Arthur/Penny/Arthur

Hey folks.  I'm fine, I guess.  Sorry for not posting. 

The past couple months have been the toughest in my life, I think.  If you look at a lot of the folks who post here, it's mostly folks like I was when I first came here twenty years ago:  Not competely unattached and ready to start a new life, but mostly single and young and arriving with at least some of the really important people in their lives.  It's not quite an adventure, but you can sort of deal, and maybe discover that you're not necessarily losing the important parts of what makes you yourself.  When I opened that suitcase and saw that I was not going to be Millie's mother, or Ray's wife...  That was something being ripped away from me like nothing I had experienced my previous three times at the Inn.

And I'm not doing well.  I had a lot of sleepless nights as Millie when I didn't know where the real thing was, but the past two have been borderline panic attacks.  I'm not sure why - a lot of this is things I've dealt with before and I know Millie is okay - but I've been ripped out of a life I've built, pushed back into one that in a certain way should feel right, but doesn't.  It wasn't like that for me before.

The morning I woke up as Arthur for the first time in almost twenty years, I knew right away, because it's a hell of a thing to go from an energetic 14-year-old to almost 50 and not exactly athletic.  Germy has not exactly spent the past couple decades in the gym - though maybe I wouldn't have if I hadn't inherited a former professional athlete's body and had it feel relatively natural - and I found myself pushing up from the bed rather than springing to my feet.  Something in my knee felt a little off as I felt the need to pee more than usual.  I sat, chuckled at that, and then cursed myself as my aim was momentarily off.  At least it didn't look like Germy was fleeing some sort of venereal disease.

I texted Ray and Millie, who said they'd bring donuts and coffee.  I sat at a patio and waited for them to show up, waving when they did.  They weren't quite wary as they approached, but hugging was awkward, not so much because I'm a guy, but because I evidently register as a stranger.  We didn't say anything until Millie asked if this was the real me. 

I could have said she was one to talk at the moment, but it was hardly a moment for jokes.  "It's where I started from.  Or at least, that's in here, under twenty years of time and maybe not hitting the gym as often as I did.  I'm still your mom.  I'll always be that, no matter what I look like or..."

I couldn't get it out, but Ray did.  "Or where your biology pulls you."

"Yeah."  I looked in Ray's eyes and felt the same attraction I had been fighting while I was Millie.  Maybe I was bisexual and hadn't ever had to even consider it twenty years ago, or maybe it was just inertia.  "Think you'd be up for trying, if I could stick around?"

He looked down, kind of ashamed.  "I...  I don't know.  I'd like to say I would, but we'd probably be roommates within a month, and then..."

Millie,  for her part, didn't seem to have any issues with us both being guys now, but she picked up on what I said right away.  "What do you mean, if you could stick around?"

So it was time to tell her about Lonnie. 

Leonardo "Lonnie" ----- is six.  Through no fault of his own, Germy, aka Arthur Milligan, is his father, and his mother recently died, the details of which are not important beyond that fact that she apparently got to know Germy well enough to know that she had wanted him to have nothing to do with their son.  Unfortunately, the grandmother has Parkinson's Disease, and there was really no choice but to assign custody to the father.  Germy dodged it for as long as he could, and that was apparently long enough to use the Inn as an escape hatch a second time.

Harmon, I imagine, didn't take a lot of convincing; being Penny seems to suit her just fine, more than becoming some random person, which could potentially even mean returning to her original life, as I gather nobody has settled down in it.  For what it's worth, she sent a resignation letter to the school district and hasn't returned to Boston since her stay at the Inn; I'm not sure where she is now.

I related all that to Millie, and she didn't like it when I said, no, it wasn't fair, but this kid didn't have anybody else, and I didn't know if I could live with myself if this boy wound up in the care of someone not prepared to be a good parent, or even someone who might hurt him.  She lashed out, saying that it was because he was my real kid.  I said that was absolutely not the case, and Ray was quick to jump in and defend me, pointing out that this past year was not something you do for someone you considered anything less than your child, especially considering...

I cut him off there, which naturally led to "especially considering what?" and we recovered in time to say that this was the kind of thinking that got this whole mess started.  We followed it up by affirming that we understood why she went out looking on her own and were mostly past her staying radio silent, and we honestly are, but part of going through something like this was making sure that it doesn't happen again.

Which is all true.  But we also didn't want her to feel responsible for the extra-special fucked-up bit.

Because that good-looking 19-year-old kid that I thought Harmon had become?  Not random.  It's Jeremy Boyd's biological son, the one Nell said was her reason for staying Jeremy way back when I first became her.  It seems like in the intervening years, (s)he and Daisy had parted, so when Daisy "won a contest" for a vacation back East, Nell/Jeremy didn't realize where they were going, and only felt a little unnerved when they came back late, because even we aren't exactly immune to whatever makes people accept "anything but a cursed inn" as an explanation.  To say he's pissed is an understatement.

And maybe that's why I've been so depressed.  Lonnie is a great little kid, and I've got to work extra hard being a good father to him because Germy has obviously given Grandma Della good reason to be suspicious of me, which means I can't uproot him from the Bay Area and go to Boston right away, so I'm trying to mend things with Millie long-distance.  It's hard, even though she's really feeling my absence now that she's herself again and back in her old room and school and is really trying to make sure I stay a part of her life and also being there for Ray, which is more than a girl her age should have to do.  It's just...

Well, it's just that every parent I know has said that they'd give up everything for their kids, and in most cases I absolutely believe that's true.  Actually doing it is a hell of a thing, though, harder than you can imagine, even if something in the back of your head keeps trying to tell you that this is what you should be (although, fuck "should be" in almost every way).  But doing that while realizing that there are folks out there who not only won't, but will literally steal their kids' future...  It leads you to despair, and there are times when I'm almost grateful that there's this little boy who needs me, because that responsibility keeps me away from doing anything drastic, which is an unfair burden on him, even if he doesn't know he's carrying it.

-Arthur, Penny, and now Arthur again.

Arthur/Penny/Millie: What Is WRONG with These People?

(Before starting on the rest, I'm really glad to hear that Cary is on the mend!  I only just met him last year, but he's a good guy and Zee is great too!)

My instinct as a writer all the way back to starting this blog is to set the scene and tell the story and maybe hit a climax, but let's face it, a lot of people bail after a paragraph or so if you don't make your point up front, so I'm going to just say it:  That wasn't Harmon in this room, I don't know where she is with my identity of the past two decades, and if anyone can help me find out, I'd appreciate it like you wouldn't believe.

Okay, so let's get back to the beginning.

Ray, Millie, and I came up on the first train Wednesday, when it was just starting to really heat up; even if we hadn't planned on a heat wave, it was kind of nice to get out of the city and a teeny bit north, and none of us were going to let the person who needs to be at the Inn be alone.  We found a nice little sublet that cost an arm and a leg for the whole month of July, so even though I'd be going back to the Inn on my own at the end of the day, my family would be nearby and we could hit the amusement park or go on day trips as a group.  We'll look like a single dad with his college-aged son and younger daughter, but we've been through weirder.

We stopped there to drop off some of the gear and then hopped on bikes to ride to the Inn, where I put my Millie suitcase on the dresser before finding it odd that Harmon had apparently brought some bag i didn't recognize and left it.  Wanting to get a head start, it unzipped it and stared in incredulity at the men's clothing inside.  There was a worn wallet loose among the strapped-down compartments, and suddenly felt light-headed when I opened it and saw the license. 

Ray caught me as I buckled, then looked down at the license.  "What sort of sick joke is this?"

One of the garments, smaller than the rest, caught my eye, and I pulled it out a t-shirt from a 2002 writing workshop.  "I don't think it is.  I think this is real.  Harmon made the reservation, but frigging Germy was the one who stayed here."  I gave a bitter chuckle.  "I'm going to be Arthur Milligan again."

"WHAT?"  Millie went completely white and rushed over to inspect the wallet.  "No!  We'll find Harmon and get him to fix this!  We've gotta!"

"We'll certainly try, but the most important thing is getting you back where you belong.  And that means I've got to stay here before you do."

I was surprisingly calm as I said this; I don't know if non-parents would understand this, but it was just that simple, just as it was last year:  This was what I needed to do to protect my kid, so I was going to do it, and I'd figure out the details later.

