Aidan/Emilia: Getting Started

I got a few messages expressing concern about my first sight of and conversation with Rusty in the last post, and it's actually kind of gratifying, because my first instinct was to sort of dance around it.  Rusty wasn't having it, though; he saw me typing on Emilia's laptop, looked over my shoulder, and said "you have to put in the bit with me asleep with my hand on my boob, it's the funniest part!"  I told him I was making the post to try and get advice, not make people laugh.  He pouts, which looks exaggerated with Monica's face.  I say I'm not sexualizing my fifteen-year-old kid.  He says the Inn did that, but that it didn't feel sexy to him, any more than touching his own body in the shower or while putting on suntan lotion does.

He's right about that, or more right than not.  A lot of the time, when you read or watch stories about people who change into the opposite sex or switch bodies, they're getting hot and bothered right away, but when you get past the part where it's unnerving, breasts are often just kind of weirdly distributed weight, and I have yet to get turned on by trying to get them settled in a bra.  I want the boys to be practical about this.

And, to a certain extent, I want anybody reading this who might give me advice to understand that Rusty and Kutter are very different kids, and I'm not sure what helps one is going to help with the other.  Rusty jumps to making jokes very quickly, while Kutter tries to get his facts straight.  They're good, smart kids, but I sometimes have to pause and consider that in both cases, they might be trying to look more confident than they are.  For instance, they both seemed kind of thrown when we got to the airport and had to get the bags we've inherited from there to Brooklyn in the middle of rush hour.  The airports, the plane, and then the subway were a lot of strangers packed in tight, reminding them of how they were shaped now, and that they were going to have to navigate a much bigger city than they'd ever lived in.

They were glad to see a PlayStation in the apartment's living room, though I told them they had to unpack before starting to play.  They did, snickering at who pulled shoes with higher heels or skimpier panties out of their luggage, and then laughed when they saw that it was apparently Emilia's, or mine now.  We got pizza and then they played until well past midnight.

The next morning, I was up before them again, so I took inventory.  Mostly well-stocked on cleaning products in the bathroom.  Nothing worrisome in the medicine cabinet.  A lot of food in the fridge needed to be thrown out, since the apartment had been empty a couple weeks longer than expected, and there were other things I stared at for a while.  There was some instant pancake mix, so I figured we were having pancakes for breakfast.

Around 9am, the boys rolled out of their rooms in nightshirts and cotton shorts, ready to dig in.  We ate, and then before they could start arguing about who got to shower first, I told them to stay at the table.

I cleared my throat.  "I assume both of you have looked in the girls' checking accounts online, just to make sure the information the ladies put in their letters was accurate?"  They nodded, saying that, like mine, it was just a few thousand dollars, including anonymous wire transfers that seemed to confirm that Emilia, Monica, and Katey did in fact have money to burn in their new lives and were willing to help us get started.  "Okay.  Well, I've looked at the lease.  That's not going to get us to the end of the year, let alone to when the Inn reopens in May.  We're going to need jobs.  All of us."

They looked a bit stunned; between their mother's life insurance and my own pretty good wages, they had never had to work during the school year and Kutter had only had his first part-time job this summer, and I'd told him not to go overboard.  As much as they hadn't really cut loose, the previous few days had still kind of been vacation, and I don't know that they'd considered how everyday life is going to work yet.

I'd been standing and pacing, so I sat back down.  "Look, I know that the big change in the past few days has been becoming girls, but you've also become adults, and that's part of it.  I'm sorry."  I suddenly found myself choking up.  "I shouldn't have to ask this of you, but this is the situation we're in, and it's going to take all of us."  They nodded.

There was an awkward pause, and I cleared my throat a few times.  "On the subject of being adults...  I suppose you noticed that there is beer and wine in the refrigerator, and you may have found, uh, other things in your rooms."

Kutter turned red.  "It's big and bendy and right in the middle of her underwear drawer and I wish I hadn't touched it!"

"Um, okay, I'm sure the girls all have one of those somewhere.  I was mostly thinking of the weed gummies I found in Emilia's desk drawer."  Kutter somehow turned redder and buried his face in his hands.  "Hey, it's okay.  But, anyway, here's the thing:  When we do get jobs, we're probably going to be coming and going at different times and I won't be able to watch you.  I'm going to have to trust you two to be as smart as I know you are, and that might not always mean saying no to everything."

