Annette/Benjamin: And to think I've had my eye on a ring

I talk with Missy a lot these days, sometimes, I think, more than I did when we were sharing an apartment.  We both feel like we need someone who gets us, even though it seems like we should have it.  He's got Max in the next room, but I don't know what their deal is, exactly; I don't think they were the closest brothers you would find, and now Max getting what he wants and deserves means Missy had to give up a life that makes her happy.  It's tense, but Max feels just guilty enough that she tries to reduce the tension, and I like her, but reducing tension isn't what Missy does best.

Meanwhile, ever since Cary and Elaine went back to Maine, I've kind of been on my own here.  I'm sure there are other Inn people in the Chicago area - it's a large enough city - but I don't know any of them, and while it should help me to just be Benjamin, it mostly makes me feel alone.  I know it's what a lot of people who have visited the Inn go through, and I don't envy them.

It's made me a bad boyfriend at times.  More often than not, lately.  When you're doing this with other people, it's not really a game, but you can blow off steam about the things in your life that aren't as they should be, and even when that just involves someone telling you that you've got to put the idea of "should be" out of your head, that's something.  Now, when I get laid off from a job I don't even really like, I'm just angry, and I try not to take it out on Marybeth, but what's the point of being in a relationship if you can't share your frustrations, even if you can't fully share them?

It came to a bit of a head about a month ago when a text came in from Missy at a terrible time, and what she could see on the screen said not too be frustrated, and she wanted to know what I could tell "my ex" (the history we inherit!) that I couldn't tell her.  Which is a fair question in, like, 99% of all relationships, but in mine, one I couldn't answer.

So things got uncomfortable, and I feel awful, because I do love Marybeth and I really don't want to be the selfish guy who acts like his girlfriend's career should come below his annoyance, and it feels like it's going that way.  I'm trying to think of ways that I can not be that guy, that I can show her just how much she means to me, and then I'm walking past the jeweler's and an engagement ring captures my eye.

It's a nice one, especially considering it's also one I might be able to afford.  It's not a diamond, because those are stupidly expensive and I actually did some research into how stupid their being expensive is as a project in high school, because the cartel keeps supply artificially limited and what diamonds are being mined are often being done under terrible conditions.  But they make some nice engagement rings with colored gems now, because there are a lot of young people with that sort of mindset, and I liked the red one I found.  I don't know how traditional Marybeth is with these things, but I thought about how I would have thought a guy getting me that sort of ring would be a cool combination of ethical and practical.  I'd gone back to see it three times before Missy sent that email with the video of Carlotta changing into Max.

It was a punch in the gut, because I like Max, and thought him dating Missy's best friend was kind of cool, but when I saw that I was the BCC on the email, and it was primarily sent to Sandra I felt this overpowering tension, wondering how I was going to sleep until I found out how she was going to respond to this, because if she decided she wanted her life back, then mine was in play, and I texted Missy back not to get my hopes up like that without thinking.

And that was it, wasn't it?  I wanted my old life back.  I could try to deny it, try to convince myself that I wasn't dealing with some really deep-seated lack of satisfaction with the life I had by proposing to Marybeth, and maybe she'd say yes and maybe we'd be happy.  That's the thing about our relationship, at least from my point of view - as much as I genuinely like her, I know that part of what initially attracted me to her was that she was like me, or at least the me that I wanted to be, and I'll probably never know how much is me wanting her and how much is me wanting a proxy.

I probably was more annoying than usual over the next few days, and then Sandra responded, saying that as much as being Annette was great and she maybe had a great future, the idea that her husband had been targeted by Carlotta, and had been living with someone like this for a couple of years, changed a lot.  She somehow managed to get that room reserved for the next week, and then reached out to me...

I don't want to write about the breakup.  It was hard and it sucked and I was so tempted to not do it at all, figuring that maybe the next Benny could use someone like Marybeth in her life, but then I thought about how I'd feel if a boyfriend was just going to hand me off to a stranger, and I felt sick.  So I said like a dozen variations on how it wasn't her, but it was me, and the move without me having my own thing was making me crazy, and I felt like it was time to head back home to, like, recharge my batteries or some ridiculous thing.  I was really determined that she not feel like any sort of loser, but I also didn't want any room for being talked out of it, because I probably could be.  I was giving up on two challenges by dumping her when it got hard, and I don't want to be the sort of person who does that.

But I got through it, and now I'm in Maine, feeling like a failure rather than excited like I should be.  I haven't worked up the nerve to visit Cary and Elaine yet, although I probably will when Missy and Max come up tomorrow, to help give this version of me a good send-off.  It's going to be tough to face Missy, but I think I owe it to her, as its her misfortune that is giving me this chance, and she is not being any sort of jerk about it, which she probably has every right to be.

But, hey, I could already be myself again by the time I see her.  There's no tingle now, but who knows if that always happens?

-Annette/Benjamin

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-Wei: No-Fun in the Sun

Summer stretching out in front of us and my brother is being a drag, binge-watching Iron Fist but complaining every five minutes about appropriation and terrible fight choreography, and is taking everything I've got not to tell him that Luke Cage is just a couple clicks away.  Or that we could go clubbing or something, but he's not having any of that.  It's a crying shame, because we both look hot as shit in our own way and Elaine came right out and fucking said not to act like being her is a hardship, but he's barely left my apartment in two weeks, and being supportive is boring as fuck.

We were hoping that we could maybe find a way out of what Carlotta and Giorgia were planning, heading back up to Maine the day after Giorgia/Bingbing dropped Max on my doorstep.  I texted Cary and Elaine to let them know we were coming, so our first stop was his truck.  He hadn't been able to get in touch with her yet - lots of people still trying to figure out what to do with a 10-year-old girl who just wants to talk to a guy that seemingly has no connection to her - but he seems like a good guy.  He freaked Max out by giving him a list of things he'd learned from being Elaine himself, from what shampoo worked best on her hair to how best to put off that particular friend who keeps texting at 3am without really hurting her feelings.

Max was not excited about an older guy having detailed knowledge of his body, even if he does grill a mean hot dog.  Maybe especially, because he pointed out that the Coke Zero that Max was drinking would make him gassier than a Diet Coke (it is not, apparently, just the same shit in different bottles), and Elaine would be pissed if he didn't make a little effort to work it off.

Next stop was the Inn, and that was weirder than usual.  The place was kind of deserted, which sticks out in a beach town during the summer, but it makes sense.  Everybody staying there was either really anxious to get back to their real lives, because it's early enough in the season that a lot of folks were doing that, or had new identities that were overdue for something.  I tried to tell Max how lucky he was that Elaine didn't have some worried boyfriend or angry boss to deal with, but he wasn't inclined to call himself lucky.

Especially not after meeting the one guy still hanging around the Inn.  Not sure how he'd spent the winter, but he was back to being himself and figured he might as well hang around for a few days.  He soon his head when I told him the story about his supposed girlfriend stealing his identity to make me give up this one, but it didn't stop the guy from asking if Max would like some help exploring his new body.  Max recoiled and I said nobody was ready this soon, so he turned to me and I was saying "boyfriend" before he could even open his mouth.

We walked away from the Inn after that, and I laugh as soon as the guy is out of earshot, asking what Max thinks:  Was he recently a way sexier man and still thinking like that, much less attractive and overestimating his current appeal as a result, or just coming off being a woman and either really excited to get his dick wet or sure it's made him a much better lover?

