“No,” I said firmly, shutting the magazine and handing it back to him. “Do not want.”
Night and Day
part 2 of 12
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. Thanks to Morpheus, epain, and Karen Lockhart for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
I came to in the playground again, wearing loose clothes and holding a note in my hand. It read:
“Thanks for being naked when we transformed this time. Waking up with panties pinching my junk was no fun. I’m going to try to stay in and take off my clothes when the sun sets, but if I can’t resist the compulsion to go outside, I’ll at least put on loose clothes.”
It was my handwriting, of course.
“You about ready to go?” Mom asked. I turned and looked at her.
“Sure,” I said. “Shopping, you mean?”
“Yes, let’s not waste any time.”
Jared was watching Jasmine. We walked around to the bus stop and waited a few minutes for the next bus. It let us off a short walk from a Wal-Mart, where we bought panties and bras, and then we took another bus to the Goodwill, where we bought a few shirts, blouses and pants. I didn’t like the idea of skirts or dresses, or pants tight enough to restrict my movement. Most of the pants were still tighter than the pants I wore when I was a boy, but I also got one pair of loose sweat pants to wear while transforming.
“Things are going to be really tight this month,” Mom said, “with these clothes and the emergency room bill. Jason said he could help out, but we’re not going to have any money for extras.”
“I understand,” I said.
I still didn’t sleep; I spent the night reading, watching movies, and playing games. I wore panties, a bra, girl jeans and a T-shirt most of the night, but when I felt the need to go out and watch the sun rise, I changed into the loose sweat pants with no underwear and went out. I “forgot” to take off the bra, just to mess with my other self. Once I was out there watching the eastern sky brighten, I wondered if I should have written a note for him, but it was too late; I couldn’t go inside and make myself miss the sunrise.
Bobby was there when I woke up. “That’s still freaky even after seeing it a couple of times,” he said.
“Thanks. Mind if I go inside and change clothes?”
“I guess you’d better. Oh, and you told me to tell you to look in your pocket.”
I fished in my pocket and found this note:
“The bra was NOT FUNNY. Don’t try that again or I’ll wear the tightest T-shirt I can fit into.”
I was wearing the loose sweat pants I’d worn that morning, but the T-shirt I was wearing was a little too tight across the chest, and I didn’t have a bra on under it; my nipples were showing, and naturally enough, Bobby was kind of staring at them. I went into Jasmine’s room, where Mom and I had stashed my new girl clothes, and changed; I also wrote out a note:
“Wear a looser shirt tomorrow at sunset. The pants were fine.”
and set it on the sweat pants to remind me to hold it when I changed tomorrow morning. Then I went out to the living room, where Bobby gawped at me in my girl clothes. I felt a little bit angry about that, and suppressed it; Bobby was just surprised, he wasn’t leering at me or anything.
“How long have you been hanging with me?” I asked. “The daytime me, I mean.”
“Since lunchtime... we walked to Peak Park and hung out for a while, then came back to my apartment and played games until a few minutes ago when you said you wanted to see the sun set. You went home and changed clothes and met me in the playground.”
“It’s weird having another self who does all this stuff I can’t remember,” I said. “But at least we both still like to do the same things.”
“Except for this obsession with watching the sun rise and set.”
“Yeah, that.”
We played Knight of the Living Dead until supper; Bobby joined me, Mom and Jasmine for supper, while Jared was eating supper at a friend’s place. After supper, when Jasmine had hugged me and gone to bed, and Mom had gone to her bedroom to read a while before bed, Bobby and I played a couple of old puzzle games and chatted some.
“What’s it like being a girl?” he asked.
“It was a little weird at first,” I said. “But not so much now. Peeing is kind of messy, and I’m not looking forward to having a period, but I don’t actually miss having a dick. I don’t know why.”
“Could be a personality change... they say a lot of the kids who transform get personality changes too.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of worried about that. Do I seem different to you?”
“Except for wanting to watch the sun rise and set every time, and not freaking out about being a girl, not really.”
“Good.”
After a while he asked me: “So, do you still like girls? Or do you like boys now?”
“Ugh,” I said. “No, I don’t like boys. Not that way. I... I guess I still like girls, but I’m not sure, I haven’t hung around any girls except Mom and Jasmine since the change.” There were some women and girls at the emergency room, patients and nurses both, but I couldn’t remember being attracted to them either.
“I guess you’ll find out soon, when you start seeing more girls.”
“Yeah, after school starts back — Wait. No. I’m not going to school. I don’t have to go to school!” I laughed in delight.
