“I like being a girl. It feels better than being a boy, at least for me. But remember Jamie is a different person; still a lot like me, I mean we’re both still a lot like we used to be, but just because he turns into me at night doesn’t mean he’s gay or transgender. If anything, from what Bobby tells me, he’s more macho than we were before.”
Night and Day
part 5 of 12
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. Thanks to Morpheus, epain, and Karen Lockhart for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
When it was time for Bobby to go to bed, I went home, and found Jared and Mom getting ready for bed. I said goodnight to them, got the tablet, and checked email. Jamie had this to say:
“No bet; Bobby could have told you how those guys reacted to the rumors, or you might have friended them from your new Artemis account and talked to them that way. Yeah, Aidan and Tony and Ali are all right, they’re not teasing me about the rumors while they think they’re not true. But I don’t know what they’d do if they found out they’re true. I’m not going to tell them about you, and I made Bobby promise not to tell either.
“Keep telling yourself you’re not jealous of me, and that you like being a girl. You’ll be happier that way, I guess. But for God’s sake don’t tell anybody else you like being a girl better than being a boy, or they’ll think I want to be a girl, or something!”
I replied:
“How much reading have you done about other kids like us, kids who transformed somehow? A lot of them have some kind of personality change. I think we did too; I’m not sure I would be so happy being a girl if I hadn’t. And I don’t think you would be trying to keep me a secret — or lying to Mom about going over to see Rachel Timson — if you hadn’t.”
There were no new comments or private messages on my social media. I read a little further ahead in the textbooks, and then watched a movie, and read more about astronomy until morning. I went out a little earlier before sunrise than I needed to, and tried to see if I could find Venus; one site said you could sometimes see it despite city lights. But I couldn’t find it, or couldn’t recognize it if I saw it.
The moment I woke up that evening, I heard someone saying “Holy shit!,” fairly loud. Jasmine was climbing on the monkey bars a few yards away from the bench where I was sitting. I turned around and saw Aidan looking at me in shock.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m guessing daytime-Jamie wasn’t too happy about you staying till sunset...?”
“Then it’s true? You don’t just turn into a girl, you turn into a completely different person?”
“Fairly different. We have all the same memories up until a couple of weeks ago, but we have some little differences of personality, and we don’t remember anything that happens to each other — like I told you.” I patted the bench next to me. “Come on, tell me what happened.”
“So, I came over and hung out with you — I mean, uh, daytime Jamie? And Bobby, for three or four hours.” He sat down at the other end of the bench, and twisted around so he could face me. “You — I mean he — had to watch Jasmine, since your mom was at work and Jared was out hanging with his friends... we watched some movies and talked, mostly. Then, uh, Jamie said I needed to go home because your mom was coming home soon and you and Jasmine needed to get ready for evening church. That sounded reasonable, and I went out to the bus stop, but then I remembered what you’d said, and I just went to the convenience store and hung out until almost sunset. Then I came back here and found him watching Jasmine play; he got mad at me and told me to go, and I asked why, he obviously wasn’t getting ready for church; why’d he lie to me? And finally he just kind of slumped over and said fine, watch if you want, I don’t care. So he sat down on the bench where he could see Jasmine and didn’t look at me again. And then suddenly he — you — got shorter and your hair turned black and got several inches longer.”
“Go easy on him when you see him at school tomorrow, okay?”
“I — he lied to me!”
“Yeah. He told me to try looking at it from his perspective, and I gave it a try; maybe you should too. If you turned into a girl at night, would you want everybody to know?”
“...No, I guess not.”
“Yeah, I kind of see it too, but I don’t think it makes sense, because he can’t keep me hidden forever, and I’m afraid some people are going to be mad at him for lying. More so, the longer he manages to keep me a secret. I hope you don’t stay mad at him for too long.”
“I’ll try not to. But I’m giving him a piece of my mind tomorrow.”
“I don’t blame you. Are you going to tell other people about me?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me to?”
“I’d like it if you told Tony and Ali, somewhere nobody can overhear you. Maybe private-message or email them and tell them what you saw, and what we talked about.”
“Okay.”
“Or, you know, maybe talk to Jamie first and ask him to tell them himself. Maybe tell him you’ll tell them in a couple of days if he doesn’t tell them first, or something.”
“That might be better.”
We were quiet for a minute or two, and it was getting kind of dark. I called out to Jasmine: “Five more minutes, then we’re going inside.”
“Okay,” she called back.
“I guess I’d better go pretty soon too,” Aidan said. “I told my mom I’d be home by eight-thirty.”
