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

Caleb: Fireworks

So, after a couple more run ins with Kaitlyn while we were going in and out of the Inn, I worked up the courage to ask if she was up for going to the 4^th of July festivities together. Nothing super serious, of course, just, you know, hangout, get some food, see the fireworks. Will I claim I did so with perfect game? No, not really. I’ll be the first to admit that dating isn’t exactly a thing I do a lot of. It isn’t like I’m not into girls or anything, but I’m not into them, if you get what I mean.

…ok, reading it as I write I realize that probably sounds a lot different than I thought, but just wait, you’ll probably figure it out. Point is, I can appreciate when a girl’s cute and easy to talk to so, hey, why not take a shot? Or at least that was the idea.

“Sooooo,” I said, the two of us walking towards the beach after grabbing something to go from some food trucks. “What got you interested in psychology?”

“I don’t know, I guess I just always thought the human mind was interesting. All the weird little quirks and things that make people different. Like, for example, how you keep rubbing at your arm every time you’re nervous,” she says, grinning as she glances down at me doing exactly that.

“What, nooo, I don’t do that,” I say in a halfhearted denial.

“Hey, don’t sweat it. We all got our little anxieties. Studying up just kind of helped me learn some ways on how to deal with them.”

“Is that what lead you to the whole counseling thing?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Kind of a mix of wanting to help people and curiosity.”

And that’s pretty much how things went for the rest of the chat. Things eventually turned towards me and what drove me to data analytics. Didn’t really have any special reason to give. I just always had a knack for numbers and thinking about patterns, so it just felt like a pretty natural career path to fall into. Even if it was rough in tech right now, plenty of other fields need people who can think quantitatively so employment seemed stable.

I took the nods and “hmmms” from her as a good sign, of curiosity if anything else, and soon we wound up by the beach for the fireworks. The show was exactly what you’d expect: loud and colorful. But let’s be honest, I’m guessing most of you reading this are more interested in what happened after the show.

We had made our way back to the Inn, and when I thought we were about to separate our ways to our adjacent rooms she instead starts pulling me towards hers.

“Did you want to stay up and talk more?” I asked.

I kind of figured what she was about to say.

“Well, I figured maybe something a little more than that…”

So, circling back to the “not into them” thing, I had meant that in the sense of not really being into the idea of sex. And I don’t mean that in a “oh you’re just nervous” or whatever way you’re probably thinking, I mean that in that I’m pretty confident I’m ace.

Whenever other guys talked about girls and the things they wanted to do with them, I just kind of nodded along, not quite getting it. Sure, I could look at a girl and think “Hey, they’re cute/pretty/etc.”, but anything beyond that kind of aesthetic appreciation didn’t really click. Thing is, being asexual doesn’t always go with being aromantic, so while I still could get crushes and take the occasional shot, most people you interact with aren’t going to be ace, so it’s usually just a matter of time till that difference in desire causes problems.

Like, you know, right then and there.

“Oh, uhm, yeah, I get it. We can just circle back to that later, take things slow.”

“Yeah, yeah, totally. For now, I’m just going to head to bed.”

There was a brief step forward, as if both us thought of trying something, and then it was back off to our rooms.

So yeah, sorry for anyone who was reading this hoping the title was euphemistic. Doubt I’ll be able to provide any sort of explosive stories for you all while I’m here, so hopefully you can settle for cute and awkward.

- Caleb 

Caleb: Summer Holidays

The last time I had ever been to Maine I was a kid. Family had rented out a house, filled with my brother and his high school friends, alongside myself and little sister.  It was one of those simple but fun vacations, where you just kind of go around and see the local sights and touristy things, and then when you got back home you bugged your brother and his friends to play whatever trading card game you were obsessed with. Still so appreciative of them indulging me, and that no one questioned when I ran off during packing to go watch the new season of the cartoon that game was based on.

We never did it again, but it had always kind of stuck out in my mind, but with a summer to kill till I have to start worrying about graduate school I figured “Know what, let’s indulge in some nostalgia!”  With all the anxiety thinking about the future, a little bit of grounding in the past felt like just the thing to calm the nerves. Sure, I’ve never been to Old Orchard Beach but, eh, close enough. Besides, it’s just me, myself, and I: brother’s busy with his family, and the rest of the family’s all over the country these days, so it’s not like I exactly needed a whole house to stay in.

