A Touch Too Close - Part 2

Involving the Second Incident and Its Immediate Repercussions

However, several matters must be resolved before proceeding further. It would be easy to examine the later lives of Harper Melvang and Codie Hewitt after this series of incidents became an overall trend and trace the myriad of sources with their reflections and thoughts. The same would be true of looking up the studies and examinations in search of causes and explanations.

Such information would satiate numerous questions of a scientific and historical nature. But it would leave a fundamental and staggering one.

Why?

The why of the intangible.

That is the purpose of my words.

And so, after the parting of Harper and Codie following the first incident, each returned to their dorms with different ideas about what may have occurred.

For Harper, strange and nebulous feelings drifted through her thoughts. Her feelings about seeing Codie as a girl seemed to resurface in quiet reflection. A detectable shiver passed through her.

For Codie, firm and rigid thoughts formed stratifications in his mind. His hand gave another little twitch as he attempted to work through the rest of his day without another thought given to the incident. With a detectable shiver, he felt the boundaries of his thoughts beginning to leak, as though touched by a harsh acid.

And then…nothing?

Lingering on their shivers reveals no special revelations or suggestions. There is no flash of insight or spark of the unfamiliar. And there is no sign of a trigger.

There is the implication of memory. Neither can resist the magnetic hold of what they know, despite all denials, to have actually occurred. They intuitively seek out one another.

Before either knows it, they are equidistant from the starting places of their simultaneous walk and looking into one another's eyes from the middle of the residence hall¹Eventually renamed 'Sewell' Hall, but then simply 'the Apartments'.

The moment can hold eternally. They can see each other as perpetual statues sealed in stasis, as if ancient insects preserved in amber. And, in that moment, what clues to the next moments?

The moment, in reality, passed to the next, which in turn passed to the next.

Harper was the next of the two to speak. Her hands clenched involuntarily, withdrawing her palms from even the possibility of contact. In the same moment, she said, "We need to talk."

With the superfluous-sounding statement, Code tucked his hands into his pockets and nodded back.

Without a further word exchanged, both made their way to Codie's dorm and sat on opposite ends of the couch in the living room. There they both sat and examined the woven texture of the muddy green carpet of all the dorms in the complex.

There was no talking for several minutes till Codie finally spoke to ask, "Can you tell me more about what I looked like?"

Harper, in turn, called upon her recent memory. The details had faded with the earliness of the hour and the lingering load of examination cramming. She had the important parts correct as she relayed them to Codie.

"Your eyes were a different color. Brown. Your skin looked so soft. You had long hair."

Codie's sense memory triggered at the mention of soft skin. He could recall the sensation despite his lack of full awareness in that moment. The same was true for his long hair as a girl.

The first stirrings of new words triggered in her mind. Harper bit down on her lips. But, despite her best efforts, she still said, "No joking, you honestly had really big breasts."

Codie's legs curled under him. The words had a far more unsettling effect for him than the entire experience of becoming a girl.

In turn, and still processing the information from Harper, Codie relayed what he had seen. He glossed over many of the details, leaning on the phrase, "You mostly looked like a guy." He repeated it four times. Otherwise, he concentrated on the softer aspects of Harper's male appearance.

During this time, his heart rate rose by a statistically significant amount.

With a longer sigh than Codie would have anticipated, Harper noted and nodded, "I guess I looked more like a boy than a man." Codie nodded with her.

With careful quiet discussion, it would take them just short of ten minutes to arrive at a preliminary hypothesis. Harper was the first to speak it. "You know…you were touching my shoulders when it happened."

Codie drew his hands back. The incident, still inscrutable in his memory, traced thin shadows at the edges of his thoughts.

Harper drew her hands outward. Curiosity flowered from her thoughts. Traces of her early years on her uncle's farm blossomed and pollinated her neurons with old imagery renewed by the right triggers. Her first encounter with a frog crystallized.

Its association with her current thoughts seems not to exist at all. Somehow, the memory has been unearthed for Harper to experience with the tint of years.

She sees her hands reach out to touch the frog. It suddenly seems, in her childish mind, to transform before her eyes. Its mouth opens wide and it emits a screech like a tormented cat. Despite her recalled alarm, Harper giggles in her little voice as the frog turns and quickly hops away.

The echo of the laugh is a smile for Harper.

She bridged the distance between them on the couch with just a shuffle of her legs. She approached Codie like that same frog. Before Codie could screech as well, tell her no, or do anything, she touched him on a patch of bare skin.

The surprise of the touch startled both. After the passing of two seconds, Codie finally asked, "What are you doing?" The contact triggered a slight perspiration response in both Codie and Harper.

As the seconds passed, the child-like feeling faded from Harper. Her mouth contorted. Disappointment settled. Before she can summon forth an appropriate word to express herself, the rush returned right at the eleventh second of contact.

Despite the fact both looked at one another, they don't see a transformation of one state into the other. Nor do they see a visible shift. To them and to any outside observer, the moment could be studied like a visual effect in a film. It could be replayed over and over.

But there is no film splicing. There is no transition.

Instead, one moment becomes the other, co-existent realities flipping like sides of a coin. There is a change and yet there is not.

