It's this sort of thing common, or is it all about the curse or whatever? I've never really traveled much, or at least not to cities. We used to go to some of the closer National Parks when I was a kid, but Ma had to sell the camper after the cancer took Dad, and even if there had been money we were never really sure there'd be a job to come back to if we took time off. I didn't really think about it much, though, I guess because I never had it to miss and there weren't a whole lot of kids in my high school who were going on European vacations.
There were some folks with money around, though their kids went to private schools. I guess Lambert was one of them. I didn't know him before I answered the ad; he must've been a couple years ahead of me anyway. He bought a car on eBay, and since he never liked to fly, he put something in a local Facebook group looking for someone to drive to Bangor and back with him. Beat the hell out of my real job, especially since they were cutting hours due to the market for soybeans drying up or something. He seemed all right and I guess he figured I could be trusted with his car on the drive back, so it was a done deal pretty quick.
We stopped at the Inn the night before driving up the coast - Lambert found it online and apparently the last two-week block of the year was an especially good deal for when you didn't necessarily know when you'd be in and out. We got there on Monday, crashed for the night, and then started for Bangor in the morning. We spent a couple hours after lunch inspecting and test-driving the Porsche - well, I kind of stood around for that - and then I was back in the BMW for the ride back. We got dinner at a restaurant on a boat in Portland before stopping at the Inn for the night.
I was awoken by a high-pitched scream, bolting up in bed and looking on the other side of the room where there was a topless woman holding her breasts. It was clearly the same room we'd been in last night - Lambert's stuff was on the end table - and I was a little fuzzier from the previous night's beers than I should have been, so I asked who she was.
"I'm Lambert Allen - who the fuck are you?"
"It's me, Toby!" That when I noticed my voice didn't sound right in my ears and my hair was long enough for some to be in my eyes. "Uh, at least I think I am." Hung over enough to go check, I stood from my bed and walked across the room to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. "How in the heck?"
As you can tell from the subject line, there was a girl in the mirror, about my age, but I was shorter. Not like super-short - I was six-foot-two and lost about six inches or so. It made the t-shirt I'd been wearing really loose, although I could see a vague shape of breasts and nipples under it. I was kind of surprised my boxers hadn't fallen down, but my butt was enough to hold it up. I guess that may go with being Latina - my skin wasn't quite black but a pretty dark brown. I pulled the neckline out to look down and then felt inside my boxers - I was all girl.
It woke me up and I ran back into the bedroom, where Lambert was pulling a suitcase out from under his bed and opening it. He said "you have got to be shitting me" as he lifted the flight attendant's uniform that was on top out.
I did the same, only the top layer on mine was a letter "to the new Dunia Cortes". It described the Inn's spell, and laid out a bit about the life I was inheriting. Shes my age, 23, from the Miami area, Cuban-American although it was her grandparents that came from Cuba as children as opposed to someone more recent. She had just been hired as a flight attendant and was expected to shadow veteran Alicia Polawski, but wound up following her to Maine when she wouldn't cut vacation short. She lives with her father in "Little Havana" and has a boyfriend, but Hector is in the Army and stationed overseas. She's become a retired truck driver in Phoenix, which feels as crazy as me being her.
Lambert's letter filled in some blanks; it turns out that Alicia Polawski used to be an college professor and a guy, but he got bored and decided to move on, saying the new Alicia could keep her life or not and he didn't care (she didn't care?). He also seemed to have invited Dunia to join him specifically because it didn't look like there were going to be 13 people to trigger everything otherwise. This Harmon guy sounds like a piece of work.
If there were any people who has been through this before, I didn't meet them, aside from the hot dog vendor who said the thing that freaked me out the most, that there was nobody staying at the Inn after us until spring, so our lives and identities would be in a sort of limbo until then. He said it's not so bad, because we'd have first dibs on our room and explaining not being around is easier than fixing a mess someone else makes of your life, but that's almost right months! What's my Ma going to do without me, to start?
Lambert seems to be more in a daze than I am. He thought he might go home anyway, but apparently Alicia looks a lot like his last couple stepmothers and his dad is on the prowl again. He also really doesn't like flying, and I almost wonder if it's bad enough for him to quit Alicia's job ahead of her next shift and try to live on his credit cards until then. I'm not going to do that - this is apparently Dunia's dream job and she seems nice enough - although there's a pretty big handbook to study in the next week or so.
(It's a lot! It looks simple enough on TV and in the movies, but I'm already afraid of screwing up the details or having to give someone CPR in midair!)
What he is sure of is that he's not leaving his new Porsche behind. One of the coupons in the flyer that pointed us to Cary's hot dog truck and this blog is for a place that offers long term parking and storage, but he says there's no way he's leaving his new baby in some beach town that empties out for the winter. He suggested we just do what we had been planning to do, me driving the BMW and him driving the Porsche, just south on Route One rather than west to North Dakota, but i said that I sure as heck wasn't going to get pulled over driving someone else's car as a Latina woman, so he reluctantly decided to park that one for the winter. It's probably a good thing we initially packed pretty light, because it's not like the little sports car has the trunk space to handle four people's luggage if Lambert and I had packed like Dunia and Harmon/Alicia.
It's weird as heck. I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a really expensive car, and every time I look down rather than forward, I see how dark and slender my arms and legs are, and I've definitely got a figure even if my pink t-shirt doesn't show the boobage that Lambert's top does (we were not left a lot of clean clothes, and I really struggled to pull these shorts onto my big new butt this morning). When we do get to Miami tomorrow, some guy is going to think I'm his daughter, and then I'm going to have to start working on airplanes starting next Wednesday despite having barely been out of North Dakota before. I'm kind of tapping this out on my phone just so that I'm not staring at my body or Lambert (he's a little older, but pretty sexy) or talking in our new voices, something to do, and maybe find out if we're doing the right thing taking our stuff along to our new homes. What I've seen of the entries here, folks usually just leave things there, but maybe not for months.
Maybe this will be my only post because I'll be too busy soon enough. We'll see.
-Toby/Dunia
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