Toby/Dunia: A Much Longer Trip Than I Expected

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

It's this sort of thing common, or is it all about the curse or whatever?  I've never really traveled much, or at least not to cities.  We used to go to some of the closer National Parks when I was a kid, but Ma had to sell the camper after the cancer took Dad, and even if there had been money we were never really sure there'd be a job to come back to if we took time off.  I didn't really think about it much, though, I guess because I never had it to miss and there weren't a whole lot of kids in my high school who were going on European vacations.

There were some folks with money around, though their kids went to private schools.  I guess Lambert was one of them.  I didn't know him before I answered the ad; he must've been a couple years ahead of me anyway.  He bought a car on eBay, and since he never liked to fly, he put something in a local Facebook group looking for someone to drive to Bangor and back with him.  Beat the hell out of my real job, especially since they were cutting hours due to the market for soybeans drying up or something.  He seemed all right and I guess he figured I could be trusted with his car on the drive back, so it was a done deal pretty quick.

We stopped at the Inn the night before driving up the coast - Lambert found it online and apparently the last two-week block of the year was an especially good deal for when you didn't necessarily know when you'd be in and out.  We got there on Monday, crashed for the night, and then started for Bangor in the morning.  We spent a couple hours after lunch inspecting and test-driving the Porsche - well, I kind of stood around for that - and then I was back in the BMW for the ride back.  We got dinner at a restaurant on a boat in Portland before stopping at the Inn for the night.

I was awoken by a high-pitched scream, bolting up in bed and looking on the other side of the room where there was a topless woman holding her breasts.  It was clearly the same room we'd been in last night - Lambert's stuff was on the end table - and I was a little fuzzier from the previous night's beers than I should have been, so I asked who she was.

"I'm Lambert Allen - who the fuck are you?"

"It's me, Toby!"  That when I noticed my voice didn't sound right in my ears and my hair was long enough for some  to be in my eyes.  "Uh, at least I think I am."  Hung over enough to go check, I stood from my bed and walked across the room to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.  "How in the heck?"

As you can tell from the subject line, there was a girl in the mirror, about my age, but I was shorter.  Not like super-short - I was six-foot-two and lost about six inches or so.  It made the t-shirt I'd been wearing really loose, although I could see a vague shape of breasts and nipples under it.  I was kind of surprised my boxers hadn't fallen down, but my butt was enough to hold it up.  I guess that may go with being Latina - my skin wasn't quite black but a pretty dark brown.  I pulled the neckline out to look down and then felt inside my boxers - I was all girl.

It woke me up and I ran back into the bedroom, where Lambert was pulling a suitcase out from under his bed and opening it.  He said "you have got to be shitting me" as he lifted the flight attendant's uniform that was on top out.

I did the same, only the top layer on mine was a letter "to the new Dunia Cortes".  It described the Inn's spell, and laid out a bit about the life I was inheriting.  Shes my age, 23, from the Miami area, Cuban-American although it was her grandparents that came from Cuba as children as opposed to someone more recent.  She had just been hired as a flight attendant and was expected to shadow veteran Alicia Polawski, but wound up following her to Maine when she wouldn't cut vacation short.  She lives with her father in "Little Havana" and has a boyfriend, but Luis is in the Army and stationed overseas.  She's become a retired truck driver in Phoenix, which feels as crazy as me being her.

Lambert's letter filled in some blanks; it turns out that Alicia Polawski used to be an college professor and a guy, but he got bored and decided to move on, saying the new Alicia could keep her life or not and he didn't care (she didn't care?).  He also seemed to have invited Dunia to join him specifically because it didn't look like there were going to be 13 people to trigger everything otherwise.  This Harmon guy sounds like a piece of work. 

If there were any people who has been through this before, I didn't meet them, aside from the hot dog vendor who said the thing that freaked me out the most, that there was nobody staying at the Inn after us until spring, so our lives and identities would be in a sort of limbo until then.  He said it's not so bad, because we'd have first dibs on our room and explaining not being around is easier than fixing a mess someone else makes of your life, but that's almost right months!  What's my Ma going to do without me, to start? 

Lambert seems to be more in a daze than I am.  He thought he might go home anyway, but apparently Alicia looks a lot like his last couple stepmothers and his dad is on the prowl again.  He also really doesn't like flying, and I almost wonder if it's bad enough for him to quit Alicia's job ahead of her next shift and try to live on his credit cards until then.  I'm not going to do that - this is apparently Dunia's dream job and she seems nice enough - although there's a pretty big handbook to study in the next week or so.

(It's a lot!  It looks simple enough on TV and in the movies, but I'm already afraid of screwing up the details or having to give someone CPR in midair!)

What he is sure of is that he's not leaving his new Porsche behind.  One of the coupons in the flyer that pointed us to Cary's hot dog truck and this blog is for a place that offers long term parking and storage, but he says there's no way he's leaving his new baby in some beach town that empties out for the winter.  He suggested we just do what we had been planning to do, me driving the BMW and him driving the Porsche, just south on Route One rather than west to North Dakota, but i said that I sure as heck wasn't going to get pulled over driving someone else's car as a Latina woman, so he reluctantly decided to park that one for the winter.  It's probably a good thing we initially packed pretty light, because it's not like the little sports car has  the trunk space to handle four people's luggage if Lambert and I had packed like Dunia and Harmon/Alicia.

It's weird as heck.  I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a really expensive car, and every time I look down rather than forward, I see how dark and slender my arms and legs are, and I've definitely got a figure even if my pink t-shirt doesn't show the boobage that Lambert's top does (we were not left a lot of clean clothes, and I really struggled to pull these shorts onto my big new butt this morning).  When we do get to Miami tomorrow, some guy is going to think I'm his daughter, and then I'm going to have to start working on airplanes starting next Wednesday despite having barely been out of North Dakota before.  I'm kind of tapping this out on my phone just so that I'm not staring at my body or Lambert (he's a little older, but pretty sexy) or talking in our new voices, something to do, and maybe find out if we're doing the right thing taking our stuff along to our new homes.  What I've seen of the entries here, folks usually just leave things there, but maybe not for months.

Maybe this will be my only post because I'll be too busy soon enough.  We'll see.

-Toby/Dunia

Arthur/Penny: Back "home", sort of

It seems silly for me to think of Boston as home; of all the places I've lived, my eight or so months here was among my shortest stays and easily one of my most traumatic. But maybe that second part is what makes it feel like home. One usually associates the word with safety, security, and familiarity, but it's also the place where one grows up. Yes, I first came to the Trading Post Inn as an adult, and I have physically changed a great deal since leaving Boston, but there's no question that it was here that I learned the lessons that made me the woman I am today.

It's also where my best friend lives. It's been about a year since I last saw Lyn, but she nearly knocked me over running up to give me a hug when I arrived at my new apartment. In my defense, I was somewhat wobbly on my legs having driven non-stop from New York. We were both wearing short shorts and she looked at my legs a bit jealously, saying she'd forgotten just how tall the new me was. I laughed at that a bit, pointing out I'd been Penny longer than I'd been Liz, so I sort of took that for granted now, although it did make Lyn seem a little short. "Well," she said, "I'm still gifted in other ways," crossing her arms under her breasts.

We spend the afternoon catching each other up while unpacking the car. I've been remiss about updating people on certain things since quitting my job, such as my new apartment and job. Lyn found the apartment for me, a small but comfortable loft right on the border of Chinatown that makes it very tempting for me to sell my car, since I'm now an easy walk from South Station as well as all four subway lines and the offices for the new job. It all depends on how much traveling off the lines I'll have to do. After living in California for another year, I can hardly imagine being without my car again, although it's not that much of an exaggeration to say that the rent on my parking spot rivals that on the apartment.

We wound up laying on the floor afterward; the bed wasn't due to be delivered for another couple days. I handled most of the larger stuff, but Lyn was still pooped. I sat up and looked at her for a few moments, and she asked if all that muscle and testosterone was some sign that I was still a guy at heart, staring at her boobs. "Not those, the thing you've got 'em wrapped. Are you so assimilated as to be a Celtics fan now?"

"Let's just say it was an easy bandwagon to jump on this season. I've got to tell you, liking sports in this town doesn't suck at all, other than trying to get affordable tickets. Although I could probably get those if I liked hockey as much as the original Ashlyn liked hockey players!"

"Well, I hope the sports stuff isn't too overwhelming; my new boss said they'd be using me to spot people in the other departments when they needed someone extra, but if the Sox, Pats, Celtics and Bruins keep me busy, there won't be too many opportunities."

"You'll find 'em. Although I'd keep my resumé up to date, if I was you - I didn't even realize Boston Now was gone until something like a month after the fact, so I don't know how much room there is for another giveaway paper."

"Eh, the Boston Today people have been doing okay out west for a few years, and it's not like Now and the Metro have had Penny Lincoln. Although I think Today is actually setting up shop in Boston Now's old offices."

She laughed at that, saying some people never learned, and asked when it was going to start publishing. I said they were planning a July 4th launch, taking advantage of what a big party Boston puts on for the fourth, with a pull-out section on the fireworks and pops and me writing pieces on the Sox-Yankees games going on in New York. Lyn makes a joke about the Yankees being old news, the new rivalry being the Rays, but I have to admit it's still hard for me to take Tampa Bay seriously.

Anyway, all that was about a week ago. I've since been reintroduced to how crazy the daily newspaper grind is - we've been doing "dress rehearsals" to prepare for the big launch - and how much "fun" dealing with utility companies is. Of course, it doesn't help when you're playing Comcast and Verizon against each other to try and get one of them to offer you something just a bit better than the other.

It's great to be here, though. As much as San Francisco and Oakland are where I come from, right now Boston is where I want to be.

-Art/Penny

Arthur/Penny: The real deal

I apologize for not posting in a couple of weeks; Louisa and I promised not to write anything until the original Marie and Jean-Michel were back home, safe and sound, so even though I've had parts of this written for over a week, it's sat on my hard drive, getting a bit of editing when I couldn't sleep, but otherwise just waiting.

Louisa and I arrived in the Salt Lake City area on Thursday, June 5th. It's an unusual area, at least for me - it's very conservative in some ways that I'm not used to. I don't mean politically - there really wasn't any time or reason for its red-state-ness to make any difference - just that there was a certain lack of edge there. The public art is never trying to push the envelope, for instance. People bustle quietly but with purpose. Most are very polite. The streets are pretty clean.

