I checked my watch. 5:36, it was definitely taking Elle a little while to get over to me. Since the idiot was still passed out I had nothing to worry about from him. Although looking at him, all sprawled out spread eagle on the floor, maybe I should be a little concerned that I potentially gave him brain damage? 

Oh wait. He tried to turn me into his subservient eager to please dream girl drooling for his unwashed dick. Nah. I hope the concussion sucks.

For now all I can do is to hold on as tightly as possible to this bizarre book that flipped my life straight upside down. Wait, the book. The book! If this magical mcguffin turned me into a girl, maybe I could use the secrets to turn me back again.

Of course these hopes were dashed instantly by flipping open the book and quickly coming to the harsh realization that I had no clue what the fuck kind of language this was written in. German? Hungarian? Czech? It definitely is some sort of European gobbledygook, but damned if I could figure out what it was. Naturally this freaked me out a little bit so I decided to do what any sane person would do and close the book and try to push the swirl of emotions and bad feelings down inside me so far that a doctor would need a colonoscopy to find them.

Instead I passed my time by badgering Elle about when the fuck she was going to get over here. Now I couldn’t just send any old “where are U?” text. It had to be subtle and polite of course, expertly crafted not to annoy my savior.  I tapped out and sent her a quick message of “Where the hell are you I’m freaking out over here.” Perfect.

Immediately after hitting send I felt just a little twinge of regret. Was that a little too on the nose? Of course it was too on the nose. Obviously it was too on the nose. Oh God why did I send that? Now she’s going to freak out. I sent the alien and heart emoji as a peace flag in case she was worried. Flawless. Oh Andy, you are a master of perfect communication.

I stood up from the couch and began pacing around a little bit. It took me a few minutes to get used to the slight sway of my larger hips. Well I don't know if they were much larger than my previous hips, but the rest of my frame was so much smaller they definitely stood out. After a few more minutes of pacing, I realized my problem. 

If I just stayed here waiting and trying to ignore the reality of my situation my anxiety would literally kill me. Elle would open the door and see some dead floozie clutching what for all she knows is the works of Goethe and a knocked out Parker. Knowing her sense of humor, she probably would have made a tiktok of it thinking it was some sort of elaborate prank. But I didn’t want to put her in that situation. How dare she hypothetically get some e-clout off of my panic-induced-heart attack. 

So instead I kept myself busy scratching down my list of Complete Thoughts on the Current Situation

1. Magic exists. Not only does magic exist but it does so in such a quantity to completely change someone physically. And if maximum-creep Parker was to be believed, it could also mess someone up quite royally mentally. Of course Parker would make this discovery and immediately decide to use it to craft himself a waifu. That would be like finding out that Hogwarts exists and immediately try to rob it. 

Well okay wait a second though. Does Hogwarts have any money? Would it even be worth robbing it in the first place? They don’t take tuition, and the wizarding world seems to quite solidly be capitalist (thanks JK for that and many other, uh, questionable at best decisions). How do they afford to pay their teachers? We know they don’t buy their food because they rely on slave labor to produce it. But that’s a huge castle. Wizardly property taxes must be super expensive. What, does hagrid have a secret dragon that just shits out gold? Wait wait. Focus. Magic. RIght.

All in all though, if this book is just sitting at a thrift store downtown- nestled in between old records and half-complete puzzle sets, what other kind of magical nonsense exists? I will place the expanding of my consciousness into the positive category for now. I mean it’s good that magic is out there, just. There’s a lot of weirdness that comes with that that I just don’t know how to deal with properly.

2. My roommate is a complete and total creep. Before this instance, I placed him in the harmless crazy category. Like a guy who edits every single little instance that someone sneezes in a tv show on Wikipedia. This instance has caused me to thoroughly reexamine these priorities and move him up the threat here into the harmful crazy category. Like a guy who writes threatening letters to the producer of the previously mentioned tv show and says they’ll get hurt if there isn’t more sneezing. Definitely a negative. This apartment is so close to State that it sucks to leave it, but as long as I was a woman (or at least presented as one) I can’t live with him for my own safety.

I looked at that momentarily and then made sure that I still had the spellbook. As long as I’ve got this, there’s no way he can mess with my head. Over the 21 years of my life I had grown pretty accustomed to my brain, and I particularly didn’t want to be bent to the whim of a guy who has trouble seasoning his own food.

3. Society has completely different expectations and norms for women than it does for men. Oh God that basically means I can’t go outside at night to play Pokemon Go anymore. Wayyyy too many ways for that to go completely wrong. I guess that puts me at a bit of a crossroads as well. There were standards for how a woman needed to dress and act. 

