This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's set a generation earlier than his Twisted stories.
We’d been awake almost twenty-four hours, and we were delirious with sleepiness. A few minutes earlier I’d been about to turn in, and Bobby had said: “We’ve stayed up this long, why don’t we go out and watch the sun rise?”
part 1 of 12
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's set a generation earlier than his Twisted stories. 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.
We’d been awake almost twenty-four hours, and we were delirious with sleepiness. A few minutes earlier I’d been about to turn in, and Bobby had said: “We’ve stayed up this long, why don’t we go out and watch the sun rise?”
“I don’t know, man. I’m about to drop.”
“Come on, man, it’ll be awesome. I dare you.”
“Sure, let’s go.”
I don’t think that was what Mom had in mind when she said we could stay up as late as we wanted. It was Monday of Spring break; we didn’t have school or church or anything the next day. Mom would have the day off, so she could watch my little sister, and it would be okay if Bobby and I slept late. Bobby lived in the same apartment building, and we were both in the seventh grade at the same school; his parents had let him come to my apartment for a sleepover, but so far we hadn’t slept any, daring each other to stay up later and later until sleep deprivation made us as high as a couple of kites.
So we walked out the front door, careful to close it softly behind us, down the stairs to the parking lot and around the building to the playground, where we’d have a better view of the sunrise. We looked around; the eastern sky was a lot less dark than the rest of it.
“Look,” Bobby said, “the moon’s setting too. I forgot it was the full moon.”
Over in the west the moon was just a little above the horizon; one of the taller buildings in that direction was jutting into its disc. After a few moments looking at the moon, we turned back toward the glowing eastern horizon.
“And wow, I just remembered it’s the spring equinox. The day and night are exactly the same length and it’s the full moon, that’s why the moon is setting exactly when the sun is rising...” Bobby was smarter than me, and read a lot; he knew a lot of stuff they didn’t teach us in school. Maybe they taught those things at our grade level in some schools, but not in school districts like ours where the teachers felt lucky if they managed to keep their students from killing each other.
“What a great night to stay up all night,” I said. “Hey, we should stay up all day today, too, if the date’s that important. Why waste any of it sleeping?”
“You’re on!” Bobby said. “Day and night, chasing each other’s tails through eternity, and us along for the ride... Apollo and Artemis, the bright and dark, the yang and yin...”
“What’s that?”
So he started talking about the Greek gods Apollo and Artemis, twin brother and sister, the gods of the sun and moon, daytime and night. “Apollo was like the best musician in the world, he played the lute like nobody’s business. A lute was like an old-time harp or guitar or something. All the girls fell for him, and he got plenty of tail. Well, not all of them, there was Daphne who ran away from him, and he chased her, and she turned into a laurel tree to keep from having to have sex with him. Artemis was the complete opposite, she was a virgin and wanted to stay that way. She’d go hunting all night with other virgin ladies, and when a guy who was out hunting spied on them, bam! She turned him into a deer and his own dogs jumped him and tore him to pieces...”
I watched the sky turn red as Bobby rambled on deliriously about all the Greek mythology he’d been reading. Now and then I’d glance back at the moon, which was almost completely obscured by tall buildings. The sun finally peeked its head over the horizon just as Bobby started saying: “Hail, Apollo, lord of the day!” and, turning, “Farewell, Artemis, lady of the night!...” But I barely heard him; I’d started feeling weird, first a bit queasy like I might throw up, and then tingling, like I’d shocked myself on an exposed wire. The electric feeling got worse and more intense, and I actually saw sparks flying off my body. Bobby saw and looked horrified.
By the time I lost consciousness, I knew what was happening. Or rather, I knew that almost anything could happen next.
Fourteen years before this, the Antarctic Flu raged through North America like a wildfire, killing millions of people and almost killing millions more. My mom barely survived it; if she’d been just a little bit sicker, my older brothers would be orphans and my sister and I wouldn’t exist. But she recovered after knocking on Death’s door for a while, then running away just before he dragged himself out of bed to go to the door and see who was knocking at that hour. He was probably tired all the time that year, poor guy; he needed his sleep.
But I digress. Two years before I underwent spontaneous electrocution in the playground of my apartment complex, an eleven-year-old kid named Caz Lipton had the same sort of thing happen to him. He felt like he was being electrocuted, sparks shot off of his body, and he fell unconscious. While he was unconscious, his body transformed; he got six inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, most of it muscle. He’d been an enthusiastic but unskilled athlete before that, playing Little League soccer but almost never scoring a goal; after that, he played with kids several years older and he was an unstoppable force. And he wasn’t just taller, stronger, and better coordinated; he figured out a few months later that he could create an almost impenetrable force-field around his body for a few minutes at a time. Nobody could explain where the extra mass came from when he transformed, or why he transformed at all, or how the force-field worked.
A handful of other kids, about the same age as Caz, went through something similar in the next few months. Not all of them transformed the same way, and some didn’t transform physically at all, but had weird personality changes. Some of them had some kind of superpower like Caz’s force-field, though most were lame superpowers like you’d see in the comic relief characters in a superhero team movie. There was a girl who could make her nose glow red, for instance; I’m sure the kids at her school called her Rudolph, poor kid.
The next year, there were over a hundred kids transforming in some way, and still nobody knew why. But the scientists scratching their heads over it had figured out one pattern: all the kids had at least one parent who’d survived the Antarctic Flu. Only a small fraction of the kids whose parents had survived the Flu were transforming, at least so far, but 100% of the ones transforming had a parent who’d had the Flu.
And I’d heard on the news, a few nights before this happened to me, that almost a thousand kids had transformed so far this year. And now it was happening to me — whatever was going to happen.
I could become super-athletic, like Caz Lipton. I could get ridiculously fat, or even skinnier than I was already; I could get fur and claws like one poor kid who’d been on the news a few days ago, or maybe even turn into a girl. But what really scared me the most was the idea of my personality changing. Maybe my tastes would change just a little, so I’d like mythology like Bobby, or working on mechanical stuff like my older brother Jason. But I might become a completely different person. I had just time to pray: “Please, no,” before I passed out.
When I regained consciousness, I felt strange and disoriented for a moment before I remembered what had happened. I’d felt like I was being electrocuted, and sparks started shooting off me. I must have transformed in some way, and I looked down at my body before I consciously took in much of my surroundings.
I had breasts. I started to reach for my crotch, but stopped suddenly, not wanting Bobby to see me groping myself... but when I looked around, he wasn’t there.
I was still in the playground, and oddly enough, still standing up straight; I hadn’t fallen down when I lost consciousness. But Bobby was gone, and Mom was there; my little sister Jasmine was over on the swing set. Mom was pushing her, and their backs were turned to me.
Where did Bobby go, and how did they get here?
And where did these clothes come from? They weren’t the ones I was wearing before. They hung loose on me except in the chest, where my breasts pushed out against them, the nipples poking through the fabric. When kids transformed in a major way, all their clothes were burned off... Mom must have put some new clothes on me while I was out.
Then I noticed another weird thing. The sky was red in the direction I was facing, but the sun wasn’t above the horizon. And — looking around at the orientation of the playground equipment, and the buildings on the skyline — I was facing west, not east. That was the sunset I was looking at.
Twelve hours had passed. At least.
Just then Mom turned around, saw me, and gasped in shock. I won’t repeat what she said, it’s not something a good churchgoing lady should say. But after she’d gotten that out of her system, she said: “Jamie! What happened?”
“It looks like I transformed,” I said. “But... didn’t you put these clothes on me after my old ones burned off? And why didn’t you bring me inside?”
“What are you talking about? It looks like you’re a girl...!”
“Um, yeah, I kind of noticed that. But if I’ve been out for twelve hours why didn’t you notice before?”
“Twelve hours? You weren’t — wait.” She’d stopped pushing Jasmine, and when Jasmine heard us talking, she jumped off the swing and turned around.
“Oh my gosh! Is that you, Jamie?”
This was really weird in ways that had nothing to do with the weirdness other transformed kids had gone through, stuff I’d read and heard about.
“Language, Jasmine,” Mom admonished her, completely forgetting the much stronger language she’d just been using. “Let’s get you inside and have a look at you,” she said, turning back to me.
“Fine with me; I just want to know why you didn’t bring me inside earlier.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, you left me in the same place I passed out all day! What’s up with that, Mom?”
“You mean...” She looked at me strangely. “Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“You woke up about nine-thirty. I got Jared to help me carry you into the apartment and put you to bed, after Bobby woke me up and told me what had happened. You were... different, but not that different. Not a girl. When did this happen?”
“Um — I don’t know, it felt like I just woke up. You mean I’ve been awake all day but I just forgot everything that happened since this morning?”
“It looks that way.”
We walked around to the other side of the building and up the stairs to our apartment. The pants I was wearing were tight in the hips, but loose everywhere else; the shoes fit pretty well, though. I wondered why I wasn’t freaking out about being a girl; just before I’d passed out, I was thinking of it as one of the worst things that could happen, almost as bad as getting a total personality change.
Maybe I had had a personality change. How could I tell? That could be why I wasn’t so freaked out about being a girl. Not that it felt normal, exactly, it just wasn’t as worrying as the idea of losing a big chunk of my memory.
Oh God, what if it happened again? Jared and I had watched an old movie from around the turn of the century where a guy kept forgetting things, pretty much everything that happened since he had a head injury. He couldn’t form new memories, so he kept being surprised by his surroundings whenever he got distracted, remembering nothing since the day of his accident. What if I kept forgetting everything that had happened since my transformation, kept waking up and being surprised by my body and my surroundings every time it happened?
Mom opened the door and we found my brother Jared watching a movie. He glanced up and said “'Sup?”, then did a double-take and said: “Who’s that?”
“I’m Jamie.”
“What happened?”
“He transformed again,” Mom said. “At least his clothes didn’t burn off this time, and he didn’t lose consciousness.”
“Never heard of that happening, but all these changes are pretty weird,” Jared said, still staring at me — at my breasts, actually. “First time for everything, I guess.”
Mom sent Jasmine to her room, and took me into her bedroom, where she had me undress and measured me all over — height, waist, hips, breast size, and so forth. Not surprisingly, I was as female in the crotch as I was in the chest. “I’m going to have to take you shopping tomorrow after work,” she said. “My bras would be too big on you.”
“I think I need a doctor,” I said. “I mean, it’s not normal — even for kids who transform like this — to lose memories like that.”
She sighed. “I don’t know if we can afford that. Let’s do some research on the Internet and see if we can find out about any other kids who lost memories after they transformed. If not... we’d better do it. We’ll get you into something that fits a little better and take you to the emergency room.”
So she gave me some of her underwear, which was a little loose on me, and had me put on one of her blouses over one of Jared’s T-shirts, and put back on the pair of Jared’s old pants I’d been wearing before. I was wearing new (well, used but not too worn) shoes — she told me, on the bus ride to the hospital, that she’d taken me out to the Goodwill to buy shoes after I transformed the first time and destroyed my old ones. And she showed me a photo on her phone of the way I’d looked that morning.
I was taller as a girl than I’d been before the sparking, but apparently before I changed the second time, I’d been taller still, almost as tall as Jared. And I’d had blonde hair, and would have been a chick magnet if it weren’t for the hand-me-down clothes.
Now I had black hair, and a lot darker complexion though I was still Caucasian. Mom said my breasts were almost a B cup, which was pretty big for someone who’d just turned thirteen; she thought I looked more like fourteen or fifteen.
We couldn’t find anything on the Internet about transformed kids who lost memories, so we left a few minutes later and waited for the bus that would go by the hospital.
When we got to the emergency room, we had to wait for quite a while since I wasn’t bleeding or unconscious. Mom hadn’t brought me to the emergency room this morning, she said. “I’ve heard on the news that most kids who go through this end up healthier than before, and I’ve never heard of one not waking up pretty soon after they transform. So I figured you were probably okay, and then you seemed to be fine, or better than fine, after you woke up. But now...” She shook her head.
“How long did I sleep?”
“You woke up about nine-thirty —”
“No, I mean later, after I woke up from being knocked out. Didn’t I take a nap later?” I didn’t feel at all sleepy anymore, and two hours wasn’t enough sleep after being awake for twenty-four.
“No — you’ve been awake since then. Huh. That’s right, Bobby said you two had stayed up all night to watch the sun rise.”
“So maybe I don’t sleep any more, and that’s messing up my memories. I mean, Ms. Stratemeyer” (my science teacher) “said that if you stay awake for several days in a row you start going crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s normal to lose a big chunk of memory after being awake only... let’s see... about thirty-six hours, minus a couple of hours asleep. Or knocked out.”
It was about half an hour before a nurse called me to get my vital signs checked, but then we went back to the waiting room for almost three hours before a doctor could see us.
“I see here it says your son transformed into a girl,” he said severely. “I know it’s shocking, probably traumatic, but please, it’s not an emergency. Hundreds of children have changed in various ways; few of them have been in worse health afterward, even if their new bodies were very different, and none of them had acute medical problems. You should take her to your primary care doctor during business hours tomorrow.”
“That’s not all,” I said. “I also forgot everything that happened for about twelve hours after I transformed the first time.”
“After you — wait, the first time?”
“He changed twice,” Mom said. “Once the usual way, with electric sparks shooting off and all, and his clothes burning up. But he didn’t turn into a girl then; he got taller and more muscular, and his hair turned blonde. Then twelve hours later — nobody was watching when it happened, like before, but I turned my back on him for a few minutes and when I turned around he’d changed into a girl. And the clothes he was wearing were fine, not even any little holes burned in them.”
The doctor scratched his head. “That’s a new one.”
“And after I turned into a girl, I couldn’t remember anything since I started feeling the electric shock. Before the first transformation.”
“That’s different. Could it be perhaps that you fell and hit your head when you lost consciousness during the first transformation?”
Mom and I glanced at each other. “Bobby didn’t say anything about that,” Mom said. “We could call and ask him, but it’s the middle of the night, he and his parents are probably in bed.”
“This Bobby was the only witness of the first transformation?”
“Right,” I said. “He’s my friend; we were hanging out and suddenly I felt that electric shock and passed out. Next thing I know, twelve hours have passed and I’m a girl.”
“Well... I’ll order a brain scan to see if anything’s wrong. Hmm, might as well make it a full-body scan to see if you have the internal organs of a girl as well...”
That made me feel queasy. He gave us some paperwork and sent us off, with a nurse’s aide escorting us, to another part of the hospital, where they had me change into a hospital gown and then lie perfectly still under a big machine of some kind for several minutes. We went back to the emergency room lobby and waited for almost another hour before the doctor called us back again.
“I can’t see anything abnormal on the scan,” he said, “nothing that would account for the loss of memories. There’s no sign of any brain injury. And you’re a normal, healthy teenage girl, as far as the scan shows... I hesitate to make predictions when we’re dealing with a phenomenon we hardly understand, but I’d guess that you’ll start your first period in a bit under a month.”
“Oh no!”
“Anything’s possible, of course, when we’re dealing with this kind of thing — but you ought to prepare yourself by buying pads or tampons. Ma’am, you should probably give her the talk, and take her to see a gynecologist. As for this second transformation...” He was quiet a few moments, and said: “Have your primary care doctor refer her to a neurologist if this memory loss keeps happening. If she transforms again without memory loss, though... there are probably researchers who would like to interview and examine her, if you’re willing. The stipend differs from one research program to another, but a hundred dollars per clinic visit is typical.”
Mom’s eyes and mine got wide. A hundred dollars would go a long way. But it wouldn’t be worth it if I lost my memories every time I transformed. Fifty years from now I might wake up as an old man or woman, puzzled at why I’m not still thirteen, surprised that I’m in a nursing home instead of the playground.
When we got back to the apartment, it was almost three in the morning. Mom crashed right away, but I still didn’t feel sleepy. I went to the living room and watched a movie with the sound turned down. After it was over, I got worried about suffering sleep deprivation, even though I didn’t feel at all like I had the morning before when I’d been awake for twenty-four hours. I was about to go lie down on my bed, but I remembered that Jared was sleeping in our shared bedroom, and I was a girl now. Probably Mom would say we should move my bed into Jasmine’s room. But for now, I just laid down on the sofa and closed my eyes.
An hour later I got up without having slept a wink, turned on the TV again, and watched another movie. But halfway through I got restless, and wanted to go outside. I unbolted the door, went out and quietly closed and locked it behind me. It was still dark, but the sky was brightening a little in the east. I walked around to the playground so I could see the sun rise.
And the moment it poked its head over the horizon, I was suddenly several yards away, wearing different clothes, facing the other direction, and watching the sun set. Bobby was staring at me in fascination.
“Let me guess,” I said, “I just lost another twelve hours.”
“Dude!” he said, “you’re a girl!”
“Yeah, I kind of noticed.”
“I mean, Jared told me how you turned into a girl yesterday evening after I went home and crashed, and your mom took you to the emergency room because you couldn’t remember anything. And then when they woke up this morning you were a guy again but couldn’t remember being a girl. Do you remember being a guy all day today?”
“No; last thing I remember, I came out here to watch the sun rise.”
“Oh wow... a few minutes ago we were hanging out and playing Roar and Rampage when you said you wanted to go out and watch the sun set.”
“Hmm. I bet this change and loss of memories is caused by watching the sun rise or set. Tomorrow morning I’m going to stay indoors and keep the curtains closed.”
He looked thoughtful, and said: “But then you won’t change back into a guy! Why not watch the sun rise tomorrow, then stay inside during sunset?”
“Because I don’t want to lose my memories again.”
“Huh. That makes sense, I guess. But I think it would be worth losing a few hours of memories to not get stuck as a girl.”
We stood there staring at each other for a few moments, and then I said: “Want to go for a walk?”
“Sure.”
We walked a long way down the street our apartment complex is on, as far as the convenience store, and then back again after looking at the magazines but not buying anything. Bobby’s mom had called my mom in the interim and asked for him to come home to dinner, so he left as soon as we got back. I changed into slightly better-fitting clothes and then ate supper with Mom, Jared and Jasmine; Jason had called and said he had to work late, but he’d come by later. (He’d moved out and gotten his own place a year earlier; he was seven years older than me and four years older than Jared.)
“You should have come here right away after you changed into a girl,” Mom said, after I told her what had happened and that I didn’t remember anything since sunrise, “not gone for a walk with Bobby.”
“Sorry. Normally you don’t mind me walking around if I’m with Jared or Bobby or somebody...”
“You’re a girl now,” she said. “At least at the moment. You’re more of a target, more vulnerable. And you should have told me what happened right away; we need to figure this thing out.”
“Sounds like it’s triggered by watching the sun rise or set,” Jared said. “And I’ll bet changing back and forth from girl to boy is your superpower.”
“That’s what I figured. I’m going to stay in and keep the curtains closed tomorrow morning and see if it doesn’t happen.”
“I was going to take you shopping today,” Mom said, “but I’m pretty tired, and the stores won’t be open much longer. If you stay a girl by not watching the sun rise tomorrow morning, we can leave as soon as I get home from work tomorrow.”
After supper Jasmine came over and hugged me. “I’m glad you’re my sister now,” she said, “even if you turn into a boy again tomorrow.”
I tousled her hair. “It’s kind of weird, but I don’t mind being your sister either.”
Jason came over an hour later.
“Whoa,” he said, looking at me, “Mom told me you’d turned into a girl, and then back into a guy... I guess you changed again?”
“Yeah, at sunrise. No, I mean sunset.”
Mom and I explained what had happened, and Jared pitched in with his theories about it. Jason shook his head. “I’ve heard some on the news about these kids that change suddenly, but I’ve never heard of it happening more than once to the same person.”
“I don’t think it is, not the same way exactly. The later changes haven’t felt weird or electrical; it’s just suddenly twelve hours later. And my clothes don’t burn off, either.”
“This morning you were complaining about waking up wearing girl’s underwear and a blouse,” Jared said with a smirk.
“If I can’t stop from changing into a guy again, he’s going to be complaining about wearing a bra too,” I said. That was the first time I called my daytime self “he,” like he was a separate person — which he was.
“I’m taking her shopping after work tomorrow,” Mom explained. “She can’t go around in Jared’s hand-me-downs, and my clothes are all too big on her.”
“Let me know if you need me to help out,” Jason said. He earned decent money as a mechanic, and now and then he helped us out with the rent or something when Mom had to miss work because of being sick. I suspected he was making money on the side in less legal ways, but we didn’t talk about it.
