"You're not a girl?" squeaked out Eve, her expressive green eyes growing wide with shock.
Bill shook his head, causing his newly acquired mane of curly hair to swish across his smooth face.
"No, I'm actually an eighteen year old boy. Man. I'm an eighteen year old man named Bill Strasserman, and you took something from me by mistake. It's a pretty green gemstone, shaped like a teardrop with a little golden pearl in the middle, about yay big. Apparently magical in nature. You were holding it in your hands ten minutes ago during play rehearsal before you wished yourself here."
"Oh my God! How do you know about that?!?"
"Because it's my gemstone. Pay attention! When I realized that the gemstone was missing from my backpack, which is a family heirloom by the way, so it's very important that I get it back, I ran all the way from McFly's back to school because I knew you were here, and then I sneaked backstage behind the auditorium. I saw you pull the stone out a makeup drawer while you were changing..."
"You were watching me change?!?" shouted Eve loudly enough to be heard across the gym floor.
"I told you that Willow was a lezzie!" shouted back one of the mean girl cheerleaders, watching their saintly captain politely deal with one of Shermer High's ignominious lower class. A couple of other cheerleaders began giggling cruelly at the glib comment.
The redheaded beauty and the braces wearing geek ignored them.
"Look, I'm not a lesbian, and I'm not a Peeping Tom. I'm just a regular guy who wants to set things back the way they were. I sneaked backstage because I knew you had the damn thing, but then you made your wish about not wanting not wanting to be in the play anymore, and now here we are. Look, could we talk about this in the hallway, Eve?" asked Bill, already tired of his high pitched, reedy voice, and the disapproving gazes of the stuck up popular crowd.
Eugene looked behind him, watching Joanna silently appraise the dorky younger girl claiming to be a boy. The blonde carried an air of absolute authority about her, as if the gym was a castle, the cheerleaders her subjects, and she their undisputed queen.
The beleaguered janitor turned around, almost intimidated by her co captain. He didn't know what to make of this Willow character's story. It sounded crazy, like something out a bad episode of The Twilight Zone. But then again, so did his story. Who would honestly believe that the prettiest and most popular girl in school, beloved by all, had been their "creepy" middle aged homely janitor less than an hour ago?
What did Eugene have to lose by listening to Willow's pitch for a little while longer? Who knows, maybe this nerdy chick was telling the truth. More importantly, if she knew a way out of this high school by way of Franz Kafka nightmare, he was going to take it.
"OK, sure. Let's take a walk."
Bill and Eugene, trapped in the unwanted guises of Willow and Eve, strolled past the gym's wide double doors and into the hallway, deciding to speak next to the school's trophy case.
"OK, so I don't know if you actually remember me or not" started Bill. "I was with you at McFly's after school, just before you went off to rehearsal with Emily and Rod. I was the brown haired kid who was Joanna's boyfriend."
Eve's green eyes widened once again.
"I do remember you! Oh my God, my wish changed you too!?"
Bill nodded his head.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to do any of this!" cried Eugene.
Inside, the former middle aged janitor felt guilty as sin. It was bad enough that he had fucked up his own life, but now he fucked up this kid's life too!? He turned him from a handsome young man with a gorgeous blonde on his arm into this...this frizzy haired nerdette! His stomach began to turn.
"It's fine, you didn't know what the stone was capable of" replied Bill, comforting Eve with a hug. "Until this morning, neither did I."
"But how did you know specifically that I had your gemstone?" Eugene asked, trying to piece everything together. "I found it jist laying around in the hallway after lunch ended."
"There was a hole in my backpack. I figure that the stone fell to the bottom, and one of the sharp edges tore right through it."
"No, I mean how do you remember everything like I do? Nobody else does. My...my best friend Emily doesn't remember anything about being at the play, and she was backstage with me! It's like we're in another dimension or something!"
"It's magic" Bill answered curtly. "Who the hell knows how magic works? What do I look like, Doctor Strange? I have no clue why only the two of us can remember the old reality. Maybe whoever uses the stone is immune from its effects."
Eugene looked down at his curvaceous female body and winced.
"I'm definitely not immune from its effects. And if you're really a boy like you say you are, neither are you. But maybe the genie inside the stone or whoever the fuck is in charge does have a rule about that. So what exactly did you make a wish for?"