But he didn’t get up and leave right away. After a few moments, he asked: “So what’s it like being a girl?”
I sighed, and gave him the same answer I gave Bobby a few days ago. After a moment’s thought, remembering what Jamie had said in his email yesterday, I added: “I like being a girl. It feels better than being a boy, at least for me. But remember Jamie is a different person; still a lot like me, I mean we’re both still a lot like we used to be, but just because he turns into me at night doesn’t mean he’s gay or transgender. If anything, from what Bobby tells me, he’s more macho than we were before.”
“Bobby knows about this? Why didn’t he say anything?”
“Jamie made him promise not to tell.”
“Huh.” He sat there quiet for a few moments before saying: “I’d really better go now. I’m not sure what to think about all this, but I guess I’ll see you again.”
“Feel free to come over some evening this week.”
“Maybe. Some night when I don’t have much homework.” He got up and walked around to the bus stop, and I rounded up Jasmine and went inside.
Mom came home about the time I was putting Jasmine to bed, giving Jasmine an excuse to procrastinate going to bed so she could get a mommy-hug. Jared had come home just a few minutes earlier. The three of us watched a movie together, then Mom and Jared went to bed, and I checked my email and social media.
Jamie said:
“Maybe I’m more confident with girls than I used to be. I remember how scared I was of talking to Rachel, before. But when I went back to school Monday and saw her it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go up and talk to her. Other than that, I don’t think my personality has changed as much as yours must have, if you like being a girl. How girl-like are you, anyway? From some stuff Mom said I think you like playing with Jasmine more than we used to. Do you want to wear makeup and date boys and stuff?
“Imagine this. Instead of what actually happened to us, we just started changing into a girl at night. I mean, I started changing into a girl at night. In this scenario there’s no you as a separate person, just one person who changes into a girl at night and doesn’t have any personality changes. How freaked out and embarrassed do you think I’d be? Now add in multiple personality disorder, and you can figure out why I might be reluctant to tell everybody about you, even without some hypothetical personality change that makes me more secretive.”
I replied:
“No, I don’t want to date boys. I have no interest in sex, period, not with girls either. And I’m not in any hurry to learn how to use makeup, although I wouldn’t rule it out someday. Not while the budget’s this tight, obviously. Maybe I do like playing with Jasmine more than before, but maybe it just looks that way to you because you don’t want to admit how much YOU enjoy it — or enjoyed it before we transformed, anyway.
“I guess I can see why you might not want to tell people about me. But not telling people is one thing; lying to them about me is another. I had a nice talk with Aidan after you checked out this afternoon; he’ll tell you about it at school tomorrow, I expect. He’s not freaking out about me, and I think he’ll forgive you for lying to him before long. You should tell Tony and Ali and anybody else you want to stay friends with (Rachel and Elijah Timson, maybe?) before they find out the hard way.”
There was a new message on my social media account, from my Aunt Alice; I’d friended her the day after I created the account, but she didn’t turn on her computer every day. Mom must have told her about me (and Jamie), because she didn’t seem surprised; she asked me where I got the name Artemis, and how I enjoyed being a girl, and things like that. I wrote her a longish reply, then watched another movie and read for a while. But after a few hours I got restless, and wanted to go for a walk. I told myself it didn’t make sense, after what happened last time. What if I got attacked again, and couldn’t get away? I remembered what had happened then, and how the colors went all wonky. If that had made the guys confused and distracted so they didn’t chase me, maybe it would help me out in a jam again... but I couldn’t count on it, not if I didn’t have conscious control of this other superpower any more than of turning into Jamie at sunrise.
So the thing to do was to see if I could make it happen again on command. I tried to remember what I’d felt like when those guys accosted me. Angry. Why had I been so angry I hardly had energy left to be scared? I remembered how mad I’d been and how the colors had changed, how the guys had turned red, and —
— and suddenly the tablet I’d been reading from was a bright red, and the TV was more of an orange-yellow, and the overhead light was pale blue. My own body and clothes were tinted red, somewhere in between the tablet and the TV. I got up and walked around, looking at different things in the different light. There was a red glow from behind the refrigerator, and Jasmine’s head was the same red as my own skin when I glanced in on her, while her sheets were a darker red like the TV.
When I went back to the living room, I saw that the sofa cushions where I’d been sitting were a slightly more orangey red than my skin. I turned off the lights; there was still a dim red glow from the kitchen, and the sofa, my body, and the electronics were still glowing red, while other things were dimly illuminated by the red light from — all the warm things. The TV had been turned off just a little while ago and still hadn’t quite cooled down to room temperature, while the tablet was still on.