“Actually,” Mom said, “can you and Jared move Jamie’s bed into Jasmine’s room?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “I don’t think I need to sleep anymore. Did the daytime-me sleep any?”
“Not that I know of,” Mom said, “but I was at work most of that time.” She looked at Jared, who said: “Not when I was around.”
“I didn’t sleep any last night, and never felt sleepy,” I added. “Maybe we can get rid of my bed and free up some room.”
Mom looked thoughtful. “Well... let’s not get rid of it until we’re sure you never sleep. Maybe you can just get by on a lot less sleep, like an hour or two every few days... Wasn’t there a kid like that on the news a while ago?”
Jason shrugged. I said: “I’ll try to look it up on the Internet.”
So we didn’t move my bed that night. Jasmine was sent to bed as soon as she’d had a hug from Jason, and another one from me, and an hour later Jason left and Mom went to bed. Jared and I played Roar and Rampage in two-player mode until he got sleepy and went to bed. Then I got out the tablet Jared and I shared and started looking up stuff about people like me.
You’re probably wondering why nobody in this story has used the word “Twisted” yet, why we were talking about “superpowers” instead of “tricks.” That’s because when this phenomenon was new, nobody agreed on what to call it yet. Some people were calling us the “Transformed,” some the “Changed” or “Altered,” some “Supers” (at least those of us with powers), and a few — in those days it was only conservative talk show hosts — were already calling us “Twisted.” It was a dark night when that stupid pejorative caught on as the standard term for us. I still don’t like it, and sometimes refuse to use it, though I know it’s a lost cause.
I spent most of the night reading about other kids like me. More or less like me; no two were exactly alike, and I couldn’t find anyone else who’d transformed more than once, or anyone who routinely went more than twenty-four hours without sleep, though there was one kid who only slept one or two hours a night since his transformation.
Just before dawn, I started feeling a hankering to go out and watch the sun rise, but I resisted it. A lot of the kids I’d read about had some sort of compulsion since their transformation, and it looked like I had one too. It got harder and harder to stay indoors, and after a while I thought: “Maybe if I just open the blinds a little...” but suppressed that thought. I went into the bathroom, which had no windows, and took a shower.
I’d barely started exploring my new body when I lost another twelve hours.
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“No,” I said firmly, shutting the magazine and handing it back to him. “Do not want.”
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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“He said you’ve changed your name to Artemis? Why? Jamie works fine for a girl as well as a boy.”
Better for a girl than a boy, I thought, remembering some of the teasing I’d had to put up with. No sense bringing that up now, though.
part 3 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 was standing near the merry-go-round watching Jasmine spin on it; Mom was sitting on a bench a few yards away.
“He said to check your email,” Mom said. “And we need to talk about this name business.”
“Sure,” I said. But Jasmine said:
“Keep spinning me!” I couldn’t resist, and neither could Mom; we stayed out there playing with Jasmine for another half hour before we went in and ate supper.
“Can I use the tablet to check my email?” I asked Jared, who was reading from it when we sat down to eat.
“I’m doing some reading for my term paper,” he said. “You can use it after I go to bed.”
“Okay.”
“The daytime Jamie told me some of what you said to him in your note,” Mom said. “He said you’ve changed your name to Artemis? Why? Jamie works fine for a girl as well as a boy.”
Better for a girl than a boy, I thought, remembering some of the teasing I’d had to put up with. No sense bringing that up now, though.
“It’s got to be confusing for you and Jared, though, and Bobby — somebody mentions Jamie and the other person doesn’t know which one of us you mean unless you say ‘boy Jamie’ or ‘night Jamie’ or something. And right now you can say ‘Jamie’s good at Knight of the Living Dead’ and it’s true of both of us, but in another year or two there won’t be many things you can say about both of us and have them be true.”
“Well... but Artemis is such a pagan name! And Apollo is maybe even worse.”
“Isn’t there a guy named Apollo in the Bible, too?”
She looked thoughtful. “Yes — or something like it. Apollos, I think. But the only Artemis in the Bible is the pagan goddess, when those worshipers of her made trouble for the apostle Paul in, what city was it? Ephesus or somewhere like that.”
I remembered something else I’d read last night. “What about Diana?”
“That’s much better.”
I smiled. If Mom didn’t know that Diana was the Roman name for Artemis, I wasn’t going to tell her. I could be Diana in real life and use Artemis as a screen name.
Jasmine wanted me to read her a bedtime story after supper; usually Mom did that. I looked through the tattered books on her little shelf. “What do you want me to read you?”
“Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” she said loudly, and giggled. So I read that to her, and she still didn’t look sleepy; she kept reciting bits of the book along with me. “What about another story?” I asked when I closed the book.
“I Belong in the Zoo?” she said, but I said:
“What about something new and different?”
“Yay!”
“Okay. So, a long time ago there was a lady named Diana.”
“Like you.”
“Yes, like me. She was a magician —”
“Like Maleficent?”
“No, she was good. Mostly. More like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz.” I wasn’t going to say she was a goddess, or I’d get in deep shit with Mom. “Or, you know, more like Bugs Bunny than either. Kind of a cross between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd,” (Jasmine giggled uncontrollably), “because she liked to play tricks on people like Bugs Bunny, and she liked to hunt like Elmer Fudd. Only not wabbits, but deer, wild boar, lions, bears, things like that.”
“Bang!” Jasmine shouted, and giggled.
“No, she used a bow and arrow, because this was a long time ago before guns were invented. She’d go hunting every night with her gal friends, who also liked to hunt.
“Then one night they’d been hunting a while and they got tired and sweaty, and they came to a place where a river made a wide pool, and they decided to take a bath. In those days people didn’t have bathtubs and showers, they just went swimming in a river or lake when they wanted to get clean.”
“Gross!”
“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Anyway, they took off their clothes and went swimming slash bathing, and they were having a good time laughing and talking about the deer they’d shot, when suddenly this guy named Siproites comes along and sees them.”
“Oh. Who was he?”
“Just some guy. I think maybe he was out hunting too? Anyway, Diana and her gal friends weren’t happy about a yucky boy seeing them with no clothes on. And Diana used her magic on him — what do you think she did?”
“Made him blind so he couldn’t see them?” Jasmine said after a few moments' thought.
“Wow, you’re a vindictive little squirt.” Though Artemis had done a lot worse than that to Actaeon. “No, what she did was she changed him into a girl —”
“Like you.”
“Yes, except it just happened to me, it wasn’t a tricksy magician doing it. So now that Siproites was a girl, it was okay for her to see other girls taking a bath. And she joined Diana’s hunters, and lived happily ever after.” The mythology site I’d been reading hadn’t said anything about what happened to Siproites after Artemis changed him into a girl, but I decided any story for Jasmine had to have a happy ending.
“That was nice,” she said, finally sounding a little sleepy. “I’m glad you’re my sister.”
“I’m glad you’re my sister too,” I said, kissing her goodnight.
After Jared went to bed, I checked my email, and found this from daytime-Jamie:
“Give me a break! I’m in school or riding the bus for most of my waking hours; let me have some fun when I get home before I have to let you take over. I’ll do some of the homework on the bus, but you need to do your share too.
“And what’s up with posting to social media about how I turn into you at night? You may not care about privacy anymore but I do. Stop it! I’ve changed the passwords on my accounts, since you decided to make your own.
“P.S. ‘Artemis’ is a good name, even if Mom doesn’t like it. I’m not sure if I want to go by ‘Apollo’, but I’ll think about it.”
I was mad, and I got up and paced back and forth for a while before I let myself answer it. I said:
“You can’t expect to keep my existence secret forever. I’m not going to hide in the apartment all the time, especially in the winter when the nights are longer. If you wanted control over how our friends found out about me, you should have told them yourself. They’re my friends too and I deserve to keep in contact with them even if we can’t go to school together.
“Mom’s probably already told you by now, but we compromised on ‘Diana’. I’m still going to use ‘Artemis’ as a screen name.”
I had no other personal emails, but there were several automatic notifications about new feedback on my social media accounts. I read them, and also the latest posts and comments on Jamie’s account. He had unfriended me (I’d friended both accounts from each other after I created the new one), but we were still almost the same person, and it only took me two tries to guess his new password. I didn’t do anything with it except read his recent posts and comments; hopefully if I didn’t abuse my access by posting anything, he wouldn’t notice.
He’d deleted my posts from last night, and claimed somebody had hacked his accounts; but a number of people must have seen them while they were there, judging from the posts and friends requests on my personal account. There were a couple of comments along the lines of “You turn into a girl? Lamest superpower EVAR” and similarly sophisticated bullshit, but others were more sympathetic, and one, from Aidan Turner, my closest friend other than Bobby, seemed to be really trying to grapple with what had happened to me. He asked questions about how we switched places, and whether we really remembered nothing of what happened to the other one. A few hours later, presumably after daytime-Jamie deleted my post and claimed he’d been hacked, Aidan posted to my account challenging me and asking me to prove I was really the night version of Jamie.
I re-read what I’d written the night before, and saw it wasn’t as clear as I’d wanted it to be; I replied publicly to Aidan’s questions, and added:
“If you want me to prove that I’m real, that daytime-Jamie turns into me at night, and I turn into him in the daytime, just ask the Jamie you see at school if you can come over and visit. He might say yes, but he’ll come up with some excuse for why you have to leave before sunset. Try to stay until sunset, or come over at or after sunset, and you’ll see.”
Then I read a little more of each textbook, and did the remainder of daytime-Jamie’s homework that he hadn’t done on the bus. I still had half the night before me, and no game system. I started to look through the list of free movies on the TV utility, but then I remembered what I’d been reading about before, and tried filtering the list of movies looking for the keywords “Artemis” and “mythology.” I found no movies about Artemis, but several about mythology, and watched Jason and the Argonauts, which was pretty fun.
Three more hours to go. I went back to the mythology site I’d visited the night before and read more, clicking on the links from the page about Artemis, and reading about Callisto, Zeus, Zeus’s other kids, the mortal women he and his sons seduced, their half-god kids, and so forth. I ran into a couple more myths about guys turning into girls or girls into guys; those Greeks were into some freaky shit. Tiresias, this guy who got turned into a girl for seven years because he messed with some snakes (seriously, what?), later on saw Athena bathing. Deja vu, right? She struck him blind, which made me wonder if I should give Jasmine the nickname “Athena” — no, Mom would blow her top. Maybe “Minerva,” but that probably wouldn’t fly either; it didn’t sound as normal as “Diana.” Too bad Tiresias didn’t happen upon Athena while he was a girl; talk about terrible timing...!
Finally I got up, changed into our loose changing-clothes, and went out to greet the dawn.
That evening I woke sitting on one of the benches in the playground. Jasmine was swinging by herself, but as soon as she saw I had changed, she jumped down, ran over and hugged me.
“I’m glad you’re back,” she said. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“The boy you was mad at me. He wouldn’t push me on the swing or anything.”
“Why, that —! Here, I’ll push you or spin you or whatever.”
“Thank you!” She hugged me again. “You’re the best sister.”
So we played for a while longer, until Mom sent Jared out to call us to supper. During supper, Mom said:
“I finally got around to calling the numbers on those flyers the emergency room doctor gave me. About people doing research into kids who change like you did...”
“Okay?”
“This may not concern you, since probably all the research will be in the daytime, but I’m taking you — the other you — Jamie, out of school Friday, the next day off I have, and taking him to the university hospital where some doctors want to examine him and ask us some questions. It will be at least a hundred dollars, more if they ask us to come back again.”
“Tell them for completeness they should interview me too,” I said. “With any luck we can get them to pay us twice, once for him and once for me.”
I thought briefly about telling Mom that Jamie was pretending I didn’t exist, but decided against it. I could handle this on my own.
Bobby came over after supper.
“Dude, daytime-Jamie was mad as hell about you posting on social media about changing back and forth. He kept telling everybody who asked him about it that his account had been hacked. I’d already promised I wouldn’t say anything, but... man. He’s being kind of a dick.”
“Yeah, he can’t keep me secret forever. It’ll get easier for a few months while the days are getting longer, but then they’ll get shorter, and watch out! By winter, I’ll be changing into him on the school bus.”
“I don’t think he can keep it secret that long, but I’m not going to break my word and tell anybody. I wish I hadn’t promised, though.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”
“What?”
I told him about my post to my Artemis Sullivan social media account last night. “Friends are going to start asking if they can come over, and he’ll make up lame excuses why they can’t, or why they have to leave before sunset. And sooner or later somebody’s going to come over around sunset and see us switch places.”
Bobby shook his head. “You two need to call off this feud. He can really make your life hell if you get him mad.”
“He’s already pretending I don’t exist and trying to cut me off from all my friends but you. How much worse can it get?”
After Bobby went home, and Jared finished his term paper research and went to bed, I checked my email and social media. There was a brief email from Jamie:
“Maybe you haven’t thought this through from my point of view. You’re safe at home all night, you never see anybody outside the family except Bobby. I’m the one who’s getting bullied at school because of rumors that I turn into a girl at night! I’m strong enough now to stand up to the bullies, at least one on one, but when they gang up on me, being taller than most kids my age isn’t enough. Cut me some slack here.”
I thought about that for a few minutes before I replied.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize how bad it was for you. But try to look at MY point of view too. I get turned into a girl, and I’m not allowed to go anywhere because Mom says it’s not safe around here for a girl at night, and she’s probably right. At least let me have some contact online with the friends I can’t see at school anymore.
“And don’t take it out on Jasmine! I don’t know what was going on between you two, but leave her out of this.”
I saw that a couple of people — acquaintances, not close friends — had unfriended me, probably because they believed Jamie when he said his account had been hacked and the person posting under “Artemis Sullivan” was a prankster. I sighed and decided to be patient; the truth would come out sooner or later.
I finished our homework, and watched another old mythology movie — Clash of the Titans, which wasn’t as good as Jason and the Argonauts. My daytime self would probably like it, as it had some naked ladies in it, but they didn’t do anything for me. But they weren’t disgusting like the women in weird poses in Bobby’s porn mags, either. Then I read about Greek mythology for a while longer, until I got too restless to sit still. It still wasn’t near dawn, but I wanted to go out. I was still a little scared to go out by myself as a girl, but somehow not as much as before. After pacing back and forth for a while, I decided I’d stick to busy, well-lit streets and wouldn’t stay out very long, in case Mom or Jared or Jasmine woke up in the middle of the night and saw I was gone.
I walked as far as the 24-hour convenience store, and read from a couple of magazines until the night clerk ran me off. Then I came straight home. None of the streetlights along that stretch were out, and nobody messed with me; I felt a lot more confident about going out again.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“Please don’t be mad at him. He’s embarrassed about changing into a girl and is afraid of how people will react. If you freak out, it will make him feel justified in keeping my existence secret, and I’m just as real as he is. Both of us remember being the original Jamie, but both of us have changed.”
part 4 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.
When I came to that evening, Jasmine was spinning on the merry-go-round with a little boy who lived in one of the apartments on the back side of the building. I couldn’t remember his name. His mom was sitting on the bench nearby, and the moment I came to, she gasped and jumped up.
“What happened?” she asked. I gave the merry-go-round another push and said:
“It’s this thing that happens to me, ever since I transformed a couple of weeks ago.”
“Oh — like those poor kids on the news...”
“Yeah.”
“So you turn into a girl sometimes? Or — is that how you are normally, and you sometimes turn into a boy?”
“I’m a boy in the daytime and a girl at night,” I said, giving the merry-go-round a push and then gesturing at where the sun had just disappeared. I didn’t explain about how we were two different people; it seemed like her mind was boggled enough with only part of the truth.
When it got a little darker the woman told her little boy they had to go home, and I started pulling a little on the merry-go-round to slow it down so he could get off.
“Spin me again?” Jasmine said hopefully, but I shook my head.
“It’s about time for supper.”
As we walked around the building to our apartment, I asked Jasmine: “Did you go with Mom and the boy-Jamie to the hospital today?” She nodded and said:
“It was kind of scary, but the people were nice. They said they weren’t going to do anything to me, just to Jamie, and they wouldn’t hurt him.”
We walked in; Mom had supper almost ready. When we sat down to eat I asked her how the visit to the research doctors had gone.
“Pretty well,” she said. “They couldn’t tell us much about why you two switch back and forth the way you do. But they said your brain scan was consistent with a rare kind of multiple personality disorder — I don’t know why that emergency room doctor couldn’t figure it out.”
“Probably he was just looking for brain injuries. Maybe only a psychologist can tell that from looking at a scan.”
“Probably. Anyway, they wanted — um, Jamie, to try to change into you. I don’t know if he was really trying hard or not, but he didn’t. So then Dr. Darrington said she wanted us to come in some day next week a little before sunset, and let them scan you while you change.”
It wouldn’t be fun for Jamie, being indoors lying under a scanner when he wanted to be outside watching the sun set, but another hundred dollars was nothing to sneeze at.
After reading Jasmine a couple of bedtime stories, I went over to Bobby’s apartment only to find he was still busy with homework. “But I’m almost done, and then I can hang with you for an hour or two before bed.” He didn’t have to go to bed as early on Friday nights.
So I sat in their living room, and made small talk with Bobby’s mom and stepdad during a commercial break in the show they were watching. “So how are you adjusting to being a girl at night?” his mom asked, and before I could gather my thoughts to answer, his stepdad said: “I bet you’re glad when morning comes and you turn back into a boy.”
“Not really,” I said, “since I don’t remember anything that happens to me when I’m a boy, and the boy version of me doesn’t remember what happens to the girl me.”
“What?”
“Bobby didn’t tell you? Yeah, this doctor said I have a split personality. Only I transform physically when my other personality gets control.”
Then Bobby came out of his bedroom and said he was done with homework, and I followed him back in there. We hung out for a while and talked, and played a couple of games, until his mom poked her head in and told us it was time for Bobby to go to bed and me to go home.
When I got back, Mom and Jared were just about to go to bed. I got the tablet from Jared before he went into our bedroom and closed the door, and checked my email.
Daytime Jamie had this to say:
“If you tell our friends about us having multiple personalities and transforming back and forth, they’re going to freak out, and maybe they won’t going to want to be friends with me anymore — much less you. I understand you’re jealous that I can see our friends and you can’t, but don’t try to destroy something just because you can’t have it.
“As for Jasmine, she was being bratty and not minding me when I was watching her yesterday afternoon. I wanted to take her inside and tell Mom, but I couldn’t make myself go inside when it was almost sunset. So I told her she was old enough to learn how to pump her legs and swing by herself. What did she tell you about me?”
I was so mad I could hardly think straight. I started writing an angry reply, but fortunately I thought better of it before I sent it, and deleted it unsent. I got up and went out for a walk, deciding to think for a while before I replied.
I walked up toward the 24-hour convenience store, like before. But when I got there, there were police cars with lights flashing in the lot. The place had just been robbed, probably, or was being robbed right now. I was curious, but I made myself turn around and go back. The police were probably too busy to bother with me, but if they weren’t, they’d be interested in what a girl my age was doing out so late... they might pick me up and take me home, and I’d never hear the end of it.
But I still hadn’t been able to collect my thoughts to say something calm and calming to Jamie, so I kept walking past our apartment complex and maybe half a mile or a mile in the other direction. I was thinking about Jamie’s vile email and not paying attention to my surroundings; I didn’t realize somebody was following me until one guy stepped past me and then right in front of me.
“Where are you going this time of night, little girl?”
“Leave me alone,” I said. I should have been terrified, but I was furious. How dare he? I glanced around and realized there was another guy standing behind me. There was too much traffic to get away by crossing the street, but I dodged to my right, into the parking lot in front of a pawn shop. Both guys came after me, I could tell from the sound of their footsteps. I headed left, as if to go around back of the pawn shop, but then doubled back toward the sidewalk.
The guy on the left grabbed at my arm. Just then the colors of everything went all wonky; there were little dark red spots on the pavement here and there, and the guys chasing me were a brighter red, but the streetlights and the sign above the pawn shop went pale blue. The guys yelled and the one holding me loosened his grip; I slipped free. The other one said: “What happened?” I didn’t stay to figure it out, I just ran onto the sidewalk and back up the street toward my apartment. The colors of everything stayed weird for a couple of minutes, then switched back to normal when I was still several minutes away from the apartment building. I glanced back from time to time, but the guys weren’t following me.