"Dude, how can you even...  You told him we were really guys and he still wanted to fuck us!"

"Yeah, and he was so ridiculous about it!"

"It's disgusting!"

"And Ravi wanted to play house with me when we first changed to Deirdre.  Some dudes are creeps, bro, and you're about to discover the number is higher than you thought."

Maybe not the right thing to say.

Anyway, with that being the situation, I didn't figure there was much more we could do until the Inn started filling up again, so we killed time in our hotel room for a couple days until Cary texted us that Elaine was at the truck and would like to meet the new her.  Max wasn't too high on the idea, kind of still thinking that this might be an elaborate prank that he didn't want to go along with, but went along just in case it wasn't.

You can't really tell someone used to be someone else by looking at them, so my first impression of Elaine was a cute little girl with way more sass than usual.  The curse works on everyone, and it was really hard for Mac to believe, even after Elaine reacted to him arriving in the park with no makeup, looking back and forth, and the wrong sort of ponytail with "ugh, am I going to have to train another one?"

"Nah," I said, "I got this.  I mean, I can get a lot of it; this life comes with money and summer vacation, and I've done the holy-shit-I've-got-tits thing before.  Heck, my first job out of college was using Agile, so I can get him up to speed on that if you don't mind him taking the summer off."

She didn't particularly like the idea of there being that sort of gap in her work history, but it seemed like a good deal to her.  Elaine took Max aside and told him some of the more intimate details of her history, while I booked us a flight to Chicago.

We probably didn't need to actually go out there - I could have bought Max a lot of clothes and stuff for what the ticket cost - but it was probably good to at least take a look at the life Max would have to slip into if we couldn't outwit Giorgia and Carlotta.  It also got me a chance to make a copy of Elaine's lease, so I could send rent checks every month.  Max asked if that wasn't too much and I said that the trust fund set up for the original Missy was about helping her get started on the dream to be a pan-Pacific movie star and allotted me enough to pay for apartments in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Los Angeles, so this was kind of using it for what it was intended.

We got back to Maine as the next block of people started coming in, and although the surveillance was kind of fun, it didn't get us the results we'd hoped.  On Wednesday night, I showed Max a model of the Inn I'd made in SketchUp, asked him to point me to the room he'd slept in, where the bed was, and where he usually wound up when sleeping.  I'd been working on a model - well, a fair number of visitors had, but we were trying to figure out how the Inn changes people when the positioning isn't obvious - Cary outside the Inn in his truck, two people in a room that held one last time, that sort of thing.  I figured that if we waited for twelve people to be in there, sneaked him in, and then made sure he was up against the right wall at 2am-ish, we could maybe change him back even if Carlotta was in the room.  The application I built around the diagram animated it a bit, showing our theory of how the curse tended to minimize individual distances between where someone lost an identity and where another person gained it even if that sometimes meant that a form could seem to move across the building, rather than minimizing total distance.  My demo had expanding circles going from people had been in Group A and turning into arrows when they hit a position in Group B.  Max was actually kind of impressed, saying he was surprised to see me do that, and I'm like, hey, my programming skills weren't in my dick. 

So we spent the next few days staking the place out.  As much as we'd sort of hoped some sorry of weird situation could have delayed Carlotta/"Sandra" from arriving the way Elaine missed her window, she arrived right on the first day.  We went back and forth on confronting her, but wound up chickening out, or at least figuring that some element of surprise was better than trying to appeal to some better nature I'm not sure the ex-Wongs have.  Especially after seeing how, though Carlotta was doing the best she could as Sandra, being a mid-thirties middle-class white woman instead of Yuan-wei was going to be a tough sell.

We still needed to smuggle Max in, though, but that didn't look like it should be so hard - as soon as I saw the 19-year-old guy at the place next door's front desk, I took my t-shirt off and told a bug-eyed Max to hold it.  I was stepping in the door when he grabbed me by the elbow.  "Why are you wearing a bikini?" He hissed

"Because this whole town's a beach and it's like 90 fucking degrees out.  Duh!"

"But--"

"You never had a problem with it before!"  I turned away and put a smile on, facing the kid.  "Hey, Jordan - whoa, what a small world, that's the name of my, well, someone super-close to me!  Anyway, me and my friend over there have got a problem - she left a bag over in the Trading Post Inn, and needs to go retrieve it.  Can we borrow a key real quick?"

"Um, I'm not...  We're only supposed to give out room keys when people check in..."

He wasn't really looking at my face, so I bent down a bit lower so that he could look me in the eyes a little easier and the tits he was looking at would dangle a bit.  "Oh, we don't need a room key, she left it in the laundry room."

"Uh..."

"And if she doesn't find it today, she's going to have me running around trying to replace everything in it all evening instead of...  Well, what's fun to do here?"

He was about to give us the key, I'm sure of it, but then the was Max, hovering over me, reaching out like he wanted to pull me back and stopping because he thought he'd pull my top off or something, over and over again, and the guy said, sorry, we're really only supposed to do this for guests who have a reservation for the block.  I smiled, said of course, and led Max out the door before exploding. 

"I was gonna get you in!  All you would have had to do was hide out until it was almost two, then maybe I could have found a way to get Carlotta away from the bed, but you had to go and make things weird!"

"I made things weird?  You were flirting with him!"

"Well, yeah!  Guy was reading a fan-service-filled manga but has probably never seen an actual Asian girl in person because he lives in fucking Maine, and I've got all this at my disposal.  Of course I fucking flirted with him!  Hot girls do that shit to get things they want all the fucking time, haven't you noticed?"

"But you're...  At least you say you're..."

"Yeah, and?"  I wasn't sure exactly where to start with that, so I told him we were getting some beer. 

As we were drinking, I saw Lucky 13 check in, so that was that.

I woke Max up at 1:30am, telling him we might as well go watch.  He freaked out a bit - even after three weeks or so, the first sensations as you wake just aren't right - and thought it wasn't cool that we were heading back over to the Inn.  "Are we going to break in?"

"Do you want to?  I mean, I'm still figuring out using hairpins to keep my hair in place; picking locks is something else."

He didn't know much about how to do that either, so I led him to a spot on the beach where we could see into Carlotta's window.  She hadn't even closed the blinds, so we got a show as she took off her top and bra.  I think she knew we were out there and wanted us to see.  Still, when I took our my phone, he said he didn't think I was a perv.  I shrugged, saying he might need to be reminded this want all a weird dream. 

It was a quick change, which was good for my phone battery, and sometimes Max just needs to have the bandaid ripped off.  Five minutes, and Max was looking at his own body through the window.  I became sure Carlotta knew we were watching when she dropped her pajamas and started...  Well, let's just say both sisters have now managed to put way more images of my brother's dick in my head than I want.

He ran off, and I ran after him.  I found him sitting on a rocky bit of beach not far away.  "It's all real.  It's like you said, and it's all real."

"No shit, kid.  You should trust your big brother."

"I think I'm older than you now."

"Nah, you just look older.  Remember, that's still your body, just reshaped, and you're still, like, the sum of your experiences and knowledge and shit."

"But everyone's going to see Elaine Preston until next year."

"Yeah, but you know Carlotta wants to be Yuan-wei, not you, and that's not likely to change in the next couple months, especially since her girlfriend is really her sister.  They're scheming asshole bitches, but I don't think they'll become a couple for real."