Millie was not calm, she was crying like the 14-year-old girl she was behind her grown man's face, hugging me tight like she was going to stop me from doing something.  "It's all my fault!  If I hadn't...  I'm so sorry!"

I put my hands on her face and made her look at me.  "Hey.  You didn't make the greatest decision, but that doesn't mean it's your fault!  Jeremy Boyd and Harmon Kendall are selfish people, and they almost certainly would be doing something like this whether you came here or not, and at least we all know who we really are rather than someone having a stranger in their house and not knowing it."

"But if I'd just asked!"

Ray patted her back.  "Then we would have either tried to come up with a story which you'd believe, but it wouldn't have worked, because we couldn't even convincingly lie to you about the Easter Bunny, or we would have told you the impossible truth and you'd have been insulted.  You would have wound up here anyway, only angrier at us and maybe without someone who seemed to have your best interests at heart."

She let go of me to wipe her eyes, and I let her step back.  "This sucks so much."

"Yeah.  But we can handle it.  Now, let's get out our laptops.  Your dad will see if Harmon did something dumb like buying a plane ticket with my credit card, I'll try and contact my friend Jessie and see if she can help figure out what's going on, and maybe you can contact your 'girlfriend' and see if they noticed something specifically strange.  And then...  Well, and then we'll take a break and have a nice dinner and make sure we don't waste any of our vacation together, okay?"

Millie allowed that it was okay, and we got to work.  So far, no luck, and the Inn's filling up, but we haven't given up.

-Arthur/Penny/Millie

Arthur/Penny/Millie: It happened!

Got a photo of Harmon flexing in his underwear this morning, and I suppose that I should just be glad that he thought twice before deciding he doesn't want to start a new life with a 14-year-old girl going to the cops because of a dick pic, which Millie and I would have been tempted to do, because it seems reasonably certain he's going to keep that life rather than roll the dice again.  He says he won't, but he's selfish, and I suppose I should feel lucky that he didn't find my life too comfortable, which may have been entirely down to me, Ray, and Millie making it clear we didn't want him.  If he'd just landed in someone like Penny with a family that didn't know what was up? Entirely possible he figures Penny is older than Alicia, but in good-enough shape until he decides to go to the Inn again, with teacher/writer suiting his temperament better than flight attendant.

Anyway, that's a huge load off my mind.  Ray, Millie, and I are off to get bagels to celebrate. 

- Arthur/Penny/Millie

Arthur/Penny/Millie: ... No More Teacher's Dirty Looks!

Look, it was either that or "school's... out... forever!"

I started typing this in my home office at a reasonable 10:30AM and left the window open while I do other things all day.  It's just me in the apartment, because Ray is in the office and Harmon is at the school, grading the last finals and essays and attending some year-end meetings that have to be done in person.  Then, just like for the past week, he'll be driving up to the Trading Post Inn, except that he won't be driving back tomorrow morning, but just hanging around until he's no longer Penelope Lincoln Lee and I've got the chance to be myself again. 

There was a time I would have envied the year he's got in front of him; the luggage and letter that was there when he arrived is a stud who looks like he's spent a good chunk of his 18 years in the gym, accepted to a good college, nobody in particular to fool.  Probably got a huge dick, because some folks just have good luck fall into their laps. 

Which admittedly includes me; the last few years have been a bit tougher than expected, with Ray starting his own firm and having to get a full-time job because "midlist author" isn't quite the stable income it used to be, especially when you've got a kid with often-expensive hobbies.  Those are the most first-world of first-world problems, really (note to self: have not heard kids say "first-world problems" in the time I've been embedded among them).  I've been Penny long enough to have developed a certain world-view that it's maybe useful to have upended.

Not that I'm ever going to admit that the months of worry are a fair tradeoff for understanding Millie better.  Yes, one of the lasting lessons I've learned as a parent is that worry is what you spend to have a child you can be proud of; I've worried every time Millie hurt herself playing sports or spent the night at a friend's place or went to camp, and, boy, that time I watched her ride a bike out of my sight gave her her first T pass at 11 were crazy, but I do think she'll be a braver, more independent woman for it, and she got through an Inn experience that I suspect might have broken me had I visited the Inn at 13 and wound up a grown woman apart from my parents, mixed bag as they were - I might have been so lost that I might not have been able to conceive going back and being myself again, but Millie is still herself underneath the silly facial hair, and I'm grateful.

And, for all that this started with me expressing private frustration with relating to her because her genes weren't the ones that made me who I was, regardless of what I became later, I know for a fact that she is my daughter in all the ways that matter.  My instincts steered me well as her, and nobody ever told me I was acting weird.  Plus, she apparently took all the writing classes she could fit into Griff's schedule at school, not quite enough that he's going to come back to find he's minoring in journalism, but it shows that a lot of what drives both me and Ray is in there - just like the way she ran off to find the Inn, she wants to know things and communicate it and make them right, which is a big part of what drove me into writing and him into law.

Maybe this time will fade for her, or maybe she'll have a leg up on dealing with men and other adults as she grows older.  I kind of hope it's the first, but no kid comes out of something life-changing, literally or figuratively, unchanged.  She looks like she's doing well, but she deserves to be a kid and a teenager.

Speaking of which, today happens to be her/mine/our 14th birthday.  We're going to eat some garbage and watch the new Supergirl movie tonight, and then spend the weekend with her humiliating me at tennis and whatever other sports we can get to while she's got a 21-year-old male physique.  With any luck, we'll get a message from Harmon tomorrow about the Inn doing its thing, and we can look forward to changing back and being able to talk about everything.

-Arthur/Penny/Millie

Toby: Dunia's Back

So, the way things turned out last week made Memorial Day weekend more of a staycation than I expected. Instead of being on my way home to  North Dakota and trying to explain my absence, I was hanging around the Cortes house, still kind of shook from spending two days in an interrogation room and seeing my life yanked away from me when I finally did get out.  I was actually getting a lot of support, because a really crazy number of Dunia's friends and family apparently know what it's like to be in Federal custody for no good reason.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised about that by now, but I am; they're super-nice people and what they describe doesn't look nearly as suspicious as me having a missing person's property.

Dunia's father Hector had been hanging around the house consoling me in Spanish for the past few days - even though I've been mostly responding in English, something about the whole situation made him feel a little rebellious - and it was kind of a relief when he reluctantly went into work Monday morning because all the people messing up their cars on a holiday weekend were creating a backlog.  Dunia's friend Ceci texted and asked if I wanted to hit the beach, and after checking my phone for other messages, I said to give me a little time to shave my legs, since I'd kind of been lying around the house for the past week, and she responded with a thumbs-up.

I'd kind of been expecting a text from "Alicia", since Dunia had texted me Sunday morning saying It had happened, including photos, and asking if I had time to give the new Alicia a crash course starting Monday afternoon, because we were expected back to work later in the week.  I said of course, but hadn't heard back yet, so I figured I'd get a text at some point and I could make my apologies to Ceci and Ines and help someone else who'd been thrown into a weird situation by the magic inn out.  But I hadn't gotten it yet, so I drew a bath and got in, making sure my hair was up because I'd already spent time blow-drying it in the morning, and let the hot water open my pores and follicles or whatever before soaping up and scraping the hair off.  It's kind of nerve-wracking because it still doesn't feel like the right way to use a razor, and I don't know if girls freak out about shaving close to their pussy or if's just some leftover fear of cutting my dick off.  That last bit is real weird anyway, because I kind of want a neat landing strip even though I don't intend for anyone to see it.

So I do that, get dried off, and put on the American flag bikini that I imagine exists just for that sort of holiday, but I'm kind of ashamed to say I wasn't feeling it when I looked in the mirror, or maybe that's totally natural.  I was headed back to the bedroom to grab another one when I practically jumped out of my skin at the sound of the doorbell, followed by someone pounding on the door.  I turned back around so I could open the door camera app on the phone that I'd left in the bathroom, and when I saw Alicia & Gerard waving, I kind of forgot what I was wearing and raced down the stairs, throwing myself into the man's arms, suddenly crying.  "Oh my god, it's so good to finally meet you in person!  I really hope I haven't let you down too much!"