“Yeah, you do. I mean, you’re not sick... Oh. I see.”
“Yeah, my daytime self has to go, but I don’t.”
“That’ll be fun in the short term, but you’ll regret it eventually. I mean, every day you’re getting more and more different from each other, and in five years he’ll have a high school education and maybe even be going to college, and you won’t have anything. Except what you learn on your own, I guess.”
“Huh. I guess you’re right. I’d better... I don’t know... study the daytime-me’s textbooks, and stuff like that. And maybe take online classes.”
“Good idea.”
Just then I heard Mom’s phone ring, muffled by the walls, and a minute later she came out of her bedroom. “Bobby, your mom says it’s time to come home.”
“All right, Mrs. Sullivan. Good night, Jamie.”
“Good night,” I said.
I needed to keep learning stuff, even if I couldn’t go to school, but I figured it could wait until the end of Spring break. I spent the rest of the night playing video games and reading torrented comics.
When I woke up in the playground that night, I was standing behind the swing, and Jasmine was swinging in it. I must have been pushing her while I watched the sunset, because she turned around and said “Don’t stop — yay, you’re a girl again! I’m glad to see you. Keep pushing.”
I laughed, and started pushing Jasmine again.
Bobby came out a few minutes later.
“Sorry I missed your transformation,” he said, “I had to go to the bathroom. You still don’t remember anything that happened to you today?”
“Not since sunrise, same as usual.”
“We need to test the limits of that. I know you don’t remember stuff that happened in the daytime, but you might know stuff that the daytime-Jamie learned. Um, let’s see... who were Zeus’s children?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Oh, wait, you were telling me about them the other night, right? Apollo and Artemis.”
“Any others?”
“Not that I can remember.”
He shrugged. “It was worth a try. I gave your daytime self a lesson on Greek mythology a few minutes ago, to see factual knowledge would stick when experience-memory doesn’t. Apparently not. So you’re not going to get any benefit out of your daytime-self’s education; you need your own.”
“Keep pushing,” Jasmine admonished me. I pushed her little butt again the next time she swung toward me.
After a while Jasmine got tired, and we got hungry, and we went back to my apartment. Mom was working late, apparently trying to get overtime so she could pay for my new clothes and the emergency room visit. I felt bad about that, but I was too young to work a real job. I’d worked odd jobs for our neighbors sometimes, but not since I started changing.
So Jared and I fixed supper for ourselves and Jasmine and Bobby. After supper, Bobby said: “Jared, can you watch Jasmine for a while? I’ve got something to show Jamie.”
“Sure,” Jared said, “you two watched her for a couple of hours there.”
“What’s this about?” I asked as we walked over to Bobby’s apartment.
“You said you weren’t sure if you were attracted to girls,” he said, “you hadn’t seen enough to be sure.”
“No, I guess not.” I’d seen some women and girls around the apartment complex early in the last couple of evenings, but mostly they were either really young like Jasmine, or really old like Mom. I’d seen one girl about Jared’s age who lived upstairs, but I remember thinking, when I was a boy, that she was just okay, not really pretty.
“So let’s find out,” he said. “In the spirit of scientific experimentation.” He opened the door to his apartment and let me in.
“Jamie?” Bobby’s mom asked. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Apparently I turn into a girl after dark these days.”
“Bobby told me, but I could hardly believe it.”
“We’ll be in my room,” Bobby said.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Bobby’s stepdad said, and Bobby’s mom swatted him on the arm.
I followed Bobby into his bedroom and he shut the door. Then he lifted up the edge of his mattress and got out some magazines I recognized but hadn’t seen in a while.
“Oh,” I said, feeling a vague disgust. “I guess that will tell us something.”
“Take a look,” Bobby said, and proceeded to read — well, look — over my shoulder as I did so.
I wasn’t turned on by those pictures of naked women. I felt disgusted at the way they were posed, and the looks on their faces, and I felt sad for them.
“What do you think?” Bobby asked after I’d flipped through a few pages.
“I guess I’m not attracted to girls either,” I said.
“Are you sure you’re not attracted to guys?” he asked. “Flip ahead a few pages, there’s one of a guy and girl together.”
I flipped through till I got to the page he’d mentioned. If anything, I was even more disgusted at the naked guy, even though his penis wasn’t showing.
“No,” I said firmly, shutting the magazine and handing it back to him. “Do not want.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “I was doing some reading about kids like you, and some of them got kind of obsessed with sex, and some changed their orientation or got a new fetish, but none of them lost interest in it entirely.”
“I guess we’re all special snowflakes.”
“Apparently.”