Louisa says it's because even though Salt Lake is a big city, it's a tighter-knit, more connected community than most cities. When most people have something in common, she says, they tend to work together to handle the smaller details of life. She doesn't totally approve of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints itself - sometimes I think Christians look at other branches of Christianity with more suspicion than they do religions with much more fundamental differences - but she does recognize the irony in saying that it looks like it would be a nice place to live if not for all the Mormons.

It seemed an odd place for a couple of people from as cosmopolitan and sometimes gleefully anything-goes a city as Montreal to land and stay. Still, I guess you never know. For all of us who never feel quite right, there's people like Lyn who embrace their new lives, no matter how far it may be from the one they'd been living. And their little house was so normal, so insulated against things as unusual as turning into a copy of another person. In the city, there can be something strange around every corner, but in a place like this, it seemed impossible.

We would learn different soon enough. Louisa and I rang the doorbell, and a man in his mid-thirties answered it. He was a couple inches taller than me, with light brown hair, and an industrious day's growth of stubble on his cheeks. His eyes darted between Louisa and me, maybe lingering a fraction of a second longer on her, but not so as to give anything away. "Can I help you?"

So, he was going to play it like that. Louisa cleared her throat. "We've got news for you - mainly for your wife - and it didn't seem right to give it to her over the phone."

"Well, then I guess you'd better come in." He opened the door and stood back a bit. Louisa went in first, and he closed the door after me. I turned around to thank him and found myself staring down the barrel of a very large pistol.

Louisa screamed, and I froze. It's strange, but the main thing I remember from that moment is that my eyes were crossing, trying to focus on something so close to my face. "Honey," he yelled, "get Casey and the suitcase, it's time to go!"

I heard some scrambling from the top floor, and then on the stairs. Louisa called out Marie's name, but the man pointed a finger at her and pushed the gun a fraction of an inch closer to my forehead and she stopped. I heard the sound of a car starting and driving off.

"Okay," I said, remembering to breathe, "you got your family away safe. That's fair. Now can you put that thing down so we can talk like reasonable people? Check us over, we're not carrying anything. We really do just want to talk."

He took a step toward me, although the gun stayed in the same position, and used his other hand to pat me down. He wasn't letting his guard down, though, and motioned Louisa to come closer so he could do the same for her. As professional as he'd been with me, he seemed a bit more awkward with her, though I guess that was understandable. Satisfied that we were armed or wired or anything, he lowered the gun, but didn't put it down. "Okay. Who are you?"

We told him, giving him the chance to google me (or Nell, or Penny, or whatever) to make sure that I was not some random person André Trudeau had sent but someone who could at least be traced. He confirmed that he was originally Jean-Michel, and also the basics of what we figured: The Inn had given him and Marie the forms of a newlywed couple from Utah (amazingly, not switching their sexes), and after a little fretting, they decided to act on it: There had been attraction between them for some time, and that it didn't disappear when they had their new looks must have meant something. They had both wanted away from Trudeau's scene, so they took the offered chance, although they were still very cautious, just in case the Inn was part of some bizarre plot on the boss's part.

Convinced we were trustworthy, or at least willing to risk it, he got out his phone and called Marie, using some code words to tell her that he wasn't doing so under duress. She hadn't gotten very far, so it didn't take her long to get back.

Marie and Louisa took a good long look at each other. Marie said she didn't know whether she would have gone for that haircut; Louisa said it was Parker Costello's idea. Louisa asked how old the baby was (eight months).

The small talk was awkward, but Jean-Michel had at least put the gun down. For me, it was almost a relief when they finally asked why it was so important that we track them down. Of course, it meant that Louisa had the hard part coming up.

"Marie... Your mother died last year."

"What? That's ridiculous; she was only--"

"It was sudden - a blood clot. It happens fast like that sometimes. I don't think Elizabeth knew - they weren't close - but soon after she became herself again and I became you, it took a turn for the worse. I'm truly sorry."

"No, it's..." She handed the baby to her husband and walked to the computer Jean-Michel had used to check my bona fides. The website of a Montreal newspaper was on their favorites list (they evidently hadn't cut themselves completely off from their old lives), and she searched it until she found the obituary. "Mon dieu... Almost a whole year..."

Jean-Michel put his hand on her shoulder. "You couldn't have known. And even if you could have, what could we have done?"

"I know, it's just - I had a fantasy, you know, of bringing Casey up to meet her grand-maman, convincing her somehow of everything, letting her know that we're the only family in Utah raising their baby to be bilingual, and now I find out my mother was dead before Casey was even born."

"I'm sorry. Maybe we shouldn't have come--"

"No! I want to thank you for coming. And for being there with her. That can't have been easy."

"It's all right. It's important to not be alone at the end."

"Yes. Well. We've been very rude, pointing a gun at you rather than offering you something to drink. May I--?"

I accepted whole-heartedly, still having the jitters from having that gun pointed at me. They got the bottle of wine from a cabinet in an unused corner (Jean-Michel said the neighbors disapproved when they saw a bottle on the counter when they first came "home" from their honeymoon, but asking them to give up both alcohol and tobacco was too much). I had a good, long sip to steady my nerves, and we spent the evening sharing information.

They didn't have too much to say; they'd deliberately cut themselves off from their fellow guests back in '06. They were fascinated by the tales of other people we'd met and visited, with all the various stories and permutations. They couldn't believe how relatively lucky they and most of their group was; most everyone had stayed the same same sex and ethnicity: Both "before" and "after", theirs was a pretty Caucasian group; Marie apparently gaining some Native American (First Nations, as she put it) blood was about the extent of weirdness on a physical level.

Of course, what they were most interested in was how Louisa's life as Marie had gone; that she hadn't had any communication with Trudeau in months was a relief, although it also made them feel a bit foolish for having been so determined to hide. Not so foolish that they didn't ask us to hold off on talking about this until they'd gone to Montreal and returned, of course. Marie wanted to lay some flowers on her mother's grave, and they both wanted to see if it still felt like home. I told them I hoped they had better luck than I did, but they figured it would be easier just visiting.

One other thing I noticed: Louisa really seemed to get on with the baby. I remembered a moment when Marie sat down next to me looking at them and asked if I'd thought about kids. I responded with a question, whether she heard about me having been a guy, and she shrugged. "I never thought of myself as a mommy type, either, until I saw my first ultrasound. Anyway, I hope Louisa stops thinking of herself as too old and a widow. Aside from the fact that she'd be great at it..."

"You're mom's gone."

"Yeah. I mean, this is me now, but I'd hate for all of her to be gone."

Louisa's back in California now; maybe she'll find someone there and wind up starting her own family. In the meantime, I'm just a few days from being back in Boston. I'm looking forward to seeing Lyn again.

-Art/Penny

Arthur/Penny: A road trip of my own.

The last time I moved voluntarily, I was moving to a larger place - back into the house I grew up in, as a matter of fact - and it wasn't very far, so I didn't really consider the need to scale down, which is a good thing: I can be a real pack rat, given the opportunity, so it was a pretty involved process, involving multiple trips, and any element of fun to it was muted by the fact that I was making the move to be able to take care of my ailing mother.

This time, it's different; there can be no going back and forth when moving from San Francisco to Boston, and in terms of help I'm basically looking at Lyn when I arrive - and while there are several very nice attributes to her body, strength isn't exactly one of them. Fortunately, I don't have much personal attachment to many of Nell's possessions, so I could be pretty ruthless in putting them up for sale or donating them to charity. I even pondered getting rid of her laptop and buying myself a new one when I arrived in Boston, but being without something to write on felt wrong.

Nell's little car is still packed pretty tight, though, which is why I was a little bit apprehensive when Louisa sent me an email, asking if I would like a passenger for at least part of the way.

I only met her once, months ago, but I liked her. We've emailed back and forth a few times, and I've kept saying I'd like to come down and see her in L.A. on an off-week, but it never seemed to come together. I also wanted to meet Dana and Parker Costello, and since I had a few weeks between when I had to be out of Nell's place in SF and the start of my new job in Boston, I figured I might as well start my own road trip cross-country by going a little ways in the wrong direction.

Before I met with them, though, I made sure I stopped in to see Cassie and Jim. Cassie was Nell's best friend, and we got along pretty well, too, so it didn't seem right to just leave her life without saying goodbye. We wound up having dinner, then going out for drinks, and yakking about sports - was I going to assimilate to Boston so fast that I rooted for the Celtics next week, which I assured them was ridiculous. She said she'd read the manuscript I emailed her, and said that if I couldn't get one of the east coast publishers to do anything with it, I should explore one of the print-on-demand outfits. I said I didn't know about that - maybe Nell was fond of the new-media stuff, but as much fun as blogging is, I feel a lot more comfortable with the established system. I don't get paid for this, after all, and this is about the limit of how much I'm willing to write for free.

I crashed on Cassie's couch Saturday night and gave them big hugs before leaving for the Costellos'. Bigger than I expected, really; even after realizing how much I liked them, I'd always thought of myself as pretending to be their friend; it was strange to realize that it was the real thing.

Meeting Dana, Parker, and Louisa was a completely different feeling. Dana, for instance, is huge; I spent a lot of time around jocks during the lacrosse seasons, but Dana is taller than them and is really going to be something when he starts to really fill out. He laughed at the way Parker and I looked at each other upon meeting, saying we both had the same expression that Jessica had had when she and Parker first met. I guess it's a sort of universal guys-who-become-girls thing, especially for those of us who have been there a while: One part of our brain is scoping out the pretty girl, another is doing the female appraisal of the competition, and still another is trying to picture the other girl as a guy and figure out what we think of that hypothetical guy, and guys in general... It's pretty confusing to us, too.

They're pretty cool people, though. They seemed to like me, too, and we had a bit of a laugh about most of the people the Inn hits with this being nice people. If I were writing it as a story, there'd be way more irony in who gets changed to what, and the assholes would have a harder time of it.

Another thing I further verified: this change doesn't give us any sort of skills at all. Nell had played basketball in school and was apparently pretty good at it, though it was her third-best sport behind volleyball and lacrosse, but Dana kicked my ass but good when we decided to play some one-on-one after dinner. Heck, he handled me and Parker when we played a little one-on-two (Louisa sat out; she says she still isn't used to being strong enough to play sports well). It made Dana pretty happy, though - it feels good to know that being good at sports is because of his own effort, rather than something inherited from the original Dana.

Louisa was pretty low-key, at least until we said our good-byes and I gave her a lift back to her small apartment. That's where she handed me a meticulously organized file and asked me what I thought, since I had done some investigative and research work before.

