The Other Side of Me – Part 33
by Lily Rasputin

After my initial shock of finding myself unceremoniously falling on my butt during cheer practice, I realized that everyone, including Coach, was staring at me with bewilderment. Everybody that didn’t know I was currently leaping back and forth between universes; that is.

“Miller,” Coach said, giving me a look that was part annoyed, part concerned. “You okay?”

I nodded, quickly climbing back to my feet to brush off my Lycra-clad bottom. “Yeah. Just got dizzy there for a second. Guess I haven’t had enough to eat today.”

Shelly shot me an amused look but wisely kept her mouth shut. Lest the ire of the cheer team’s leader get turned in her direction.

“Well, the last thing I need is you falling over again. Or, heaven forbid, dropping your flier.” She looked at the rest of the girls, then her watch, before sighing. “Fine. Call it a day, girls. We’ll go at it again tomorrow.” Then her stern gaze settled back onto me. “And Miller? Make sure you’re properly nutritioned and hydrated tomorrow. You’re already skating on thin ice. Understand?”

I nodded, ignoring the way a few of the other girls grinned and elbowed each other. Figures that Charlene’s attitude, coupled with the weird behavior they’d seen recently, had pretty much eroded any past camaraderie. I’m sure most of them, especially the alternates, would love to see me get kicked off the squad.

“Got it, Coach,” I said enthusiastically. “Won’t happen again.” I hoped.

The assembled squad broke up, girls drifting away alone, or in tiny groups, to gather their things and head off. Josie and Shelly stayed right next to me, holding their interrogation until we were all alone on the field.

“Welcome back,” Shelly said. “How was your day back in your own body?”

I frowned, shrugging my shoulders. “Weird.”

Josie canted her head to the left, arching a single brow. “Weird good? Or weird bad?”

“Weird wrong. I …” My gaze drifted away from them as I thought about how I meant to express the experience. “It just doesn’t feel like me anymore. Like I was … I dunno … wearing a costume or something.”

“But being here doesn’t feel that way?” Shelly probed deeper.

I shook my head and looked back at them. Shelly wore a mask of confusion, but Josie was nodding her head ever so slightly.

“What?” I asked her. Her demeanor was making me feel uncomfortable.

“Nothing,” she said, enigmatically.

I started to push back and demand that she tell me what was going on in that blonde head of hers. Was Charlene’s temper affecting me? However, Shelly sighed and crossed her arms under her chest.

“Well, while you were over there feeling weird and wrong, Miss Thang was over here being just as weird.”

“Oh? She didn’t try to set the remainder of her life on fire before lunch?”

Josie snorted. “No. She showed up in class, sat down, and then looked at me and said, ‘I’m not him.’ After that, she pretty much ignored me for the rest of class.”

I glanced over at Shelly, who nodded.

“Yeah. I mean, she wasn’t a bitch to us. But she also wasn’t … normal. She kept fidgeting and frowning. She sat with us at lunch. Even though she didn’t talk much or eat hardly anything. When you fell, we thought it was just her blood sugar dropping.”

“No.” Then my stomach rumbled audibly. “Though, now that I’m thinking about it, do you think we could catch up over something to eat?”

As we walked toward the cafeteria, I told them about waking up in Samantha’s bed and the discovery that she and Charlene were officially a serious couple. And that my doppelganger had told her new paramour all about the dimensional game of Pong currently taking place.

“I cannot believe Charlene told Samantha,” Shelly said, with more than a hint of derision.

“Maybe that personality thing is affecting her as well,” Josie suggested, holding up one finger. “I mean, even if she was sort of standoffish today, she wasn’t being a total bitch.” That finger turned in my direction. “You’re a good and honest person, Charlie. Maybe that’s rubbing off on her.”

“Great,” I grumbled. “Guess that means I’ll be the one lying to my friends now, huh?”

“Better not,” Shelly warned playfully as she bumped me with her hip.

I also told them about what Sam had said about my feelings toward Mike. As well as how the hunky young man had practically bolted from my house when he thought the version he preferred of the girl he wanted might not be staying.

“Jesus, Charlie,” Shelly said as she shook her head. “You should have either lied or told him the whole truth when you had the chance.”

“We just had a discussion about the fact that Charlie is more honest than Charlene,” Josie countered. “Let’s not start asking her to change that.”

“Then you should have just told him the truth,” Shelly said. “You could have dragged him across the street to Jackson’s lab to prove it.”

My face heated up as I wrapped my arms around my middle. “I … I was scared he would freak out and reject me. You know, if he knew I’m really a guy. On the inside.”

The two of them looked at each other, then Shelly put her hand on my shoulder.

“Are you, though?”