I got home without further incident, and locked the door behind me with relief. I had to think about that. And I felt sweaty from running. I went and took a shower, wondering why the colors had gone strange and what it had looked or felt like to the guys chasing me. Did I make them see weird colors too? I realized I’d just discovered another superpower. Did Jamie have the same power, or a different one, or was he limited to just turning into me at sunset? After a while I was able to stop worrying about it and relax, enjoying the hot water... and other things. Showering in the middle of the night, I didn’t have to worry about using up all the hot water and dooming Mom or Jared to a cold shower. — But I did have to worry about the water bill, I realized. I reluctantly turned off the water.
Once I dried off and got dressed (all except my hair; I couldn’t get that completely dry with just a towel, and I didn’t want to run the hair dryer in the middle of the night and wake people up), I went back to the tablet and wrote a reply to Jamie.
“I trust our friends to have our backs a lot more than you do, apparently. Maybe some kids at school are making fun of you for turning into me, but is Aidan? Or Tony? Or Ali? I’ll bet you none of them are. In fact, let’s make it a bet: tell any one of them about me, after getting them to promise to keep a secret, and if I’m right and they’re cool with it, you agree to tell all the others, if not everybody at school. Deal?
“I’m NOT jealous of you. Kind of pissed at how you’re telling people I don’t exist, but you know what: I like living at night. I wish I could have more contact with other people, but I like having the apartment to myself after everyone goes to bed. And I wouldn’t trade places with you;”
I paused, thinking about whether I wanted to tell him what I’d just discovered. No, that would be too embarrassing, and it might get my account flagged by the Kidmail admins. After a few moments I just said vaguely:
“being a girl is better than being a boy.”
I didn’t tell him about my new superpower either, because I’d have to tell him about sneaking out of the apartment and running into those guys, and I didn’t trust him not to tell Mom. Not the way he’d been acting lately.
Then I checked my social media accounts, and found a private message from Aidan.
“I did what you suggested: I asked Jamie if I could come over, and he said it might not suit, he’d have to ask his mom. His mom never objected to my coming over before. What about Saturday afternoon and evening, I asked. No, he said, he had family stuff going on, and Sunday he had to babysit his little sister because his mom had to work. Early Sunday afternoon might work but I’d have to go home by six. I might go over Sunday and see if I can worm anything out of his big brother or little sister about what happens at sunset.”
I laughed. I’d have to prime Jasmine to tell Aidan about me when he came over. I replied:
“When you come over, try to stay past sunset so you can see him change into me. Jared might help Jamie keep me a secret but I’m sure Jasmine’s on my side.
“If you have to leave by six, go hang out in the convenience store a couple of blocks west, and come back just before sunset to the playground behind our apartment building. Jamie’s going to be there watching the sun set. If he gets mad at you, or runs inside when he sees you, you’ll know he’s trying to hide his transformation into me. But yesterday he had a reason to go inside early and couldn’t, he had to stay and watch the sun set. So maybe he’ll stay and change right in front of you.
“Please don’t be mad at him. He’s embarrassed about changing into a girl and is afraid of how people will react. If you freak out, it will make him feel justified in keeping my existence secret, and I’m just as real as he is. Both of us remember being the original Jamie, but both of us have changed.”
I did half of our weekend homework, and left the rest for Jamie to do during the day Saturday and Sunday. After I finished that, I read some more about mythology for a while. Then I followed up a link from Andromeda, the girl Perseus rescued from the kraken in Clash of the Titans (really it wasn’t a kraken in the myth, just a random sea monster; krakens aren’t Greek) to the Andromeda galaxy, and then to a bunch of astronomy articles. A lot of it was over my head, but by being careful about what links I followed I managed to find some that I could understand. It almost made me wish I lived out in the country where you could see stars at night. Being an astronomer would be an ideal job for somebody like me, but I’d have to live somewhere you could see stars, that was also somewhere Jamie could do his daytime job. (An astronomer could probably earn enough to support two people, but no way was I letting him freeload on my salary.)
Who was I kidding? Even if I worked twice as hard, he’d probably end up with a better education, because he’d have live interaction with the teachers and other students and I wouldn’t. He’d probably be the one complaining about supporting me. And I remembered hearing somewhere that women got paid less than men.
After a while I got tired of reading about how stars form, and thought about something Mom had told us a while ago. She’d forbidden us to install games on the tablet; we were supposed to use only the game system for games. Of course you couldn’t get new games for it anymore, while there were a lot of new, free games for the tablet, but she said she wanted to be able to tell at a glance if we were doing homework or playing. But she couldn’t reasonably object to it now, when we didn’t have a working game system. I installed a couple of games, and played for a while; then, not wanting to get Jamie or Jared in trouble over it, I uninstalled them again just before I went out and watched the sun rise.
I was sitting, my face pressed against the window looking at the purple western sky. I looked around; I was near the back of a bus. The woman across the aisle from me was staring at me in shock; I was wearing Jamie’s normal boy clothes, not the loose clothes we normally tried to wear at sunrise and sunset, and I had a note in my hand:
“You’re on the #14 bus, on the way home. Sorry I didn’t get home earlier.”
Nothing about where he’d been or why, though. I looked out the window and soon saw stuff I recognized. I was home fifteen minutes later.
Mom scolded me when I walked in. “You said you’d be back by sunset — oh.”
“Yeah, it was Jamie who said he’d be back by sunset. He was on his way, anyway; I changed back on the bus.”
“Maybe the bus was late,” Mom said.
“Hey, um, Diana,” Jared said when he and Jasmine came in from the playground a couple of minutes later, “it’s your turn to watch Jasmine, from now until bedtime. And remember — no, wait. I’ll remind the daytime Jamie myself; he owes me one.”
“Yeah, it’s not my fault I was back so late. I didn’t even know we were going somewhere. Where did he go, anyway?”
“To visit a friend,” Mom said. “Elijah something — hmm — Timson, that was it.”
“Must be somebody he just met this week,” I said; “I don’t remember him.” I went and changed into more comfortable girl-clothes, and then we ate supper.
Jared went to his room after supper, leaving me to watch Jasmine while Mom watched a movie. I went to Jasmine’s room with her and we played with her toys and some of my old ones I’d handed down to her (an eclectic mix of fashion dolls, princesses, toy soldiers, dinosaurs and robots, all of which had already been old when Jason, Jared, me or Jasmine had received them). After about ten minutes, Mom called out: “Ja- — Diana, Bobby’s here.”
“Just a minute,” I said to Jasmine, and went to the living room.
“Hi,” he said. “I went to the playground at sunset but you weren’t there, and I came by and your mom said you weren’t home yet.”
“Yeah, it was a surprise to me when I woke up on the bus. Who’s Elijah Timson? A new kid that daytime Jamie just made friends with?”
“He’s a grade ahead of us,” Bobby said. “He’s Rachel Timson’s older brother. He didn’t tell me that was where he was going, just that he would be gone a few hours but would be back before sunset.”
Light went on in my head. Mom wouldn’t let Jamie or me date until we were fourteen. Jamie had somehow gotten to know Rachel’s brother and wrangled an invitation to their house so he could see her today.
So I had some ammunition against him. But I didn’t waste it by telling Mom right away. I said to Bobby, “I’ve got to watch Jasmine until her bedtime, but you could hang with us if you like. Or you could come over again after she goes to bed.”
Bobby sat on the side of Jasmine’s bed while Jasmine and I played on the floor. “Where were we?” I asked Jasmine. “Oh, yeah. ‘Release the kraken!’ — RARR!” The kraken was a plastic plesiosaur that Jared had given me when he got too old for it, and I’d given Jasmine a couple of years ago.
“Help!” Jasmine said, holding up one of her princess dolls to represent Andromeda. “The evil king tied me to this rock.” Then she took picked up of the toy soldiers: “Percy will save you!” We banged our soldier and dinosaur together for a while and then I tossed the plesiosaur halfway across the room, making a dying sound effect.
Bobby was bemused. “You’ve got her playing Perseus and Andromeda?”
“You’ve got to start them young,” I said.
“What do you think about Jamie going over to see Rachel?” he asked. “Do you think he was really hanging out with Elijah or was that just a cover story?”
“I don’t know. I was never friends with Elijah before. Maybe he just got Rachel to get Elijah to cover for him if our mom talked to their mom?”
“Could be.”
“Who’s Rachel?” Jasmine asked, changing Andromeda’s dress for her wedding with “Percy.”
“A girl who goes to our school,” I said hastily. “It doesn’t matter.” And I drew a finger across my lips, looking at Bobby; he nodded.
When mom poked her head in and said it was nearly bedtime, Jasmine demanded a story. “Bobby knows a lot more stories than me,” I said. “If he doesn’t mind?”
So Bobby told her about Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur. He left out the part where Theseus abandoned Ariadne later on. Jasmine still wasn’t feeling sleepy and wanted another story, so I read her “Green Eggs and Ham,” and then we turned off her light and left her alone.
Mom was still watching her movie in the living room, and Jared was in our room; there wasn’t anywhere else to go. “Is it okay if I go over to Bobby’s apartment for a while?” I asked. “Jasmine’s in bed with the lights out.”
“All right,” she said. “Be careful walking back.”
So we went over to Bobby’s apartment and to his bedroom, and speculated more about Jamie, Rachel and Elijah for a while. Then he said: “So since when did you read about Perseus and Andromeda?”
“I’ve been reading a lot about mythology, and watching a couple of mythological movies, the last few nights. And a little bit about astronomy. I’m not sure if I want to be an astronomer, but it seems like the best job you can do at night... everything else I can think of is pretty low on the totem pole: night clerk, night watchman (I don’t think they’d let a girl do that), waitress or cook at a 24-hour restaurant...”
“Night court judge,” he supplied. “Night shift emergency room doctor.”
“Cool. But I guess I don’t have any more chance of going to law school or medical school than basic college.”
“Some of them have classes after dark,” he said. “Or online classes.”
“Paying for them is the problem.”
“Yeah.” His family was better off than mine, but not by much; either of us would need a major scholarship to go to college. He had a lot better chance of it with his grades than me or Jamie had.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“I like being a girl. It feels better than being a boy, at least for me. But remember Jamie is a different person; still a lot like me, I mean we’re both still a lot like we used to be, but just because he turns into me at night doesn’t mean he’s gay or transgender. If anything, from what Bobby tells me, he’s more macho than we were before.”
part 5 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.
When it was time for Bobby to go to bed, I went home, and found Jared and Mom getting ready for bed. I said goodnight to them, got the tablet, and checked email. Jamie had this to say:
“No bet; Bobby could have told you how those guys reacted to the rumors, or you might have friended them from your new Artemis account and talked to them that way. Yeah, Aidan and Tony and Ali are all right, they’re not teasing me about the rumors while they think they’re not true. But I don’t know what they’d do if they found out they’re true. I’m not going to tell them about you, and I made Bobby promise not to tell either.
“Keep telling yourself you’re not jealous of me, and that you like being a girl. You’ll be happier that way, I guess. But for God’s sake don’t tell anybody else you like being a girl better than being a boy, or they’ll think I want to be a girl, or something!”
I replied:
“How much reading have you done about other kids like us, kids who transformed somehow? A lot of them have some kind of personality change. I think we did too; I’m not sure I would be so happy being a girl if I hadn’t. And I don’t think you would be trying to keep me a secret — or lying to Mom about going over to see Rachel Timson — if you hadn’t.”
There were no new comments or private messages on my social media. I read a little further ahead in the textbooks, and then watched a movie, and read more about astronomy until morning. I went out a little earlier before sunrise than I needed to, and tried to see if I could find Venus; one site said you could sometimes see it despite city lights. But I couldn’t find it, or couldn’t recognize it if I saw it.
The moment I woke up that evening, I heard someone saying “Holy shit!,” fairly loud. Jasmine was climbing on the monkey bars a few yards away from the bench where I was sitting. I turned around and saw Aidan looking at me in shock.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m guessing daytime-Jamie wasn’t too happy about you staying till sunset...?”
“Then it’s true? You don’t just turn into a girl, you turn into a completely different person?”
“Fairly different. We have all the same memories up until a couple of weeks ago, but we have some little differences of personality, and we don’t remember anything that happens to each other — like I told you.” I patted the bench next to me. “Come on, tell me what happened.”
“So, I came over and hung out with you — I mean, uh, daytime Jamie? And Bobby, for three or four hours.” He sat down at the other end of the bench, and twisted around so he could face me. “You — I mean he — had to watch Jasmine, since your mom was at work and Jared was out hanging with his friends... we watched some movies and talked, mostly. Then, uh, Jamie said I needed to go home because your mom was coming home soon and you and Jasmine needed to get ready for evening church. That sounded reasonable, and I went out to the bus stop, but then I remembered what you’d said, and I just went to the convenience store and hung out until almost sunset. Then I came back here and found him watching Jasmine play; he got mad at me and told me to go, and I asked why, he obviously wasn’t getting ready for church; why’d he lie to me? And finally he just kind of slumped over and said fine, watch if you want, I don’t care. So he sat down on the bench where he could see Jasmine and didn’t look at me again. And then suddenly he — you — got shorter and your hair turned black and got several inches longer.”
“Go easy on him when you see him at school tomorrow, okay?”
“I — he lied to me!”
“Yeah. He told me to try looking at it from his perspective, and I gave it a try; maybe you should too. If you turned into a girl at night, would you want everybody to know?”
“...No, I guess not.”
“Yeah, I kind of see it too, but I don’t think it makes sense, because he can’t keep me hidden forever, and I’m afraid some people are going to be mad at him for lying. More so, the longer he manages to keep me a secret. I hope you don’t stay mad at him for too long.”
“I’ll try not to. But I’m giving him a piece of my mind tomorrow.”
“I don’t blame you. Are you going to tell other people about me?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me to?”
“I’d like it if you told Tony and Ali, somewhere nobody can overhear you. Maybe private-message or email them and tell them what you saw, and what we talked about.”
“Okay.”
“Or, you know, maybe talk to Jamie first and ask him to tell them himself. Maybe tell him you’ll tell them in a couple of days if he doesn’t tell them first, or something.”
“That might be better.”
We were quiet for a minute or two, and it was getting kind of dark. I called out to Jasmine: “Five more minutes, then we’re going inside.”
“Okay,” she called back.
“I guess I’d better go pretty soon too,” Aidan said. “I told my mom I’d be home by eight-thirty.”
But he didn’t get up and leave right away. After a few moments, he asked: “So what’s it like being a girl?”
I sighed, and gave him the same answer I gave Bobby a few days ago. After a moment’s thought, remembering what Jamie had said in his email yesterday, I added: “I like being a girl. It feels better than being a boy, at least for me. But remember Jamie is a different person; still a lot like me, I mean we’re both still a lot like we used to be, but just because he turns into me at night doesn’t mean he’s gay or transgender. If anything, from what Bobby tells me, he’s more macho than we were before.”
“Bobby knows about this? Why didn’t he say anything?”
“Jamie made him promise not to tell.”
“Huh.” He sat there quiet for a few moments before saying: “I’d really better go now. I’m not sure what to think about all this, but I guess I’ll see you again.”
“Feel free to come over some evening this week.”
“Maybe. Some night when I don’t have much homework.” He got up and walked around to the bus stop, and I rounded up Jasmine and went inside.
Mom came home about the time I was putting Jasmine to bed, giving Jasmine an excuse to procrastinate going to bed so she could get a mommy-hug. Jared had come home just a few minutes earlier. The three of us watched a movie together, then Mom and Jared went to bed, and I checked my email and social media.
Jamie said:
“Maybe I’m more confident with girls than I used to be. I remember how scared I was of talking to Rachel, before. But when I went back to school Monday and saw her it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go up and talk to her. Other than that, I don’t think my personality has changed as much as yours must have, if you like being a girl. How girl-like are you, anyway? From some stuff Mom said I think you like playing with Jasmine more than we used to. Do you want to wear makeup and date boys and stuff?
“Imagine this. Instead of what actually happened to us, we just started changing into a girl at night. I mean, I started changing into a girl at night. In this scenario there’s no you as a separate person, just one person who changes into a girl at night and doesn’t have any personality changes. How freaked out and embarrassed do you think I’d be? Now add in multiple personality disorder, and you can figure out why I might be reluctant to tell everybody about you, even without some hypothetical personality change that makes me more secretive.”
I replied:
“No, I don’t want to date boys. I have no interest in sex, period, not with girls either. And I’m not in any hurry to learn how to use makeup, although I wouldn’t rule it out someday. Not while the budget’s this tight, obviously. Maybe I do like playing with Jasmine more than before, but maybe it just looks that way to you because you don’t want to admit how much YOU enjoy it — or enjoyed it before we transformed, anyway.
“I guess I can see why you might not want to tell people about me. But not telling people is one thing; lying to them about me is another. I had a nice talk with Aidan after you checked out this afternoon; he’ll tell you about it at school tomorrow, I expect. He’s not freaking out about me, and I think he’ll forgive you for lying to him before long. You should tell Tony and Ali and anybody else you want to stay friends with (Rachel and Elijah Timson, maybe?) before they find out the hard way.”
There was a new message on my social media account, from my Aunt Alice; I’d friended her the day after I created the account, but she didn’t turn on her computer every day. Mom must have told her about me (and Jamie), because she didn’t seem surprised; she asked me where I got the name Artemis, and how I enjoyed being a girl, and things like that. I wrote her a longish reply, then watched another movie and read for a while. But after a few hours I got restless, and wanted to go for a walk. I told myself it didn’t make sense, after what happened last time. What if I got attacked again, and couldn’t get away? I remembered what had happened then, and how the colors went all wonky. If that had made the guys confused and distracted so they didn’t chase me, maybe it would help me out in a jam again... but I couldn’t count on it, not if I didn’t have conscious control of this other superpower any more than of turning into Jamie at sunrise.
So the thing to do was to see if I could make it happen again on command. I tried to remember what I’d felt like when those guys accosted me. Angry. Why had I been so angry I hardly had energy left to be scared? I remembered how mad I’d been and how the colors had changed, how the guys had turned red, and —
— and suddenly the tablet I’d been reading from was a bright red, and the TV was more of an orange-yellow, and the overhead light was pale blue. My own body and clothes were tinted red, somewhere in between the tablet and the TV. I got up and walked around, looking at different things in the different light. There was a red glow from behind the refrigerator, and Jasmine’s head was the same red as my own skin when I glanced in on her, while her sheets were a darker red like the TV.
When I went back to the living room, I saw that the sofa cushions where I’d been sitting were a slightly more orangey red than my skin. I turned off the lights; there was still a dim red glow from the kitchen, and the sofa, my body, and the electronics were still glowing red, while other things were dimly illuminated by the red light from — all the warm things. The TV had been turned off just a little while ago and still hadn’t quite cooled down to room temperature, while the tablet was still on.
Cool.
A minute later, when I’d picked up a magazine and tried to read by the glow from my body (it was hard, with the low contrast between the ink and paper, but not impossible), the red glows suddenly faded and I was in the dark. After trying and failing to make the colors change again, I cautiously stepped over to the light switch, trying not to bump into anything, and turned on the light.
That was something to think about.
After thinking about it a while, I decided I’d go out for a walk again only after I got better control of this thing, and could rely on it protecting me. At least to some extent. If it made people’s vision go weird, it would give me a few moments of surprise to run away, but if my next attackers were quicker to adapt to having their vision screwed up, they could still see to follow me by the red glow of my body.
I still didn’t realize how it worked, and what had really freaked those guys out.
Monday night, I woke up in the playground as usual, behind the swings. There was a woman about twenty-five or thirty pushing a toddler in the child-safety swing, the bucket seat with the seatbelts, and over on the merry-go-round the lady I’d met a few days ago was spinning her little boy and Jasmine. None of them had been looking at me while I changed, which was probably why Jamie had been standing here while he watched the sun set. I walked around the swing and over to the merry-go-round.
“Yay, you’re back!” Jasmine said, her voice dopplered slightly by the rotation of the merry-go-round. The woman pushing it smiled at me.
“Hello again.”
“Hi. Thanks for pushing Jasmine.”
“No problem. I can go for another couple of minutes, maybe.”
When her arms got tired and the kids weren’t tired yet, I pushed them for a while. When they wanted off, I gradually slowed it down. Jasmine jumped off and gave me a hug. The woman took her little boy’s hands and helped him down from the merry-go-round, smiling at me and Jasmine. “I think she likes you better as her sister,” she said.
“Yeah!” Jasmine agreed enthusiastically. “She tells better bedtime stories than she did when she was a boy.”
“I’m glad you like me,” I said, “but try to be fair to daytime-Jamie too, okay?”
“He’s being all grumpy,” she complained. I could guess why; he’d probably had a bad day at school.
