Jon stared down at his clothing with more than a little displeasure. He was dressed in a pink tank top that clung tightly to his still-masculine chest, a denim miniskirt that rode high up on his hairy legs, and pink flip-flops. His fingernails and toenails were painted red, and he had a couple of feminine bracelets hanging off his wrist. There was no question in his mind: he had become a girl. He shuddered at that thought.
Looking up from his body, Jon tried to get his bearings. High cieling, dark wood, long bookshleves, and a collection of oak tables with students seated at them, all of them a little older than Jon. Jon himself was seated at one of those tables, a pair of textbooks on the table in front of him and a pink pen clutched in his hand, poised over a piece of paper covered in looping, feminine handwriting. It took Jon a moment to realize it, but he recognized this place; this was the library of the college across town. He had been here a couple of times to do research for school projects.
Jon rested his cheek on his hand--noticing as his fingers swept over his ear that an earring tangled from his earlobe--and tried to wrap his mind around what was happening. The wish this morning... Jon had wished for something interesting to happen, and it certainly had. Somehow Biff Meadows had switched places with his sister, landing in Zoe's clothing and with Zoe's reflection, and though Jon had seen Biff as Biff, his mom had seen him as Zoe. Then Biff had touched Jon, and somehow--as though he had caught some contagious virus--that had caused the same sort of thing to happen to Jon. Now Jon was across town, apparently having switched places with a college girl. Now he was wearing a skirt--a SKIRT--and if what he had observed with Biff held in Jon's case, everyone who looked at Jon probably didn't see a lanky teenage boy but rather a girl. (Perhaps that was a small blessing. The only thing that could be more embarassing than everyone in the world thinking he was a girl, Jon reflected, was everyone in the world thinking he was a crossdresser.)
That was all well and good, and it gave Jon at least the start of an understanding of his situation, but he needed to know more. He rose to his feet, suddenly grateful that he was wearing a pair of cheap flip-flops instead of the high-heeled monstrosities that Biff had been forced to walk around in. Reaching down, he began to scoop up his textbooks, then he stopped himself. No one was going to steal his... Spanish books, he noted, as he flipped through the open pages of one of the books with his newly-painted fingernails. He'd noted with some annoyance that there wasn't a backpack nearby that he could throw the books in, and Jon didn't want to be any more burdened right now than he had to be. He could come back for the books later.
Jon did, however, spot a black leather purse lying next to him on the table; this he snatched up and hoisted over his shoulder. He suddenly felt even more ridiculous than he already had; Jon didn't even like it when his mom made him watch her purse while she ran to the restroom in a restaurant or mall or something. The only thing less manly than carrying a purse was... well, wearing a skirt and a pink tank top, he supposed, and lucky him, he got the whole package.
Weaving his way through the tables, Jon strode toward the center aisle of the library. He tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a blush from spilling onto his cheeks; he didn't want to look as embarassed as he felt. If he had to walk around as a girl, he didn't want to draw any more attention to himself than he had to. Jon wondered whether it would have been better for him to have actually switched bodies with this girl whose life he had taken over, instead of just switching clothes with her; that way, at least, he wouldn't have to feel like a crossdresser, and a bad one at that.
He sighed.
Every second of Jon's personal walk of shame crawled by; Jon had never felt so humiliated as he did right now, and time had never seemed to drag so much. He wanted to disappear, or at least to get somewhere more private. He felt positively naked right now... both emotionally and physically.
As he walked on, though, he began to notice that no one else paid much attention to him. A few people glanced at him, but they glanced away just as quickly. If they saw Jon as a guy, they didn't seem to care; more likely they saw him as the girl whose clothing he was wearing. There was a strange kind of comfort in that, and Jon's thundering heartbeat began to quiet down. He felt a little bit better now. At least, that was, until one guy looked up from his book and leered at Jon with his best "How YOU doin'" grin. Jon dropped his head and quickened his pace.
At last Jon spotted his salvation: a "restroom" sign along the far wall. He beelined for the double doors and began to push open the men's room door until he caught himself and let it swing shut. He hesitated for a moment. Taking either door could be a big, big mistake depending on what kind of prank fate and the wishing stone decided to play on him. At last, though, after a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, he opened the women's room door and step inside.
Ignoring the sweetly sour smell of strawberry hand soap and a poorly-kept public restroom, Jon scanned the room carefully to make sure he was alone. Once he had assured himself that he was the only person in the room, he turned to the long mirror on the wall to his left and, with some trepidation, looked at his reflection.
