Circle of Friends Part 1

 Circle of Friends

 

 Hi, I'm Joe, or at least today I am. Want to know something weird? I'm in the body I was born in.

Yeah, I know, you want me to explain. Okay. Where to begin...

Ever heard the expression, 'walk a mile in my shoes'? It's not funny when it happens, especially when there're more than two sets of shoes for you to walk in. You get used to it, though; I think people can get used to just about anything, really. In this case, there were six of us, plus, eventually, two surprises, but that came later.

We weren't so much a tight crowd in high school as just a group that got along real well and liked to do things together. We could try things out, make mistakes and get messy, and trust that nobody in the group would laugh at us. We laughed with each other at our mistakes and messes often enough, but it was never cruel. So we ended up tight, and I ended up knowing a lot more about a girl's growing up than your average guy. Hey, I helped pull off a sticky sanitary napkin when one of the girls, I won't say which one, was starting to leak and she was too drunk to manage the job herself. That's the kind of trust you don't find too often.

The funny thing is, as close as we all were, and despite the fact that, strictly speaking, we were three couples if we chose to pair off, we didn't get really intimate back then. It was like we were all too close for sex, and anyway we had something better: real friends. I'd fantasize about the three girls sometimes, and so did the other guys, and the girls let it be known that they fantasized about us sometimes too, but nobody got around to doing anything about it physically back then. Not because we were too young, either; there were two temporary pregnancies in our grade already. Maybe we thought we'd break something if we tried. Maybe we would have, at that.

How it started, I don't know. Lynne was playing with the occult stuff -- you know, runes and Ouija and crystal-gazing, trying to open her Third Eye, as she put it -- and Dave was playing around with hemi-sync tapes and two sets of headphones, and giving all of us a try... and I was, well, I was probably astral traveling, though I called it "going someplace interesting". Maybe it was all just dreaming, but it sure felt real while it was happening, and there were a few times when I woke up with bruises from fights I'd been in while I slept, bruises I hadn't had when I went to bed.

Or maybe it was Halloween, when, after all the little kids were in from their trick-or-treating, we all went over to the Old Grove. It was on a rise in an older section of the forest that surrounded the town. That place, if you looked at it in the day, didn't seem like much, not unless you really looked, and then it was impressive.

There were old trees there, I mean old, real old growth. Some of those trees seemed like they were at least a hundred feet tall, and they looked as if they'd been there since the beginning of the world. Maybe they had, which made them real special when you think that nobody'd gotten around to cutting them down, a couple hundred years back when a lot of the forest was cleared out for a while for farming. It couldn't have just been the rocks, there at the heart of the place, because you could walk around them or sit on them. It wouldn't have been that much trouble to plough. Something made the people back then leave this place alone.

It was misty and cold and nice and spooky in that grove, then, and we just sat there in the dark for a while huddled together, boy-girl boy-girl, seeing if we could see anything special, anything at all.

We never did see anything, but that place sure gave us all a strange feeling, like there was something there that we should have seen but couldn't. By the time we left there, we were all ready to go sit huddled by a lit fireplace together and drink something hot.

Maybe it was all of the above, I don't know. I just know that, on the seventh of November, all six of us woke up in the wrong bodies, and, just to make it real embarrassing, the wrong sex.

I didn't know about any of the others when I woke up, of course. I just recognized that I was in Tiffany's bed, and then I got up and went to the mirror and found out I was wearing Tiff's face and Tiff's everything-else. And, just in case I wasn't too spooked by it all to even think about exploring how things felt in Tiff's everything-else, I also had Tiff's mother hollering at me from downstairs that I was going to be late for school if I didn't get dressed and get down for breakfast.

That morning was... interesting. Thankfully as our school have a uniform policy, I did not have to worry about looking for clothes to wear. I quickly pulled on a pair of white panties, struggled for a minute whilst getting a bra on, and then pulled on the pinafore dress, followed by the sneakers ( thank God it wasn’t anything with a heel) I'm sure she would have worn more makeup, the less said the better. I didn't need Tiff's mother asking me who I was and what I'd done with Tiff. She never had time to notice because I was out the door so quickly. I needed that extra time to find out where the other kids were lining up, and even then I almost missed the bus.

