn’t trying to get loose at all. He was making sure he had sufficient support from Duck’s two bozos–sufficient support to bring a leg up as his body twisted. An extended foot landed right in Duck’s crotch.

For a moment, I thought a magical sex change had been performed on Duck, for a beginning cry of surprise suddenly rose and octave until it became a scream of agony. Duck’s two henchmen were so surprised that they released Ralph. It was a bad move on their part. Ralph spun at once, another lethal kick slamming into one of the tough’s knees. I heard a sickening pop as Duck’s henchman fell to the ground screaming, his leg twisted in a painful direction. Then, it was the other one’s turn. Before he could bring his own fists up, Ralph struck him in the throat with a blow I thought would surely shatter the boy’s windpipe. Ralph held back a little though, for as his would-be assailant dropped to the ground, he was still breathing, although with some difficulty.

Ralph helped me to his feet. The kid didn’t have a mark on him. In fact, he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He grinned. “And to think, sis, you laughed at me for all those karate lessons. You said it was too much of a Japanese stereotype.”

I smiled at him. For once, I was happy a Japanese stereotype had rung true.

“Well, isn’t this interesting?” The voice was familiar. I turned to see the Judge standing there. “It seems I wasn’t needed after all.”

I looked back at the scene beside me. Ralph and his three assailants were frozen in place. They seemed completely unaware of the Judge’s presence. Only Jennifer and I were still moving.

“What do you mean–needed?” Jennifer asked, still nursing her wrist.

The Judge looked at her with sympathy. “Oh, my dear, that wrist must be causing you pain. Here, let me.”

He touched her wrist and I could tell from her expression that he had taken away the pain. I was sure he could have done the same for the stinging sensation in my ass, but I had no intention of letting him fondle my rear.

“You knew this was going to happen.” I hadn’t asked him a question; it was a statement.

To my surprise, he smiled. “I suspected Duck and his friends might do something like this. Don’t look so shocked. They may be shades as you call them, but they do have free will.” He stopped for a moment. “Or perhaps I should say that they have free will within the context of their identities. I wanted to make sure the two of you were safe. Normally, Officer Mercer would have handled the chore, but I was curious.”

“About what?” Jennifer asked. The tone of her voice made it clear she had no love for the Judge.

“Why, as to why the two of you would choose to try out for cheerleader,” he explained with another smile. “It seemed most uncharacteristic of both of you.”

“Why do you care?” Jennifer growled. “If anything, you should be pleased. We’ve decided to be good little girls and go with the flow. Now half of Ovid will be able to watch us jiggle.”

“I suppose your reasons are your own,” he admitted. “Perhaps, though, there’s more to the two of you than I first believed. I’ll have to keep an eye on you.” He nodded at Duck and his friends. “You seem to have an instinct for trouble.”

“So what will happen to them?” I asked. Jennifer had told me there were stories floating around Ovid that shades had been changed as well as outsiders. If we had wished for that, we were soon to be disappointed.

The Judge merely shrugged. “They will be expelled from school for a period of time. I doubt if it will teach them anything though.”

“You aren’t going to...” Jennifer’s voice trailed off.

“Change them?” the Judge finished for her. “Whatever for? There are some things we will not tolerate. Sexual assault, for example. Or smoking.”

He said it so seriously that I could scarcely believe it. Rape and smoking seemed to bear equal weight? He might look human, I realized, but he was not. None of his kind were; that seemed suddenly obvious to me.

With a final smile, he wished us well, flicked his wrist to release those he had frozen in time, and was gone. He didn’t exactly disappear. It was just that he was no longer there.

Jennifer and I found out the next day that we had made the cheerleading squad. We were as happy as... well, as happy as schoolgirls. Barry and Luke even took us to Rusty’s to celebrate. Mom was pleased, too. It becomes harder and harder to think of her as anything besides Mom, and I think she likes it like that. We’ve stopped discussing our former lives entirely. Maybe that’s for the best.

As for Luke, well, I guess we’re an item now. I don’t know how long it will last, but I have to admit, he’s fun to be with. As long as I’m stuck as a girl, I might as well date a guy with common interests. We talk sports and cars just the way Brooks and I used to do it. And did I mention that he’s a great kisser?