Of course, I should probably talk a little bit about myself, what, three paragraphs in?

To start, my name’s Caleb Jones. I just spent the last four years or so getting a bachelors in data science. Lot’s of math, programming, that kind of thing, so you know I need some of that beach sun! Currently looking at a couple options: there’s some jobs out there you can do with just a bachelors (especially outside of tech!), but a master’s degree does snag you a higher salary so as a backup I got a program lined up for the fall. But, you know, if someone offers pay now, well, won’t exactly say no.

Outside of that, I kind of hate to admit it, but not much else going on. School was kind of brutal, so outside of some online hobbies, the usual consumption of streaming and occasional book, and spending more than I hate to admit on trading cards (which really, Old Orchard, no place here running tournaments?), social life was kind of a bust. It’s fine, though: school’s an investment for the future, after all. So once I get settled in whatever happens I can take that step to try and be out more.

Though if I’m being honest, maybe this vacation will be the start of something. Apparently the room next to mine’s occupied by this girl, Kaitlyn. She’s about my age, starting grad school in psychology this fall with hopes of going into counseling. Having the first impression be running into each other going into the conjoined bathroom at the same time was a little awkward, but once we got past that I thought we hit things off. With her glasses and put-up hair she gave a bit of librarian vibe, but hey, I happen to like the library so, you know, I thought it was cute. Might ask if she’s up to going to the 4^th of July stuff in town…

- Caleb 

Daryl/Zee: Letting you all know about Cary

I know the news about Cary's heart attack has been going up and down some group texts, but a lot of Inn folks lurk here to keep up with what's going on and might not find out otherwise.  I just want to let everyone know that it was mild, though they'll be keeping him in the hospital for observation for a couple of days.  We're not sure if it was triggered by the heatwave or something else.

The timing is especially lousy, not that there's ever a particularly good time for something like this, because Mackenzie is actually abroad right now.  She was down in Boston for a show while Scotland's Tartan Army was swarming the city, hit it off with a kilted fellow whose hair is an even brighter red than hers, and she said that, yeah, she thinks she's Scottish but she's adopted so she's not really in touch with that part of her heritage when asked.  Which sounds better than "under this pale exterior, I'm actually a Black woman ten or fifteen years older than I look".  He impulsively asks to let him show her Glasgow, she says yes, and Cory's cool with it because, as mentioned, the former Krystle has more than enough experience to deal with anything this guy might pull.  It does mean that she's been spending all day trying to pull together a flight back home and dealing with delays that messed with her transfer.

I'm second on his "in case of emergency" call list after Mack, so I left work, rented a car, and drove up as soon as I could.  Happily, there's been relatively little bullshit about a Black woman half his age being his girlfriend rather than a caretaker; Southern Maine can be lily-white at times but often pretty live-and-let-live, even if I've been getting some sideways glances.

Thankfully, Cary was awake for a couple hours tonight, and was in pretty good spirits, but tired.  I've taken work off through the holiday and I'll probably be sleeping in an uncomfortable chair next to him, waiting for Mack to show up.

It's hitting me kind of hard, harder than I expected.  We kept telling ourselves that our thing was kind of casual, friends with benefits and a unique shared experience, and maybe that's why it his so hard, because lovers come and go but people you've shared lives with are incredibly rare.  Elaine gets it; she's been texting me for updates ever since I called her.

Anyway, even though the doctors say he's going to be fine, spare Cary a moment if you can.

-Zee

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

Isaac/Ainsley: This City Should Not Exist

Peggy Hill was right about this place. The instant we set foot outside the airport in Phoenix, Heather and I got kicked in the stomach with an unending onslaught of hundred-and-five-degree heat magnified by all the concrete and asphalt. I get why a lot of the girls my age around here wear basically nothing, especially if they're forced to go out in the afternoon, but that's not enough to get me to partake and neither was Heather making fun of me when she saw me digging out an old ASU sweater from Ainsley's closet. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Clearly, I made it to Phoenix without totally collapsing into a pit of self-pity and anxiety, or at least not a bad enough one to cave and find a non-cursed motel to shut myself in until my bank account runs dry. But before that, I had to deal with the homework the Inn gives to all its guests, which I'd put off like the rest of the homework I've done in my life.

