I was a man again. On Monday of my week off, I had checked into the nearest BodyMat clinic and resumed my life as Chris Olsen. I still had two weeks before the deadline, and the only real casualty of my extended life as Holly was a great deal of paperwork I would have to redo.

Veronica was tremendously supportive. This had not been the vacation in Manhattan we had planned on, but she made good use of the time I was indisposed, first figuring out where Phillip Warner lived, and then charting out his movements.

Even though her employee ID was no longer active, her face was familiar enough that she had no problem getting a former coworker to let her into the eNext building, and under the guise of catching up with friends, managed to make it all the way to the CEO’s office. Warner was not there, nor was his computer. But his executive assistant Alice was around, and all it took was waiting for her to go to lunch. Veronica slipped in before the screensaver came on and took photo after photo of Warner’s schedule on Outlook. She also went through the drawers and found a ring of keys, each labeled in Alice’s neat handwriting. One of them was the key to Mr. Warner’s penthouse on Central Park West, and another was Cassie’s Soho apartment.

We decided to try Cassie’s first. That required me, since the fake Cassie knew what Veronica looked like, but she had never met Chris. On Thursday, the day after I checked out of the BodyMat, I slipped into a work-stained jumpsuit, assumed a bored expression, and turned the key in the lock of her apartment.

My cover story was simple. I was building maintenance, doing the yearly required check on surge protectors, smoke alarm batteries, etc. As it turned out, my cover was not needed. No one was there, nor did anyone arrive while I was inside.

The place was deserted. There was no food in the refrigerator, no dishes in the sink, no signs of life at all. A few clothes hangers were bare in the capacious closet, but that was the only thing that seemed to be missing.

“And her double hasn’t been spotted out since the weekend. At the very least, there has been no gossip on the usual sites,” Veronica told me, when I described my findings. “Real or fake, she appears to have vanished.”

“We had been emailing her about our trip for weeks. You don’t think that they put the fake there just for us? How could they know we would check that club?” I asked.

“Well, her father does own BodyMat...” Veronica began.

“And BodyMat owns the communication platform we were using to exchange plain text messages,” I finished. “They knew exactly what we were up to.”

“And had a fake waiting for us, to throw us off. But why? Is it because they’re hiding her, or she got away? We’re not better off than we were before.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We need to draw out the fake again.”

We logged back onto the BodyMat communication portal. Veronica sent “Cassie” an email, begging to see her — and threatening to reveal something of what we knew about Cassie’s father if she did not show. A message came back within an hour — she would meet Veronica at Columbus Circle, the southwest corner of Central Park, the next night at 11pm.

In my guise of repairman, I set up shop in Cassie’s apartment. The outfit wouldn’t do me much good, but it might buy me enough time to get away if I was found. I didn’t intend to be found, however, hiding myself in an alcove behind a folding screen, where a thin coating of dust indicated that no one tended to go.

My efforts were rewarded around 3am when I was awoken by a key turning in the lock. I took a deep breath an attempted to hold it, watching the living room from between the slats.

The door opened, and I immediately recognized Phillip Warner himself. He was accompanied by two enormous guards — the same two, in fact, who had thrown Veronica and myself out of the club.

“You’re clear on the plan, then,” he said as the door closed behind him.

“Yes, boss,” they replied.

“Which is?” he prompted.

“If she goes off into the park, I grab her, drug her, get her to the car,” said the hairier of the two. “If she runs down the street, the car goes after her.”

“And if she gets into the car, we got no problem,” said the other.

“And that’s where I will try to lure the blackmailing bitch.” They were in the bedroom now, and I could hear the sound of hangers scraping on the wooden rod. “What about this? Is this something my slut of a daughter would wear?” Neither guard answered, possibly realizing that there was no correct answer they could give. “Fuck it, it’ll have to do. I need to get to the BodyMat before it opens. Even with the accelerated program it will take at least twelve hours to change me over. I was supposed to be in Aspen, goddammit!”

He continued to abuse Veronica as he emerged from the bedroom, carrying a skimpy red dress and a pair of shoes. “And when this is over, you better FIND Cassandra and get her back here. Her Daddy won’t always be around to clean up her messes!”

“Yes boss.”

A few moments later, the key turned in the lock, and I was alone once more.

My mind reeled. I had my answer at least — Chloe had gotten away. And the fake had been none other than her own father. There were some rather disturbing implications there. Chloe had always talked about how her father tried to control her life, and I suppose that taking it over was in a sense the ultimate control.

But we had misstepped with Veronica. She would not be there tonight, of course, so they could not kidnap her right away. But would she be safe? Perhaps in the UK, she would be out of Warner’s reach.

I waited an hour, and then another, before I felt safe enough to leave the apartment.

Veronica and I parted company on Saturday, her to fly back to the UK and me to take the train back home. She had come to a difficult personal decision of her own after I told her the news.

“So I’ve got to go back to my original body too, yeah?” She shrugged. “I didn’t use BodyMat. I went to TurnTown, and he doesn’t own that. Once I’m fat again they’ll never be able to find me.”

“But this body... it was everything you had ever wanted!”

“Time to earn it the hard way. And if diet and exercise doesn’t get me fit, I’ll save up to do it the easy way again, once this has all blown over.” It was all stiff upper lip, I knew. Neither of us could afford another conversion. But I retained enough emotional intelligence to know that it was the lie she needed to tell herself, and I let it pass.