But am I even going to be a girl? Just because I’m in a woman’s body doesn’t mean that really intrinsically changes my identity. I could still be Andy, the scruffy dude who doesn’t give a fuck. It just means that I’d need to get some testosterone injections and maybe eventually do top surgery to get rid of these jiggling fat sacks that I now find myself with. From cursory google searches, I know that people who transition from female to male have their own array of struggles and triumphs compared to trans women, but if I was still super attached to being a guy I could still like, be a guy. Thanks late night search sessions about trans issues. I just really wanted to be a good ally for any trans people that I might meet at college but it turns out the best ally I can be is to myself! Cool!!

But regardless, further research is needed. I mean it's pretty damn obvious that society is totes geared towards men and now I no longer had access to that privilege. Damn.

That’s not to say that being a woman is bad. It’s not like my life is over completely and I’ve been handed down the death sentence. It’ll just be. . . well it’ll be hard to adjust right. it at least theoretically should be hard to adjust t-BZZZT 

“Ahhh shit!” I shot up out of my seat at whatever that sound was. I swear I almost put my sweaty fingerprints all over the ceiling. Getting settled I realized it wasn’t some sort of spell, it was just a text notification on my cellphone. Jeez this whole incident had left me jumpier than I thought. 

Checking my texts, it was Nathan, “Hey Andy. Just got a message from Elle that something freaky was going on at your place. Asked if I knew where a good place to hide a body was. I was just checking to see if you were okay. Also just a reminder that we need to plan our next game night soon. Thanks and I wish you all the best! Nathan.” Nathan was a great guy, but damn his texts always read like they were being written by someone’s grandmother.

For a moment I just sat there thinking. How do I even deal with this? Should I call off all social activities until I become used to going out in public as a woman? Well, what if I never got used to it? Would I get really good at peeing into jars and go full on recluse? The aiming would be gross no, no no, no. Don’t wanna think about the logistics about that right now. 

I decided that for now the single best plan would be to play like everything is normal. Yeah. Normal. I shot out a quick response. “Just had a little tiff with nutso. I’ll get back to you about game night, k?” This wouldn’t be the first time we had to move board game night because of Parker. And plus that basically bought me a little bit of time to come up with a game plan vis a vis my presentation.

Two months ago Parker was boiling some sort of love potion in his room and it stunk the whole place up. I ended up sneaking into his room while he was gone and throwing out the whole thing. You know, looking back on my interactions with the guy, the red flags were all there. It just took a weird event like this to make it glaringly obvious. I went back to item #2 and just added “don’t leave a drink unattended near Parker and eat nothing he gives you.”  

Okay uh, besides realizing how much of a blind eye I had turned to the mondo creepiness of Parker, I should probably get back to my list. 

4. Women’s fashion is cool right? Right? There’s neat colors and patterns and it’s not just pants and shirts and things. I could totally adjust to-oh God who am I kidding? I'm really uncomfortable about the idea of going out in public in women’s clothing at all. Will people judge me? But why would people judge me in the first place? That's placing a lot of internal fears out on the general public and damn I'd like to say that I think the world is better than that but I dunno. I am going to have to eventually get used to going out in public in case this whole book thing isn’t figured out. Well that and going to the bathroom and dealing with. . . Okay you know maybe I should stop making this list. Let's pile presenting as a woman under the "ambivalent" category for now.

Right as I was finishing my not very conclusive at all list there was a knock on the door. Finally! Elle, my knight in shining armor was here! I jumped off of the couch in order to open the door when all of the sudden something went completely and terribly wrong. In my hurry to go get the door my shorts, which were not really used to this newer, smaller Andy 2.0, had slid down my legs and got all tangled up. I was in such a rush there was no time to recover and all I had time for really was to protect my head in the fall. 

Embarrassingly upon making a close acquaintance with the ground I let out a little involuntary shriek as my newfound body smacked into the floor. Kicking off the shorts I quickly shoved myself back to my feet and found the way to the door. Wait, shit. In my hurry to spend quality time with the floor I had just flung the book across the room almost towards Parker’s bedroom. Making a beeline I scrambled to scoop the book back up and finally made my way to fling open the door. 

And there she was, Elle, thank God.