"So...  What you're saying is I should go grab a beer now so that I'll know what I'm in for if someone wants to hang out after work sometime?"

I gave Rusty a look I hoped was withering.  "Well, not now, it's ten in the morning, for crying out loud."  The boys and I laughed, but kind of nervously.  "But, to be serious, it's something we've got to think about.  We're all going to have to try a lot of things without a lot of practice between now and May, and, well, I don't want you to be afraid of it.  I'll be there for you any time - no matter what happens, I'll always choose to be your Dad rather than your friend Emilia."

They seemed to appreciate that, and we all spent the rest of the morning looking for jobs online.  It's a little strange - I may be in possession of Emilia's Political Science degree, but I don't really know much about it, and the boys are in the same boat, so we're all kind of applying for jobs that don't really need a degree - but I keep reading about how unemployment is low, so we'll probably come up with something soon enough.

-Aidan/Emilia

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Mothers & Matrimonies

Hey all, been a minute.  Just dropping in to congratulate Jonah/Krystle on her engagement and state for the record that while I would feel like a complete asshole to ask her to choose a date that's either the weekend before or the one after my brother Max's wedding next summer so that I could just take a couple weeks of vacation and minimize the brutal jet lag next June, I am absolutely not above just casually mentioning this circumstance in a slice-of-life blog entry about how I've evidently reached the point in my life where everybody I know is getting married and it's kind of a pain in the ass.

I am, of course, pretty happy for everybody in my life who is tying the knot, especially them, although I'm not likely to join them any time soon; I had a long string of bad dates before meeting the guy I'm seeing now.  The funny thing is that my mother is starting to get antsy, quoting some statistics about women over 30 getting married or having children, and I tell her that wither you consider me a man over thirty or a woman under, but you can't mix them up willy-nilly like that.  She says it's perfectly reasonable - I've lived that long and I certainly seem to identify as a woman - but she's had two kids and is about to attend her second wedding, anything from me is a bonus.

Meanwhile, both of the Chen-Ais got married this summer, and I was a bridesmaid at both.

For original Chen-Ai/current Bingbing, it's to some guy whose family owns a bunch of factories in Guangzhou, who doesn't seem particularly evil himself, but the rest of his family and friends...  Ugh.  This was my first trip into the Mainland, which I gather isn't necessarily that big a deal for a lot of Hong Kongers, but I've been kind of skittish about it.  I'm not politically outspoken, but folks know I've spent a lot of time in the United States and that I tend to take that perspective.  Plus, I'm a Chinese-American guy who has taken over the life of a Chinese woman and while we've all experienced how the Inn's magic keeps people from believing in it, maybe there's someone in the Chinese government who sees me or the "Lee Yuan-Wei" identity as an asset.  Or just a criminal.

It doesn't seem to have bothered Bingbing, though, who after draining her old bank accounts as much as she could without the lawyers starting to lean on her sought out a new potential rich husband, and this guy is probably a good target because he may technically be what they used to call a "princeling" - wealthy family, educated abroad, not involved with the business's day-to-day - he seems to be an earnest socialist and humble.  Enough that, after I'd wound up dragged along on a few outings with them, I asked if she has Inn-related plans for him, and she stook her tongue out saying "yuk, no interest in having one of those things on my body, and his is big that I don't know what I'd do with it."  I gave her a look and she said she liked being Bingbing and wasn't looking to change.  Much more fun, she says, to be the pretty wife who is good at social things than actually running the business

I think she remembered my skepticism, though, because I fucking swear she had the dressmaker make my bridesmaid dress tighter, shorter, and doing more to push my tits up into a plunging neckline than when we tried them on, so I spent the whole wedding and reception looking like I was some tacky Kong Girl trolling for a rich Mainland husband of my own from among the much-less likable folks on hand.  Just gross even when they weren't grabbing my ass.

(It's been a while, but, no, I haven't become a shrinking violet or anything; I just enjoy guys pawing me a whole lot more after we've established we like and trust each other than before, and part of that is them not being asshats because I'm not one to hide what yoga and dance do for me!)