On the train ride home, I finally had more of a chance to reflect. I was me again, and it felt so deceptively normal that I sometimes forgot until something would remind me. For one thing, I was attracted to women again — a fact that became very apparent, in an embarrassingly physical form, when I hugged Veronica goodbye. (She thought it was hilarious, luckily.)

The depth of my voice shocked me every time I spoke. Everything around me felt smaller, from the train seat to the taxi that took me to my apartment, to my bed when I settled down to sleep. It only took a few days to remember to stand up to pee again, and a late night porn browsing session quickly reminded me what a male orgasm felt like. It was like putting on an old, well-worn pair of tennis shoes that had sat up in my closet all winter. Novel and familiar all at the same time.

I emailed Claire and Rita, told them that I had moved back home to take care of a sick relative, and that I would give them a call when I could. I hated to lie, but I felt it was best to just let that particular friendship lapse. We had been friends, but not super close friends, and I did not want to deal with the trauma of upending the entire relationship.

Surprisingly, I did resume my friendship with Josh. I still spent late nights studying or reading in the campus coffee shop, and so did he, and we quickly fell into conversation. I already knew his likes and dislikes, and still shared many of them, so it was only a short time before we were hanging out again. One night, after a bout of drinking, I confessed who I was, and her told me that he had guessed. (Apparently I gave a bit too much away about what I already knew about him.). He was surprisingly okay with it all, and that just confirmed my opinion that he was a good person to spend time with.

The semester ended, and we started the next, the last of my college experience. Josh and I became the nexus of a new group of friends. Veronica — or Stacy, as she was actually named — sent frequent emails, and after a bit of convincing, a few photos. She really was very fat, but had already lost two stone, whatever that was, and had even started jogging. What was more, she looked just as happy as I had ever known her.

A much greater surprise was an email from Lamar. It was addressed to Holly, through the BodyMat system, and I realized that we were still at pre-conversion Level 1 text only. He had finally read my email, and decided that he really did owe me an explanation. A few minutes after his message arrived, I received a notification from BodyMat. Lamar had granted me Level 3 post-conversion, the highest access level. I would see what he looked like originally.

Lamar was a petite redhead.

He, or rather she, had a plethora of freckles scattered across her pale face, like chocolate chips floating in a glass of milk. She was a little overweight — kind of like me, really — but cute and curvy. Along with the photos came a brief message. “I understand if you never want to hear from me again.”

It did not take me long to man up and reply. All along, Lamar had been laboring under the same secret I had — but unlike me, had the guts to reveal it. I granted her full access to my photos, along with a message, “So.... funny story....”

I got a reply right away. “Well shit, dude. We should talk.”

And we did. Isabel (“Don’t you dare call me ‘Bella.’”) lived only about fifty miles away, as it turned out. We emailed and talked on the phone for a week, and then met up in town.

It was weird. Here was someone I knew quite well, and yet didn’t know at all. At first we were awkward, finding nothing to say to each other, but at some point the subject of our cross-gender conversions came up, and on that subject we had a ton to say. Pretty soon, we were comparing and contrasting our experience, trying to figure out who had it harder, and generally acting like the friends we had been.

Though not friends with benefits. It wasn’t that Isabel wasn’t cute — she was, and if she wasn’t my usual type, I did find her attractive. It was that my mind granted her a level of intimacy that my body did not, and the dichotomy constantly stopped me from reacting like I wanted.

I think she felt the same. At one point as we were walking, she reached out and took my hand, just as Lamar had done many times before. But now she was shorter, and the angle was awkward and uncomfortable. After a moment, she let it go, and did not try to pick it up again.

I’m sorry for the anticlimax, but here is how that particular story ended. We continued to write for a while, but the calls became less frequent. Then I got busy toward the end of my senior year, and she got busy too, and the emails stopped altogether. I still have her friended on Facebook, and every so often we’ll comment on one another’s posts.

When all was said and done, many of the things I liked about Lamar had to do with how he treated Holly. Isabel didn’t treat me the same way. She didn’t treat me badly, but when I was with her, I didn’t feel like the most special person ever created. I didn’t feel like she would bend over backwards for me, nor did I feel the need to give myself completely and utterly to her. Perhaps we could have made it work in time, but then again, I don’t think so. As far as I’m concerned, Lamar and Isabel are two different people. Holly was in love with Lamar once, but Chris and Isabel were never more than strangers who had a very specific thing in common.

And I graduated. After graduation, I moved to New York City, where I figured I would have the best chance of finding a job. Josh wanted to move there too, and he and I decided to room together. We found a tiny apartment in Queens. There was only one bedroom, but we were able to carve it in half with a couple of curtains. It looked terrible, but for a bachelor pad it was fine. I only really ever slept there, and since Josh often worked nights, we never really got on each other’s nerves.

We had been living there for a few months when one September night, Josh came back far earlier than I expected him to. “Hey, man, what’s going on? Did they get your hours wrong?”

“No. I had to leave.” He was carrying a brown paper bag. He set it on our minuscule counter and opened the kitchen cabinet. He selected two mismatched glasses — we had no matching ones — and brought them over to the couch. He handed one to me. From the brown bag, he withdrew a bottle of white wine. “Confession wine time.”

My eyes bulged from their sockets, and my voice barely escaped from my suddenly-tight throat. “C-c-Chloe?”

“Yeah,” said Josh. “I know. It’s probably hard to recognize me without my pug mask.” And he unscrewed the bottle and poured.