He gently pushed me away.  "Merci, but I think you are a bit confused?  I am not Dunia, she is."

I turned to look at the new Alicia, who was smiling sheepishly.  "Really?  What is it about this that makes people think it's something to joke about?"

She brought her hand to her chest.  "I swear, I didn't mean to - I thought I made it clear what happened!  Maybe that text didn't send?"  She started to move her hand toward her purse and then decided it didn't matter.  "I'm really sorry!"

I said it was okay, and then suddenly realized I didn't know anything about this new Gerard before getting all in his personal space, and what he might have taken from that.  "Hey, I'm sorry, that was really rude of me!  I'm Toby Watson, although I guess I'm going to be Dunia Cortes for a little while more."

He smiled.  "I'm Geraldine, which I guess will make Gerard easy to remember."  He/she started to reach out for a hug, but then seemed to wonder about it and offered a hand instead.  "But my new friend Dunia is right, you do wear her body quite well."

I suddenly felt self-conscious.  Girls walking around Miami in bikinis isn't that unusual, but were were saying crazy-sounding things, and I looked around to see if the were neighbors about.  "Do you want to come in, have something to drink...?"

Geraldine shook her head.  "No, I think I will let you two get acquainted.  I only came along because my two friends had things to discuss alone."  She turned to Dunia.  "Which way is the bus stop?"  We both pointed up the street, and laughed as we saw what we were doing.  She laughed, said "adieu mes amies", and started off while we waved and I led Dunia inside.

She stopped inside the doorway and took a deep breath, beaming at the lingering aroma of her father's breakfast.  "I have missed this place so much!"  She turned to me and grinned.  "Look at you, just answering the door in that swimsuit, and have you lost weight?  You look fantastic, if I'm allowed to say that!"

I blushed.  "Well, the job has me on my feet a lot and helping folks stow their luggage in the overhead bins; I guess you'll find that out.  And speaking of that, what the hell?  I thought you were supposed to be Gerard!"

She sighed dramatically.  "I know!  I thought I'd be able to talk the person into the next room into trading with me, but Geraldine was sharing a bathroom with her friends, and she was the only one of those lovely French-Canadian retirees who wasn't hitting on me, so I couldn't get into the room that way.  I tried pushing my bed right up against the wall and hoping for the best, but no luck."  She shrugged, and then smiled.  "But this should be fun!  I'm really looking forward to hanging out with you rather than us just going our separate ways, even if it's like this.  I mean, who gets to sort of watch their life from outside, right?"

I didn't know what to say (aside from Dunia taking this way better than you'd expect, Lambert was seldom this cheerful and it was weird seeing a bunch of new expressions on Alicia's face), but fortunately the phone pinged, so I could give it a quick look.  "Uh, Ceci's on her way with Ines, and I kind of decided I wasn't feeling the flag bikini after last week, so I'm gonna go get changed."

"Right, of course.  Hey, do you think they'd mind if I came?  I've got a swimsuit in my bag if nothing in the closet fits."

I suddenly felt awkward.  "I mean, I'd like it, but Lambert and I didn't really hang out much outside of work, and I don't think Ines and Ceci ever met him as Alicia, so I don't know how they'd feel."

It took her a moment to digest that before saying that they'd feel she was over 30 and white.  I said they'll like her, but that was maybe not the day.  She nodded and said that's probably true, and she should probably look at her new apartment anyway.

I told her she was handling meeting me way better than I had seeing Gerard, and we hugged before I went upstairs for a yellow bikini and she went "home".

It made for a weird rest of the day; I've been spending more time with Dunia's friends since New Year's and I'd just gotten to the point where it feels more like hanging out than trying to fool them, but that changes when you meet the real thing in person for the first time.

Gonna be different having her around.

-Toby/Dunia

Toby: Dunia's Not Mad

If I were in jail, she'd be mad, but she sounded more just relieved on the phone after not hearing from me during a big chunk of this crucial period, which is nice.  I'm not saying the past few days were more nerve-wracking for her than me, but it had to be close.

To cut to the chase, as of Friday, Lambert and I had spent a week doing the weird Miami to Boston to Old Orchard and back when we woke still girls route, by which time we were getting to know the other folks waiting to become themselves again a little bit, not really anxious but sort of wondering what was taking so long.  He and I sort of got better acquainted during the drives, and I was kind of blindsided when we arrived in Miami and the Feds were waiting for us again.  Or, more specifically, for me, searching my bag and finding my phone.  The one belonging to Toby Watson.

It shouldn't have been there!  Lambert and I had taken our phones north and left them in a drawer at the Inn, power drained, specifically so that they couldn't be tracked, but I was really tired Thursday night and while I was messing with the bureau, I must have taken it out and put it on top of the charger instead of Dunia's phone, so it charged and then responded that it was in Boston's Logan Airport when my mother did a Find My Phone thing, as I guess she's been doing every day for weeks.  It got passed on to the FBI, who remembered me and Lambert, and so they were waiting for us when we landed.

I guess I'm lucky I didn't wind up in ICE's hands, but they held me as long as they could.  They didn't throw me into a cell, at least, but 48 hours in a small room with a one-way mirror on the side is insane, especially since they won't let you fall asleep and will keep you well-hydrated until you're begging to use the restroom, so they can offer to trade basic dignity for some information.  The lawyer put a stop to that so I didn't actually wet myself, but even then, I sometimes felt like he wasn't entirely on my side - I don't think he wanted to get on the FBI's bad side, so he kept asking me if I had something I could tell them, or at least him, so I could help negotiate.

And I kind of wanted to!  Like I said back in March, Ma raised me to respect that sort of authority, and the way Dunia's friends and family are much more skeptical isn't entirely something I feel in my bones yet.  And even though I know that their comments about how I'm keeping Ma and Lambert's family from finding peace weren't true, they still made me feel bad.  But time was running out, and while there are a lot more stories about people being held indefinitely (mostly when ICE is involved, though), the lawyer said they could only hold me for 48 hours, and running out the clock was the best way to get back to Maine and actually solve the problem.

Just about 48 hours later, they let me out without any explanation whatsoever.  I stumbled out into the street a sweaty, smelly mess, wanting to fall asleep in a bathtub more than anything else, but it felt really good when Dunia's father wrapped me in a bear hug just outside the Federal building's door.  He said something Spanish that I was kind of too frazzled to understand, although it was pretty clearly that he'd been worried and was proud of me for something.  I didn't really know what that could be, but I figured I could ask him later after that bath and a good night's sleep.  I didn't even notice anyone else around us until he turned around and said something about putting me in an impossible situation.

That's when I looked up and saw Lambert - not Alicia, but Lambert.  And... me!

The guy wearing my skin bowed his head, apologizing for what sounded like not the first time, but it was really bizarre.  I guess none of us really have a good idea of what we seem like from the outside, but he was always rushing to get the first word in instead of thinking it over, and maybe suppressing a grin, like everyone thinking he was someone else and looking to him for answers was sort of a rush, and having to come up with a story made it even more exciting.

Obviously, I had a ton of questions, but Mr. Cortes was guiding me to his car, away from them, and spent the whole drive home cursing about how those blancos had caused me so much trouble until we got to the house.  A shower made me feel at least a little better and perked me up long enough to get some food down, but I reached the bed more or less on autopilot and slept until about 10am the next morning.

Even then, it was the noise that woke me up.  Mr. Cortes had gone to work but left a note on the bedroom door about coming home immediately if I needed anything, but otherwise to rest up from my ordeal.  Dunia's phone was so full of messages I couldn't even scroll.  And outside the house, getting an earful in both English and Spanish from the neighbors, Lambert was sitting in the driver's seat of that Porsche that got us into this mess, honking like crazy, while "I" leaned back against the car.  Fed up, I made a throat-slashing motion so that Lambert would cut the noise, and then planted myself just out of grabbing range of the other guy.  "Well, I guess the Inn did its thing.  Who the heck are you?"

"Why, I'm Toby Watson!"  I gave him a glare, not really in the mood.  "Sorry.  My real name's Gerard, I know that was in bad taste, but I couldn't help but say it once it was in my head."

Lambert had gotten out of the car.  "Gerard's got a real problem with saying anything that pops into his head," he said bitterly.

"You said to sell it!"

