We were still naked, cuddled up next to each other, when I felt the jekyllase starting to wear off. I jumped up and started pulling Scott’s underwear out of the bag I’d brought before the change could go very far.

Cynthia looked sadly at me for a moment and then pulled the sheet up to her chin and turned her face to the wall. “I won’t look while you’re getting dressed,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, already more Scott than Jennifer by that point. My hips were narrow enough I could get the underwear over them, though my junk didn’t fill it up completely until a few moments later. I silently finished getting dressed, with my back to Cynthia, and then packed up Jennifer’s scattered clothes and shoes in the dry cleaning bag and paper sack.

“Um, Cynthia... do you know where Jennifer’s bra is?”

“Hmm,” she said, rolling over. “There it is, under the desk. I must have tossed it there when...”

“Yeah, thanks.” I bent down, pulled it out and stuffed it in the sack. “Uh, tell Emily I’ll see her tomorrow or Monday.”

“I will. Do you think you’ll take jekyllase again before Christmas break?”

“I don’t know... probably. When’s Emily’s last final? How long is she sticking around after that?”

“She has a Trigonometry final on Thursday afternoon, and she’s driving home Friday.”

“Oh. I have a final on Friday morning, and I’ll leave just after... maybe you and Jennifer can do something early in the week.”

“I doubt she will want to take jekyllase again that soon, but we can hope.”

“I guess you’re right. Bye, then.”

When I returned to my room, I found Walter silently studying. He barely acknowledged me with a nod. I put away Jennifer’s clothes, jewelry and makeup — she never had gotten Cynthia to show her how to use it — and settled down to studying. I might regret not spending most of today studying, when it came time for the exams next week, but right now I was in too much emotional turmoil to clearly regret or rejoice in what had happened, what Jennifer had done — what I had done.

---

I spent all day Sunday studying — even taking a book and notebook with me to the dining hall for breakfast and supper. I ate a sandwich in my room for lunch. Randall also spent a fair amount of time studying, though he went out for lunch and didn’t come back for a few hours. I said a distracted hi to Darrell and Emily at breakfast, and sat with Linda for supper, but we didn’t talk much.

I was irritable, headachy and distracted, not able to study as much as I should, because I hadn’t had a cigarette since Saturday night. Toward evening, I finally gave in and lit up a cigarette, promising myself I’d quit for real after finals, during the Christmas break.

Monday I had the final I’d mostly been studying for over the weekend; the others were on Thursday and Friday. When I saw Emily at the dining hall on Monday evening, she said: “I, um — if you see Jennifer, could you tell her I’ll be busy all week? And I’ve got a date with Darrell after my last final on Thursday?”

“Yeah, she told me she’ll be busy too,” I said. “Studying, you know how it is.”

So I didn’t become Jennifer again until after Christmas break, in 1971. Linda and I studied together a couple of times for our American History final, but we didn’t go on a proper date again until January, either.

The first few days of Christmas break I was pretty distracted, thinking about Jennifer and what she meant, whether I was transsexual or bisexual or what, and about Linda and whether she’d still want to date when I figured out what I was, and about Cynthia and whether Emily would want to keep taking jekyllase, and whether it was cheating on Linda for Jennifer to get together with Cynthia. I wasn’t going into withdrawal from jekyllase; it’s not that kind of drug, but I missed Jennifer more or less the way I missed my friends from school — the way I’d missed Robert since he went off to Vietnam. More at some times than others, when something reminded me of them. I was suffering nicotine withdrawal, having left my cigarettes at school, but with my dad and aunt and older cousins all smoking, it wasn’t long before I bummed a cigarette off of someone and then bought another couple of packs next time I went out.

After that, I was able to put my obsessive thoughts aside for a while and visit with my parents and grandma, aunts and uncles and cousins and friends from high school.

---

When I returned to school, Randall wasn’t back yet. I unpacked my stuff and went to see if Linda was back. She wasn’t, so I went over to the library to see if my interlibrary loans from the previous semester had come in yet. Several of them had, so I paid the postage and copy fees and took them back to my dorm to read. Randall was unpacking when I returned.

I didn’t learn a lot more from the additional articles about transsexuality I’d requested. It was more of the same, with a few more case studies, none of which sounded a lot like me, as far as I could tell. But I hit the jackpot with one of the articles about jekyllase. It was by a psychiatrist who’d had some of his patients try it under supervision, and he described some of the physical and personality changes he’d observed, and how it had helped some of them realize things about themselves they’d been in denial about. One of them was like me: a man who changed into a woman under the influence of jekyllase. There weren’t a lot of details — two paragraphs out of a four-page article — but the author did say that after using jekyllase a few times, and talking to the patient about how he felt about his hyde, he decided the patient was transsexual and put her on hormone injections. He also mentioned that the patient’s sexual orientation didn’t change — his hyde was a Lesbian, and in the months since taking jekyllase and going on hormone injections, the jekyll was so far not exhibiting any attraction to men. (One of the other articles I’d read had mentioned that some transsexuals looked like heterosexual men at first, but when they started taking female hormones and dressing in female clothes, they started reporting an attraction to men. It wasn’t the most common pattern, they said. I wondered if they could have been bisexual, like Emily and Jennifer — and maybe me? — and in denial about their attraction to men until after they got official permission to think of themselves as women.)