Ralph is the new golden boy at Ovid High. Before he took on Duck and his friends, Ralph was just that strange little Japanese boy. Now, he’s some kind of a folk hero around the school. Boys want to be his friend and girls call him up at home. The little twerp is going to be more popular than me!

As for Duck and his boys, they were kicked out of school for the rest of the semester. That means they won’t be able to keep up with their classmates and move up. They were all marginal students to begin with. Most of my friends don’t think they’ll ever even finish school. Unfortunately, that means they’ll probably be in some of my classes next year. Oh well, nothing is perfect.

I hate to admit it, but in the two weeks that have gone by since the tryouts, I’ve actually settled into a routine. It seems natural–actually pleasant–to be a girl. Jennifer is currently having her period, though, and she assures me being a girl won’t seem nearly as much fun when I suffer my first bout with the cramps.

Maybe so, but when I look in the mirror each morning, I see an attractive, young face looking back at me. It just happens to be female and Oriental. And maybe that isn’t so bad after all.

“So there’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Susan began when I had come out of the trance.

“Only one thing in Ovid you don’t understand?” Di said dryly.

Susan scowled. “You know what I mean. What I still don’t understand is why Brooks accepted her womanhood so easily. Even if she had been curious about being a woman before, she accepted it almost at once. Most of us seem to take a few knocks before we accept it.”

Di thought for a moment. “Are you familiar with the term ‘transsexual’?”

“Sure,” Susan said. “That’s a person who wants to be the opposite sex. Are you saying Brooks had more than a little curiosity about being a woman? Are you saying Brooks was a closet transsexual?”

She nodded. “Yes, he was. Working in something as macho as the auto industry, he was careful never to let on. Even when she became Trish’s mother, she downplayed her desires when she explained her curiosity about being a woman. Actually, it was a burning desire she never dared tell anyone.”

“But he was as much a bigot as Ripley,” I pointed out. “Why did the Judge reward him?”

“He didn’t,” Di explained. “At least not exactly. Brooks really did have a dislike of Orientals. It was drilled into him much the same way Allen’s father and grandfather did to him. But he also secretly–desperately– wanted to be a woman. The Judge gave him a conundrum. He could be a woman but it would have to be an Oriental woman. What Trish didn’t know is that Brooks did see the Judge on the Friday that she was in school.”

Susan looked at me. “Hey, I didn’t know!” I protested.

“No, you didn’t,” Di agreed. “She left her husband with the movers and saw the Judge while you were at lunch. She didn’t even want an attorney there. Like many transsexuals, she didn’t want others to know–including you, Susan. Most transsexuals never go beyond the wishing stage, and they take particular pains to make sure no one ever knows about their hidden desires.

“The Judge then gave her a choice. He would turn Brooks back into a Caucasian, but it would be a Caucasian man. He gave her twenty-four hours to make up her mind. If she had sex with her husband in that time, she would remain an Oriental woman. If not, she would be changed into a Caucasian man–still in Ovid of course, but a man, and Patricia’s mother would be replaced by a shade.”

“So her desire to be a woman was greater than her dislike of Orientals,” Susan concluded.

Di nodded in agreement. “It became a matter of principle. He was denied what he thought he really wanted–to become a Caucasian woman. Brooks could either overcome his prejudices and remain a woman or stand behind his bigotry and be changed back into a man. You see which one he chose.”

“A fitting challenge,” I commented, admiring once again how absolutely diabolical my boss could be. “And with Trish, the prejudices apparently revolved around nationalistic feelings.”

Di smiled. “Exactly. Her male persona saw Orientals as being excluded from what was truly American. Sadly, it isn’t as uncommon a philosophy as you might think. Whites, blacks and Indians all have their heroes in American history, but who can name a famous Oriental in that same history? Just as Brooks considered it more important to be a woman than maintain her prejudices, Ripley felt it more important to be seen as an American, than to fight coming to terms with his femininity. And what is more American than a cheerleader?”

There was a sudden cry from the baby’s room. Then, a second baby cried out. “Speaking of coming to terms with our femininity,” I said, “I think two babies need to be fed.”

Di’s eyes twinkled. “This I have to see!”

The End