“Cut him some slack,” I said. “Come on, let’s go get you to bed.”
“And tell me a story.”
“You got it.”
The woman was looking at me strangely, obviously curious about what she’d overheard but maybe not wanting to pry. I waved goodbye to her and walked around to our apartment with Jasmine.
A city bus was just pulling away from the curb when we walked around to the street side of the building, and a girl was walking up to the apartment complex from the bus stop. She was the girl who lived upstairs, who looked about Jared’s age. She reached the foot of the stairs toward her apartment just as Jasmine and I got there.
“Hi,” she said as we walked up to the second storey. “Have you just moved in? I saw you a few days ago but I don’t think I’d seen you before that.”
“It’s complicated,” I said, pausing on the landing near our apartment. “You remember those kids on the news who transformed?”
“Yeah — oh, you changed like them? Then you’ve lived here a while and you just changed recently?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’d like to talk, but it’s almost my little sister’s bedtime.”
“I’m Wanda — I live in 314.”
“I’m Diana, I’m in 213, and this little varmint is Jasmine.” Jasmine giggled. “Nice to meet you.”
Why hadn’t I ever talked with her before? Duh, because I was a boy and shy around girls, especially if they were older than me.
Jasmine told me she’d already eaten supper earlier, so I put her to bed a few minutes later, read her a story, and told her another story — adapting more of the story of Theseus for a child’s sensibilities. (It didn’t need much; I just gave the violence a cartoony exaggeration and Jasmine would laugh at it instead of being horrified.) Mom got home a little after Jasmine fell asleep halfway through the story of Theseus and Procrustes.
“I talked with Dr. Darrington’s secretary during a break at work,” she said. “I’m taking Jamie over to their lab tomorrow evening so she can scan him while he changes into you.”
“Is Jasmine coming with us?”
“No, Jared will watch her tomorrow.” Jared grumbled a little at that, but didn’t say anything loud enough that I could hear it.
After Mom and Jared went to bed, I checked email; Jamie said:
“What did you tell Aidan? You’re ruining everything! He said I had to tell Tony and Ali about you by the end of the day Wednesday, or he’d tell them himself. I looked for a chance to talk with them privately at school but haven’t found one.
“Yeah, Jasmine’s cute, but it’s a hassle to have to watch her almost every day from the time I get home from school until you take over, and it’s hard to concentrate on homework when I have to go check on her every few minutes. You just have to watch her from sunset until her bedtime, then you’ve got the whole night to watch movies or whatever.”
So now he was saying I had it easy, where a few days ago he was claiming I was jealous of him? I replied:
“I told Aidan I’d like to get in touch with Tony and Ali — they haven’t replied to my friend requests, probably because they believed you when you said your account was hacked and assumed I was some kind of stalker/prankster. I said I’d like to give you a chance to tell them about me first, though, before he tells them. If Tony and Ali react the way Bobby and Aidan did, I’m not ‘ruining’ anything, and if they react worse — well, it was inevitable anyway. As Bobby and I both keep telling you, you can’t keep me secret forever, and the longer you keep me secret the more betrayed people are going to feel when they find out.”
I did the remainder of the homework that Jamie hadn’t had time to do before sunset — there wasn’t much left — and then spent most of the night practicing with my new superpower. By dawn, I could pretty reliably turn it on when I wanted to, unless I’d just used it recently, and then I had to let it rest a while before I could use it again. The longest I could get the weird colors to last was about three minutes.
I felt kind of tired after a few hours of that, and I spent the next couple of hours reading. After reading all those articles about mythology, I thought I might try reading some of the original stuff. I started the Iliad, but the out-of-copyright translation I found available for free was too hard to read, too many old-fashioned words and weird phrasings. I’d had that experience with old free books before, though some of them were okay. I sent Jamie another email asking him to check out a modern translation from the school library. Sunset was too close to the city library’s closing time this time of year; I wouldn’t be able to use the library again until the end of daylight savings time, if not later.
I practiced with my color-changing power a couple of times more, then went out to watch the sun rise.
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“I get a little stir-crazy sometimes, being cooped up in the apartment all night. But Mom says our neighborhood’s too dangerous for a girl at night, and I know she’s right.”
part 6 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.
When I woke up that evening, I was lying supine on a hard surface, in a dimly-lit space, wearing something thin and not very warm. I couldn’t see much straight ahead of — I mean, above me, and I instinctively squirmed around to get a better look. I realized my legs and arms were strapped down.
“Hold still,” a woman’s voice said. “Just lie straight and stay still for a few more minutes... it’ll be over soon.” I did as she said.
A few minutes later I felt the surface under me moving, and the space above me opened up into a larger room as I slid out of the narrow cylinder I’d been in. Then an overhead light came on, and I blinked. A woman in her twenties wearing medical scrubs came over and undid the straps across my arms and belly, then the ones across my legs, and helped me sit up. I realized I was wearing a hospital gown and nothing under it.
“You can go into that bathroom there to get dressed,” she said. I clutched the back of my gown to keep my butt from showing and went in the little bathroom, where I found a bench and shelf as well as the usual toilet and sink. I found a complete change of my girl clothes, plus shoes, as well as the boy-clothes that Jamie must have been wearing before he changed into the hospital gown. There was a plastic bag dispenser on the wall; I took one and put Jamie’s clothes in it.
When I came out of the bathroom, the woman — a nurse, I guess? — led me out into a hall and down to another room, where someone else checked my vital signs and drew several vials of blood from my arm. Then she took me to a waiting room where Mom was sitting. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” she said.
“How did it go?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know about Jamie’s part,” I said, “but I woke up inside a narrow little cylinder, and then they told me to lie still for a few minutes. Then they pulled me out of there and let me get dressed, and weighed me and checked my blood pressure and drew blood and stuff.”
“I think they did the same with Jamie last week. Except it might have been a different type of scan. And a psychologist asked him some questions.”
Fifteen minutes later, and older man in a labcoat came out to the waiting room.
“Hello again, Mrs. Sullivan. Hello... I understand you’re going by Diana now?”
“Yes. Are you Dr. Darrington?”
“No, I’m Dr. Ware, one of her colleagues on this project. She’s a biophysicist; I’m a neuropsychologist. She may have some questions for you later, after she has a chance to study your scans, but for now I just wanted to have a little chat. Mrs. Sullivan, I’d like to talk to Diana alone for about half an hour, as I did with Jamie earlier; then I’ll ask you to join us.”
“Of course,” Mom said.
I followed Dr. Ware to his office, which could generously be described as cozy or ungenerously as cramped. I sat in the nicer of the two guest chairs.
“Now, Diana... Do I understand correctly that you don’t remember anything that’s happened to you in the daytime since the day you first altered?”
“Right, except I’m not sure that stuff happened to me, if you know what I mean.”
“Then you consider yourself a separate person from Jamie?”
“Yeah. I remember being Jamie up until a couple of weeks ago, and I still mostly feel like him, but I’m different from the version of him that lives in the daytime now. He’s different from the old Jamie too, at least a little bit.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I haven’t met him, obviously, but we’ve been leaving notes for each other and sending emails, and I’ve talked to my friend Bobby about him... I think he’s more confident with girls than we used to be.”
“Interesting. What about yourself? What do you think has changed about you, besides turning into a girl physically?”
“Well, I guess I’m a girl mentally too. Maybe not a stereotypical girl, cause I don’t want to wear skirts and stuff, but I feel okay having a girl body.”
“Anything else?”
I thought about those guys the other night, and how I’d been so angry at them, not scared at all. The old Jamie would have been scared of being beaten up even if he wasn’t scared of being raped. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell him about all that. I remembered hearing that doctors were supposed to keep their patients' stuff secret, in the old days, but now they had to report all kinds of things to insurance companies and the government, and maybe that only applied to adult patients anyway — he might tell everything to Mom.
“I’ve gotten interested in some new stuff,” I said. “Greek mythology and astronomy. And daytime Jamie says I enjoy playing with Jasmine more, but I think it’s really that he enjoys it less than we used to.”
“I’d heard from Jamie about the events leading up to the alteration, but I’d like to get your version as well.”
Did he think we’d remember it differently? Maybe we did. I told him about staying up all night with Bobby, and how we’d gone out to watch the sun rise, and how Bobby had started talking about the Greek mythology he’d been reading, about Apollo and Artemis.
“Interesting!” he said. “Jamie didn’t mention that aspect. Had you read any Greek mythology yourself before that time, or had Bobby told you about his reading before?”
“No, I hadn’t read any until several days after I transformed. He’d told me about some other stuff he was reading, I think about Odysseus? But I don’t think he’d told me about Apollo and Artemis before that morning.”
Dr. Ware made some notes on his tablet, then asked: “So was that a factor in your decision to call yourself Diana?”
“Yeah. I mean, Jamie works for a girl or a boy, but I figured it would be less confusing for my family and friends if they didn’t have to specify which Jamie they meant every time they mentioned one of us. Jamie said he was thinking about going by ‘Apollo’ but I guess Mom put the brakes on that, or he just changed his mind.”
“Hmm. Can you clearly remember what your friend told you about Greek mythology right before you altered, as opposed to what you learned later on from your reading?”
“I’m not sure...” I thought back. “I know he said Artemis used to go hunting all night with her friends. All women. And all of them were virgins, and they’d punish guys who spied on them. And he said Apollo was a ladies‘ man, or ladies’ god, he’d get together with different mortal women.”
“Hmm. Jamie reported that he felt like he had to go out and watch the sun set every day if at all possible. Do you watch the sun rise every morning?”
“Yes.”
“Does it feel like a compulsion, or just something you like to do?”
“I guess it’s a compulsion. One time when I didn’t want to go outside for some reason it was kind of hard to make myself stay inside. And Jamie has wanted to go inside before sunset at least once, because he didn’t want somebody to see him change, but couldn’t make himself do it.” I didn’t tell him I’d been trying to stay inside so I wouldn’t turn into Jamie.
“Have you noticed any other compulsions? Like, say, wanting to go hunting at night?”
I twitched a little then, I think. I paused before saying: “Well, not hunting exactly. I get a little stir-crazy sometimes, being cooped up in the apartment all night. But Mom says our neighborhood’s too dangerous for a girl at night, and I know she’s right.”
“Let your mother know if you start feeling a compulsion to go out despite how dangerous you know it is. She’ll call us and we can get you some help.”
I nodded.
“Have you slept any since your alteration — that you’re aware of?”
“No, and I’ve never felt sleepy. Not even when I’m watching the sun rise, about to turn into Jamie.”
“Interesting. Do you remember having any dreams during the time between sunrise and sunset?”
“No... it’s like the time just jumps past me. I’m a little bit disoriented for the first few seconds, but I don’t really feel sleepy like I’ve just woken up, exactly.”
“Did you often remember dreams before your alteration?”
“Not every night, but sometimes. Once or twice a month, I guess. Why?”
“I have an idea about why you aren’t remembering your dreams, and if I’m right, you and Jamie will remember your dreams a lot less often than most people, but it will sometimes happen. We had Jamie under the scanner for a full ninety minutes —”
I winced in sympathy. It had been claustrophobic enough for five minutes; I couldn’t imagine ninety minutes of that.
“— that is, a full sleep cycle. The brain goes through different states during the course of the night, from REM sleep, that is, the rapid eye movement that takes place when you’re dreaming, to various other stages of sleep, and back to REM sleep again. People tend to wake up during REM sleep unless some outside circumstance — the sound of an alarm, for instance — wakes them at another part of the cycle. And you’re most likely to remember your dreams if you wake up while you’re dreaming. Well, in our scan of Jamie, part of his brain showed activity typical of sleep, while another part of the brain appeared to be wide awake.”
“So I’m asleep when he’s awake,” I said. “That makes sense. And if we’re always waking up at sunrise or sunset, it’s not particularly likely to happen during a dream if we dream only once every ninety minutes, right?”
“Exactly! Eventually, the sunrise cycle and your REM sleep cycle will line up exactly, like when the full moon happened to be on the spring equinox this year, and you may remember a dream. Let me know when and if it happens.
“Is there anything else you’d like to talk to me about?”
I thought for a few moments. “No, I guess not.”
“Then stay here, and I’ll have your mother join us.”
He was back in a minute or so with Mom.
“Diana seems to be adjusting pretty well,” he said. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Jamie and Diana. For instance, Diana says that she enjoys playing with Jasmine more than Jamie does; they apparently disagree about whether Diana enjoys it more than they did before the alteration, or Jamie enjoys it less. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “Jasmine seems to like playing with Diana more than with Jamie, but I don’t know if that’s just because they’re both girls or for other reasons as well.”
“She told me Jamie was acting grumpy around her,” I said.
“Yes, I’ve noticed that, and I’m not sure why.”
I knew, but I wasn’t going to air our dirty laundry in front of Mom and this psychologist. Jamie and I could work out our own issues, with maybe some help from Bobby and Aidan.
“I think,” Mom said after a few moments' more thought, “they might both have changed in that way. But I’m not sure.”
Dr. Ware told us about a support group for kids like me and our families. Mom said she might take Jamie to the meeting if she had a day off on the day the support group met, but it didn’t sound like I’d be able to go to their meetings until winter. Maybe I could catch the tail-end of a meeting if they ran long. And he asked Mom if she’d enroll Jasmine in another study.
“We’d like to get before-and-after data on children who might be going to go through an alteration later on,” he said. “It won’t be very onerous — a psychological test and a full-body scan once a year until and unless she goes through an alteration, and then probably some more intensive tests for a while afterward. The annual scan will be just a few minutes, not the long one we did on Jamie today. And of course you’ll be compensated for each visit.”
“I can bring in Jasmine next time I have a day off,” Mom said. “Do you think she’s going to transform like Jamie did?”
“We don’t know,” he said. “Only a few percent of the children of Antarctic Flu survivors have altered so far, but there are more every year, and the oldest children of survivors are only thirteen. When and if the numbers of children altering start to decline, we’ll be able to estimate how likely Jasmine is to alter, and at what age it’s most likely to happen.”
Of course, we eventually found out that every child of an Antarctic Flu survivor would go through a Twist, and that kids eleven to thirteen years old, like Caz Lipton and me, were extreme outliers like people who don’t Twist until they’re college age. 90% of Twisted go through their Twists between ages fourteen and seventeen, and 75% between ages fifteen and sixteen.
We now return you to your historically accurate muddle of nonstandardized terminology.
Jared had already put Jasmine to bed by the time Mom and I got home. Mom went to bed right afterward, and I hung out with Jared for a few minutes before he went to bed too. I looked over the book bag Mom had been holding onto while Jamie and I were getting tests done, and found that Jamie had done only about a third of his homework, probably on the bus home and the bus to the lab. I did the rest of it, and then checked email and social media.
There was nothing from Jamie — he probably hadn’t had a chance to use the tablet all day, having to leave for the lab almost as soon as he got home from school. But on my social media account, I had friend requests from Tony and Ali, and a message from Aidan saying:
“Jamie told Tony and Ali, and I think they’re okay with him turning into you. I told them to get in touch with you too, online, and maybe ask their parents if they could go over to your apt some evening and stay till after sunset.”
I confirmed Tony and Ali’s friend requests, then posted a public message saying:
“I hope everyone will go easy on daytime-Jamie. Imagine if you turned into the opposite sex at night; you might be pretty embarrassed, at least for a while until you got used to it. I don’t think he did the right thing, trying to keep me secret, but it’s understandable. Please forgive him.”
And then another one, with some of the interesting stuff Dr. Ware had said about Jamie sleeping and dreaming while I was awake, and vice versa. “I wonder if I can influence his dreams by what I’m doing, or if he influences mine? It’ll be hard to tell if we only remember our dreams once in a blue moon.”
Then, on further thought, I sent Jamie an email condoling with him for having to lie in that scanner machine for ninety minutes, and telling him what Dr. Ware had said.
I practiced with my new power off and on, reading about astronomy while I waited for my power to “recharge.” I found I could use it about every twenty or thirty minutes for up to four minutes. I wanted to go out and walk around, but I managed to resist until just before dawn.
A day or two later, Jamie wrote me again to say:
“I told Tony and Ali, like you and Aidan wanted me to. But I asked them not to tell anybody else. They seem to be sort of okay with it, I guess, better than I would have expected. Please don’t tell anybody else without checking with me first, okay? I think the rumors about me are dying down some, or at least the gossip around the school seems to have moved on to Cassie Linder’s latest shenanigans.”
I wrote back:
“Fine with me, but remember you won’t be able to keep me secret any longer once I start changing into you on the school bus in the winter.”
As the spring progressed, sunrise got earlier and sunset got later, and I had less time to play with Jasmine in the evening. A few weeks after my first visit to Dr. Darrington’s lab, Jasmine’s bedtime was before sunset, and I hardly saw her for the next few months, which was a lot harder than I would have expected. I exchanged social media messages with Tony and Ali, but their parents wouldn’t let them stay out late enough to visit me.
After another week and a half of practicing with my new power all night, and getting to where I could make the weird colors last for five or six minutes and use the power again just fifteen minutes later, I finally let myself go out again after everyone was in bed and I’d finished Jamie’s homework. I walked up to the convenience store, hung out there for a few minutes reading from a magazine, and then walked a little further in the same direction to the intersection of Porter Street, where I walked north for a few blocks before I headed east again and returned home via Angela Street. I did something similar the next night, and the next.
After several nights like that, my luck ran out. I was on my way home after ranging farther afield than before, and visiting another all-night convenience store where the night clerks didn’t know me. I had made a habit of glancing around and behind me from time to time, and after glancing back a couple of times at the guy who was walking behind me, I decided he was following me — he’d turned the corner when I did, and he was narrowing the gap between us. I picked up my pace, and when I heard his footsteps change into a run, I ran too. But his legs were longer; he caught up with me and grabbed my arm, and I stumbled and half-fell to the ground. I used my power, and the colors went strange — well, by that point they weren’t all that strange to me, but I figured they must have really freaked him out, because he clapped one hand to his eyes and yelled. I tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip and said: “What did you do to me, bitch?” He whacked me with his free hand, but not very hard, and not very effectively; it felt more like a slap than a punch even though he was using his fist, as it just grazed my face slightly. I kicked him, and he stumbled and fell on his back, still not letting go, pulling me down with him. He threw his fist at me but didn’t hit me this time; it went wide of my face by several inches. I kneed him in the groin and he finally let go. Then I got to my feet and ran; when I glanced back, he wasn’t following me, but I kept running and glancing back every few seconds until I got home.
I didn’t go out again for a while after that, though it was hard to make myself stay indoors sometimes.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“I’ll pour three mugs of water, and heat one of them up in the microwave, and then shuffle them around while you’ve got your back turned. Then you look and tell us which one is hot.”
part 7 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.
One evening toward the end of April, Mom was fretting about the budget again. The three hundred-dollar research stipends (one for Jamie, one for me, and one for Jasmine) had helped out a lot, but my new clothes and the emergency room bill had cost more than that, and we were still in the hole. I didn’t say anything then, but the next night, after I came in from the playground, I told Mom: “I’ve found out I have another superpower.”
“What? When?”
“Last night,” I lied. “I don’t know what’s up with it, but I can make the colors of things change... I think I’m seeing in infrared, or something.” I didn’t tell them I could make other people see weird colors, because how could I have found that out if I’d been staying in the apartment all night like a good little girl?
“Cool,” Jared said.
“So,” I went on, “you could call Dr. Darrington or Dr. Ware tomorrow and tell them about it, and maybe they’ll pay us to let them scan me while I’m using this new power?”
“I’ll do that,” Mom said. “My next day off is Thursday; hopefully we can go in then. I wonder if Jamie can do the same thing?”
“Did you email him about it?” Jared asked.
“No, not yet.”
“How about — hmm.” He looked thoughtful. “I’ll pour three mugs of water, and heat one of them up in the microwave, and then shuffle them around while you’ve got your back turned. Then you look and tell us which one is hot.”
“Okay, let’s do that.”
So I waited for him to get the mugs of water ready, and then turned my back while he put them on the dining table all in a row. I turned around when Jared said: “Ready,” and was about to warn them to brace themselves when I remembered I wasn’t supposed to know that my power affected other people’s vision, too. I just said: “Here goes,” and the colors went strange. Mom and Jared’s bodies lit up red, and the cup on the left turned hot pink, but before I could say which one it was, Mom and Jared yelped, and Jared said: “I can’t see!” I turned my power off right away.
“Whew,” Jared gasped.
“What did you do?” Mom asked.
