1.

“What’s your name?” Mom asked, staring me in the eye. Over a day of doing nothing and that was all the farther we’d really gotten. Oh, I’d told them other things, and they’d told me things about the boy they thought I was, but it always kept coming back to my name.

I sighed and answered for about the fiftieth time. “Kendra Selene Brewster.” I took a bite of the Snickers bar I’d been eating. “How many times to I have to say that?”

Gabby was standing on the other side of the room, a concerned look on her face the likes of which I’d never seen before. Why was she so scared? Well, other than the fact that everybody seems to think I used to be a boy. I don’t get it, I think I’d know if I used to be a boy. Had everybody taken crazy pills at exactly the same time?

Mom held up a photo of her and some boy, probably this Kenneth that they keep thinking I’m supposed to be. “And you don’t remember being male at all?”

“How could I remember being a guy if I was never a guy?”

“Sweetie, the pictures aren’t fake, you were a boy, you just don’t remember it now, for some reason.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Okay, say i really was a boy. Why don’t I remember it, if I was?”

“That’s what I hope your cousin tells us,” Gabby said, finally speaking up. She walked over to the kitchen table and pulled a chair out. “If she ever gets here.”

Almost as if on cue, there was a knock on the door. Mom got up and opened the door, and I saw Amy and a girl I didn’t recognize. That sorceress she talked about nowhere in sight. Whatever was going on, maybe Amy could explain that I had always been a girl, like I was certain of.

The unfamiliar girl sat down in front of me and that was when I realized she wasn’t a girl at all. Oh, she was wearing a bright yellow tank top with an obvious bra underneath and a pair of short shorts that looked absolutely adorable on her, and her fingernails and toenails were both painted the same bright yellow as her top; her hair was longer than mine and her makeup was perfect.

But she her flat chest and her slight bulge made it obvious that she was a boy.

Not that I had any problems with that. She was still cute, and if not for the fact that I wasn’t into girly boys, I might go out with her. Or, well, no. I was still treating her like she was a girl, so maybe I wouldn’t. Either way, if she wanted to express herself as female, I was okay with that.

Ugh... I was sounding stupid.

“Kendra,” Amy said, “this is my friend Dean. She’s Ms. Malski’s… um…”

Dean finished the thought, “Ms. Malski’s my stepmom. She’s also the reason I’m the way I am, but I’m better off this way. Last but not least, she’s teaching me the tricks of the magic trade.”

I nodded my head, just to make movements, if nothing else. “Okay. What’s that gotta do with me?”

“Mom thinks you… Affected… The spell she used to change you the other day.”

“What spell?”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. Somehow, you’ve made your spell take effect again, and you’ve rewritten your whole past. Mom told me that part’s almost impossible, even for higher level sorceresses like her. She mentioned something about genies being able to do it, but then she tossed that idea away because something about genies not being around anymore. I’m only just starting my magic training, so what I can do is absurdly limited right now.”

Mom asked, “So why did your mother send you? It sounds like something she should be here for.”

Dean shrugged. “I dunno. I’m getting pretty good at reversing minor spells. Like, last week Mom turned an apple into a curling iron, and I turned it back into an apple, but then she turned me back into the old me, and I couldn’t reverse that, so she had to. Not only is this a pretty high level spell, Ken… Dra… Kendra… Reversed it herself and somehow changed her past in the process.” She looked back at me. “Mom says that you might be capable of magic.”

Mom sat down in a dining room chair and looked like the wind had been knocked out of her. “This is all… All this was supposed to be was Ken experiencing how it felt to be female while wearing girl’s clothes, how did all this happen?”

I folded my arms under my breasts. “From my point of view, nothing happened. I was a girl yesterday, a girl the day before, and all the way since the day I was born. Everybody acting like this is wrong somehow makes no sense to me.”

Gabby said, “Trust me, this makes no sense to anyone. You were a boy yesterday, not a girl, and you’ve always been a boy.”