"Oh, shit, why'dya have to go putting that image in my head?"

"Well, I can be kind of a bitch myself."  I picked up a rock and hucked into the ocean.  "Look, your deal sucks more than it does for most of us; we've got other people in the same boat but every place we feel helpless is balanced by someone else asking how to handle our own life.  But, on the other hand, you've got me, and if I've got to give this life up, I'm going to squeeze every bit of fun I can out of this summer, and having you with me would make it even better."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah.  Just think of how the combination of your 9-man skills and how distracting you'd look in a bikini would work if we find some guy's playing volleyball tomorrow!"

"You suck."

I smiled, took his hand, and got back to the hotel.  He dropped back to his bed right away, but I opened my laptop and attached my phone to the USB port. 

"What're you doing?"

"Sandra's a bitch who could have just let Annette have her real life back, but I'd be a real asshole not to let her and Roman know there's going to be a new person with her identity."

"Ah.  You know, being a girl seems to have made you less of a jerk."

"You're just saying that because some part of your brain still thinks of me as a random hot chick.  And because it hasn't quite hit you that I forgot to edit your dick out of the video before sending it."

He threw a pillow at me, and I thought that was going to be the start off us at least trying to have fun, but in the morning, he was all morose again, and kind of has been ever since.  I mean, I get it, but you've got to play the hand you're dealt, and it's not like "pretty good-looking woman who doesn't have to work all summer because someone wants to hang out" is the worst hand the Inn could deal you.  

But, no, he doesn't want to go out for practically anything.  I got him out of the house to eat a couple times, but he couldn't take being looked at, and as excited as we were to see the Red Sox game where they called up Lin Tzu-wei from the good seats - as much as I'm still a Mets fan, when was their last Chinese player? - he got bummed out when he realized how goofy he must have looked at getting so excited that a guy from Taiwan hit a triple and wanted to leave. 

I think he'd be down for going to Hong Kong with me, it turns out that Cary and Elaine let her passport lapse over the winter, so be practically time for me to change before we can do that.  Which means I really have no way too let Jackie down gently.  He's probably already thinking that I'm cheating on him or don't really care because I've stayed in the States all summer, so maybe an email breakup is all that he expects at this point, but he deserves better, even if he wouldn't believe the truth. 

Yeah, I know,who would've ever thought I'd care about hurting a man's feelings by dumping him or be frustrated that Max doesn't want to go do girl shit with me.  But, man, with Jonah and Benjamin no longer around while Ashlyn and Penny seem to have grown out of what I want to do, I really want to be able to have a good time with someone who gets what our situation is like, and I think it would be good for him, too. 

-Jordo/Yuan-wei

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-wei: Halloween #HotGirlProblems

I mentioned how much more social going to school as Yuan-wei in this major than my first go-around in college, but what I kind of held back on is just how many people she knows. Even if I ignore Weibo and other Chinese social networks, it seems like the Facebook page I inherited is always updating, I'm getting calls all the time, and folks just walk up to me after class or in Starbucks or wherever, because they know " me" from somewhere despite Yuan-Wei only arriving here around 14 months or so ago.

It could be more extreme; there's this tall blonde in my play who always seems to be swarmed, but there's a fair supply of white guys that just wouldn't consider Asian girls, and a weird group of nerds that lose interest when they realize I'm not fucking Japanese. Still, the upshot is that I am expected to know a lot of people, there's a fair amount more that want to know me, and it can be overwhelming for the fat kid who spent her first year as a girl hiding out.

On the other hand, it means that I am never wanting for a distraction when something is bugging me, with Halloween being a perfect case in point. As I think I mentioned last year, Halloween was always a big deal in my family - as my dad would put it, the guys who called him "Chinky" all year would let up because on that day, he could be Bruce Lee - and even when they didn't, he still felt awesome.  That's why our family always gave out the biggest candy bars on the block, why we had a big party, why we made elaborate costumes that at least tried to celebrate our Chinese heritage a little. We fucking love Halloween, and now I was missing out for the second year in a row, and chances of having another one like that are slim, since Benny seems to be doing better each time I check in.

So it's kind of a relief when my "Missy"/"Yuan-wei" email and Facebook accounts started getting chock-full of invitations to Halloween parties. No, they wouldn't be my family's, but they would be parties, I'd get to have some fun being in costume, and it would be really time-consuming in a fun way. It would actually be the first time I could show my handiwork off to folks aside from my family and friends in a few years, too!

It was crazy at first - I think I had invitations to a dozen different parties, but a lot of them had conflicting dates. In a lot of cases, I felt like I was choosing among them almost randomly - while other Inn people might contact their predecessors to figure out which ones were more important to them, I'm trying to make this life mine, and figure out which group would be throwing the best parties versus people who would really hold a grudge if I said no. I'd like a bit more info before making those decisions.

Still, I think I did okay choosing five, and when I heard Blondie talking about how she was going to need so many costumes this year, I was kind of excited. As much as that was multiple times as much work as I'd been anticipating, it was also making up for last year and keeping that energy redirected. I figured I could get away with three, and had fun sketching ideas, only to be confronted right away with how becoming a girl doesn't mean you can do everything you need to.

For instance, although my drawings didn't outright suck, it quickly hit me that I didn't know how to sew at all. That's not entirely a not-prepared-to-be-a-girl thing, because I kind of doubt that Yuan-wei knew how to sew any better than I did - I've got the money to just replace things in her life and haven't found a sewing kit in her apartment - but it's something I always relied on my mom or other women to do, and everybody treated that as natural. Doing it as Yuan-wei, on the other hand, is privilege.

My first instinct was to ask Benjamin, even if I do sometimes feel weird about asking for his help with the life that should have been his.  Fortunately,  while I was worrying about this, one of the folks doing tech stuff on the play asked me about my Halloween plans while we were painting scenery (when you've got four lines, you're expected to pitch in other ways) and she mentioned she had a sewing machine and would show me some of the ropes. I wound up picking up the tab for parts of her costume at The Garment District, but I can afford it and one of the costumes was trickier than I originally thought. Of the others, one was just putting pieces together and the other I could do myself, with her looking over my shoulder.

So, with three costumes prepared, I was ready for the gauntlet!

October 23rd -Superheroes at the old roommate's

So, uh, I guess Cissy was just being polite and didn't really expect me to RSVP, and having RSVPed, didn't expect me to come. She didn't say that, but when her boyfriend opened the door with "Oh... Missy", I kind of got the idea that Yuan-wei would probably have never had much more contact with them even if she hadn't magically been replaced by someone else. Freshman roommates, after all - you're matched up pretty randomly, you don't have much in common in the way of interests, you drift apart.

Especially if you're a nice Southern girl like Cissy and your roommate is not just Chinese-American, but Chinese, which means you can't understand her music, her calls home are at annoying hours, and she just doesn't care about stuff that's a big deal to you. I also got the impression that her boyfriend was maybe a little prejudiced or something. It's something I didn't necessarily stop worrying about looking like Deirdre - I kind of swapped racism for sexism there - but which manifests itself in even more ways now that I've got a Hong Kong passport. Now I'm an "other" who isn't even sort of like them since I grew up here.

