“Then maybe it’s something else. Some feminine side that you’re not letting yourself express... could you maybe be a transsexual?”
“A what?” The term “transgender” wouldn’t be coined for decades yet, and “transsexual” wasn’t exactly a household word. I’d never heard of it.
“So how’d the day go?” Randall asked. He was getting ready to go somewhere as I came in.
“Pretty good,” I said. And enlightening, I didn’t say, both because I wasn’t ready to talk with Randall about it and because, though I felt I’d learned something new about myself, I didn’t yet understand what I’d learned. And too much of what I’d learned myself was tied up with Emily and Cynthia’s secrets. Randall didn’t press for details, but nodded and went out. “See you later, man. I’ll be back late.”
I put in a couple of hours of distracted study, thinking off and on about what Cynthia had said, and then figured I’d given Cynthia and Virginia plenty of time to turn back into Emily and Linda. I went down to the lobby phone and called Lanyon Hall, then waited a while until someone picked up.
“Hello?”
“Can you get Linda Finsbury? She’s in room 145. Tell her it’s Scott.”
“All right, give me a minute.” Linda’s dorm was on the first floor, so the girl didn’t have to walk far. I waited two or three minutes before Linda picked up.
“Hi,” she said, and then: “I want to apologize —” we both started to say. Linda laughed nervously, then said: “You go first.”
“I want to apologize for Jennifer,” I said. “She shouldn’t have let Virginia go off by herself... she should have tried harder to persuade her to stay, or at least escorted her back to your dorm.”
“And I want to apologize for Virginia’s behavior, and the things she said to you and the others. To Jennifer and the others, I mean. That was inexcusable. I guess, if I act like that under the influence of jekyllase... I’m not as nice a person as I thought I was.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “I think... I’m not an expert on jekyllase or anything, but I’ve seen several people transform with it, people I know pretty well, and I think there are different ways it can work. Different people have different aspects of themselves that are out in the open, or hidden and suppressed. And the better a person you are, the worse are the aspects that jekyllase lets out. Sometimes it lets out things that you’re afraid of,” (I was thinking about myself, and trying hard not to), “and sometimes it lets out desires you’re aware of but you know or think they’re bad and so you don’t act on them. And sometimes it might be other things. Pieces of the person you might have been if you’d grown up in different circumstances, or something.”
“I think...” She paused. “I think I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone. Can we meet at breakfast or lunch tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said, and we arranged to meet Sunday morning.
After that, I called Emily’s dorm and the phone rang a while with no one answering. I tried again half an hour later and got Alice; Emily was out. I asked Alice to have Emily call me sometime, but she didn’t call back that evening, at least when I was near the phone, and if she called when I wasn’t there, nobody told me.
I went by Lanyon Hall early Sunday morning, and waited for Linda in the lobby, then walked with her to the dining hall. We didn’t say much at first. Then I asked: “So... I know you didn’t have long to get acquainted, but what did you think of Jennifer?”
“...I liked her,” she said after a moment. “I’d like to get to know her better another time. If she were a regular person, I mean. But I don’t want to pressure you into taking jekyllase again if you don’t want to, or talk you into taking it sooner than you’re ready.”
“Part of me wants to take it again today,” I said. “But it’s a bad idea to take it too often... next weekend would be better. Or maybe around the middle of the week would be okay.”
“I don’t need to ask you what you thought about Virginia,” she said. “She’s a bitch... I feel so horrible, knowing I’ve got that bile and intolerance in me.”
“But you don’t let it out when you’re yourself,” I pointed out. “Uh... by the way, did Virginia keep her promise?”
“What Jennifer made her promise before she let her go...? Yeah. But she dropped the key to the drawer where I keep my stash behind my desk. Add mean and petty to intolerant.”
“Do you need help moving the desk?”
“Yeah, after breakfast you can help me with that.”
We didn’t say anything more until we got to the dining hall and picked out something to eat. We found a table with nobody else too near and sat down.
“So... if the jekyllase is telling me I have the potential to be mean and intolerant, what’s it telling you? That you could be more cheerful and outgoing if you let yourself, or what?”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” I said, “but I’m not sure what yet.”
