“You aren’t alone hun.” she said, pulling me into a tight hug. “You will never be alone. I know I’m not your mom, but the body you’re in is the body of my daughter. I’ll never let ANYONE hurt you. I’m here for you.” “That goes for me to.” came a male voice from near my door. I looked up to see Mark walking toward me with open arms. Mean Girls 3026 Part 2 Written by Toni Trepasso Edited by Gwen Brown, with my many thanks to her.

It kind of felt weird to be sleeping in my old bedroom again. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t so much of sleeping there, as it was sleeping there in a different body. I tried for a few hours to get some much needed rest, but all I ended up doing was staring at the shadows on the ceiling. It was kind of freaky how the mind can do what it wants to do, and you have little say in the fact.

As I lay there, I couldn’t help but think of everything that had been revealed to me over the last couple of days. For starters, I’d been in a motorcycle crash. Alright, I can live with that. I know a lot of guys who’ve had crashes, so that’s not that big a deal. The big deal was that I’d been frozen for over a thousand years, and everyone I knew and cared about was dead. I felt the tears start to well up in my eyes as I started to picture my parents, sitting there in a hospital, looking down at me crying themselves. I don’t know if I could have made the decision they were pretty much forced to make. It was either freeze me, and hope I could be fixed at a later date, or let me be a vegetable. I know they made the right choice, but it was still awkward to think about not having them around.

All my friends were gone. Not that I had that many to begin with, but those that were my friends were long gone from this world. I never really let myself get close to anyone back in the day. I think it might have to do with being an only child, compounded with being the youngest kid in the neighborhood, I pretty much ended up as the whipping boy for the older kids. Until about the end of my freshman year in highschool, when I started lifting weights for Track and Field, I was always a small kid. Usually the last to get picked for games, and the first to get blamed when things went wrong. Like when we broke Mr. Patterson’s window playing stick ball. The bigger kids made me go get the ball. Well, as you could guess, they told me that if old man Patterson asked to tell him that I was the one who did it. It was either that or catch an ass whoopin’ for the rest of summer, and not be allowed to play with them again. Hind-sight being 20/20, I should have just left, and not bothered with those guys. Because I ended up catching an ass whoopin’ from my parents and then had to pay for the window, by mowing the Patterson’s lawn for the summer, then had to rake the yard in the fall. I guess that’s really why I usually try to keep people at a distance for a while.

I do know that my buddy Dave is about the only guy I’d ever take a bullet for if it came right down to it. He and I met, when a mutual friend invited me to karaoke one night. It didn’t take long before Dave and I became about as close as brothers. I actually looked up to him like the older brother I never had. I guess he felt the same way, since he actually told me, one night at the bar, that I was like a little brother to him. We’d go everywhere together. Hunting, fishing, to the races, you name it, we probably were there, together. Hell, he even helped me build an old BSA motorcycle into a chopper. Little did he know that I was building it for his birthday. But he was gone too.

Jennifer, my girlfriend of three years, was gone too. After all that time, she never pestered me about commitment. She knew I loved her with all my heart. I also knew that she loved me the same way. I was going to ask her to marry me when she got back from a business trip she was on, the weekend I crashed. I had the ring all set, and it was a beauty too. I even had a plot of land that I’d managed to scraped together enough money to buy outright, so we could build a house and start a family. I always pictured me and her together with a couple of kids and a couple of dogs, living the American dream.

I think it was about the time I started thinking about Jen, that my brain shut down. The reason I say this was, because the next thing I knew, Amanda was in my room holding me. Rocking me back and forth as she softly stroked my hair, whispering that everything was going to be alright. I finally came to my senses, and saw that both her nightgown, and mine were soaked right through. You don’t have to tell me, because I know it was from my tears. I finally looked up at her, and tried to smile, but that smile never came.

“Why?” I asked her in a weak voice.

“Why what hun?” she asked stroking my hair.

“Why are they all gone, and I’m still here?”

