The darkness never changes, but sometimes it smells different. After 400 years, whether my eyes are open or closed matters because it’s how I communicate. One if by land, two if I see….

I can’t really smell anything anymore; all I have is memories. The scent of early morning rain on the cool desert sand, the odor of sweat on the back of a long-time lover’s hand, the reek of aviation fuel on the ground below the flight path of an airplane bigger than the sky.

Do they still have airplanes? Maybe I’m an airplane. How would I know?

When I was a kid, I had all sorts of ambitions for what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t think any of them were root vegetables, but I yam what I yam. Someone blow a whistle…

I asked my robot caretakers if I could be allowed to die. They said, of course, any time you like, as often as you want, a thousand times at least.

They don’t like being called robots, but who gives a damn what they like as long as they let me die….

---

Eventually, the drugs they had me heavily sedated on wore off, and all the hookah-smoking caterpillars and purple, inside-out cows went away. I still couldn’t see, but my memories were clearer.

My family had been heading to Japan for a vacation. I remember looking past my twin sister Chelsea to see Tokyo out the window. There were a lot of buildings, and then a small bay and there was the airport. We came in for the landing... and crashed.

The last I remembered was getting mashed into Chelsea. We both had our seat belts on, but because our side of the plane hit the ground, our seats didn’t stay where they were supposed to be and the seat belts didn’t do any good. Her seat bent one way, mine the other, and we were pressed face-to-face, lips touching like we were kissing. Ew! My sister’s pretty hot, but I never wanted to kiss her!

That memory kept playing over and over in my head. Kissing my sister. Maybe a day after that, I still couldn’t see, but I could hear and smell that I was in a hospital, as I suppose I should be, having survived a plane crash.

---

Several days later they took the bandages off my face. Until that point I had only had small holes for breathing. Hooray! I could see! Sort of. After a moment, my vision cleared, and I could see perfectly. Beyond the doctors, I could see my parents standing there across the room.

To my left, there was another bed in the room where they had similarly just been removing bandages. I expected that was Chelsea. But when I looked over, I saw... me? My face. My attempt at a mustache.

She, he, whoever, was looking at me, too, and looking just as confused as I felt. He spoke first, sounding like Chelsea’s manner of speaking but in my actual voice.

“Kevin, are you in my body?!”

I replied, “I must be, because I see my face over there. So I’m Chelsea now?”

“Yeah.”

---

The doctors were dealing with all of our physical injuries, but said if our minds had gotten scrambled to the point we thought we were each other, there was no way they could fix that. At best, they could send us to a psych. They actually brought one in for us, who concluded that I firmly believe I’m Kevin and my roommate firmly believes she’s Chelsea, even though those are not the bodies we are in. But there still wasn’t anything they could do about it.

We lay in bed for another two weeks before they took off the rest of the casts. A terrible fortnight of looking over and seeing myself in the other bed every day, a hundred times a day, knowing I was going to have to live as Chelsea for the rest of my life. Mom and Dad came to visit once a day, giving short talks meant to comfort us. Gradually, little by little, I got more of the feeling of my body back. Of her body. Whatever. It itched, but it was all under casts and unreachable.

One morning they started removing our casts in stages, first removing the ones on our arms and legs and finally the casts over our torsos. After each removal, they gave the exposed skin a thorough sponge bath, and then took a break before the next cast. I don’t know if those breaks were to give us a rest, or to let the doctors rest.

When they prepared to remove the torso casts, they pulled curtains across between us and over the windows of the hospital room, since we’d be exposed sometimes. I did confirm I had Chelsea’s body once that cast was removed and I could see her breasts. My breasts now, I guess. They covered me with one of those paper hospital gowns before opening the curtains, and Kevin’s body likewise. Up until that point we didn’t have any clothes at all, just casts. For the rest of that day and all of the next we were subjected to lots of tests. They were making sure we had healed properly, and there were a lot of parts that needed healing. But apparently everything was good.