It is as if the change has not occurred to two parties alone but to the very nature of reality, of which any observer would still be an inseparable part. There can be no independent dissection of the moment despite how many times it would be reviewed and picked apart for clues.

At this point, after roughly twelve seconds of sustained physical contact with one another, Codie and Harper both pulled back simultaneously. While their reactions still had something of the numb surprise of the first incident, both gave a little scream.

For Harper, his scream could be traced to a sense like that of release. In much the same way that someone holding a static charge may give a scream from its sudden shock, Harper felt in his scream a sense of relief.

For Codie, her scream could also be attributed to some sense of assurance and confirmation. Primarily, however, her scream came from a sense of surprise that her breasts appeared larger than she remembered. She felt, erroneously, in that moment that she'd been given a different, bustier form this time.

Codie and Harper were exactly the same opposite sex forms that they had been for the first incident.

Luckily enough for both, the scream went undetected to any direct listeners. Codie's only other roommate present at the time had a pair of headphones on and death metal²Morbid Angel, “Blessed Are the Sick” playing while he browsed magazines on his bed. The room on the other side of the closest wall was dedicated to plumbing and electrical access.

After the screams, both stammered to each other. Their words would be best paraphrased to follow as – "It happened again!" "Oh my god!" "How?" "I feel like a girl/boy." "Is it permanent?"

Why the first incident led to such calm while the second led to far more emotion is still a matter of much uncertainty.

Waves of nausea came to both Harper and Codie. Despite lingering near the sinks, neither found the need to void their stomachs.

After a minute, Codie glanced towards the wall mirror and, despite an unrelenting willingness to undo the changes, decided to look upon herself in the mirror first. Harper soon joined her.

The discovery of gazing into the mirror for both Codie and Harper wasn't at all like Narcissus looking into the water at his own reflection. More due to the fact there are several versions of that story, one which implies incest, and none that would lend themselves to a fair comparison.

Still, the effect of Harper and Codie staring at their own reflections would seal that moment in their minds with a memory which would preserve every sensation for the rest of their lives.

Harper looked into his reflection and saw so much of herself cast as a boy. Lacking any male siblings, her mind returned to old pictures of her uncle's childhood for some mental context.

Codie looked into her reflection and saw her mother. It brought up his incident with fresh confusion.

And so the two remained, unblinking, with their eyes locked in their own reflections.

It took two minutes of sustained staring before Harper suggested they touch again. It was enough to break the stare. Codie nodded. Harper found the presence of mind to set the timer on her watch before they touched.

More feelings of anxiety passed between them as they held each other's hand. Harper kept his eyes on his watch, never noticing how different it was.

By Harper's count, it took twelve seconds for them to return to their original forms.

They immediately disengaged and felt a wall of tension break. Codie allowed himself a normal breath and a momentary sensation of disappointment that he didn't own a camera. Harper grinned to herself and mentally documented the time on her watch.

Her first words, from the safety of being right about the contact trigger, were, "That was cool!"

Codie just said, "I have no idea…"

Harper's mind flew at the possibilities relating to cause. She recalled a sci-fi movie³This film does not exist she'd seen a long time ago. The film proposed that there are some people who when they meet behave like matter and anti-matter to one another. The majority of the plot she recounts deals with efforts to keep such people from meeting, lest portions of the Earth suddenly explode.

Fortunately, despite Harper's association, the supposed plot had nothing to do with their situation.

The discussion that followed finally woke Codie's roommate from his death metal trance. When he asked what was going on, Harper suddenly reached over and grasped Codie by the shoulder.

Codie's roommate would've become the first direct outside party to witness one of these incidents, but Codie separated himself from Harper with seven seconds to spare and immediately locked himself in the bathroom.

The roommate, thoroughly confounded as acid-tongued lyrics still swirled in his head, shrugged off the whole situation as a strange sort of couple's argument and proceeded to fish a Mountain Dew from his mini-fridge before settling in to listen to side B of his mix CD.
  
Harper knocked on the bathroom door and called to Codie through it. She told him many things, but most importantly, "I'm sorry…"

On the other side of the door and uncomfortably seated on the edge of the bath, Codie heard her clearly. It was just what he wanted to hear but he told her, "I need to be alone for a while. I'm sorry too…"

Just what Codie was sorry about was mired in half-thought memories and feelings.

He would remain inside the bathroom for nearly thirty minutes before finally deciding to shower. After his shower, his mind felt clearer. He dressed in his same clothes, left the bathroom, and walked over to where Harper was spread out on the couch.

They regarded one another, and both said "Hi" at approximately the same time. No other words occurred to them till Codie finally noted, "You know…I know a guy who works in…I guess it's the pre-med department....around here."

Harper yearned for a shower herself since she'd been too nervous to do much in the early morning prior to their examination. Instead of saying so, she just nodded and told Codie, "Can you call him? Can you set something up?"

Codie gave a nod of his own. "I'm sure. And he knows several doctor teachers who are experienced with strange medical conditions…"

Harper scratched her chin once. "You sure we should try doctors? It may not help and they may make an experiment of us. My roommate is a physics major…this has got to be caused by weird…science-y…stuff going on."

With that, my parents would begin the search for answers, a search which continues.