"I meant that we were embarrassed about the whole thing, not that we had been part of some gay nudist polycule!"

Lambert was about to argue, but I was like "wait, what?" first.

Gerard sighed, and then put his arm around Lambert's shoulder, gesturing in the air with the other.  "Picture it:  Driving across the country, spending all day in that hot car, and then nights in small motel rooms.  It awakens something in us, something we never expected, until we give in to our passion, again and again.  We spend the entire two weeks in Old Orchard Beach, not ready to return home to where nobody understands, and by chance meet up with another couple.  They've got a cabin on an island off the coast of Maine where they hole up for the winter, and invite us to join them.  Excited, but afraid we'll be tempted to back out, we give our phones and the keys to the cars to the nice flight attendants staying in the Inn after us, asking them to keep our secret until we return!  I never imagined that you would be so committed to protecting our reputations, even after our cover story collapsed and we were gone far longer than the few weeks we initially indicated, or when that huge storm in the northeast might have put us in real danger--"

Lambert was shaking his head.  "Like, I was just being vague and hoping folks would get the idea and not press us about something clearly humiliating, but Mr. Improv here has to keep yes-anding!"

Gerard raised an eyebrow to me.  "For someone who gave a wistful sigh when a certain married pilot walked through the airport, he's being needlessly uptight about me making sure his vague story holds up."

I was about to make a comment about how "Alicia" breaking things off with Brock was about him being married rather than something sexual, but cut it off.  "Okay, fine, whatever, I'm grateful you got me out of jail and we can figure out how to fix this later, but what did you tell my mother?"  There was an awkward pause.  "You have talked to my mother, right?"

Suddenly, Gerard was tongue-tied.  "Uh, I texted.  It, you know, didn't feel right to try to explain all this, uh, not in person."

"Well, maybe tone it down when you do!  I don't want to have to fix you coming out to her when we're ourselves again!  And she's, like, Midwestern, not some East Coast person who's okay with all that!"

He rolled his - my! - eyes.  "You say that like there aren't bisexual people everywhere."

"C'mon, man, my life is already going to be messed up by having this eight-month gap in it, don't make it worse!"

He looked like we wanted to say something, then reconsidered it.  "Hey, I'm not looking to cause trouble.  I maybe got a little carried away with the cops, but seeing you, knowing you're supposed to be this, it kind of drives home what a big deal this is."  He reached in to wipe away a tear I wasn't even aware of.  "Just tell me what you need me to know, okay?"

I nodded, then invited them in.  There wasn't as much to tell Gerard as I might like - so many of my high school friends had left town or dropped out of touch - but I made sure he had Dunia's number so that I could hopefully be as helpful to him as Dunia was for me, though hopefully not for as long.

He actually went back to the car before Lambert, which suddenly seemed really awkward.  We actually had talked a lot over the previous week about what we wanted to do when we were ourselves again, and what we'd learned about women, and he'd had a chance to clean up at the hotel overnight, and it suddenly crossed my mind that we'd shared some tight quarters and changing rooms as girls, but he was a man again now.  I think he was having similar thoughts realizing that Dunia was actually kind of pretty, because he blushed a bit.  "Are you going to be all right?  I almost thought of not going back up there until you could come with me."

"Yeah, but then we both might have ended up stuck and who knows how that would have turned out?  I mean, Gerard seems okay, at least."

He smirked.  "You just think he's cute."

"Gross!"  I shook my head to try and purge that thought.  "Well, keep him out of trouble if you can.  I'd hate for anything to happen to me before I got to be me again!"

He laughed and said goodbye, standing in the street for a bit to take Miami in one last time before heading home.

After that, I sighed and called Dunia.  She picked up the phone immediately.  "Toby?  Are you okay?"

"Yeah, although I've got some bad news."

She knew what it was - with just a few days before the second group of folks arrived at the Inn and most of the people going there in early May looking to change back, she probably figured my not texting in three days meant something had gone wrong, and I think she was relieved to hear that I was all right, even beyond joking that she certainly wouldn't want me hurt in any way that she'd have to deal with later.

We sat in silence for a bit after that (what can you say?), and then she cleared her throat.  "Well, my plane leaves Thursday, and I promised this guy his life back, so I guess we'll see what happens.  I guess being Gerard wouldn't be so bad; I've gotten used to being a man and he sure sounds younger than I am right now.  Plus, that makes us a nice tight little circle for... later."

I agreed that probably made sense, and then we tried to chit-chat about other things, although it all seemed really small in comparison to my staying her for at least another month or so and he becoming someone else soon.  But she doesn't seem mad; I was kind of half-expecting her to come up with a list of things that Lambert and I should have done as soon as we changed, but either she didn't have any or figured it wouldn't do us much good now.

So, another few months, at least, as her.  I'm lucky that there are worse people to be, I guess.

-Toby/Dunia

Toby: Dunia's May schedule

I've kind of been wondering how we were going to return to the Inn and our own lives without losing Dunia and the next Alicia these jobs, especially Dunia, as I/we haven't been employed long enough to have a lot of slack.  I'm not sure that what we've hit on quite works, but it's the best we can do:  Basically, we've managed to get assigned to the Miami/Boston route for May, and somehow managed to work out that we're overnight in Boston most of the time, as there aren't many red-eye flights going that direction.  We rent a car at Logan, drive up to Old Orchard, hopefully arriving before whatever happens overnight happens (I guess it's usually around 2am), and then drive back to the airport the next morning.  With any luck, we'll text the airline about how we're really sick, and hopefully that will get us to the week or so that we've blocked off on the schedule, during which Dunia and a new Alicia will return to normal. 

It's not really a great plan; it kind of relies on the idea that the first couple groups at the Inn will be folks trying to get their lives back and will show up the first chance they get.  It also probably wouldn't work at all if the lady who is living as Alicia's mother Magda hadn't gotten a promotion that put her in the scheduling department.  Or if folks from Canada were visiting Florida as much as they used to (I guess a lot transfer at Boston) and they needed us for more than just one round trip a day.  Honestly, I kind of wonder how many folks get changed and then stuck in their new lives because they just can't afford the trip back.  If someone has become me, there's a good chance that, once the reservation is made, gas money is tight and they're not exactly enjoying the Maine restaurant scene while they wait for something to happen. 

But it's the plan we've got, and so far, it seems to be working out.  Nothing happened last night, but we aren't really expecting the place to fill up before the weekend.  Heck, so far as we could tell, there were only five out of 13 there, and it was kind of a weird vibe. It felt like we should have breakfast together or compare notes or something, but nobody really wanted to dwell on the lady seven or eight months, and there was a lot of fretting about explaining how and why we'd been missing.

It is kind of strange being with Lambert outside of work, though.  You might think we'd have bonded or something over all this, but that never really happened.  Instead, we were mostly quiet on the drive north, before taking turns in the bathroom removing our makeup and changing for bed.  I kind of kicked myself when I saw what a big nightshirt she was wearing over loose boxers with a drawstring, while I was wearing the same panties and belly shirt as when I'm sleeping in Miami.  I can joke about how my butt may wind up smaller when I'm a white guy again, but other parts of those panties would squeeze and I'd probably shred the top like the Hulk or something.  I suppose i could sleep in the nude, but boy would that get uncomfortable with a roommate! 

But, nothing happened, so we showered, got dressed and made up for work, and I've been writing this during the drive back to Boston to try and tune out Lambert's podcast.

It's crazy that we probably won't be friends after we get back, but I'll know there's someone in town who went through the same really weird thing as me. 

- Toby/Dunia

Toby/Dunia: A Much Longer Trip Than I Expected

So... Hi.  I'm afraid that I don't have any sort of introduction where I'm just me saying what I'm doing in Maine.  I kind of didn't even realize this place had a blog attached until after I became this girl. 

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 Luis 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

Arthur/Penny: Substitute Millie

I haven't had a reason to come back to Old Orchard Beach since I became Penelope after Jermy decided he was talking my life, and I can't remember if I liked it the first time around.  I was a young man and probably cynical about vacation/tourist spots, figuring they're not real or authentic, but between being older and having home on vacations with Millie, I think I understand their appeal a bit more.  These places have a goal and a function that I can probably appreciate anywhere else, but being sick in one when you are not happy, and feel like you have to guard against any attempt of the place to make you happy, is a certain sort of Hell.