I looked it over and was pretty impressed; it was thorough and as well-documented as it could be; Parker had made a good call getting the studio to hire Louisa on as a research assistant. The content of it was pretty impressive, too - Louisa and Jessica had managed to spend the last few months productively even while holding down a full-time job in Louisa's case and a heavy classload in Jessica's (she doesn't intend to graduate a semester late). It had taken a lot of patience and convincing, but it looked like it had paid off. They had the names and addresses of the original Marie Desjardins and Jean-Michel Therriot.

"You understand," she said, "I don't want to tell them on the phone or via email, but I don't want to call ahead and spook them..."

I told her it was no problem. I was planning to drive through Utah anyway, just to see the natural beauty of the place, and be only too happy to make a stop there.

-Art/Penny

Jessica: Family reunion

I've been putting off writing this stuff up because I wasn't sure how I felt about sharing it. Art, Ashlyn, and some of the others have all met predecessors and successors and written about it soon afterward. Maybe it's different if you've been waiting and both you and he have settled into your new lives. Maybe I'm still having a hard time believing that it's even possible to talk about this. Or maybe I just don't have words for what this whole thing means.

After I called Mom to find out whether or not it was okay for me to bring guests home for Christmas, Parker did her thing, arranging for flights, hotel rooms for her and Dana, and a rental car. It was an impressive job, but she said it wasn't a big deal - handling that sort of arrangement is pretty much the definition of a personal assistant's job, and her boss regularly asks her to arrange weirder things than a few days in Boston.

"You must be good at it," I say. "I remember that Dina's father - Dina's the one who became Mindy - was in over his head as an event co-ordinator, but your skills must have been pretty transferable."

"Yeah, I think that was our one bit of good luck. I think Parker was initially hired for the job I inherited based on her looks, but I was able to build on that. If you'll pardon some advice from a younger woman, don't be afraid of using that unfair advantage in your head. Nobody questions when you're too competent. You said you were a cop in your old life; are you planning to do something similar?"

"Law school, eventually. I loved being a cop, but I don't know if I'd trust myself in this body; even now, I'll sometimes act like I'm still as strong as I was, and that's no business to not know your limits."

"Trust me, that goes for everything." She didn't elaborate, and I let it go.

Louisa dropped us off at the airport that evening, promising to take care of my car until I got back and thanking Parker for letting her crash at her house until she found her own place. Parker said she was glad to, and hoped Louisa would stick around for a while, and she'd help with work and a work visa if that was necessary.

I waited for Dana and Parker to enter the gate area before giving Louisa a big hug. "Five months ago, I'd never have imagined it would turn out like this. Finding Dina and Dana--" I laughed at that, catching it for the first time. "-- learning what we have... It's almost bigger than when I changed, if you can believe that. Anyway, I'll be back here in a couple of weeks, and when we find a lead on Marie, I don't care what sort of lectures or tests or anything else I've got, I'll be all over it, you understand?" She did, and I hugged her again. Then I went to join the others.

* * *

The plane ride from LAX to Logan seemed nearly as long as the drive in the opposite direction had taken. Dana somehow fell asleep right away, but Parker flagged a stewardess down early for a drink. She just looked at Dana instead of drinking it at first, though. "I don't know if I could do this alone."

"Excuse me?"

"I still have days where I feel like a giant fake, but I can come home and see Dana practicing free throws, totally natural, and it makes me feel okay. I know he's going to go off to college next year, and I'm preparing myself for that, but we're about to meet his mother..." She took a sip. "I never asked him to call me Mom. I insisted he call me Parker, at first, in fact, and I wonder if that's just encouraging him to leave me at this first chance..."

"I sort of feel the same way. It's kind of pathetic, at my age, to be worried about what some woman I initially resisted thinking of as my mother thinks, but..."

* * *

As you might imagine, we were all plenty nervous when we got off the plane. I'd called ahead with the gate number, so I knew Mom would be waiting, but I couldn't see her in the crowd. Dana's got a foot on me, though, and when he froze, I followed his gaze and saw her. I took his hand, nodded, and led him and Parker through the crowd.

"Hi, Mom. I've got someone here you might like to meet."

Mom was speechless, and we just stood there until Dana reached out to hug his original mother. I didn't have time to feel left out, as Mom reached out from the bear hug and pulled me in.

"I can't believe... Is it really you?"

"It is, Mom. I've missed you... I didn't even know how much."

I saw Parker looking uncomfortable out of the corner of my eye, so I cleared my throat and broke the clutch up a little. "Parker, you remember--"

"Kathleen!" Mom looked a bit confused as this strange woman grabbed her, and then realized.

"Molly?"

"Barry."

Mom was a bit taken aback by that, then looked at the three of us. "Does it always...?"

I laughed. "Not always, just half the time. You remember Louisa, and Molly's still female, although... Well, it's weird."

"That's an understatement!" She looked at Dana some more. "I can't believe my little girl... Although neither of those words fits you any more, do they?"

Dana laughed. "Not really. But it's cool. I can't imagine my life going any other way, now." He realized how it sounded, and then started to apologize.

"Don't worry. I can't imagine having a normal daughter, so we're even." I gave her the exaggerated eye-rolling "Mooooooooooooom!", and we all laughed, and agreed to see what sort of places were open for breakfast on Christmas Eve.

* * *

We ate, Parker and Dana went to check into their hotel, and Mom and I decided to stick around Boston to do some last minute Christmas shopping. I wished I had time to see Ashlyn then, but Mom insisted we get home early, because there was baking to be done.

* * *

I had groaned at that, but it paid off when the Costellos arrived the next morning. Dana was carrying a stack of presents that must have weighed more than I do, but he dropped them all when we went through the kitchen. He grabbed a peanut butter cookie with an imbedded Hershey's Kiss in each hand and started shoveling them in his mouth. "You remembered!"

"Of course I did - although you weren't able to put them away like that before! I should have known something was up when this kid wasn't asking to lick beaters any more."

Dana seemed to ignore the last part, but smiled at the rest. "You are one of the two best moms ever!"

Hearing that made Parker and Mom both feel good.

We went to the living room to open presents. I laughed at the Lakers shirt Dana gave me, especially when he explained that it would provide good camouflage at school. Also because I'd gotten him a Paul Pierce jersey. Because, you know, likewise. I also got him a great big unicorn poster, leading to him warning Parker that no-one must ever know. The biggest laugh came when Parker unwrapped her present from Mom, a mirror with the Playboy logo across the top, so that if looked like a magazine cover. Dana and I didn't really get it.

"Barry was a huge breast man, and I just thought, seeing him with those..."

"Hey, they're the best money can buy!"

Mom wasn't expecting that! "You got implants?"

"Would you rather I was a total hypocrite?" Mom sort of shrug-laughed, while Dana looked uncomfortable, but Parker went on. "No, after a couple years, when I knew this was going to be my life, and everyone in L.A. seemed to wear plunging necklines that showed off more, younger cleavage than I had, I thought, why not? It was sort of the last step in accepting who I was."

"Yeah, well, I don't quite see how plastic surgery can be construed as accepting who you are, but if it makes you happy. Still, Jessica--"

Dana and I both answered "not a chance in hell!" simultaneously and laughed at it. Dana answered awkwardly that it was my body, but he wouldn't be thinking that way if it was still his, and I said I'd always been a leg man, anyway. But I still didn't like high heels.

We left the living room a mess of shredded paper while we waited for the ham to finish cooking. The half-dozen cookies Dana ate in the meantime didn't seem to diminish his appetite.

* * *

I wish I hadn't waited so long to write this down; I can't remember as many details of the next couple days, and now I wish I did. We had a good time - I introduced "my friend from California" to my friends from high school. Dana pointed out that I didn't have many of the same friends he had when this was his life, but that he liked the sort of sporty girls I hung out with, and wondered what it would have been like if we'd never visited the Inn. Would these have been his friends, or would he have grown up a total girly-girl? He seemed kind of revolted by the concept.

Mom and Parker did the same thing, although it was harder on Parker, because Mom still did have many of the same friends that she'd had nine years ago. She had two margaritas to Mom's one that night, but assured Dana that it wouldn't be an problem.

They went home on Thursday; Dana had one of those holiday basketball tournaments over the weekend.

I haven't yet stopped by to see them since arriving here; school has had me slammed. I have seen Louisa; she told me about her visit with Art/Penny; I'm going to have to find a chance to see the new Art.

So... That's me caught up. What's up with the rest of you?

-Jessica

Jessica: Arriving in California. Twice.

It's beautiful here in southern California, although it was unusually nice for New England before I got here. It was nice to see some of my friends from high school the past week; I'm a semester behind all of them right now, but they were jealous of my cross-country road trip, even if I only told them a heavily expurgated version of the story. They wouldn't believe the end, in particular.

The last time I wrote something in this blog (or even read it, really), I had met half of the family that the Wrights and I replaced, and they told me that the original Jessica - now "Dana Costello" - lived in Malibu, mere miles from where I'd be going to school. It was almost Christmas, and I'd wanted to go home, so we drove through the night in hopes of meeting her before flying back.

So, it's Sunday morning, and Louisa and I are both really tired. We drive around for a while, trying to find the address Phuong gave me. We're having no luck, mostly because we can't concentrate, so we pull up to the side of the road next to a park to get some rest. It's a nice area, so we don't feel particularly worried about sleeping in the car. A few hours later, I wake up and the passenger seat is empty. Louisa's left a note saying that she's gone to the church we saw a couple blocks away. I kind of envy that she's able to do that. I never really was a church-going man, but ever since the inn, I've been afraid of them. There's apparently real magic in the world, but it's not what they talk about there, not something that should be messed with. But Louisa takes the inn as vindication that there are powers greater than us, even if we don't understand them.

I put my glasses on, head to a corner store and grab a coffee and muffin before heading back to the park. It's warm, so I remove my sweatshirt and start walking around. There's a few parents with their kids, some people of various ages reading Sunday papers and ohter things. I wind up wandering over to the basketball court, where some teenagers are playing a little two-on-two. They're all pretty good, and the fact that it's shirts versus skins doesn't hurt at all. There's one black guy and one white guy on each team, and after a while, they must notice me, because they're starting to show off a little. It's kind of flattering, since they're good looking guys and there must be plenty of tan California girls with no glasses and bigger boobs hanging on them all the time. So I smile and wave, they wave back, play a little more, but they opt to take a break well before they're really sweaty.