I looked at them for a moment, then shrugged and pulled slightly ahead as we walked into the eatery. Fortunately, neither of them commented on the situation further.

However, Shelly’s question reignited the feelings I’d spent most of the day battling against. The idea that I was more comfortable in Charlene’s body - and her life - than I was in my own. And, apparently, the same could be said for her. I didn’t know what she’d been like, really, until her mom died.

Had she always been a bit unhappy with herself? Had she felt something amiss inside her; something that she couldn’t explain?

I sighed. “I just don’t know anymore.”

After swiping our meal cards with the cashier, we took our trays outside and found an isolated table.

“The thing I don’t get,” Shelly said, as she sat down across from me. “If it’s electricity that’s causing you two to swap places, how does that factor into all the other swaps? I’m fairly certain you weren’t grabbing any high voltage lines in any of those instances?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I stabbed at my salad and brought up a conglomerate of spring mix, bell peppers, and one cherry tomato. “The human body generates an electrical current. Maybe something inside builds up until the charge is enough to initiate a transfer.”

“Like in the Matrix?” Josie asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

“We could call Jackson and ask him. No reason to drive all the way there if he’s going to need to think about it for a bit before testing anything.”

So, I dialed Jackson’s number and waited, impatiently, for him to answer.

“You know,” he said with a note of annoyance, “it takes longer to repair the machine every time I’m interrupted.”

“Sorry, dude,” I said. “I’m here with Shells and Josie. I just got back from being h-”

“We have some new information about the whole body swapping thing,” Shelly interrupted him. “Do you think that’s worth an interruption?”

There was silence from Jackson’s end for a few seconds, followed by. “Well, of course it is. What new information?”

I gave him the abbreviated version of my discussion with his dimensional double, ending with the incident that sent me back to this side of the Charlieverse.

There was another couple of seconds of silence, meaning that it was likely he was looking at his all-important whiteboard.

“Electromagnetically Induced Transference. Hmm … that actually makes sense now that I think about it.”

“It does?” Shelly and I both asked at the same time as we glanced from the phone sitting on the table to each other.

“Well, yeah,” he replied. “The initial transfer took place when both Charlene and Charles grabbed the dimensional window’s power coupling. The electrical current passed through them, into the window, and dragged their consciousness with it. It only stands to reason that another electrical discharge would likely create another exchange.”

Shelly grinned, but I held up my hand to silence any premature celebrations.

'How many volts are we talking about?" I asked. "I don't want to unplug my curling iron and accidentally jump back."

"Especially if it means arriving when Charlene's doing something intimate with Samantha," Shelly responded dryly. "Because then those of us on this side will have to deal with her bitching about getting blue balls."

Josie snickered, and I shot her a soft glare. I almost reminded her that one of those types of swaps had already happened, but it was Josie’s then-boyfriend Danny that Charlene was getting down and dirty with at the time.

"Without proper testing," Jackson continued, "we can't know what the threshold is. I mean, it's obvious that more than simple static discharges are required to initiate transference. Otherwise, you'd be constantly bouncing back and forth."

"Oh! I have an idea," Josie said with giggly delight before she began rummaging around in her purse.

"So, what's the plan?" Shelly asked. "Just hook probes up to Charlie and zap him with various levels of juice until he and Charlene swap?"

"Yes. If we did that, then we could extrapolate the information and see if we can figure out the reason behind the other times." There was more of that noticeable silence for several seconds on his end. "In theory, it might even be possible to sever the connection permanently. If so desired."

Shelly nodded, looking from the phone to me. "That's good news, right? I mean, then you and her can decide where you want to stay and ... what the hell!" Her gaze whipped from me to Josie.

I turned to look as well, only to find that the grinning blonde sitting next to me now had what looked to be a simple two-button box in her hand. It was a little smaller than a television remote with two silver bumps protruding from one end.

"My dad gave me this the day before I left for school. Never used it before." She glanced from the device in her hand to me. "Hold on to your panties, Charles." Her thumb pressed down on one of the buttons, causing a bluish bolt of electricity to leap between the silver nubs.

"Josie, wait!" I yelled as I attempted to leap up from my chair and away from the blonde's arm, which was already moving in my direction.

The sparking end contacted the middle of my bicep, sending a flash of agony leaping from the point where it touched and running all through me. Every muscle in that limb seized as my jaw clenched and my eyes rolled back into my head. It was like being splashed with acid - on the inside. Darkness and vertigo slammed into me, twisting my guts into a painful knot.

Then, it was over. The pain, disorientation, and nausea vanished in an instant. Even my arm felt perfectly fine.

"Charlie," I heard my mother say. "Are you okay?"