Sitting in my Inn room very early last Wednesday morning, after being up all night freaking out about the impending flight, I had two obligations to choose from: Turn on Ainsley's phone, or write my letter. Contacting Ainsley could wait a little longer, but I'd have to leave my phone behind at the Inn for my body's future occupant and despite my trepidation with truly entering Ainsley's world I'm still too phone-addicted to go without one for too long. I needed it for my boarding pass regardless. After staring at the thing for too long, only at the backside (floral case up) to avoid having to confront my reflection for any unnecessary second, I pressed the side button, felt the vibration and slid that thing under the bed as if it were a grenade about to go off in my hand. Not now, Ainsley. It was time to distract myself from a problem by solving another one.

The actual content of the letter was the easy part. My life is not complicated (before now, anyway). That's sort of the problem-- my life might be kind of barren, but that'll only help someone slip into it. And I'm young, even if I'm not exactly a gym rat I'm still certain that twenty is much younger than the average age of an Inn guest. Is it that crazy to be paranoid about someone stealing my life? Is that what everyone around my age who goes to the Inn thinks? If anything I got off easy only gaining an extra five years-- maybe this is the luck Heather was talking about. Regardless, I hate thinking about somebody else walking around in my skin, and that's only made worse knowing that somebody got my body two days ago. Much sooner than I expected, by the way. Heather and I haven't heard anything (and yeah, I know, I have no right to criticize with how long it took me). I might ask Penny if she saw anything but I'm assuming she was understandably distracted.

All those thoughts made the solid five minutes of constant vibrating from under the bed slightly more ignorable. It took way longer than that to agonize over my two-paragraph letter, but the second I finished I grabbed the phone before I could let myself overthink it, in a fit of rage about how I'd cowardiced myself out of getting to sleep that night. My bravery rewarded me with a lock screen full of hundreds of missed texts, calls, group chats (at least one of which had a conversation going even at this hour), and some very concerning emails from some kind of kennel. Any courage I had quickly evaporated and I was like, screw it. Ainsley's left these people hanging for two weeks, they can wait a little longer.

Heather came to drag me out of the room before I could beat myself up too much. Since our blowup at the diner we've had an unspoken agreement to pretend it didn't happen, which is good enough for me. Or maybe not, since if she was pissed at me she wouldn't have spent the entire ride up to the Portland airport talking my ear off. Hell, maybe that was her revenge. It's the kind of thing she'd do.

"And around when Violet came along– that would've been when I was 31 by the way, so she's the same age as we are right now, gosh that's fun– that's when it all went to shit. Not 'cause of Violet, love the girl, wish I could see her more but she moved out to LA, she's the best. But I think it happened because Dave finally got into his head that having more kids wasn't gonna fix the marriage. And it took him three to realize that! Come on! So his heart wasn't in it anymore. And yeah, I started seeing Kenneth who was a VP at the school I was working at at the time, and I know it was cheating– I didn't know Dave had already been actually cheating on me at the time, but I knew he was emotionally cheating on me, so. You get it. Anyway it all blew up around when Jack was finishing middle school and I had to move to the next county over and it's, it's a complete mess. And I thought it would've been better once I finally got back to the dating game, but no, there was this guy at the bar, Jack, and yeah I know it's the same name as my oldest so that was weird but at that point I hardly ever saw him–"

You get the idea. I wonder if she does that to everyone or if it's only because I appear to be a woman the same age as her. By the time we boarded our first plane I knew far more than I ever wanted to about Heather Flynn and her life, even accounting for how I didn't retain more than a quarter of it. And so did our very confused and admirably silent rideshare driver.

