Tyler/Alan: Milwaukee and a fresh(ish) start

Shacking Up

There was some hostility between me and Kitty when I arrived in Milwaukee, mostly stemming from the fact that neither of us expected to see the other. As far as I knew, when Kitty became Greta (and her husband became a 10-year-old boy) they had packed up and gone to Providence, and stayed there. So when I opened the door to "our" apartment and saw her there, I just stood in the doorway, surprised. And she was surprised too, because she was in the middle of a make-out session with some guy - I think his name was Zane or Zack or something.

At first, all she could do was blurt out a panicked "You!" While Zane peeled himself off her and turned to face me. I'm a tall guy as Alan, but I'm lanky and haven't exactly bulked up. This guy looked like he hit the gym often enough, and while I can fight, I have never thrown a punch or attempted a takedown in this body so I don't really know my own (lack of ) strength in that area.

I stammered, trying to cover, "Greta! I'm back!"

"Greta?" said her beau, "I thought you said your name was Kitty."

"That's... what I like to be called," she said, covering embarrassedly, "And this is..."

"Alan," I said, "I'm the... ex, I guess. Roommate."

"You live with your ex?" said the guy.

"No... I live alone," she said rather curtly. "He lives... somewhere else."

"My name's still on the lease, isn't it?" I asked - part rhetorically, part genuinely. I had been paying the full rent while I was in Vermont. "Anyway. Key still works. I'm surprised to see you here."

"I could say the same thing," Kitty sneered. "You won't be staying long, will you?"

I had planned on dropping right into bed, but the last thing I wanted was to deal with this after a long day on the road. "No, just... stopping by..." I sighed, "I see you're busy, I'll come back tomorrow."

"Call first," she said sharply.

It was late, and I didn't know any of Alan's friends or relatives so I stayed in a motel. The next morning I called. She must have seen Alan's name on the call display because instead of Hello, she said "What do you want? I thought you were in Virginia."

"Vermont," I corrected, "And things... went bad for me there. I needed to refresh."

"Well good luck," she said, and then she hung up.

I could see she was being difficult, but I had been paying rent on that apartment for months, and as far as I knew it was unoccupied. I had a right to it, and if I couldn't use it I wasn't going to let her squat for free.

I went over and went right in, dropping my stuff by the door. Zane or Zack's shoes were gone. I called out, "Honey, I'm home."

"Get out of here, you idiot!" she said, storming out from the bedroom in a huff.

"Easy, easy," I said, "Let's just talk. I've been paying your rent apparently, so you owe me that much. Money, too, but we'll get to that."

She sunk down to the couch. "Fine, cut me off, I don't care. It doesn't matter."

"Okay, let's not... look, what happened, how did you end up here?"

The story went basically how I expected. She and Chet stayed in Providence for a short while before the police arrived - apparently they had gotten a tip that someone may have been squatting at their house, and lo and behold it's a grown woman with a minor from out of state. Chet agreed to go back to the "Jenkinses," against Kitty's wishes, because he felt Wisconsin was too far from the Inn, and the brush with the cops left him skittish.

"Things were bad before we went to the Inn, and the transformation didn't exactly help," she said bitterly. "I guess we're still technically married - we even e-mail sometimes... but it's starting to feel like it's all in the past. Like it's for the best if we go our separate ways. I'm realizing that we both knew the marriage was in trouble, but we didn't know the other person knew."

"And does he know about this? About Zane, or Zack or whatever?"

"He knows a bit," she said. "He doesn't care about me, He's having the time of his life out there. He's got a ton of little girlfriends, I see them on Facebook and Insta-whatever..."

"Instagram," I said, embarrassed that I both knew and felt the need to correct that. "He doesn't... actually date them, does he?"

"Maybe, I don't know," she scoffed. "It's perverse." (More perverse than whatever they were doing together in Providence? Who knows.) "He's scum and most of the time I want nothing to do with him."

"What about the rest of the time?"

"The rest of the time I cry myself to sleep wondering how I let him get away."

This conversation took almost all day, I'm just paraphrasing and cutting it down. I shared my story, too and we bonded over our break-ups, how badly the Inn had screwed up our (already borderline, in both cases) lives.

She had been living there since October, rent-free thanks to me. She made some money here and there by taking temp jobs that she was not well-suited for but never staying long enough to get really established. "It was just the easiest way, the apartment was just sitting here..." she said, "Don't make me leave."