Which, apparently, even made my costume worse. I made a pretty damn good Jubilee (from the X-Men) out of stuff I found at Garment District. Maybe not win a prize at a comic convention good, but not bad at all. The guys who liked comics all seemed pretty impressed even if it was the least sexy of the three, but, man, did Cissy's boyfriend take it as a personal affront when I said that Marvel and DC weren't exactly supplying me with a bunch of options.  I guess original Yuan-wei wasn't into comics and this was me and by extension China trying to try steal America's place at the top of something.

So, I left that one early, and probably won't have a lot of contact with Cissy again. Maybe that's for the best.

October 24th - Chinese Students' Association

If wasn't quite whiplash going to the next evening's party, but it was certainly different.

This one was thrown by an organization of Chinese people at various Boston-area colleges, and served as a decent way to see how much my Mandarin had improved from Saturday morning classes and watching a bunch of movies - that a new Mandarin-language movie opens in regular American theaters every week, at least in New York and Boston, is some sort of indicator of how the 21st will likely be the Chinese Century by the time it's all said and done - although the inspiration for my costume was pretty thoroughly Hong Kong.

This was the trickiest costume in some ways - I had a pretty specific idea, and while it looked simple enough, there were several pieces that had to be altered and sewn together.  This is shit I've got to learn to do myself, but I was so glad Amelia was willing to help me with it this time.  I looked so cool and cute in the mirror, and it was kind of exciting to put a long coat on over the costume and take the T into Cambridge with just the headdress and shoes peeking out, like the rest of the world had no idea how awesome I was right at that moment.

That made it pretty gratifying when I checked my coat outside the hotel function room that the Association had booked and got some appreciative looks from both guys and girls.  One of the former, dressed as a pirate, walked up and asked me who I was.

I smiled.  "You like it?  It's from The Cave of the Silken Web, a Shaw Brothers movie my grandmother was in.  She wasn't the main spider-woman trying to seduce Tripitaki, but I think she was the sexiest.  Do I measure up?"

I did a little turn.  The basis of the costume was a bodysuit with fringes covering my panties and butt, straps a lot closer to my neck than the usual, and some decoration on the chest which I had briefly considered replacing with a scoop to show some cleavage, and Amelia did an amazing job of adding shoulders and sleeves made from sheer material with a spiderweb design, attached to a slightly more opaque cape.  The rest of the costume from the movie was a headdress that put a bunch of my hair up and dangled a jewel on my forehead, some earrings, and a pair of sandals with one-inch heels.  Here's a still from the movie to give you an idea:

I added some spider-web pantyhose because Boston in late October is somewhat chillier than a Shaw Brothers soundstage in Hong Kong.  It maybe looked a little less authentic, either in terms of ancient China or late-1960s Hong Kong movies, but I dug it, and so did my new friend.

His name was David Chang, he goes to Harvard Medical School and maybe wasn't a big Shaw Brothers fan beforehand but was at least curious about the Hong Kong film industry and "my" grandmother after that.  It's a weird subject, because I only met Yuan-wei's grandmother for a few hours during my trip to Hong Kong, but I liked her; she had nifty stories about her few years in the movie business but didn't sound particularly wistful about it; I could sort of see why Yuan-wei v1.0 might have had doubts about film as a career versus family with that as an example, even as I could also see her being inspired to become an actress.  But her movie career was at least something I could research; she only did a few movies and only one lead role before marrying and retiring.  She's probably the part of this life that I can feel I can talk about easiest.

Which was good, because I got to repeat that story a lot over the course of the evening, to the point where I memorized bits of it in Mandarin.  This is, apparently, a big difference between me and Original Yuan-wei; while she may mostly have been comfortable with Cantonese speakers, her ambitions had her hanging out with people from the Mainland a lot, so these were a lot of people at the party who greeted me in Mandarin and wanted to catch up.

And of that group, I get the distinct impression that at least Tsang Chan-Sam knows what I look like naked.

I guess that's kind of to be expected. His young. good-looking, and the son of one of the tap dogs at a Beijing film studio. He is probably a damn good fuck-buddy for me to have.  Still, while I don't think I'm particularly hypocritical about guys looking me over - I've done enough time looking at girls like me wishing they were wearing less that I have a hard time objecting to others doing so - it's kind of gross to do it with another girl, wearing less and probably starting the evening with actual thoughts of staking some claim to fuerdai dick, hanging off one's arm.

("Fuerdai" was my new Mandarin word for the night; it translates roughly to "asshole with rich parents". Well, "second-generation entrepreneur", but the first is what people who aren't fuerdai mean when they say it.)

Truth be told, "Sam" didn't really come off that badly to me at first; I wasn't necessarily looking to get picked up but I was wearing a "look-at-me" outfit and not feeling picky about whether the compliments were for the clothes or the bod underneath.  Guy rubbed David the wrong way, and by the end of the evening the type was certainly starting to get to me.

Got a bunch of numbers, though.

October 29th - "Dress sexy"

The next Thursday night, though, was number-collecting craziness. You know that scene in The Social Network where a van drives into Harvard Square and basically drops off a cargo of townies looking to score themselves a Harvard man and dressed to sell them on the idea? That's a real thing. I wasn't quite part of the bulk delivery, but once inside the party, it was tough to tell, especially since my English doesn't have the sort of accent you might expect a foreign student - I don't have much of one anyway, although at parties a little more Queens comes out because I'm yelling or drinking, and that sort of sounds like I'm a local to people who are also drinking and trying to be heard above the din.

It was fun, though.  Back when I first got turned into a woman, there was no way I would have accepted an invitation that had some variant of the work "sexy" in it a dozen times, but I was eager this year.  As much fun as it is going out in the nice clothes I inherited, that wasn't what really got to me as a man - it was the stuff that said I have something you want and I'm going to put it right where you can almost touch it, daring you to take it.  The chance to feel that power in an outfit that makes the inner Jordan crazy was one of the things I most wanted to get out of Halloween.

So, for this one, I did the "sexy schoolgirl" thing - skirt that barely covers my ass, half-shirt and cardigan that shows off a lot of midriff and cleavage (which, yeah, I pushed up and enhanced), white stockings, and four-inch heels.  I took a selfie before heading out because if for some reason I ever wind up changing again, this was something I wanted to remember.

The party itself was almost exactly what I'd imagined the cool college parties were like when I was a freshman - they'd hired a DJ, there were tons of girls in sexy costumes, guys who were trying to be just as sexy but were still kind of dorky but charming for it, and an almost never-ending supply of beer.  I haven't had much to drink since changing the second time - not only does my ID say I'm below the legal drinking age, but Massachusetts can make it damn difficult to buy beer without anything but their license.  Not necessarily a big deal, but I have no idea how easy it would be to be sent away based upon my student visa - I've heard people say you have to really watch out, but there are also tons of stories of students with wealthy parents skating because people will wind up looking the other way.  I don't want to test it most nights, but at a party where I'm sure a lot of other folks drinking more than I am are under 21?  Sure, why the fuck not?

I did kind of find myself wondering what it would have been like to do this last year while I was white, though.  I got plenty of attention, including some that was way more touchy than I was used to, but there are some folks out there that don't even seem to see you if you're not the same race.  There was this one guy, talking to some other girls about movies and being pretty funny, and not being the sort of jackass that just wants to hold forth and not actually let the girls show they know their Star Wars trivia as well,  But, man, it was like he couldn't even register that I was there.  His loss, but in some ways it was worse than the guy who squeezed my tit and then fell over, drunk, almost taking my top with him.