I admit, I did agree to a date with the least-objectionable one, but I'm glad the night ended on a silly-seeming pop-cultural argument as opposed to actually getting near a second date.  And that wasn't all bad; the guy I'm seeing now had actually been in the restaurant and mentioned it when a dating app matched us up, saying that I was right and he was impressed at my willingness to call something a red flag.  So not a total disaster.

I'm happy for the newest model Chen-Ai, though.  As much as she's made some solid progress in that identity, Cantonese is a tough language to learn at her age.  Six months ago, she met a nice man her apparent age that works at one of the large UK-based banks, they hit it off, and when he was reassigned back home, he proposed.  And while immigrating to a new country by marrying someone from there is not nearly as straightforward as people assume - I've reap up on this "just in case" - Hong Kong to the UK is apparently one of the easier cases; the new quasi-stepfather says that making it easier for Hong Kongers who held UK passports before the handover easier to immigrate was one of the few good/competent things Boris Johnson did.

This was a much smaller ceremony, as a lot of Chen-Ai's friends have sort of fallen away as she disappeared and returned as someone else who had a hard time communicating with her.  It's good, I guess; she's going to be starting a new life on the other side of the world and being able to make a clean break is probably pretty handy, but she gave me this big hug like I was her actual daughter and thanked me for how much I'd helped her to be able to get by so that she could meet someone like him.

I'm not sure what to do with that, really.  I know that I was often a real asshole before going to the Inn and especially while I was Deirdre, and I don't really recall a point when I decided to stop being an asshole.  Anne likes to point to me deciding Benny could keep my old life as that moment, and, maybe, but sometimes I feel like I was more intimidated than generous there, or what it means that I had to be made attractive or female for me to treat others well.  I like myself more than I did, and it's not just knowing that there are folks out there who want to fuck me.  If the thing I've got going now doesn't work out, I know I'll be okay.

But Chen-Ai didn't have anyone from her old life when she got married as Bingbing; her real daughter and the real Bingbing are men in Montreal and I gather she didn't really have any regrets about their not being there.  I don't know if the original Yuan-wei will come when and if I get married, but she came to graduation and we get along okay.  We'll find a way to explain why my folks are there.

Is there a point to this?  Probably not.  It's just been crazy hot and busy and I've had my weekends eaten by weddings lately and I needed to blow off some steam.

-Jordo

Aidan/Emlia: Congratulations?

Congratulations!  You get to be Emilia H---!  I know, you're probably wondering, what's the catch, but there isn't one.  Me and my friends Monica & Katey have been upgraded to really amazing new lives (maybe I'll tell you who we are someday, although you'll understand if we choose to keep it close to the vest for right now).  But that means you and whoever is in the next room get to be us, no strings attached!

That's how the letter i found in the luggage left in my room at the Trading Post Inn starts.  The guy at the hot dog stand says that's unusual, that mostly they're apologetic or laying out what they would rather you not do, or assuring you that you'll be able to return to your real life.  But, he said, it's not unheard of; a fair number of people as young as I look now tend to be impulsive, especially if their new lives look good, so maybe don't worry about it too much unless we don't hear from them or the folks taking over our lives when next year's slots open.

Sorry for kind of starting in the middle here, but I didn't contribute to the blog when we first checked in since it looked like some sort of scam or identity theft thing.  Conventional identity theft, that is.  This just seems like the weirdest part, at least for this blog, so I wanted to put it up top and get people's attention to see if they can help.  Maybe not to reverse this in some way that cheats whatever is making the Inn do this, but because I'm not sure I've seen anything about anyone in quite our situation.

Introductions:  I'm Aidan, until a couple days ago, a man in my late 40s.  I've got two sons, 15-year-old Rusty and 16-year-old Kutter; we lost their mother about ten years ago, and I never found anyone else, although I didn't exactly spend a lot of time looking, because raising two young boys doesn't exactly give you a lot of free time.  These two weeks at Old Orchard were our first real summer vacation in a couple of years.

We'd actually packed to go home the next morning when we went to bed Wednesday night; I set my alarm for 6am.  When it went off, I bolted upright, and then noticed that it was just a little pain around my chest rather than my back punishing me for that.  I looked down, saw that my undershirt was like a tent and the neckline drooped low enough that I could see I had breasts, then ran to the bathroom to take a look in the mirror.