Begrudgingly, I admitted it would be cruel of me to cast her out, but it wasn't fair to me to have to pay for an apartment I couldn't use. I told her I would take the couch, and that she would have to work hard to find work she could do. Of course, I didn't take into account exactly how long Alan's freakish legs are, so the couch wasn't exactly... ideal.

Weeks pass. True to form, I'm working already, but the only restaurant job I could find was bussing (I had just missed the hiring period for most restaurants heading into summer, and I think I got a bad reference out of one of my Vermont jobs.) To fill things out, I took up Alan's old driving job for Threo, an Uber-knockoff, and Kitty, well... like she said, she doesn't really have many skills, except access to a bit of rainy day savings she and Chet divvied up and kept from the new-them.

What Friends Are For


As to how we went from reluctant roommates to something more, well... it didn't all happen at once. Kitty is a very social animal, so she had already ingrained herself with Greta's friends. Naturally, they all had questions about where I was. Her answer was that I "just vanished with some woman." That definitely didn't make me/Alan sound good and leaves a lot of questions. Still, apparently they weren't so scandalized that I was Public Enemy #1 when Kitty let it slip that Alan was back in town. They wanted to see how I was and get some more details.

I protested at first - these people aren't my friends, and in the long run I wasn't going to be here very long, so why get attached? But she was insistent and brought them around the apartment to run into me.

The first meeting - there was six or seven people there, a few couples and some single friends - was rough, because I was supposed to know these people well and had no prep time. They grilled me about my missing months, but I deflected - a skill I learned well from my time as Lauren. Basically, I alluded to the idea that something (and yes, someone) had gotten between me and Greta, but we were moving past it... and we weren't sure where we stood. When you talk in cryptic terms like that, people don't tend to pry for further details, (if they're polite.)

Of course in reality, I was pretty sure where we stood. Roommates. Fellow Inn Victims. Maybe even uneasy friends, given the fact that I didn't particularly care for her when we first met, but my sympathy for her situation had grown. I wasn't looking for more and although I knew she was right man-hungry, I didn't really see myself as filling that position. But a few things happened over the course of time.

I think having to talk to her friends as though we were "Alan & Greta" (instead of "Alan" and "Greta") made her hungry to establish something concrete between us. I started noticing signals. First I thought they were in my head: a lingering gaze at me, a text to see how my day (or night, if I was out driving) was going. Little signs. I didn't know how to feel about that. First I thought it was in my mind, and then I felt like I didn't want the attention, and then... I kinda did, because hey. I can't deny that looking the way Kitty does... a tall, svelte, cute-faced young woman... getting positive attention from her felt good on a primal level. But still I played it off.

Then we started talking. Really talking. About our lives before the Inn, about my experiences since. I think the conversation that did it for me was when she asked me about the year I spent as Lauren. I wanted to help her understand what her husband might be going through, being a teenager with the mind and experience of an adult. "It's not exactly like being a teen... you know so much more, everything isn't so life-and-death. I kind of had to laugh and roll my eyes at my friends who were constantly coming to pieces over boys and the like. But there's this rush and excitement when things are going well. You're still in a body that's a little out of control, and that's intoxicating."

"What was that like for you? Did you make any... mistakes?"

"No, no... I was good. I had lots of opportunities, and at times... like, when you want to blow off steam because things are just so crummy, and there's no... goodness. You're still human. You want sex, and you want love and attention and it's like... where are you going to get it? Not grown-ups. But the people who look like you, what they have to offer, you don't want exactly that either. I... don't envy your husband right now."

Being Lauren brought with it a ton of contradictions for me. It sucked feeling so trapped between places, second-guessing every thought I had and wondering if it was coming from my mind or my body. If I had landed in a grown woman's body I might have behaved very differently, relaxed more... but the way things were, I had to be definitely on guard. I wanted attention but I didn't want to want it. Because all my available options were unappealing to me, I focused on the one least realistic but most sought: Meg. Maybe I did idealize her, but the thought that we were meant to be together after all that crap, that I had to keep my slate clean for when I could finally declare my feelings for her, kept me from doing a lot of stupid things.

As I revealed these things, and she didn't judge me for any of them, I felt closer and closer to her. And there was even a moment when I thought "I could kiss this person right now." But I didn't want my actions to be confused by the intimacy of the moment.