Maybe not the greatest idea for Thursday night, though - I was there until 2am, had to take an Uber home, and then go to class hungover.  Maybe not the best Yuan-wei I can be Friday morning.

October 30th - Cast Party

I almost bailed on that night's party, but it was being thrown by the cast of the play and I kind of get the impression that even if you've only got a few lines, you don't want to be seen as letting the team down.  I was never really a group person - I was pretty damn comfortable working independently enough that nobody knew I had turned into a white girl after my trip trip to the Inn - but this me trying to absorb what's good about Yuan-wei's life, and that's part of it.

In a lot of ways, it worked as a nice contrast to the night before and the rest of them.  There was beer, and music, and hanging-out, but this one was with people I already knew - maybe not as well they think I do, but I have been spending time with them for a few weeks, so seeing Rachelle dressed like a Ghostbuster or Ernesto like Batman actually sort of says something to me, another part of them rather than the first clue that I'm trying to figure out.

It was kind of nice to deflect compliments about my costume back to Amelia - I wore the spider-woman outfit again - and talking about her decision to walk away from acting to be a wife and mother.  There was a kind of funny irony to it, in that they couldn't imagine "Missy" doing the same, whether based upon knowing her from last year or just this play.  The original Yuan-wei did, after all, while I walked into it and don't know how super-attached I am to acting yet.

There are some pretty dedicated matchmakers in the group, raising eyebrows every time I danced with somebody, saying it was time for me to get back on the horse after breaking up with "Benny".  And when they heard that Ernesto and I were both going to the same party the next night...

Well, they're good people, but I think I'll enjoy a little less time with them once the play's over.  Everything just gets so drawn together.

October 31st - Zombies!

That last party was zombie-themed, which meant I spent a fair chunk of time Saturday afternoon working on make-up.

I don't know how much my family really loving Halloween, and thus me learning about how to do special-effects makeup, helped me as a girl.  If anything, it's been the other way around; actually having to spend time learning how to make what I put on my face inconspicuous probably helped me with the costume stuff - instead of just a pus-filled blob on my face, I had a pus-filed blob that blended in with the skin around it.  I layered a little foundation over the veins I drew on my arms, legs, and boobs, so they looked like they were under my skin rather than on top of it.  That sort of thing.

It took a while, though, because I had decided to pair it with the schoolgirl costume, which meant that, despite not having as much skin as I did before, I had way more exposed.  I was never going to create a gash across my gut with intestines hanging out before, but it seemed like a great idea this time around.

And, don't get me wrong, it was kind of a hit.  Looking back through "my" Facebook account, Yuan-wei didn't really do much like this last year, and I don't think anybody at the party expected it, especially considering how much help I needed with the cloth part of the costumes.  I wasn't the girl with the sluttiest costume, but I was right up there with the best at both sex appeal and gore.

I get the impression that the folks at this party were the closest to Yuan-wei's real friends from last year; there was a lot more talk about not seeing me around and questions about "Benny" than at the other parties, and one time I was dragged out from the kitchen when some Taylor Swift song popped up, it apparently being a thing for Yuan-wei and the girl who grabbed me.

About two beers into the night, Ernesto found me between conversations and said he really liked my costume.  I smiled, and said I bet he said that to all the half-naked girls.

He laughed.  "Oh, I like that part, but I didn't really see you as a blood and guts sort of gal.  You're such the fashion plate--"

"Not everyone is always like they seem."  It is fun to say things that imply the Inn, folks.

"Oh, I know.  Anyway, I was wondering if you might like to do a little more."

Maybe it was the booze, but I felt just a little bit more in my spine than when a guy typically hits on me.  "A little bit of what?"

"Acting, and make-up - some friends and I are going to be shooting a short horror film I wrote in about a month, but the director broke up with our lead actress and half the make-up guys got hired by a Hollywood production, and even though I didn't conceive the character as Asian--"

"Oh."  Not what I was expecting, but on the other hand.  "That sounds... interesting."

"I know it's kind of short notice, and you'll probably be cramming for finals and stuff, but you'd be saving our lives.  Although--" he pulled out his phone. "--I should probably send some pictures to the director and other producers."  He got a shot of me and then hit send before stumbling a bit back into the party.  "We'll be in touch!"

It was a weird little come-down to hear that.  As much as I think I'd kind of be ready for a real first date, I haven't made it happen yet, and having it held out and then taken away, and then realizing that the short-film thing would probably disappear after he got sober, made me feel a little dejected.  I grabbed another beer and kind of made sure I circulated away from him.

People were going in and out all night, some going to and from other parties, and I was close to being ready to tap out myself when I heard a song I liked, so I came out to the living room/dance floor, shaking it for all of ten seconds before a zombie nurse yelled "you bitch!" and punched me in the face.

Between the alcohol, the three-inch heels, and weighing about half of what I did the last time I figured I might get punched for something, I went down quick.  I put my hand on my nose to check that, yeah, it was bleeding.  I looked up so that I could actually see the face of this girl, and even though her make-up wasn't nearly as elaborate as mine, it took a second because...  Well, at first I wasn't terribly interested in who Benjamin used to be, and lately he hasn't been much into looking at old pictures of himself.  Seeing that face in the flesh was new, and I'd sort of expected it to be his problem.

"What the fuck, Sandra?"

That didn't go over well, as the friends she brought with her started asking if I was such a fucking slut that I couldn't remember the names of all the girls whose boyfriends I stole.  One of them actually tried to stomp me, but I rolled out of the way before the heel of her shoe did some damage.  Ruined my intestines, though.  Still, I was clear-headed enough to scrape my shoes off, stand, and get in a stance I remembered from my wushu classes as a kid, hoping like hell that these girls would assume that any Chinese person holding her hands out like that was a kung fu expert who could fuck them up, because otherwise I was going to get my ass kicked.

Or not; as much as there was probably a good crowd that would have liked to see a couple of chicks in skimpy costumes fight, a lot of people got in between us and suggested it was time to leave.  I said something about not doing anything wrong, but fuck it, and grabbed my coat and shoes and walked to the T.  Of course, it was late enough that the Orange Line was only coming every fifteen minutes or so, which meant I had time to sit, stew, and peel off my makeup while sobering up a little with some coffee.  When it finally did come, I grabbed a seat and closed my eyes for a second, tilting my head back so that the washcloth I had on my nose could hopefully do its job a bit better, thus missing an arm being jammed into the doorway and then the person attached stumbling in and crashing down onto the seat next to me.

Sandra, of course.

She had been well ahead of me in terms of drinking, thus thinking all of the previous half hour was a good idea, so her voice was kind of strange.  "I'm so sorry...  Jordan, right?  I was just looking at pictures of a Halloween party in our house and I got so sad seeing them so that when I saw you I was pissed, even though it makes no sense because it was seeing her as me that set me off and that means I've got no argument with you..."

Okay, so I had been doing this party gauntlet in part as a way to keep busy enough that I wasn't tempted to see what my family was doing on social media, but...  "Fine, whatever, just leave me the fuck alone."

"But why?  She made a mess of both our lives, and ever since Ronan left, there's nobody who understands what it's like.  Folks like us should stick together!"