I spent the whole week doing things I know are bad for me.  Eating at the worst fast good restaurants so I don't have any fond memories of the trip, holding my phone in my hands all the time just in case Millie decided to call, even though it's terrible for your mental health.  I texted and left messages to everybody in my Inn network, but was kind of curt with everyone, even Ray, mad he wasn't there to help even though I'm the one who said to hold the fort at home.

It could have gotten expensive, too, but Cary knew a guy who knew a guy, and I was able to hunker down in a little cottage that had been rented by a Canadian man who wasn't coming to the U.S. this year.  I didn't get a whole lot of work on the new book, being in no mental state to edit, especially when I took a deck chair and moved to the Trading Post's porch ahead of the new groups arriving on Thursday.  I wanted to at least have a look at the folks who would be in Room 4.

They didn't show up until late Friday, a couple of tattooed twenty-somethings who just absolutely could not keep their hands off each other, digging right into the fronts of each other's pants right in the off-street parking and yelling an enthusiastic "fuck off" to anyone who looked at them cross-wise.  I could immediately see into the future and what the school administration and coaches were going to be calling me about, especially if the guy wound up as Millie.  And there wasn't much time, because, sitting on the porch, I'd felt the tingle.

A lot of Inn people don't actually believe in the tingle; they either never registered it, figure those who claim to have felt something the afternoon before the change are retroactively drawing a connection, or just kind of dismiss the idea that magic can reach back in time, because cause precedes effect no matter what.  Despite being affected by something otherworldly, Inn folks as a group do not really believe in fate, more likely to see the place as something chaotic even if we settle into a new life and like it.  I figure there's no reason magic can't send ripples up and down the timeline, even if it does lead to me doing something I hadn't really considered before I felt it, although it seemed to make complete sense once it occurred to me.

So when I saw they had Room 4, I offered them the place I was staying in exchange.  It just made so much sense, even though I hadn't really considered it before doing it.  I'd been reaching out to people I know who might agree to be Millie until next year (Ashlyn actually might have done it if she and her boyfriend weren't on a cruise) and making plans for how to deal with someone who decides it might be a decent life, but when it comes right down to it, who else can I really trust? 

They thought I was nuts, but went along with it.  I let them drive me to the house, grabbed my luggage, and made my way back with the key.

Then I took a deep breath as I opened the door.  The room was still set up with a queen bed, Millie's backpack on one side and this other woman's suitcase on the other, and I took the bedding off to form a little next on the floor next to Millie's backpack.  I recognized that I was gambling at this point - first, it would be logical that they placed their bags on the sides of the room that corresponded to where they slept, but not certain, because folks don't necessarily figure out the minimal distance thing after just one trip to the Inn.  Honestly, there's still some holes in the theory - like, if things work out that there are ten people right on top of where the last person was in the center of the building, but the rooms on the ends have 1 and 2, but in different arrangements in separate visits, will one person change into someone all the way on the other side, or does whatever this force is go for the shortest total distance?  Also, by doing this, was I potentially closer to someone on the other side of the wall than where Millie had been?  Still, it was the best I could do.

Having a plan felt good, and I decided to indulge myself a bit, taking a cab into Portland, dropping a c-note on a nice dinner (including what I figured would be the last drinks I'd be having for the better part of a year), and coming back to the Inn full and buzzed and thinking that the person who wakes up as Penny in a couple weeks or so was going to have a stomachache and a hangover, and I should probably apologize for it in the letter.  I'd stopped at a 7-11 to get some of the energy drinks Millie likes that I usually find gross and popped one open so that I'd be awake for the change.

Around 2am, I set my phone up and started recording, figuring that if someone younger than me wound up becoming Penny, they might appreciate video over text, and assurances that there wasn't multiple layers of deception going on among the people with whom they'd soon be sharing a home.  It meant I got to watch myself change, and changing into one's daughter is a trip - it feels less like your face is turning into someone else's than you're noticing how much you have in common, right up until the moment when something she has that you don't shows up.  I noticed that my hair hadn't been that long in a while or that dark since I was Liz before any almond shape to my eyelids showed up, and then I pulled my knee up to my chin and, yeah, I keep in shape and have nice legs, but skinny 13-year-old legs are something else.  My pajamas were feeling a bit loose all around, and when I stood I could tell that the top and bottom overlapped a little more than they did before, although at the rate Millie's been growing, I'll probably be shrinking again in spring.

I stood up to take a proper look in the mirror, and immediately recognized that even if the alcohol in my body hadn't vanished with the change (and I honestly don't know whether it did or not; it's another thing you get different accounts of), I still bounced to my feet with ease.  Nell had been a college and (briefly) professional athlete, and I spend a fair amount of time in the gym to not waste what I had inherited, but it felt downright rude of the Inn to remind me that there is indeed a big difference between how a 40-something woman making her best effort looks and feels and how a sporty 13-year-old girl looks and feels.  I took a good look at Millie's face in the mirror, though as someone who has been through this I wasn't sure what I was expecting to find.  A beauty mark that hadn't changed?  Something missing?  Lines that didn't completely vanish?  Whatever it was, I suddenly felt like the caffeine was out of my system, and I flopped down on the bed immediately.

By the time I woke up the next morning - Millie can sleep in! - most of the screaming was done, and a note had been slipped under the door asking if there was an extra bag in my room.  I resolved to knock on the next door, but had to go to the bathroom first.  It all seemed normal enough until I was about to wipe and suddenly had a flashback to when I first became Liz and felt like this was a huge invasion of privacy, that I was now going to have to interact with someone else's private parts - a child! my child! - every day for months.  I gritted my teeth and told myself it was better than the alternative, but I still opted to hit myself with some spray deodorant rather than hit the shower, and practically looked away from examining myself in the mirror.  I knew from experience that I couldn't avoid this forever, but felt like putting it off.

There was a text from Ray saying that he was on the train when I checked my phone, and I replied saying it happened last night and I'd meet him at the station.  Then I gave the woman next door her new clothes and phone and wallet - she looked askance at the opened letter but and then her jaw dropped when I explained the very good reason and extracted a promise to call me as soon as she heard from the person whose life she was taking over, especially if they mentioned Millie - and then headed out.  I had a couple hours before the train arrived, and I needed to make a Dunkin' run (apparent teenagers buying breakfast sandwiches and coffee on a Saturday apparently not that unusual) and buy a change of clothes.  

Once i'd changed into them, eyes closed as much as possible, I made my way to the train station.  It was a little late, as is the Downeaster's wont, but I spotted Ray right away and jumped up, waving my hand in the air.  He saw me and started running toward me like he thought I was really Millie and was going to jump into his arms, before realizing that wasn't the case and stopping a little short, and awkwardly extending a hand.  "Hey, I guess we're going to be seeing a lot of each other.  I guess you must recognize me from the photos on Millie's phone, but where's Penny?  I was under the impression you'd met your mother for the duration."

"Uh, I'm right here, hon."  It suddenly seemed to dawn on us both that my messages had sort of said all the things I had done over the past few days but hadn't exactly put them together.  We started for a couple of seconds and then he pulled me into a hug.  "My God, Penny, what have you done?"

I started crying.  "The only thing I could think of to do!  I mean, who else are we going to trust with Millie's life?  Maybe Ashlyn if she were around, but--"

"But she's on that cruise, and it would be so much to ask of her."  I could feel the sigh that moved his entire body before he pulled back to give me a kiss, but froze when he saw my new face, hugging me close again.  "I wish you'd explained everything yesterday, so I could help."

I shrugged.  "How?  You'd just try to stay in the room with me, to increase the odds that one of us became Millie, only then we'd probably wind up separated and with all sorts of mess to deal with when it came to change back!  The next ten months or so are going to have enough moving parts as it is, and I kind of need you steady."  I paused as he gave me a strange look.  "Not that I was planning this, mind you, I was just kind of careless in my texting, but this is still probably the best case situation."

"And it sucks."

"It sucks so much!  I thought I'd be able to handle it but I've freaked out at least three times since 2am, and I've got no idea whether she'll thank me for this or never forgive me.  And now, she's not going to have, you know."

He didn't for a second, but then it clicked.  "It could still happen."