Throughout all this I managed to go out into the world as a woman without having a visible panic attack. Mostly I just spent the whole trip staring at the ground and trying to avoid eye contact with anyone, which is a more extreme version of how I'd already been spending my vacation before any of this happened. But that's harder than it sounds in settings like air travel where you're constantly up in other people's personal space. Like the middle seat, for instance. Heather and I naturally ended up with two middle seats about ten rows away, with how late we booked the tickets. I could already notice people looking at me differently– some with lust, probably, but considering my baggy clothes and disastrous appearance not nearly as much as there could be. Instead people seemed to look kinder at me? Maybe? Like they think I'm harmless. That could just be me reading too hard into reactions I only see for a split second before turning away, but it'd explain the old man in the window seat who spent much of the second leg from Philly to Phoenix trying to tell me about his grandkids. There went the one good thing about being seated apart from Heather.

But I made it to that curb outside baggage claim where I doubled over from the heat. At some point, I had no choice but to just ignore other people, put my head down, and try to make it to my next point of relative safety with as little disruption as possible. The psychology changes from procrastinating entering the public world for as long as possible, to charging ahead at full speed just to get things over with. The sink-or-swim metaphor is a cliché because it's true.

That didn't stop me from collapsing on the couch and crying a little bit the moment Heather and I got into the apartment. I shut out everything: the last three days, the feeling of my chest against the cushions, the walls covered in tacky tapestries, Heather talking about how those girls are better decorators than she was at their age, everything. Ainsley's friends wondering when she'll come back from her "digital detox vacation" and arguing about whether Pedro Pascal is actually a good actor. The real Ainsley, who I was still failing. Figuring out how I'm going to be Ainsley, which I still hadn't really done at that point. Even the ominously empty dog crate and the fur lingering on the couch.

I've dealt with most of those things in the last week, but reliving the trip over here has me almost as drained as I was then. I'll keep you guys updated with my harrowing adventures. Hopefully before I start with Ainsley's job, but she managed to work out a pretty generous emergency leave deal so I've still got a little while. (I suspect nudging people to be lenient with employees disappearing from work for several weeks is part of the "nobody believes you" aspect of the Inn's curse-- you'd think way more of us would've lost our jobs!)

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

Isaac/Ainsley: Public

I hadn't eaten just under forty-eight hours.

I understand, abstractly, that I have no choice but to fly to Phoenix and live as Ainsley Thomas, not unless I want to be living out of hotels until I run out of money. I can see, logically, that I will wear Ainsley's clothes, attempt to not entirely destroy her career, and somehow navigate whatever her social life is like. I will generally exist in public as this woman with the expectation to act like this is completely normal and my entire life hasn't just been run over by an entire cavalcade of eighteen-wheelers. In the near future, I will actually bother to reach out to her about any of this instead of leaving her hanging about whoever's now apparently in charge of her life.

But that future, no matter how little choice I have, feels an unimaginable gulf away from the present. Since I met Heather the day before I left my room exactly once: rushing to the lobby to grab one of the bagels they put out, and then getting the hell out of there. That's hard enough despite knowing everyone in the Inn understands my situation, meaning social standards are meaningless. Going out in public is... different. Every fear I already had about making the general public uncomfortable feels ten times more justified now. I feel like everyone can tell I'm not supposed to look like this, even though reading the blog tells me not only that it's not true, but the Inn's magic actively works to prevent this. But sure, I can look like a woman, and nobody's going to believe I turned into one two days ago, but I can't walk or talk or act like one! And that's what randoms would notice. Clearly, Inn guests have managed to thread the needle, but probably by not thinking too hard about it. So it's too bad for me that I was put on this planet to overthink. I'm going to be an accountant, that's good in my line of work!

I was in the middle of doing exactly that when I heard another bang on the door from the only person it could've been. "Isaac! Hey. We need to talk about flights. They're not getting any cheaper and I haven't seen you all day. Wanna get dinner?"

"I'm good." Anything to prolong the inevitable a little more. "We can talk in here if you want, it's no big--"

"You haven't eaten at all today, have you?"

"I--" I'm a horrible liar sometimes. "You're not my mom!"

"Look buddy, I'm somebody's mom! And I don't know who you really are, but I know what it's like to deal with a scared teenager who won't leave the house because they got a pimple--"

"I'm twenty."

"Oh, wow, twenty, that's a huge difference. But you know what? You're right, I'm not your mom. I'm your roommate. And that means I don't wanna have to mom a roommate who won't leave the apartment, loses their job, and won't pay their half of the rent, okay?"