I blinked a few times, looking around. I was at home, sitting on the couch next to my mom. I could hear someone, likely my father, rummaging around in the kitchen. Katie was nowhere in sight, leaving just the two of us alone in the living room.

When I turned back to her, my mom arched a brow in inquiry.

“Charles?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

She frowned. “That was so weird to watch. Especially now that I know what is happening.”

“You should experience it from this end. It’s more than just w-”

My vision went dark again for a heartbeat or two. Then my sight returned along with the excruciating pain in my arm.

“Ow! Fucking hell!”

I glanced over to see that Shelly had Josie’s arm in both of her hands, gripping tightly to keep the stun gun pointed upward. The blonde’s face seemed both amused and annoyed. At my outburst, both of them looked my way.

“Charles?” Shelly asked.

I rubbed furiously at the tingling spot on my bicep, glaring at both of them with as much anger as I could summon.

“Yes. I’m back.” I snarled, shaking my head. “What did you do, zap me again?”

Josie nodded, continuing to pull against the larger girl’s grip. “It worked, right? I shocked you back home and then shocked Charlene to bring you back. So, we know that a powerful enough zap will cause you two to swap.”

“That was extremely dangerous,” Jackson warned, apparently still on the line.

“But it proved the theory,” Josie replied, sounding almost pouty. “There was a theory and we tested it.”

How Jackson didn’t sigh aloud, I will never know.

“Yes, Josie,” he said in a voice much calmer than I was feeling. “But we don’t know what the lower limit is. That’s why I wanted to do this in my lab. In order to find out the lowest necessary power level.”

She looked from the phone over to me. “Sorry.” Though I didn’t believe she was being completely sincere with her apology.

I continued rubbing my arm. “That really hurt, Josie. I mean, really hurt. And you did it to me twice.”

Josie shook her head. “No, I did it once to you and once to her.” The way she said ‘her’ informed me that any regret she felt about electrocuting me didn’t carry over to Charlene.”

“But it’s still the same body, doofus,” Shelly grumbled, finally wresting the stun gun away from the blonde. “You shocked that body twice, and now Charles is the one feeling the pain. Charlene only had to deal with it for a few seconds and now she’s back in the form that didn’t get electrocuted.”

Josie’s mouth dropped open, and a blossom of crimson spread across her face. “Oh. I didn’t think about that. Sorry, Charlie.”

I waved her off and turned my attention back to the phone. “So, when do you want to hook me up to a Flux Capacitor and make my hair stand up?”

Jackson ignored my movie reference. “Give me an hour or so to rig up the equipment. I want to have precise control over the voltage level, as well as the necessary measuring devices in place so that I can get readings on everything. It might not be just the voltage. It might take a certain current, it might depend on the resistivity of the body-”

“OK, we get it, Doc Green,” Shelly interrupted. “1.21 Gigawatts. Just like required for time travel.”

“Doc Brown,” I corrected Shelly. “In Back to the Future, it was Doctor Emmet Brown.”

Shelly looked at me like I’d just rattled off a whole sonnet about the wonders of Danny Morris’ dick. Then she shook her head. “Not in this universe, Charlie. It was Doctor Eliza Green and Melanie McFly.”

“Actually,” Jackson said thoughtfully, interrupting my near-protest about the wholesale slaughter of one of my favorite movies, “the right conditions might cause leaps in time as well-”

“Wait! Stop!” I shouted over everyone. “Let’s focus on controlling the universal transfer. Get a dog and a DeLorean if you want to experiment with time travel. The last thing I want is to be stuck as Charlene running from dinosaurs!”

When everyone calmed down we resumed discussing the electrical transfers. “Charlene isn’t going to like being a part of this experiment,” Shelly warned. “Especially if she bounces over here to find herself strapped to a table in Jackson’s lab, hooked up to a battery.”

“She can just get over it,” Josie said, twirling her stun gun before putting it away.

I told Jackson I’d see him in an hour and a half, hung up the phone, and then looked back at Josie.

“What’s going on, Jose? You said that Charlene was being uncharacteristically nice while she was here today. Yet you seem pissed about something.”

Josie looked from me to Shelly, then sighed.

“After you told me about Danny’s phone and the video on it, I thought he might have made a copy. So, I accessed his cloud account to see if I was right. I figured if there was one, I’d delete it from there so it would be gone forever.”

“How did you get into his account?” Shelly asked her.

Josie rolled her eyes. “Danny Morris is a lot of things. A password genius, he is not. I simply took a few guesses. Turns out it’s his initials and his birthdate.”

“Okay,” I said, shaking my head. “I think it’s possible your Danny is monumentally more stupid than mine.”

Josie nodded. “No argument there.”

Shelly leaned in closer. “Was there another copy?”