I shook my head.  "Maybe, but you know they were talking about preparing for menopause and how dangerous 'geriatric pregnancies' can be at my last physical.  And we're not going to try and sell the new me on the idea - you've talked to Jonah-slash-Krystle, and maybe you can say her situation's unique, but you know changing this much does weird things to your head, and even someone who said they would just act as an unconventional surrogate--"

He put his finger on my lips, which took me aback; it was something he would occasionally do with Millie when she was motor-mouthing off on a tangent, but not with me, and, again, he seemed to realize it after half a second.  "Hey, let's just worry about the kid we've got and not some hypothetical other one, okay?"  I nodded.  "Have you heard anything?"

I shook my head.  "No, but I'm pretty sure my neighbor will work on her predecessor.  Millie might be stubborn, but this other woman's a mom, and she'll get it."

"Absolutely."  He looked around.  "So, do you want to hang around here at all, or just get on the next train south?"

"Oh, next train south, absolutely!  Although..."  I took out my phone and checked the time.  "We've got a couple hours to decide what's staying in the room and what's coming with us - I'm going to need my writing laptop, for example - and maybe grab some hot dogs and let Cary and Krys know the latest and see if they can watch out for anything."  I tried to grin.  "Maybe he'll have some advice for you about what to do with a tween who thinks she knows everything because she's really an adult!"

He quarter-laughed - it was only half a joke but neither of us really felt like joking - and then we started walking toward the Inn.

-Arthur/Liz/Penny/Millie

Arthur/Penny: She's Gone

It looks like my fears from Saturday night were right: After tennis practice Saturday morning, my daughter Millie told her friend that she needed to head home, but instead went to North Station and bought a ticket for Old Orchard Beach.  She's tall enough that folks occasionally take her for being further into her teens than she is, and it's not like it's a federal crime to ride Amtrak as an unaccompanied minor.  Or if it is, it doesn't seem to have been enforced.

From there, I gather, she went to the Inn and started looking in windows, asking if there was anything weird about the place, and it didn't dawn on her until after the last train south left that there were likely no hotel rooms open in this beach town and the debit card onto which Ray and I deposit her allowance probably wouldn't be enough to check into one even if it was.  She was apparently sitting on the Inn's front porch when someone asked what was up and said she could stay in her room for the night.

She was lucky number thirteen, and the changes happened that night.

I know this because I decided to head north on Sunday morning, with Ray handling the search in Boston, knocking on all the doors, asking if anyone had seen Millie.  My heart sank when I saw there was a lot of confusion from post-transformation morning.  I explained what was happening to a lot of people - this late in the season, there aren't a lot of Inn veterans there, as chains from the people who were able to switch back in May break - and a couple my apparent age said that they saw her with the talking with their neighbor.  Nobody responded to my knocking, but they shared a bathroom which was unlocked.

I found Millie's backpack in the room.  She had already left.

Trembling, I opened the bag and found a letter on top.  I knew it wasn't for me, but I opened it anyway.

Dear Whoever Opens This:

My name is Millicent Anne Lee, Millie for short.  I came to the Trading Post Inn wondering what my parents meant when they said they weren't entirely my parents, and now I know.  My mom, and maybe my dad, used to be someone else, and now I get a chance to find out what that's like.

Their numbers are in my phone, so you can call them and tell them to pick you up.  They can tell you anything that you need to know about being me until we get a chance to come back, and you can tell them not to worry:  The lady who let me stay in her room last night is going to be with me and will help me out.  I'm a little older now, but not that much, and I think I can handle this situation.

I don't know if I'm ready to tell you or them who I am now yet, though.  I'm still kind of mad that they didn't tell me this.  I'm not running away for good, though, and I'm going to want to be me again as soon as I can.

Please don't do anything weird with my life,

Millie

I sat down on the bed and just cried for a while.  The people from the next room came in and asked if I was all right, and I said no, I wasn't, my daughter was somewhere out there in the world and I didn't know where or who she was.  I allowed that she was smart and mostly responsible, and that Ray and I had tried to raise her to look out for herself and solve problems, but she was still a kid and mad enough at me that she might not ask for help out of spite.

They didn't seem to know what to say, but said they'd be around for the next few hours if I needed to get back in that room.

I nodded, and they went back to their room to give me some privacy.

Obviously, the first thing to do was call Raymond.  He wasn't sure whether to be relieved to know what happened or panicked that this was something much bigger than Millie not checking in before staying over at a friend's house.  He started trying to remember everything he could about teen runaways, saying that most of them came home pretty quickly, and not just because they didn't get very far and realize they've got no resources pretty quickly.  Millie, though, may have the resources of an adult, and who knows what sort of adult?

I immediately realized that someone else might know, and ran across the room to see the bag beside the other bed, opening it up to find the letter they had left for the people in their lives.  It didn't tell me much - she was a woman in her mid-fifties, from somewhere in the Midwest, where she worked in the local town hall.  I looked her name up online, and she seems pretty trustworthy - a relatively young widow, one grown son, involved in her community.  Not much social media, but gently pushes back when conspiracy-minded friends get weird in the comments on Facebook.  You can't really know about people from their online profiles, especially now, but she seems okay.  Unfortunately, she also seems reluctant to disclose her new identity.

Still, the very fact that I have the equipment to give birth to a daughter means that there is an awful lot about this situation that shouldn't be taken for granted.  I've left a note of my own on the desk in the room, although I don't know if it will still be there when the next guests arrive - whoever cleans the Inn has been leaving lost luggage in rooms for at least twenty years, but will they throw that away?

I guess that I'll have to set up shop on the Inn's front porch, if I want to vet who is going to be filling in for Millie.  Ray's offered to join me, but he's got more time in courtrooms than usual this week, so I probably won't see him until Saturday.

What a terrifying and absurd sentence to write.  This isn't my first time in crisis mode as a mom, but I'll bet you can count on one hand the number who have tried to deal with this specific crisis.

-Penny

Daryl/Zee: So, This Is Weird...

...  I mean, I've been looking at a lot of posts here lately and thinking "How can you post that when there's a good chance the other person will read it, even if they say they won't?", but here I am, apparently feeling like my position as the person with the messiest personal life on the blog has been challenged, and doubling down.

So, you all know, Cary, who was Elaine before I was, and who has been "raising" Elaine and then Krystle as Mackenzie ever since.  He's also kind of the guy who winds up as first point of contact for Inn visitors who need someone to believe them, with an ad in the little guidebook which also includes a card with login details for this here blog.  Most of the time, folks just need to be reassured that this is real, but you can handle it, no matter how extreme the change may seem, and Cary's the guy to give it to them, a friendly white guy in his 60s who seems to be running his little hot dog truck as a hobby to the point where he can close up and give folks his full attention if need be, or call in Krystle/Mackenzie.

Someone needed it bad yesterday.  I gather they'd started out a young white guy who got turned into a petite Afro-Latina girl and in less than twenty-four hours their best friend - who I guess was kind of the same to start but became a tall, muscular, black college athlete - had convinced them they might as well try sleeping together, given the situation, and then talked them into a bikini and sort of paraded them around the beach the next day.  When she got to Cary, this person was kind of shell-shocked, and with Mackenzie out of town with friends, he called me to see if I could talk to them.  I said I would, but as Cary was talking to me, they had fallen asleep in one of Carl's Adirondack chairs.  Apparently, they had never gotten to sleep the previous night.

Not having anything planned for the day, I said I'd be up as soon as I could, and looked up the nearest car rental place.  I don't drive a lot as Zee, but there aren't that many trains or buses between Boston and Portland and I'd want to be able to put Cary on speaker if he called while I was in transit.  He didn't, but when he arrived there, there was a guy like he described trying to lead a girl away by the wrist.  A few guys from the beach were trying to stop him.  I sighed and slipped off my sandals, grabbing heels and sunglasses from my bag; it wouldn't get me up to his height, but if Cary was right, he might still be intimidated by an Angry Black Woman if I sent the right signals.