---

Starting with dinner that evening, we got to eat food again. All-you-can-eat rice, veggies with a lot of soybeans, and some meat, piled high. It was supposed to help us as we worked to regenerate lost muscle. They helped us with that first meal in case we were uncoordinated with eating after so long in casts, but I got the hang of feeding Chelsea’s body quickly.

The next morning the therapists came in. We’d been in bed for more than a month, and we needed to learn how to walk again. Before we could even do that, we needed to relearn to move our limbs, and they led us through aerobic exercises in bed, stretching out arms and legs, fingers and toes. The big meals continued.

After several days like that, one morning the doctors came in and unhooked us from the IV and the catheters between our legs. We both got a sponge-down of that area.

My doctor said, in broken but intelligible English, “Your period start. You need tampon.”

He left, and a female nurse came in and showed me what was unmistakably a wrapped tampon before opening it. I’d never even touched one before, but I knew what it was... and where it had to go.

She asked me, “Can you insert it? I can do it if you cannot.”

Ugh! You just insert that thing and push the plunger, right? I bet she didn’t even realize that I was Kevin and not Chelsea, not that anybody else was ever really going to understand that. So I told her, “You do it, please.”

But I watched as she inserted the thing, and it went about like I expected it would. If I was going to be Chelsea the rest of my life, I was going to need to know this.

Chelsea had been over there snickering the whole time, and burst out laughing as soon as the nurse left the room. But that didn’t last long, as the therapists came back in. The reason we got disconnected was for us to try to learn to walk today. They lowered the beds so it was like getting out of a normal bed, and helped us turn, sit up, and stand up. We only took a couple steps that first time, and back to bed, but we practiced the sitting and standing a while.

Pretty soon, we were alone again, and I asked Chelsea, “You just insert that thing like she did?”

Although Chelsea had joked before, now she spoke in a serious tone. “Yeah. You’re going to have to get used to that. You could use pads, but the tampon is more freeing, and you don’t really feel it after it’s in.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that. I know it’s there, but...”

“To remove it, you pull on the cord that hangs out, at the same angle it went it.”

I reached down and found the short cord hanging out of Chelsea’s vagina. My vagina. Whatever.

“You never leave it in more than 8 hours, and I’m sure they will be around to change it. In the heavy flow, the second of three days, you may need to change it more often and maybe use the heavy flow tampons. They’re larger. I didn’t see what they gave you, but if it just started I’m sure they gave you a standard one.”

A nurse actually came 6 hours after the first one to change it, and after seeing her remove the old one and insert another, I felt like I could do this the next time. Immediately after that the therapists came back, and this time helped us to walk as far as the restroom within our hospital room. We were after that authorized to walk that far ourselves if we needed to, though we also still had a bedpan to use if we felt like we couldn’t make it.

The nurse continued coming every 6 hours including in the middle of the night to change my tampon, or rather to offer me the chance to do so. After I said I’d do it, she handed it to me, and held open a small bag for me to toss the used one, the wrapper, and the applicator into. The second day, it was every four hours, and after one of them came out dripping, it was indeed heavy flow tampons the rest of that day. The third day it was back to six hours, and when I removed the tampon the fourth morning, I found it completely clean. Fortunately, like Chelsea had said, it only lasted three days. Three days during which we got serious practice walking as therapists came in twice a day to help us.

We were down to normal-sized meals after we started walking, ones I could finish. Then the therapists got us doing longer and longer walks, eventually going far across the hospital, where I no doubt would have been lost had they not been there to guide us back to our rooms.

After the first of these walks longer than two rooms down the hall, I complained about the jiggle of Chelsea’s breasts. My breasts. Whatever. A nurse came with a tight-fitting top to wear under the paper gown, which helped, and was subsequently changed out each time they came to wash down my body. Chelsea explained later that what I was wearing was a sports bra, though it was Japanese and a little different from hers that would be waiting for me whenever we got home.

One of these nights, after the last nurse service we expected until the middle of the night, Chelsea asked me, “Did we unintentionally kiss during the accident?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I remember that. When I came back down to the real world after some really weird dreams from whatever drugs they had us on, that memory really stuck in my mind.”