It was two days later, after rolling it around in my head for a while, that I phrased it this way, over take-out: "I'm going to come right out and say what I think we're both thinking. You and I should sleep together."

She came off as stunned, but I think she was just playing. "Wow that was very forward of you, Tyler... I don't know what to say."

"Think it over," I said, playing along with her coyness, "I think it would be good for both'a us to have the outlet. If either of us is going to have somebody, it should be... each other."

"You mean like... no strings attached?"

I smirked, "Well... we already got the strings, don't we? Out there, we're Alan and Greta, a couple, but in here, we can just be Tyler and Kitty, two folks having a good time. We didn't ask for this. But I think... well look, I just think it could be good. It will help us both get over what we've been through."

She leaned in and pressed her lips to mine for a moment. Pulling back, she smirked, "You're not a very good kisser."

"I'll be more ready next time."

And so it began.

I'm not going to pretend I don't still feel guilty about things. Meghan might be reading this, and the story of me admitting to her that Kitty and I were having a fling (ahead of revealing it on this blog) was not one of the best feelings I've ever experienced, sure as shit, but it was a necessary awkward conversation so that we could all get on with our lives and maybe I could feel free to talk about things on this blog again.

Sometimes I feel regret, when I'm lying in bed with Greta, because I know it should be someone else. I shouldn't have even gotten here, but things happened how they did and I... I responded the way I did. You can't un-ring that bell.

I'm just someone trying to find the most comfort he can in a shitty life. That may be all I have left, for as long as my days.

Meghan: Mobility

Sorry it's been a month. Time flies...

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house... with a beautiful wife...

Some days I wake up and I can't believe my life. It's a bit trite to say, but the past year feels like a dream, like it didn't happen. It did happen to me, but there's hardly any evidence around me to say so. I'm back in my own home, wearing my own clothes, communicating with my own friends for the first time in a year. But there is one notable absence: my cane.

In my early 20's, I was in a car accident that left me a little handicapped: standing or walking for long periods caused me a lot of pain. I wasn't a great candidate for surgery, and while physical therapy helped some, I was inconsistent in keeping up with it, unmotivated... resigned to my fate.

When I became Tasha, I remembered what full mobility was like, and relished it. I danced around the kitchen, did yoga, worked on my feet as a waitress. Yes, the weight of Tasha's improbably-sized F-cup breasts caused some back issues, but it was nothing compared to what waiting in line at the DMV could do to my real body. And forget concerts (because everybody stands), amusement parks... leisurely strolls were my maximum. I was never the most athletic girl, but I became very sedentary.

When Carrie arrived in my body, she told me she wasn't using the cane very much. At first we wondered if the Inn had somehow "fixed" me - or at least helped the process along. Then she floated the idea that some of the problem may have been in my head. That upset me, made me feel weak, and I didn't want to give it any credit ("magic hotel" sounds so much more likely than "psychosomatic pain," sure!) Now I'm feeling it for myself - the pain from simply being Tasha dissipated overnight as I felt my melons shrink into little apples, my back muscles ease up, and while I did feel a familiar sting when I first stepped off the bed onto that bad knee, it wasn't nearly as sore as I remember it. I don't know what the truth is behind this recovery, and to be frank, I could hardly care less.

Now that I've picked up some good wellness habits as Tasha, I don't plan on abandoning them as myself.

I knew the body I would be getting back wasn't exactly as I left it. I felt lighter and slimmer to a slight degree, although I hadn't weighed myself recently at the time of the change. My hair was left longer and, to my dismay, bleached blonde (haven't I spent enough time as a blonde for my life? I'm going dark again as soon as I get home.) And I don't even want to get into what she did to my eyebrows.

But it's me. It's home.

That first morning, before chaos erupted around us, I slipped out of Tasha's ugly gray sleep bra and marveled at the fact that it had just fit me quite snugly until the night before.

Then Tyler and I took it on ourselves to round everyone else and try to contain the madness. It was a long, exhausting day. Then again, the first time we did this, it was just Ty and I left to fend for ourselves. Here, we felt we had the obligation to use our experience to help others.

Of course, they weren't all receptive.

