For nearly a week after I arrived home with my Gibson in tow, Mom was reticent. I would occasionally overhear discussions, if not full-blown arguments, between Mom and Dad about my new acquisition when they thought I wasn’t listening in.
“David,” Mom would assert, “the doctor said we need to encourage feminine activities. It’s to help her adjust to who she actually is.”
“I know, Annette, I know…”
“Do you really know? Are you aware of the consequences of her not integrating? It’s been a miracle that she’s come this far, but we can’t chance it.” Mom sniffed. “We can’t lose her.”
“But this isn’t football or G.I. Joes; it’s a guitar. Besides, it was my mother’s; we grew up listening to her play after Pop died. If Dr. Walters wants to argue that playing a guitar isn’t a girl’s activity, we can point out it belonged to her grandmother.”
“Alright,” Mom conceded. “The guitar can stay, if that’s what Maya wants.”
“I just hope she’s good,” Dad quipped. “I’d hate it if we had to listen to her make noise all day and she’s terrible!”
“David, you’re awful.”
Mom and Dad had nothing to worry about there; my dexterity was quickly coming back to me as I got used to the size of the Gibson compared to myself, and I was quickly remembering so many of the songs I had played for the last decade of my former life. My parents were a little shocked at how proficient I was; I merely said that Grandma Lola was a really good teacher.
It was freeing to be able to retire to my room after a mindless day at school and simply sit and play like I used to. I didn’t have perfect pitch; I had developed relative pitch once I taught myself the chords so I was able to work backwards to play whatever song I heard. It was fun recalling songs from my previous life and reassembling them to the best of my ability. I even took a page out of Grandma Lola’s book and attempted to write them down, though it was difficult since I wasn’t very good at reading sheet music, let alone writing it from memory.
Well, I thought to myself, I have plenty of time to learn sheet music.
It was something that I had been thinking a lot about ever since I returned from Wisconsin. For the first time in a while, I felt like I wasn’t just scraping by. I didn’t enjoy my circumstances, but for the past year it had begun to at least feel normal. I couldn’t live in fear of being plucked out of reality by whoever or whatever did this to me a second time. For better or for worse, this was my new life, and I was stuck in it.
But it wasn’t a curse. If anything, what happened to me could be an opportunity. I’d been able to see long-dead family members again and watch history unfold in real time. I was young again, healthy, and safe. I would get to grow up again without the pain of uncertainty. Sure, I was in a different body, but how many people would jump at the chance to become essentially a new person? To see the world from a different perspective.
And time. I had been given decades of pure, unadulterated time.
What would I do with an extra thirty-some years? I could brush my teeth regularly, I joked to myself. Maybe not waste my youth in front of video games like I did before.
I quietly chuckled as I strummed my guitar, thinking up other foolish ways kids ruined it for themselves by the time they became adults, if only they’d known. As I mentally tabulated dozens of little ideas, I began feeling the need to jot them down. Setting my guitar on my bed, I rummaged through my room for something to write on. I eventually found the only stationary in my room: the butterfly notebook that had been gifted to me at Christmas, which I had casually tossed into the back of my closet.
I regarded the pink cartoon butterfly on the cover for a moment, and wrote down the first few things that came to me. Avoid junk food. Get regular exercise. Read more books. As the ideas poured out of me, I started categorizing them. A section for improving my mind. A section for improving my finances. A section, which I grimaced as I penned it, for improving myself as a female. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
When I got to the section about improving my family, I had a profound revelation. I knew my family’s eventual fates. Sure, my sister Jane would start a successful career as a doctor, but my brother would be chewed up by the Army in a post-9/11 bout of patriotism. Mom would survive her horrific cancer scare in the late 2010s, but Dad would suffocate to death from COVID in 2020.
Could I prevent all of this? I asked myself.
I made a new section, with subheadings for everyone in my family. I noted important dates and events in their lives. My brother’s high school football injuries. The companies Dad was fired from. The student loans that Jane struggled with. Even the time Mom needed stitches when her sewing machine malfunctioned. I wrote down everything I could remember, and before I knew it I had pages of notes outlying each one of their lives. Things that wouldn’t happen for years, if not decades. Things that I could fix, or even better, prevent.
I kept going through every person that was important to me in my old life. By the time I had gotten to the section on my uncles and aunts, I had to rest my hand from the furious scribbling I was doing. Setting it aside for the moment, I switched on the radio and lay back on my bed. The song that popped on was “Come As You Are” by Nirvana, who was exploding onto the music scene and pop culture in April of 1992. Right on schedule.
Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
Choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest as a friend
As an old memoria…
I shook my head, my first thought was wondering how Kurt Cobain was able to get into my head so succinctly. The second that I had was much darker; trying to remember when he died. When he would die. April of 1994, if I recalled correctly. Less than two years from now. I couldn’t decide if it was my cold recollection of thirty year old trivia or my detached foreknowledge of a currently living person that made me shiver.
But then I thought, Could that be prevented as well?
I had always had a knack for trivia, and names started appearing in my head along with the dates. Well, the years at least; I couldn't be more specific than that for most of them. I grimly started listing them out, along with the cause of their deaths if I could remember them. I had an entire catalog of dark misfortunes by the time Mom called me up for dinner.
I brought the butterfly notebook to school with me for the next few weeks. Since I had ample time in class, what looked like a studious girl writing notes was actually the machinations of a time traveller determined to record a future full of tragedies. I had expanded my listings from singular deaths to other disasters and crises that loomed in the future. The Afghanistan War. The housing crisis of 2008. The Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2023.