My sense of shame didn't quite outweigh the crippling social anxiety just yet. "Go eat. We can talk flights when you get back, in here."

"If you wanna starve, suit yourself. But I'm gonna say-- you're going to have to leave the Inn before you know it. We've got two nights left before they kick us out. Do you want your first time out in public as this girl to be going through TSA? Sitting next to a couple strangers in the middle seat of a transcontinental flight? Or, maybe you'd rather chicken out, stiff me with the rent, and stay put. You'd have to go out there and find someplace to stay. Talk to hotel staff and beg for a room. Or... you can come get dinner with me, in a town where nobody gives a crap about who you are. Your choice."

There it is. There's that shame.

---

"Can you quit looking over your shoulder every five seconds?" Heather whined as we walked past the pier towards a diner she'd picked out, too slowly for my tastes. I like to walk so fast sometimes people tell me it's scary. "I'm telling you, nobody cares. It just makes you stick out even more if you look to the whole world like you're hiding from the cops."

I fiddled a bit with my shirt. Most of Ainsley's vacation wardrobe was fairly... minimal, but she fortunately had some dirty jeans and a baggy T-shirt reading DELTA PANCAKEFEST '19 with some graphics of pancakes and a list of participating sororities. And, terrifyingly yet most mercifully of all, a sports bra. Good enough for me, I'll probably wear the same thing on the flight over.

"You talked me out of that room, okay?" I muttered, as if there were some reason everyone walking by would find it strange that someone appearing to be a young woman sounds like a young woman. "Don't push your luck."

Heather rolled her eyes. "You're gonna have to get used to people looking at you even if you're not doing it wrong. 'S how it is for girls our age."

We finally made into the diner before I could reflect too hard on that. I grimaced a bit when the hostess referred to us as ladies, but at least she sat us down a relatively out-of-the-way booth, as if she could tell I'm a wreck who can't handle the slightest bit of eye contact right now.

"So," I broke the silence once we'd ordered. "I have to ask. How are you handling this so well?" I spoke quietly, wary of any normies listening inn, despite knowing full well this can't possibly be the first Inn-related conversation to be had in that diner. "Seriously. You act like I'm the weird one for freaking out. What about this situation isn't freakout-able? Is this not your first time through the Inn?"

"Oh honey, I work in a high school," Heather smirked, her volume indicating her clear disregard for anyone who might hear. "You don't get through seventeen years of that by freaking out, I'll tell you. So yeah, this is my first time at the Inn. Ever had to talk to twenty angry parents at once who can't believe their previous little babies ran a cheating ring? This ain't nothin'. Also helps that Sara's a pretty little thing. Could be worse."

I decided to ignore that last part. "Yeah, well. I would've thought you'd be nicer if you're a teacher."

Heather just laughed. "What, you never had an asshole teacher? You'd be surprised." A waitress came by to take our order before she continued. "But I never said I'm a teacher. I'm an administrator, and that means I'm a meat shield the principal uses whenever she can't be damned to break it to a parent that their kid's a little hellraiser. You gotta be mean sometimes, and you need thick skin in a job like that. Thick skin, Ainsley."

"Do you have to call me that?"

"You're gonna have to get used to it," she said as she glanced at her phone. "She's not happy you haven't talked to her, y'know."

"You've been talking to Ainsley!?" I raised my voice for the first time all day. Somehow, it felt like a breach of privacy even though that doesn't make any sense.

"I've been talking to Sara since yesterday. Ainsley's the one who needs to play telephone with her about getting a word out to you. Seems like she's got a lot going on she'd rather talk to you about than put in that letter. Gonna need to talk before we hit Phoenix, y'know."

I went back to staring at the table and sighed. "I'll get around to it."