I just couldn't see it. I remembered being a girl too clearly, from Gabby and I having sleepovers when we were little to that day at the mall when I had my first kiss with Shawn Breckenridge. It was probably the most disgusting kiss I’d ever had, but it was my first.

Hearing that this life I remembered was supposedly fake was starting to get on my nerves. “Look, I’m fine the way I am, okay?” I stood up and walked to the door. “I’mma go out and enjoy the rest of the day at the mall, or something.” With that, I shut the door behind me and set out for the nearest inner-city bus stop.

2.

His eyes were on me the second I sat down at the food court with my ham, cheese, lettuce, tomato and mustard sub sandwich. I had to admit, I was doing as much staring as he was.

If course, I was dressed specifically to make boys stare at me. After leaving home, I made it to the nearest clothing store and bought myself some new stuff, mostly to keep me from sweating too much since it was almost a hundred degrees outside. I’d picked a scoop-neck tank top and tiny, tiny skirt, plus a pair of sandals with a three inch heel.

The girls, naturally, were getting most of the attention.

I went to take my first bite out of the sub when that Dean girl sat down across the table from me. “You gonna eat the other half?” she asked. I slid it across the table to her. “Thank you, I’m goddamned starving! Amy never told me how long it would take to get here, and I haven't eaten since we left town.” She glanced over at the boy I was almost flirting with. “Oooh, he’s cute.”

I put my half of the sub down. “Why’d Mom and Gabby send you? No offense or anything, but you really don’t have any stakes in whether I was really a boy like they say I was.”

She shrugged. “No, but I volunteered. I love going to the mall back home. I honestly think I’ve developed some kind of shopping… Well, complex, really. I just like to shop.” She took a pretty big bite. “You freaked your mom and your friend out when you left.”

I sighed. “Whatever. I’m fine the way I am. They can leave me alone.”

Another bite. “Yeah, you said that.” She let out a light burp. “And your family says otherwise. Now, my mom sent me out here because she thinks I can help you, I don’t honestly know how, and you’re just fine with your change, which from what Mom tells me means one thing.”

“What?”

Big bite again. “A sorceress’ body knows that it needs to change itself, and will do so once her power has finally been awakened. If you're really a sorceress, like my mom thinks you are, then your power awoke and your body reshaped itself like it should. Why your mind changed is the question.”

I leaned forward. “But I don't feel like my mind changed. I don’t remember being this boy they say I was.”

She nodded. “I know. And I don’t know how to fix that, but I think I know how to get you to fix it.”

I leaned back. “Now I’m confused.”

3.

“Okay,” Dean said as she sat me down on my bed. Amy, Gabby and Mom all around us. I had to admit, my room did look like a boy’s room. I could have sworn I had yellow curtains. “I need you to lie down now.”

“Why?”

She pulled her phone out. “My mom gave me this list of spells to awaken deeper parts of someone's mind. Mom doesn’t think you actually rewrote your life after I texted her some extra details, now she thinks you’re one of at least two personalities. Y’see, everybody has some form of split personality, usually a part of us that we repress or just something we never knew was in us to begin with.” She tapped away at her phone. “Lie down.”

“Why?”

She glared at me. “When the alternate personalities are allowed out, your body may experience some… Effects. You’ll be fine if you're lying down, but you might accidentally hurt yourself if you sit up.”

I sighed. “Whatever. Just get this over with.”

She placed a hand on my chest and started saying something in a language I couldn't understand. Nothing magical seemed to be happening, at least from my perspective. I yawned, my hand was slapped away from my mouth.

That was when my body started tingling. My vision doubled, blurred, then finally, everything went dark...

4.

The dark enveloped me, and then that was replaced by the light. The two danced around and swapped places constantly, but in spite of this, the brightness of whatever room I was in never actually seemed to change.

The floor… Wasn't there. I walked along it, never once hearing footsteps, despite the fact that my heels should have been making a distinctive clicking sound. The place didn't seem to have any sort of air, though I wasn't having trouble breathing. The whole thing was creeping me out.