“Um, the same thing I did the last couple of times I used it... I just sort of squinch my eyes a certain way and suddenly the colors change.”
“Everything went dark,” Jared said. “Like the lights turned out, but then there would be a glow from the TV.” (Mom and Jared had been watching a movie, and they’d paused it while we were talking.)
“Huh,” I said. I didn’t have to fake surprise. “So that’s...” I cut myself off. I couldn’t say how it explained more about why those guys hadn’t chased me, why the second guy hadn’t been able to hit me very well and why he hadn’t been able to get a grip on me again after he lost it. “I’m affecting your vision too?”
“It sure looks like it,” Mom said. “Maybe Dr. Ware or Dr. Darrington can tell us more.”
They went to bed soon after that, but I was too excited to even sit down. I paced back and forth in the living room for a while, thinking about what we’d discovered. It looked like my power made people blind while it changed the colors I could see. That made it a lot more effective at defending me from predators than just surprising them with a change in the colors they saw. It made me confident enough, in fact, that I went out for a walk just an hour or so later, after I was sure Mom and Jared were sound asleep. I didn’t run into any trouble that time, though I felt safe enough to walk on some less well-lit side streets that I’d avoided before.
A few days later I woke up one evening with my face pressed to a window in an unfamiliar place, looking at the western sky out across the city. I looked around and saw Mom sitting on a cushioned bench nearby.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“On the top floor of a building at the university,” she said. “They said they didn’t need to scan you while you changed this time, so Jamie asked where was a good place to watch the sunset from, and they told us we could come up here. Come on, let’s go back to the waiting room and tell them we’re ready.”
We went down an elevator to the second floor, and then to the waiting room I’d been in a few weeks before. Fifteen minutes later, a nurse came and got me, and led me back to the restroom with the bench and shelf, where I put on a hospital gown — I’d been wearing the loose sweats and T-shirt we usually wore when changing. Then they strapped me down on the sliding table and slid me into the cylinder again, warning me to keep still or they’d have to do the test over again.
Once I was completely inside the cylinder, and the machinery I was surrounded by started humming, a woman’s voice came through a speaker. “All right, now exercise your paranormal ability.” I turned on my power and waited. The cylinder walls were dark at first but gradually started glowing a dim yellowish-orange. I heard distant muffled voices and then the speaker said: “Turn it off.” I turned off my power and the cylinder around me went dark again.
Again those distant muffled voices. A few minutes later the man said to turn my power on again, and I did, and then to turn it off... Finally they pulled me out of the cylinder and unstrapped me, let me get dressed in the girl clothes Mom had brought for me, and escorted me back to the waiting room.
I’d barely had time to read a little from the book Jamie had brought with him when someone came and got me again, and led me to another room full of equipment where several people were standing around doing things. A woman about Mom’s age came up to me and said:
“Hello, Diana. I’m Dr. Lise Darrington. You’ve got a very interesting paranormal ability; it’s affecting our scanner so we can’t get an image of your brain while you are using it. We’re going to try to test it in some other ways. Just give us another couple of minutes to set this up.”
They did incomprehensible things to various pieces of equipment that were sitting around on tables, and then Dr. Darrington told me to turn on my power — several people gasped, but not Dr. Darrington — and a few second later to turn it off again. Then they huddled around computer monitors and over panels of dials and LEDs, and talked excitedly. I recognized a few words from the stuff I’d reading about astronomy — words for different frequencies of radiation, ultraviolet and infrared and microwaves, but I didn’t understand enough of the other words to know what was going on. Twice more they had me turn on my power for a few seconds, and then they had me go out in the hall and stand in different places while turning on my power, counting to ten, and turning it off again. They had me look at different things while using my power and tell them what color they were when I had my power turned on. Finally Dr. Darrington led me to her office, and a couple of minutes later someone escorted Mom into the room.
“We’ve figured out part of how your paranormal ability works,” Dr. Darrington said, sounding excited. “We can’t get any images of your brain or eyes, and see how they are letting you see these different colors you described, but we can see the effects on your surroundings. Among other things, you’re shifting the frequencies of the light around you downward — that means you turn ultraviolet and visible light into near infrared, and near infrared into far infrared.”
I understood a little of that because of doing Jamie’s science homework and studying astronomy on my own, but Mom was baffled. “What does that mean?”
“It means that to ordinary people’s eyes, the room appears to go completely dark. The light is still there, it’s just invisible to normal eyes. But you must somehow be temporarily altering your eyes, and maybe the visual processing center of your brain, so you can see the infrared spectrum, including both normal infrared light emitted by human bodies and other warm things, and the down-shifted ultraviolet and visible light that is no longer visible to people around you.”
“Awesome!”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it? It’s not the strangest paranormal ability I’ve seen yet, but it’s probably in the top ten. That shifting of light means that the wavelengths the brain scanner uses get shifted as well, so they can’t be detected by the equipment that’s supposed to pick them up and see how they’ve been altered by passing through your body. I think we can adjust the scanner to pick up the altered wavelengths, however, and then we’ll be able to get good imaging. We’d like you to come back again in a few weeks, when your mother has a day off work, and do some more tests.”
“Sure,” I said, glancing at Mom. We were both happy at the prospect of more research stipends.
“Of course,” she said, turning to Mom, “if — ah, Jamie — learns to use this paranormal ability, then we could do the research in the daytime. We’d prefer that, actually, but if it’s necessary for us to come in at night again, we can do.”
“Of course. Let me know when you have the scanner ready,” Mom said.
It took Jamie several weeks after that to figure out how to use his “paranormal ability,” as Dr. Darrington was calling it, or “trick,” as Nia Clarence would call them in a famous public service announcement that had various photogenic young Twisted showing off the silliest, most harmless superpowers ever. His power was different from mine in its manifestations, though Dr. Darrington and Dr. Ware eventually decided that the physics and brain-physiology of them were almost the same. My ability shifted light frequencies downward, so visible and ultraviolet light became infrared. His shifted frequencies inward, squeezing ultraviolet and infrared into the blue and red parts of the visible spectrum and all the visible light into different shades of green. In effect, it seemed to got a lot brighter to people around him, as well as making things look weird because of the colors. He could blind people with the sudden increase in brightness, but it didn’t bother him because his eyes adjusted to it instantly.
By then, it was late May, and I finally had my first period. The emergency room doctor had told us back on the equinox that I’d probably have my first period in a little under a month, and he wasn’t totally wrong — it was about a month later in terms of the total hours I’d lived since then, not counting Jamie’s increasingly large share of each day. Mom had gotten worried when April passed without a drop of blood, and wished aloud she could take me to a doctor, but we couldn’t afford it, not when we still hadn’t paid off the emergency room bill. So I was as relieved as I was disgusted when it finally started, ruining a pair of panties. It wound up lasting longer than other girls', too, if you measure by the calendar; about ten days on average. And I was awake for every minute of it, unlike other girls who get to sleep through a third of theirs.
After Jamie and I made our truce, he’d checked several books out of the school library for me, about Greek mythology and astronomy and several other things, and I’d done my share of the homework and household chores. But we had another altercation when my period came on. I didn’t want to transform into him while wearing panties; I knew his junk would be painfully compressed by them. But I couldn’t just put on the sweat pants with no underwear like I’d been doing, or I’d get bloody spots on the crotch while I was watching the sun rise. I snuck into Jared’s room, trying not to wake him, put on a pair of Jamie’s jockey shorts, and — after experimenting with a maxi pad and finding it wouldn’t reliably stay in place — stuffed the loose crotch with crumpled toilet paper. Jamie wasn’t happy about that, and complained vociferously in his next email, but I pointed out he’d be even less happy with panties and a pad. And asked him to stuff his underwear with toilet paper or something before he transformed back into me that night.
All during this time, Mom was trying to get the school district to do something for my education, and they kept dragging their feet, and I kept learning on my own — reading the remainder of Jamie’s textbooks, and doing a share of his homework, and learning about other stuff from books I got him to check out of the library and from online sources. First, the school district refused to believe that Jamie and I were separate people. Then when they got that through their thick heads, they thought our kind of multiple personality disorder justified putting both of us in a mental institution instead of a regular school. We dodged a bullet when Dr. Ware intervened for us and said there was no reason for that. Then when Mom asked again for them to send a teacher out to our apartment every weeknight, or at least a couple of times a week, the first teacher they assigned to do it balked at going into our neighborhood at sunset and staying till a couple of hours after dark. They couldn’t pay her enough to do that, she said. Finally, with barely two weeks left in the school year, they found a male teacher who wasn’t afraid of being in our neighborhood after dark, and he came out one night in May, just a couple of days after my period started.
I was over at Bobby’s apartment, hanging out in his room and playing games, when his mom poked her head in the door and said, “Diana, there’s someone here to see you.” I went out in the living room and saw a big guy, a good six or seven inches taller than me, dressed in a casual suit with a briefcase.
“Diana Sullivan?” he asked, and I nodded. “Hi, I’m Mr. Martin, your homebound teacher. Your mother said I’d find you here.”
“Finally,” I said. “I guess we can go back over to my apartment.” I turned to Bobby and said, “See you tomorrow night.”
“See you then.”
I followed Mr. Martin over to our apartment and we sat down at the dining table. Mom was watching a movie, but she turned off the sound and turned on closed captioning. Mr. Martin looked around and said: “Go get your tablet.”
“I’ll see if Jared’s using it for his homework.”
I went to Jared’s room (I no longer thought of it as mine, even though I still kept a lot of my stuff there) and asked him what he was using the tablet for. He looked up from it and said: “Watching a movie... I guess you need it for school? Here you go.”
Mr. Martin and I talked for a while first, about what I’d been doing to learn on my own since my transformation. He was pleased with my efforts, but less pleased with my progress, at least in algebra and Spanish. And he wasn’t at all pleased to hear that Jamie and I had been splitting up the homework between us. “I’m not surprised that you aren’t making more progress in algebra if you’re only doing half of the problems — apparently the more difficult half, skipping over the easier problems that are supposed to let you work up to them. As for Spanish, I can’t expect you to make much progress when you can’t have conversations in Spanish with your classmates. And I can’t help much; my own Spanish is pretty rusty. But I’ll see about getting you into an online conversation group with some kids in another time zone.”
“Since the school wouldn’t admit that Jamie and I were separate people until a little while ago, they can’t accuse us of cheating by splitting up the homework. Besides, Jamie usually doesn’t have time to do all his homework before turning into me, not when he has to take care of Jasmine. We used to do most of our homework after she went to bed, but now he can’t do that because he turns into me just a few minutes later.”
“Hmm, that is a problem. I’ll talk to Jamie’s teachers about that and see if we can accommodate him, but for now, you aren’t to do any more of his homework. I’ll assign all your homework, except where we get you into online classes and you have another teacher — probably in Spanish, at least, and maybe in other areas if I think you need more help than I can give you in six hours or so a week.”
“Are you going to keep teaching me in the summer?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m sorry the school district took so long to send someone out here. I only heard about part of it, and it sounds like a real mess.”
“Thanks.”
So we settled down and started teaching and studying, mostly focusing on algebra since that was what I’d fallen behind in most. After that, he came out to see me three times a week, even into the summer. Occasionally he’d get there early and come out to the playground with Jamie to watch him change into me. I joined an online Spanish conversation group with some kids on the west coast, and eventually caught up on that too.
Mom never went to bed until after Mr. Martin left, although she sometimes fell asleep on the sofa while we were still working through algebra problems.
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Wouldn’t you know it, where before I’d found trouble without looking for it, now I couldn’t find any.
part 8 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.
The summer solstice passed, and the days finally started getting a little shorter. But it would still be another couple of months until Jasmine’s bedtime would be before sunset, and I missed the little squirt. Once in a while she’d wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, and she’d come find me instead of Mom since I was awake. I worried that she’d wake up from a nightmare sometime when I was out walking, but though I cut my walks shorter, I didn’t stop going out. Being able to blind my attackers while simultaneously improving my night vision made me feel pretty confident — overconfident, really — that I could handle whatever our neighborhood might throw at me, and I’d started exploring less well-lit side-streets that I’d previously avoided. I’d avoided any more fights, turning on my power whenever I thought someone was probably following me and keeping it on until I zigzagged around a couple of corners.
Then one night when I woke up, I remembered a dream. I hurried into the apartment, said a distracted hi to Mom and Jared, and found one of my school notebooks (by now Jamie and I each had our own), where I wrote down everything I could remember.
“I was out in the woods, and the full moon was high in the sky. There were some other girls with me: Wanda, the girl from upstairs, and a couple of girls I knew from school, and some other girls I don’t know in real life, but they were my friends in the dream. And we had bows and arrows and we were hunting. We shot a deer, and then a wolf, and then we came on a man who had grabbed a woman by her hair and was threatening to rape her. We shot him, too, and the woman joined us and we gave her a bow and arrows.”
After a few moments' thought, I tore that page out, folded it up, and hid it under my panties in the top drawer of the dresser in Jasmine’s room. I didn’t think Mom or Jamie or Jared would snoop through my school notebooks, but Mr. Martin might look at them, and I didn’t want anyone to know I dreamed about killing people, even people who deserved it.
I think it was after that dream that I really started looking for trouble. I went out almost every night — except when Mom fell asleep on the sofa, and would see I wasn’t there if she woke up during the night and dragged herself back to bed. And I’d go looking for the kind of guys who’d attacked me twice before.
Wouldn’t you know it, where before I’d found trouble without looking for it, now I couldn’t find any. I spent an hour or two each night walking along the least well-lit streets in the neighborhood and found almost nobody around, and those few minding their own business. It took me over two weeks to find someone like that again. I knew I’d found them when they started following me. I led them into an alleyway even less well-lit than the street we’d been on, and turned on my power.
I turned around and saw them hesitate near the entrance to the alley. “She went in here, didn’t she?” the taller one said.
“Yeah. Could be out the other end by now... come on.”
The advanced toward me, but slowly, and then stopped.
“I can’t see a thing in here,” said the taller one.
“Yeah, so you’re afraid of the dark now?”
“The streetlights behind us just got real dim, nitwit. This ain’t natural.” (Dr. Darrington had figured out that my power’s effect didn’t have a sharp edge; the light seemed to get dimmer at its edges, and completely dark as you got closer to me, as more and more of the light was shifted into the infrared.)
“Come on,” said the shorter one, barging ahead blindly. I tiptoed toward him a few yards, then held myself flush against a wall while he blundered past; his friend was still hanging back, groping around, and finally touching the wall of a building. Once the other guy was ahead of me, I walked up behind him and kicked him in the back of the knee.
He fell, yelling. “What’s wrong?” his friend asked, sounding panicky. He had been groping along the wall toward the street, but when his friend yelled, give him some credit, he started back the other way, toward me.
“Something hit me in the leg,” the guy I’d kicked said.
“You mean you tripped over something.”
“No, it hit me from behind, I tell you.” He struggled to get up, but I’d apparently hurt him more than I expected, because he was having trouble.
Just then I kicked the other guy in the back of the leg. He fell, screaming. “They kicked me too,” he said, and as soon as he sat up, pulled a knife out of his belt and waved it blindly in front of him. I backed away a little, wondering if I should retreat. Instead I tiptoed around him and over toward his friend, who had just gotten to his feet and had pulled his own knife. I carefully circled around him and kicked him in the back of the other knee.
“Who are you?” he yelled while he was picking himself up. “Don’t mess with us.”
There was warm stiff dripping from his arm — he’d cut himself when he fell. I kicked him again while he was down, and he waved the knife in my direction, but since he was blind I was able to dodge it pretty easily. I backed away, making more noise this time because I was in a hurry, and the guy waved the knife at me again. I walked over to the other guy and around him and his waving knife, picked up a broken piece of wood — probably the leg of a chair or table, there were several things like that in the alley — and hit him in the back of the head. He spun around and waved his knife, but I was already out of his reach.
“He hit me in the head,” he told his partner. “It hurts, but it didn’t knock me out.”
By the time he’d said that, I’d circled around to his side, and whacked him on the knife hand. He yelped and swung the knife toward me, but I dodged to the side and toward his friend. He stumbled after me.
The shorter guy had gotten to his feet by now, though he was looking a little unsteady. Both guys were facing each other, waving their knives in front of them blindly — a recipe for an accident. I stayed out of their way, but tossed a piece of gravel over in between them. They moved toward each other.
“We need to get out of here,” said the guy I’d kicked first. “Can you tell which way is the street?”
“Keep moving in a straight line and we’ll either hit a wall or come out into the street. If you hit a wall, go left, keeping a hand on the wall.”
Smart guy. I kept watching, wondering if I should stay and mess with them some more, or clear out. I could keep my power going for seven or eight minutes by now, and I was pretty sure only a minute or two at most had passed since I turned it on; I decided to stay.
The two guys weren’t heading straight toward each other — they weren’t moving in straight lines, period, stumbling around in the dark — but after a little bit they came within range of the knives they had out, and one of them poked the other in the arm. Not very hard, unfortunately, but enough to make him yelp. He swung wildly with his knife and hit the other guy in the side, more effectively.
“He’s knifed me!” the guy yelled, and the other said: “Oh my God, was that you?” Then they were talking over each other and I couldn’t make out what they said. I gave a laugh, which I immediately realized was a mistake; both guys turned to face me, and one of them threw his knife. It missed me by a foot or two. I looked around, thinking to pick it up and keep the guy from getting it back, but I couldn’t see where it landed. It should have been warm from his hand and plainly visible, so it must have slid up under some of the broken furniture.
“That sounded like a girl,” said the guy who’d been stabbed, and was holding his hands to stanch the bleeding.
“She did this to us somehow,” said the guy who was bleeding from a self-inflected wound in the arm. “Blinded us and made us hit each other.” He was moving toward me. I could probably keep dodging around these guys until my power ran out, but I decided it was time to go. I tiptoed out of the alley around the corner onto the street, and then took off running. I turned off my power after turning another corner, and walked back to my apartment, keeping an eye out behind and around me as usual.
I’d gotten lucky; on some level I knew that. I could have gotten hit by the thrown knife, or when one of those guys was waving his knife at me. I could have bled to death in that alley, probably after being raped — I wasn’t sure if I could keep my power going after being stabbed, and didn’t want to find out. But though I knew intellectually that I’d been in serious danger — was in danger every time I went out, though less danger than a girl without my power would be in — I didn’t feel it. I felt like Artemis turning Actaeon into a stag and watching his dogs tear him to pieces; I felt good, and I wanted to do it again.
The next night, though, just as I was about to go out, Jasmine woke up and came into the living room, blinking sleepily.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I had another bad dream.” She sat down next to me on the sofa and hugged me, and I hugged her back.
“It’s over now,” I said. “And it won’t really hurt even if it’s kind of scary.”
“Will you tell me a story?” she said. “Jamie doesn’t tell stories as good as you.”
By rights Apollo should have been a better storyteller than Artemis. But I don’t think we knew that when we transformed, so that particular bit of mythology wouldn’t have had any effect on how we changed. I think Bobby just described Apollo as a musician, and not all songs are stories — probably fewer nowadays than when those myths were first made up or when they got written down.
“Go use the potty if you need to, then get back in bed, and I’ll tell you a story.”
So a few minutes later I sat on the edge of Jasmine’s bed and told her about Jason and the Argonauts, and made up a happy ending for Jason and Medea which neither of them really deserved. Jasmine was pretty sleepy by then, maybe already asleep, and I tiptoed out of the room and, a few minutes later, out of the apartment.
I didn’t find the trouble I was looking for that night, or the next, or the next. Almost a week later, I saw a guy was following me, lured him into an alleyway, blinded him, and whacked him in the crotch with a piece of wood I’d stashed in that alley a few nights earlier. He curled into a whimpering ball and I cleared out.
I kept doing that as the nights got shorter, finding some would-be predator and turning the tables on them a bit less than once a week on average. I think I’d beaten up five or six guys, counting those first two who’d stabbed each other (I didn’t have such good luck as that again), when it all went terribly wrong.
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“‘With great power comes great responsibility.’”
“Your power isn’t all that great,” she pointed out.
part 9 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.
One night early in the school year, when everyone had been in bed for a while, and the usual time at which Jasmine sometimes woke with a nightmare had passed, I went out looking for trouble. And I found it.
For the first time since I’d started my campaign, I found a crime in progress. I was walking along one of the more dimly-lit streets when I heard a scream up ahead. I ran toward it, turning on my power.
