Well, I've Been Afraid of Changing / 'Cause I Built My Life Around You
“… The first step towards any change or transformation is to accept ourselves exactly as we are with all of our weaknesses, fears, attachments and desires. We need to first feel that we are worthy of love and acceptance exactly as we are. Whatever we reject in ourselves or others will resist change.”
Najemy, Robert. (1985). The Psychology of Happiness. Holistic Harmony Publishers.
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The afternoon had proved to be thoroughly entertainment for the strangely unfazed Kaitlyn. A few hours earlier, she had found herself inexplicably teleported away from solitary confinement in her bedroom and back out onto the front lawn, where she stood, dazed, listening to her sister Emily.
“So, please Jay,” Emily was saying, looking directly into Kaitlyn's eyes. “Take that stupid thing you found in the hole and hide it in your house. Don't let Kaitlyn ever know you found anything there. She needs to be more grounded in reality and less prone to these manic swings of fantasy. Will you do that for me, Jay?”
Kaitlyn blinked a few times in silent bemusement, then finally looked down and saw she was holding tarnished bronze annulus thoroughly discolored by a patina of verdigris.
“The Toroid of Transformation!” she exclaimed, recognizing the object that had haunted her dreams lately.
“Yes, Jay,” sighed Emily. “I think that's what she called it. Anyhow, please just hide it from Kaitlyn.”
That was when all the pieces came together for Kaitlyn: after she'd been dragged inside by her mother and ordered to do schoolwork, Jacob and Emily had kept investigating the hole in the yard she'd been working on. They'd found the Toroid – just where she had known it would be. And somehow, Jacob had clumsily activated it. Though it seemed insane, this was the only theory that fit all the facts. Through means yet-to-be-explained, Jacob had used the Toroid (probably unintentionally) to switch places with Kaitlyn.
That was why Kaitlyn's own sister kept calling her “Jay.” And that was why Kaitlyn was outside in the yard, instead of shut up in her room doing homework. And that was why Kaitlyn had suddenly changed clothes, come to think of it! She was now dressed head-to-toe in the same clothing she'd seem Jacob wearing just a few minutes ago.
Rather than panic at this exceedingly unlikely turn-of-events, Kaitlyn simply smiled with impish delight. She now possessed the magic artifact she'd been dreaming of, she was free (for the moment) of the scourge of homework, and she was in a delightful position to play around with the freedom that came from not-being-yourself.
“Sure, Emily!” Kaitlyn said, trying hard not to burst out laughing. “I'll go inside my house right now. And I'll hide this in my bedroom. I absolutely will not let 'Kaitlyn' get at this thing, under any circumstances. Oh, no, no, no. She's not going to get to touch this thing!”
At this, Kaitlyn couldn't help but chuckle aloud gleefully at the thought of Jacob, filled with panic and dread, at suddenly being thrust into her old life. Though she held nothing against the boy from next door, Kaitlyn was too much of a prankster to resist such an opportunity to sow chaos.
Giggling like the girl she truthfully was, Kaitlyn ran from Emily and headed straight into the unfamiliar domain that was the Smith family home. Knowing the rest of the Smith family would perceive her as fifteen-year old Jacob Smith, she did not fear being confronted as an intruder. But possession of Jacob's life had not conveyed upon Kaitlyn any of Jacob's day-to-day knowledge and experience, and it took a bit of exploring and a process of trial-and-error before Kaitlyn finally discovered which room in the house was now her new bedroom.
“Typically stinky mess that would belong to a smelly, teenage guy!” she said, dramatically holding her nose while exploring the room. The bed was a rumpled nightmare of twisted sheets. The walls were plastered with posters of comic book and video game characters: scantily-clad females with anatomically improbable breasts, for the most part! The floor was an obstacle course of books, DVDs, mounds of unwashed clothes, empty soda cans, and scattered fast food wrappers.
“I wonder if he has any secret, embarrassing stuff squirreled away in here?” Katilyn thought aloud, again indulging her sense of mischief. “I've got to find a good spot to secrete away the Toroid anyhow. So, if I were a dude – which I now am – where would I hide stuff?”