“Do you think it caused us to swap?”

“I don’t know why that would happen. Lots of people kiss and they don’t swap bodies.”

“Yeah, but not also with the kind of forces on us during the accident. You want to try it and see if we swap back?”

“Uh, I really don’t want to kiss you. No offense, but I’m not ready to kiss a boy, even if he’s my old body. And we wouldn’t have those forces from the accident on us.”

“True.”

“But I’ll do it. It’s worth trying, even if there’s only the slimmest chance of us getting back into the right bodies.”

So we stood together between the beds and kissed each other like we were on a date. It wasn’t bad, actually. I closed my eyes and just pretended I was kissing a girl. It worked because they’d shaved Chelsea that morning. Chelsea didn’t want my mustache and had been having them shave it off when they took care of the rest of her face. My old face. Whatever. I wasn’t going to argue with it because she was the one having to live with it now.

It felt good, but didn’t work. I was still in Chelsea’s body and she in mine when we stopped, so we got back into our separate beds and gave up on that idea.

---

We got more walking practice, and another round of tests. After two weeks, we were walking the halls on our own, we passed all the tests, and they said we were ready to leave the hospital. Mom and Dad arrived with real clothes for us, and pulled the curtains to let us get dressed.

“Ugh, Mom, did it have to be a dress?” I told her.

“Chelsea, you love dresses!”

“But I’m Kevin, remember?”

“Oh, that mind-swap thing was real? We thought you were joking. You’ve been taking it well, if you’re Kevin.”

“100% real. Though I realize there’s no going back and I have to learn to live this way. I’ve learned how to go to the bathroom as a girl and use tampons. I guess I will have to learn this too.”

“Well, you can get whatever clothes you want. Since all our luggage was destroyed in the crash, we’ve got a clothing allowance that should let you buy a week’s worth of clothes here before we go back home.”

Chelsea had a similar conversation with Dad, and pretty soon we both were dressed and the four of us were together as a family again, Mom and Dad towing suitcases.

They signed some paperwork and led us out of the hospital, but not by walking out the front door into the sunshine like you might expect. No, we left underground, directly into Tokyo’s subway system. They had monthly passes, and a weekly pass for each of us.

“All on the airline’s dime,” Dad explained. “Insurance after your plane crashes is pretty good, as it turns out. They put us up in a hotel room and we’ve had our expenses covered all summer. But now we’re going to get the family vacation we came here for, though we know you two will still have to take it easy.”

After traveling the city all summer, Mom and Dad were experts at navigating the Tokyo subway. Along the way, Mom explained, “We stayed in a hotel near the hospital while you were there, but now we’re going to the one at Tokyo Disneyland. You remember, Chelsea, the one you chose as your prize for finishing high school with a higher GPA than Kevin.”

They’d staged a contest between us. We were both good students, but whoever got the higher final GPA got to choose where we’d go on our celebratory summer vacation, anywhere in the world. Chelsea won, and she chose Tokyo Disneyland. Since our brief conversations in the hospital had all been about how we were feeling and recovering, our parents had arranged on their own to set up the vacation we came here for, but in late August rather than late June.

At the hotel we had a “family suite.” Chelsea and I took a look into both kids’ rooms, which looked like they were intended for age 8 or so rather than our 18. There was a little girl room all made up in pink with a big Minnie Mouse on the wall and a boy room in blue with an equally large Mickey. The bedroom for our parents was more tastefully done, with decorations showing Donald Duck’s entire family, and we had a living room with couches and a kitchenette and bathroom.

“This was your choice,” I told Chelsea as I glared at her. Him. Me. The person now occupying what used to be my body.

“Yeah, I know. I didn’t realize it would be so... kiddie. But I can sleep in the Minnie Mouse room; I’m not going to subject you to that, unless you want it.”

Chelsea went and sat on the edge of the bed in the pink room, and I went and sat in the blue room. Anybody looking at us would have thought it pretty weird that the boy was in the pink room, and it was weird. But we didn’t stay there long.

