You slam your body into the door and lock it. Luckily your mother doesn't know how to pick the lock, and your voice is Adam's and not David's. "Adam? What are you doing in there?" she asks accusingly.
"I'm getting changed, Mom! You can't come in while I'm changing!" Well, technically, at the moment you aren't lying—you ARE changing, just not in the way she thinks. Well, you will put Adam's—your—clothes in a minute or two, as soon as the changing stops. In the mirror, you see that your eyes are still green, and you still have the beard and body hair, but the hair, both body hair and head hair, is changing colour. It's lightened from black to brown, and then changes into blond, and your head hair has shortened. You study your face, knowing that that's very similar to what you'll look like in a few years, with a blond beard. Well, other than the green eyes and the childish shape of your face. Well, that, and you'll switch back with Brian, so YOU won't be the one who looks like that.
"Well, I'm going to start cooking dinner and I want you to help me." You know that you won't help her cook dinner. Adam never has, and since you're Adam, you still won't.
By now, your eyes have changed from green back to blue. Your body hair is vanishing, almost gone. You're completely back to normal—well, "normal" being Adam and not Brian—other than the fact that you have a scruffy blond beard.
You walk over to your bed and pick up your clothes, the ones that you'd left there before changing back from Dave. You pull on your shirt, but leave your boxers and jeans because you can't pull them over your shoes and you don't want to take the shoes off yet, because although at least five minutes have passed, your beard isn't gone yet.
Slightly panicking, you stand in front of the mirror, shifting from foot to foot, hoping that you'll finish changing soon. Surprisingly, shifting your weight seems to work—your beard completely retracts into your face and disappears in a matter of seconds. The slightly queasy feeling you get when you change has gone. You take off the shoes and socks, hide your socks in your school backpack, and put your boxers and jeans.
You unlock your bedroom door but don't open it. Then you go back to your bed and sit down on it and try to figure out why it took so long to change back from David's body to your own. You think of Adam's body as your own now, even though you started as Brian. You don't even notice it anymore.
About the change, you think how long it took might have something to do with changing back into bodies that you'd been in before. You decide to test it out the next day after school.
• • •
The next day, Monday, you walk to school. The socks are still in your bag. You got an email late last night from the school to let you know that most the teachers will be going on strike today, so there's a only a skeleton staff and school will only last half of the day, and you will have free access to the PE locker rooms after school. You texted Brian your plan to switch back after school in the hours before he has to go to karate, and he agrees.
During school, neither of you dares to mention the socks because there are other students around and you don't want them to hear about the socks.
The day passes quickly and before you know it, it's midday. All of the staff leave immediately, because they weren't payed to do work after school, and all of the kids leave, too. You and Brian make your way to the PE locker rooms. When you get there, you lock the door to the outside behind you and jam it with a chair, just in case someone has keys and tries to come in.
"Okay," you say. "I was experimenting with the socks after I went home—to your old home, my current one—last night, and I discovered that it takes longer to transform back into someone you've been before. I'm not one hundred percent certain about this, but I think I'm right."
"Well, dude, you're the smart guy. I trust you." You both walk into the changing rooms. "Hey, dude, do you want to switch straight back, or do you want to be someone else for a few minutes first?"
"Let's be someone else for a little while. Just for fun," you say. "But if we want to get anyone's shoes, we need to pick the lock to the PE teachers' office and get the combinations."
Brian made his way over to the door of the teachers' room and picked it using a bobby pin. He opened a drawer and pulled out a list of students, their lockers, and their lockers' combinations. But who to choose…