I didn't want to tell people what to do. I've read where Jordan has said (often and a little crassly for my taste, but maybe I'm just sensitive) how proud he was that he just went on living his life, and in an ideal situation that would be possible for everyone. But what do you say to a grown man who now appears to be a child? Or his teenage son who now appears to be that child's father? For all the talk of "this is my body, it just looks like someone else's," the world runs on photo ID and the letter of the law: you are who you appear to be. Legally, Trevor's parents couldn't even operate a motor vehicle, and if they're kept out of school, child protective services might feel inclined to intervene. Could Erin simply show up at her job appearing to be a young man from New York and say that he was "filling in?" For a year? No.

Then there's the questionable legality of Kitty and Chet resuming their married relationship while one appears to be a minor. If that's even what they want to do.

These points came up during a lengthy and exhausting debate about whether it was right to live these lives or simply ignore what had happened. Kitty was firmly representing the "We don't have to do what anybody else tells us" camp. Erin and Rosie sided quietly with me. I tried to nudge the group towards acceptance of the situation without tipping the fact that Ty and I had been here before.

Kitty accused me of having a hidden agenda, which made her stand all the more firmly against us. I guess my arguments came a little too fully-formed to be spontaneous. Tyler was not much help, even though I repeatedly brought up how his fate was now linked with Kitty -- if "Greta" goes missing, who are they going to come looking for? The boyfriend.

Kitty argued that this was not her problem.

Finally a little voice screamed at the top of its lungs - "ENOUGH!!" It was Trevor's father, in the body of a ten-year-old girl, stepping into the middle of the ring. My guess is that as a middle-aged white man he was not used to being ignored the way we had been doing.

He (ever aware of pronouns - inside, he is a male) - turned to me and asked, "Are you sure there's no way to get our bodies back right away?"

"We have a couple more nights here," I sighed, "See for yourself. It would just happen, wouldn't it?"

Of course, we didn't necessarily have a couple of nights. Kitty and Chett took off before dark, presumably for their home in Rhode Island. I vented my frustration to Ty, and admitted I was annoyed at him fornot helping the argument more, but he seemed to see their side: "Sometimes I wish we could have done that."

"But we didn't, because we couldn't," I shot back.

"That's something they need to see for themselves, then." I wrapped my arms around him. He's always been so zen when I'm getting worked up about things. It's equally infuriating and reassuring.

I had trouble writing my letter. I tend to be pretty picky about what words I use, and in the case of my experience as Tasha, I found it even harder to express, even though there's a year's worth of blog entries on the subject. I wanted to sum the whole thing up grandly and express my truest regrets about the mistakes I made in her name. In the end, I summed it up with "You and I have a bond, and if you ever need me for anything, even just to talk, I will be there."

With Kitty and Chet gone, the remaining "Victims" (can there please be another word for this?) resumed our discussion the next day a bit easier. The new-Jenkinses, who are mostly already a family anyway, agreed to pick up stakes for Albany. Trevor got quite an earful from his parents about dragging that poor girl into it - not that he would have known what would happen, but obviously they weren't fans of the way he snuck a random girl into his room after dark. Trevor's dad fired off numerous e-mails preparing for his extended leave, and crossed his fingers that his successor would be capable of middle-managing a delivery company. Rosie and Erin didn't seem to agonize too badly over their decision to go to NYC.

Which left me and Tyler. "So where to?" I asked him, nervously.

He sighed. "There's an apartment with the name Alan Schmidt on the lease in Wisconsin... but it can wait."

He took my hand and smiled at me. I told him, "Tyler... I don't know what to say. It's so complicated between us."

"It's not," he said. "It doesn't have to be."

"I never promised anything... I didn't mean to give you the idea that this was... like, a sure thing."

"All I want is a shot... a chance to forget the past year and pick up where we left off."

He looks so different from the man I met last year, and so much more different than the way I have gotten used to seeing him. I felt myself smile weakly.

"There's this smile you do," he said, "It's so unmistakable, like you don't want to admit you're happy. I've seen it on Tasha's face and it looks even better on yours."

I took a deep breath. I may not be sure that he and I are meant to be anything, but I owe it to myself to move on with my life.

"Let's just take it slow... for now.

"In Vermont."

So here we are. At my little apartment in Vermont. Beginning... something, in earnest. He's sleeping on my couch. We're playing house. We have spent long nights just talking, walking around, or watching TV, and I find myself leaning over and drifting off to sleep in his arms. It feels so similar to those times when I let myself feel something for Wade, and yet so much better because I know this is real, this is for me.

