Jon turned to see a young woman, petite and brunette, looking up at him. She was dressed in a pink t-shirt with a triangle, the letter Z, and some kind of freaky symbol that looked like a circle with the letter I through it printed on the front of her shirt. A backpack was slung over her shoulder.
"Hey, Meg," the girl said, "how's it going?"
"Um," Jon said. "It's fine. Uh, you?"
"Going good," the girl said. "I've been studying all morning... I'm just finishing up, then I'm heading back to the dorms."
"Yeah," Jon said, "um... me too. Just finished studying."
The girl smiled. "Cool. Want to walk to the dorms with me?"
"Sure, Jon said. He needed to get home, but he also needed to learn a little more about his life, in case this swap was permanent. Maybe he could have this girl lead him to his dorm room; Jon didn't have a clue how he would find his room otherwise. As he glanced at the girl's backpack, though, he remembered something he'd almost forgotten. "But, um... let me get my books first, okay?"
"'Kay," the girl said. "I'll wait here."
Jon walked back through the library to the tables where he'd been sitting when he'd first jumped into Meagan. Meagan's books were still where he'd left them, thank goodness. He picked them up and tucked them under an arm; he looked for a pocket in his skirt where he could put his pen, but, not finding one, he tucked it behind his ear.
As he was turning around to head back to where his new friend was waiting for him, Jon suddenly saw a man jump up from the table next to him. He was a middle-aged, heavy-set man, wearing a Halo t-shirt and baggy khaki shorts that looked every bit as out-of-place on him as Meagan's clothes did on Jon. Jon frowned; this must have been someone else who had switched. For a moment Jon entertained the thought of helping the man... but he'd already made that mistake with the old man, hadn't he? So, steeling himself to the man's panicked confusion, he hurried past the man to his friend.
"Hey," the girl said as Jon rejoined her, "are you going to the party tonight?"
"Party?" Jon said.
"Sure," she said. "The Beta Kappa Rho party. All the Delta Zeta Phi girls are invited."
All the Delta Zeta ... did that mean that Jon was a "Delta Zeta Phi girl?" Jeeze, as though being a girl weren't bad enough, he had to be a sorority girl? He hoped he wasn't a cheerleader, too, though at this point he wouldn't have been surprised.
"Um," Jon said, "maybe. If I'm free tonight."
"Come on," the girl said, opening the library door and stepping outside, "come with me. You didn't go through all the trouble of pledging to just stay at home, did you? And, um..." she grinned. "I know you're with Kyle now, but there are going to be a ton of boys there. In case you're interested."
He was... with... Kyle? Ugh. Jon blushed furiously.
As they started across the campus, Jon was surprised to see a young man striding past him wearing a bikini and sunglasses, trying in vain to hide as much of his body as he could with his arms. "Oh God, oh God, oh God," the boy chanted as he walked.
"You know, Meg," Jon's friend said, pulling his attention away from the guy in the bikini, "I'm really glad you got in this year. You deserved to get in last year, but that bitch Jenna totally had it in for you. So glad she graduated last spring..."
"Uh, yeah," Jon said. "I'm glad I got in, too." But he wasn't really paying much attention to the girl; instead, his eyes were drawn across the quad, where a young boy about Mikey's age, shirtless, shoeless, and dressed in khakis, was talking to an old woman, even older than Jacob, dressed in all-black clothing and with her white hair slicked up into a mohawk.
"Hey," the girl said suddenly, "What's this all about?"
Jon turned to where the girl was looking. A small crowd of people were gathered outside the door to a lecture hall, and more people were pouring out of the door by the second. Jon noticed, to his alarm, that a number of them appeared to be entirely out of place and dressed in clothing that didn't even remotely match their bodies. Men dressed in women's clothes, women dressed in men's; children and elderly people and everything in between. Most of them were panicking. One teenage boy, wearing a sundress and ballet slippers, ran past Jon and his friend shouting, "I'm a boy, not a girl! I'm supposed to be a boy!"
Jon's friend waved her arm high over her head and shouted, "Lisa!"
One of the young women in the crowd--one of the relative few who actually appeared to be wearing the clothes she was supposed to be wearing--turned and waved at Jon and his friend. "Walking over, she said, "Katie, Meg, hi!"
"What's going on?" Jon's friend--Katie--asked.
"I don't know," Lisa said, shrugging. "It was... we were all in class, and my professor, Professor Whitaker, he stopped talking all of a sudden. And we asked him to continue, but when we called him 'Professor Whitaker,' he said it wasn't his name, that his name was Jayde and he was a six-year-old girl. And he looked scared, like maybe he was going to faint, so a couple of the people in the front row ran up to help him, and a few more people stood up. And then..." She shook her head. "I don't know what happened after that. Everyone just started going crazy..."
Jon stared in horror at the crowd. It was spreading, and it was spreading at a far faster rate than he could even have predicted. At this rate, the whole town would probably be switched by sunset.
"Something's wrong with them," Lisa said, her voice shaking. "I don't know what's happening, but someth--" Suddenly she paused, mid-word, and a second later she was replaced by a man in his thirties. He looked blankly at me and Katie for a moment, then down at his clothes. "What the fuck? Where am I? And why am I dressed like a woman?"
"Lisa...?" Katie asked, suddenly concerned.
This was getting out of hand. Way, way out of hand. "Katie," Jon said, do you have a car?"
"What?" Katie said, turning to Jon distractedly. "You know I do, Meg."
Jon nodded. "Can I borrow it?"