I made sure the heels made a lot of noise on the sidewalk and gave my best Angela Basset "what do you think you're doing?" as I approached.  He said something like "she's with me" and I stepped in a little closer, making it clear I knew he could hurt me but that he didn't dare.  "I don't know who you really are or who you are now, but you do not want to alienate the only person who does on your first day."  Obviously not what he expected to hear, because he let go of his friend, who hurried back to the stand and Cary.  Cary said I would take them to his house and they could borrow some clothes from Mackenzie's closet, since they just had a little handbag with their new wallet and phone.

They were breathing heavily as they got into the passenger seat of the rental, and I asked if they were okay.  "No!  I'm a girl, and black, and I'm not saying those are bad things, but it's really weird for me, and I let my friend fuck me in my new pussy, and who even are you?"

Keeping my eye on the road, I reached one hand out.  "I'm Zariyah, or Zee for short.  Started out as a Daryl, been an Elaine and a Magda in between, and let me tell you, it's really easy to make bad decisions with a bunch of new hormones.  I gave up everything for a man who wound up not being worth it.  But you can get through it.  Cary, the guy at the hot dog stand, he did, got his old life back, and helps others cope besides."

They grasped my had warily, introduced their new and old identities, and seemed surprised when I stopped at Cary's house so soon.  "New England towns are pretty small."  I got them inside and found some sweats in the laundry; they seemed relieved by the shapelessness, though I said they were probably going want something else soon with it being a hot day.

Then we told each other about ourselves, and they seemed worried about how completely I'd taken to female identities, and I said it sometimes felt strange to me as well, and one of the things they'd have to do until they changed back was differentiate between rash, impulsive, and reasonable under the circumstances.

Once they'd calmed down, I drove them back to the Inn.  The "boyfriend" wasn't there, so I helped them go through their inherited luggage, explaining that it would probably be wise to pick up where their predecessor left off with their birth control pills, looking their new life up online to see what could be learned, and helping write a letter to the person taking over their old life.  They gave me some side-eye when I offered make-up tips, but I pointed out this was something they were going to be expected to know soon.  I reflected that it was kind of crazy that, outside this blog, we don't really have a support network for people who just got changed.  A lot of people text back and forth with the next folks up and down their line, but they aren't that much more experienced than newbies, and it was really striking how much someone like me who had been there before could really make these crucial first steps go a lot better.  Honestly, I wonder how many people aren't even resilient enough to fake things and wind up in situations where they go into a spiral and can't get back to their real lives.  I've kind of always assumed that the folks like me who post on this blog are the ones who got into the most bizarre situations, but what if actually being able to confront and handle it this openly is actually better than the paralysis others feel?

By mid-afternoon, my new friends was feeling hungry, so we packed their things and went up to Portland (a surprisingly good restaurant town) and found a place with Dominican food to match their new identity.  Spice is apparently something they're going to have to get used to, because it seems like they're going to be around people who really like that sort of food.  I pointed out that they didn't have to if they didn't want to, but they said they didn't want to mess up this person's life.  I nodded, saying that for as selfish as some people are, it's really surprising how many folks who come to the Inn instinctively feel this sort of responsibility to people they've never met.  They said they hoped the next people staying in the room felt the same way.

We'd taken their bags with us - they really didn't want to spend another moment with their roommate, and bought a plane ticket to their new life.  They changed in a restroom at the Jetport, opting for the most gender-neutral outfit of slacks, t-shirt, and sneakers they could find, though it still revealed their navel.  I could see them doing a sort of "I think I can do this" thing in the restroom mirror, pulling their hair back behind their ears.  I told them they didn't have to go right away, that I had a spare room, but they said they figured it was best they try and explore their new life on their own, before someone was looking over their shoulder.  I nodded, making sure my number was in their phone, and saw them to the TSA line.

It was just starting to get dark when I got back to Cory's place to return Mackenzie's clothes and his keys.  He offered me a beer and I joined him on the couch to watch the ballgame.  I asked him how many like that he saw, and he said it was only a couple a year that were real bad.  The worst was a Naval aviator on shore leave whose letter him them that his new life had been fleeing an abusive home, although couples who got sent separate ways always made him sad.

After another beer, I had taken off my sandals again and had my legs up on the couch, leaned up against him.  It may surprise a lot of guys - it surprised me - but men with Cary's body type, a solid layer of muscle built up by a lifetime of hard work but a somewhat soft exterior built up by a lifelong fondness for hot dogs and ice cream, are a lot nicer to get close to than the really ripped and defined ones, and I leaned my head on his shoulder.  He responded instinctively by wrapping his arm around me, but when his hand came to lay on my breast, he jerked it back, apologizing.  I took that hand in mine and put it back, saying it felt good.  We kept watching the game for a little bit, and then I turned my head and scootched in a little closer, so that our faces were right next to each other, and then we kissed.  There was tongue, his hands in my hair, but after I got his shirt unbuttoned and he'd done the same with my top, he carefully pushed me away.

"I'm sorry...  I shouldn't..."

I nodded a bit, but more because I understood than because I agreed.  "Cary, that was mostly me.  It's, ah, been a while since I've been in the arms of a good man, or one who knows all about me, and I don't know if they've ever overlapped."  He was buttoning his shirt, so I did the same.  "It's lonely, you know?"

He grunted.  "I know."  Realizing he could, he elaborated.  "I haven't really gone out with anybody since I was Elaine.  Tough when you're a single dad, even if the kids aren't really kids, and they probably can look after themselves, but they'd probably envy any adult relationship you had, and who wants to date a woman that's okay with letting your daughter run wild?  I thought it would get easier when Mack got older, but it just hasn't.  Maybe I'm just too old for it now.  65 next week, you know."

I shrugged.  "That's not so old, and what's age mean for us?  I've been the older woman in a relationship, and even if others talk, it's okay if you really like someone."

"I don't recall that turning out terribly well for you, if you don't mind my saying."

I spit out a laugh.  "Oh, I say that all the time!  To the folks who would understand, at least."  Feeling like the evening was done and it would just get more awkward as I stayed, I put my sandals back on and grabbed my purse off the coffee table.  "You should put yourself out there anyway, though.  You're a good guy.  And a good kisser."

He saw what I was doing and held out a hand to shake, body language clear he would step back if I moved in closer, so I grabbed it, making a little joke of giving him a firm, manly handshake.  Then I headed out to the car, punched up the nearest Dunkin that was still open - two beers doesn't really get me that buzzed as Zee, but coffee seemed like a good idea anyway - and headed south.

So, yep, made out with Cary, a white guy almost twice my age, with whom I share a past identity.  It's probably a real good thing we didn't get to three or four beers.  I've made a lot of mistakes that started out with "hey, we've got this in common!"

Or maybe not.

-Zee

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

Marilyn Vance/Juliana Nakamura: Family?

Where to begin?  I suppose with the obvious - a week and a half ago, I was your average white suburban mom, complete with all the tension behind the placid exterior; now I'm a teenager again, and from what I'm told and can see with my own eyes, a Japanese-American father and a Latina mother, crossing my fingers that my high school Spanish from almost twenty years ago will be enough for me to fake it.  My husband and son are in a similar boat, although I'm sure that they feel having a different gender is a bigger deal than a different ethnicity.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know the gist of it, although I suppose it's worth going back a bit to understand what I'm dealing with here, although I'll try to get right to the point:  My marriage to Lucas was basically over before all this, and it was kind of a relief.  The end was better than the long decay leading up to it; instead of worrying about not being enough or resenting how success for one of us always seemed to lead to sacrifice for the other, and then worrying about how all of this was affecting L.J., deciding to divorce let us be practical and start to plot a way forward.  We've even been closer to friendly since we started hashing things out.

There was a kid in the middle of this, one who is probably reading this as I've encouraged him to read the blog and maybe contact some of the other authors who have been through what he's dealing with now, and while we obviously couldn't have expected this, we knew that the split was going to throw his life for a loop.  So, maybe underestimating him a bit - L.J. is 15 and feels everything so strongly! - we planned one last family trip.  We used to visit the coast of Maine every summer along with cousins, but that changed when Lucas's job took us from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver six years ago, and we were looking to recapture that before telling him everything just before we flew home.  But the place we booked was the Trading Post Inn, there was leftover luggage in our closets, and...