The next time sunrise abruptly changed into sunset, I found myself in the parking lot of our church. Jared was with me; I was wearing the usual T-shirt and sweats with no underwear. We didn’t always go to church on Sunday nights, but apparently Mom thought I should go to church and not just my daytime self.
“Come on,” he said, “Mom said to come back inside as soon as you’re finished changing. Oh, and you’re supposed to go in the restroom and put this on.” He handed me a grocery bag; I opened it and saw panties and a bra.
Mom and Jasmine were sitting in the back pew, which wasn’t our usual place, probably so daytime-me could slip out at sunset and I could come back in without disrupting the service too much. Jared and I came in in the middle of the last hymn before the sermon.
After the service, several people wanted to talk with us.
“Is this Jamie?” Mrs. Walton said. “My, you look nice.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“So you turn into a girl at night and a boy during the day?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, at sunset and sunrise.”
“That must feel very strange.”
“It felt strange at first, but I’m getting used to it.”
Some kids in the youth group had come over while we were talking, and I said hi to them after Mrs. Walton walked off to talk to someone else. “You’re Jamie?” asked Colin, a guy a year older than me.
“Yeah. I know it’s weird, but — there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I guess so. Why didn’t you tell us about it this morning?”
He hadn’t told them about me? What a surprise. “I don’t know, but I can guess... he probably didn’t want you to know he turns into a girl at night. I imagine it’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Wait a minute, who’s ‘he’?” Janice asked.
“My daytime self, the boy version of me. We share memories up until we transformed early Tuesday morning, but since then, I don’t remember anything that happened to him and he apparently doesn’t remember what happens to me.”
“Weird!”
“Tell me about it.”
“So your superpower is to turn into a girl and back again?” Pete asked. “And you can’t even control when it happens? That kind of sucks.”
“Yeah, but if you haven’t noticed, in the real world most superpowers are kind of sucky. Caz Lipton’s an exception, and even he can’t keep his force-field up long enough to battle a supervillain.”
“There aren’t any supervillains,” Colin pointed out.
“Give it time,” I said. “I expect you’ll see some in a few years.”
We found out later — it was hushed up at the time — that Caz Lipton snuck out one night to fight crime with his awesome new superpower. He nearly got killed when his force-field gave out at a critical moment, but the police rescued him from the gangsters he’d been tangling with, and took him to the hospital. When he got well enough to go home, his parents grounded him for months. The police took a similarly dim view of other transformed kids using their new superpowers (which weren’t called “tricks” yet) to fight crime, still less to commit crimes, and almost none of them got away with it for long. But more about that later.
Daytime-Jamie went back to school Monday. I was hoping he’d leave me a note to tell me how it went, but no such luck. I found out a little from Bobby, though, who wasn’t with me when I transformed, but came over later, after he finished the day’s homework and ate supper.
“Did your other self finish his homework?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He might not have had time to do it all before the sun set. You should finish it for him if you can.”
“Huh. I guess maybe so.” I went in to mine and Jared’s bedroom and looked through the papers on our desk; sure enough, there was a note in big letters on top, saying:
“Got to go watch the sun set. Night-Jamie, can you finish this please?”
“I didn’t see this until now,” I said; “I helped Mom fix supper and then played Nocturne for a while.”
“I’ll help you with it if necessary.”
So we worked on my other self’s homework until we finished it. Bobby answered my questions about the bits I didn’t get because I hadn’t attended that day’s classes.
When we were finished, he said: “Your daytime-self is still interested in girls.”
“Not surprised,” I said. “He didn’t change as much as I did.”
“In fact, he asked Rachel Timson out, and she said yes. But I don’t know how he’s planning to take her on a date when he turns into you at sunset.”
“We’re not allowed to date until we’re fourteen, anyway. What was he thinking?” I vaguely remembered thinking that Rachel Timson was hot, but I hadn’t had the courage to go up and talk to her. Maybe my other self had more courage because of a personality change, or maybe he just felt more confident because of his new body.
“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s told anyone at school that he turns into you at night; he asked me not to tell anybody, and I didn’t.”
“That skink! He didn’t want to tell anybody at church, either. I think he’s ashamed of me.”
After Bobby went home, and everyone else went to bed, I spent the next couple of hours reading ahead in the textbooks before I allowed myself to play any more games. I wanted to go outside and walk around, but I knew Mom wouldn’t approve, and I was a little scared too; she’d pointed out that I was more vulnerable as a girl, though I was taller and might have been a little stronger than before. Even going out to the playground just before dawn wasn’t the safest thing to do, but when dawn approached I could no longer think rationally about the risk of rape; it was all I could do to change into looser clothes before I went out.