Mom said, “Come on! We have to go shopping. You can’t wear the clothes you are in all week.”

Fortunately, that didn’t mean shopping within the Disney resort, but just at normal stores. Normal for Tokyo, which meant weird Japanese sizes on top of women’s sizes being weird anyway and trying to shop for a body I wasn’t used to. But Mom helped me, and Dad helped Chelsea, er, Kevin’s body, er... As a family, we agreed we would call my sibling Kevin and me Chelsea because those were the bodies we wore, and we were going to have to get used to that.

Women’s clothes were weird, but Mom got us into stores where the weirdness was only because I wasn’t used to shopping for women’s clothes and not because they were Japanese on top of that. Most of them had American sizes printed next to or even instead of the Japanese ones.

I also learned that the deal we had with the insurance funding us had limits. We each had about $500 to spend on clothes. That was actually 60,000 Japanese yen, less an amount that they had spent on the clothes we were now wearing. That made my choices easier: basic shirts and shorts, underwear and bras. Yeah, I needed bras; I didn’t even argue with Mom over that. The kind of clothes I wanted were actually cheaper, and I’d have more left to... buy more of them, I guess. Or long pants or something. We didn’t spend all of it today.

We also each got a large suitcase even a bit larger than what we had packed to come here, to make sure we had enough space for whatever we bought. We packed our other purchases into it for transport back to the hotel. I got a large purse that didn’t really look girly, though it wasn’t anything I would ever have carried as a boy, and Ch-... Kevin got some other kind of bag that was not a purse, though I wasn’t clear on the distinction; it was also something I never would have carried as a boy. And we each got wallets; a woman’s wallet isn’t actually much different than a man’s, except it’s larger and not designed to fit in a back pants pocket, which she likely wouldn’t have unless she was wearing jeans, anyway.

Some of what I got were jeans, ones with real back pockets. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself that there were women’s jeans with fake back pockets. Stitching in the shape of a pocket with no actual pocket. And they cost more than the jeans I got. They were definitely women’s jeans, though. The fit was different, but it felt right. Men’s jeans would have stuck out in places they had no need to and would have been too tight over the hips. I wasn’t going to dress girly, but I accepted the fact that I was putting these clothes on a young woman’s body.

We got dinner before coming back to the hotel. Again, we had a limit; it was more than the cost of fast food, but less than room service in the Disney hotel. Mom and Dad had seen a lot of the city while we were stuck in the hospital, and knew some good affordable restaurants.

Because Dad and the new Kevin were shopping in a different part of the store from me and Mom, I didn’t actually see most of what he had picked out until we got back to the hotel. We did a modeling show after we got back, each of us going into our bedrooms, changing, and then coming out to model for each other and both our parents.

One of the shirts Kevin wore was a pink button-up shirt. I recognized that it was actually a man’s shirt; Mom had explained the different directions of buttoning to me while we were out. And he’d worn it with tight yellow shorts.

I said, “People are going to think you are gay wearing clothes like that.”

“And who says I’m not? I didn’t stop liking boys when I changed bodies.”

“I guess you’re right. I have been more focused on how I’m going to live as a girl than who I am attracted to, but I still like girls, too.”

We finished in our pajamas. Mom had shown me some of the sleepwear women wore and I gave her a hard no. I’d seen Chelsea wear stuff like that before. But then Mom showed me I had choices that didn’t make it look like I was trying to entice someone into having sex. Mine were blue and Kevin’s were peach-colored, but we both had solid, opaque, long sleeve and long leg outfits.

We made shopping lists that night, what we needed to finish the week and estimated costs. Mom and Dad knew what we wanted, and we were able to finish that more quickly the next day, and then visit various museums and other attractions. Our third day there, we actually went into Disneyland. Kevin felt even more silly about having wanted this after having experienced it for real.