Well, you probably know the drill.  I'd been doing a morning run for the previous week, so I had my phone's alarm set, and when it went off I sat up quickly, feeling surprisingly refreshed and alert.  At first, I presumed I was just having a good morning, and didn't notice anything particularly amiss as a silenced my alarm, looked over to verify that Lucas was still a stationary blob under his covers in the other bed, and walked to the bathroom.  My skin was a little darker, but I'd picked up some color over the past week, and I didn't notice that I had much longer hair, jet-black at that, until I pulled off the headband I sleep in.  By then, I had turned the light on and was taken aback by what I saw in the mirror.

I didn't scream - at first, I thought that this was a dream where I had to live out some sort of weird fantasy of Lucas's, but when I stomped over to his bed and ripped the covers off to show dream-Lucas that I wasn't putting up with this...  Well, I'll let him describe himself and how he reacted; same with L.J.  Our son figured out about the luggage in his closet first, and that's how I've learned about Juliana Nakamura.

She, Cora, and Leda are classmates at the Burlington Academy for Girls in Vermont, and had come to Old Orchard without their parents to attend a music festival before returning to school.  I won't "doxx" Juliana and her friends, but suffice it to say that they have seemed to handle their change as well as can be expected, faking a story about testing positive for Covid before flying home, editing the photos they hadn't uploaded to social media because they were just boring pictures of them in their hotel rooms and sharing them in support of this story, and somehow rigging things up so that they could text home from their computers until we arrived.  Their parents have obligingly changed their flights so that we would go straight from Portland to Burlington where they are apparently best friends and suite-mates, rather than returning "home".  We didn't do anything so advanced for the people taking over our lives, although we did send emails to our employers and school district about our own positive Covid tests.

We arrived yesterday, and we're still trying to sort out living arrangements - Cora apparently had the single room while Juliana and Leda shared the other, but we're kind of not sure whether I should let Lucas and L.J. bunk together, or if he'd be more comfortable in his own room rather than sharing with his parents, or if he'd rather have me with him in case he needs to handle female problems on short notice.  We haven't mixed a whole lot with the other students who have already arrived yet - I get the impression that this group can be a little clique-y - but I'm already worried about L.J. a bit.  The last week or so has been a lot for him to take in, from proper hygiene to just rolling up stockings like you've been doing it for years.  He doesn't want to put makeup on, but his bare face does not look like what Leda puts up on Instagram, and his idea that he wouldn't need it in an all-girls' school showed that he hadn't really absorbed how that sort of thing can be more important among girls than in terms of attracting guys.

The thing that is really making me question myself, though, is that while I know it's only been a week, it sort of feels like "Leda" takes advice from "Juliana" better than "L.J." does from "Mom".  I don't know if I can explain it, other than him addressing me by that name even when no-one else is around, to try and make it a habit, or asking "how would you try to blend in?" when I try to tell him what he should do.

That's my question to the other former Inn guests:  How do you stay someone's mother when you've got to be something else practically 24/7?

Daryl/Zee: I can hardly believe this is FINALLY me

Of all the folks posting on this blog, I suspect that Jordan is the only one who really gets how nice it is to wake up in the Inn, look in the mirror, and feel like things are finally right, even if being white was easier in a lot of ways.  Two nights ago, I went to sleep as Magda for the last time, having intending to be awake to watch my body change in the mirror, but one's mid-fifties are no joke, and I eventually flopped down on the bed, only to wake up, see the sun on my darker legs, and suddenly feel energized to bounce up and run into the bathroom.

I'd seen the face already, but it was great to be able to make it smile in the mirror; this may be my fourth face, but I don't know that you ever get used to this.  It twirled my hair, thinking I'd probably braid it, because while it's not super-nappy, it's also not the fine, silky stuff they make wigs out of, so it would take a lot more combing than Magda's did for the same effect.  I said a couple test sentences, and my voice felt a little closer to right.  "Hi!  I'm Zariyah Andrews!  Call me Zee!"

Though I'd grown an inch and a half, it wasn't enough to make the shorts and tee I had slept in as Magda feel tight.  Heck, with the weight off my chest, it was probably a wash up top.  Not that I'm flat-chested now, but Magda had always been busty and had a kid besides, so being perky maybe didn't look quite so impressive, although I remembered from being Elaine that you can do a lot with the right bra.  My legs and butt looked pretty good, and a quick look inside the shorts indicated nothing unexpected.

(I feel bad about reducing this to a bunch of body parts, but apparently four years isn't quite enough not to be waking up a new woman by taking inventory of the sort of thing guys look for)

Soon after that, folks started yelling, so I threw some daytime clothes on and went to help folks out.  After that, it was the obligatory trip to Cary's hot dog truck.  I must have been smiling like an extra-special goofball or maybe nobody else orders a Chicago-style dog - or maybe both - but he sort of held it in the air for a second, considering what a fool he'd look like if asking "Daryl?" was the wrong call, before I busted out "call me Zee!" for the first real time.

He told me I looked really good, and I thanked him, and then he did me the favor of asking how dropping twenty years overnight felt because I wanted to say it was great, thank you very much, without acting like I pitied him for taking those years back after his time as Elaine.  Us having both had the same identity at different times gave us a bit more room to talk about how things were going with the original (and never being anyone else again) Elaine.  She and the guy living as me found each other and are getting married next spring, which is crazy, especially when you think that neither of them were using those names the last time "Daryl & Elaine" was a thing.

Anyway, he seemed genuinely happy that this had finally worked out for me.  I was planning to take over this life a year ago, but then the original Zee's father died, and even if it didn't mean much to the last person living that life, being in it meant responsibilities she couldn't get out of without feeling awful, so we put everything off a year.  I haven't posted about it because I didn't want to jinx this time, which feels stupid but I can't exactly say that there's no chance of jinxes being real, can I?

I spent most of yesterday afternoon making sure that new-Magda would be in good shape - doing laundry, buying a couple new underwear sets, finding a spot where you could print things out so that she had a bunch of maps and diagrams (and making sure they were all stored in her phone), attaching names to a bunch of people at the airport.

There was also a big section in the binder on Harmon/Alicia, more than I might have expected a year ago, but fake family's fake family, and maybe the new Magda would want to spend more time with him.  We never really got on, but ever since I got my own place in Flushing in preparation for this whole switch a year ago, he's kind of made himself at home there whenever his schedule takes him to New York, because after all, Magda wouldn't expect her daughter to stay in a hotel or crash pad, would she?  We aren't actually roommates that often - I still stayed over at J.T.'s a lot - but, we do go through the motions of playing mother and daughter more than we used to.

In fact, she was there when I got into town this morning, and you'll pardon if I switch pronouns up, but you would have to look very hard to see a man eligible to collect social security in the 27-year-old woman sitting on my couch in a miniskirt and a top that was little more than a bra, feet on my coffee table in high-heeled knee-high boots, hair back in a ponytail, barely looking up at me from her phone (where she was probably looking to see if anybody had tagged photos of her from the night before) as I came in using a spare key.  There's something about her that I don't like, maybe because I feel like it's a reflection of me switching lives for my own ends and not looking back.

That and the dismissive compliments, like "yes, I guess that's at least a lateral move" upon looking at me, which probably wasn't actually racist, but sort of felt that way, like being younger and taller and tighter maybe didn't entirely compensate for not being white anymore (I'm not proud that I've worried about that myself).  I shrugged it off and said I was going to take a shower and a nap, because I'd wound up taking the train after a flight or two was canceled.

It hit me as I saw myself in the bathroom mirror that my new face didn't match what I was expecting in this place - by now I expect the Inn to be random, I guess - and I started thinking about what I'd like to keep from this apartment/phase of my life to bring into the next one.  Should I want to bring more mementos, or physical things, than I was planning?  Given that J.T. and I figure to pick right back up where we left off it doesn't seem like I should be leaving as clean of a slate.

Of course, to do that, he's got to "meet" Zee, which is why I've spent an hour or so after getting up from my hap working on my hair and make-up and making sure I chose just the right outfit so that nobody would be surprised when this "tourist" catches his eye at the bar tonight.

It's funny - I've been with him for longer than I have been with any girl, but we've switched our shapes so often that it doesn't necessarily feel like that.  Heck, I almost wonder if we'll start joking about it if we hit a rut in a couple of years.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves - tonight, I'm seeing a play and finding out what these taste buds think of gin!

-Zariyaryl (Hmm, maybe not)