I had homeroom with Tiff and Lynne, so that's when I found out that Tiff and me weren't the only ones who got swapped. Lynne told me she was Mike, and my own body, Joe, told me he was Steph, and we wondered what happened, and then it was time for first period. It wasn't until lunch that we could all get together. Fortunately, nobody else was paying attention, because all six of us were acting weird if you knew how we normally acted. Mike's body kept doing these little fluttery hand things while he talked, which was normal for Tiff but odd for Mike, and he had to tell me three times to close my legs and stop giving a public display of areas girls shouldn’t. We got schedules passed around, and advice on who to avoid and what to say to who, but nobody had a clue how this had happened, and that's about when we ran out of lunchtime.

After school, we had more time. I should have gone to chess club, and Steph had acting, and Dave had track, but we all skipped those to meet in the library to talk this over. Lynne thought it was the Old Grove that had done it, and, thinking back, maybe she was right, but at the time we didn't have a clue about Old Magic, and so we all blew that off. We thought this one switch was going to be permanent, so we were pretty much focused on helping each other to manage living in a new body.

That idea of permanence kind of got blown away the next morning when I woke up in Lynne's little bedroom, and had to fake being Lynne long enough to fool her little sister who slept in the same room. Fortunately, I'd listened in on what Lynne was telling Mike, so I wasn't totally lost.

One thing we'd made sure everybody knew is how we all got to and from school, bus numbers and bus stops and everything, just in case, so I knew to allow extra time because Lynne walked to school.

This time it was Lynne in my old body and Dave in Tiff's body who met me in homeroom. Dave hadn't heard anything Tiff had told me, so I had to go through it all with him.

Lunch was almost a repeat of the day before, except that I was getting used to girl-sitting, so nobody had to tell me anything about that. Lynne did ask me why I was wearing a bra, though; she was small enough that she usually went without. I'd noticed that before, but I wasn't sure if she did that all the time or just for us guys in the group and so I'd played it safe.

This time the after-school conference was all-to-all, with everybody sharing what could be vital details on fitting into their life. Unlike the day before, I didn't feel that we'd near covered everything by the time the late bus left and I set out for home.

That evening, Lynne's little sister wanted a bedtime story, and I gave it my best shot. She told me I'd done the voices all wrong, and how could I use that expression when I was pretending to be the fox-woman, but she hugged me anyway and went right to sleep afterwards, leaving me lying in the darkness in the next bed listening to her breathing, and wondering who I'd be when I woke up, and when the change would actually happen.

It was another day before I got to be a guy again. When I went to sleep in Steph's bed and Steph's silky chemise, the next night, I was worried that I might just wake up as Tiff again, female forever. I woke up as Mike, though.

That morning was strange. Mike has strict Fundamentalist Christian parents, and I had to sit through a morning prayer before breakfast. I was almost out of time by the time that got done and I could eat. Then I was supposed to hug both of his parents, and kiss his mother on the cheek, before I could get out the door. In one way it was neat, and in another way it was very scary. Those parents of his cared a lot about their kids, you could see it in everything they did, but they were so sure that they were right that they didn't have a clue. We, the six of us together, had kept Mike out of drugs, not them, but there was no way you could tell them that.

And so it went. Every night, every damn night, we'd rotate.  At least, back then, the rotation didn't vary. I'd have three days as a girl, then three days as a guy, with my own body as the last one before I was Tiff again. I could wake up in the morning and know who and what I was without even feeling around. Tiff and I lucked out as we would have 3 consecutive days as the opposite sex, whereas the others rotated day to day, which made things more awkward, however on the days I was a girl, it was a girl in my body too.

The girls loved it being in my body, the guys not so much. Why ?. Well let’s just say that I do not have the most muscular of bodies and would not be a Jock. So it came as no real surprise when I found out several months later ( you will discover later how), that the girls had taken to wearing what you might call ‘more feminine’ attire under the clothes I would normally wear, obviously only during the day, and not at night, nor leaving them where one of the guys would find them the following morning.

Continues in Part 2