Jon wasn't sure what he had been expecting to see. Himself in women's clothing? A cute college girl? Some sort of weird female version of himself? He hadn't really thought about it; he'd had enough else to occupy his mind. Now, however, the vaporous wisps of his imagination coalesced into a coherent reflection, and he was amazed at what he saw.
The girl looking back at Jon was... "pretty" wasn't strong enough a word. Neither was "attractive". She was gorgeous... like some textbook illustration of the girl next door. She was fairly tall without breaking the supermodel threshold; she was slender without being unpleasantly thin; she was curvy without being some adolescent wet-dream of a double-D porn star; her face was soft and perfectly formed, with a sweetness that a Sarah McMillan could never attain; and her beautiful blonde hair fell in eager waves over the perfect skin of her perfect shoulders. The tank top and skirt she and Jon both wore flattered her figure wonderfully without showing an excessive amount of cleavage or an indecent stretch of leg. For a moment Jon felt like he was falling, improbably, in love... until he absently moved his arm and saw his reflection do the same, and realized, with a start, that this was HIM.
It was strange. Very strange. Very VERY strange. Where he should have seen himself, the reflection he'd seen every day for the entire seventeen years of his life, he saw instead a young woman, a beautiful young woman, and she was matching his every move, his every gesture, his every expression, as though it really was his own reflection he was looking at. He had been in this girl's life, wearing her clothing, for upwards of ten minutes now, but Jon's situation hadn't quite sunk in, hadn't felt truly, viscerally REAL until right now.
Jon stared at his reflection a moment longer, memorizing its every feature and trying--without much luck--to wrap his mind around the idea that this is what he looked like now to everyone who looked his way. Then he slung his purse off his shoulder and began searching through it. Fingering his way past a compact, a tube of lipstick, a movie stub, a couple of tampons--Jon flinched at the sight of those--he at last found what he was looking for. He pulled out a small cloth billfold and opened it, taking out the first plastic card he saw inside... a driver's license, he was pleased to see. The picture on the license showed the same girl Jon had seen in the mirror, albeit a little younger and with a different haircut. His gaze drifted from the picture, however, to what he'd really been looking for: the name on the top of the card.
"Meagan Danielle O'Shea".
Meagan. Meagan. His new name was Meagan. Jon tried to drill that into his mind, though it felt every bit as embarassingly and unnaturally feminine as his skirt and his purse and his reflection had. It was a nice name, pleasant enough, but Jon wasn't sure if he could ever accept it as his own. As long as he remembered it well enough to answer to it when someone called it out, though, he supposed it was good enough.
Replacing the driver's license, he flipped through the other cards in the billfold. A couple of credit cards, a debit card, a student ID, a Blockbuster card, a small slip of paper announcing that Meagan O'Shea was a registered member of the Democratic party, a social security card... all interesting, but nothing terribly enlightening about his situation. At least now, however, he knew a few rudimentary details of his new life. Satisfied, he dropped the billfold back in his purse and began to think over what to do next.
The first step, Jon realized, was obvious: he would do what he always did when he he felt confused: he would find Karyn. Then, together, they would go to Jon's house and track down the stone. He just hoped he could get to the stone before Biff or Meagan or someone else found it. Reality was messed up enough as it was; he didn't want to think about what would happen if someone else found the stone. Right now if was probably his only way of setting things right... if even the stone was enough.
For a second the thought that this couldn't be fixed, that he was going to have to spend the rest of his life as Meagan O'Shea, as a girl, crossed Jon's mind, and he felt suddenly nauseous. But he dismissed the thought. No sense in dwelling on the worst, at least not until he had the stone in his hands.
Placing his purse back over his shoulders, Jon took one last look at his reflection, then turned to the restroom door. Pulling it open, he stepped out...
...and immediately bumped headfirst into someone else. A girl, he noticed in the moment before the universe shuddered.
A shiver, a rush, not altogether unlike the sensation that had heralded his jump from his own life to Meagan's, but without the brilliant flash of light... and then everything was back to normal. Except...
Except that now, standing in front of him, instead of a small Asian girl, he saw a tall, older man, perhaps in his late sixties or his seventies, with a greying beard... wearing a decidedly feminine top and capri pants, with makeup on his face.
Jon looked at the man in shock. It had happened again, this time to two strangers... again, Jon realized, on bodily contact. Was this going to happen every time he touched someone from now on? Every time Biff touched someone? Every time Zoe or Meagan, or the girl and the man who had just switched touched someone? Was an epidemic of life-swapping going to creep across town? And if so, Jon wondered with creeping horror... how would it spread before this was all over?