My daytime self didn’t have as much homework the next night, but as if to make up for that, he left almost all of it for me to do. I did it, not needing as much help from Bobby after I’d read ahead in the textbooks, but I left him an angrily worded note:
“I’m not doing all your homework for you again. You need to do as much as you can before sunset.”
Once I got the homework done, half an hour after supper, Jared and I played Roar and Rampage for a while. But just before Jared’s bedtime, the screen suddenly went blurry. Jared swore, and Mom chewed him out for it. I felt like swearing too, although I knew it was a miracle that our game system had lasted this long. It had been used, and several years old, when Mom gave it to us for Christmas the year I was nine. You couldn’t get new games for it anymore, not that we could have afforded anything but used games anyway — it had been months since we bought a used game, but since Bobby had the same kind of system we could trade. Now it was kaput, and who knew how long it would be before an affordable one turned up at the Goodwill again.
I watched a movie after Jared and Mom went to bed. Later, I slipped quietly into mine and Jared’s bedroom, got the tablet off the desk, and went back to the living room. I read ahead in the textbooks some more, but got bogged down by a boring passage in the algebra book, and thought about what else I could do. I wanted to go out for a walk, but I was still too scared by what Mom had said to go out at this time of night. Then something reminded me of what Bobby had been saying a week ago about those Greek gods, Apollo and Artemis. One was a sun god and the other a moon god, right? What else did he say about them? I looked them up on the Internet and read for a while. It was sort of interesting, definitely more so than the algebra textbook.
Then I noticed something. Artemis was a virgin and planned to stay that way; I didn’t have any interest in sex, with anybody. Apollo was a ladies' man; if my daytime-self wasn’t that, he was at least more confident with girls than I’d been before. Had I been influenced in my change by what Bobby was rambling on about in his sleep-deprived delirium?
Could I turn guys into deer by looking at them funny?
No such luck, probably. I’d never heard of anybody with a superpower that awesome, and probably my only power was turning into a boy and never seeing the sun except when it was rising. I looked up one of the sites that was documenting kids' changes (mostly anonymously) and looked around; it seemed like a few kids had two different superpowers, and one might have had three, but somebody argued that they were different manifestations of the same basic power. So I could have another power I hadn’t discovered yet, and it might be less sucky. That cheered me up. I noticed that a lot of kids seemed to have been influenced in their change by what they were doing when it happened; one guy who’d turned into a girl (I wasn’t the only one, apparently; there were at least a dozen others documented on this site and probably more) had been dressing up as a cheerleader for Halloween, and some of the kids who’d gotten taller and stronger had been playing a sport or exercising when they changed. So yeah, it was plausible that Bobby’s talk about Apollo and Artemis had influenced the way I changed. And I’d been staying up for twenty-four hours when it happened; that could be why I didn’t sleep anymore.
I created an account on the site — I used the handle “Artemis” — and posted about my change: several details about my age, and what my day and night selves looked like, and how we switched back and forth at sunrise and sunset, but no names or places. Then I realized I was still using the same email and social media accounts as my daytime-self. That was probably okay for now; he didn’t have any friends that I wasn’t friends with too. But that would change over time, as he went to school and I didn’t, and I hung out more with people online because I was shut up in the apartment all night.
I went to kidmail.com and created a new account under the name “Artemis Sullivan”. (In those days most email services wouldn’t provide email to people under eighteen, because of legal liability; Kidmail was about the only one that would let kids get email accounts, and they monitored the hell out of their traffic, reading all the messages with certain keywords flagged and randomly reading a sample of others to watch for adult predators corresponding with kids.) Then I went to my social media services and created new accounts under “Artemis” or “Artemis Sullivan”, and made one last post to my old “Jamie Sullivan” accounts telling people about my change and about my new Artemis accounts. I took a selfie with the tablet and posted it as a profile picture on the systems that used them.
Then, instead of writing out a note by hand and holding it while I transformed, I sent a long email from my Artemis email account to my old Jamie email address, telling him what I’d decided. Then I went out and sat in the swing, watching the sun rise, holding a little slip of paper that just said “Check your email.”
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Comments
this continues to be very interesting
glad the two sides are mostly cooperating, especially with the memory loss being a real temptation.
Night and Day
This is an interesting twist of the Twisted universe. I really like it. I hope Artemis has a good trick to compensate her for such an odd life.
Thanks and kudos (number 6).
- Terry
Great beginning
I am so enjoying the start of this new story line. Well written and interesting start. Please keep it coming.