“Because they wanted you to have a chance to be happy.”

“Yeah, right. If they wanted me to be happy, then why the hell did they freeze me, and leave me here all alone?” I asked as the tears flowed once again.

“You aren’t alone hun.” she said, pulling me into a tight hug. “You will never be alone. I know I’m not your mom, but the body you’re in is the body of my daughter. I’ll never let ANYONE hurt you. I’m here for you.”

“That goes for me to.” came a male voice from near my door. I looked up to see Mark walking toward me with open arms.

The both of them holding me, kind of made me feel better. I could feel that they really did care about me. But I still wasn’t sure if it was just because they still saw me as their little girl, or as someone who was alone, and needed their love.

They finally left me, when they were sure I was calmed down. But once they left, the realization hit that I really had no idea how to be a girl. Yesterday, when we went to dinner, I simply tried to mimic what I saw Amanda doing. But in less than a month, I was going to be on my own, and I had to cram at least seventeen years of being a girl into that short amount of time. Amanda said she’d help me, but I had a feeling, this was going to be harder than anything I’ve ever done before. She was going to have to help me unlearn thirty years of being a male, and reprogram me to be a lady.

The speaking would be the easy part. The walking would take some work, but I was sure I could get there. The hard part, was going to be all the subtle mannerisms that are unique to being a female. I wonder if this is what my friend Kia went through when she stopped being Kent? Yes, you heard me right.

Kent and I went to preschool together, and since we were the smallest kids in the class, we kind of hung out together, more out of self preservation at first, than anything else. We both figured that if one of us was in trouble, the other could have a chance to go get an adult, since it’s much harder to catch two people than it is one. That soon changed, and we actually became friends. Close friends. All through school, we’d go everywhere together. We’d play the same sports, and most of the time, when we weren’t getting beaten up by the older kids, we were at each other’s houses, playing video games. In highschool, we’d double date, or whatever. He was my best friend back then.

When we went away to college, we were both excited that we were going to be going to the same town. You see, there are two schools in the town, and while I was going to be going to the state school, he’d be just across the main street at the private one. It wasn’t until about a month of being at college that he started to drift away a bit. I didn’t really think much of it at first, but it did kind of bother me that he wasn’t around as much. But that happens sometimes at college.

Near the middle of the first semester, as I was leaving he pizza shop after dinner, I saw a young girl being beat up, across the street. I’ve always been taught that you NEVER hit a girl, and since I had started playing rugby, I wasn’t as scared as I might have been to step in as I would have been a few years ago.

She was down on the ground and as one of the guys was kicking her, I hit him with the hardest tackle I’d ever laid on anyone in my life. As his body slammed against the corner of the building he was driven into, I could feel, and hear his ribs break. As I let him go, his two buddies came at me, and dove at me from opposite sides of my body. Now for those of you who aren’t physics majors, let me explain what happened when I simply ducked down. You see, and object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. That being said, when one person jumps at another, the only thing that will stop them from continuing on their path, is when they impact the person at which they are jumping. So, when I ducked, one guy flew over the top of me, and ended up hitting head on with the other guy who was also airborne at the time, knocking each other out cold.

Before anything else happened, I grabbed the girl, and we ran back across the street to my car. Once inside, she turned to me crying and thanked me. That’s when it dawned on me that I recognized her voice. I tried to calm down enough to figure out who she was, but she beat me to it.

“It’s me Josh.” she said starting to cry. “It’s Kent.”

Have you ever seen what a deer looks like when it’s in the headlights of a tractor trailer, that’s coming right at it? That was me that night. I just sat there in my car, my mouth hanging open from shock, staring at my best friend who looked more like a woman than the girl I had just broken up with.

“Kent?” I asked as I moved my head around to try to see if I could see in the light of the street lamp we were under if it was really him.

“Look, let’s just go back to my apartment, and I’ll explain, alright?”