We spent the rest of our time there enjoying all sorts of other things across the city. We also had a stop at the U.S. embassy, where Kevin and I picked up our replacement passports. I had already accepted I was Chelsea, but now it was official, as I signed her name on a document, which came out looking surprisingly much like she had signed in the past. Mom and Dad already had theirs, and the neighbor they had arranged to pick up our mail had confirmed we had replacement driver’s licenses and debit cards and more waiting for us at home. One evening, Mom and Dad gave us a repeat of the sex talk, oriented toward our new genders, though some of it assumed we’d be straight.

After a week of Tokyo, we were all ready to go home, and we boarded a flight which arrived safely.

---

That wasn’t the end of our problems, though. A bigger one was that we’d basically missed the whole summer in the hospital, and we were immediately having to get ready for school. If we had still been in high school, we would have already missed the start of classes. As it was, though, we were going on to college, both of us at Gobelstic U., the alma mater of both our parents and where we apparently would have some extra privileges as children of alumni. We were both taking a standard freshman class lineup, and had similar enough grades that the classes were not an issue. But we were going to have to be out in the real world, me living as Chelsea and my twin as Kevin for the first time.

We had one week to pack, and packing was a mess. I was living in Chelsea’s old room, mainly to go through her old clothes to decide what to take with me, and I felt only about a third of them were appropriate. I was depending heavily on the clothes I’d picked up in Japan. But there were lots of other things besides clothes, and in many cases it made sense to trade them for ones I’d used before. Fortunately, Kevin was pretty like-minded. At least a dozen times I went over to his room or he came over to mine with something and the other of us looked at it and immediately traded it for something else.

At one point I came across her sex toys. Mom and Dad had forbidden us to have sex before we moved out of the house after finishing high school, but they hadn’t forbidden masturbation; they weren’t cruel. I knew Chelsea had these, mainly because I heard the hum of the vibrator sometimes. But we had never spoken to each other about sex before; it didn’t seem right. Now, it didn’t seem right for me to take these things and start using them without saying something first.

When I stepped into Kevin’s room holding them, he turned beet-red.

“Oh, yeah,” were the only words he said at first.

“I know what these are, and I think I know how they are all used.”

“Do you have anything like that around here?”

“There are things guys can use, but no. I just used my hand.”

“OK. I’ll learn. One bit of advice: never leave the batteries in. You wouldn’t want one getting turned on by accident and you really wouldn’t want it ruined if the batteries ran all the way down and leaked.”

“OK. I saw the box of batteries next to them. Oh, and by the way,” I said, holding the foot-long dildo with balls attached between my hands, “Guys aren’t actually this long. Did this actually fit all the way inside you?”

“Almost. And by the way, this one was for my ass. Do you mind if I keep it?”

“Um, OK,” I said, handing over the one Kevin pointed to.

“Thanks. It’s the only one I used with a body part I still have and I want to find out if it still does anything for me. I’m going to wash it thoroughly first. And that’s another bit of advice for those things; always wash them after use.”

“Of course.”

We also had a talk about dealing with our old friends and exes. We had both dated in high school, but we hadn’t been very serious about it. We’d also never really had steady partners; many of them expected us to have sex after we had been on a few dates, but since we were forbidden that, we couldn’t stay with any of those. More than once, Chelsea and I both dated the members of a couple who’d just broken up, before they each moved on to other partners. In fact, that was how we got our senior prom dates just 3 days before the event, after we thought we weren’t going.

None of those dates were going to Gobelstic, so we’d intended to make a fresh start there. That was good, since it meant we didn’t have to break off any existing relationships now that we had swapped bodies. But it didn’t mean those old friends wouldn’t seek us out at all. Not to mention all the other friends who we didn’t date.

“Kevin, I know that as Chelsea you had a lot of friends before, almost all of whom you never expect to meet in person again.”

“Not a single one of them is going to Gobelstic.”

“I only know Steve Brandt is going there.”

“The hacker?” he said.

“Yeah, that’s the guy, the one who bragged about knowing everybody’s final GPAs before they were released, and proved it by giving anyone who asked their correct GPA before the official release.”

“He didn’t go to prison for that?”

