Becky was so used to sleeping in on her homeschool schedule that she was groggy and bleary-eyed when her mom woke her up at 6:00 A.M. Fortunately, her morning shower helped snap her out of it, and by the time she had finished breakfast she was pretty much awake.
Jenny was still asleep as Becky headed out the door and down to the bus stop. Since she wasn't actually a girl anymore but would never be able to pass for a boy, it was unlikely that she ever would return to public school. Becky envied her the sleeping in until nine part, but she had good reasons for going back. For one thing, although she pulled through okay, she just didn't handle self-supervised schoolwork as well as Jenny did.
But the bigger reason was that she wasn't at all sure that her other friends would stick by her the way Andrew did, and so she was eager to get a head start on making new friends. And so, although her parents had suggested she wait until the next semester, she was returning to school after a little over two and a half months of absence. She was nervous, but if this experience had taught her one thing, it was that she couldn't make problems go away by pretending they weren't there. She had to face them, and the longer she put it off the harder it would be.
Andrew arrived at the bus stop not long after she did. "Becky?" he asked. "You're coming back to school?"
She nodded. "I figure I've been away long enough," she said. "But I'm still trying to keep a low profile, so no telling anybody, please."
"Sure thing," Andrew said. "But...what are you going to do when the other kids figure it out? I mean, it's not that hard; you have a similar first name and the same last name, you act and dress the same, and you still even look mostly like you, just as a girl."
Becky shrugged. "I don't know. I know I can't deny it, since the school records would show that I was lying. I was thinking that I'd spin them some variant of the 'sick' story I used with you and the guys, where the sickness somehow left me with my only hope for a normal life being to get 'the operation,' but I'm not sure how to make that believable yet. I'll have to look some stuff up first."
"Well, if you need me to corroborate anything, just let me know," Andrew said, as the bus pulled up. They climbed aboard and headed off to Rebecca Lynn Connelly's first day at school.