For the first time, Heather looked more genuinely angry than condescending. "You and your procra-- You know? God, what do you want whoever's stuck with your life to act like? Y-you want radio silence while you wait to find out if they might not completely ruin you? You don't want to know if it's an infant, or an old man with dementia, or some complete basket case who--"

That, for all my worries about taking over a strange woman's life and appearing as her in public, was the one thing I'd avoided thinking about the hardest. I do not want to confront what could happen to my life-- I still haven't written my letter. It's the single most bone-chillingly mortifying thing imaginable. "What is your problem?!" An uncomfortably shrill voice rose from the diner table. "Thick skin, thick skin-- can you just get off my back for one goddamn second! Why does how I am handling the single most insane and least like thing that's ever happened to me affect you in any way? I know I don't have a choice but to figure it out, okay? You think I'm not reminded of that every time I see my reflection? If you're not my mom, then treat me like a fucking adult who can handle his own problems."

Too late, I realized that, no matter how stress-inducing she is, talking to Heather was distracting me from my paranoia of being stared at. Now there were more than a few stares, stares at that girl who'd just bitched out in front of her friend and interrupted the meal of every poor, innocent tourist.

What a freak I am. I gasped, shrank in my seat, and went back to staring at the table.

"You don't understand how lucky we are," Heather muttered. Neither of us said a word for the next ten minutes before we finally got around to talking about flights.

I can see, logically, that Heather and I will eventually reach an acceptable mutual tolerance as roommates. I understand, abstractly, that I have no choice but to stop being such a coward.

But not today.

Isaac/Ainsley: Roommate

 "Ainsley? Ainsley, you in there?" Another few knocks on the door. I dutifully ignored them before remembering I look like an Ainsley and getting run over by another anxiety spike.

"Look, if you're listening this is the only room where nobody's come out yet," continued a young woman's voice. She knocked again. "I'm Sara, if that means anything to you yet. Or, I look like her, but you get what I'm saying." Another, louder knock. "Tell me you're not a runner. That poor woman said her daughter ran off and I can't--"

Yet again, I couldn't take it anymore. Paralysis gave way to the irresistible restless urge to do something, anything to change the situation. It's a cold comfort that this new body hasn't changed my habit of caving in the most awkward way possible. "I'm here-- oh!" My hand shot up to my mouth as it hit me that I hadn't actually spoken since yesterday. I sound like an auto dealership owner's daughter, the kind they'd occasionally put on crappy local TV commercials I used to see as a kid. That's oddly specific, but it's what came to mind.

I opened the door once I'd shook myself out of it and threw on my now-oddly clingy T-shirt from yesterday, greeted by a short, stick-thin woman about my age (real or apparent) with shoulder-length straight, light brown hair. "Sorry if I--"

"Oh, yup, about this girl's age. Gotta be her." "Sara" crossed her arms over her chest and tried her hardest to look down at me, despite being shorter. "You read your letter yet?"

I looked at the floor, away from this woman's intimidating gaze, and realized I'm probably the only one left who still hasn't. Kind of embarrassing, even though it really shouldn't be. "I, uh. Haven't gotten around to it."

"Well, c'mon then. We're reading it now." As if she owned the place, Sara slipped right past me through the doorframe and found the luggage in the closet. "We've got some stuff we need to talk about and it'll be good for you to hear most of it from Ainsley herself. But I'll just say, you're my new roommate, and we need to figure out flights to Phoenix before they kick us out of the Inn again."

Phoenix? We couldn't even get somewhere in the Northeast like seemingly three-quarters of the Inn's guests? I only let out the barest complaint at the girl digging through "my" crap. She produced a floral-cased iPhone and some dirty laundry, not having to go to deep to find an envelope. Honestly I'm still not sure which of those items scares me the most.

Sara held out the envelope. "You want it, or am I gonna have to read it for you?" I opted to save the last shreds of my dignity and opened the letter.

It was actually fairly tame, all things considered, though she didn't write very much. Ainsley Thomas, 25, of Phoenix, Arizona. Works a laptop job for a marketing firm currently contracting with a hotel chain-- not a completely impossible job to fake, even if I'm still wincing at the thought of having to spend all day surrounded by the types from the other half of B-school whom I'm all too familiar with. Lots of addresses and passwords. More ominously, the letter ended with instructions to text her as soon as possible, because "you'll need my help keeping track of everyone" and I'm not looking forward to learning what that means. At least it didn't say she's dating anyone, that counts for something.

I didn't notice Sara reading over my shoulder until I finished the letter. I gave her a what-the-hell-are-you-doing look. "Do you mind?"