That gave me a lot to think about. By the time I finished reading those articles, it was already suppertime.

“You’re already studying hard,” Randall said when I finally looked up from my reading. “I need to let Walter out more often. Or stop repressing him so much and let him seep into me, one or the other. I barely passed a couple of classes last semester.”

“I didn’t do so great either,” I admitted. “I got nothing better than a B, and one C.”

“Still better than me,” he said. “If I don’t get my grades up, I’ll get kicked out and lose my draft deferment.”

We contemplated that in grim silence for a few moments. Then I said: “Well, I’m heading out for supper. You want to join me?”

We walked to the cafeteria together. Once inside, I looked around for people I knew. I spotted Emily and Darrell sitting at a small table, and decided not to interrupt their reunion, so I sat with Randall. A few minutes later, though, Linda plopped down beside me.

“Miss me?” she asked.

“Did I!” We kissed. At some point while we were kissing, Randall went off and left us alone.

“So,” she said after that, “have you figured out anything more?”

“Nothing much over the Christmas break,” I said. “My thoughts just chased each other in circles, when I found time to think about it in between visiting family and friends. But when I got back I found some articles I’d requested via interlibrary loan waiting for me...” I told her about that article and the guy who changed into a woman when he took jekyllase.

“So the psychiatrist who wrote the article thinks this person is transsexual?”

“Yes. And I guess I probably am, but there’s this one thing holding me back: Jennifer doesn’t think so. And she should know. She’s supposed to be a version of me without the denial and repression, right?”

“I guess. I haven’t done the research on jekyllase you have. And when we talked about it a while back, you didn’t sound like you wanted to be a woman full-time.”

“I guess the next thing to do is turn into Jennifer next weekend and let her read the article and tell me what she thinks about it.”

“Or — I don’t know. You could write to the person who wrote the article and talk to them about it, maybe.”

“Huh. I doubt they’d tell me anything more. Doctor-patient confidentiality, you know.”

“There might be other details that aren’t private information, but which wouldn’t fit into the space limits of a journal article. That article talked about a bunch of different patients, right?”

“Yeah, it just had a couple of paragraphs about her. Maybe you’re right.”

I started writing a letter to the author of that article during a boring bit of lecture in class the next day, finished it that evening, and posted it when I swung by the campus post office to check my mail after breakfast the next morning.

This semester I shared one class with Linda and one with Emily. After Political Science on Monday, I hung out with Emily for a few minutes before we had to get to our next classes.

“Do you want to take jekyllase next weekend?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Let me talk to Darrell and see which day suits best. But I kind of miss Cynthia.”

“Me too. I mean, I miss Jennifer, and I feel like she misses Cynthia.”

“Have you seen Linda since you’ve been back?”

“Yeah, we had supper together last night. Not a fancy date, just at the dining hall.”

She was quiet for a few moments. “I hope you two are happy together. Things are... not quite right between me and Darrell. I’m not sure what’s wrong.”

“Do you want me to talk to him for you?”

“No... I wouldn’t know what to ask you to say.”

---

Wednesday evening, I went to see Larry Ryman and bought several doses of jekyllase — all he had on hand. He said he could get more by the following week, and I said no hurry, it would take me a month to use up what I’d just bought.

Emily told me that she had plans with Darrell on Saturday, so we decided that Cynthia and Jennifer would meet late Sunday morning and spend the day together. I made a date with Linda for Friday evening; we went out to eat, and talked mostly about our Christmas vacations, and a little about my problem.

“Are you taking jekyllase tomorrow?”

“No, Sunday. Cynthia won’t be able to hang out until then.”

She nodded. “Jennifer doesn’t like to hang out with Emily?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. This was getting close to the area I’d promised not to talk about. “Jennifer and Emily get along fine, but they aren’t as close friends as Jennifer and Cynthia.”

“What about you and Emily or Cynthia?”

I thought a moment and realized there was something I hadn’t told her. “I used to date Emily,” I said. “Last year, for a few weeks. We’re still friends, but we don’t hang out that much when I’m Scott because, well, Emily didn’t want me scaring off other guys, making them think she was with me. And now she doesn’t want me making Darrell jealous.” But the moment I said that, I wondered if that was the real reason, or the only reason.

“Yeah, I can see that. It’s good Cynthia and Jennifer can hang out. I’d like to see Jennifer again Sunday if it suits.”

“I’ll... let her know. Try to hang out by your dorm’s phone for a while Sunday, around ten or eleven, and she might call you.”