One of the black guys pulls a shirt off the ground and waves in the direction of the deli I'd gone to, heading off with the other. The white guy wearing the tank top walks over to where a girl sitting on the grass had been reading. That left the shirtless white guy, who walked up to the little half-fence and leaned over, bringing his face closer to eye level. He had a good foot on me, a fit body, and a nice face that even his shaved head doesn't screw up. "Like what you see?" Even for a big guy, his voice is a little deeper than I expect. It's kind of sexy.

"Not bad."

"So, I haven't seen you around here before. You new in town?"

"Sort of passing through; I start class in Pasadena next month."

"Nice, a college girl. Guess I should tell the recruiters I want to stay close to home."

"Recruiters, huh? I don't know that you're that good."

"Oh, I'm that good. They got nicknames for me and everything. Go google Direct Current sometime."

"Riiiight."

The other white guy and his girlfriend walked up. "Who's the new girl?"

I held out my hand. "Jessica Brooks."

"Aaah!" DC recoiled, actually crouching down. "God, girl, why didn't you say so?"

His friend ran over. "What's the deal, Dana?"

Dana!? "Oh, my..." I kind of sank to the ground myself, a little queasy. Then I started to laugh, and I can't stop. I just keep laughing and laughing, and at first he looks at me like I'm some sort of monster, but before long he's laughing too.

It's at that point Louisa shows up and asks what's going on. "He's Dana Costello," I say, "and he was hitting on me!"

"I was hitting on you? Who was the one who was scoping out all this, Miss Jessica Brooks?"

That makes us both start laughing again. His friends think we're both nuts, and maybe Louisa too, if she's started laughing. She tries to do some damage control, since we're in no condition to talk rationally. She says that we were old friends back in elementary school, and why not?

He eventually gets up and offers me a hand up. I take it and we share a look. It makes us tingle a bit, but it's not totally or even primarily sexual. It's... I don't know if Ashlyn felt anything like it when she met Jean-Michel for the first time, and I'm pretty sure Art didn't feel it with Jeremy, but we've been without each other much longer, so it's like I've found a part of me that's missing, and I know from the way he's looking at me that he feels the same way.

We walk to a bench and he sits next to me, stretching his six-foot-seven frame out. "Look at all of you. You are not what I expected. I mean, I just assumed Dana was a girl's name, which was stupid. I didn't even think to ask Phuong! And your room was just full of Disney Princesses, unicorns, and... and other unicorns."

"Hey, don't you tell anyone about the princesses or unicorns. I got a rep."

"Oh, they wouldn't believe me anyway. You know how it works."

"Yeah, I do. So, you say you met Phuong and Carson? How are Mindy and Mrs. Cahill?"

"Getting by. Glad to meet others like us. We had a nice visit."

"That's cool. And your friend...?"

"Also one of us. She looks like Marie Desjardins of Montreal, but in reality she's Louisa Torrence of Baton Rouge and older than me."

"Older than..." He held up a hand to stop me. "I don't want to know. I mean, I do, but not yet. Let me process, okay?"

"Sure."

"Cool." He looked up and saw that the other two players had returned and were talking to Louisa, who looked a bit uncomfortable. "C'mon, let's go to my place."

He hopped in the car and directed us down a road that seemed obvious in retrospect. Their house wasn't enormous, but it was bigger than where Carson and Phuong lived, with an attached garage that we parked in front of. Dana led us inside and stopped in the kitchen, asking if he could get us a Coke or something; he pulled out a 2-liter and drank straight from the bottle. I still had my big coffee, but Louisa took an orange juice. Dana grabbed a box of crackers from a cupboard and led us out the back door.

I crashed into his back when he stopped suddenly as we approached the swimming pool and turned around, averting his eyes. "Geez, Parker, you should put a sign up or something."

Dana's body was blocking my view, but I saw enough to see that the woman he was talking to had been sunbathing nude, and was quickly putting her bikini on while telling him that he was usually at the park for hours. After a minute she told him it was safe, and stood to greet us. Dana made the introductions, and she did a bit of a spit-take when she heard my name. She told us to hang on a second, took a swig of the margarita that was sitting next to her lounge chair, and then grasped my hands and took a good look at me. "Wow, look at what might have been. It must be weird for you to look at her, huh, Dana?"

"Weird starts to cover it."

I was sort of taking a good look at her. Parker (who used to be Barry Cahill) wasn't as tall as Dana, so my eyes weren't quite down at breast level, but they probably would have been if she were wearing heels. She had a pretty spectacular body, although I could see some small laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. I shook my head to clear it. "Sorry, I was just having a flashback to my life as a man in his forties. You look really good."

"For a forty-three year-old woman? I'm not bad. You've got to look good in my business, though - even if Hollywood wasn't run by dirty old men, as soon as you start to let your appearance slip, they take it as a sign you might start to let your work slip too, and there's plenty of younger people out there."

"Well, you're a ways off from that."

"That's so sweet, but it's all going to come crashing down at once when my workout buddy here goes away to school this fall, I can tell."

She put her arm around Dana and gave him a squeeze, which clearly made him uncomfortable. "Look, I haven't even decided where I'm going yet. UCLA's looking pretty nice."

"But you've got a chance to get some real minutes as a freshman at Boston College..."

I gather they'd had this conversation before. But... "Wait, you're thinking of going to BC? Have you visited yet? Because I bet Mom would love to see you when you do."

They stopped dead, Parker recovering first. "Wait... Kathleen knows? How is that even possible?"

"We think people are more open to accepting it when something life-changing is already happening. I tried to tell her a hundred times, but she didn't believe me until her father died."

"Grampa Carl's dead?" Dana sat down on one of the loungers; Parker sat beside him and put her hands on his shoulders. "I hadn't even thought of him in a few years, but... Man. And you say my mom... my other mom... is she worried about me?"

"Of course she is." Parker squeezed Dana again. "You know I still worry about Mindy and Molly, even though they tell me they're doing okay whenever we talk. How could she not be?"

"I guess." Dana wiped a tear from his eye, and looked uncomfortable doing it. "Um, I gotta--"

"You go on and do what you need." Dana got up and headed into the house. Parker turned her attention back to me and Louisa, crying a little too. "He's such a guy; can't stand to let anyone see him crying no matter what, even more than most boys his age. It's like he's afraid people will find out he used to be a girl."

Louisa nodded. "He's certainly adapted pretty thoroughly."

Parker shrugged. "It's half his life; he can barely remember being Jessica Brooks. Min-- Carson is the same way, only... Well. And part of it's me. I confess, I liked having a son so much that I kind of steered him in that direction. Not that I loved my little girl less at all, but Dana being such a guy's guy - well, it lets me stay in touch with that part of my life, despite having all this." She held her hands out in front of her breasts for emphasis.

I got that; I'd certainly played a bunch of sports in high school, even if I didn't have the natural ability of some of the more athletic girls, for the same reason.

We sat silently for a bit, and then, just to break the silence, I said that they should come back East for Christmas. Unless they had other plans. Which they must...

"No, but... Won't it be weird for Kathleen? These two strangers from L.A. coming on short notice?"

"You're not strangers. She'll have a hard time believing at first, but trust me, you can convince her. She's used to me, remember."

"Well, I'll have to ask Dana, and you should really call her, but if they're all open to it..."

They were. But that will have to wait; I'm still on Eastern time and ready to crash.

-Jessica

Arthur/Penny: Three "generations". Man, there should be a word for us.

Or a pair of words. Something like "ancestor" and "descendant". You can form a chain between Louisa and me: Jeremy became me, Nell became Jeremy, I (as Liz) became Nell, Liz (as Marie) became herself again, and Louisa becomes Marie. I don't know if that makes us any closer than two random visitors to the Inn, but maybe there is. We acted like there was when she came up this weekend; our situation can be an isolating one, so we try and find any connection we can. The reflexive disbelief upon meeting another person changed by the Inn was a little less strong this time; I'm pretty sure it's beacuse seeing her confirmed that the woman I saw waiting to check in was, in fact, Liz-as-Marie, so she at least had a face I'd seen before.

Louisa's been flying solo for the past couple weeks, with Jessica having headed home for the holidays. She's sort of in limbo right now, still waiting to hear back about the original Marie's whereabouts and having trouble renting an apartment in L.A. without a long-term visa. I told her the U.S. should be grateful to have a Canadian who wants to move here with the current economic and political climate, rather than vice versa. She makes a comment about bureaucrats just wanting to make everyone jump through hoops. She's checked into a residential hotel, worried about how quickly that will drain her finances. She's starting a new job on the recommendation of "Parker Costello" this week, but won't really be comfortable until the sale on the house she inherited closes.

She tells me all about Nell, and I'm glad to hear that she really is doing well in her new life. She's curious about meeting the original Jeremy, but I don't want any part of that, and try to convince her not to. He's a jerk, so why taint your impressions of either me or Nell by getting any first-hand experience with him? Well, she says, maybe I've been hanging around Jessica too long and her paranoia is rubbing off on me, but isn't it kind of strange that Jeremy bailed on the trip to switch back at the last minute, sending Nell and R.J. instead?

Yep. I can't say I haven't been thinking of that, ever since they told us about Pygmalion being more than a stalker. I've put off asking directly, because I didn't want anything to do with Jeremy, but because I was a little afraid of the answer. I didn't want to be a chump. Or at least not a total chump; as much as I was the victim of Jeremy deciding to keep my life, the idea that someone had been laughing at what I didn't know was... well, something I'd rather not know about.

Louisa's right, though. If we want to find out answers, we can't hide from them, no matter where they may be.

So, it being Saturday night, we head to one of the bars I've heard "Arthur" hangs out at. Our luck's good, since we find him on the first try. Which is a bit of a relief for both of us; neither of us is really comfortable with the bar scene, and this place is a big-time meat market. Louisa comments that at least I can say I have a boyfriend to anyone who hits on me; I say not so much. Neither Drew nor I is seeing anybody else, but his (that is, R.J.'s) practice is picking up, I work a lot of nights. We still see each other on a regular basis, but it's not really a thing. Louisa says she might actually think about dipping her toe into the pool, but the age thing is though for her to get past. Men her apparent age are all children to her, and she's kind of disturbed by Mindy/Carson having a child's mind but an adult's urges.

But, I digress. We find Jeremy at the bar, and each get on one side of him. He looks at Louisa and smiles, but that fades when he spots me. "What do you want?"

I smile at him, because it will get me into less trouble than ripping out his spleen. "We're wondering if there's something you're not telling us."

"About what?"

Louisa doesn't bother with the sweet smile. "We're wondering if you've had any contact with people who knew about the Inn aside from us."