"Are you serious?"  I was starting to raise my voice, gaining some notice from the folks around us, but I don't know as I was that much louder than the guy on his cell phone on the other side of the car.  "What, you think we're going to come together as some sort of Boston-based cursed-inn support group?  Why don't you ask Benjamin - you know, the real Annette Grayson - how she feels about that idea?  You know, the great person whose life you made a conscious decision to fuck up?  So that while you're suffering by being, what, fifteen years younger and at the country's top university on scholarship, I'm still dealing with periods and language classes and now crazy bitches who think I stole their husband when they're drunk and he's trying to figure out what he can do with his life!  So, no, I don't think I'm going to start hanging around with the person who fucked up my best friend's life!"

With that, I stood up and moved to the other end of the car with as much dignity as is possible while holding a cloth to your nose.  I kept an eye out to see if she was going to try and make a second attempt, but I think she was passed out when I got off at Downtown Crossing to transfer to the Green Line at Park Street.


Kind of a shame that the whole Halloween thing ended like that, because it was, for the most part, fun; if nothing else, it was a concentrated look at the life I have been living for the past few months, or at least the American side of it.  And while I don't want to give Sandra too much credit, I do have to admit that I'd much rather be annoyed by guys grabbing my ass than the way I felt a week later, when Benny finally got around to putting pictures of himself, Kareena, and everyone at the family party on Facebook.

-Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-wei

Annette/Benjamin: Ladies I Like

You would think that dealing with new sexual preferences would be easier for a girl who gets turned into a guy, but I seem to be pretty oblivious until something hits me over the head with it. After all, I may only be 20, despite what this driver's license says, but I probably told other girls that they looked hot more than Missy said something similar to other guys despite vastly more time to do so. Girls making out with each other may mostly be a male fantasy outside of folks who are actually gay, but there's less fear of acknowledging each other as attractive, which you would think would carry over after the Inn reshapes whatever part of your brain is responsible for finding other human beings attractive.

On top of that, you can't argue with erection. A guy turned into a girl may be able to rationalize any sort of internal sensations as meaning something else at first, but there's really no other way to interpret your dick getting hard other than it being ready to go into that person you find attractive. It's embarrassing but definitive.

I suppose that I can be forgiven for needing to get so drunk that inhibitions were out the window as Ravi; even he didn't seem to realize he was gay and I figured that it was just all the things I had filed away in my head as stuff I liked pulling a mind over matter stunt.  Once I actually did it, though, there wasn't much doubting or going back - I was a guy who liked guys, and not just with me taking the girl's role, so to speak.

So while I knew from first-hand experience that being Benny physically would mean being into girls, it didn't really hit me until that ballgame when I wound up kissing Missy. Suddenly, I couldn't deny that holding a woman felt good, and I found myself thinking back on all the times I'd complimented her outfit to see if it wasn't just the clothes I was talking about. My sex dreams suddenly got a whole lot more specific and vivid. It suddenly seemed like every movie poster and magazine cover was pushing breasts in my face.

And that that was kind of awesome.

I can't exactly say that I didn't appreciate my boobs when I had them - I had no problem wearing a bikini at the beach, and my prom dress wasn't that of a shy church girl. I knew how to lean over a bit when I wanted a guy to notice me, and buying bras - real bras - was one of the first times I felt grown up despite still being in high school. Even now, I know that if a woman is showing some cleavage, it is probably because she just likes the look, not because she wants a guy's attention.

I know all that, but my head is on a swivel anyway. Maybe there's some element of envy to it for me, but I can't lie: I want to touch.  Not quite to the extent of understanding why boys acted like lunatics in high school, but a lot.

Which brings us to the part where my story begins and gets kind of weird.

I don't go to Harvard Square a lot, because that's where the university is and thus where Sandra is, and being around her is something that I have been avoiding. It's got one of the country's best book stores, though, with author talks and a basement full of used books and remainders, plus two or three other book stores besides, so I took the 66 up Monday afternoon and started browsing. It was all going well until I looked up, saw Sandra walking straight toward me, and ducked into the next aisle because this was not the day I was ready to deal with her. It's one of those stores where it's a sort of maze, though, and even if you really wanted to leave (which I didn't), you may have to take a pretty indirect route around other browsers or be pushed in the opposite direction because avoiding someone was taking priority over getting somewhere.

After about a half-dozen near-misses, we finally wound up turning a corner right into each other. I almost knocked her over, and when I instinctively reached out a hand to keep her from falling, she grabbed it. looked up, and smiled as she said she'd finally caught me. That's when I realized she wasn't actually Sandra.

It was an easy mistake; she was the right height, had brown hair styled much the same way Sandra did when I saw her in August, and wore glasses that made her heart-shaped face look even more triangular like I used to do. The t-shirt she was wearing - the cover of The Great Gatsby - had been one of my favorites.

If I had taken a closer look rather than run away, though, I would have spotted the freckles, the closer-to-green eye color, and the fact that she was doing everything with her left hand (Inn folks: does handedness change like sexual orientation?). And, of course, the tag that said she was an employee of the store and that her name was Marybeth.

I asked what she'd meant about catching me and she pulled my wallet out of her pocket. "You dropped this over by 'Mystery'. Pants that dump your stuff from the pockets and avoiding the folks who are here to help isn't a great combination."

I  blushed a bit as I took the phone back. "Sorry!  I don't usually do that, I just thought you were someone else."

"Did you? Or did you think I was someone specific, only for me to actually turn out to be 'someone else'?"

"Wow," I said, "and here I thought that I was picky about grammar when I asked people who say they're 'doing good' about their volunteer work."

She laughed. ''That's a good one. I'm stealing that." She apparently felt a supervisor wandering into the area, because she started asking if there was something she could help me find. I remembered that biography was on the other side of the store, which gave her an excuse to lead me there.

"So, who did you think I was? Ex-girlfriend?"

"Sort of. Yeah." I pondered saying she literally wouldn't believe me, but this was not the time for gags about "literally" being redefined. "Let's just say it seems like a complicated situation until I realize that in reality, it's pretty simple - we're not going to have anything to do with each other because no good comes out of being that angry."

"Ouch! Explains why a grown man plays hide-and-hide-and-seek in a bookstore, though."

''Yeah--" I saw something out of the corner of my eye and stopped, drawn to a poster listing upcoming events, and I kind of rudely, I guess, took a step in that direction. "You've got a Penny Lincoln-Kim signing coming up?"

The change of subject threw her a bit, but she is pretty good at her job. "Yeah, she's local and shops here all the time to boot. Why, are you a fan?"

"Totally! I totally connected to Pygmalion's Proteges right away - I was such a, um, such a Morris back when I was in high school." I tried to put the brakes on my fangirling, at least not blurting out that I identified with Geena. Or saying how it and Pygmalion's Pioneers made a lot more sense to me knowing that my favorite female writer had started out a man before spending a couple weeks in a cursed Inn. "The Lynn Ashford mysteries are really good, too."

"Well, then, I guess you'll have to brave the crowd of teenage girls when she comes to sign Pygmalion's Proposal, won't you?"

She was amused by me, I could tell, but it didn't bother me much. Sometimes you've just got to let the original you out, and let folks think that you're just kind of eccentric.

We stood there for a couple minutes, and then someone asked her where something by Richard Feynman was, and she said that one would be under science rather than biography, and led him away.

I had my books paid for and was halfway back to the T station before something clicked in my head.  

"Damn it!" I yelled, setting some looks as I turned around and started stomping back toward the bookstore. "You're the guy now!  She drops hints and you ask for her number!"