I glanced aside into alleyways and parking lots as I ran, and soon saw a man with a drawn knife who had probably been threatening the woman standing near him until I came close and brought them within my power’s field. Now they were both glancing wildly around, and groping to find some landmark. I had to intervene fast or he might slash her with the knife he’d been waving around.
“What did you do to me?” he growled.
“I didn’t do nothing, I swear,” she said in a high, trembly voice. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“He won’t hurt you,” I said in the deepest voice I could manage, which wasn’t very deep but didn’t sound like my normal voice either. As the guy was turning toward the sound of my voice, I was moving around behind him, closer to the woman. I kicked him in the back of the knee, but I didn’t connect well, and he stumbled, but didn’t fall. I took the woman by the shoulders and nudged her away from the man, whispering “Run!” in her ear.
I was barely aware of her stumbling off in the direction I’d pushed her; my eyes were on the man who’d spun around and was waving the knife in my direction. I backed up, but soon ran into the wall of the alleyway, and he was getting closer... I dodged to the side, but my foot slipped on a piece of gravel and I fell, skinning my hands and forearms as I caught myself.
“Who are you?” he called, slashing through the space where I’d have been if I hadn’t fallen. I didn’t answer, struggling to sit up. But then he stumbled over me and fell on top of me, and before I could react, I felt a stabbing pain in my right arm.
“Got you, bitch,” he said, sitting up straddling my belly, his left hand on my breast and the other still gripping the knife. “Don’t know how it got so dark, but now that I’ve got hold of you I don’t need to see you.”
He should have been pinning my arms instead of groping me. I couldn’t lift him off me, but I could try to distract him. I pressed my right arm close to my side, hoping to stanch the bleeding against my shirt, and with my left hand I scratched at his eyes. He yelped and brought the knife up, cutting my left arm too but not as deeply, I thought, as the right. I kept scratching desperately at his eyes, which he’d closed, and caught one fingernail in his nostril and pulled — disgusting, but effective. He scrambled backward and I was able to get up and run.
But I had two problems — one of them pretty serious. I was losing blood from my right arm pretty fast. The cut in my left arm wasn’t nearly as bad, but I had to bandage the right arm as fast as I could. And the only source of cloth for bandages, at this time of night, was either my shirt or my pants — I didn’t want to wrap that wound in a dirty sock.
I still had my power going, and I’d lost track of time in the scuffle, but I figured it should last several more minutes. Unless I fainted from loss of blood. I found another alleyway to hide in, took off my shirt and tied it around my right forearm as tight as I could using only my left hand. Then I set out briskly toward home.
My power failed me long before I got there. My initial brisk pace had slackened and I was trudging along, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, when the colors reverted to normal. I barely noticed it, and just kept on walking, soon turning onto a busier street that would take me to the street our apartment complex was on.
Then a police car pulled up beside me. My first impulse was to turn on my power and run, but, one: my power didn’t do anything. Apparently it needed longer to recharge. And two: I was too tired to run.
The police officer rolled his window down and started to say: “Ma’am, if you don’t cover up I’ll have to — Oh. You’re hurt.” He parked the car and opened his door; I backed away, looking back and forth. Nobody else was around.
“This guy stabbed me,” I said, “twice! And I barely got away from him, and then I had to take off my shirt to bandage one of my arms...” I’d been on the verge of exhaustion, but thinking back to the fight made me angry again.
“Get in,” he said, opening the back door, “I’ll take you to the hospital... I’d go after the guy who stabbed you, but getting you help has to come first.”
I hesitated, and decided I’d better take him up on it. I’d been vaguely planning to go home and pour peroxide on the cuts, but that was kind of stupid; it was a bad wound and the blood had soaked through the shirt and was slowly dripping on the sidewalk, showing my trail plainly enough if the guy I’d fought had tried to follow me.
“I’ll get blood on your seat,” I said, sitting down. I positioned my wounded arms over my lap; my pants were already ruined too.
“Wouldn’t be the wost thing that’s ever happened to this car,” he said, getting back in the driver’s seat and shifting gears. We started moving; from the flickering reflections off of windows, I could tell he’d turned on his flashing lights, but I didn’t hear the siren. I guess he didn’t need it with the light traffic. “I’m taking you to the hospital first thing, we’ll get that arm looked at and fixed up no matter what. What happens after that depends on what you’re willing to tell me. What’s your name?”
I hesitated, but finally said: “Diana Sullivan.”
“I’m Officer Dave Kowalski. Is the person who stabbed you someone you know?”
“No, he’s just this guy I ran into.”
“Do you have a home to go to?”
I hesitated, not sure if I wanted him to take me home after the emergency room doctor sewed up my arm, or if I wanted to pretend I was homeless and get home on my own... the latter plan had a slight chance of getting me home before Mom or anybody woke up, and not getting me in trouble. He went on:
“If you don’t have a home, or if you don’t feel safe there, I’ll call Child Protective Services, and they’ll take custody of you after the hospital thinks you’re well enough to go. If you have a home, and you’re willing to go back, I’ll call your parents or guardians and have them pick you up from the hospital.”
I didn’t see a good way out. Maybe I could escape from the hospital or from Child Protective Services, using my power or just general sneakiness. But what if it took until dawn for the doctors to fix me up and say it was safe for me to go? Jamie would be there and have no idea how or why, and Mom would be awake and missing me about then... Or I’d probably change into him while I was halfway home, and leave him alone in a neighborhood he wasn’t familiar with... “I live in Cranston Apartments,” I said, and told him the address. “Number 213.”
“Do your parents have a telephone number I could call?”
“Could you just take me home after the doctors are finished?”, and even as I said that, I knew it was a stupid thing to ask, but I pressed on desperately: “I mean, my mom’s a sound sleeper, and I’m sure she hasn’t missed me yet. I just went out for a walk... If the doctors can fix me up in an hour or two, I could be back before she wakes up.”
“I have to report this to your parents.”
“It’s just my mom.”
“All right, to your mom. Will you tell me her phone number?”
I gave in. But he didn’t call while he was driving; he had me repeat the number once we got to the hospital and he’d helped me walk in to the emergency room and turned me over to one of the nurses. “I’ll call your mother and then go park the car,” he said. “I won’t leave the hospital until she gets here.”
“She doesn’t have a car,” I said, “and I don’t think the buses run this time of night, do they?” I’d lost track of time.
“I can give her a ride here if I need to.”
Unlike the time Mom had taken me to the emergency room for memory loss, my bleeding arms got fast service. They cleaned both wounds and stitched them up, and then drew blood and checked my vital signs. My blood pressure was really low, not surprisingly. Then they said I needed a transfusion. That took a while, and Mom got there while I was lying in bed watching some stranger’s blood dripping into my veins.
I was afraid she was going to be mad at me, and she was — later. Just then, she bent over and hugged me, sobbing. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked. “They said you lost a lot of blood and they had to give you an emergency transfusion, they couldn’t wait to ask me for permission... What were you doing?”
I was crying too; it must have been infectious.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just get so bored sitting around the apartment all the time, I started going out for walks. I figured my power would keep me safe if anybody got mean, and it did, until tonight...”
“What happened?”
I told her basically what had happened, though I didn’t mention all the other predators I’d lured into alleys and beaten up in the last couple of months.
“That was very brave,” she said. “And really stupid, too. I know you have that weird power, but it doesn’t make you a match for a grown man with a knife.”
“I couldn’t just let him kill that lady, or rape her, or whatever he was planning. ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’”
“Your power isn’t all that great,” she pointed out. “And... I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”
“I’ll be more careful,” I started to promise, but she wasn’t satisfied with that.
“You most certainly will, young lady. You won’t leave the apartment at night again.”
“But that means never leaving ever! I only exist at night!”
“Maybe after a while I’ll let you go out in the early evening, when sunset falls earlier in the day... but you’re grounded for the next two months: no going out. If you find yourself outside at sunset — I don’t have any reason to keep Jamie from going out to watch the sun set — you have to come right inside and stay until dawn. No going out to watch the sun rise until the end of October, and no going out before sunrise for any other reason.”
I was about to protest, but just about then I started feeling anxious for another reason, and I pressed the nurse call button.
“What do you need?” Mom asked. “Is it anything I can do so we don’t have to bother the nurse?”
“I need to go out, or at least get to an east-facing window,” I said.
“Diana Sullivan! Did you or did you not hear what I just said? No going out at night until the end of October. You’re staying right here until you turn back into Jamie.”
“But I need to see the sun rise! You don’t understand!”
We argued, or rather I argued and Mom stubbornly repeated herself, until I suddenly found myself in the playground behind our apartment building. Jared was there too, and he said: “Hi, Diana. Mom told me to make sure you came inside as soon as the sun was down.”
“Hi, Jared. Mind filling me in on what I missed?”
“Let’s see... Mom said you were at the hospital getting a blood transfusion after you got your cuts stitched up. Mind telling me how that happened? She wasn’t very clear.”
“Later. What happened when Jamie came back?” I looked at my arms and hands. There was no sign of last night’s injuries.
“The stitches and IV needle popped out of his arms, and the blood transfusion started running out onto the floor. It was a mess, to hear Jamie and Mom tell it. The doctor looked at Jamie and couldn’t find any trace of the injury you’d been admitted for... so they sent Jamie home, and he and Mom got here just in time for her to go to work and him to go to school. I’d already taken Jasmine over to Mrs. Comstock’s apartment for the day, and caught the school bus, so I didn’t find out about all that until evening.” (Mrs. Comstock took care of Jasmine while we were at school and Mom was at work. I hadn’t seen her since my change.)
“Thanks.” I filled him in on what I’d been doing — not all of it, but as much as I’d told Mom and a little more. We walked into the apartment while I was telling him how I’d scratched the guy’s eyes and nostrils until he let me go.
Mom looked at me and said: “Good. Remember, I want you to come in as soon as you wake up every evening, and stay here, and I don’t want to have to send Jared to tell you every time.”
“You won’t have to,” I said. “I’ll remember.”
“Remember and obey.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I went to Jared’s room and studied while he watched a movie with Mom, and after they went to bed, studied for another hour and then watched a couple of movies. I was pretty restless by dawn, and unable to concentrate on the movie I was sort of watching, much less read. I told myself I wasn’t supposed to go out, but actually making myself stay indoors as the sunrise approached was easier said than done. I opened the blinds and looked out the window; our apartment faced north, so I wouldn’t be able to see the sun rise, but maybe seeing the sky brighten would alleviate the distress...?
Not so much. Several times I caught myself moving toward the door and forced myself back to the window. The sky outside brightened a little more, and then I was in the playground.
There was a note in my hand.
“What the actual FUCK, Diana? This is the first time since March that you forgot to change out of your tight girl clothes before turning into me. Don’t do it again.”
I crumpled it up and went inside.
After everyone went to bed, I wrote Jamie an apologetic email explaining why I’d been so distracted and had forgotten to change clothes. I made sure to change clothes well before dawn after that... some nights, I never changed out of the loose sweats Jamie had worn when he changed into me. Why bother when I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone? Mom wouldn’t let Bobby come over after sunset while I was grounded, and my interaction with Jasmine was limited to telling her a bedtime story just after I woke up — her bedtime was just a few minutes after sunset now.
Some nights were harder than others in terms of resisting my compulsion to watch the sun rise. One morning I failed to resist; I was out the door almost before I realized what I was doing. I tried to go back inside, but I couldn’t make myself do it, even though I knew Jamie would report me and I’d get in trouble.
I knew it was a mistake, but it was still an indescribable relief to finally watch the sun rise after being cooped up inside all night for so long. Sure enough, as soon as the sun was over the horizon, and I was suddenly looking west at the post-sunset sky, Mom grabbed me by the arm and marched me indoors, lecturing me about obedience and wondering aloud what else she needed to do to me to get it into my head that I needed to mind her... I let her rant. I felt relaxed, only then realizing how on-edge I’d been over the past few days. Mom forbade me to watch movies for the remainder of the period I was grounded; she and Jared moved the TV from the living room into her bedroom just before bed, which had Jared glaring at me as though it were my fault. I just nodded and said “Yes, ma’am,” and after they went to bed, read another book about astronomy that Jamie had checked out of the library for me, then did schoolwork for a while. I was able to concentrate on it better than I had for the last few nights.
But even though going out and watching the sun rise was so beneficial to my mental health, I couldn’t keep doing it. Not often, anyway. Mom would keep escalating until she was locking us all in at night and creating a fire hazard.
After Jamie started eighth grade, I got in the habit of regularly taking a shower near the end of the night, so Jamie wouldn’t have to. (We’d discovered that if one of us cleaned up near the end of our “shift,” the other one would be clean when they came back.) A few weeks after school started, the day came when sunrise fell after Jamie had to catch the school bus, and I finally got to go outside with permission — carrying Jamie’s school backpack, and a second bag with a change of his boy-clothes, while I was wearing the loose T-shirt and sweats that we usually wore at sunrise and sunset. Bobby was there, and Jared, and Wanda from upstairs, who were waiting for the high school bus, and some younger kids were waiting for the elementary school bus.
“Hey,” said Wanda, “I haven’t seen you in several months. Where have you been?”
“I used to only go out at night,” I said, “and now I don’t even do that, because I’m grounded.”
“Is Jamie sick today, do you know?” she asked Bobby, after staring at me in confusion for a moment.
Bobby looked at me. “Should I tell her?”
“I might as well,” I replied. “I’m Jamie,” I said to her. “Or at least I turn into him at sunrise... any second now.” The sun was already poking its head over the horizon.
One of the buses was approaching down the street, but I couldn’t tell yet which bus it was. Wanda was still staring at me, and looked like she was about to ask a question when I suddenly woke up in the playground that evening.
The next morning I had more time to talk with Wanda. “You’re really a separate person from him?”
“Yeah, we have the same memories up until the day we transformed back in March, but different ones since then.”
“You seem different in other ways too.”
“I think we both got some personality changes from the transformation. Me, I’m more comfortable being a girl than I would have expected, and him... I’ll let Jared or Bobby tell you about him. All my interactions with him are at second-hand.”
“That must be weird.”
“You have no idea.”
“When I first saw him a few months ago, I thought he was my age... until he got on the middle-school bus.”
“Yeah, the transformation made both of us look older.” I turned to Bobby. “Haven’t seen you in a while, what with being grounded and all. How are you doing?”
But he hadn’t told me much before the sun rose and I was back in the playground.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
Once the kids on the bus saw me turn into Jamie, and told other kids at school and their families about us, it wasn’t more than a week before we had a reporter knocking on our door. I found out about it when I woke up in the playground that night with TV cameras and lights pointing at me.
part 10 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.
Things were going badly for Jamie. Once I started changing into him on the school bus, soon everyone at school knew. Bobby told me something about how people were treating him, and I saw some of the mean comments people were leaving on his social media account. (He hadn’t changed his password again, and I hadn’t let on that I’d figured it out. I sent him another friend request once my existence was public knowledge, but it took him a while to accept it.)
I’d started watching the late-night news after Mom and Jared went to bed, and it seemed that more kids were transforming every day. And there were more and more horror stories on the news about bad things happening with the transformations — particularly with our personality changes and what would later be called our “tricks.” Only a small fraction of us had serious personality disorders, but those and the inhuman-looking ones got the lion’s share of the news coverage. The first time I heard the word “Twisted” used to describe us was in a news story about a kid who had used his power to paralyze his parents and older brother, then tortured them until the cops came in to investigate the screams. That story got a lot of coverage for weeks on end, and there were people calling for all of us transformed kids to be rounded up and quarantined.
I realized, reading and hearing about other transformed kids, that Jamie and I were among the weirder ones, and I wondered why we hadn’t gotten any reporters wanting to interview us, or interview other people about us if we wouldn’t talk. But then I realized that, until I started turning into Jamie at the bus stop or on the bus, hardly anybody knew about me, only about Jamie, and if you didn’t know about me, his change was pretty normal as transformations went — the single most common type, becoming a little taller, better-looking, more athletic. (That “most common type” was only a plurality, not a majority by any means, but Nia Clarence got a lot of mileage out of those kids in her publicity campaigns for Altered rights. She was one of the last holdouts to keep using “Altered” instead of “Twisted.”)
That didn’t last, though. Once the kids on the bus saw me turn into Jamie, and told other kids at school and their families about us, it wasn’t more than a week before we had a reporter knocking on our door. I found out about it when I woke up in the playground that night with TV cameras and lights pointing at me; I have to admit I did not react well, remembering how most of the news coverage of kids like me I’d seen was slanted to show how weird we were. And I had no idea what Jamie or Mom might have told the reporter and cameraman.
“Um, hi? Who are you?” I was flustered, okay? A moment after I said that, I realized it was a silly question; I knew what these people were, if not their names.
“I’m Amelia Nichols,” the reporter said. She was from one of the cable news networks — we didn’t get cable, which is why I didn’t recognize her. “You don’t remember meeting me?”
“No. You’ve obviously met Jamie...”
Just then I saw Mom over behind the reporter and cameraman — it had been hard to see her at first, with the bright lights in my eyes, and I wondered if Jamie had been able to get a decent view of the sunset. Mom was waving at me frantically with one hand and making a zipping-the-lips gesture with the other. I wasn’t sure if that meant “don’t say anything” or “don’t be sarcastic,” and decided to ask.
“...Excuse me, but my mom doesn’t like me talking with strangers. I’m not going to talk to you unless she introduces us.”
“Fine,” Ms. Nichols said, and to her cameraman: “Take five, Mike. Let him — uh, her talk with her mom for a few minutes.”
I went over to Mom and spoke to her in a low voice. “Is it okay if I talk to her?”
“Yes, but be nice,” Mom whispered. “They’re paying us five hundred dollars for the interviews. They already talked with Jamie.”
“All right. Anything in particular you want me to say or not say?”
“Nothing about being grounded, or why... and nothing about your power.”
“Of course.” I turned and walked back over to the reporter. “Mom says it’s okay.”
“Great. Mike, can you get both of us with the swing set in the background...?”
We moved around at Mike’s direction until he said we looked okay, and then Ms. Nichols said: “So... Diana. I understand you don’t remember anything that happens to Jamie?”
“That’s right. We used to be the same person, but we’re separate people now.”
“So you have multiple personalities?”
“Kind of. Dr. Ware says it’s not like the usual dissociative identity disorder. We’re not crazy, we’re just two sane people that take turns being awake while the other one’s asleep.”
“That would be Dr. Jonathan Ware, the neuropsychologist?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He’s been doing research on kids who’ve transformed, him and some other professors from the university. Dr. Darrington’s the only other one I’ve met, but I think there are a couple of others.”
“You said that you and Jamie ‘take turns being awake.’ What is that like?”
“One minute I’m sitting on the bus on the way to school — I never get there, I always turn into Jamie partway there — and the next I’m standing here in front of your camera and lights. And... I guess I never see the sun except when it’s rising. And I don’t see a lot of people outside my family, and the kids on the school bus.”
“That must be difficult.”
“I guess it’ll be better later in the year, when the nights are longer and people stay out longer after sunset. The hardest part was during the middle of the summer, when my little sister’s bedtime was before sunset, and I didn’t get to see her except when she woke up with a nightmare.”
“So you always change into Jamie at sunrise, and he changes into you at sunset?”
“Yes.”
“Even if you’re indoors and can’t see the sun rise or set?”
“Yeah. It happened one time when we were at Dr. Ware’s lab, in some kind of X-ray machine, so he could watch what happened when we changed. And some other times we’ve been indoors.”
“How do you feel about being a girl?”
I thought I’d already said that, but I answered anyway. “I’m okay with it. I mean, back when I was a boy, I would have thought it would be terrible, but it’s not that bad. A little inconvenient sometimes, but no big deal.”
“You’ve changed your name to Diana. Was that your idea, or did someone suggest it?”
“It was my idea to come up with a new name. So people wouldn’t get me and Jamie confused, or think we were the same person. I suggested that Jamie should do the same, because he’s not the original Jamie any more than I am, but I guess he decided against it.”
“Interesting! So you think you’re a completely different person from the original Jamie before the alteration?”
“Not completely different. Not like some kids who’ve transformed. But I’m not the only one who got personality changes; daytime-Jamie got some too. I just don’t want the fact that he goes by our original name, while I’ve changed my name, make people think I’ve changed more than him, or that he’s the original and I’m a spinoff, or something.”
“How do you know he’s had personality changes? You’ve never met, right?”
“No, but I talk to people who see him. Mom and Jared — that’s my older brother — and Jasmine, my little sister, and our friend Bobby. And some other friends I talk to online, who see Jamie at school. And Jamie and I exchange email too.”