"What? No! If not for you, I might think I'd always been Arthur Milligan. Dorky name you saddled me with, by the way."

I snorted, so Louisa continued. "I've got a little more faith in people than Penny here does. I don't think you'd just screw her over like you did for no reason. Did someone offer you something?"

"No, just..."

"Just what?"

"Some fed came and visited me after I made the reservation. Asked if I'd had any contact with... well, with me. Went on about deserters in a time of war, scared me real good. Then the next night I get drunk, strike out with Nell, take a bit of crap from her boyfriend..."

I think he's actually looking for me to feel sorry for him. "Do you remember the fed's name?"

"It was almost a year ago!"

Even though Louisa doesn't look her age, she still knows how to give the look that keeps you from lying to your grandparents. "Jeremy. How many times has the FBI come to talk to you? I'm sure you'd remember the details."

Jeremy's looking at her, so I don't see the expression on his face, which is probably for the best.

"Langan. Something Langan."

I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. "Son of a bitch!" I storm out, and Louisa follows me.

I'm pacing back and forth when she makes her way through the bar. "So much for my faith in humanity. Jessica knew he was dirty."

"But why? Why me? Why me and not everyone else who tries this?"

Louisa doesn't know. Maybe Pygmalion just didn't have the resources to screw things up for Jeff, or Liz, or other folks. Maybe he finds Jeremy interesting or useful and was defending that. Maybe it's something else we can't see because he's the only one who knows the whole pattern.

It doesn't really matter. Someone's been using my life as a toy, and it ticks me off.

-Art

Jessica: So close...

None of us who have been transformed by the Inn really envy others. I mean, not enough for it to be common. We all know just how traumatic it is, so even when someone gets the draw that Louisa did - younger but not a child, in a more comfortable socio-economic position, no sex change - we take it for granted that it hurts for them too. We know it hurts bad, and it's hard for us to conceive of ourselves as lucky until we meet someone who is worse off.

Take Dina, for instance. On the surface, it looks like she got off easy - she even got to keep her family. Look below the surface, and she's in pretty rough shape. What's worse is, she knows it - she's smart enough to see that the past eight years have stunted her natural growth as a person in some ways, and I pity the psychiatrist who has to try to unravel her parental issues down the line almost as much as I pity her for having them.

Ashlyn, Arthur, and Louisa at least got relative independence. I at least got a mother who loved me even after she knew the truth. Dina got something I don't even have words for.

And when I called her the other night, she still acknowledged that she got off easy compared to the original Cahills.

We've been driving with a little extra urgency since Wyoming - we've got an idea that even though we only have a few people left on our list, they need to know about Pygmalion before their lives are fouled up incontrovertibly. It's silly - in most cases Pygmalion has had months or years to do his worst, so what's a couple of days on our part going to matter - but no-one wants to be too late. But unless Pygmalion is in control of whose body changes into what (and the current best theory is that it relies on proximity, rather than the will of any person or thing), there's not much more he could do to the Cahills.

We got to Seattle late at night, and checked into a motel. We dilly-dallied the next morning - I think it took me two hours to eat my pancakes at the diner we found, and even Louisa wasn't as nosy as she usually is when some element of my past comes up. We were within miles of the original Jessica Brooks, and a million strange thoughts were going through my head - would she approve of how I'd lived her life? Would she resent me? Would I find out she wasn't a very nice person? I've been carrying a mental image of Mom's Daughter around in my head, and she was eternally ten years old. Could I even handle her being something else?

Finally, though, we got out of the diner to let them serve lunchtime customers, and headed to the address Louisa had coaxed out of the Wrights. We walked up to the door and knocked.

No-one was home. Pretty much the only thing that could make me more tense.

Made sense; it was a weekday afternoon, so everybody was going to be at school or work except people on months-long cross-country road trips. We made sure the name on the mailbox - "Costello" - matched, and then settled down into the car to wait for someone to show. Louisa, thankfully, kept the "stakeout" jokes to a minimum.

At around four o'clock, one of the people getting off the bus at the end of the road made a turn there. She was an asian girl, seventeen-looking, with her hair in her eyes and wearing ripped jeans underneath a skirt and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. Figuring that no good could come of waiting until the last minute, I jumped out of the car and ran up to talk to her. "Excuse me," I said, a bit taken by her not exactly looking like a Costello, "do you live here?"

"Have all my life," she said. "What do you want? Did I piss you off without knowing it? Did my father?"

"No, not at all. It's just... Uh... Well, I'm Jessica Brooks."

She looked confused for a second, then squinted at me before the realization hit her. "Oh, you mean the new one! Although after eight years, it's not quite "new", is it?"

I agreed it wasn't, and she got out her keys. "This is amazing... I didn't think I'd ever get to meet you, although we've considered heading back East to try every once in a while, but once those assholes who wound up with our lives made it clear that they weren't going to let us try to get our real bodies back by staying in the inn in reverse order, we figured it might hurt too much to see the new us... I'm Phuong Costello, by the way, although I was born a Molly. Who were you?"

"Conrad Mancini... I was a cop in Baltimore. So you're not Mindy or Jessica?"

"Oh, no... We've got stories to share, I guess. And I'll bet you do too, Miss...?"

"Louisa Torrence, although my passport says 'Marie Desjardins'."

"Passport, huh? I know that feeling. But come on in, it's too cold to keep this up out here."

Phuong opened the door, dropping her backpack in the entryway. "I don't remember there being so many books my first time through high school. Do you?" I shook my head, but said I wasn't one for studying that time. "Ah, me neither. Not really now, but you lap your classmates in elementary school while being an asian besides, you wind up on the 'gifted' track. Sounds like a good idea when you're thirty-four-going-on-ten, then you hit junior high and find out how hard those kids work..."

I laughed at that, and we swapped stories about being adults in children's bodies. Our stories were different, of course, although they had points of similarity: It took us a long time to feel like we belonged in a locker room during sports and gym classes, although she had more luck getting her friends to dig her favorite music. It was so amazing to find someone who had had so many experiences close to my own - it was something I'd been missing for most of the past decade - even Dina wasn't this close to my own experience.

We must have talked for an hour and a half straight, and we didn't realize where the time had gone when we heard the door open again. Phuong quickly looked at her watch and then ran to the door. "Honey, come into the living room! You'll never believe who found us!"

She leads a man through the door. He's a big, burly guy, with a bit of an unkempt beard just starting to show some gray. He's wearing a Mariners cap and a grocery store nametag that reads "Carson". He introduces us as Conrad Mancini and her friend Louisa, and mentions that I'm the person who became Jessica. He looks me up and down for a moment and I wonder whether or not I should be uncomfortable. There's the "older man checking out a younger girl" thing, sure, but we're both aware that the inside doesn't necessarily match the outside. He nods, saying that "she" turned out pretty, and I blush a little. Phuong gives him a kiss on the cheek and says she's sorry, we just got caught up talking, but she'd get dinner started. He thanks her and heads to the bathroom.

She suggests we take it to the kitchen where she pulls a package of chicken breasts out of the fridge. "Yeah, I still do the cooking; old habits die hard. You guys are going to stay and have dinner with us, won't you?" I say I'd be glad to, and Louisa nods agreement.

"It's nice to see that you and your husband still get along," Louisa says. Cautiously. "A lot of relationships might not be able to handle the strain."

Phuong stops with her hand on the oven's temperature control, and sighs. "Yeah. Well... You know how I was talking about being on the gifted track because I knew so much more than a nine-year-old usually would? Well, one of the things they teach you in the AP physics courses is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

"Carson wasn't my husband. Carson was Mindy."

I stop thinking for a bit there. Nothing is going through my head. I hear Louisa say she's so sorry, and that it's worse than Dylan; I think she may have suspected something like this. She says she's not much of a detective, but while I was comparing notes with Phuong, she was looking around the house, and I think she's a good half-dozen steps ahead of us.

Finally, I'm able to think again, and tell Phuong I'm also so sorry.

"Yeah, me too. People talk about kids having to grow up fast these days, but Mindy... Mindy was so totally unequipped to live Carson's life. He was a lawyer - family law. That's why the Costellos had adopted Phuong - he'd been moved drawing up adoption papers for another family. The partners at his firm were livid when his wife drove him in to work a week late from vacation so that he could say he couldn't do the work any more and was resigning effective immediately. We had to refinance the house and the school loans so the family could get by on one income because I wasn't old enough to work. And Carson... Mindy... felt so bad about it. She thought it was all her fault somehow."

Louisa asks where the dishes are, and Phuong points to a cupboard. Louisa reaches in, pulls out a stack of four plates, and closes the door. I'm not looking terribly smart at this point as I sputter out that that can't be enough if we're staying for dinner. What about Jessica, and Mindy's father.

"There's been a divorce."

I turn around and see Carson Costello (né Mindy Cahill) standing there. I try to see him as someone who's only lived eighteen years, but it's hard. Eight years can bury one's old self pretty deep.

Louisa gestured at the walls. "It is a small house."

Phuong nodded. "It is indeed. Too small for a lot of things. No spare bedroom, for instance, and you couldn't expect Mindy to share a bed with someone who used to be her father. Couldn't expect Barry to share a bed with the nine-year-old girl who used to be his wife. Mindy and Jessica had been best friends, but one suddenly being the parent and the other the child drove a wedge between them." She almost automatically turned to her father/daughter, barely leaving a pause. "It's not your fault, dear. We're just not made to take this."

"If you say so, Mom."

Phuong chuckled at the looks on our faces - it just seemed so incongruous coming out of Carson Costello's mouth. "Yeah, he calls me 'mom' sometimes. It's a joke with the neighbors; they think growing up in Cambodia made me mature beyond my years and treat it like a pet name. We're known to have a weird family dynamic."

"And I thought my mom and I were unique."

Phuong started laughing hysterically. "That's right! When you were talking about you and your mother, I forgot that would have to be Kathleen! Oh, man, I hope you made it easy on her! She was always such a great neighbor and friend."

"Not hardly. I got into fights, and was anti-social, and she only was able to know the truth because I said something horrible when her father died."

"That's nothing," Carson said, giving Phuong an elbow. "Tell them about the time you found my porn stash."

(About a second later, Louisa said something in French that I think translates to "Pardon me, I've just thrown up in my mouth a little.")