I started the car, and since it’s a small town, we were at his place pretty quick. Once inside, I started looking around and things weren’t adding up. For starters, the apartment was spotless. I mean, obsessive-compulsive/ anal-retentively spotless. Kent was always a neat freak, but his place looked like it could be in a magazine rather than being lived in by a college student. He offered me a drink and we both sat down on his couch to talk about what was going on.

He explained to me that he was trans-gender. The way he explained it, was that all his life, for as far back as he could remember, he always felt as if he were a girl. He did have the parts that would normally be associated with a male, but on the inside, he felt he was a female. He, sorry, she went on to tell me that she started to live life as a woman. Going to classes, and work, or anything else that she did, as Kia. She started to bite her lip as she asked me ‘THE QUESTION.’

“Josh, do you think we can still be friends?” she asked, almost crying.

I pulled her tight into me, and gently held her in my arms to comfort her. “You’re my best friend. Nothing’s going to change that.”

Over the next couple of hours, once she calmed back down that is, we talked about how things were going to be different. I finally made her laugh when I asked her if she was into guys or girls.

“What are you trying to say? You want to bang your buddy?” she asked me teasing.

“No. Not at all. Well...” I started to blush, “I mean you do make a pretty cute girl.”

“Thank you.” she said squeezing my hand. “But you’re not my type Josh. I prefer girls too.” she told me with that smile that she’s always had that made me smile whenever I saw it.

“Well that makes things less awkward.”

We finished out the semester, and I ended up moving into her place, when her room mate, transferred out of school. It was kind of like old times again. We’d do almost everything together. That is when we weren’t in classes. Her girlfriend even introduced me to her roommate, since she figured that if I was friends with Kia, I’d have to be a pretty sweet guy.

The party ended abruptly the week before spring break our freshman year. I was walking back to the apartment, when I saw Kia crossing the street at the light. She had the walk signs, so she wasn’t really looking for traffic. Before I could yell to her, to look out, an SUV plowed into her, and as she tumbled into the road, it ran her over.

The thing that pissed me off was that no one was doing anything. Everyone just stood there, and I think I heard a woman screaming. I finally found her cell phone and dialed 911, but someone took the phone from my hands. There was a woman still screaming and she wouldn’t stop. The ambulance arrived and they loaded her body inside, but that woman was still screaming. That was the next thing I remember was that I was in the hospital. I woke up and saw a nurse taking my blood pressure.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in St. James Hospital hun.” she told me trying to calm me down. “It’s alright, the paramedics brought you here when you became unresponsive.”

“Unresponsive? What the hell happened?” I asked her trying to clear my head. “The last thing I remember was holding the lifeless body of my friend who had just been run over. Some woman was screaming, and no body would do anything.”

“The paramedics said they sedated you, because YOU were the one screaming.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Where is who?”

“My friend who got ran over.”

“You’ll have to wait for the doctor. Let me see if he’s free.”

She brought the doctor back, and I was told that my friend was dead. After I was released from the hospital, I started asking the police if they had any leads as to who did this to Kia. I gave them a compete description of the truck that hit her, but after a month, they stopped returning my calls. I know it was a different time back then, but the police were supposed to help people, not just sweep them under the rug, because they were different.

As these memories came back to me, I started to cry again. Knowing I couldn’t sleep, I went for my morning run a bit early. As I ran, I could remember all the morning runs that Kent and then Kia and I would go on. It was our alone time. Were nothing else mattered, except for the road beneath our feet, and the sky above us. When I started my run, the sun wasn’t up yet, but it was starting to show light. When the sun finally broke, I saw I was running right at a cloud in the sky, that looked a lot like Kia. It was almost as if she was telling me that everything was going to be alright, and she would be looking out for me.
I couldn’t help but smile. Even though my lungs were burning, and my legs were aching, I had to smile at the thought of Kia’s smile. At that moment, I knew I could do this. Whatever else happened, Kia’s strength would help guide me through.

To Be Continued...