I still worry about things. I worry something's going to happen and upend this whole arrangement. I worry about the things I don't know, about Alan or Tyler himself. I spend whole days waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then I worry that I'm going to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, like I did with Wade and Mykal.

But then I realize that's doesn't have to happen, because I'm home.

Tyler: Lauren no more.

I could sort of feel it in the air last night, but I was worried it was just my imagination. The preliminary... whatever it is. It was like a small skin irritation that spread slowly from the middle of my body outward. I could actually feel it starting around 2 AM, but I was so exhausted I fell back asleep for a few hours while it, I guess, happened.

I woke up around 4:10 AM, woozy, but seriously alert once I realized it was probably already over with. I was sleeping naked on top of the covers, but it was dark in the room. I sat up and got lightheaded, because suddenly "up" was a lot further of a journey than it used to be. But I also didn't feel the familiar counterweight of my breasts pulled down toward the floor as I did so. My one arm went to confirm, it was a flat, lightly-haired chest, and the other rushed to my crotch to feel the new equipment there.

And I have to say I maybe was a bit too enthusiastic there, because I didn't know the exact dimensions of it, and... well, there's no easy way to put this. Within a minute of realizing I was a man again, I had punched myself almost full-force in the testes. Agh. Sort of a bittersweet homecoming.

I hobbled over to the bathroom mirror to find that the transformation was... mostly complete. There were still some vestiges of Lauren. My chest was flat, but the breast tissue was still converting into muscle, I suppose, because they were still very tender. And then there was my face... a really warped version of Lauren's, with a man's jaw and hairline. I had to look away... it was like being warped in a funhouse mirror, except for real. I actually had to look away, I found it a little disturbing.

I cleared my throat and said the first thing that came to mind, "Testing, testing. My name is Lauren. No, it isn't." Sufficiently deep, I supposed.

I checked my reflection again fifteen minutes later. I no longer looked like Lauren in any sense. In her place was this very tall, very skinny man with a wide, toothy mouth and short, curly, sandy blond hair. A chill went up my spine. I was almost overwhelmed.

There were two sets of luggage in the closet of my room: one man and one woman. The man was Alan Schmidt, 24, of Milwaukee, WI. The woman was Greta Johansen, 23, whose ID indicated she was from Minnesota. The ID also indicated she was 5'11, so I figured she would stand out.

I dumped out Alan's luggage and found something I could throw on - a pair of gym shorts and a tank top. I was about to head to Meg's room when I heard two knocks on my door.

I opened it and looked down - way down, at a face I had not seen in over a year, cheeks streaked with tears, I assume of joy. She looked slightly different, but it was her. She craned her neck up at me and gasped, "Holy..." then collected herself, and ask-stated "Ty?"

I grinned as widely as my new mouth could (which apparently is a lot.) "Yeah. Yeah! It's me!"

She fell into my long arms and I wrapped them around her. We laughed so hard in relief we couldn't breathe. "I was so worried! I was so worried." she just kept repeating. "I know, I know," I said back. My heart was beating faster and faster. I couldn't believe our luck. We had to get all this joy out of our system, though, because as far as we knew we had 11 newly-transformed people to explain things to. We kept saying back and forth "I can't believe it, I can't believe it..."

We didn't hear any signs of panic, yet, so we took a moment to read over Alan's "letter." It was actually just a brief paragraph summarizing Alan's understanding of the curse, followed by a series of bullet points:

• Name, home address, e-mail address
• Works as a driver for Thrio, an Uber-like service
• Has lived with girlfriend Greta for the past year of their four-year relationship
• Current whereabouts (To be discussed at a later date)
• Parents Jack and Mary, 2 sisters Helen (27, married, 1 son) and Doreen (22, single) and a younger brother Jack Jr., (19, with a special note: "Jack is gay and you had better be nice to him. Mom and dad don't know yet." No problem.)
• Allergic to strawberries, lactose intolerant (gee, must have sucked growing up in Wisconsin then.)

When you put it all out on paper like that, it seems like there's not that much to taking over someone's life. And in truth, that's just it... you're given their face and the strange trust of everyone around you that you are who you say you are, and that's half the work right there. The other half is simply not screwing up what's been given to you. There's this old saying I heard, "Leave the fridge fuller when you leave" that seems to have guided me during my year as Lauren.