I replied, “No, I saw on Facebook he’s still free and is going to be at Gobelstic. Fortunately, I barely know the guy and it sounds like you’ve only heard about him.”

“That’s right. But you’re reading Kevin’s Facebook and I’ve been reading Chelsea’s. Going forward you’re going to have to be Chelsea.”

“Hmm. That’s going to be a problem. If we swap accounts, people from our past are going to message us and we’re not going to know how to respond. If we keep our accounts, and just change our names and profiles, all the people from our pasts who look us up are going to know we changed and so will new people we meet who look back into our timelines.”

“We have to make new accounts,” Kevin said. “Keep our old ones, but don’t post on them except to reply to DMs.”

“Huh. So we don’t tell anybody? That might just work. It may look weird that we don’t have any history before Gobelstic, but maybe we could just say we didn’t use it before. All our friends used some other social network that closed down.”

“Yeah.”

“I suspect some of the new close friends we make will figure out we’re not quite right. I haven’t really had enough time to practice being a girl and I suspect you haven’t really had enough time practicing being a guy. So we can tell really close friends who figure it out, but we should also tell each other everyone we share the secret with.”

“That sounds fair. What about other accounts?”

“We should do the same with our email. Beyond that, I don’t know. How many accounts do you have that reveal that kind of information about you?”

That got us really thinking, and we each wrote down a list of 40 or 50 online accounts we had, but most of them weren’t personal enough to matter and weren’t on sites we both used, so we just kept them, and at most changed our real name and email in a profile somewhere on the site that maybe non-administrators couldn’t even see. We did each have a couple other social media accounts, none of them on sites we both used, and we agreed to treat those like our Facebook and email accounts, stop using the old ones, make new ones under our new names if we wanted to interact with new friends there, and if anything got weird, we’d talk.

We also decided we needed to stay close and talk regularly. As we prepped each other, Kevin explained about PMS, but how it had never been bad for Chelsea. I explained about wet dreams, but Kevin said the likelihood of him going that long without masturbating was slim anyway. Nobody needed to explain to me about being hit on by guys; I quickly learned ways to shut them down. But neither of us realized some of the issues we would face.

---

Gobelstic had shared dorm showers and locker rooms. We had both had locker room experiences in school around other naked and semi-naked people of the same gender, but that was as our original gender. Now we had that, but in our new gender, where all those people were potential fantasies, maybe even potential dates if they felt the same way. Freshmen were required to take PE if not enrolled for sports, so we had to deal with it every morning in the dorm and every class in the locker room.

When I was a boy, it was a widely accepted rule not to look at other boys’ penises in the locker room, that those who do are gay. Initially, I did the same here. But should I actually be staring at the girls now?

Kevin explained, “Girls aren’t like that. Girls who look at other girls in the locker room are trying to size them up as rivals for the guys they’re after. Nobody thinks they are lesbian for looking.”

“So how do lesbians identify other lesbians?”

“I don’t know. I was never part of that. Maybe they are just more direct? I do know that the line is not as cut-and-dried as you describe with boys having to be straight or gay. Several of the girls in our high school who had boyfriends sometimes did sexual stuff with other girls, but I don’t know how they found each other.”

“So they were bi?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

I responded, “Well if there were any bi boys, they kept quiet about it, and all the guys saw them as gay. There were only four gay boys, anyway, at least that anyone knew about. You know the ones, right? Did any of the girls ever lust after them?”

“David. There were at least three girls who claimed to have dated David, but he had told them to keep it quiet. But you know how girls are. You do know how girls are, right?”

“If you mean they are always gossiping, yes. I’ve encountered it here already, and while I haven’t contributed anything, I’ve been listening.”

“Exactly. Basically every girl at school knew that David was bi, but they kept it secret from boys. What are the girls here saying about me?”

“Nothing yet. If they start saying you’re gay or bi, I’ll let you know.”