Elle and I met each other on the first day of middle school. We both were in the same homeroom and our last names were next to each other. I think she was wearing an Invader Zim t-shirt or something, but somehow or another we struck up a conversation. We quickly realized that we had pretty similar senses of humor and soon became inseparable. She was always a bit tall for a girl, around 5’8 or 5’9. Given her Chinese heritage, we always made fun of the fact that nobody really knew how she got to be that tall. Which looking back on it now was honest to God kind of a shit thing to do, but I guess tearing people down for perceived differences is definitely a public school kind of thing. Now opening the door I realized she was a good bit taller than me and I kind of regret making fun of people for their height. Bad Andy, file this into your “be a better person” memory hole.

“Hey Andy I know you said no, but I looked anyway and I wasn’t able to find that shovel and. . . Wait. . . Who the hell are you?” I could see the gears turning in Elle’s head. Her tone had a complete 180 degree change from messing around to deadly serious.

Well. There’s no time like the present to drop some world shattering information. How do you tell your friend that your body has magically been altered? “Elle I don’t know how to-”

“No no no.” She interrupted me! How rude. Only I’m allowed to interrupt people. The nerve of some people. “Wait I want to figure this out.” And just like that the seriousness was gone. Elle has a particularly unfortunate habit of messing with people, especially people she just met. She pushed past me and went right into my living room. She surveyed the whole scene for a moment, occasionally making little hmm noises. “Oh my God! Is that? Yep. Parker. Suspicion confirmed. I think Detective Elle is ready for the parlor scene.”

I rolled my eyes. “We’re in a living room.”

“Ha! You’re good. Now, when I was called here by Andy I thought something had to be up. And now that I’m here, he’s nowhere to be seen. But you. You look almost like you could be related to him. Same eyes, same terrible hair. By the way, I don’t know if you know this but a high quality hair dryer and some good conditioner could do wonders for that frizzy mop of yours. The riot girl thing is cool, but you still have to take care of your hair. Anyway, I’ve known Andy since high school and I know for sure he only has one brother. So that has to make you his cousin or something.” She was really getting into this. I know when she was wound up it would be hard to stop so I just pretended to smile and watched the “detective” at work.

“Besides, you’re wearing one of Andy’s Mountain Goats shirts and I know he’s particularly fond of that one. He won’t stop talking on and on about the Beat the Champ tour and all their music. So you have to be close to him. I’d know if he had a girlfriend because he would have talked about her already and there’s no way he’d get close enough to a random girl just to give them a shirt without me knowing. How am I doing so far? Pretty good?”

“Uhhh well”

“Right! Then we have the muuurder scene.” To go along with her goofy tone she did an exaggerated point at Parker’s body. She really drew out the syllables in murder too, giving Agatha Christie a real run for her money. “As Andy’s cousin you were here to visit him for the weekend or something. He can’t make it, doing some nerd shit, yadda yadda yadda.

“You get the key from him, but because Andy is a simpleton he probably tells you “oh I’ve got a weird roommate” but that was his big mistake. Let me guess, you walk in, change clothes and think you’ve got the whole place to yourself. Then suddenly Spooky Mulder. You know, like the nickname for Mulder on the X-Files? It’s a little inside joke that I have with Andy. He loves it.” 

I most certainly do not. 

“Anyway he suddenly gets way up in your personal space and says something like ‘HOW COULD SUCH AN EXQUISITE CREATURE BE RELATED TO THAT IGNORANT NINCOMPOOP ANDY. WHY DON’T YOU JOIN ME FOR DINNER AND I CAN IMPRESS YOU WITH MY BIG DUMB BRAIN AND WE CAN REALLY GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER BETTER! BY THE WAY, HERE IS SOME KOMBUCHA THAT I BREWED MYSELF WHY NOT HAVE A DRINK”  Well trying to copy Parker’s voice was definitely going the extra mile, but it made her break out into a fit that seemed to be a bizarre combination of coughing and giggling. “Ha. . Ha. . Oh God he’s such a perv. Seriously if he offers you something to drink, do what Nancy taught the kids of the 80's and just say no.”

“Wait, I mean I know he’s a weirdo but-” Before I could say anymore I was cut off again. This was getting a bit annoying.

“Oh yeah, not just a weirdo but instead he's a total creep. Whenever I’m here waiting for Andy to get ready or something he always hits on me. Class act, that guy. But you can’t steer us away from this conversation missy. I’m just about to reveal who dunnit! Judging by the way you’re clutching the book, it’s obviously the murder weapon. I can read you just like I can probably read that book.” Good luck there, mein freund. “Parker over there got close enough so that you could smell his breath, which I don’t think he ever brushes, and then wham-o! You beaned him right over the head. Right?” She looked back at me like she was going to get a trophy for #1 Detective. “How did I do?”

“Well. .. How should I put this? You are pretty close in some aspects, and completely wrong in others. I did smack him in the head.” I sighed, still trying to think of the best way to really break the truth to her.