“What do you two talk about?”
“He fills me in on what’s happening in the daytime, and we negotiate about stuff. Like — um. I guess your viewers don’t want to hear about my period.”
“Maybe not,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m curious about how that works, though. We can cut this part out later.”
“Well, I mean when we change, our clothes aren’t affected. So we have to wear loose stuff, like an oversize T-shirt and sweat pants with no underwear, or else the other one will be pinched in certain places. And when I’m having my period...” I explained about our arrangement, and how Jamie hadn’t liked it at first but grudgingly agreed it was the least worst we could do.
“If you consider yourself a girl now, do you regret not being able to wear more feminine clothes? T-shirts and sweats are comfortable, but I’d hate it if I had to wear them all the time.” She was dressed in a navy blue blouse and skirt with probably three- or four-inch heels.
“Oh, I don’t wear this all the time. Just at sunrise and sunset. Usually I go inside and change clothes pretty soon after sunset, and then change back into the T-shirt and sweats after I shower, before I catch the school bus.”
“Do you bring a change of clothes for Jamie with you, or does he keep them in a locker at school?”
“I bring them with me. Um, and I guess he keeps stuff in the locker in the gym too.”
“What do you like to wear?”
“Pretty similar to this, I guess, but stuff that fits better. T-shirts and jeans, mostly.”
“I suppose you don’t have much opportunity to go out and show off anything nicer.”
“Not much. This time of year, the evening service at our church is almost over before sunset, and our church is pretty casual anyway.”
“You stared to say something about Jamie having had personality changes. How do you think Jamie has changed?”
“Well, he’s more confident about talking with girls than we used to be. So am I, I guess, but for a different reason. And Bobby tells me he whistles a lot more than we used to — all kinds of different tunes, sometimes ones he makes up himself.”
“You said you’re more confident about talking with girls for a different reason than Jamie... would that be because you’re a girl yourself?”
“Yeah, and because I’m not distracted by how pretty they are.”
“Oh! So you like boys now?”
“No, why would you assume that?” I said, annoyed. “I’m asexual; I’m not attracted to anybody.”
“Are you sure? You said you haven’t seen anybody but family...”
“Not often, but I’ve seen neighbors around the apartment complex, and kids on the school bus, and people at the hospital and the university.”
“The hospital?”
Oh, shit. I couldn’t tell her about that... But yeah, I could mention the first emergency room trip. “When Jamie first turned into me, and I couldn’t remember what had happened for the last twelve hours, Mom took me to the emergency room to see if there was something wrong with my brain. They couldn’t find anything wrong. Anyway, yeah, I’ve seen enough guys in person that I’d know if I was attracted to them, not to mention all the people I’ve seen on TV.”
“Have you noticed any other personality changes, in yourself or Jamie?”
I thought about that for a few moments. “I don’t get scared anymore, I think. At least not at the same kinds of things. When I think about this neighborhood and how it’s not safe for a girl to walk around in at night — which is the only time I’m around — I’m not scared, I’m angry. Angry at the criminals who make it unsafe and the police who don’t patrol here very often and the city that doesn’t hire enough police to cover neighborhoods like this.”
“You’ve thought a lot about this, I can see.”
“I’m alone most of the night. I have a lot of time to think.”
“Thank you for talking with me, Diana.”
“No problem.”
It took Mike (I never learned his last name) several minutes to get his equipment taken down and put away. He was still working on it when Mom and I went inside. Jared had already put Jasmine to bed, so I didn’t get to see her that night.
A few nights later, when I came in from the playground, Jared told me: “A couple of the kids at school told me they’d seen you on the news.”
“Oh, cool. Maybe I can watch it on the channel’s website.”
“I don’t think you should,” he said. “I watched it, and... it would just make you mad.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s the way they edited it and spun it, and how the talking heads in the studio introduced it. Do yourself a favor and don’t watch it.”
But of course I did, later that night after everyone had gone to bed. And as Jared had predicted, I got pretty mad. I don’t know if it was Amelia Nichols' fault, or the editor in the studio, but they’d cut it down to about thirty seconds of Jamie talking, and another thirty seconds of me after the footage of him turning into me. And then they’d also interviewed several kids from school, including one who saw me turn into Jamie on the bus in the mornings.
For one thing, this news network had just standardized on “Twisted” as the term for kids like me. (It had been coined by one of their commentators.) They’d gone through the interview and whenever Ms. Nichols used the word “Altered” they’d had her overdub it with “Twisted”, and that’s how the studio talking heads referred to me and Jamie.
For another, they played the part where I said “he’s not the original Jamie any more than I am,” without any of its context, and a similar bit where Jamie said “She’s not me,” and played up the differences between us and the original, as though there was no continuity between the original Jamie and us.
But the worst of it was that they made me and Jamie look crazy. They played footage of some psychologist I’d never heard of talking about dissociative identity disorder — I’m guessing they only used a few seconds out of a much longer interview, and he may not have even known they were talking about a transformed kid. They left out the part where I said Dr. Ware said what we had wasn’t the usual DID. Then they had the psychologist talking about sexual repression, and interleaved that with me saying I wasn’t attracted to anybody.
By the time I got done watching it (it was only two or three minutes) I was so mad I couldn’t sit still. I paced back and forth in the living room, wishing I could go out, and knowing I could probably get away with it but the consequences would be severe if I didn’t.
Finally I sat down and wrote an angry post to my social media. But none of my friends were up this time of night, and I couldn’t expect a response until tomorrow night, so that was only a partial relief of my feelings. I went to that site that tracked transformed kids, found the forum, and posted there about that tendentious news story — a little more calmly this time. Some of the people who used that site kept all kinds of hours, and I saw a couple of replies to my post when I looked at it again an hour or so before dawn.
Somebody wrote:
“My daughter came home crying from school a few days ago because kids at school were calling her ‘twisted.’ I could strangle that talk show host that started calling kids that! Not that kids can’t be pretty cruel on their own, but they certainly don’t need adults encouraging them.”
Another person said:
“The same kind of thing happened when the local news interviewed me and my son. They edited the interview to make me look pathetic and my son look crazy. They exaggerated his compulsion and made it define him, and left out all the other stuff the reporter talked with us about. I think it was the editor in the studio who’s responsible; if the reporter were aiming for that he wouldn’t have asked so many other questions only to have the editor cut them out.”
I sent a link to that forum thread to Jamie’s email and asked him if the kids at school were treating him different since the interview aired. Then I showered and got ready for the school bus.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“So, all of the girls in Diana’s posse swore they’d never have anything to do with yucky boys. But this guy named Jupiter saw one of them, a girl named Callisto, and thought she was pretty. He was a no-good kind of man, always chasing after girls and then leaving them alone as soon as they fell in love with him.”
“Yuck,” Jasmine commented.
part 11 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.
Jamie wrote back:
“It looks like a lot of kids saw the interview, and they sent links to it to all their friends. The five hundred dollars Mom got out of this? Not worth it. Some kids were already calling me ‘twisted’ before but I think there’s more of them now. And they’re making fun of me for having multiple personalities, too.”
It wasn’t long before I got some of that treatment too, early mornings on the school bus. I tried to ignore it, sitting with Bobby and talking with him while I pressed my face to the window or turned around and looked out the other windows, trying to see as much of the sunrise as I could while the bus meandered around picking up different kids. As sunrise got later and the bus got more crowded before I checked out and Jamie took over, some kids who stood in the aisles because all the seats were taken by the time they got on realized what I was doing and took pleasure in standing between me and the sun; that made me a lot madder than any of the mean things they said about me.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to control my temper for very long at a time before Jamie came in and took over. I wasn’t sure if Jamie would get punished for stuff I did, but I suspected so, despite the school district recognizing our separateness by sending Mr. Martin out to teach me. I managed to stay out of trouble, reminding myself that if I used my power on the kids who were messing with me, I’d probably crash the bus and any nearby cars.
I never did get to school; the sun always rose before school started, because just as sunrise got toward the end of the bus ride, daylight savings time ended and I wasn’t riding the bus at all for a while. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Halloween was approaching, and Bobby and I were planning our costumes. On my first Halloween as a girl, I had a lot of costume options I’d never considered before, which was cool, but I still didn’t have any more money to spend on them, and no older sister whose closet I could raid for costume parts. I scrounged around our closets, and Bobby’s, and made a trip to a thrift store with Mom and Jasmine; they went over there with Jamie, and he turned into me in the parking lot. I found what I needed and put it all together.
On Halloween night, I woke up holding Jasmine’s hand, wearing Jamie’s costume. He’d dressed as the Flash, and as usual when I woke up wearing something other than the loose stuff we tried to change in, it was too tight across the chest and at the hips and too loose everywhere else.
“Hi, Diana!” Jasmine said, and hugged me. “You want to go home and change into your costume?” She was wearing her best white Sunday dress with a plastic tiara we’d found in the toy department at the St. Vincent de Paul store, and one of Mom’s necklaces.
“You bet,” I said. Jamie had apparently been taking her trick-or-treating around our apartment complex; we were over by the south building, and Jasmine had a respectable amount of candy in her grocery bag.
So we went back to our apartment, to Jasmine’s bedroom, and I changed into my costume while Jasmine showed Mom the candy she’d collected so far. I put on a dark green skirt — it was the first time I’d worn one, except trying them on in the store. I didn’t think I’d make a habit of it, but this one was long enough to be modest, and loose enough to not restrict my movement. Then a similar blouse, and sandals, a plastic garland in my hair, and finally the bow and arrows.
They weren’t a real bow and arrows, of course; I didn’t have the money. But I’d found a toy bow and arrow set, with suction cups on the arrows, at the thrift store.
“You look really pretty,” Jasmine said.
“Ready to go, princess?”
“Yay!”
Mom smiled at us. “You can keep her out for another half an hour,” she said. “Then I suppose you can hang out with Bobby until his bedtime.”
“Thanks.” So Jasmine and I went out and picked up where she and Jamie had left off, knocking on doors in the south apartment building.
“Trick or treat,” Jasmine demanded, holding out her bucket.
“My, what a beautiful princess!” said the old lady who’d answered the door, dropping a couple of pieces of hard cinnamon candy into Jasmine’s bucket. “And you, Maid Marian, are you this sweet girl’s sister?”
“Yes, I’m her sister, but I’m not Maid Marian. I’m Artemis.”
“Oh! Yes, I can see that. I’m not sure if the Greeks had green dye, though; I know they had purple dye... It looks very nice, anyway.”
“I tried making a peplos out of an old sheet,” I said, “but Mom said it looked indecent.”
“Oh, well. Happy Halloween, Artemis and Princess...?”
“Princess Jasmine,” Jasmine said.
And so we went on to the next apartment, and the next, and the next. Twenty minutes later, we’d knocked on every door in the building. I was about to take Jasmine over to the west building, but she said she and Jamie had already worked it over.
So we went back to the apartment, and Mom said it was time for Jasmine to go to bed. She demanded a bedtime story, and I obliged her; I helped her get out of her princess costume and into her pajamas, and set my bow and arrows aside, and sat down on the edge of her bed once she was under the covers.
“What do you want to hear about tonight?”
“Another story about Diana.”
“Do you want to hear about Siproites again?”
“No.”
“Or Actaeon?”
“No. Tell me a new one.”
“Give me a minute, let me think.”
Most of the myths about Artemis weren’t suitable for a little girl; I’d been stretching things with Actaeon, really. After a few moments' thought I came up with this:
“So, all of the girls in Diana’s posse swore they’d never have anything to do with yucky boys. But this guy named Jupiter saw one of them, a girl named Callisto, and thought she was pretty. He was a no-good kind of man, always chasing after girls and then leaving them alone as soon as they fell in love with him.”
“Yuck,” Jasmine commented.
“So he knew Diana’s girls wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was a guy, but he was a magician too, like Diana. So he made himself look exactly like Diana, and then he came to Callisto when she was alone and said, ‘Hey, let’s go hunting.’ So they did, and they shot a deer, cooked and ate some of it, and sat around talking for a while, and only then he revealed who he really was.”
“He turned himself into a girl?” Jasmine giggled.
“Yep, and then back into a boy a few hours later. So Callisto was freaked out that she’d been hanging out with a yucky boy, but then she decided he wasn’t that bad — they’d had a lot of fun hunting together and stuff — and so they started hanging out secretly when Diana wasn’t around, kissing and stuff.”
“Gross!”
“Tell me about it.” (In one version of the myth, Jupiter raped Callisto. But I thought that didn’t make sense; why would Artemis punish her for getting raped? It must have been consensual if Artemis got mad about it.) “But one day Diana saw them together, and she was mad because Callisto broke her promise not to have anything to do with yucky boys. As soon as Jupiter was gone she confronted Callisto, and then she turned her into a bear.”
“Rarr!”
“So Callisto the bear wandered off into the woods and did bear stuff, slapping fish out of the river and eating them, looking for honey and getting stung by bees, things like that. And then she had a baby.”
“A people baby or a bear baby?”
“A people baby.” (This part hadn’t make any sense to me, but I came up with an explanation.) “Diana didn’t know she was pregnant, or she would have turned the baby inside her into a baby bear too. She couldn’t take care of a people baby because she was a bear, so —”
“Why not? That mama gorilla took care of Tarzan when he was a baby.” (I’d wondered where she’d heard about Tarzan; later I found out Jamie had told her that story.)
“But Callisto hadn’t ever heard of Tarzan. This was a long time ago. And gorillas have hands and bears don’t. Anyway, she took the baby boy and put him on the doorstep of a poor couple that couldn’t have children of their own.”
“How’d she carry him if she didn’t have hands?”
“In her mouth. — Very carefully. So the boy grew up, and when he was about Jared’s age, he went hunting one day and he ran into his mother. Only he didn’t know she was his mother, because bear.”
“Oh no!”
“So he was about to shoot her, but Jupiter happened to be there — probably he was sneaking around trying to get in with one of Diana’s other girls. And he turned Callisto into a moon.”
“What?”
“Really, she’s one of the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter had a planet named for him, you know.”
“Why’d they name a planet for him if he was so mean?”
“Beats me. It should have been named for a girl, right? But guy astronomers think that planets should be named for guys and girls only get moons and asteroids named after them. Except Venus, she got a planet named for her. Anyway, there she is. We can look at her in my astronomy book tomorrow.”
“What happened to her boy?”
“Well, he was so surprised to see a bear float off into the sky and turn into a moon that he dropped his bow and arrows. He decided to become an astronomer, but back in those days they didn’t have telescopes, so once she got far enough away he couldn’t ever see his mother again. He still had his adoptive mom and dad around, though, so that was okay.”
“And they lived happily ever after?” She didn’t sound too sure.
“Pretty much. Good night, princess.” I kissed her on the forehead and slipped out of the room.
Rachel Timson broke up with Jamie after she found out he turned into me at night — I heard from Bobby about it several days after it happened. But it wasn’t long before Jamie started dating another girl at school, still without Mom’s permission. They couldn’t do much outside of school because she didn’t have a brother they could use as a pretext for Jamie to come over. So one night I got an email from Jamie:
“Do you remember Angie Dawes? Well, I’d like to go out with her, but you know Mom won’t like it, and Angie’s mom isn’t too keen on her dating yet either. But she wants to meet you, and her mom lets her invite girl friends over. Of course, for you to get there at a reasonable hour, I have to go, and then turn into you there... see? Then her mom will give you a ride back here a couple of hours after sunset, or maybe I’ll take the bus home the next morning if you two decide to do a sleepover. Well, wakeover in your case. I don’t know exactly when but it won’t be on a school night.”
And on one of my social media accounts I had a friend request from Angie. I accepted it, and a couple of nights later I had a private message from her:
“My mom says I can invite a couple of friends over for a sleepover this Friday-Saturday. Do you know Teryn Simon? I invited her too. If you can come, have your mom call mine,” (she gave me the number). “I’ll tell Jamie to get here a while before sunset; I want to see him turn into you. I’m not allowed to date until I’m fourteen but that’s in just another couple of months, and I think I might want to date Jamie but I want to get to know you too first. I hope we can be friends. I remember you being a nice guy before you and Jamie changed.”
I talked to Mom about it the next evening, and she said Jamie had told her, and if I wanted to go, she’d let Jamie go over there after he spent a couple of hours watching Jasmine so Jared could do his homework. We’d have to get all our other homework done after we came home Saturday.
So Friday night, I woke up in Angie’s back yard. Angie and Teryn, girls I hadn’t seen since before my change (we didn’t ride the same bus) and never knew very well, were standing a few feet away staring at me in awe. An older woman was with them — probably Angie’s mom, I figured.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Diana.”
“Wow!” Teryn said. “And you don’t remember anything that we did with Jamie for the last half hour?”
“No, I don’t remember anything that’s happened to Jamie since we changed back in March, and he doesn’t remember anything that happened to me.”
“Come inside,” Angie said, “it’s too cold to be out here any longer.”
“Where’d Jamie leave my clothes?” I asked.
“He gave me a bag; I put it in my bedroom with Teryn’s things. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Go on upstairs, girls,” Angie’s mom said as we went inside. “I want to talk to Diana alone for a minute.”
Angie and Teryn went upstairs, and I stayed with her mom in the kitchen.
“I saw the news report,” she said, “after Angie told me about you, and that you’d been on the news and all. You’ll change back into a boy at dawn, right?”
“Yes. He’s a different person from me, even though we used to be the same person.”
“And you’re a girl. Mind, not just body?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can spend the night with Angie and Teryn in Angie’s room, but I want you to come downstairs before dawn.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll be up early to check.”
“All right.”
Angie’s was the first girl’s bedroom I’d ever seen besides Jasmine’s, and a four-year-old has a very different taste in decoration than a thirteen-year-old. I liked it; it wasn’t all pink and princessy like Jasmine’s room, but you could definitely tell a girl lived there. I saw my bag, picked it up and started to go in the bathroom to change clothes.
“You can change here with us,” Angie said, and giggled nervously. “I mean, you’re really a girl, right? Jamie said you were, that he was really a guy and you’re really a girl... not a boy in a girl’s body or something?”
“Yeah, but... I’m not wearing a bra,” I said. “And I’ve never been undressed in front of anybody but my mom... and doctors, I guess.” I thought about Artemis bathing with her girl friends and said: “Okay, whatever.” I took off my shirt and dug through my bag for the bra.
Meanwhile Angie and Teryn were changing into pajamas. They didn’t take off their panties, but they took off their bras. Angie’s breasts were as big as mine, Teryn’s a little smaller.
“Why are you putting on a bra?” Teryn asked.
“Why are you taking yours off?”
“'Cause we’re going to bed soon,” Angie said. “After we watch movies and do our hair and stuff. You mean you’ve been wearing a bra to sleep ever since you changed?”
“No, I don’t sleep. I mean, I kind of do, but it’s when Jamie is awake. I generally put on a bra and panties and real clothes soon after sunset and then change into loose sweats and a T-shirt, with no underwear, just before dawn.”
I put on a clean T-shirt, since I didn’t own any pajamas, and pulled down my black sweat pants. Underneath them I was wearing jockey shorts stuffed with toilet paper; in the few minutes since sunset the toilet paper had gotten spotted with blood here and there. (I’d started my period a couple of days earlier; only a week to go.) I took my panties and a pad from my bag and pulled them on, then put on another, girlier set of sweat pants. By then Angie and Teryn had finished changing into their pajamas.
“What do you mean, you sleep when Jamie is awake?” Teryn asked.
I explained what Dr. Ware had said about it.
“So he could be having a dream right now?” Angie asked, her eyes brightening.
“Maybe. The odds are against it, though. I think Dr. Ware said you dream about a quarter of the time while you’re asleep.”
“So do you dream about stuff that happens while Jamie is awake? Would he dream about the stuff we’re doing now?”
“Maybe? Probably not, I guess. I don’t remember as many dreams as I used to, before the change, and the one I remember best didn’t have anything to do with Jamie.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed. “What did you dream about?”
“I was out in the woods with some other girls, and we were hunting deer with bows and arrows.” I didn’t say anything about rescuing that woman who was being attacked, and killing the guy who was about to rape her.
“Huh. I wonder why.”
“I can guess. I’d been reading about mythology lately...” I told them a little bit about Artemis, and how she was also known as Diana and I’d named myself after her.
After that they wanted to watch a movie, and I said “sure,” though I wasn’t enthusiastic about the teen romance they’d picked. We trooped downstairs to the living room and watched it sitting on the sofa; I enjoyed it more than I expected, which isn’t saying much. Just after it was over, Angie’s mom came downstairs.