The blonde looked from her to me and nodded, her eyes moving away from my face. “And others. About a dozen or so.”

“That bastard!” I snarled, almost slamming my fist down on the table. “He filmed her more than once? What an asshole.” Then I blinked, realization hitting me in the chest like a punch from a prizefighter. “Wait. A dozen? Like, when?”

Tension rolled into Josie’s frame as if it were fog rolling onto the shore. “The first one was dated about two weeks after the semester started.”

“That son of a bitch!” Shelly spat.

“Let’s not forget that Danny’s not the only one in the wrong here,” I added. “Charlene was a willing participant - to the sex - I mean.”

“To the video, too,” Josie added, finally looking back up at me. “In one of the videos, she looked directly at the camera and winked.” The tremor in her voice made no secret of her anger. “She knew he was filming them and didn’t care.”

I ignored the nausea forming in my tummy and reached out to put my hand on her arm. “She didn’t care about much back then, Josie. But that’s not to say it’s an excuse. She fucked up, and she knows she fucked up. That doesn’t make it right, and I’m not going to say you should forgive her.”

Shelly sighed. “But at least stop blaming Charles for Charlene’s actions.”

Josie glanced over at Shelly and nodded. “Okay. You’re right. But I’m done being Charlene’s friend. Charles, whenever Charlene is here, I will be courteous to her in public settings. Only because I don’t want people to think I’m mad at you. However, when there’s nobody around but people who know, I’m going to tell her exactly what I think about her.”

“You already did,” Shelly reminded her. “That evening in Jackson’s lab.”

“Then I’ll come up with some new insults for her.”

I nodded. “Fair. Now what are we going to do about all the other videos?”

Josie shot me a confused look. “What do you mean? I erased them all from Dannys’ cloud account. Except for one. I’m keeping that one so that if he decides to try and get revenge, we can bust him for recording a sexual act without permission of the other person.”

“Uh, you just said that Charlene knew about it,” Shelly said.

When Josie turned to me, the unsettled feeling in my stomach lessened a bit. “Did I?” I asked Shelly. “Did I really know he was doing that? I don’t think I would agree to such a thing, do you?”

We finished our lunches and agreed to meet up at Jackson’s in an hour. Josie needed to meet up with a friend to get some notes from a lecture she missed, and Shelly had an appointment with her faculty advisor.

As I cut across campus toward the parking lot, I thought about the new information about the swaps. The electrical thing wasn’t painless. All three times I’d been shocked into leaping across the dimensional barrier had been decidedly not enjoyable. Perhaps the required energy discharge threshold was actually lower.

If that was the case, then Charlene and I could change places at will. We could coordinate schedules and at least be guaranteed to know when some transfers would take place. Which would be great for being able to occasionally see my own family.

I stopped in mid-stride as I realized that I’d finally found the solution to the main problem with me staying on this side of the Charlieverse. If I had the chance to visit my mom from time to time, then I could throw myself into Charlene’s life completely. No hesitations.

Feeling my lips curl into a smile, I began walking again. Just as I was about to exit the Quad, I spotted Mike’s familiar form about a hundred feet ahead, striding toward me from the other direction. Clearly looking at me.

Did he want to talk about the previous evening? If so, I decided that I would risk it all and tell him everything. About the failed experiment, my being a guy currently inhabiting a girl’s body, all of it.

The glimmer of my nightmare tried to rear its head, but I pushed it back down. It was more likely that the basketball star would believe I was either lying or insane. Or possibly that one of my personalities was trying to get rid of him. Either way, I promised myself that I was done lying to people. That was Charlene’s schtick, not mine.

Mike smiled as he drew closer, and the expression made my pulse quicken and my heart surge within my chest. The smile, I felt, was a good sign.

I lifted my arm to wave at him just as someone walked up behind me and spoke.

“Charlie?”

I turned to see Samantha Thomas right behind me. She was biting her lip and had a pensive, almost anxious, look on her face. The nervous expression was one I had never seen her wear before. At least not in my universe.

“Sam,” I said. “What are you-”

Before I could finish the thought, the pretty redhead moved in, slipped her arms around my waist, and pressed her lips against mine. Stunned by her actions, I could only stand there confused as her tongue pushed inside my mouth and swirled around my own for several mind-bending seconds.

When she pulled back, she flashed me a relieved smile. As if she had thought something bad was about to happen and was glad it had not.

“Yes,” she said softly, nodding her head in the affirmative.

“Yes?” I repeated, still dazed from the unexpected kiss. In my periphery, I could see that Mike had stopped about twenty feet from us. Despite not looking directly at him, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he’d just seen the blatant PDA between me and the sporty redhead., who still had her hands resting on my hips.

“Yes,” Sam repeated. “I’ll go out with you.”