Hearing this she shot her arms out in a victory pose. “Awesome! It’s about time somebody gave him a proper smack. On behalf of 51 percent of the world’s population, I thank you. You have done a great service for women everywhere. But what about the other stuff? You're totally related to Andy right?”

“Ummmmmmmmmm kind of sort of?”

“How can someone be kind of sort of related to someone? That’s ridiculous. You’re either related to him or you aren’t.” Elle was obviously getting a bit visibly upset that her brilliant detective work was a bit off. I realized that this farce had gone on long enough and I just had to tell her.

“Elle. It’s me. Andy.”

“Uh huh.”

“Oh my God Elle I just tolerated you playing Hercule Fucking Poirot in my living room. This book here.” I shook it for influence. “This is some sort of magical spell book that Parker found. He wanted to turn me into his brainless girlfriend or something. I got hit by one hell of a whammy and now he thinks he's basically entitled to my body. So you were right up to a certain point because you would have to be one hell of a detective to predict this plot. And I know what you’re going to say. We’re going to do this big song and dance where you ask me to prove something to you that only I would know. And I’ll say some sort of bullshit secret you shared with me when we were freshman or something but today has been a little bit stressful for me so if you don’t mind can we just skip to the part where you are a little bit skeptical but are there to support me because holy fucking God I could really really use a friend right now.” Tears welled up in my eyes towards the end of my speech. I cried every now and then but at that moment I felt like I was close to the edge of just straight up bursting out crying hysterical tears.

I know, you’re thinking, oh he’s a girl now and girls cry because they are more in touch with their emotions. First of all, rude and sexist. But at that moment I realized how hard it would be to hold on to what was me. The arbitrary fears and positives that I was trying to get out on that notebook were just circling around the big grand question of identity. 

I would have to fight tooth and nail just to get the friends that I once had in my life to recognize me, let alone my college, my professors, and getting all of the administrative nonsense changed on my birth certificate and driver’s license. AND that’s only if I failed to actually turn back. Did I want to turn back? I should want to turn back right? Right? At that moment these fears washed over me and I wasn’t really sure if I knew who I was or what my future held. That’s why I was sobbing big ugly tears in front of one of my closest friends, and by the uncomfortable look on her face it was pretty hard for her to process. After a few seconds she cleared her throat.

“Have.” Elle looked around awkwardly. Like she was trying to find the right thing to say. “Have you eaten at all?”

“What?” I said, wiping a particularly fat tear from my eye.

“Have you eaten at all? Since all this happened.”

It felt like forever since lunchtime. I remember I was going to scrounge up some leftovers after the Overwatch match and then all this nonsense happens. I shook my head no.

She gave me a smile and went over and embraced me in a big hug. For a moment all I could focus on was how surreal it was that she was bigger than me, but really I just needed that hug. Also focusing primarily on the hug let me ignore the feeling of our bodies coming together. “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here, get you some actual clothes, and some food. Alright? We can even go to that chicken and waffles place that you love.”

I sniffed. Awkwardly rubbing my eyes and trying to avoid eye contact. After a few moments of trying to compose myself I managed to squeak out a very small. “That sounds like the best damn idea I’ve ever heard.”

“Well then what the hell are we waiting for. Bring the book and let’s go.” And so we went. I took a second to pack up my laptop, my PS4 (again, I’ve got my priorities), whatever beer I had left in the fridge, and whatever other necessities I needed for the next few days. As we left I darted quickly down to Elle’s car, realizing that I wasn’t particularly dressed like a modest young woman. The fact that I was wearing an overly large t-shirt, boxers, and sandals seemed perfectly feasible inside my own home. Outside it looked like I was on the walk of shame from hell.  Fortunately for the good of my heart we didn’t run into any of my neighbors that I actually knew or cared about. But damn the disapproving stare I got on the way down the stairs from one woman was hard to deal with. I could feel my face blushing the whole time down with shame.

Once we made it to the car Elle burst out laughing. “What the hell, Elle? What in all of this situation is so Goddamn funny??”

“I have just been thinking about this the entire time. Mulder and Scully. He really wanted to date you! God he must have been really desperate.” With that she made a show of unlocking her shitty old VW beetle and smiled a big shit eating grin. I flung my stuff in the back seat and buckled up.

“Just shut up and drive.”

“I don’t blame him though. You know it was absolutely adorable when you were yelling at me. I bet people would pay you to do that.” She gave an ugly cackle and pulled out of the parking lot of our apartment complex.

“Just shut up and drive!!"