For days I would manically pour whatever information I could recall onto the pages of the butterfly notebook. Names, dates, key words, whatever came to me. By the time my birthday in May arrived, I had managed to fill most of the notebook. I even began sorting the contents, putting things like natural disasters together, and economic shifts in another. There were some events that weren’t tragic, merely future context, but they were written down anyway. Anything I could remember, I wrote down.
I made sure to keep the notebook hidden, pulling it out only when I was adding new segments. What I held in my hands, with its cute pink butterfly smiling on its cover, was potentially the most dangerous weapon on the planet. A chronicle of a definitive future. If world leaders had even an inkling of what was held within, I shuddered to think of what they could do with it. As it stood, even I didn’t know what to do with it. But whatever quirk of fate was handed to me, I alone had the ability to affect change.
I would have control.
“Maya, are you in your room?” called Dad’s voice from upstairs.
I snapped out of my power trip, and tucked the notebook under my pillow. “Yeah!” I yelled.
“Come upstairs, please. Family meeting.”
I sighed. I didn’t have control yet.
When I got upstairs, I saw Tim sitting on the sofa in the living room, with Mom and Dad sitting on chairs facing him. I had to remind myself that despite my machiavellian scheming, this wouldn’t be what the meeting was about. No need to look guilty. They gestured to the seat next to Tim, and I sat down.
“Hey guys, we have something we have to talk about,” Dad started.
Mom nodded. “We wanted to let you two know that there are going to be some changes coming for all of us.”
I chuckled ever so briefly. I remembered this meeting. This was where my parents announced that Dad had gotten a new job, and the family would be moving to a bigger house – since they were expecting another baby. Oh, and we would make new friends at our new school. But I had to look surprised.
“Your father has gotten a new job,” Mom continued, “and it also means that we’ve bought a new house in a new town.”
Tim looked crestfallen. “So I have to leave my friends behind?”
“Hey, sport,” consoled Dad. “You’ll make new friends at a new school next year. You’re even going to get a bigger room!”
“This will be good for you too, Maya,” Mom told me. “This year has been hardest on you most of all, and we think that it will be good bringing you to a brand new place where you can have a fresh start. Where people won’t know about your…correction.”
I grinned. I wasn’t going to miss elementary school; I was anxious to move to the house that our family would live in during my teenage years. I had more memories of there than I did in this cramped little house. Besides, if I was going to get started on the improvements that I listed out in the butterfly notebook, it would be a lot easier if I didn’t have the baggage of a gender reversal to deal with.
“I think it will be a good change,” I replied confidently. “I’m looking forward to moving.”
“Well, good,” said Dad, clapping his hands. “I’m very proud of you, Maya. And Tim, you’re going to love our new house. We won’t be moving until after the school year. So you have lots of time to prepare.”
Mom and Dad both stood up, nodding approvingly, while Tim scrambled off of the sofa. I kept in my seat, staring up at Mom expectantly.
“Yes, Maya?” she asked.
I shrugged, raising my hands upward. “Well, what about the other news?”
Mom tilted her head. “What other news?”
I laughed. “Mom, you’re pregnant! That’s why we’re getting a bigger house!”
“Maya, I’m not having a baby.”
“What do you mean? You and Dad have been trying for years to have another kid, because you always wanted a –”
The word girl caught in my throat.
Of course they wouldn’t try for a girl. They already had one.
Mom and Dad looked at each other, confused. My knuckles went white from gripping the seat cushion. I could feel myself shake, and I couldn’t breathe.
“Maya,” said Mom as she knelt down in front of me. “Are you okay?”
My eyes bulged at her, and I tried to form words.
“I…I…I’m fine,” I said mechanically. “I’m g-going to my room.”
Tensely, I stood up with my fists bunched at my sides, feeling Mom and Dad’s eyes follow me as I took the stairs down to the basement. By the time I shut my door the tears were pouring out, and I made no sound. I collapsed to my knees in the middle of my floor, hugging myself as I hyperventilated and trembled uncontrollably.
Jane would never be born, I realized in horror.
She would have to have been conceived months ago. But one slight deviation, and you would get a different child – or no child at all. What was worse was that the main reason they never tried was because of me. Because I simply existed.
For hours I lay on the floor, sobbing as quietly as I could. Decades of memories of Jane flashed through my head. Helping her climb down a tree when she got stuck at six years-old. Driving in from out of state to watch her high school graduation, and later at her white coat ceremony when she finished medical school. How we bonded after Tim’s death, and how as a medical professional Jane alone was allowed to be by Dad’s side when he was dying of COVID.
Jane didn’t die.
She wouldn’t even get a chance to live.
It was late by the time I was able to lift myself off of the floor and struggle to my feet. I lurched to my bed, gently setting down on my pillow. My shoulder touched the notebook, its corner sticking out from underneath it. My eyes were still raw as I sat up and placed it on my lap, opening it up to the section earmarked FAMILY. I went to Jane’s page, seeing the destiny she would have had, what my pathetic plans would have been to improve her life.
Bitterly, I threw the notebook across the room. It spun like a disc, landing flat on the floor face up. The pink butterfly smiled sweetly among the stars on the cover.
I collapsed onto my pillow, another round of tears already forming as I remembered a girl named Jane.
A girl who would never exist.