I did laugh about being assigned a job as a professional driver... I don't mind driving, but I haven't done much of it this past year. Could be bad.

Once we felt settled with what had happened to ourselves, we decided it was time to start gathering people and explaining what we knew. We had made a few friends (and some not-very-friendly acquaintances)  in our short time in Maine, so we felt it behooved us to help them handle this any way we could. At the very least, one of them would be in the body of Alan's girlfriend, with her appropriate clothes and "welcome" letter in my room. I brought it along with Greta's ID.

We figured "Greta" must be in one of the adjacent rooms. In the room to my left was Erin and Rosie. Since we were closest with them, I knocked on their door first. I was about to speak, but Meg went first, saying that if they heard a man's voice they might feel threatened.

"Rosie? Erin? Are you in there?" We heard the sound of some bodies moving around. "Listen, it's... Tasha... and Lauren... if something happened to you, it's okay, it happened to us too."

I stood behind Meg in a non-threatening position. The door opened a crack. A man's eyeball was visible. He looked us over, and gasped "Oh my God." He opened the door wide enough for us to come in.

He was white and about six inches shorter than me. Probably 150 pounds soaking wet, with short dark hair and a tan complexion, with a towel wrapped around his waist. Sitting on the bed was a tall African-American guy with his head in his hands and a blanket covering his lap.

We looked back and forth between the two: "So, who..."

"Erin," said the white guy, meekly holding his hand up. He pointed across the room, "Rosie." Rosie gave a slight embarrassed wave.

"I know the feeling," I said bashfully, "You might remember me as Lauren."

"I can't believe this," Erin gasped. "What happened? What is... did it happen to all of us?"

"Yeah," I said, "Sit down, we need to talk."

We gave them the short version, about how we had been at the Inn a year ago and it turned us into Lauren and Tasha, and how we came back to get our bodies back, emphasizing that it was possible - not a guarantee, but emphasizing that this definitely wasn't permanent.

We searched the room and found that the original owners of those bodies had left their luggage under the bed rather than in the closet. They were Brooklyn natives: Erin was now Chris DeVito, and Rosie was Ahmir Johnson.

The four of us then proceeded to the room to the other side of mine, but it had emptied.  We kept knocking on doors and doing our best to reach out. It didn't appear that anyone besides Meg and myself were second-timers.

We found some young girls, ten-year-old twins. They identified themselves as Trevor's parents. I asked where Trevor was, and they brought me to him. In his room were a man and a woman - apparently the parents of the two girls. The man - probably about 36 or so, paunchy with a shaved head and a beard - stood and identified himself as Trevor. 

I guess he didn't turn out too bad, considering the possibilities, and what happened to his parents. But aging close to twenty years overnight is not a perfect situation either.

We discerned they were the Jenkinses, from upstate New York, also parents to a 13-year-old boy who had not yet appeared. The Jenkins wife/mother was sitting cross-legged on the bed, weeping. I asked who Trevor that was, and he explained that he had met a girl at the club the night we went out, and had snuck her into his room a few nights since. That made me make an involuntary groan of exasperation.

I felt bad that he had brought someone else into this, but it was more or less the same thing that happened to me and Meg, so I was hardly in a place to judge. I paid her a little extra sympathy - not that everyone else didn't deserve some, but she wasn't even supposed to be at the Inn, and now she dragged into it. Her parents will think she went missing, and she has little choice but to go off with strangers and pretend to be wife to Trevor of all people.

I was starting to get stressed, taking stock of who was ending up where and making sure everyone was OK, when I spotted her, this tall, willowy girl with dark hair down her back. Greta. She was dressed in clothes that didn't really fit her long body.

"Hey!" I called out, probably too aggressively, "Hey, excuse me!"

She glanced at me and then went for the door.

I dashed after her, almost tripping over my long legs, "Hey! Sorry! I didn't mean to scare you! I just... you're... sorry, I mean, who are you? Do you know what's happening?"

"We're leaving," she said sharply, "That's what's happening. I don't know who you people are or what you think you're doing here..."

"We changed. And you did too," I said simply, "We... we can explain. I can help. My name is Tyler, but when I came here my name was Lauren Sherman, you might have seen me around, an 18-year-old girl..."

