And that brings us all back to this morning.

    I was slammed against the wall of my entranceway. “What the fuck, Jamie? The fuck have you given me?” Snake sputtered, his heavy breath raging out of his nostrils onto my face. He was holding the gender change potion in his right hand, still only half drank. “Why the fuck do I wanna be a girl!?” He admitted, cheeks red and tears pooling at his eyes.

    I was absolutely stunned. Snake, my bully, was emotionally opening himself to me and saying words that rang eerily… relatable. A question I didn’t know I needed to ask myself, and when he did for him, it kicked the door open for my own feelings to pour out. My gaze dropped to our feet. “I dunno, Snake… I… I do too...”

    I could almost hear the gears in his head turning. And one moment later, his gaze softened. He dropped me back down, then wrapped his arms around me and gave me the best hug of my life. It was tight and intimate, like we understood perfectly how each other felt. Like it was the first time ever Snake met someone that understood his feelings, he had been even more starved for compassion than I’d been, and we wanted nothing more than to give it to one another.

    “Everything alright, boys?” I heard my mother call out from the kitchen.

    We exchanged a pained expression and climbed the stairs up to my room.

    “So…”

    “Yeah…”

    “Yup.”

    Snake was sat on my bed, and I on my desk chair. I’d opened my computer, was browsing the web looking for answers. But typing in ‘gender change potion’ had only lead to pages upon pages of… I think it was weird kink writing? But nothing relating to a real life equivalent.

    “I fucking want to punch you right now, Jamie. For all this. But I can’t even do that. Makes me feel too… Manly.” I heard him mutter behind me, his tone dropping lower with every word.

    “I… I’m sorry, Snake. I didn’t know why I’d grabbed that potion of all things, but…” I sighed. “I guess I… Wanted it to do something else.” 

    I changed my search to ‘I want to turn into a girl’, and found a weird website. Under its logo, it said “You could totally be a girl if you wanted.” I eyed it confusedly.

    “Fucking hell, ma- Jamie…” Snake threw his head backwards onto my mattress, holding the bottle in his hand and being as mesmerised by it as I’d been yesterday. “Is this how you feel every day?”

    “I guess it is, but I would never have noticed it without all this…” The website sported a big, red, ‘turn me into a girl’ button that gave me funny feelings I was starting to understand the nature of. I skimmed the rest of the page, seeing words like ‘transition’ and ‘transgender’. I had seen them before of course, but I always thought they’d referred to crossdressers? Clearly, this page didn’t agree. I looked up ‘transgender’ next, so that I properly knew what I was struggling with.

    “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck this shit.” Snake stood back up and started pacing around the room, his walking was a mess where he constantly switched between walking like a girl, and falling back into his habits, grimacing every time it happened. “Worst part is when I looked at the label and saw what kind of potion it was, I thought it’d give me a girl body, not a girl mind. Then it just all fucking hit me at once.”

    “Yeah. I’m sorry. I saw it and just… Poof. My mind went blank and I grabbed it and I didn’t even notice I didn’t put it back and then someone came and I couldn’t look for the strength potion anymore and I also thought it’d change the body rather than the mind and-” I stopped myself to take a breath. “I’m sorry. My thoughts are just as much a mess as yours right now.”

    “I get that. I’m thrown into a world I was never in, while you discover you always was in it.” He sighed, then started looking over my shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to live like this, Jamie.”

    I continued looking through the internet at words and their meanings, ranging from transition to non-binary, and our gazes both stopped on the same one. I read the definition, felt a pang in my gut I knew Snake was also having. The word escaped my lips in a mutter. The feeling of mismatch with one’s own body: “Dysphoria…”

    Snake was so enthralled he surprised me by reading quicker than me. “Fucking hell. We have to become girls, Jamie. That’s the only cure.”

    I blinked at the screen a few times, before slouching into my chair. From what little I understood, cure seemed to be an extreme word, but I get what Snake meant by that. We exchanged a glance, then I looked at the potion he was still holding. “I’ll… I’ll manage, Snake. I’ve lived my whole life like this so far, I can continue, probably. You just… Drink the rest of the potion and turn your mind back into a boy’s.”

    It was his turn to glance at the potion, and where his grip before was tight, like it was his most precious thing in the world, he instead started to hold it from the tip of his fingers, seemingly disgusted with it. “I don’t want to.”

    “...Why?”

    “...I’d never have drank it in the first place if I knew what it did, sure, but…” He scratched the back of his hair, looking for the right words. “As a boy, the idea of being turned into a girl was scary… And now, as a gir-... With a girl’s mind, the idea of turning my mind into a boy’s is just as scary. I don’t want to.”

    I glanced up at him… Her? Should I start calling him her? ...I glanced up at Snake, noticed we were both shaking heavily. I lifted myself from my chair and wrapped my arms around my… I wanted to call Snake a friend, now, tentatively. My friend. And my friend did the same.

    “What do we even do now?” I asked.

    Snake paused and thought. Stopping the embrace, my friend moved to my computer and typed in ‘change body alchemy’, finding that, sure enough, it could go further than just muscles and details. I threw Snake a frightened glance. “We’re gonna get out of this the same way I got in it.”