"Hon, this whole thing is the biggest privacy violation you can imagine. It's not even possible to get more intimate with someone than, y'know. This. There's no secrets anymore."

"It's not like I asked for this." I really didn't like how she sat next to me on the bed, as if she was planning on being there for a while. "There's not anything crazy in the letter, so. Whatever. But for all you know there could've been!"

"Are you always this paranoid?" Sara just cackled. "My real name's Heather, by the way. You?"

I blushed. "Isaac."

Heather wolf-whistled. "Ouch. Guess it's fifty-fifty, but, gotta say, I'm not jealous of the sex change. Good luck with that, bud."

My eyes narrowed-- I didn't need the reminder. "I'm trying not to think about it," I added, suddenly hyperaware of my nipples chafing against my shirt.

Heather looked like she was about to say something but was interrupted by the phone in her hand going off with some unidentifiable 90s-sounding grunge song. (I'm not a fan.) Her eyes widened once she saw the caller ID. "She picks now to-- You're kidding me," she muttered. "Hey, I gotta go figure out how to take this. Talk to you later." And as just quickly as Heather had barged into my room, she mercifully vanished from my life. For now.

What an irritating person. Do you ever remember being a kid going out shopping with your mom, and your mom ran into someone she knows and she'd talk to them for what to a child feels like an eternity? Heather is that friend of your mom's.

Well, I've had worse roommates.

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

Isaac/???: Stranger

So I assume that if you're a regular reader of this blog you know what just happened to me and I'm gonna spend my time writing in here instead of doing anything requiring me to actually accept that this all happened to me and SHIT.

I was asleep, for better or worse. Probably better. When I'm out of school or work I'm a night owl to the point of regularly staying up past 4 AM doing absolutely nothing but this whole town kind of bores me to sleep. (I'd give anything to be bored right now.) I still went to bed pretty late though and my first thought on waking up was annoyance with the loud commotion in the hallway interrupting my sleep. I think I actually dozed off again for a little while after that, and I would've had another few hours of blissful ignorance if I didn't roll onto my stomach and notice something wrong with my chest.

Unfamiliar straight blonde hair (a far cry from my Jew-fro) blocked my vision while I fumbled my way out from under the covers. Sitting up only made it more obvious that there's something attached to my chest. It dawned on me what might be happening, but it still took me what felt like far longer than it actually was to psych myself up and pat my crotch. Or even do anything besides lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling, really. Because that's what I do when I get bad news I can't do anything about: I ignore it. I put myself in a hermetic seal until I can't stand it anymore.

Lying on the bed and doing literally nothing, as it turns out, doesn't shut myself off from sensation. There's obviously weight on my chest but the sheer newness of every sensation was enough to make zoning out impossible. The nothingness between my legs is so conspicuous. Hair brushed my shoulders and entangled itself against the pillow... Even the sheets, the colors, the light, the ambient nature of my mind felt different, somehow. Maybe you can chalk that last one up to the barely suppressed freakout but I swear, it's implacably different. The world, turned strange.

Once I couldn't take it anymore I said fuck this and reached for my phone, hitting me with the triple indignity of arms too short for the nightstand, hands too small for the phone (that one really hurts) and my browser opened to this blog. I tried reading a bit through the archives but once it became clear that I'm probably gonna have to live this woman's life I stopped. That's too much. I'm a horrible actor, and I've always prided myself in, if nothing else, knowing who I am and staying true to it. I refuse to think about it.

I also refused thinking more about what I look like now until I had to go to the bathroom (how's that for making it real...). I won't tell you about that part, but I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and couldn't hold back my curiosity anymore. Staring back at me I saw the kind of girl I'd hurriedly walk past if I saw her on campus because she's handing out pamphlets for why I should join her particular bible study group out of the approximately fifty billion we have at UVA. She's about 5'5", I'd say, and since I'm not (I wasn't?) a particularly tall guy I only lost a few inches. Kind of thickly built but not what I'd call chubby. About my age, maybe a little older?

I stared involuntarily into unfamiliar eyes for I don't even know how long until something snapped and I ran back to the bed and just sobbed. I felt a heat behind my eyes that hadn't been there since I was a kid... I'm not like this! Why do I have to be like this!? I can't be this woman...