I kept walking, despite no obvious evidence that I was even moving. The place was just a giant nothing, for all I knew I was walking in place. I stopped to look around for a moment to get my bearings, but my bearings never really seemed to get got.

I decided to sit down. Either something would happen, or I’d bore myself to death not doing anything. If I were lucky, one of those alternate selves Dean talked about would show up at some point.

A shadow crossed over me. I looked up and saw… Well… Me. A girl that looked exactly like me, wearing a short sleeved shirt and a pair of blue jeans. She held out her hand for me to take, so I did. She pulled me to my feet and patted me down like I was dusty.

“There you go, good as new,” she said, a smile on her face.

“Who are… You?”

“Technically, you. My name’s Kenneth.”

“You’re the guy everybody keeps mistaking me for! Well, but you’re not a guy.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not, and, well, this is complicated.”

“Actually, that Dean girl explained it, I’m… We’re split personalities, and you’re the dominant one, but I’m the one that took hold when your magical sorceress powers decided to come out, for some reason.”

She scratched at her head. “Well. That… No, I can't say that makes sense. I’m a sorceress?”

I nodded. “Yeah. And apparently your body changed because of it. I guess boys can't be sorceresses.”

She rolled her eyes. “That makes sense. Stupid as it was to hear out loud.” She walked around me, as if looking for something but not quite certain what. I looked around again, wondering if maybe I could actually find something if I actually knew I should be looking for something. Of course, that attempt failed horribly.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for the way out.”

“How do you know there is one?”

She grabbed me by the shoulders. “Look, this is your mind, this is my mind, this is our mind. There is a way out, we’ve just gotta find it.”

5.

It took us five hours of searching before we finally found the way out. The girl, Kendra, looked completely out of it. I wondered what she’d been told in the real world to make her look so down.

I also wondered why she would be a split personality to me. Was there some part of me that wanted to be female? She seemed so very different from me, it almost made me wonder what her “life” had been like. Made me wonder if she still had a dad.

The more I thought about it, I wondered what would happen to her when we made it out of here. Would I be in control of our body? Would she? Would we merge somehow, and have the memories of both our lives? Would one of us just die off being pushed to the back of our mind? Would the other be a nagging voice at the back of the mind?

Did I really have the right to be in control of our body? Her life was just as real to her as mine was to me. I couldn’t take that away from her, it would be wrong. I wondered if there was something I could do to help her. If I was really the sorceress that I apparently was, maybe there was some way to give her her own body.

The exit before us looked an awful lot like that doorway made of light that I’d seen before I didn’t wake up. The doorway was about six times larger than any real door I’d ever seen, and yet I was certain only one of us would be able to go through it. I stepped toward it, but stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Kendra asked.

I turned to her. “What’ll happen to us?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Dean didn’t tell me that.”

“What if one of us… Y’know… Dies?”

The color drained from her face. “If what they’re saying is true, I’m not real anyway. I can’t die, I’m just a part of you. You’re the real us, and I’m… The part of you born female, I guess.”

I stepped away from the door. “But if I’m really a sorceress, wouldn’t that make you the real one?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know, okay? Maybe nothing will happen to either of us and we’ll both be okay when you step through that door, you’ll just be the dominant personality again. I’ll go find some cave in our mind to live in. But we’ll never know anything, our body will probably die, and then Mom and Amy and Gabby and everybody we know will watch it all happen if you don’t go through that door.”

I felt tears welling up in my eyes. She was actually willing to live with whatever consequences there were. I took a deep breath, then took a step toward the door.

Then a thought crossed my mind.

“Hey, while you were… Y’know, me, us, whatever, did you and Gabby do anything?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “What? What are you talking about?”

I walked back over to her. “Well, Gabby and I kinda had sex the other day, and I was just - “

She cut me off. “I’m a girl, doofus, and so are you right now. There was nothing I could do with Gabby.”

