"So," Karyn asked as she and Jon walked through the mall, "how are things going with Jeff?"
Jon's steps faltered for a second. Jeff Williams was Janelle's boyfriend. They'd been dating for a year and a half, and their relationship was still going strong; as two popular and good-looking kids, Janelle and Jeff were one of the "it" couples at school. Apparently Jon had inherited Janelle's relationship with Jeff... that was one aspect of being a girl that Jon was definitely not prepared for.
"Uh... they're fine," Jon said, trying to sound casual and noncommittal.
"Is he still... you know...?" Karyn asked.
"Um... yeah he is," Jon said, rather at a loss about how to respond.
"Oh, sweetie," Karyn said, "I'm so sorry." She stopped to give Jon an uncharacteristically warm hug. Jon and Karyn were best friends, but Jon had never known Karyn to be all that affectionate; around Jon, at least, she was usually just one of the guys, and that meant a lot of joking around and not much open affection.
"It's uh... it's okay," Jon stammered. "It... it'll be fine, I'm sure." He wasn't sure what any of this stuff about Jeff meant, so he decided it was probably safest to just try to evade the topic. "Um... so, what do you want to do?" he asked, trying to change the subject.
Karyn looked at her watch. "Well, we're supposed to meet the girls at the food court in about half an hour... we have some time to kill until then. Want to look around?"
"Sure," Jon said, though he wasn't entirely sure that was true. Jon wasn't sure what exactly shopping with Karyn as Janelle meant. Jon didn't think Karyn and Janelle had ever gone to the mall together; Janelle usually went with her fellow cheerleaders. When he went to the mall with Karyn as himself, Jon and Karyn usually just hung out at the food court or the arcade, or occasionally at the movie theater. He didn't know what Karyn did when she came here with her female friends, though he knew that when girls went to the mall it usually involved a lot of time trying on clothes... Jon wasn't sure he could get all that enthusiastic about clothes shopping. "So," he said, deciding to just bite the bullet and find out how Karyn was planning to pass the time, "where should we go first?"
Karyn smiled and rolled her eyes. "Come on, where do we always go first?" And with that, she turned and made a beeline directly for Jon's favorite store, the Game Emporium.
"We're going to the video game store?" Jon asked, surprised.
Karyn gave him a strange look. "What's wrong with that? You're usually the one begging to go here."
It was true; the Game Emporium was usually Jon and Karyn's first stop when they visited the mall together, and Jon was always the more enthusiastic of the two of them, though Karyn was interested in browsing the games, too. But Jon didn't think Janelle was all that into video games. Was this a part of his own life that he had retained, despite turning into Janelle?
As they entered the store and began to look around, though, Jon began to suspect it wasn't quite as simple as that. Jon considered himself to be a hard-core gamer; he was into fast-paced action games like Halo. When he picked up a copy of Deathstorm 3, a game he had been waiting several months for, however, Karyn gave him a strange look and said, "I'm not sure that's really your kind of game, Janelle." Instead, Karyn steered him toward calmer games, like role-playing games and the latest in the endless stream of Sims expansions. Jon had never been able to get into those kinds of games; he didn't have the patience for controlling sims and juggling statistics. Apparently these were the types of games he enjoyed as Janelle, though.
At one point, Karyn picked up a copy of a soccer game. "Hey," she said, after she'd looked it over for a moment, "maybe you should buy this for Zoe for her birthday next week."
Jon frowned at the game in Karyn's hands. "For Zoe? Really?"
"Yeah," Karyn said. "I mean, yeah, I know she's not into video games, but she loves soccer, right? Maybe you could get her to play it with you."
Jon wasn't even sure where to begin thinking about the strangeness of what Karyn was saying. First of all, Zoe's birthday should have been months off, not "next week." Second, his sister's name was apparently still Zoe, despite the fact that Jon's own name had changed... despite all the things that had changed, in fact. Most importantly, though, Zoe was decidedly not interested in soccer. Zoe hated sports... Jon had listened to her rant a hundred times about how idiotic sports were, how much she hated athletes... and yes, she'd even directed her ire specifically toward soccer. Then again, the girl Jon had seen in his house definitely hadn't been the Zoe he had known and tolerated, though; she hadn't been dressed even remotely like a goth, though she'd still been a bit of a brat. Apparently, despite sharing a name, an attitude, and a general age range with her, Jon's new sister didn't have a lot in common with his Zoe.
Then something struck Jon. Janelle's brother, Ryan, was a football player... had been a football player, anyway. Jon's life seemed to have been scrambled with Janelle's... had Ryan's life been mixed up with Zoe's, too? Then something else occurred to him. Ryan wasn't just an athlete; he was also a serious student. Straight A's. He was even planning on going to medical school. If that part of Ryan's personality had been overlaid on Mikey, that would explain why Jon had seen his brother doing homework instead of watching cartoons. It was like Jon's siblings were now half themselves, half Ryan Carter.... just like Jon seemed to be half Jon, half Janelle.
Jon was beginning to grasp what had happened to him. His life and Janelle's, and in turn the lives of his and Janelle's family members, had been... shuffled together, almost like a deck of cards. He had Janelle's body but his own mind; Janelle's boyfriend but his own family, to a point at least; his own interest in video games but Janelle's less masculine, less violent tastes. Even the clothes he was wearing, the tank top and jeans, were sort of the midpoint between boy clothes and a cheerleading outfit. If his and Janelle's lives really had been mixed together, Jon wondered where exactly the cards had all fallen.
And there was another nagging question, too. If Jon was now Janelle Madison... did that mean that there was a... Jon Carter out there, too? Was there a Janelle who had inherited all the parts of Jon's life that he himself had lost? Or had Jon and Janelle merged into one person, one life, with Janelle's consciousness just... gone?
So many questions... and Jon wasn't sure he was ready to hear the answers.