Phuong turned beet red, but soldiered on. "You have to understand... Mindy was about twelve but Carson was about thirty-five. Barry tried to find a job where he could work nights so that he could look after Mindy during the day while I took the night shift, but it didn't always work out. We tried to pretend that he wasn't a grown man with his needs, but when he had a day to himself, he could watch R- or X-rated movies, and he is kind of ruggedly handsome. Women notice him, and that energy had to go somewhere... We were just too blind to see it until I was getting the laundry and saw what my little baby had stashed in a closet."

"Oh, they yelled at me good. Dad had to give me 'the talk', which was all kinds of weird."

They were laughing, so I decided to broach a subject that gave me fits. "So, what did you wind up doing... about that stuff?"

"Well, they reminded me that I was technically still a married man, and pointed out that I of all people shouldn't think of women that way. But they also agreed I needed an outlet, because I'd go crazy without it, and I was about to start my job at the supermarket and it wouldn't be right for someone with a kid to look so ignorant about sex."

"But we also told him that just because he looked older didn't mean he was dating before he turned fifteen."

"Right. I could touch myself, but no-one else."

The two of them were laughing, and it had me pretty confused. "How can you...?"

"Comedy equals tragedy plus time. Trust me, we were just as horrified then as you are now."

"Yeah." Carson's laughter stopped kind of abruptly. "I was a real jerk to Jessie. She was going through her own stuff, missing her family, and I was lording the fact that I was a grown-up and she was still just a little kid over her. That's why..." He stopped, tearing up.

Phuong was serious now, too. "That's why Carson has custody of me, as far as the government is concerned, and 'Parker' has custody of 'Dana'. It was easier for everyone that way."

Louisa touched Phuong's hand. "But still not easy, right?"

"Not at all. Don't get me wrong, we still talk - we try to have a vacation together every year, although it's been harder since we all decided to let ourselves be attracted to people. A week is about all we can do anyway, and you add other people and the jealousy gets really ugly. When Barry got the new job, it was a good thing for us to get some distance."

We all got quiet, so Louisa mentioned that she saw Carson's Mariner's hat - did that mean they'd abandoned Red Sox nation. That led to a lot of sports talk - Carson had gotten into sports in a big way to try to fit in with other guys, and there was still enough New Englander left in Phuong for her to be excited about the World Series and Super Bowls. That led to other, lighter topics that kept us up late that night.

We probably would have stayed all night, but Phuong's boyfriend called. She put him on hold, claiming another call. "Sorry, new boyfriend, and aren't newly-besotted teenagers clingy? High school boys haven't changed in the past twenty-five years, that's for sure. It's totally not going to last, and a dumb idea because we're in the same band, but man, he is so cute, and is that stuff about men being at their sexual peak at nineteen true or what?"

I declined to comment, and she smiled wickedly before getting back to her call. Carson said she could be hours, so Louisa and I got our coats, said goodbye, and headed for the door.

Before we left, Phuong held up a finger for us to wait. After she found a scrap of paper, she wrote an address down and handed it to me. "You've been very nice," she said, putting the phone on her shoulder for a moment, "to act so interested in us. But I know why you came here. Give them my best."

I thanked her, and put the piece of paper in my pocket without looking at it. It only stayed there until we reached the car, when I took it out.

And laughed. Harder than I've laughed at anything in a long time. Louisa asked what was so funny.

"I put off going to college in Pasadena for the semester to do this trip. But check this out - Parker and Dana Costello live in Malibu."

Louisa was a little confused until I pulled out the road maps I'd bought six months ago, in preparation for living down there. Then she laughed, too.

What a strange trip this has wound up being. Next stop, Los Angeles. If we drive through the night, we should get there tomorrow morning.

-Jess

Louisa: Road Trip - Everything's Connected

I'd like to say the title of this post refers to some greater truth that Jessica and I have discovered here in the American West, where you can drive for hours without seeing much in the way of human settlement, but I'm afraid it refers to something more - well, not prosaic, but decidedly human. Jessica and I have been going back and forth over whether or not to post about it the past couple of days, figuring it might be wiser just to mail Arthur, Ashlyn, Darren, Jeff, Jaci, and the others privately, but we figure this is better; we know there are other people like us who read this blog and this is worth knowing. The rest of the world should probably know, too, but of course they won't believe it. We barely do.

Dex Langan was part of Arthur and Ashlyn's group. We met the "new" Dex toward the start of our trip, in Washington, and we've been trying to get in contact with the original for a while. We didn't think it would be that difficult; after all, Jessica had found a lead on him/her even before I'd ever gone to that inn.

It took some doing, though. He'd become Kayla Johnson, so we started in her hometown. We found her parents easily enough, but they didn't have much to say. They hadn't heard from their daughter in over a year; it was as if once she'd finished college she decided she didn't have any more use for her family. Jessica asked if she had any friends in town who might still be in contact with her. "Not according to Kayla."

Detective work it was, then. That meant another public library; I joked with Jessica that I was spending more time in these places than I did when I was in my old life, working as a school librarian. She laughed and said it would be a tragedy if these places ever disappeared completely, to be replaced by the internet and e-books and the like. The internet is not very good at being local, for instance, and even the biggest monitor and best user interface can merely approximate how well spreading a bunch of information out in front of oneself can be.

(This, as my old English teacher friends would point out to her students, is what they call foreshadowing.)

We got lucky in that Kayla is a nice photograph and was involved in a bunch of activities in high school. There were plenty of pictures of her in her school's yearbooks, not just "official" club portraits, but candids and collages. Jessica was methodical about seeing who she stood near for both National Honor Society and field hockey, and then flipping through the book to see who she was standing near in the candids.

This was five-year-old information about Kayla, as opposed to Dex, but it gave us some people to talk to. A number had moved away after college, and a couple really weren't that close to her, but we hit the jackpot with her high school boyfriend.

Johnny Farmer had looked nice in his yearbook pictures and had matured into a handsome adult. His family actually did have a farm, and a couple women our apparent age looking for him made him feel good. We decided to go with the reporter story again - only this time, Jessica had printed out some business cards for me. Simple things reading "Marie Desjardins, Freelance Journalist" along with my cell number and email address; Jess said people respect the no-frills approach and being a freelancer means no-one asks why I have a generic Yahoo! address rather than globeandmail.ca or something. He was a little disappointed that our "story" was about Kayla rather than him, but admitted that there was a story there.

According to him, she had come back home to get her things en route to her new job after being in Maine a couple weeks longer than expected, but everyone noticed how erratically she was acting. She stayed in a hotel rather than her parents' house, she didn't drop in to see old friends. He had run into her by chance, in a bar, and been confused by the way she acted - she had almost never been one to drink enough to get hammered, and while they'd talked amicably enough, she had completely freaked when he made some innocent comment that referenced their prior relationship. She made a big enough scene for them both to spend a night in lock-up, and when her parents were brought in...

Dex had told the truth. All of it. And, of course, it just bounced right off people. Johnny said that she made some comment about it not just being Maine, that this was bigger than anyone thought, and a lot of stuff that didn't make any sense.

There'd been brief talk about having her involuntarily committed, but upon hearing that, she'd started acting, if not normal, then less hostile. After a few days, she left town for her posting with the Forest Service. She didn't write, call, have her mail forwarded, or do anything else. She didn't even come home for the holidays, and don't think that wasn't a sore spot with her family. It was no wonder the Johnsons gave us the deep freeze when we came to talk about Kayla.

Johnny gave us the location of her post, and asked us to mention him to her if she decides to talk to us. We do, and head out again.

December is not the greatest time to try and visit a National Park in a cold-climate state, especially if you're driving an old car like Jessica's without four wheel drive. (Actually, December is not the best time to do anything up north. I can't wait until we reach Pasadena!). We tried to get hold of Dex/Kayla by phone, but neither of us could navigate the voice-mail system. So, when we arrived at the rangers' station, we were just hoping "Kayla Johnson" hadn't been fired or transferred.

We got lucky; she was still there. We did the usual little dance: "Do I know you?" "No, but we have some mutual friends - Arthur Milligan, Jake Matthews, Jeff Miller." She was more wary than most of the people we've talked to, but was willing talk with us. Better than going into town and getting hit on by the cowboys.

She (unlike Ashlyn, I never met Dex as a man, so I have a hard time calling her "him") got really nervous when we started asking if she'd had any contact with people who knew who she really was. When Jessica showed her some of the pictures from her phone, the ones she took in Texas, Dex/Kayla took a real long look. She was weighing what we were showing her, and the fact that we just put it in front of her. "Perhaps I should show you the back room."

We followed her to the back of the little cottage, where there was a bulleting board hanging up, with pictures and photocopies of documents and different-colored pushpins and handwritten notes and strings connecting the pushpins. "Damn," I said, "you've got a wall-of-crazy straight out of the movies." And, of course, instantly felt bad about it.

But she laughed. "Don't I just?" She pointed at a couple of documents which matched names from Stephen Jeffries/Jake Matthews's address book. "But maybe it's not so crazy after all."

The three of us stood in front of the wall, just staring, and then Jessica wrote "J & S Motion Graphics" on a blank card and stuck it into the board. Dex/Kayla nodded, and then started stringing lines between it and the places he already knew about. It wasn't connected directly to the question mark at the center of the board, but there was no doubt that whoever the Feds' mystery man was, he was an investor in J & S. Dex/Kayla started adding more, finally putting Ashlyn's name up, as well as Jean-Michel's and then André Trudeau's.

We stand back and stare at the more complicated pattern, not saying anything for a bit. Jessica was the one who broke the silence.

"You weren't in Maine to investigate microbrews marketing to minors, were you?"

"No." She sat down in a chair and stretched her long legs out. "After 9/11, a lot of federal agencies were ordered to share records more closely - you know, Department of Homeland Security. Internal investigations of people in different branches of the government turned up some common leads; once we knew what to look for, we found a few more. The thing that tied them together was vacations at the Trading Post Inn in Old Orchard Beach, Maine."

So, I asked, is that what the Inn's about? Replacing people in the government?

She shook her head. "I don't think so. There's no pattern, and half the people leave their jobs afterward. I think it's more opportunistic - that someone finds people who have changed and gets their claws into them. And even after... There's stuff that looks like corruption, but no bad acts. Just people not very good at their jobs for no apparent reason. The Special Agent In Charge of the investigation thinks that's evidence of sleepers, but now..."

"It's just people in unfamiliar situations unable to tell anybody else why."

Dex/Kayla nodded at Jessica. "Yeah, at one level - but there's an infrastructure here, doing something. But it's been going on for so long - I managed to find stuff in internal investigations from forty years ago before the new me changed my password. And some of the people who left government service wound up doing stuff that just seemed random - and it wasn't just going back to their original lives; they weren't always good at it at first."

