Chapter 1

I blinked, trying to get my mind to focus. I blinked again trying to get some information to clear up my confusion. In front of me was a coach seat, so I was obviously sitting on a bus. The fog in my mind cleared a bit. The last thing I remembered was travelling with Jen to a French ski resort. I think I had fallen asleep and had a nightmare. I remember dreaming that the bus hit something in the road and drove off the cliff. Weird.

I looked to my left expecting to see Jen, instead I could see a stranger who was looking as confused as me. The bus was stationary, but we weren't at the resort. My eyes caught the eyes of the man sitting next to me.

“You alright, Rich?” he asked me.

“Who's Rich?” I replied and noticed my voice was all wrong. It was a lot higher in pitch. I started looking at the rest of what I could see with my confusion growing by the second. My hands were pretty hairless, small and delicate and I was wearing a leather jacket that I did not own.

“Oh Yeah!” I heard from someone sitting behind me.

I turned to look at him and to my shock saw my face looking back at me. “What the fuck.” I said, disconcerted again by my different voice.

“Richard, don't use that language.” The man next to me said, speaking sternly.

“Hey dad, he is not Richard. I am.” The person in my body replied. “Pretty cool, huh.”

Trying to be polite I held out my hand towards the man next to me. “Nice to met you, my name is Dillan.”

“Is this some kind of a joke?” he asked.

“Don't be rude, dad. Shake his hand. This is way better than a joke, this is a miracle.” Richard replied.

Awkwardly the man shook my hand. “I'm Peter.” he said uncertainly.

“Lets swap places.” I suggested to Richard.

“OK.”

I stood up to get around Peter. I was significantly shorter and generally smaller. “How old are you?” I asked Richard as we passed each other.

“I was fifteen. You'll have to tell me how old I am now.”

“Eighteen.”

“Old enough to drink, sweet! Oh, by the way, we need to talk before you go to the bathroom.”

“What?”

“You convince your girl here who you are and I will do the same to my parents, then we will talk.”

I sat myself next to Jen.

The driver at the front of the bus stood up facing us holding the microphone. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have no idea what just happened, but we appear to be in a safe passing point. Everyone appears to be alright, so I am going to continue our journey. Please fasten your seatbelts.”

He waited about thirty seconds and then started up the engine and we were on our way again.

Jen and I looked at each other. “So you are supposed to be Dillan?”

“Yeah, pretty freaky, huh. You are still Jen aren't you, not someone who looks like my beautiful witch.”

She smiled at hearing my nickname for her. “Yes I am still Jen. How are we going to do this?”

“Just ask me questions that only I, I mean Dillan, would know.” I had known Jen since we were eight years old and had moved in next door. A year later her parents divorced and it was a nasty one. At one point her father forced the house sale and she and her mother had nowhere to live. Rather than go to a shelter we had invited her into our home.

Her mother was overqualified and struggled to get anything but the most menial of jobs and they didn't pay very well. Before she had Jen, Katie, her mother, had been a very successful business woman, working mainly in marketing. After being out of the working world at the insistence of her husband, she had struggled to get back in. According to her interviews, despite her previous success, the marketing world had changed too much with the advent of Google and Facebook which she had no experience in.

In combination with a husband who had an extremely effective lawyer, she was left relatively destitute. What little she did have ended up going to her lawyer to pay his fees. In the last few years Katie had been doing much better financially, but none of us wanted her to leave, so she paid for an extension on the family house so she and Jen had their own space. Jen and I had been really close, but it was only in the last two years that we realised that we loved each other as a couple rather than brother and sister. No one knew me better than Jen, so she was the perfect person to know this was really me.

To be honest, she knew within a few seconds, but to be sure she carried on asking questions for a good ten minutes trying to catch me out. Just for fun, since I knew Jen was really Jen, I asked her a few personal questions as well.

“So what do we do now?” She asked.

“I haven't got a clue. I feel really weird in this body. It doesn't feel right at all. I don't mean my voice and looks. Something else just feels off.”

“Off in a bad way?”

“Umm.” I thought about it. “No. Not bad or good, just different.”

“Do you think it is permanent?”

“Since we don't know what happened in the first place, I have no idea, but I think it was pretty unlikely to happen once, let alone happen again.”

We spent the next twenty minutes holding hands and not talking much, just trying to digest. When we arrived we gathered with Richard and his parents.

“So what do we do guys?” Jen asked.

“I think we have to believe this has really happened. I guess Richard, in his new body will have to stay with us and Dillan will stay with you. We have a two bedroom suite so why don't we check in and meet there. They are going to need to swap clothes, equipment and stories.” Peter suggested.

“Stories?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Richard said with a laugh. “I can't wait to see your reaction.”

“Richard. That is not nice. Behave.” Amy, Richard's mother said. He just continued to chuckle.