“Are you enjoying the sleepover so far?” she asked me.
“Pretty well, I guess.”
“Is this your first time hanging out with other girls since you became a girl?”
“Yes, except for my little sister. I don’t get out much.”
“Have fun. I expect Angie and Teryn can teach you a lot.” She smiled.
Angie, Teryn and I sat around talking for a while, and ate a snack before going upstairs to Angie’s bedroom. Teryn wanted to show Angie a makeup trick she’d learned recently, and after they’d made Angie up, they wanted to try it on me too. I shrugged and said sure. When they got done with me, I looked a lot more glamorous; my face didn’t go well with my loose T-shirt and sweat pants. I felt like I should be wearing a fancy dress or something.
“Have you ever worn makeup before?” Angie asked.
“No. Like I said, I don’t get out much.”
“Let’s do your nails too.”
“And mine,” Teryn said; “I want to try something different.”
Teryn cleaned off her old nail polish while Angie showed me how to apply it, demonstrating on a couple of the fingers of my right hand and then leaving me to do the rest. I did kind of a sloppy job on the first few fingers, but I got better by the time I was done, and touched up the other fingers a bit after that. When I stopped concentrating on that, I realized Angie was saying something to me.
“What was that?”
“I said, what do you normally do all night, if you don’t sleep? You said you don’t get out much... that must suck.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Besides doing schoolwork, I mostly read and watch movies. I used to play video games but our game system died.” I didn’t tell them about my nighttime excursions.
“You don’t ever get to go see friends?”
“Just my friend Bobby; he lives in my apartment complex. But I can only see him for an hour or two some nights when he doesn’t have much homework.”
“I’ll try to invite you over more often.”
“Thanks.” I suspected she wanted to use me as an excuse to see Jamie more often, too; I wasn’t enjoying this girly stuff as much as I’d hoped I might, but it was a nice change to get out of the apartment and see different people.
After doing our toenails, we went down to the living room and watched another movie, then ate some nachos and cheese before going upstairs again. After we took some pictures of each other and a group shot Angie set up using the camera on her laptop, we cleaned off the makeup and went to bed — or Angie and Teryn did. Angie let Teryn have her bed, and laid down on a pallet, while I sat in her desk chair. We lay or sat in the dark, talking about various things, until first Teryn and then Angie dropped off to sleep. After I’d listened to their breathing for a few minutes and was sure they were asleep, I sat up, picked up my bag, and went downstairs to the sofa, where I got out the book I’d packed that morning and read until almost dawn, getting up to stretch every hour or two. Just before dawn, I went into the downstairs bathroom and changed into our loose T-shirt and sweats. I’d come out and was about to go out in the back yard to watch the sun rise when Angie’s mom came downstairs.
“Good,” she said. “You’ll be changing back in a few minutes, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. I was just about to go outside. I kind of need to watch the sun rise.”
“Or you won’t change back?”
“No, I’ll change if I’m indoors with no windows, I just get really fidgety and claustrophobic.”
“Oh, I’m sorry... I won’t keep you. I like your nails, by the way.”
“Thanks; Angie taught me how to do them.” I paused. “Oh, no! I need to wash this stuff off before Jamie wakes up, or he’ll be really pissed at me. Can I borrow some nail polish remover? I don’t want to wake Angie up going in her room rummaging in her things.”
“Sure, come on upstairs.”
I followed her to her bedroom, though I’d rather have been going outside, and she showed me where the nail polish remover was. I started working on that, but I found it hard to concentrate, and I asked: “Can I take this outside while I watch the sun rise?”
“All right. I’ll come with you and take it back in after Jamie — ah, wakes up.”
So we went outside, and I kept one eye on the sunrise while I finished removing the nail polish. It was only moments before the sun rose that I remembered the toenail polish.
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“Cool! Were you this smart before you transformed? I wasn’t. I transformed while I was doing some science homework, and suddenly everything made a lot more sense, and I read to the end of the textbook by the end of the week, and asked Mrs. Taylor for some more books...”
part 12 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.
But I never got an angry email from Jamie about the toenail polish. Apparently, it being Saturday and cool weather, he never got around to taking off his socks to take a shower until Sunday morning before church, by which time I’d already removed it using nail polish remover I borrowed from Mom before she went to bed. Jared overheard our conversation, and promised to tease Jamie about wearing toenail polish all day. I pleaded with him not to mention it, and he said he might think about staying quiet until he needed blackmail material.
I got an email that Saturday night from Jamie, asking how the sleepover went, and saying:
“I hope you got along well with Angie and Teryn, but if you don’t like them, try to pretend you do. Don’t mess this up for me. I think Angie looks at this as a package deal, she’ll be my girlfriend if she can be friends with you.”
I wrote back saying yes, I’d enjoyed the sleepover (I might have exaggerated a bit; it was definitely a nice break from staying in all the time, though Angie and Teryn weren’t the friends I’d have chosen if I could pick from any of the girls at school), and I wouldn’t mind doing another one or hanging out with Angie in the evening after Jamie went on a date with her. If he could talk Mom into allowing it, or sneak it past her.
The toenail polish started me thinking about what changes carried over between us and which got reversed when we changed. When I’d had an IV in, getting a transfusion, and wounds in my arms, the IV had popped out when Jamie woke up, and the wounds were gone when I came back. But the nail polish didn’t flake off when Jamie woke up. What if I got my ears pierced, and was wearing studs when Jamie woke up? I suspected they’d pop out when Jamie woke up, and the holes would have closed up by the time I woke again. What if one of us got a tattoo? Not that I wanted one, but I wrote Jamie an email asking him to promise not to get one either, until and unless we understood more about what carried over and what didn’t.
Back in the spring, Dr. Ware had told us about a new support group for kids who were transformed and their parents. It took a while before one of their meetings fell on a Saturday when Mom had the day off and some cash to spare, and she left Jasmine with Jared and took Jamie to it. To hear him write about it on social media, it wasn’t that great. And I didn’t think I’d ever have a chance to go, since the meetings were once a month, Saturday at noon; they met at a restaurant, the kids at one table and the adults at another. But then they planned something more elaborate for a Christmas party, and Mom told me it was going to be in the evening so I could be there for most of it. She was taking Jasmine and Jared too; the siblings of the transformed kids were invited.
So one evening in December I woke up looking out a western window of a building strange to me. Jared was standing by.
“Hey, Diana. We’re at that party Mom told you about.”
“Where’s the party?” We were alone in what looked like a Sunday School classroom; there was a map of the Holy Land on the wall, and a whiteboard, and a shelf of books I didn’t take time to examine.
“This way.”
“Did Jamie bring... oh, good.” I realized there was a clothes bag draped over a chair; I picked it up and Jared led me to a ladies' room, where I went in and changed into my underwear, blouse and dress pants, and nicer shoes. When I came out, Jared showed me the way to the party, which was in the fellowship hall on the east side of the church.
There weren’t a lot of people there, probably less than forty, and some were adults or kids too old to be transformed, and some were too young like Jasmine. She was running around with a couple of other little kids, and Mom was keeping an eye on her while standing talking to three other ladies of roughly her age. There were only eight kids about my age, who I figured were transformed.
“Diana!” Mom called when she saw us come in, “I want you to meet some people.”
So I went over and let Mom introduce me to her friends, all mothers of transformed kids, and then one of them introduced me to her daughter, Megan Hughes. Megan was a little shorter than me, and more than a little overweight.
“Wow! So you’re like the same person as that Jamie guy who was here earlier?”
“No, we’re different people. But he transforms into me at sunset, and I transform into him at sunrise.”
“So he went somewhere to transform in private, I guess. He didn’t tell us a lot about you, he mainly talked about his compulsion to watch the sun set every day, and about his superpower. Do you have the same power?”
“The physics is really similar, Dr. Darrington said, but the effect is kind of the opposite. He makes the light brighter, and the colors weird, and I make it pitch black, but only for other people — I can still see. We both just shift light frequencies around.”
“Cool! Were you this smart before you transformed? I wasn’t. I transformed while I was doing some science homework, and suddenly everything made a lot more sense, and I read to the end of the textbook by the end of the week, and asked Mrs. Taylor for some more books...”
“I might be a little smarter, but it’s hard to tell. I’m interested in more stuff, anyway, mainly astronomy and mythology. I’d kind of like to be an astronomer when I grow up, but I don’t know if I can even go to college with my condition.”
“You mean living only at night?”
“Yeah.”
Megan introduced me to the other transformed kids, and over the course of the evening a few more families arrived, with three more transformed kids. We didn’t really have much in common besides the experience of being transformed; the ways in which we’d transformed, our interests and personalities were all over the map. One girl wouldn’t tell us how she’d changed, except that it wasn’t physical; she was apparently really embarrassed about her personality change or compulsion, whatever it was. There was a guy just over fourteen, a few months older than me, whose orientation had changed; he’d been bi before, and now was purely gay.
“I sort of know what that’s like,” I said. “I used to be attracted to girls and now I’m asexual.”
“I don’t think that’s the same,” he said.
“No, I guess not.”
I talked at least briefly to all the transformed kids, except one who was really shy and wouldn’t talk to anybody except her older sister and dad. I spent most of the evening hanging out with Megan and a twelve-year-old Asian kid with pointed ears and white hair, Aaron Rothschild, who was also into science. He wanted to figure out how our superpowers work, and asked me a lot of questions about mine and Jamie’s powers. He also mentioned he hadn’t been Asian before his transformation, though I could have guessed from his name; he was Jewish.
Several of the kids had some odd feature like Aaron’s white hair and pointed ears, but none were completely inhuman-looking like a few kids I’d seen on the news or read about on the web. Those of us who had superpowers showed them off; I begged off at first, saying I’d throw a damper on the party and scare the little kids if I made it pitch-dark in the fellowship hall, but Megan and Aaron begged me, so we went down the hall toward the bathroom and a little way past it, where I showed them my power.
Almost half of us had some kind of compulsion like my need to watch the sun rise. “Dr. Ware figured out that learning new stuff about science is a compulsion for me, not just something I enjoy,” Megan told me. “If I go too long without learning something new, I get bored and frustrated.”
“I’m kind of like that when I can’t go out and watch the sun rise. When I was grounded and couldn’t go outside... that was horrible.”
“What were you grounded for?”
“...I’m not supposed to tell.” I wasn’t sure if it might be okay to tell Megan, but I remembered Mom telling me not to tell that reporter. I added in a whisper, “I might tell you later, in private.”
I would have liked to have stayed longer, but Jasmine got tired and cranky, so Mom gathered us up and we went to the bus stop. Jasmine was asleep by the time we had to change buses, and Jared carried her to the bus stop, onto the next bus, and into the apartment.
I hadn’t gone out walking at night again for a while, and I was getting antsy despite the relief afforded by visits with Angie. She invited me over again a couple of times in December — not for sleepovers; her mom or dad drove me home a couple of hours after sunset — and again for New Year’s Eve. She and I and several girls from school had our own party upstairs while her parents and their adult friends were partying downstairs; Angie even stayed up long enough to see me change back into Jamie, after her parents' guests had left and her parents had crashed so hard they couldn’t wake up to chaperon Angie and Jamie.
I think that was the first time Jamie got lucky. I’m not sure, because I’d asked him and Angie not to tell me how far they went. He probably wouldn’t have anyway, but I think Angie would have.
Megan invited me (and Jamie) over too, but that was tricky because she lived out in the suburbs, where the city buses didn’t run. I — or rather Jamie — would have to change buses three times, switching from a city bus to a county bus at the county line, and then walking almost a mile to her house from the nearest bus stop. So after a considerable amount of negotiating and planning by Mom and Megan’s parents, it was arranged that Megan’s dad would pick Jamie up one Friday afternoon after work, we’d spend the weekend at Megan’s place, and Megan’s dad would drop me off at school early Monday before work. I had a blast; it was much more enjoyable than my sleepovers with Angie, though I was grateful for those too. I gather that Jamie didn’t get on quite as well with Megan and her brother Will as I did.
Alone in Megan’s room at night, I told Megan about my brief campaign of vigilante justice and how it had ended, and she told me about how she’d lost all her popularity at school and most of her friends when she gained twenty pounds in thirty seconds. “I can’t get it off,” she said, a few tears leaking from her eyes. “No matter how little I eat or how much I exercise, I don’t burn off fat. Mom and I tested it one time — I went a whole day without taking in anything but water, and she checked my blood sugar every four hours. I felt hungry, but my blood sugar never got low and my weight didn’t drop. On the bright side, I don’t gain weight when I eat more, either. Dr. Darrington says it’s my superpower,” she added with a bitter laugh. I hugged her.
“I know it sucks,” I said. “It sucks to never see daylight either, though I guess the sunrise is the best part of the day and I do see that. But never seeing Tony and Ali — their parents won’t let them stay out late and won’t let a girl sleep over with them — that sucks too.”
After a while we got off the subject of our troubles and started talking about science, which was a much cheerier subject. We also watched several science fiction movies over the weekend, which Megan said she didn’t like before her transformation.
“It’s kind of fun to pick them apart and figure out how many things they got wrong,” she explained, after telling me why time travel couldn’t work the way it did in the film we were watching even if it were possible. “But once in a while you find a movie where they did get a lot of the science right, and it’s a real gem.”
Jamie’s and my fourteenth birthday was coming up in a few weeks, and then the one-year anniversary of our transformation a month after that. Mom arranged her work schedule so she could be off the Saturday after my birthday, which fell on a Thursday that year. We had a small family dinner with just us and Jason on Thursday evening, and then a bigger party on Saturday afternoon and evening. It started at four and went on until a couple of hours after sunset. Megan and Angie were going to spend the night.
When I watched the sun rise Saturday morning, I still wasn’t sure if Tony or Ali’s parents were going to let them stay after dark. So it was a pleasant surprise to see Ali there, along with Mom, Jared, Jasmine, Bobby, Angie and Megan, when I woke up at sunset. “Happy birthday, Diana!” they all said, more or less in unison.
“Ali, man! It’s so good to see you!” I hadn’t seen him in almost a year, though we’d chatted online a bunch of times.
“Hi, um, Diana.”
“It’s okay, I don’t have cooties or anything.” Jasmine picked that moment to come over and give me a birthday hug, and I knelt down and squeezed her back.
“I know.” He smiled awkwardly. “It’s just, well, I hear about you and I’ve seen photos, but seeing you change, it’s...”
“Weird, I know.”
“You know what it’s like to lose time,” Bobby said, “but you don’t know what it’s like to watch one of your best friends turn into another of your best friends.”
“I guess so. Hey, is Tony still here?”
“His mom only let him stay about hour,” Mom said. “He had to leave right after Jamie opened his presents. He left one for you, though.”
“Cool.”
And it was pretty cool, though not as cold as Mom said February evenings used to be when she was a girl. We went inside and warmed up. Aunt Alice, Megan’s mom, and Ali’s mom were sitting on the sofa chatting.
Mom gave me a hug, and then Aunt Alice got up and did the same.
“Do you want to open your presents now?” Mom asked. “I don’t think Ali can stay much longer.”
“Sure,” I said.
I went to Jasmine’s room and changed clothes. When I got back, Mom put a candle on one of the remaining cupcakes and lit it. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” and I blew out the candle. I wished that if Jasmine transformed when she got to be my age, she’d get something easy to deal with. But I didn’t really believe in birthday wishes anymore.
Then Mom pointed out the presents Jamie had gotten that were for both of us. Mom and Aunt Alice together had gotten us a used tablet, so Jared and Jamie or I could work on stuff at the same time, and Ali had gotten us an old handheld game system and a couple of cartridges.
After that, I opened the presents that were just for me. Bobby had gotten me a book on plans for Mars colonization, and Megan a book on exoplanets. Jared and Jason gave me Amazon gift cards. Angie gave me a makeup kit, which I thanked her for and really did appreciate though I didn’t know how often I’d have a chance to use it. I obviously didn’t need it to attract boys, but maybe it would help me fit in better with other girls once in a while. Tony had given me a cartridge for the game system Ali had given me — they’d obviously coordinated that.
Ali had to leave right after that. Bobby stayed for another hour, but he seemed a little uncomfortable being the only boy among a bunch of girls. (Jared had gone to his room after I opened my presents, though Jasmine was allowed to stay up a little past her bedtime, charming the socks off of Angie and Megan). And I think Angie was ready to have Bobby gone so we could start the girly part of the sleepover. Megan and Bobby got along well, though, which I was happy to see.
After Jasmine went to bed and Bobby left, Angie and Megan unrolled their sleeping bags on the living room floor, and we watched a movie. Afterward, we used my new makeup kit on each other, and chatted about various things. I realized that Angie and Megan didn’t have a lot in common, except basic stuff that nearly all straight girls were interested in — stuff I wasn’t interested in, like boys, and how to look nice for boys, and so forth. But since I remembered being a boy before my transformation, they wanted to pick my brain about how boys think. I tried to remember what it was like, and tell them something useful.
“I am sooooo sleepy,” Megan said after a while, and yawned.
“You could lie down,” I pointed out. She was sitting on the other end of the sofa from me, and we were watching a movie with the sound turned off and closed captioning on. Angie was already asleep.
“Not yet. I want to finish this movie. And I want to talk with you some more. I don’t see you enough.”
“I’m glad you could come.”
“Bobby’s really cute.”
“Do you want me to give him a hint that you like him?”
“No!” she said, alarmed, and then: “Did I say that out loud?”
“Maybe you should go to bed, if you’re that sleepy.” It was getting hard for me to relate to sleepy people. I sort of remembered what it was like, back before our transformation, but the memories were getting vague.
“Don’t tell him,” she said, suddenly seeming wider awake. “It wouldn’t work, we go to different schools and live thirty miles from each other, and besides I don’t think he likes me.”
“Sure he likes you. I’m no expert on romance but I could tell.”
“Not like that.”
“Maybe. Well, suit yourself.”
She curled up in her sleeping bag as soon as the movie was over, and was snoring softly a few minutes later.
But I remembered what she’d said, and made a point of inviting her over as often as Mom would let me, especially during Spring break and summer. It turned out, eventually, that Megan and I were both right; Bobby liked her, but it wasn’t until a long time later that he got past her appearance and liked her “that” way. That’s getting beyond the scope of my story, though. In the last few years what they call “Twist Narratives” have become popular; at first it was mostly second-generation Twisted who went through their Twists in the 2070s, and then some old-timers like me started getting into it. Not that none of us had ever told our stories before, but I at least have never told it at this length and in this much detail. Anyway, a Twist narrative is supposed to begin just before the Twist and continue a few weeks or months after it, and I’ve already run past the usual time. I only lived through half of our first year, though, so I think I should be allowed some slack.
I still went to visit Megan more often than she visited me, because her parents weren’t entirely comfortable with her visiting me in my terrible neighborhood, though they liked me well enough; they only let her visit when Mom was off work and could supervise us. I spent the first couple of days of our Spring break with her, though I had to return home Sunday afternoon as Megan’s school didn’t have their Spring break until a week later.
A few days later, the anniversary of our change arrived. I went out to the playground a few hours before sunrise and watched the moon rise. The moon wasn’t full this equinox, but waning crescent. I hoped Bobby would do as I’d asked. He’d been pretty reluctant when I asked him a couple of nights ago, but he promised he’d try. After the moon set, I sat down on the bench, took out our tablet, and read until about half an hour before sunrise, when I turned it off and started watching the eastern sky. It was barely ten minutes till sunrise when he came out, blinking sleepily.
“I’m here,” he said. “I set my alarm like you asked, but it was so hard to get up...”
“Harder than staying up all night?”
“That was different. No, probably not quite that hard, but we were helping each other that time.”
“Thanks for being here.”
“No problem.”
“You got your camera ready?”
He fiddled with his phone a minute, then held it up and nodded.
I turned toward the reddening sky, and said: “Hail, Apollo, lord of the day! Artemis, lady of the night, greets you and bids you farewell. When I return, you will be gone, and we will never meet in this world. But exasperating as you are sometimes, you’re still my brother.” I faltered, realizing that I hadn’t planned this as well as I’d thought. Then I said: “Thank you for helping make these last six months a lot easier than our first six months.” I gave Bobby the sign, and he stopped recording.
“And thank you, Bobby,” I added. “Without your help I don’t think Jamie and I would get on half so well.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll show him the recording as soon as he wakes up.”
“Any second now. See you tonight.”
And the glorious sun that I loved so well, but would never see for more than a moment, came fully into view.
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