A peak under the mattress revealed a stack of salacious magazines: glossy pages of nude women in lascivious poses.
“Eww, you pervert!” she groaned. Wrinkling her nose in disgust, Kaitlyn left them untouched for now, vowing to throw them out and replace them with something anodyne before switching back with Jacob … maybe issues of Reader's Digest or AARP: The Magazine. That would teach him a lesson!
For the moment, Kaitlyn moved her search elsewhere, proceeding to rummage through the rest of Jacob's bedroom. The back of the closet proved more fruitful for Kaitlyn's purposes. Jacob had a disorganized pile of cardboard boxes stacked atop one another, each one practically bursting with old comic books. Digging down to the box at the bottom of the stack, Kaitlyn excavated a handful of comics, set them in a sloppy pile on the closet floor, and filled the void in the box with the corroded, copper ring. Then she carefully re-arranged the boxes to resemble how they'd been when she first found them.
“Now, I'm the only one with knowledge of the whereabouts of the Toroid of Transformation,” she said proudly. “Anytime I get bored with being 'Jacob Smith,' I can dig it out and figure out a way of rotating reality back to its former configuration. But in the meantime, Jacob can sweat a bit doing my homework and getting treated as Emily's little sister.”
She indulged in a dramatic, diabolical laugh.
“Now what?” she said, looking around her new room again.
Kaitlyn proceeded to locate a mirror, which she used to entertain herself by making the barmecidal image of Jacob affect all sorts of facial expressions. She flexed her phantom muscles, puffed out her chest in a few macho poses, and found great hilarity in making her own new laryngeal prominence bob about in the mirror.
“I wonder if I could grow a mustache now?” she asked her masculine reflection.
When the humor in cavorting before the mirror had finally worn thin, Kaitlyn started sifting through Jacob's wardrobe with an eye for unusual, comical outfits she could force him to wear the next few days. Her efforts ceased only when Jacob's parents called “him” to dinner.
“What's for dinner, mommy?” giggled Kaitlyn skipping towards the table with a distinctly effeminate gait.
“I could do without the sarcasm please?” snapped Jacob's mother. “And we're having meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Wash up first.”
“Couldn't I just have a garden salad instead?” smirked Kaitlyn.
“You'll eat what your mother prepared,” said Jacob's father, looking a bit puzzled. “And anyway: since when do you eat salad?”
“Oh, I'm thinking of re-inventing myself as a brand new person,” Kaitlyn said cryptically. She then sauntered off to the Smith family bathroom, and spent an exceedingly long time washing her hands and practicing silly grimaces in the mirror.
“Hurry up!” snapped Jacob's father. “Your food's getting cold.”
“Coming, oh father dearest!” Kaitlyn retorted in a squeaky falsetto.
Both her new parents exchanged quizzical glances at one another as she took her place at the table, but neither spoke to Kaitlyn.
“So, Ashley – how was cheerleading today?” asked Mrs. Smith.
“Awesome,” replied Jacob's older sister, flipping back her long, blond hair. “We managed a perfect swing flip. It was pretty sweet. We are, like, totally the best we've ever been. ”
“I can't wait to see it at your next competition,” answered Mrs. Smith.
Is this why Jacob was always so glum-faced and boring, thought Kaitlyn. He lives in the shadow of the pretty princess of perfection. Perhaps after Kaitlyn figured out how to use the Toroid she'd have to make a few special “improvements” to Ashley Smith, Queen of High School. Likewise, a few improvements should be made to Michael Jones – the idiot pretty boy dating Kaitlyn's sister Emily. He deserved to be taken take a few pegs. But one thing at a time, Kaitlyn warned herself. Monkeying about blindly with the Toroid is probably what caused Jacob to get trapped in Kaitlyn's life in the first place! She'd have to exercise caution in deciphering all the ins-and-outs of what the Toroid of Transformation was capable of. And in the meantime, there was no rush. Kaitlyn, ever the eccentric teenage crackpot, was having the time of her life impersonating the neighbor boy. Tomorrow she'd explore his life at school, and maybe after a couple days eventually get bored enough with the novelty of all this to take a crack at properly experimenting with the Toroid.