Cool.
A minute later, when I’d picked up a magazine and tried to read by the glow from my body (it was hard, with the low contrast between the ink and paper, but not impossible), the red glows suddenly faded and I was in the dark. After trying and failing to make the colors change again, I cautiously stepped over to the light switch, trying not to bump into anything, and turned on the light.
That was something to think about.
After thinking about it a while, I decided I’d go out for a walk again only after I got better control of this thing, and could rely on it protecting me. At least to some extent. If it made people’s vision go weird, it would give me a few moments of surprise to run away, but if my next attackers were quicker to adapt to having their vision screwed up, they could still see to follow me by the red glow of my body.
I still didn’t realize how it worked, and what had really freaked those guys out.
Monday night, I woke up in the playground as usual, behind the swings. There was a woman about twenty-five or thirty pushing a toddler in the child-safety swing, the bucket seat with the seatbelts, and over on the merry-go-round the lady I’d met a few days ago was spinning her little boy and Jasmine. None of them had been looking at me while I changed, which was probably why Jamie had been standing here while he watched the sun set. I walked around the swing and over to the merry-go-round.
“Yay, you’re back!” Jasmine said, her voice dopplered slightly by the rotation of the merry-go-round. The woman pushing it smiled at me.
“Hello again.”
“Hi. Thanks for pushing Jasmine.”
“No problem. I can go for another couple of minutes, maybe.”
When her arms got tired and the kids weren’t tired yet, I pushed them for a while. When they wanted off, I gradually slowed it down. Jasmine jumped off and gave me a hug. The woman took her little boy’s hands and helped him down from the merry-go-round, smiling at me and Jasmine. “I think she likes you better as her sister,” she said.
“Yeah!” Jasmine agreed enthusiastically. “She tells better bedtime stories than she did when she was a boy.”
“I’m glad you like me,” I said, “but try to be fair to daytime-Jamie too, okay?”
“He’s being all grumpy,” she complained. I could guess why; he’d probably had a bad day at school.
“Cut him some slack,” I said. “Come on, let’s go get you to bed.”
“And tell me a story.”
“You got it.”
The woman was looking at me strangely, obviously curious about what she’d overheard but maybe not wanting to pry. I waved goodbye to her and walked around to our apartment with Jasmine.
A city bus was just pulling away from the curb when we walked around to the street side of the building, and a girl was walking up to the apartment complex from the bus stop. She was the girl who lived upstairs, who looked about Jared’s age. She reached the foot of the stairs toward her apartment just as Jasmine and I got there.
“Hi,” she said as we walked up to the second storey. “Have you just moved in? I saw you a few days ago but I don’t think I’d seen you before that.”
“It’s complicated,” I said, pausing on the landing near our apartment. “You remember those kids on the news who transformed?”
“Yeah — oh, you changed like them? Then you’ve lived here a while and you just changed recently?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’d like to talk, but it’s almost my little sister’s bedtime.”
“I’m Wanda — I live in 314.”
“I’m Diana, I’m in 213, and this little varmint is Jasmine.” Jasmine giggled. “Nice to meet you.”
Why hadn’t I ever talked with her before? Duh, because I was a boy and shy around girls, especially if they were older than me.
Jasmine told me she’d already eaten supper earlier, so I put her to bed a few minutes later, read her a story, and told her another story — adapting more of the story of Theseus for a child’s sensibilities. (It didn’t need much; I just gave the violence a cartoony exaggeration and Jasmine would laugh at it instead of being horrified.) Mom got home a little after Jasmine fell asleep halfway through the story of Theseus and Procrustes.
“I talked with Dr. Darrington’s secretary during a break at work,” she said. “I’m taking Jamie over to their lab tomorrow evening so she can scan him while he changes into you.”
“Is Jasmine coming with us?”
“No, Jared will watch her tomorrow.” Jared grumbled a little at that, but didn’t say anything loud enough that I could hear it.
After Mom and Jared went to bed, I checked email; Jamie said:
“What did you tell Aidan? You’re ruining everything! He said I had to tell Tony and Ali about you by the end of the day Wednesday, or he’d tell them himself. I looked for a chance to talk with them privately at school but haven’t found one.
“Yeah, Jasmine’s cute, but it’s a hassle to have to watch her almost every day from the time I get home from school until you take over, and it’s hard to concentrate on homework when I have to go check on her every few minutes. You just have to watch her from sunset until her bedtime, then you’ve got the whole night to watch movies or whatever.”