"Huh?" asked Bill.
"You said that you made a wish with the stone before. What did you wish for?"
Crap thought Bill to himself. What do I say? I can't tell Eve that I turned the school bully into my girlfriend! Then she'll think that I'm a bad guy and she'll never give it back to me!
"I...um...I wished for..."
Suddenly, the double doors burst open.
"Eve, what does Asserman want? She's not giving you any trouble, is she?" demanded Joanna, giving Bill a dirty look with a pair of piercing Nordic blue eyes.
"No! Not at all, Joanna!" shouted Eugene nervously, chuckling in Eve's beautiful voice. "Willow is just, uh, wondering if she can audition for the squad!"
"Really, again?" sighed the blonde Amazon, as if she's had this conversation with the redhead a hundred times before. "I told you, Eve, you need to stop saying yes to every girl who stops by. We're not running a charity here. With all due respect to her, you know and I know that girls like Willow aren't cut out for this sort of thing. You got to be co-captain alongside me based on your popularity and your talent, and I accepted that, but being captain means having to wear your big girl pants sometimes and making tough decisions. Now what's it going to be, Eve?"
Joanna's forceful speech and lingering eyes bored right into Eugene's soul, intimidating him into compliance. He stared right into Bill's eyes.
"I'm sorry, but I...I have to turn you down."
"What!?" shouted Bill. "No, Eve, listen to me, call me later tonight, OK? Here's my phone number..."
He began to pull out his phone to dial Eve's phone, but his slender arm was detained by the vice like grip of Joanna.
"Let it go" said the blonde coldly and forcefully, staring at her former boyfriend in another reality with undisguised contempt.
Suddenly, Bill's heart began to race, and his breathing became rapid and shallow. He realized that he was in the beginning stages of a panic attack.
"OK, I'll let it go!" he squeaked out in Willow's pathetic voice, lacking even a hint of confidence or authority.
Joanna unclenched Willow's arm, leaving a slight skin bruise.
"Good, now get your skinny little ass out of here."
Bill looked briefly in Eve's direction, who was staring at him silently with a mixture of sympathy and trepidation, but clearly intimidated by Joanna's power as well.
Frowning, as he realized that he wasn't getting any closer to the gemstone tonight, that he was stuck in this new shitty reality and back to square one for at least one day, Bill grabbed his mother's old uniform and took the long walk back home.
**
The chilly autumn air of October felt harsher to Bill in this new lanky female body of his. The wind blew across his smooth cheeks and through his frizzy mane like a burst of ice water, the skin on his forearms rippling with goosebumps despite being covered by long red sleeves.
He felt less safe now, more vulnerable. Maybe it was because time had rewound itself by six months and it was now pitch dark out, save for the street lights and the glow of the harvest moon above, but it wasn't just that. Bill figured that maybe he was more on edge because he was female now.
Shermer was a nice small town with next to no crime save for bullies, and the street he lived on was one of the most quiet and unassuming out of all of them, but he had heard enough stories about young girls getting abducted and raped from episodes of the Casefile podcast he was a listener of to know that it was always a possibility.
Alas, he made it back home in one piece. He even saw that his old car was in the driveway completely unscathed.
"All right!" squealed Bill, realizing that with no Big Jon in this reality, he wouldn't need to rely on others for transport anymore. He climbed the steps to his front porch, found his house keys in his pocket, and let himself inside.
"I'm home!" he shouted in his reedy new voice.
"Willow, did you make it on the cheerleading team!?" asked Martha Strasserman, his mother, from inside the kitchen. She was clearly cooking something. Smelled like meatloaf.
"No, I didn't! They said that the team is full!" Bill lied.
"Oh honey, I'm so sorry! Maybe next year!" shouted Martha.
"Yeah, I'm sorry too, princess!" yelled Greg Strasserman, her father. "Dont let those Regina George wannabes get to you. But look on the bright side, your friend is here to see you! Come in and say hi to them!"
"My friend? Who could that be?" asked Bill.
Option 1: Bill walks into the kitchen and sees the tubby Paige Walters sitting at the dinner table alongside Bill's father and his sister Kimmy.
Option 2: Tom Ackerton is still somehow Bill's best friend in this reality, having always harbored a crush on Willow but never acting on it for popularity's sake.