“So what? I was a girl when we had sex.”

She shivered. “Ugh… I didn’t know that and I didn’t want to know that. I’m straight, you didn’t have to tell me you aren’t.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Male brain, male urges, okay? Besides, Gabby’s gay, too.”

Shock spread across her face. “I didn’t know that either.”

That made sense. If Kendra wasn’t gay, Gabby would have had no reason to come out to her, since she didn’t come out to me until I was a girl.

I patted her on the shoulder and then turned back to the doorway. The light only grew brighter as I neared it. Then a warmth encased me, wrapped itself around me and spread inside me. The feeling was so strange and yet familiar at the same time.

And then for whatever reason, I had a song by Men At Work stuck in my head.

6.

The reason for the music in my head was revealed to be Mom listening to the 80s station on XM radio. I sat up and rubbed at my forehead. There was Amy, Gabby, Mom and someone I assumed was “that Dean girl”, though she was clearly just an androgynous guy in absurdly cute clothes. Definitely cute enough to be mistaken for a girl.

They were all looking at me with concerned looks on their faces, especially Gabby and Mom. I just looked around at all of them and prayed somebody else would say something first. When it became obvious that nobody was gonna talk, I just said, “Hi.” It surprised me for a second that my voice was still female, but, it probably shouldn’t have. If I’m gonna be a sorceress, I guess I’ve gotta have the anatomy to have the ‘ess’ on the end.

None of them said anything. I could tell they were all anxious, probably not even sure who they would be talking to. I couldn’t blame them. They’d just spent the better part of an afternoon with Kendra, and now I was back in control.

Mom was the first one to say anything. “Sweetie, are you… Kenny or Kendra?”

“Kenny,” I said. “Though I guess Kendra’s probably the more appropriate name, now. I’m not the girl that didn’t know she’d been a boy, though.”

Gabby breathed a sigh of relief. So did Dean. Amy just looked relieved, but neither she nor Mom sighed. “It’s about time you’re back,” Gabby said.

I pivoted on my bed, but didn’t get up. For some reason, I was exhausted now. Something told me it had something to do with the heels. “How long was Kendra here?” I asked.

“Not too long, just a little over a day.”

“A little over a day?”

Amy said, “Well, Dean and I had to get here.” She stepped closer. “It’s like a five hour drive and we couldn’t exactly make it in a night.”

“What did she do the whole time?”

Mom answered, “When we weren’t asking her questions, she took naps and watched TV.”

Dean stood up. “Okay, it looks like we’ve settled your personalities and put you back in control. Now I’ve just gotta text my mom and ask her what to do next.”

“Your mom?” I asked.

She looked confused, then smacked herself in the head. “Duh. The other one. My mom, the sorceress that turned Amy into Amy, fixed my life and helped you discover your feminine side. She’s our principal at school, and she adopted me after getting me away from my shitty old family.”

I realized for the first time that I was wearing a skirt and my panties were pretty plainly visible. I closed my legs instantly and probably turned red as a beet. “Um, so… Uh… Kendra said something about me being a sorceress?”

She nodded. “Yeah, my mom’s about eighty-five percent sure that something you did the other day when she let you experience femininity awakened latent magical power inside you, and then that power changed you to accommodate the fact that a sorceress’ magic physically needs a woman’s body to sustain it.”

Gabby said, “That seems kinda sexist, but if it keeps Ken as a girl, I’ll take it.”

Dean turned to her. “It’s actually a sad trade-off.” She turned back to me. “The magical power of a sorceress in a way replaces your reproductive system. Your body contains so much magic that you’re rendered infertile.”

“Completely?” I asked.

She nodded. “If there’s been a case of a sorceress having children, it’s never been recorded.”

I scooted across my bed back against my bedroom wall and hugged my knees to my chest. In the span of a day, I’d caused a split personality to come forth, be repressed again, become permanently female because of magic, and lost the ability to ever have children.

Tomorrow was going to be the hardest first day of my life ever.