Jessica processed that. "So, what do you think is going on, knowing what we know?"

"I think someone is screwing with us. Not all of us, just whoever he takes an interest in, or maybe the ones who can help him with the ones he's interested in. He's been doing this a long time, so maybe he's been to the inn himself once or twice. Maybe he's not a he, or wasn't to begin with. Maybe he's been alive so long his brain's gotten full and he's gone nuts."

This was starting to seem too big for me, so I tried to concentrate one what I could understand and relate to personally. I pointed to one card. "Ashlyn. Why Ashlyn?"

Dex/Kayla laughed. "You've never been a guy, have you? If you had, you wouldn't ask that question."

I blushed, and Jessica laughed. "Yeah, if I were my old self... Maybe it's just a bit of fun."

"And it fits the profile. Like... There's a guy we were suspicious of in the New York INS office. Maybe he threw the monkey wrench into 'Ginessa''s and 'Nicoleta''s visas, just to see what would happen. There's documents that the guys in DC don't understand - can't understand - but make perfect sense to me. He gets off on that - sticking people into difficult situations and seeing not just what they do, but what they become."

We talked all through the night, leaving the next morning. We're not sure posting this is the right thing to do, but anybody who is in our situation reading this needs to know that Ashlyn's secret admirer appears to be into bigger things as well. Besides, now that he's apparently got someone inside the investigation of his network, he might be twice as dangerous. We don't know who he is, but we've got a name for him.

We're calling him Pygmalion.

-Louisa

Jessica: Road Trip - Old "Friends"

Sometimes, I don't know how Louisa puts up with me. The stated purpose of this trip was to find the original Marie, and I was just along for the ride, giving my advice on how to investigate a case. Lately, though, we've been spending a lot of time digging into my history. It's her own fault; I was doing fine living in the present tense until she made me visit "my" grave in Baltimore. Since then, I've put a lot of energy into trying to find the original Jessica. The trouble is, there are people I have to go through to find them.

Ten-year-old Jessica Brooks wasn't at the Trading Post Inn alone, of course - she had gone there with her best friend, Mindy Cahill, and her parents. They had all been changed into someone else and disappeared - at least as far as I know; I don't remember anyone ever showing up at our door claiming to be the real Jessica. Another group became the Cahills - Dina Wright and her parents.

I hadn't met Dina but had seen her briefly before we changed. She was yelling at her mother, something about how her boyfriend was coming to get her and they were going on their own vacation. She was wearing ripped jeans and a t-shirt with some rapper's face on it, more piercings than I'll ever see the need for, and a shock of blue in her hair. She was seventeen and as a cop, I looked at her and saw future charges of drug possession, DWI, and vandalism. I may have had a thought or two of "good lord, they're going to let her vote in the next election!"

Then everything changed, and suddenly this angry teenager in a ten-year-old's body was the only person I could talk to.

It wasn't for lack of trying. The inn's curse or magic or freaking super-technology kept anyone from believing me until Mom's father died. The Wrights had been my contemporaries but they insisted on treating me like a kid when I was over there. It was bad practice, they said - it might make things difficult if people saw us acting as peers, and Mindy would never properly accept her circumstances if she saw me being given special treatment she wasn't receiving.

I won't misrepresent myself and say I didn't find that a little chilling at the time, but even as I chafed against Mom's attention, I was still looking at it from the adult perspective, and not the kids'. It seemed weird, sure, but I didn't have kids and had learned not to tell others how to raise theirs. Not that I didn't have opinions, and based on what little I'd seen of Dina, her physical and mental maturity levels were now more in sync.

What I'm getting at here, in my roundabout way, is that when "Mindy" was sent to a private school rather than going to public school with me that fall, I could see the logic - if she wasn't going to know anybody anyway, it was probably better that she not know people she wasn't supposed to know, if that makes any sense whatsoever. My "acting" like I didn't know anybody when I started fifth grade got me a reputation as a bitch and the enmity of almost every kid in the class (and my first look at just how vicious elementary school kids could be to each other). It got Mom called to the office regularly because I was getting into fights despite no prior record of bad behavior, and I was worse off than anybody could know. My self-esteem had already taken a huge hit by being turned from a trusted adult male police detective to a powerless little girl, and while on some level I wanted those brats to leave me alone, being shunned was another story altogether.

So, even though I didn't particularly like Dina at first, for a few months she was the very best friend I ever had. We only saw each other on weekends and school vacations - her new school gave her a lot of homework - but we were inseparable during that time. We did little-girl things because that's all we could do: We spent a lot of time riding bikes, complaining about how stupid our parents and the kids in our classes were, writing in diaries and reading each other's entries. Most ten-year-old girls probably don't try to sneak beer from their parents' fridges, but to be fair we only did that once: It made us really sick (for which we cursed the inn all afternoon), and the thought of being grounded and not allowed to see each other if we got caught was absolutely terrifying.

So imagine how it felt to go on my first Christmas trip to see my new grandparents and come back and find my best friend, and the only person who understood me even a little bit, was gone. Mom said the Cahills had moved to Chicago because Mr. Cahill had gotten a new job, but the why didn't really matter to me. Dina was gone, no-one was ever going to call me Conrad again, and I was trapped.

I finally broke down and told Louisa this story after I had tracked down the Cahills. Finding them was hard - businesses don't give out employee information to eighteen-year-old girls who say they're doing a school project, "Mr. Cahill" had changed jobs twice and moved to the suburbs, and private school yearbooks aren't as easy to find in public libraries. I'd almost given up, and almost just drove through Chicago on our way to Hibbing but decided to take one last shot. Louisa was annoyed, and probably had every right to be. She actually apologized after I found an address and told her all this on the way.

She thinks it explains a lot - that even if finding the Wrights/Cahills means I'm able to track something else down, that finding my friend is the most important thing. She also suggested that maybe Dina was the reason I'd never had a real boyfriend - that I'm afraid anyone I love will leave me. I point out that I've got a bunch of other issues going on, and she shrugs it off.

So it's the day before Thanksgiving, we're outside the house, and I'm about ready to wet myself in fear. Louisa rings the doorbell for me and before I've got a chance to run away, it opens.

Dina's there. I know it's her. She's dyed her light brown hair jet black, she's only as tall as I am because of her high heels (she was an inch taller than me eight years ago), and even as I grew my own, I never imagined her with cleavage. Still - I recognize most of the face and a bunch of the attitude. Dina and I never called each other Mindy and Jessica when we were alone, so I blurted her real name out.

Her eyes bugged and I think this is the first time I ever saw her smile. "Connie? Oh my god!" I was about to say something about going by Jessica these days, but she squeezes all the oxygen out of me. Then she's screaming in my ear, although that's just a side-effect of her still holding me while calling to her parents that I was there.

They come walking from another room, and they don't look terribly pleased to see me, but she's already pulling me and Louisa into the house, dragging us upstairs to show us her room.

Dina has dealt with being changed in a different way than I have. I adapted, I forged a relationship with my new mother, I studied hard in school to make the most of my new situation. Dina got into the occult. She'd left no stone unturned - there were pentagrams, Ouija boards, charms, candles, and every book on the subject you might want. Louisa actually stepped back through the doorway when she saw it, asking us to allow an old bayou woman her superstitions.

Dina had the moment of disbelief, then said it was okay, because none of this stuff worked anyway. She'd tried it all, she said, everything she could think of to be herself again, and then again because it pissed her parents off. All it got her was a leg up on everybody else in her comparative religions class at Northwestern.

"I guess that means my folks got the last laugh - I'll probably wind up going for my Ph.D. someday, be a renowned anthropologist. Can you imagine?"

I had to admit, I hadn't seen that coming. Then she asked why I never responded to her letters. I told her I'd never gotten them.

Boom.

She's back downstairs like a shot, screaming at her parents about not sending her letters, lying to her and saying that I must have accepted my new life and she should to, making her think that the only person who could understand had abandoned her. Normally, I'm pretty good about staying out of family business, but they screwed me up pretty good, too, so I was hot on her heels.

By the time we got down there, Dina was lighting into her folks pretty good, and it only got worse when they called her "Mindy". Watching them go at it, I figured this was roughly the thousandth time they've had this argument, but knowing that they'd deliberately taken every bit of choice out of her hands was more than Dina could handle, and no arguments about how she was doing so much better as Mindy than she had as Dina was going to sway her. She ran out the door and I followed. She got into her car and so did I, just planning to talk, but she started the engine and drove off, leaving Louisa stuck with the parents. Probably a good thing; I certainly wasn't in any frame of mind to ask them the usual questions.

We drove with just the radio blasting for a while, finally pulling up just outside a mall in the suburbs. "This is pathetic. I should be twenty-five years old, and I'm still going to the mall when I want to get away with my parents! I can't even go to a bar! God, Connie, even if you had to adjust to being a girl, you at least know what it's like to be an adult. I feel like I've been seventeen my entire life, and up until a year ago I was always scared that if I screwed up, they'd take me back to that inn and make me ten years old again!"

I told her it didn't work that way, but she rightly pointed out that there's no way she could know that.

"And every time I do something right, whether it be making National Honor Society or getting into college, they're always acting like it's their doing. 'Oh, I guess we did something right this time.' Like my entire life has just been about them, and I can't even be proud of what I accomplished because the last eight years have just been a big ol' do-over for them."

I let her vent. Looking back, I think some of what she said was overwrought, but at the time, and still now, I could really see her point of view. Louisa is kind of lucky, having a second youth, but not having to wait to have a real life again.

We went into the mall and looked around, having a good time in spite of ourselves. After a few hours, Louisa called and asked if there was a spare key in the car; I told her there was and where, and she said she'd meet us back at the hotel. She may never have had kids of her own, but she just assumed Dina was going to spend the night on campus.

She was right. She showed me around, saying she wished she could join us on our trip, but she really did like her classes. After the tour, she dropped me back off at the hotel, where Louisa and I agreed not to talk about it right then.

So that's how I wound up having Thanksgiving dinner in a Chinese restaurant with Louisa and Dina this year, and then spending two hours in the bathroom at a rest stop, talking to my mom on the phone and telling her how thankful I was that she'd respected my maturity after she found out who I was even while making sure that the kid/teen stuff I couldn't control didn't trip me up to bad. I could have been Dina if things had gone just a little different.

I hope it was all for the best. On the plus side, I've got my best friend's email and phone number and promise to keep in touch. And somehow, Louise managed to coax an address for the Cahills in their "new" lives, out in Seattle. I might actually get to meet the original Jessica.