I opened the door hard enough that the bells attached made more noise than usual, scanned the place, and not seeing Marybeth, headed down to the basement where she was tidying up a shelf in the Young Adult section.  She looked up and smirked. "You realize that I'm about to make a major exception, right? Normally guys have to be a lot quicker on the uptake to get my number!"

"Then what makes me so special?"

"Well, you're buying a lot of books for the size of your paycheck - did I mention I looked through your wallet? Cuz I did - you've got a couple interesting movie tickets in there, a Maine driver's license, some random business cards from New York City, a phone message where the name crossed out isn't even vaguely related to the one replacing it... Let's just say I like good stories and you probably have way more than a guy I'd meet in a bar.

"You're also cute."

That last sentence had an effect on me that may not have been quite so definitive as an erection, but arranging to meet for dinner and a movie on Saturday was a foregone conclusion. If nothing else, it's my turn to have some fun after the stories Missy has been telling me for the last few weeks.

-Benjamin, because it's hard to sign a post about getting erections and asking a girl out ''Annette"

Annette/Ravi/Benny-to-be: Getting some answers from myself

So, yeah, that hit me like a ton of bricks. If you'd told me a year or a little more than a month ago that Jordan would be any sort of lifesaver, I would never have believed it. But now, twice in one week, he's stepped away from the life he had the right to for the benefit of other people. Go figure, right?

That said, the example I figured to learn from wasn't Jordan from this week, but Jordan from last year, who didn't just accept that his life was in the hands of another and that he was going to have to follow some third person's lead for at least the next year.  My thought was that just because passively taking what you are given and hoping that things workout is the traditional way things are done  at the Inn, they didn't have to be. So, when I woke up well before Jordan the next day - Ravi's frame can handle much more beer than Deirdre's - I decided to go see Sandra.

Fortunately, Ravi's ID says I'm old enough to rent a car in Maine, although once I'd done that, I realized that I didn't actually know which direction to drive. Sandra's last post on my Facebook wall was weeks ago - if you ever think your friend has been replaced after spending a few weeks in old Orchard, check for changes in social media activity; I annoyed people with status updates and Sandra, well, does not - and it mentioned spending some time in Maine. Nothing after that, though-no comment about "Benny" being a dick, no relationship status change, no anything. Did she go back to Boston, did she go to my hometown, or somewhere else entirely?

I figured I could only choose one and hope to get back on time if the change was going to trigger that night, so I started driving north.

I don't know if that made a lot of sense, but I sort of figured that in a situation like this, you sort of go for unconditional acceptance and that's more likely to be found at my home than among her friends in Boston, as some of them might be on "Benny's" side or might just think that they've been broken up for weeks, so "Annette" should just get over it already.  Heck, I might have thought that way were the situation presented to me that way.

About a half hour into the drive, I found myself thinking that I really should have invited Jordan along.  I told myself that it was important to keep him there so that Deirdre could get her body back, even if people changed without me, and there's truth to it, but for all that he's been cooler lately, I didn't want him sticking his foot in my mouth.  Given that my hometown is three and a half hours north of Old Orchard, it made for a long drive.  Pine trees may be pretty, but they get monotonous after a while.

Still, it was odd and kind of nice to be back.  Despite not being there for a year, I felt like I was on autopilot driving through town, although when that autopilot took me to the Burger Shack, I laughed and went to the town's other sit-down restaurant, which is an Italian place.  I parked, accepted the sign's invitation to seat myself, and played with my phone until a waitress came over and asked how I was doing.

I looked up and saw that the waitress was Gretchen, my best friend since forever, and replied with a "been better, how are you doing?" that was probably weirdly enthusiastic, and for a second I was sure she would recognize me; as much as I've gotten used to seeing all kinds of people living in New York, someone living in a small town in Maine might not have seen another Hindu guy since the one that claimed to be her female friend last summer.

Gretchen did give me a long look and then asked if I was still into role-playing.  I shrugged, saying I'd grown pretty tired of the game, but asked if she knew whether Annette was around.  It was a really weird question coming from who I looked like and she didn't seem inclined to chat with "Ravi", so she took my order and dropped it off without much fanfare.

I still gave her a pretty nice tip, though.

Then I drove up to my house, figuring Mom would be at work and I had as good a chance of finding Sandra there as anywhere.  My car was in the driveway, so the odds seemed good.  I rang the doorbell and waited, my heart climbing into my mouth.  It seemed like hours but it was probably only a minute or two before the door opened and I saw Annette Grayson standing there.

It was profoundly weird, and I wondered how Jordan didn't go nuts living in the same apartment as Benny for the last year.  It made me start and stop a few times before finally getting something out.  "So, what can we do about this situation?"

She shrugged.  "Nothing to do.  Ronan made his choice, they seem pretty happy, and I'm not rolling the dice again."

"But it's my life!"

"Yeah, I know, and that sucks.  But life are can you offer me in return?  'Benny'?  How can I possibly look at that face in the mirror after what Ronan did to me with it?  'Missy'?  That times a thousand!  Some random person?  Uh-uh."

"But--"

"No!  Look, Annie, you've got to deal with they way things are, rather than what you want them to be.  We've both been dealt a shitty hand--"

"You look like you're doing all right!"

"Really?  Really, kid?  Look, you may think you've got some sort of enhanced perspective because you've gotten to experience different sexes and races and all that, but you're young.  You don't know what it's like to give your entire adult life to a relationship and marriage only to have your husband throw it away, with the only compensation that you've got a chance to start over.  I can't lose that second chance.  It is the only way that the last fifteen years aren't a complete waste of time."

"You can't look at it like that.  I mean, what about the other opportunities you might have?"

"Like I said, you're young.  It seems that way to you.  But eventually you want something you can count on. What am I supposed to do, go back every year hoping to find some life that suits me but which has no claim?  It's just not reasonable."

I tried to talk her out of it, but it was no good.  She had decided my life was hers, and I couldn't exactly force her into doing something else.

So it looks like I'm going to be Benny, and be him for the foreseeable .  Not tonight, apparently, but soon.  I can handle it.

But I just don't get it!  Sandra has a chance to fix something, and she just won't.  Was she always this selfish a person, or did I just not want to believe that the person in my life would be like this?

-Annette

Jordan: You try to do something nice, and where does it get you?

Annette frets about not writing enough or well enough on this blog like it shows her lack of commitment or ability to be a professional writer someday, but she needs to give herself more credit: Reading that last entry, I was almost convinced that more crying went on over the last couple of weeks than I remember.

Even without the histrionics she put in there, though, I'd be lying if I said our plan didn't scare me some; every moment from waking up to getting off the train in Old Orchard yesterday seemed to present a good reason to turn back, and I'm still not sure now that I shouldn't still go back to New York and tell Benny that the deal is off. Especially since it's not exactly what I expected.

Every time I seemed about to go back, though, Annette would give my hand a squeeze, and I felt a little more like I could do it if (s)he was going to make sure I wasn't going to do it entirely alone. Besides, backing out now would really fuck things up for Deirdre and Gary, who are making new plans to stagger their visits to the Inn to get back to normal.

Or at least try. We got off the train, picked up the keys to our room from the other place (because even if the locals don't realize that the place is fucking cursed, nobody actually wants to work there, apparently), and went back in for the first time in a year. It was eerily the same - after a certain point I guess people just stop trying to improve cursed places - although we were in a different room this time around. We knew that there would be a break in our "chain" because someone wanted to finish their school year, but we didn't really think about that.