I'm pretty, though my hair's a mess, and my boxers are riding a bit low on my hips.  I do a quick feel inside and almost pass out.

I don't, though, and remember the flier on the desk that said something about not disturbing or looking inside any luggage stored in the closet unless I really need explanations, and that's when I find the letter Emilia left, telling me about the Inn and details of her living situation.  My head's still spinning, because first I think, well, I can't just go off and leave the boys, then worry that they're going to be attracted to me, and then it hits me that the curse is on the Inn, not the room, and I rush through the shared bathroom into their room.

There's two women in there, asleep.  I guess one is Rusty, because (s)he's thrown all the covers off the bed in her sleep the way that he does; (s)he's Asian-American (half-Korean, we'll later learn) and has a hand resting on a bare breast.  The other must be Kutter; (s)he's laying on his/her stomach, one arm dangling over the side of the bed and snoring, brown hair kind of getting in his/her mouth.

I walk over to him first, pull him hair back and give him a shake on the shoulder.  He groggily rubs his eyes with the back of his wrist, opens them, and gives a kind of confused smile.  "Do I know you?"

"All your life, kiddo.  C'mon, I'll show you."  We walk to the bathroom, I put him in front of the mirror, and his eyes go wide.  He taps the glass with a finger, pulls it back, looks over his shoulder to see Rusty feeling himself up and then over the other to see my empty room.

"Dad?  What's going on?"

"Near as i can tell, cursed hotel.  You remember the weird pamphlets on the desks and the bags in the closets."  He gives me a look like I'm planning some elaborate prank, and I shrug.  "I'm in the same boat you are, kiddo, but we'll get through it.  Now, why don't you go to my room for a second so I can help your brother?"  He nods, and I walk over to Rusty's bed.  I'm about to wake him the same way as Kutter, but decide to cover him with a sheet first.  

It lasts a second; as soon as I shake his shoulder he bolts upright, feels that he's cupping his left breast in his right hand, and looks down.  "What the f---?"  Seeing me in the room,  he uses his other hand to cover the other one, then starts thinking aloud.  "If I've got those..."  He gets what coverage he can with his right forearm and then reaches his left hand into his boxers.  "WHAT THE F---?!"

I don't scold him about language.  "Near as I can tell, the place is cursed.  I'm your Dad, and Kutter's in the other room.  Same thing happened to him.  It turned us into the last people to stay here.  I guess these two rooms were occupied by young women."

"No kidding!" He took his hand out of his shorts, looked around, and saw his clothes from the day before by the bed.  "Uh, do you mind?"  I nodded and turned around until he said it was okay.  He was blushing - he hadn't hit his growth spurt yet, and while he hadn't gotten that much taller, the shirt was tight and hiding nothing.  "I, uh, think I'm going to need some new underwear."  His eyes were also going to what was showing for me.  "I think we all are."

I nodded, and said that this is what the luggage left in the room was for, so we told Kutter he could come back in and that's when we found out that Rusty had become "Monica" and Kutter was "Katey" (I'm not going to give our new or old last names, but Rusty groaned when he saw the full name on the driver's license).  We're all 21 or 22 years old - Rusty had a good laugh at being three months older than Kutter now - graduated from the same college and sharing an apartment in Brooklyn.  All of the letters suggested they really liked their new lives and wished us good luck.

I quickly got the idea that the boys didn't want me in the room as they got changed, and I figured that was reasonable; it's not like I've got any special expertise I could offer them.  I did grumble while getting my bra on the first time, envious that maybe they could help each other out.  I must admit that I didn't really know what to do with my hair until I knocked on the door and saw that Kutter had used one of the elastic loops I thought was worn on the wrist to put his into a ponytail.  We'd all gone for t-shirts, slacks, and sneakers, with Kutter grumbling that Katey had just thrown all her clean and dirty clothes into the same parts of the suitcase and who does that?

The next few days were surreal.  We visited the hot dog stand and the guy there gave us some useful hints, mostly not to worry too much because people tend to accept the obvious reality in front of them rather than pick at something that seems wrong.  The first month of learning your body's new normal will be horrifying, but after that, it's only a big deal if you make it that way.  And almost everyone can tread water for a year.

