Jacob (if he could even be called that anymore, and he suspected that very likely couldn’t be) looked around nervously, lightly stepping from one foot to the other, as he tried to figure out what to do next. Unfortunately, even this slightest of movements only served to send Jacob’s newly blossomed bosom jiggling, every motion further forcing home the reminder of how very much he was now a she.
Emily might look over at her at any moment, and that could start off a whole new series of bizarreness. Who was she? Where had Jacob gone, and how had he and this unknown new woman swapped places so quickly without Emily having noticed? On the other hand, attempting to simply walk away might draw Emily’s attention all the same. Was it better to wait or to move?
Emily answered the unspoken question for Jacob when she turned her head towards Jacob anyway, a flash of fresh recognition lighting up her face.
“Hello, Ms. Smith,” Emily said, much to Jacob’s surprise. “Visiting your parents?”
Jacob was about to reply, although she had no idea how she could answer such a question when even she didn’t know what was happening, when memories drew themselves up from within her mind. Of course, Jacob remembered her parents, and the mental images she saw in her mind’s eye were nearly identical to the people she had always called ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad.’ However, the people in her memory were older than she had thought they were. It took her a moment to realize that even her mind, and apparently others around as well, had not been left untouched by whatever this strange metal ring seemed to be.
If Jacob had been made a woman, then her parents had had a daughter rather than a son, and they had to have been older to have had a daughter who was currently twenty-five. But how did she know her own new age, Jacob wondered? She was obviously more mature than a teenager, as her weighty chest and ample backside and other curves attested, but how did she feel with such certainty that she had been born twenty-five years, three months, and eleven days ago from this very date?
New memories were also filtering into Jacob’s mind now, or rather, her old memories were reshaping, changing to fit this new life into which she’d been thrust. Thankfully, it seemed this version of Jacob still remembered her old life, but the new memories flowing in from the old seemed more recent, fresher somehow, as if they cast a shadow over the old. Just thinking about it made her mind ache, but it was undeniable that everything around her was triggering memories of being and growing up as this woman.
There was a stop sign down the street where Jacob had crashed her tricycle as a little girl. She remembered climbing the overgrown willow tree in the Michael Anderson’s old yard a few houses down when she’d been thirteen. Four years later, she remembered she had given Michael Anderson himself a goodbye kiss before he moved away that summer.
Jacob’s eyes widened, long, thick lashes fluttering as she realized--remembered?--this last factoid and memory. She was a woman, and she was attracted to men, just as she had been a girl and been attracted to boys, ever since the summer she entered her teens. She tried to remember something else, but the harder one tries to think of the thing they don’t want occupying their minds, the longer that thing kicks back its feet on the mind’s living couch and makes itself at home.
After Michael, there had been a short succession of boys through college. That had all ended when she’d met Max, another bright student in the education program. Education? Schools, classes, homework--Jacob had always thought she would have left them all behind once she was freed from the educational system, but instead she’d found her passion in educating the very type of people she had once hated to be numbered among.
That was how Emily knew her, why she had called Jacob ‘Ms. Smith,’ she both realized and remembered. Jacob was serving as a student teacher at Emily’s high school, where Jacob herself had attended not too long ago. In fact, Jacob’s new memories were telling her that she had babysat Emily when Jacob was a teen and Emily was very young, Emily’s parents having moved into the neighborhood several years after Mr. and Mrs. Smith grew their own family here.
But, ‘Jacob?’ No, this new persona didn’t seem to think that name sounded right. Her parents had named her Jamie, hadn’t they? Then why did she remember being a boy named Jacob? She was Jacob, wasn’t she? It was all so confusing, but something fiercely demanded in her mind that she was still the same person, even if she was so heavily altered it was hard to tell the difference.
Whatever the case, Jamie--for it was becoming increasingly hard to think of herself as any other name, though she knew in her heart she used to be Jacob--was broken out of her recollection when Emily asked, “Ms. Smith? Are you alright? Should I call Mr. Hutchinson?”
Hutchinson? Of course, how could she forget? Max Hutchinson. The man whom Jamie had fallen in love with at college. The man whom Jamie had, despite being resolute on keeping her maiden name, married.