As nice as Annette was to me, she was anticipating the exact opposite of me, getting her life back rather than than giving it away, so she dropped her "Ravi" suitcase in the middle of the floor and dashed to the closet. She recognized Benny's and shoved it toward me, the pulled the other one out, commenting that other-Annette must have been shopping, because the one she had checked in with had been a beat-up hand-me-down and this one was nice.

"Isn't this a little like opening your presents before Christmas?"

She shrugged, pulling out the letter that was on top as she opened it. "It's not like I'm ruining some sort of surprise, and besides, there might be stuff we need to do to get ready!" Then she started looking at the letter and the blood drained from her/Ravi's face, and she started reading her letter very intently. Sensing something wasn't right, I opened Benny's suitcase and took out my letter.

Dear Benny,

I'm pleased to present you with your body more or less as you left it, another year of mileage on it but otherwise in pretty good shape. It's been so good to be young again that I almost considered not coming back, but I figured we had done enough damage and you, at least, should be able to come out of this unscathed.

I'm afraid me and Sandra haven't been completely honest with you and Annette about how our lives were going in your bodies, in large part because what we didn't want to talk about was "our lives" as opposed to "your bodies". As you know. we came to the Inn for our tenth anniversary, and though the changes shocked us, we figured it would be kind of fun, like dating again. What we had apparently forgotten was that dating can be a minefield, and her living in a Harvard dorm while I wound up sharing an apartment in Allston with three other young men after a dozen years of living together also did a number on our relationship.

And then, I met Missy.

The exact details don't matter; the point is that I was feeling 32 more than usual that night, and when a 19-year-old that hot shows interest - and your wife is back "home" with her "mom", you respond. And when she stays interested...

Sandra found out, of course. We tried to get past it, but everything we did just made things worse, and Missy is not only determined but also a genuinely great girl. And it's not like she could have known she was destroying a marriage. Or would it be more accurate to say that she was the way I did so?

Sandra and I still planned to meet up here, and figure out what to do afterward. But somehow Missy saw my printed-out reservation, figured I was planning to surprise her with a trip up the coast, and wound up coming along.  When Sandra arrived and saw Missy helping to unload the rental car, there was a screaming match, and Sandra stomped away, saying I was welcome to her.

Maybe if the change didn't happen that first night, we could have fixed things, but it did, and now Missy is Sandra and Sandra looks like she's going to be Annette indefinitely.

Amazingly, Missy seems happy to be Sandra and my wife. I hope that Sandra and Annette can work out some kind of arrangement to make things work out for them soon, but in the meantime, please give Annette all the support she needs. I won't insult her by saying that becoming Missy rather than herself should make her happy, but much worse could have happened to her, and I hope you can help her through it.

Yours Truly,

Ronan

I looked up at a shell-shocked Annette. "Those fucking bastards, not even giving you a heads-up while you've been emailing back and forth.  Sure, at least you'll get to be a girl again, and I guess still from New England so it'll be an easier adjustment--"

She did a double take.  "I don't think Ronan told you everything." Then she handed me her letter.

Dear Annette,

I guess I should get this out of the way before the signature - I'm not Sandra, so you won't be able to become yourself again right away. My name is Lee Yuan-wei, although I use "Missy" as a Western name. As you might guess, I'm not from around here. Hong Kong is my home, or at least it was.

How did I get here? Well, first I decided to go to college overseas - I always wanted to be an actress in both Hong Kong and Hollywood when I grew up, so I figured that going to school here would be good for my English - and it has been! Nobody thinks I speak with a weird accent!

So I enrolled in Boston University; they've got a nice film and theatre program. It's also not that far from the Landsdowne Street clubs, and that's where I met "Benny".

It probably sounds funny to you that his apparent maturity is part of what attracted me to him - little did I know! -but from what I gather, you can understand how I found him hot, too. But he was great, and even though it didn't take me too long to learn that he was "dating Annette", I didn't let that stop me.

That makes me sound horrible, I guess. It's more explanation than justification to say that I was always told to go after what I wanted growing up, and I've always had a leg up in being able to get it; my family does have money and I was quite pretty, which helps if what you want is a guy.

So I did, and "won", or at least "didn't lose", if you figure that Ronan and Sandra were done but I would have wound up with the original Benny after the dust settled.  I don't think that's in any way malicious or uncaring on Ronan's part - he was just trying to make things right as best he could - but I guess it explains a few things about the last few weeks; he didn't think it was going to last much longer.

But then fate stepped in - I saw the reservation at this Inn and assumed it was a surprise trip for the both of us, so I rented a limousine to set us there in style. "Annette" was there, we yelled at each other, and then one last night of great sex later, I woke up a 31-year-old American woman named Sandra - and Ronan's wife!

And I love it!

I guess it's not that strange - everyone tells me I take after my grandmother, who is a big part of the reason why I wanted to be an actress. You might have seen her in some old Shaw Brothers horror movies, but not that many, because she retired when she married my grandfather. I used to think that was crazy, but now, looking at a life with Ronan, feeling that weight of a ring you don't take off on my finger... It just feels right, and when you look at all the strange things that fate has done to get me here, it seems even more meant to be.

So, until and unless you can work something out with Sandra, enjoy my life. It's a good one, just not the one I was meant to live.

Good luck!

Sandra (formerly " Missy" Lee Yuan-Wei)

P.S. Don't worry about the airplane tickets if Hong Kong seems a bit daunting at first; my friends and family will understand even if it is my birthday.

"Holy shit."

''I know! I'm not ready to to China next week! I probably won't be ready next year! I mean, it's one thing to be second-generation Indian-American, mostly in situations where nobody said boo if I only spoke English or didn't celebrate some holiday or something, but she probably hangs out with other Chinese kids at school and there's probably a big birthday party for her in Hong Kong, and that's before getting into how Sandra just decided to keep my life because she was mad at Ronan..."

Our sizes and sexes were not right for her to curl up in a ball and lay her head on my lap, crying, but that's where it went. It was weird, really - I've actually never seen her as a girl, nor she me as a guy, but we still fit our roles, even after a year.

I sighed. "Look, if neither of us are going to be ourselves anyway..."

She looked up. "I can't ask you that."

"Yeah, but, c'mon.  I speak Cantonese - my grandma never totally mastered English and my Dad imported lots of movies from Hong Kong - maybe even some with Missy's grandmother.  You and Benny are both from Maine. It's not like it doesn't make sense. Besides, I've realized that dicks are totally fucking over-rated."

She laid her head back down but didn't look at me. "No, having a dick is awesome. I love being able to use urinals and being on top."

Her and me both, but... "Well, then you keep doing that, then." One of Missy's bras had fallen on the floor, and I gave it a look. "Besides, it looks like Missy has bigger tits than Deirdre. These bug bites were a real letdown."

She laughed, bitterly, and then looked up. ''You are a terrible liar, and kind of a jerk, but you're okay otherwise."

She sat back up, a sad but relieved look on her face. "Well, I guess I'll go wash up, and then, 'Missy', how about I buy you a beer or two while they'll still serve you? I need about five, I think."

"Best offer I've had all day, 'Benny'."

And so we did. It wasn't a huge farewell party, but it left me with a pretty serious hangover. I hope Missy's form holds it better.

-Judo, who can't believe he'll be answering to "Missy" soon.