It had been a little over a week since Sarrah's world had been turned completely upside down, though if you asked her, it could well have been a month or six. Boys looked like girls and girls looked like boys. The worst part of it was that Sarrah was no longer a part of the popular crowd. Instead, she was the opposite: an outcast, a goth, one of her worst nightmares had come true.
Over the course of the week, Sarrah had been able to adjust a little bit to her new life, but it was hard. Sarrah had been such a girly girl before: makeup, dresses, earrings, the whole nine yards. But now those sorts of things were off-limits. Now Sarrah's options consisted of baggy shirts and pants, all in black. She tried to compromise and started wearing some makeup, just to try and get some familiarity, but she found that even then, she had limited options. Not many girls wore makeup, and the ones that did where the ones that followed her crowd, so she tried to imitate their style. Not to mention, getting makeup didn't start to make up for everything else.
Her new boyfriend, Danielle, had watched her new interest with a bemused look. Obviously, it was odd for Sarrah to take up an interest in makeup. Before the wish, it seemed that Sarrah had been such a feminine girl, staying away from the boyish things in life. So it came as a great surprise to Danielle that, not only did Sarrah want to wear makeup, but she had a fair bit of knowledge about the stuff.
"Oh, Sarrah... Is that makeup?" Miranda Shale finally noticed it. "I don't think I've seen you wear it before."
Sarrah tried desperately to cover her tracks. She wasn't ready to talk to everyone. "Uh... I figured it's something I'd try."
"It looks really good on you," Danielle complimented. "I'm surprised I didn't have to help you make it look that good."
"Well, I kinda figured out pretty quickly that I didn't need that much blush."
"Not many girls know makeup that well." Miranda tilted his head. "Who taught you? Is there a boy's mind inside there?"
"It's not like we judge others around here. We're not Christians or something. Society isn't perfect," Nadine butted in. Oh my goodness... She doesn't know the irony in who's saying that, Sarrah thought.
Suddenly, Sarrah felt rather uncomfortable. Since her transformation, Sarrah had lost a lot of confidence. Where she was used to people doing things for her or just staying out of her way, it was now the opposite. People looked down on her. They criticised her lifestyle, called her a freak. More than a week of this had beaten down on her.
"I...uh..." Sarrah faltered. She looked to Danielle. It would be so much easier if she was alone with him. "Um, Danielle? Can we talk for a moment? Alone?" Danielle looked at the others who nodded, informing him that it was fine with them. Sarrah grabbed Danielle's hand and lead him out of the cafeteria.
"What is it?" Danielle asked when they finally found a spot where they were alone.
Sarrah paused again. Should she tell him? Tell him what? she asked herself. Even she wasn't sure that she could explain what had happened to her over the last week or so. One moment, she had been standing in the gym with the other cheerleaders and Nicole yelling about something, and then the next thing she knew, she was a goth. Something clicked inside Sarrah. Nicole... She seemed to be the key to all of this. Everything had been fine until she had started yelling.
"I..." Sarrah tried, but the words wouldn't come out. It was crazy, sure. Girls and boys don't just swap roles out of nowhere. Danielle would think that she was nuts.
But then Sarrah looked at Danielle. The way that he was looking at her with deep concern in his eyes made her feel that she could tell the boy anything.
"What if I told you that ten days ago, the world was completely different?"
"What do you mean by different?" Danielle asked, a slight look of concern across his face.
"Well," Sarrah began. "What if I told you that the reason that I know about makeup is because, 10 days ago, girls were the ones who wore makeup and dresses, not boys?"
Danielle stepped back and looked at her in disbelief. "W...what?"
"Ten days ago, I was a cheerleader, and a popular one at that. I had a boyfriend who was the quarterback on the football team." Danielle just looked at her, shocked. Sarrah struggled to say more. "I...wasn't very nice. I looked down on people who weren't as good as me and I despised..." Sarrah hesitated, wondering how Danielle would react. "I despised people like me...like us."
There was a long pause as Danielle took in what Sarrah had just told him. Sarrah waited with bated breath when finally...
"Was I the boyfriend?"
Sarrah laughed. "No, it was a guy named Biff Meadows. I tried to find him so that I could talk to him about this, see how it affected him...but I haven't been able to find him." Sarrah looked sad.
"Hmm," Danielle commented as he thought about something. "That last name doesn't ring a bell to me. What was he like?"
"Well, he was tough! I told you that he played quarterback and he was handsome," Sarrah said dreamily thinking back to her boyfriend, surprising herself that those thoughts were still inside her. "But you probably are laughing at the idea of a boy being a hunk and playing football."
"Like Shan Jackson?"
"She's on the football team, isn't she?" Sarrah had tried to find some of her old friends, but as she looked around she had found that everything had changed. The whole football team had changed, and she supposed that none of the boys like Biff or Steve Farber ever made it on to the football team. They had been replaced by girls, some of whom Sarrah supposed hadn't existed before whatever had happened happened.
Danielle nodded. "And the basketball team as well. She's a multi-sport star."
"Right."
"After failing to find Biff, I tried to find my best friend Melissa Smith, but the only person that I found fitting that name was another basketball player named Mel.
"Oh yeah. I know her." Danielle replied. "I bet that went down well. She hates us."
Sarrah nodded. She started to feel tears running down her face as she remembered the encounter.
"She called me a freak."
"Oh my."
"Then I found Tiffany Sanders as Tiff—"
"The student body president?"
"Yeah..." Sarrah's voice wavered. "She called me godless and immoral."
Danielle rolled his eyes for a moment, then he suddenly jolted as if something had come to mind. "I just remembered... There is someone around here with that last name Meadows."
"Who?"
"His last name's a mouthful. Buffie Meadows-Ikechukwu," Danielle explained, his mouth stumbling over the double-barreled and foreign name.
"Well, that's different." Sarrah raised her eyebrows. "Where do you get a last name like that?"
"He's black."
"What!? Biff is white—"
"Obviously, it's not just a straight swap of things."
"So, Biff's alive!?" Sarrah asked, suddenly sounding hopeful for the first time in the entire conversation.
Danielle nodded.
"It would seem so. Obviously, he's quite a bit different to what you were expecting, but..." Danielle trailed off as Sarrah bolted back toward the cafeteria. Sarrah didn't care what Biff looked like in this reality. He was her boyfriend, and she just wanted things to go back to normal—or at least, as normal as they could be.
As Sarrah ran down the hall, her hopes were dashed as the bell rang. Lunch was over. Finding Biff would have to wait.