Also, we were in a beach town, but none of us really felt like dressing for the beach.  I tried to set a good example of being comfortable by wearing shorts yesterday - it was pretty close to the last clean clothes Emilia left me - but, wow, that's a lot of leg to show and it was stubbly enough for folks to make comments that made me self-conscious despite everything.

Oh, also - we weren't in the Inn for the last few days, because our check-out time was Thursday morning and their texts were very insistent about us being out of the room, saying that the next couple weeks for the Inn were fully booked and "many people are adamant about their choice of room", leaving out the part about it being about turning back.  It turns out that it is cheaper to find a motel and fly "home" to New York today rather than try to get a flight between Friday and Sunday.

That leaves us here, at the Portland International Jetport (I know a lot of people like to use the train but it's almost as expensive to take that between Boston and New York as flying), hoping there aren't more surprises waiting for us in the big city.

-Aidan/Emilia

Daryl/Zee: Where to next?

Stayed in the hotel room for a couple of nights, but I'm not exactly loaded enough to do that long-term, so I went looking for apartments, but as you might expect, that's also crazy in New York, even when you get to lesser neighborhoods.  I found one that looked pretty nice, and then I got Inn-brain and stopped short of signing a lease.

Breaking up with J.T. messed me up, like every breakup kind of messes you up for a while, except that every cell of my body had been changed from what they had been before I met him to facilitate being with him, and while I wasn't going to try and demand my old life back - it had been freely given with assurances about this very situation, and even if I had done so because I hadn't thought it was ever going to happen then, I'm not that kind of person - the thought of becoming a man again was certainly at the front of my mind.  So I figured, let's not commit to anything.

I don't think I'm gong to do that, though.  I've gotten used to being Zariyah Andrews, and while I'm at least the third Zee, so it's not like I've been entrusted this life by its original owner, I've tried to form some bonds with her mother and other people on her contact list because I feel like I've been entrusted with them.  I've been a woman for long enough that I'd have to not just adjust to all the details of a new life but relearn what it's like to be a man.  And, ultimately, after spending six years with J.T. and seeing it end in an afternoon, I'm ready to move forward.

But how?  And where?

I've come to really like New York, and while I could probably spend the next thirty years in Manhattan and never cross paths with someone I knew from dating J.T., I kind of don't want to risk it.  I don't want to accidentally run into Magda-4 or Harmon/Alicia, either.  Harlem is tempting; I've got a short-term rental there now, and I kind of hadn't realized just how much the Black part of my life was missing until now.

Going back home to Chicago is also tempting, but it kind of feels wrong.  I'll be tempted to return to familiar places, but form new relationships there, and drive myself nuts when they aren't quite like the old ones.  That's something I did being three of J.T.'s girlfriends, and it wears on you.  Plus, I might run into new-Daryl, and that's also weird.

A weird thing I kind of wasn't expecting is how many of the friends I've made as Zee find this course of action completely reasonable.  They know my backstory, that I met J.T. and uprooted my life to be with him and were sympathetic to both the impulse and the way it blew up and left me adrift, and it's a kind of funny thing that both sexes will react mostly the same way, but with slightly different different emphasis.  Men and women both find it romantic, but men tend more to "she's setting you up and is going to think it's funny when she dumps you" while women are usually more thinking about he might wind up hurting you without thinking about it and you'll be without a support system.  Not all men (does that rate a "TM"?), obviously, and not all women, but on the average.

So by the same logic, men will hear you talking about moving after a relationship ends and think you're nuts ("don't give her the satisfaction!") and women will be like, yeah, that's kind of extreme, but I get it and have sometimes wished it were an option for me - and are you okay, by the way?  Again, not everyone in a demographic, but there's a trend.

Looking over this, it makes it sound like I think J.T.'s dangerous, and he's not, and I don't think he would be if I stuck around but continued to reject any attempt to reconcile.  I just kind of find this really interesting and worth focusing on, because having been with him for so long, the fact that the end of a relationship can be an especially scary time for a woman is something I've avoided.  But it's something I'll have to keep in mind for the future, especially if I wind up someplace without other Inn veterans for support.

-Zee