So now he was saying I had it easy, where a few days ago he was claiming I was jealous of him? I replied:
“I told Aidan I’d like to get in touch with Tony and Ali — they haven’t replied to my friend requests, probably because they believed you when you said your account was hacked and assumed I was some kind of stalker/prankster. I said I’d like to give you a chance to tell them about me first, though, before he tells them. If Tony and Ali react the way Bobby and Aidan did, I’m not ‘ruining’ anything, and if they react worse — well, it was inevitable anyway. As Bobby and I both keep telling you, you can’t keep me secret forever, and the longer you keep me secret the more betrayed people are going to feel when they find out.”
I did the remainder of the homework that Jamie hadn’t had time to do before sunset — there wasn’t much left — and then spent most of the night practicing with my new superpower. By dawn, I could pretty reliably turn it on when I wanted to, unless I’d just used it recently, and then I had to let it rest a while before I could use it again. The longest I could get the weird colors to last was about three minutes.
I felt kind of tired after a few hours of that, and I spent the next couple of hours reading. After reading all those articles about mythology, I thought I might try reading some of the original stuff. I started the Iliad, but the out-of-copyright translation I found available for free was too hard to read, too many old-fashioned words and weird phrasings. I’d had that experience with old free books before, though some of them were okay. I sent Jamie another email asking him to check out a modern translation from the school library. Sunset was too close to the city library’s closing time this time of year; I wouldn’t be able to use the library again until the end of daylight savings time, if not later.
I practiced with my color-changing power a couple of times more, then went out to watch the sun rise.
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Comments
the boy version seemed immature
at least compared to the girl version.
On further reflection:
Reading back through this story at the moment.
At the time I agreed with you, and I will say that it definitely is being played up as part of the "macho" side of Apollo (as compared to Artemis, who is portrayed in the myths as relatively mature even when young).
With that said, though, daytime-Jamie absolutely has challenges unrelated to being Twisted that would test any kid's maturity. In addition to going to school and watching a younger sibling after school, he ALSO has to have ALL his homework done before sunset unless he's shrugging it off on Diana/Artemis. What normal high school student has NEVER done homework after dinner or into the night before going to sleep? Jamie has lost that option for reasons out of his control - he couldn't pull an all-nighter or even part of one whether he wanted to or not, even without Jasmine distracting him. So, with the obligations being forced upon him, he would indeed feel like he has very little chance to relax or have fun. And that isn't without merit.
Her "color changing" ability.......
Is obviously some form of thermal imaging, or perhaps more accurately she is seeing in the electromagnetic spectrum as well as thermally. A tablet doesn't really give off any appreciable heat, but she would be able to see the e-m activity. On the other hand, the fact that she is able to see thebleed over of thermal energy into the couch where she had been sitting, as well as the bed where her sister was sleeping would indicate that she is in fact using some form of thermal imaging. Heat is a simple form of energy, so her vision could simply be based on the amount of energy bleeding off of any particular object.
Now the real question becomes whether the effect impacts only her, or those in her vicinity as well. My first thought would be that only her vision shifts, and that it is probably accompanied by some form of cloaking or invisibility - perhaps due to some power to bend visible light around her body preventing anyone from seeing her.
She is obviously getting more control over her power, but she still needs to expirament with it to see just how it works - like are others affected by it, and can others see her when she uses it. I would think that Bobby would be a good person to help with that. Also, if she uses it more will the time she is capable of using it expand? How long does it take her to recharge before using it again? Can she impact the times in some manner by increasing her energy levels?
I can't wait to see more!
D
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
"A tablet doesn't really give off any appreciable heat"
Au contraire. A tablet actually gives off very substantial heat inside the plastic housing. They generally have a full area heat sink inside them serving the dual purpose of providing rigidity and preventing the components from burning themselves up. The reason you can't FEEL that heat as "appreciable" when holding the device is because plastic is really a darned good insulator. Put your hand over the ventilation of the unit and you'll feel appreciable heat emanating from inside the unit, guaranteed.
The way they manage to transform convective heat to radiant heat to efficiently dissipate the heat produced by such devices through such limited ventilation so to provide for user comfort is really quite clever.
Abigail Drew.
It also only works up to a
It also only works up to a point. Try to run an action game on an Android phone. If the phone's too old or the game too demanding, you won't be playing for long.
And anyway, seen heat is just infrared radiation, so also e-m, just very different wavelength range. So, if she does warp visible light around herself, using heat to see fits in with the sun/moon god setup. That also means anyone could find her by wearing infrared goggles...or just listening.