Her eyes bugged out, "Lauren? You're that... you were... you have something to do with this?"

"I didn't... not exactly, but I know something about it. Sorry, who are you?"

Her demeanor relaxed and she held her arms out for a hug. "It's Kitty, darling!"

Oh, great.

I reluctantly let her hug me - we were practically eye-to-eye. I went on, "Yeah, it got all of us who were staying at the Inn... um, I don't mean to be rude, but what happened to your husband?"

"He's in the car," she sighed. "We were just going to go home, all this spooky stuff really freaked us out. My heart is still racing!"

She took me over to where a 13-year-old boy was sitting in the passenger's seat of her Lexus SUV, sulking. We had found the missing Jenkins kid.

I told them not to go just yet, we had a lot of stuff to sort out.

Sorry, this has taken a long time out of my day to write and I need to address some things. Will be back later. I can't wait until I have a minute to feel, somewhat shamefully, good about what's happened to me.

Tyler/Lauren: Filling/killing time

The temperature shot up today, to the point where sitting in the stuffy Inn was no longer appealing to Meg. She finally relented and let me take her out in the sun.

We went down by the beach. Meg wore a modest one-piece under a pair of cutoffs and a tank top. It seemed designed to keep her stuff in. I wore a blue two-piece designed to do the opposite, under a flowery light dress.

Meg has asked from time to time, how I can be comfortable dressing this way, if I'm a man inside. The truth escapes me. One day I woke up and decided I was cool with it - it's as simple as that. Some days I don't, and just opt for jeans and a sweater, but having the option, why not explore it? It'll be gone soon anyway, and it'll just be part of my past.

Alternatively, I'm a girl forever and I should just embrace it anyway. Whatever - zen.

I think it's just a product of being among teens for so long. I got sick of girls hearing "Don't wear low cut tops because it'll distract the boys" that I started wearing them out of spite. I hated being told what to be, being treated like I was at fault for other peoples' backwards attitudes, like I had no agency in my life... the frustration of a real teenage girl. Nobody takes them seriously. And sometimes, they don't deserve it - they like a lot of shallow things, they're fickle, they have ever-changing atittudes based on what's hot at the time - but they also have a lot of ideas, more awareness of the world than they get credit for. Especially the amount of time these kids spend on the internet exposing themselves to new ideas and other cultures. No wonder they want to assert their independence, and I'm right there with them, in a form fitting bikini, if I wanna be.

It's not to flirt, I can tell you that much. If people need to glance, that's their business as long as they don't breach my personal space. No boys, no girls, nobody could approach me these days without being rebuffed. I'm not interested. I hate the idea that the way I'm dressed invites people to come talk to me. Perhaps it does send that signal, but my attitude will send the opposite one. And maybe these guys will learn a lesson.

I did some frolicking in the sand and surf, but the beach was crowded. Meg mostly stayed back in the shade, reading. She said that was something that kept her sane, spending an afternoon in the empty apartment, able to forget whose life she had when she was absorbed in a book.

Back at the Inn, we caught up with those girls I noticed the other day: Erin and Rosie. They both appear to be in their late 20's. Erin is petite and bookish looking with long dark hair. Rosie is a bigger girl, and didn't say much. I think she was expecting some rude treatment from the "hot girls." I hate people laying preconceptions on me just because of how I look, but I can't really blame them. That's the culture. Women are pitted against each other.

Erin commented that she had seen me around the other day and wondered "Who I belonged to," assuming I was with the middle-aged couple who checked in earlier. I scoffed. That would be Chet and Kitty. Chet's an upper-management type and Kitty has a "real housewives" vibe about her. They introduced themselves in passing when I said "You must be the ones making all that noise last night." He sort of half-apologized and slanted the blame onto Kitty.

Meg and I had a "girl's night" with Erin and Rosie. We mentioned it was our second time at the Inn in case that meant anything, but it didn't appear to. They talked about what brought them to Maine, and we gave a version of our story.

When we got to the Inn, Meg thanked me for getting her out of her room, but said she was still gonna be careful and make it an early night, and I admitted all that fun in the sun had worn me out too. We hugged good night, and I went back to my room to write this.

I regret being so friendly with Erin and Rosie, though... now I'm a little worried what might happen to them.