(I haven't told Mom that, yet. I don't want to get her hopes up, especially not knowing who she is, exactly. Besides, if Jessica resurfaces, where does that leave me?)

I just hope we didn't have to destroy a family to do it.

-Jessica

Louisa: Road Trip - Minnesota, land of a thousand surprises

Louisa: Road Trip - Minnesota, land of a thousand surprises

Thanksgiving in the Chicago suburbs was... interesting, but more than almost anything else that's happened on this trip, that's Jessica's story. I'm glad she found what she was looking for, even though she said she wasn't looking for anything specific when we started this trip. It's been getting a little tense between us over the past couple of weeks, since I have been looking for something specific and all the time we were spending in Chicago hasn't gotten me much closer to it.

Things should be moving much more quickly now, though, and perhaps a little more smoothly. After Chicago, we took the 94 and 53 north, reaching Minneapolis Sunday evening. Our next move was to spend some most of Monday in the public library, searching local newspapers for mention of a Sarah Hansen graduating high school in 2003 or 2004 who was scheduled to attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She had taken a trip to the inn just before starting the 2006-2007 academic year, and the result once everything was said and done was that Vincent DeSantis had wound up with her body and life.

We met the "new" Vincent near the start of this trip, in Long Island, and weren't terribly impressed. When the trip first started taking longer than expected, we initially believed that we'd skip this leg, as Vincent/Sarah would probably wind up returning to Massachusetts for the fall semester. Ashlyn said she hadn't, though; she had tried to meet up with "Sarah" in October only to find the latter was no longer enrolled. She felt guilty about that - that she and Arthur had had someone else who understood their situation so close and just lost track of her. So she asked us to check in on her, if it wasn't too much trouble.

I continue to be amazed just how much detective work can get done in a public library or on the internet. It took a few hours, but using only a microfilm reader, a few selected rolls of film, and the local phone book, Jessica had tracked down Sarah Hansen's parents, and we were off.

We had some idea in our heads of what to expect; if the new "Vinny" had been able to slip into the old one's life without missing a beat, we figured we'd see someone like that - a lazy slob, probably leaching off Sarah's parents after having been chased out of school. Reality, as usual, was somewhat different.

The Jensen home was one of a dozen identical ones laid out inside a grid, separated by trees to look less repetitive. There was a minivan in the driveway despite the two-car garage, so we figured someone had to be home and knocked on the door. A light-haired woman in her early forties answered; not recognizing us, she asked who we were.

Jessica jumped right in to say that we were friends of Sarah's, doing a semester on co-op at a local business, and we were sorry we hadn't come to visit earlier, but we hadn't even realized that Sarah was here until talking to some classmates on Thanksgiving break. Is she home?

I think the woman was about to say no, but someone yelled from the back, asking who it was. Jessica probably would have stepped in if she could, but settled for pushing her head up against the screen door an yelling that it was "Jess and Lu, remember, from the Inn". Mrs. Jensen looked cross, and there was a long pause before the voice said we were okay, but she opened the screen door and told us Sarah was in the den, vaguely pointing to the back of the house. I followed Jessica, and I guess I was looking at the house kind of distractedly, because I ran right into her back where she'd stopped, hands on the edges of the doorway, slack-jawed and repeating variations on "oh...my...god!"

I looked up, and though I didn't say it out loud, I couldn't really disagree with it. Vincent DeSantis had been changed into a beautiful girl, stunning even in the long-sleeved t-shirt and sweatpants she was wearing - tall, with golden blonde hair and incredible blue eyes. She was also very, very, very pregnant.

She shifted her weight a little, as if to indicate she'd get up to greet us, but it was a lot of effort, and gave us a rueful grin. "Careful. 'Mom' isn't a big fan of taking the Lord's name in vain."

Jessica stopped babbling and moved aside so that I could get in, but didn't seem anxious to move any closer to that huge belly. I was nearly as surprised, but tried not to show it, so I sat down on the couch next to her (it is very difficult to use male pronouns to refer to someone who is pregnant), introduced ourselves, and said that she must have had an eventful time since Arthur and Ashlyn lost touch with her.

"Ashlyn?"

"Jake," I answered. "She goes by who she appears to be now."

"Oh. Right. That makes sense. I didn't even realize, and I probably started earlier than they did. Going native, I mean. I hated my body at first, but once I got to school, I sort of started getting used to it. Being female didn't seem terribly weird at an all-girl's school, and... it was school, you know? Not the crap job I hated going to every morning. I was ahead of the game in the core courses, and Sarah's major seemed much cooler. It was a weird kind of second chance."

Jessica snorted. I explained that she wasn't a big fan of using someone else's life as a do-over.

Vincent allowed that that made sense, and picked right back up again. I idly wondered if she had liked to talk so much in her old life. "Anyway, Sarah left me a really detailed letter, and actually got in touch with me after a month or so, saying she loved her new life doing costumes for Broadway shows, and wanted to help me fit in any way she could, or help me break away from her family gently. But the Jensens are cool, and I figure it would suck for them to lose their only child, so I kind of settled into Sarah's life."

She stopped a bit longer than necessary to take a breath, almost like that was the whole story. Given that Jessica had been staring at Vincent's belly the whole time, there was no doubt what she meant when she said "AND THEN...?"

"Spring break." She shook her head. "I really hadn't had much to drink at all since my trip to the inn - I was trying to make something of myself, so I was pretty serious, and when I wasn't at school I was here, and you-know-who are kind of strict. I didn't even go down to Daytona or anything; me and some of the girls just took the Chinatown bus to New York to see a concert. But it was Jan's twenty-first birthday, so we went to a bar afterward, a really good one that I remembered from my old life, which is where we ran into my old friends, and that was so exciting. It was like an out-of-body experience when the new Vinny arrived, totally surreal, but we were all hammered enough by then that nothing seemed really weird.

"And then the next morning, we woke up back at my old place. My memory was kind of hazy, but I know I slept with at least two guys that night...

"I considered an abortion after I missed two periods, but considering how churchy Sarah's family is - well, at least compared to mine - it didn't seem right, and, besides... What if Vinny, new Vinny, was the father? I don't know, you understand, but if he is, wouldn't that seem right? I mean, a lot of people don't get any reminder of their old lives, whereas I could..." She didn't quite seem to know how to finish that sentence, and settled for rubbing her belly.

I won't bother to transcribe the rest of Jessica's recording of the conversation. Jess never sat down, but we got through most of the usual questions. About midway through, she started smiling, and as we were about to leave, she asked if we wanted to go with her on her daily chocolate run. "Trust me," she says, "there's this little place in Grand Rapids that makes the best hot cocoa."

We mumbled something about having a long drive to Wyoming, but she said we had to come, and, besides, it's a great excuse to get out of the house: "Mom" and "Dad" always give her trouble when she's seen around town, but they understand her having cravings, so as long as it's someplace their friends won't be reminded of their shame, it's okay.

We pile into Jessica's car (Vincent in the back seat) and follow her directions a half hour to the next city over. We find street parking and settle in at the little café, and each order a hot chocolate. Jessica is finally getting used to the idea of a former guy being pregnant, but still asks how she's handling it so well.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm freaking out all the time, but according to the girls at the Lamaze classes, that's pretty normal. And the whole process is just kind of amazing. I think in some ways I'm handling the whole girl thing better because of the pregnancy. It's even stranger, that's for sure, but it's a really good thing. I don't know if I've ever felt more important, or at least useful, than the first time I heard my baby's heart beat."

I mentioned that Lamaze was a two-person activity; who was her partner; some friend of Sarah's? She gave a big grin and said that's what her folks think, but it's also the second surprise. As she finishes saying that, she then says she timed it perfectly and lifts an arm to wave at someone coming in the door. I'm sitting across from her, with my back to the street, so I have to turn around to see who she's signalling.

It's a good-looking guy - tall, thin, on the light-skinned side of black. He's giving a nice smile to Vincent and walking toward us when I turn around, at which point he stumbles a little bit and doesn't take his eyes off me, sitting down in our table's fourth chair more or less by feel. I'm a little embarrassed - I know this form is pretty, but I don't know about stopping traffic. But that's not quite it.

"Liz? Is that really you?"

Jessica's jaw drops in shock - kind of surprising in and of itself, because she seldom gets caught flat-footed like that - and I smile kind of nervously. "No, I just look like her, or like she did. My name's Louisa."

I reach out a hand and he takes it, still staring at my face. "Of course... Right... Someone has to be. Sorry. I'm... Well, I guess you could say I am or was Sarah Hansen."

I felt the initial gut reaction of disbelief - we always do, even though we've had the same thing happen to us. People who haven't don't have that reaction subside at all, at least without something equally jarring. Jessica seized upon something else, though. "Wait... I thought you were a girl, and didn't you say she was in New York...?"

Sarah shrugged. "Bitsy wanted her life back, and after a few months I didn't mind giving it to her. Working backstage is fun, but the pay isn't really that great. I admit, I was super-pissed when I showed back up at the Inn and Vinny hadn't stayed there, but he told me about the baby and... Well, once I saw how unattached to anything George was, I came out here, and we've been each other's support system since."

"And the real George?"

"Won't say. I think he wanted to make a clean break but just couldn't get up the nerve before." She stopped talking to Jessica and turned to me. "But how about you? Liz and I weren't really close, but she and I did talk, and she said Marie was really looking to make a clean break. How'd you get away from that gangster?"

"Marie's mother died. I told André that there was a cousin in America that I wanted to tell in person, but I didn't know her exact address..."

"That's pretty clever... Oh. How long has it been?"

"Four months, almost five."

"My god... I mean, I moved back here in part to be with Vinny and in part because being around her meant I could be around my own family. If something had happened to my folks while I was Bitsy and I didn't find out until later."

"Can you help me find her? Do you know where she is?"

"I... I can talk to Bitsy, but you've got to understand, she made it sound like Marie and Jean-Michel are kind of hiding. If I just told you..."

"Of course," I said. I wrote down my email address and gave it to him. "Feel free to check us out however you want, get in touch with Ashlyn, anything. I suppose you could just get in touch with her yourself, but I think this should be delivered in person."

He agreed, pocketing the napkin I'd written on. Jessica asked the usual questions about people trying to influence their lives, but I don't know as we found anything really interesting out. Once you get paranoid, anything can look like outside interference.

Maybe we'll get luckier on our next stop in Wyoming.

-Louisa