“Probably,” she said, and took a bite of her scrambled eggs. We chewed and thought silently for a few moments before she said: “Don’t take this wrong... but, when we were playing Truth or Dare, Jennifer said she’d made out with a guy. Do you think that’s part of why you change into Jennifer?”
“I thought that might be it, but... I’m not sure. As far as I can tell, when I’m me I’m not attracted to guys.”
“Then maybe it’s something else. Some feminine side that you’re not letting yourself express... could you maybe be a transsexual?”
“A what?” The term “transgender” wouldn’t be coined for decades yet, and “transsexual” wasn’t exactly a household word. I’d never heard of it. So Linda explained to me the little she knew:
“So there are some guys who feel like they’re supposed to be women, that they were born with the wrong body or something. Some of them have surgery and stuff to make them look like women, but it didn’t look to me like it was completely effective — there were some photos in the article I read, and some of them looked like real women, but not all of them. Like they might have breasts but not much in the way of hips, and the shoulders and face were still pretty masculine. Not like Jennifer at all. I’d never know she was you if she hadn’t told me.”
“Huh. Do you remember what magazine that was, which issue...?”
“No, sorry.”
“Well, at least I have a subject to research when I go to the pool hall tomorrow. How do you spell that...?”
She wasn’t sure if it had one ‘s’ or two, or whether it was hyphenated. I shrugged and scribbled down a tentative guess at the spelling on the back of a napkin.
“I’m not sure that’s me,” I said. “If you’d suggested it before I started taking jekyllase, I’d say it was absurd, and even now...”
“Well, it’s just a guess. You said you like being Jennifer because she’s cheerful and outgoing, not because she’s female?”
“Well, yeah. Or at least I thought I did. Now I’m not sure.”
“But she must be female for a reason.”
“Yeah, and I’m going to figure out why.”
After breakfast, I helped Linda move her desk and retrieve the key to her pot drawer, then went by Utterson Hall to talk to Emily. She was out, but Alice told me she’d given her my message. When I got back the dorm, Randall told me she’d been there looking for me.
“You two up to some jekyllase shenanigans?” he asked with raised eyebrows. “Does Darrell know?”
“Why should Darrell be jealous of Emily’s hyde hanging out with another girl?” I asked. But I think I blushed a little, or did something that gave me away. Randall may not have guessed everything, but he knew I was nervous or embarrassed about something. He smiled slyly.
“No particular reason, I guess.”
I studied until lunch, and managed to find Emily in the dining hall — she was sitting with Darrell. She blushed when she saw me, and didn’t meet my eyes at first when I sat down across from them.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “We keep missing each other.”
“Yeah,” Emily said. “Cynthia said I should talk to you, and I called your dorm but you weren’t there, and then I dropped by later but you were still out.”
“What’s this about?” Darrell asked.
“Cynthia and Jennifer figured some stuff out,” I said, “and they want us to do some research at the library before we take jekyllase again. Or, you know, take jekyllase and then let them go to the library, but they don’t have library cards although Cynthia could probably get away with using Emily’s.”
“The pool hall probably doesn’t have much on jekyllase,” Darrell said.
“It’s other stuff we need to research,” I said. “Although knowing more about jekyllase would help. We were thinking about researching psychology and seeing what we can find out about repression and stuff like that.”
“Yeah,” Emily echoed faintly, her face still red.
“Anyway,” I said, “you want to join us, Darrell?” I’d realized that Darrell would be jealous if Emily went off to the library alone with me. Having Darrell along wouldn’t be ideal — it would hamper us in doing some of our research — but we could still get a lot done.
“Huh,” he said. “Maybe.” He put his right hand on Emily’s left. “You planning to go together?”
“We don’t necessarily have to,” I said to mollify him. I didn’t want him thinking I was still interested in Emily that way — although, if Jennifer was interested in Cynthia and they were part of us, didn’t that mean I was still interested in Emily? “We just need to talk about what we find out so we don’t waste our effort, both of us looking at the same sources. It might help if we go together once or twice and then map out where each of us is going to do further research.”
