Nancy recommended a couple of hangover cures, which required ingredients the dining hall didn’t have, but I made up a makeshift with orange juice and hot sauce, which took my mind off the hangover if it didn’t cure it.
I looked for Tim, Chuck and Nancy at breakfast the next morning. I found Chuck and Nancy just finishing up their breakfasts when I arrived.
“You guys seen Tim?” I asked.
“He was still asleep when I left the room,” Chuck said. “Last night Jennifer fell asleep while Glenn and Charlotte were talking about what to do, and you were — well, Jennifer was too heavy for us to lift out of bed and get into the sleeping bag, and we weren’t that sleepy yet, so we went down to the common room and... talked for a while. When we got back, you were gone and Tim was asleep in his bed.”
“Yeah,” I said. I decided not to tell them what had happened. If I didn’t blame Linda for Virginia’s intolerance and rudeness, I shouldn’t blame Tim for Dean’s attempted rape, either. “I woke up with a hangover just as Tim got back, and I decided I’d go back to my dorm to leave the bed for you.”
Nancy recommended a couple of hangover cures, which required ingredients the dining hall didn’t have, but I made up a makeshift with orange juice and hot sauce, which took my mind off the hangover if it didn’t cure it.
“So,” I said, “Tim said he was never taking jekyllase again. What about you guys?”
They looked at each other.
“I probably will,” Chuck said.
“I might,” Nancy said. “For studying, like you said your old roommate at Newcomen used to do.”
I smiled. Charlotte was too nice a girl to never exist again. “And maybe for thinking problems over from two perspectives, too,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, that could help sometime. You think we can buy Tim’s stash for cheap, since he doesn’t want it now?”
“Wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
I didn’t see Tim again outside of class for several days; he was obviously avoiding me, coming into class at the last moment and hurrying out before I got my stuff together to go. I finally put a letter in the campus post for him, saying I didn’t blame him for what Dean did, but he’d better not take jekyllase again. I suspect he didn’t get it until after the Thanksgiving break, though.
I had a couple of nightmares in the next few nights about what had happened. In one of them, it was Tim, not Dean, who was attacking me or Jennifer (I wasn’t sure which I was, maybe some amalgam of both), and in one, Dean changed back into Tim but didn’t stop pawing at me... I woke up both times before anything worse happened.
I was looking forward to my next visit with Linda, which would be the Friday through Sunday after Thanksgiving. We’d be hanging out with her family for a good part of that time, and on Sunday I’d give her a ride back to Newcomen before driving myself back to Clouston.
After my own family’s Thanksgiving dinner, where the main thing we were thankful for was Robert coming home safe from Vietnam, I packed up my stuff and got ready to leave for Linda’s family’s house in the morning. Then I spent the rest of the evening doing brother stuff with Robert, whom I hadn’t seen in ages. We drove around town looking at places we used to hang out, went back to the house, listened to records... I almost told him about my experiences with jekyllase, or offered to share some of mine with him, but I decided that wasn’t the right time. I’d offer him some jekyllase when he had his own place to live, or I did — not under our parents' roof.
I had another nightmare that night, waking up kicking at the sheets and soaked with sweat. It rapidly faded, but I knew Dean had been attacking me or Jennifer again. I got back to sleep after an hour or so of tossing and turning, though, and managed to get a decent amount of sleep before morning.
The next morning, I said goodbye to Robert and my parents and drove off to see Linda. I got to her parents' house around noon, and had lunch with Linda and her family. After chatting with them for a while after lunch, Linda and I went out to see a movie while her mom and sister went shopping and her dad and brother watched a football game.
As soon as we were alone in the car, I said to Linda, “You remember my last letter?”
“Yeah... that paragraph at the end was kind of cryptic, but reading between the lines, I guess you finally figured out how to make jekyllase?”
“Yeah, my friend Tim and I made up a hundred doses a couple of weeks ago, and we tested it with some friends last weekend. Part of me wanted to wait and do it this weekend with you, but I missed Jennifer so much, and Tim and Chuck wanted to try it, and I said I wouldn’t want to be the only girl there, so Chuck’s girlfriend Nancy joined us. It wasn’t as good as that first time I tried jekyllase with Darrell and Emily and Randall — one of my friends turned out to have a terrible hyde — but it worked, I turned into Jennifer and felt the same as ever, and it lasted as long as it should or a bit longer. I think it might be purer or more accurately measured than the stuff I used to get from Larry Ryman.”
“That’s great, sweetie! You brought some, of course?”
“Yeah, I figure I’ll take some tomorrow, if we can be out most of the day, or maybe Sunday while I’m taking you back to Newcomen and going back to Clouston.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Maybe you’d better let me drive as far as Newcomen, and hang around there with me until it wears off.”
“We could do that.”
I wasn’t sure how long 250 mg of the jekyllase Tim and I had mixed up a few weeks earlier would last; I’d been too hungover, too pounding with adrenaline from our hairsbreadth escape, to check the time when I changed back. It was well into the night, I thought, but it could have been anywhere from six to ten hours after I’d taken it. The stuff I used to get from Larry Ryman would last around eight hours, once or twice closer to nine. If this stuff lasted ten hours, and I took it shortly after we got on the road, Jennifer would be hanging out with Linda until pretty late Sunday before I could get on the road again.