I was beginning to get a sickening feeling in my stomach. One shoe had dropped and I felt like the other was about to kick me in the nuts. Everyone started sorting out our check in papers, which mostly involved Jen and Peter while the rest of us sat waiting nervously. Once we both had our keys and directions we travelled on mass to Jen and my room to drop off her suitcase and then continued on to their suite. Their room had a small lounge with a fridge and a sink in it. They took their suitcases to their room leaving my suitcase and Richards in the hallway.

I opened my suitcase and started pulling out all my other gear, like my toothbrush and all my electrical items. Richard just sat on the lounge.

“Aren't you going to go through your suitcase?” I asked him.

“Mum packed most of it, especially the clothes. She can unpack it.” He said and switched the TV on.

His parents were obviously discussing something in the bedroom, but it wasn't loud enough for me to work it out, so I shrugged my shoulders at Jen and we sat together on the other sofa.

After a few minutes Peter and Amy came out holding hands. “Richard. Turn the TV off, we need to talk.” Peter said and then pulled a couple of chairs across so that we could all sit together in the small lounge.

This was going to be bad. I just knew it. I was practically shaking. I was wondering if I was terminally ill. Cancer was all I could think it was, but I didn't want to say anything, so I held Jen's hand tightly.

“I'm not quite sure how to say this.” Peter said.

“Let me give this a go.” Richard interjected. “Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked me.

“Err.. I am a boy.” I was wondering if this was a trick question, but I couldn't see what he was getting at.

“So am I, and I always have been, the thing is, my body didn't agree with me.”

“What. I don't get it.”

“Up until that miracle on the bus, I have been labelled as transgender. A boy born in a girls body. Your body is classified as female. My passport, sorry, your passport says you are female. On the plus side you only have to wait a few months before you turn sixteen and can start taking testosterone. You will have to wait a couple more years before you can have surgery, but that is nothing, I have been waiting since I was five.”

My hands instinctively went between my legs and found.....nothing. I then brought them up to check my chest.

“Your body has been taking hormone blockers since you were eight. Mum is not small in the breast department and I was horrified that I would follow her.” Richard continued.

I think my mind was in overload and was following automatically, reacting to suggestion, so I couldn't stop myself from looking at Amy's chest, which looked reasonable, but nothing excessive.

She saw me looking and smiled at me sadly. “I had breast reduction surgery two years ago, my back was killing me.” She responded without prompting.

“Right I think that is enough.” Jen stated strongly, now holding me tightly. “We are going back to our room, if you could kindly bring some clothing that will fit and these items that are Dillan's, we would be grateful.” With that she stood up and then helped me up. She led and I followed. I don't think I was capable of anything else. If anyone said anything else it didn't register, my mind was officially blown.

“What am I going to do?” I whispered to her as we closed our door behind us.

She took a deep breath. “You are going to keep breathing, deep even breaths. Concentrate on one thing at a time and we will figure this out. There is a lot to process and research, but it doesn't have to be done at once. We have a holiday ahead of us. Let's enjoy it as best we can and let our brains filter this overload a bit at a time. I would say you need counselling, but I'm not sure anyone else should know about this. What happened on that bus was pretty freaky and I am already worried that we are all going to end up in someone's lab. Add in your experience and I am really worried about other people knowing about it.”

My protective instincts for Jen switched on. “I'll manage. Besides, how lucky am I that I need counselling and my beautiful witch has already been accepted into Cambridge to study Psychology.”

“Only if I get the right grades.” She replied. “And besides, that hardly qualifies me for this, as interesting as it is.”

“More qualified than virtually anybody else.”

“My interest was in relationships. The whole transgender subject is a completely different field.” I think she realised now was not the time to downplay her strengths since I was going to really need her help. “But I do have the right background reading, so together, we should be able to thoroughly investigate this.”

“In your professional opinion, what should I do now?” I asked her honestly.

“Take your leather jacket off and your shoes, then come to bed for a cuddle. If you are not in shock then you probably should be. I feel in shock and it didn't even happen to me. You need to be distracted for a few days. We will learn to ski together, enjoy ourselves as much as possible, thinking about it as little as possible and then do some research in the evenings and just let the information sink in. Shit. I think we messed up. We need to know if you are allergic to anything. They need to know about your penicillin allergy.”

“They have to come here anyway to deliver my clothes, I mean his clothes, err.... is that her clothes?”

“We'll just call them Richard's clothes. Clothes that fit you anyway.” She moved around me helping me to remove my jacket and then knelt at my feet to undo these, almost military, boots. She then drew me to the double bed and gathered me in her arms. Normally I am much bigger than her and she is usually on the inside of the spoon. Now I am a bit smaller and she wrapped herself around me. Holding me tight. Emotionally, I fell apart, but her constant loving presence held me together and allowed me to fall apart in a safe environment, her arms.

I drifted into a semi-conscious state. I was vaguely aware that someone knocked on the door and Jen got up and spoke to someone. Then she was cuddled around me again and all was right with the world.