So I didn't be this woman. For now. I haven't left the room in hours even though I'm fucking starving because there's still people around here and I don't want to face being seen as, whatever I am. If I go through that doorway, or look inside the suitcase I found in the closet, this all becomes real and, I'd like to avoid that for as long as I'm able. That's why I'm blogposting when I have way more important things to worry about right now. Is that why all you people do it?

Also, someone knocked on my door just now, right as I was finishing writing all this. Guess we'll see if that means anything... later.

Isaac: Low Beam

Am I insane? Be honest with me.

I ask myself that question a lot these days, but right now it's because I chose to travel hundreds of miles to spend two weeks I won't get back at the cheapest bed and breakfast in Old Orchard Beach, by myself. (And the "breakfast" part is being generous.) Granted, I wasn't supposed to be alone; the plan was to make the arduous trek up here with my best friend. My girl best friend, who told me to get a room with one bed. You do the math. Of course that doesn't give me a pass for getting a nonrefundable reservation for a room with someone prone to depressive episodes when she's especially stressed, even if New England and the beach were her idea to begin with.

And you know, I get it. Alice has a lot going on in her life, with swordfighting tournaments (yeah, really), parties with Viking LARPers (not my crowd), invoking whatever dark magic rituals make her so unflappably cool half the time (don't ask me) and dealing with major lifelong mental health issues. And, you know, school and work on top of all that. Her life changes so much, she gets caught up in it, and one day after one of those tournaments I run into her and she's just dead inside. Going to New England would be too much for her, and ultimately I can't blame her. Like I said, she's got a lot going on.

But I don't. The most interesting thing I've done since finals ended is get a new fern for my room. That's how I treat myself, you know. I like to think of myself as a gardener, but I hate working outdoors so I've got a bunch of plants competing for sunlight around the one window in my tiny single dorm room. Some people's majors turn into their hobbies, but that's hard to do when you're an accounting major. So the thought of giving up the one actual plan I'd made for this summer didn't sit right with me. Which is why in a fit of impulsive contrarianism I embarked on twelve hours of solo driving up from Charlottesville, VA, fueled only by spite, to the world's only bed and breakfast with its own blog.

I realize I've kind of been trashing the good name of the Trading Post Inn but, to give it some credit, I've spent a lot of time in here since I got into town. Sure, I've walked around town, paced around the beach for a while and checked out the pier, and I've done all that at least a couple times a day for over a week now. But there's really not much to this place, and I hate sticking around in one spot for too long when I'm by myself in public. Going around on my own, surrounded by all these couples, friends, families out having fun doing things together and genuinely living their lives... Especially the ones my age. It just makes me feel like I'm a fraud, like at any moment somebody's going to turn around and say, ha, look at that creep! What's he doing here? And then I get mad at myself, not only for weirding out entirely hypothetical people, but also for being that paranoid in the first place. I hate sounding to myself like some kind of incel, and it all makes for a vicious cycle of negative thoughts. And I signed up for two weeks of this!

All this means I've spent a lot of time lying around in bed, just a different bed from usual, one from which I can't easily keep an eye on my plants. Or hanging around the Inn, where I can take comfort in the fact that I'm far from the weirdest person here-- I saw a kid who couldn't be older than ten yelling at someone over the phone about a mortgage. I mean, damn, did her parents give her a script or something? It feels like half the BnB is always whispering something to each other whenever I happen to walk by. Which I'm fine with, I don't need to involve myself in random people's problems.

Anyway, that's why I'm bored enough to rant at a blog just barely younger than me which somebody wrote down the link to in the lobby. I wasn't going to overshare this much, but I saw a post on the sidebar with a title about someone wondering if she's supposed to be horny. And if that's the standard I'm working with, I'm not about to stick out very much. (No clue why so many of you keep posting months or even years after your stay, but even I'm not desperate enough to read any more of this thing!)

So, I'll be around the Trading Post Inn for a good while longer. On the off-chance someone who's actually here right now reads this far, and they're similarly bored, you know where to find me.

And maybe you can tell me whether I'm insane for coming here!