... Jon's little brother, now his little sister, and her girl friends.
Michelle was screaming in the pool as three girls, one blonde, one redheaded like her, and one brunette, pulled her out. As soon as she got out of the water, she hugged her sister Jon. "Oh Joanne, I almost drowned!" Michelle's voice sounded like Mikey's - if one ignored its new higher pitch and Irish brogue. I don't know how to swim!"
"But you do-" Jon, now Joanne, paused. He guessed that even though Mikey could swim, Michelle couldn't. Maybe they had supposedly just come over from Ireland and they didn't have swimming lessons there.
Joanne wiped her sister. The poor little girl was bright red and covered with dark freckles. "You didn't put on any sunblock, did you?" When reality changed, the amount of sunblock that Mikey had worn - zero - hadn't changed. Mikey could withstand the sun. Michelle couldn't. She lacked the genes for sun-resistant skin ... just like her friends.
Joanne turned toward them. "You guys should put on sunblock too."
"We're not guys!" they protested.
But you were, thought Joanne. And you weren't white! Mikey's friends had could have come out of a Benetton commercial. They had once been so diverse. One was black, one was Hispanic, and one was Asian. But now they were as white as he were. And as female.
Mikey had become female because he had gained his mother's Irish ancestry. But none of his friends had white mothers. So where did they get their new white ancestry and their new gender from?