Before I heard any girls talking about Kevin in that way, in October Kevin already had other boys asking him out. By the same time, I had girls coming on to me in ways that were clearly more than social. In fact, I saw the same kinds of signals from girls that I’d seen in high school when I was a boy. Maybe lesbians aren’t really much different from other girls, except they like girls.

Before long, Kevin came to me, asking, “Chelsea, I want to accept John’s offer of a date this Friday night, but...”

“You’re hesitant because it’s your first date as a guy?”

“Yeah. And it’s something you would never have done.”

“Hey, it’s your body now. We agreed on this. We’re stuck with these bodies, so we live our lives the way we want, and we support each other. If it helps, I can ask out one of those girls who’s been giving me signals, and make it a double date.”

“Oh, that sounds interesting!”

So now it was on me to go ask one of these girls out. I identified four candidates and managed to ask three of them in the next couple days. One was now dating someone else, one was busy, and the third accepted.

In preparing for the date, I decided it was time to wear one of my skirts. The old Chelsea’s skirts, as I hadn’t bought any in Japan, but I saved a few of hers for such occasions. I found a suitable top that matched, and my date Jenna showed up in a knee-length dark pink dress with some light pink flowers on it. Kevin’s date John came in a conservative suit, but Kevin wore one of those outlandish outfits he picked up in Japan, a bright green one.

The restaurant meal went perfectly fine. Our waiter was slightly surprised to see we were two guys together and two women together rather than two straight couples, but he had no problem with it. We kissed and talked, and Kevin and I both told the stories we had agreed upon. I had dated girls and Kevin had dated boys in high school, but we had never had sex. That was true, but omitted the fact that we were in different bodies then.

During the movie, Kevin and I sat next to each other, between our dates, but I was turned away from Kevin to face Jenna most of the time and barely looked at Kevin.

Jenna told me at one point, “You don’t have to wear skirts and dresses for me... but it makes it easier to do this.”

I saw she was moving her hand under my skirt, and I was torn whether to stop her or do the same thing to her. Ultimately we both touched each other’s pussies through our panties, but we pulled away before getting too far into arousal.

Mostly, we just kissed, and we did so more than we paid any attention to the movie. Afterward, Kevin told me he and his date did much the same thing, though no penises were touched, just lots of kissing.

The date kicked the rumor-mill into overdrive. Somehow, everybody knew that I had dated Jenna and that Kevin had dated John, and instead of it just being four girls, there were more like fourteen giving me those looks, a few of them explicitly asking me out. Kevin had several more asking him out as well.

We both told all of them to wait, and we instead arranged another double date with our first dates the next weekend. Instead of a movie, we finally used one of those privileges we had as the children of alumni to take them to the alumni lounge.

“I’ve brought us all here because we need to talk.”

“Talk about what?” Jenna asked.

“Us. Me and Kevin,” I replied.

“Oh, you two aren’t bi, are you?” John practically shouted in response.

“No, not at all,” Kevin chimed in. “I only date guys, and Chelsea is my sister. But that’s not really what we’re here to talk about.”

“No,” I said. “It’s our sudden popularity. The grapevine of gossip at this school circulated the news of our date very quickly, and now I’ve got what I assume is every lesbian on campus at least giving me those eyes, if not directly asking me out.”

“And I have all the gay guys asking me out,” Kevin added.

“So I was wondering what it’s like for you two.”

Jenna spoke first, “I’ve been out since I got here, and I was bombarded with requests like that the first couple weeks. They weren’t very persistent, though. I accepted a few of those dates, but their idea of a date was dinner followed by sex. So I ignored the rest of those and looked for someone a little less eager.”

John chimed in, “My experience was similar to Jenna’s, but in addition, they were only looking for a bottom. I... could bottom, but I’m more of a top, so I told them to get lost before we even dated. But Kevin, would you be my bottom, sometimes?”

Kevin was taken aback, but responded, “Gee, thanks for the warning. I’m a virgin, but I do kinda see myself on that side of a relationship, eventually.”

I added, “Is there even an equivalent to that for lesbians?”