We watched When the Legends Die, cuddling in the back row of the theater as we hadn’t been able to do at Linda’s parents' house, and then did a little Christmas shopping before we went out to supper at a steakhouse.
“So tell me about last weekend,” she said as we sat down and looked at our menus. “You said one of your friends' hydes was —?”
“An awful human being,” I said. “The other two were okay. We went out to a bar, and as bad as Tim’s hyde was before, he was worse when drunk. I... I’m not sure I want to talk about it. Maybe Jennifer will want to.” I wanted to put the memory of Dean’s attack out of my head and never think of it again. I wanted to be very careful about the circumstances when I changed into Jennifer, to keep that kind of thing from happening again. It was easy to resolve never to drink while I was Jennifer again, or hang out with anyone who was drinking, but it would be up to Jennifer if she wanted to stick with that — all I could do was decide whether to take jekyllase again.
Linda seemed to intuit a fair amount of what had happened, and she put a hand on mine and squeezed it.
We talked about school for a while, and our longer-term plans for after graduation. Neither of us mentioned engagement or marriage in so many words, but we were both clearly thinking about it.
Saturday, we mostly hung out around the house with Linda’s family, playing board games, watching television, and chatting. Linda’s brother and I brought a couple of boxes of things out to the car for Linda to take back to Newcomen — actually Jennifer’s things, but Linda’s brother didn’t need to know that. I had no particular plans to change into Jennifer at Clouston, only while visiting Linda at Newcomen. So she could keep Jennifer’s clothes, shoes, purse, jewelry and makeup in her dorm room.
Sunday, we got on the road early, before Linda’s parents and younger sister left for church. Her older brother left about the same time as we did.
As we headed up the road, with me driving the first leg, I said: “Are you sure it’s okay with you for me to take jekyllase now? If you want more time with me, I’d understand.”
“No, go ahead. I miss Jennifer, too. Maybe not as badly as you did, after not being her for well over a year, but I’m eager to see her again.”
“All right. I’ll stop at the first place that looks good.” I pulled into a gas station a few miles further on, and after paying for the gas, went into the restroom with a bag of Jennifer’s clothes and a flask with a dose of jekyllase dissolved in grape juice.
I locked the door (it was a one-person restroom) and looked around for a semi-clean surface to set the bag down on, deciding on the back of the toilet. Then I pulled the flask out and unscrewed the stopper, and —
— and I hesitated, thinking involuntarily of Dean’s rough hand groping Jennifer’s breasts, his legs pinning mine down... my imagination supplied his erection, which I hadn’t seen at the time because it was too dark. I shuddered, stood there agonizing for a couple of minutes...
...and screwed the stopper back on, peed and washed my hands, returned the restroom key, and went back out to the car in defeat. Linda had pumped gas and gotten back in on the driver’s side while I was in the restroom, so I got in on the passenger side.
“What’s wrong?” Linda said. “Did it not work?”
“I lost my nerve,” I said. “I... I didn’t want to tell you what happened last weekend... I thought Jennifer should be the one to decide... but because of it, I — I’m not sure I can be Jennifer again in public. Or Cheryl, either,” I added, referring to the name I’d used when presenting as female without transforming.
“Was she raped?” Linda asked in a hoarse whisper, putting her hand on mine.
“No. But it was a near thing.” A little at a time, sitting there in the parking lot, I told her everything that had happened.
“Oh, my God. That sounds horrible. This... what was his name?”
“Dean.”
“No, I mean his jekyll.”
“Tim.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember you telling me about him. Have you seen him since then?”
“Just in class. He’s been avoiding me... I don’t know if we can be friends after this. I sent him a note saying I didn’t blame him for what Dean did, but... if I hang out with him again, I’m afraid I might have flashbacks to that night. Like in the restroom just now. Or it might make my nightmares worse.”
“Relax,” she said. “I’ll drive for a while. If you recover enough that you want to try being Jennifer again, I’ll be with you when you change, and hold your hand.”
“I don’t know... what if Jennifer has even worse flashbacks than me?”
“Do you want to give up being Jennifer?”
“No, but... I don’t know. Maybe I need more time to recover.”
“You don’t have to decide right away.” She hugged and kissed me, and then started the car.
I brooded about it as we continued up the road. Should I try to change into Jennifer at our next stop, with moral support from Linda, or put it off to some later occasion when we’d have more privacy — maybe a whole day in a motel? Part of me was afraid that if I didn’t immediately get back on the horse, I’d never have the courage to be Jennifer (or even Cheryl) again. But part of me said that was macho thinking, that Jennifer and I needed time to recover from what had happened (and almost happened).
I told Linda what I’d been thinking. “If you put it off,” she said, “you should set a definite date you’re postponing it to. Otherwise, you might keep procrastinating and procrastinating, and building up your fear more and more.”
“Okay. What about... just after Christmas, before we have to be back at school? We can get a motel near Newcomen, and if Jennifer’s suffering even worse from it than I am, she can stay in the motel room with you until it wears off. Or if she feels okay, you two can go out and do some stuff in daylight.”
“All right. I’ll hold you to it. And I want you to write me twice a week, okay? I’m worried about you.”
“Yeah, me too.”
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