Beth sighed as she pulled her shirt over her head. Oversized t-shirt, sweatpants, and tennis shoes again. Her friends were seriously going to get after her. She hadn't even bothered brushing her hair this morning; she'd just pulled it up into a haphazard knot. She looked like a mess, she knew that. But she didn't really care.
Her friends had been telling her she needed to get back into the game, she needed to start living her life again. But it had only been two weeks since Alex had broken up with her. How was she supposed to heal so quickly? She knew her friends were just concerned, but it felt like they were being impatient, even callous. She needed time.
Beth picked up her backpack and headed out the door. As she walked through the hall and down the winding stairs to the quad, she tried to force out the cheesy Disney song she had stuck in her head. She needed some Smiths, some Metallica, some Joni Mitchell... anything to replace horrible old love songs. She'd had too many of those... slowly, bit by bit, breakup by breakup, she was beginning to see how they were all lies. Awful, cruel lies. and she'd had enough.
As she left the dorms, Beth felt a sudden new determination to make herself get better. Forget moving on... she was giving up. Screw love. She didn't want any of it. It wasn't worth this kind of pain. There were more important things in the world than men.
Weren't there?
As she rounded a corner, Beth suddenly heard footsteps, and a voice screaming, "I'm not a girl! I'm not! I'm a boy, a boy! I'm not supposed to be a girl!" Beth looked up, baffled, and saw a girl in a sundress running directly toward her. The girl tried to swerve and Beth tried to dodge out of the way, but they both ended up jumping in the same direction... and suddenly crash, they both went tumbling to the ground. Beth's world spun for a second.. then suddenly she found herself somewhere else entirely.
Beth was hit by a storm of sensations all at once. Suddenly, instead of lying on the ground outside her dorm room, she found herself staring into the face of another woman. A very, very naked woman. The woman screamed, "Yes, YES!" in a fit of ecstacy, her mouth wide open and her face crossed with a look of utter and complete pleasure. The woman's cry cut through the loud, pumping bass music that filled the room. Beth found herself poised above the woman's prone, horizontal body, and she was just as naked as the woman. Most baffling of all, she felt her pelvis moving as though riding its own momentum... up and down, back and forth, in and out, slapping her hips against those of the other woman.
At last Beth seized control of her body, stopping her flailing torso and crashing hard into the other woman's body. The woman looked up at Beth with a horror and disgust that must have mirrored Beth's own expression, and screamed, "Get off me!" Flying from the surprising strength of the woman's slender arms, Beth rolled off the bed the two of them had been in and down onto the floor.
Beth stood, he body aching from her collision against the floor, and grabbed the blankets that she and the woman had been wrapped in. Pulling the blanket around her chest, she felt a tiny bit better... covered up and confused beat naked and confused any day.
The woman, for her part, was leaning over and scramling through the clothing on the floor. Tossing aside several articles, the woman finally snatched up a pair of boxer shorts. After pulling them up over her hips and around her waist, the woman seemed satisfied, though the boxer shorts left her breasts swinging free.
"Look, man," the woman said, "I don't know what this is. I don't know where I am or how I got here, and I sure don't know who you are. But this is..." She seemed to struggle for words for a moment. "This is just messed up, man. You better believe I'm calling the cops."
"The..." Beth began. "Wait, the police? On me?" Her head swam; she tried to make sense of what was going on. "Look, I don't know what's going on, either. One moment I'm in the quad, and the next I'm here, and I'm..." She shuddered at the thought of what she'd been doing.
"You're fucking me," the woman said. "The next moment you're fucking me."
"Yeah," Beth said. "No, wait, I mean... I couldn't... I don't even have... I'm a girl!"
"Yeah, you're a girl," the woman said. "Right, and you're..." She paused, as though hearing what Beth had just said for the first time. "Wait, you're what?"
"I'm a girl," Beth said. "Just like you. And that means I can't... I couldn't have..."
"Wait wait wait," the woman said, rounding the bed and walking up to Beth. "You're a girl? You sure don't look like any girl I've ever seen."
"What?" Beth shouted. Now she was offended. She knew she hadn't been taking care of herself lately, but there was no way any right-minded person could think she was a boy. She was all girl, and she was a pretty good-looking girl, too, if she did say so herself.
"I'm a girl," Beth snarled. "I'm a girl, just like you."
The woman frowned. "Just like..." She shook her head. "Look man, you need help. You're a dude, man. You look like a dude, you sound like a dude, you talk like a dude, and a few minutes ago you were..." A look of nausea crossed her face. "You were trying to thrust your dick into me like a dude."
Beth gaped, speechless. She couldn't even begin to follow the woman's line of thought, but she couldn't. Nothing was making sense. She rubbed a hand over her face and walked back to the bed, trailing the blanket she had wrapped around her body behind her. Sitting on the bed, she sighed heavily...
And then spotted something through the bathroom door that faced her.
Standing slowly, Beth kept her eyes on the door, or rather on the man who seemed to be staring at her through the door. The man rose to his feet just as she did. Slowly, she crept to the door and into the bathroom, and slowly, he crept in her direction as well. At last Beth found herself face-to-face with a tall, good-looking man with a blanket wrapped around her chest. Beth slowly lowered the blanket and the man did the same, and she saw that, just like her, he was naked except for a pair of dog tags that hung from from both their necks, settling between Beth's breasts and on the man's very masculine chest.
The woman walked slowly into the room behind Beth, gaping in shock at her own reflection. Together in the mirror, the two reflections looked like a perfect couple. A handsome, dark-haired man and a small, attractive, brunette woman, both of them a few years older than Beth, probably in their mid-to-take twenties. They looked like they belonged on television, or on the cover of a magazine. In the mirror. But turning to her partner, then to her own body, Beth saw one confused woman dressed in boxer shorts and another woman, naked in her entirety and equally baffled and astonished.
"Oh my God," the woman whispered. "Is that what you see when you look at me?"
Beth nodded. "And him?" she asked, pointing to the man in the mirror.
"Yeah," the woman said.
They were silent for a moment. Then Beth reached a hand out to the other woman. "I'm Beth," she said.
"And I'm Shane," the woman said. "And twenty minutes ago, I was a man."