“When were you planning to go? I might join you.”
“Well, they close early on Sundays, so why not right after lunch?”
On the way over to the library, we decided that I’d start out looking for information on jekyllase, while Emily and Darrell would look for information on psychological repression. Emily and I both had some other topics we wanted to research, but we didn’t want to talk about them with Darrell for obvious reasons. I sort of regretted inviting Darrell along, but — well, he had his own hangups to deal with, and inviting him would make it obvious (I hoped) that there was nothing between me and Emily.
Only between Jennifer and Cynthia, who were us.
I wondered: if I were Jennifer and Emily wasn’t Cynthia, would Jennifer be attracted to her? An experiment for another time, perhaps. But it would probably be safer for us to both take jekyllase at the same time.
We split up at the card catalog, going to different drawers and digging through them for things that looked relevant. Under “Jekyll” I found Stevenson’s famous book about the Jekyll and Hyde case, an unexpurgated edition of Henry Jekyll’s diaries and letters, and a history of Jekyll Island, Georgia, which was named after a different Jekyll. Under “jekyllase” there was nothing. I wrote down the call numbers for the Dr. Jekyll books and went to the shelves with the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. There I found several articles about Dr. Jekyll and jekyllase over the last five years, starting with the discovery of Dr. Jekyll’s papers in that London attic and their donation to University College of London, and the first modern synthesis of jekyllase a few months later, and then some articles about psychiatrists using it as an experimental treatment. Those looked promising. Our library didn’t have all the magazines and journals cited, but it had several of them. I wrote down the information about the articles on the use of jekyllase and went to look for them, and for the books.
I met up with Darrell and Emily at one of the study tables, carrying a stack of books and bound volumes of magazines.
“What have you found?” Darrell asked me in a whisper. I showed them the articles I’d found.
“And these might not be that helpful,” I said, pointing out the books about Henry Jekyll, “since he turns out to be pretty atypical as jekyllase users go, but I’m going to check them out and read them anyway. That can wait, though; we need to read or at least skim as many of these articles as we can before the library closes, and only photocopy the most important ones to study later. What about you two?”
They had several psychology books spread out on the table and were looking through the tables of contents and indexes for passages about repression and, incidentally, jekyllase. Most of the books were too old to mention jekyllase, but one published early that year had a couple of pages about it. Darrell and Emily had already read it, so they passed it to me and I read it before going through the articles.
The consensus of that book passage and the articles, such as it was (there was a lot of disagreement between them), was that jekyllase temporarily induced a kind of hysteria (that was the word they used in those days) involving a dual personality, and a physical transformation. That, we sort of knew already. There were a bunch of theories about the dual personalities induced by jekyllase and why they were the way they were; I was more interested in the anecdotal evidence of how jekyllase had affected various people mentioned (not by name, usually) in the articles. It seemed that jekyllase tended to induce temporary sanity in patients with a wide range of psychological disorders, but it didn’t necessarily cause temporary disorders in healthy volunteers who tested it. And if a person didn’t take jekyllase too often — one article said a minimum of forty-eight hours between doses, another more conservatively estimated a week — the dissociation didn’t last after the dose wore off. A couple of them said that poor Dr. Jekyll’s troubles came from using his new drug too often; if high levels built up in the body, they theorized, switchover to the secondary personality could happen spontaneously, and the secondary personality might become the base state. With modern clinical methods, testing the blood for jekyllase levels between doses, there was little risk of that. The lethal dose in rats was somewhere around fifteen times the typical clinical or recreational dose, and proportional to body mass, it would be a lot higher in humans.
That didn’t help us, except to warn us not to take it more than once every couple of days — preferably once a week. Randall taking it twice in one week when he needed some extra hard studying was probably safe, especially since he didn’t take it again for weeks or months.
Unfortunately, closing time snuck up on us, and we had to leave without having a chance to photocopy any of the articles. I said I’d come back and copy the important ones tomorrow between classes. I checked out the Dr. Jekyll books, and we each checked out one or two of the psychology books that talked about dissociation or repression or hysteria. After I got back to the dorm, I kept reading until long after I should have gone to bed.
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