Jenna replied, “Well, there’s butch and femme. You’re definitely butch, a girl who dresses more masculine and takes the lead in a relationship, though not so over-the-top as those who came on to me right away. But it doesn’t imply roles in sex the same way.”

There was an awkward silence during which I think all of us were waiting to see if anyone would ask our date for sex right now. John broke it by asking, “How about we go play some video games? I’ve got a pretty good setup in my room.”

“Sure!” “Sounds fun!” “Let’s go!”

We enjoyed ourselves that night, and had another double date the next weekend. By then, they had figured us out.

At the end of it, Jenna pointed out, “Chelsea, I took you for butch earlier, but as I have been with you more, I see you actually act more like a guy. Not the jerky kind every lesbian has to run off, but the caring kind that straight girls are lucky to get.”

Then John added, “You know, Kevin gives me a real ‘girlfriend’ vibe. Is it from the way you two hang together?”

I leaned over to Kevin and whispered in his ear, “Do we tell them?”

He replied, “Yeah, we should. Honesty is good for a relationship.”

So we told how we almost died but came back in each others’ bodies. And Jenna and John not only believed it, but were both OK with it. In fact, it really cemented our relationships. We continued going out as a foursome whenever possible.

---

It was our last date before Christmas break when we arranged one where we would split up into couples for sex afterward. Later, I asked Kevin, “So, how was sex?” I can’t imagine having done that when I was Kevin if Chelsea had gone out and had sex, nor her doing it if I’d been the one, but we were a lot closer now due to the changes.

“Oh, it was wonderful! John went slow and easy for me and made sure I was enjoying it. And I did! I only wish I could have had the opportunity to have felt it in my pussy. Now I’ll never know how a real dick feels there.”

“I didn’t even have anything inside me. Jenna and I only used our mouths. But even that was pretty amazing.”

Kevin had a huge grin as he said, “I remember getting off just rubbing my clit, plenty of times.”

“I know there’s still a lot for me to explore.”

“John says next time he’ll let me put it in him. He thinks we should both be able to have that experience.”

“I think John sounds pretty nice. Jenna’s really nice, too. We both lucked out.”

The four of us stuck together all through college. I was really comfortable with Jenna, and when I was alone with her, sometimes I could forget I had ever been a boy. Kevin seemed to bond just as tightly with John.

During junior year, that guy Steve Brandt tried to blackmail us about telling people we went to high school with we were gay. And we decided we didn’t care; that is who we are now, everybody here already knows, and he wasn’t telling them we swapped bodies. But we did take it to the police and they got him for a bunch of more serious stuff when they investigated him. He went away for a long time.

After graduation we had a double wedding with first Kevin and John getting married and then me and Jenna. That was another of those occasions when I knew it was necessary for me to wear a dress. Kevin wore a tux, but somehow managed to find a red one. Jenna had some special fun for me afterward.

---

Different jobs forced us to live apart after that. I moved to Boston with Jenna, and Kevin moved to New York City with John. We were still close enough we could meet some weekends, and at Christmas and Thanksgiving we were always together with someone’s family: ours, John’s, or Jenna’s.

Years later we started talking about children and having to adopt. I suggested, “We don’t really have to adopt. Kevin and I are twins. If John impregnates me and Kevin impregnates Jenna we can have kids that are genetically related to us.”

Jenna and Kevin both asked me, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I never wanted to be a woman, but I’ve come to love it. So yeah!”

Everybody else agreed, so we arranged some swap parties until Jenna and I were both pregnant.

Jenna gave birth two days before me, but I didn’t fully appreciate how intense it was until my turn. For a moment I regretted having agreed to it, especially since I was giving the child away. But it was for my brother, the person I loved second-most in the entire world to Jenna, and I was glad I had done it as soon as she was out. We both gave birth to daughters.

We signed some paperwork to make the right couple legally the parents of each child. While those children experienced very close aunts and uncles in their lives, and they eventually saw their true parentage on their birth certificates, we never told them about how Kevin and I had swapped bodies. By that point, I had been Chelsea so long that it didn’t even feel like a thing anymore.