Julian came back to consciousness the way he did most things — carefully, from the edges inward.
First: the cold. The specific cold of a tiled floor at nine o'clock on a Friday evening, working its way through his jacket and his jeans with patient efficiency. He was aware of this before he was aware of anything else.
Second: weight. Not his own weight — something warmer, something that resolved, as his attention sharpened, into the fact of a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. And beneath his head: not the floor. Something softer. Warmer. The particular warmth of another person.
Third: a smell. Vanilla and something else — sandalwood, maybe — that his nervous system recognized before his conscious mind did, cataloguing it under a heading he didn't look at directly.
He opened his eyes.
Emmy was looking down at him.
She had her back against the cabinet under the sinks, her bare feet flat on the linoleum, her golden hair falling forward as she looked down at him in her lap with an expression that was trying, with limited success, to be merely curious. The fluorescent light was unkind to most things and was doing its usual work, but it didn't seem to know what to do with Emmy — it bounced off her hair and came back warm, which Julian felt was typical.
"Hey," she said. "Welcome back."
Julian processed this. Processed the ceiling. Processed the humming fluorescent and the cold floor and the weight of Emmy's hand on his shoulder and the fact that he was, apparently, lying on a bathroom floor with his head in Emmy Calloway's lap, which was not a sentence he had expected to be true at any point in the foreseeable future.
"I fainted," he said.
"You did."
"I've never fainted before."
"New experiences are important for personal growth." She paused. "How do you feel?"
Julian considered this with the seriousness it deserved. He performed a quiet inventory: the cold floor, the hard tile, the glasses that were — he reached up — slightly askew again. He straightened them. Tried to identify what his body felt like from the inside.
Different. Still different. Comprehensively, quietly, stubbornly different.
"The floor is cold," he said.
"It is."
"Do you think anyone will come in?"
"I've had my foot against the door for the last few minutes. Dormitory bathrooms have an informal in-use signal system." She paused. "Also I may have texted Priya to casually guard the hallway while pretending to look at her phone."
Julian looked up at her. "You texted Priya."
"She thinks I have a migraine situation. She's very supportive. She sent three emojis." Emmy's mouth curved slightly. "She doesn't need the details yet."
Yet. Julian noted the word. Filed it under things to think about later, when later was available.
He became aware, gradually and then all at once, of the specific configuration of his body — the new geometry of it, the weight distribution he was still negotiating, the way the jacket sat differently across shoulders that were narrower than they had been. He was aware of his chest in a way he hadn't been an hour ago. He was aware of his hair against Emmy's thigh.
He did not move.
"Emmy," he said.
"Still here."
"What—" He stopped. Started again. "What do I look like?"
Emmy was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone who didn't have an answer — Emmy always had an answer — but the silence of someone choosing carefully among several. "You look like you," she said finally. "Mostly. Just — " she tilted her head slightly, studying him with the frank, unselfconscious attention she gave to things that interested her "— more."
Julian looked at the ceiling.
"More," he repeated.
"I'm not sure how else to put it. The ingredients are the same. The — proportions are different." She paused. "You have a dimple."
"I know."
"It's on the left."
"I know, Emmy."
"I'm just confirming." A beat. "It's a very good dimple."
Julian closed his eyes briefly. "Thank you."
"That's not a weird thing to say, I'm being objective."
"It's a little weird."
"Under the circumstances, I'm claiming a very wide latitude for weird." She shifted slightly beneath him, adjusting her position against the cabinet. Her hand, which had been resting on his shoulder, moved to rest instead at the back of his head — a steadying gesture, entirely automatic, the kind that arrived before the decision to make it. Julian felt it happen and did not comment on it. "Do you think you can sit up?"
He tested the proposition. His body offered various opinions on it. "Give me a minute."
"Take whatever you need."
The fluorescent light hummed. Down the hall, something — a door, a voice, the ordinary sounds of a Friday evening that had no idea — carried faintly through the gap at the bottom of the bathroom door. Julian lay still and did the inventory again, more carefully this time, the way he approached anything difficult: from first principles, without flinching, one fact at a time.
Fact: something had happened.
Fact: it had happened to his body.
Fact: his body was, as far as he could determine without a more thorough investigation than he was currently prepared to conduct, female. Comprehensively. In all the ways that designation implied.
Fact: Emmy was here.
He held that last fact for a moment. It was, he found, the most stabilizing of the four.
"The Ship of Theseus," he said.
Emmy's hand, at the back of his head, went briefly still. Then: "Yeah."
"I was writing about it."
"I know."
"Does it matter," he said. Quoting himself. Quoting the forty-minute-ago version of himself who had said it with abstract philosophical confidence and had not known — could not have known — that the universe was apparently listening.
"Jules." Emmy's voice was soft. "It doesn't. Okay? Whatever this is, wherever it came from — that's not what matters right now."
He looked up at her. The fluorescent light was still doing its inadequate work on her hair and she was looking down at him with that expression he didn't have a catalogue entry for — the one that moved through her face like weather, the one that had moved through it several times tonight already and that he kept failing to read in time.
"What does matter?" he asked.
She held his gaze for a moment. Then, in the precise tone of someone who has decided that the situation calls for forward motion: "Getting off this bathroom floor, for a start."
Getting off the bathroom floor took longer than either of them expected.
The difficulty was not, technically, Julian's new body — though the new body had opinions about being asked to coordinate itself on a cold surface with no warning. The difficulty was that Julian was trying to do it with the focused calm of someone determined not to make anything worse, and Emmy was trying to help without touching anything she shouldn't touch without permission, and neither of them had a script for this.
"Okay," Emmy said, kneeling beside him. "Just — sit up first. Don't stand yet."
Julian sat up. This involved a brief renegotiation with gravity that would have been undignified under any circumstances and was considerably more so under these. He ended up with his back against the cabinet next to Emmy, knees drawn up, breathing carefully.
"Good," Emmy said. She was watching him with the focused attention she usually reserved for things she was trying to understand. "How's the head?"
"Fine." He paused. "Strange."
"Strange how?"
He considered. "Everything feels — different. Not wrong. Just different. The way a familiar word looks wrong if you stare at it for too long." He looked at his hands, resting on his knees. Smaller hands. Familiar knuckles in a new arrangement. "The word still means the same thing. It just looks — different."
Emmy was quiet for a moment. "That's a good way to put it. The psychological term for it is Jamais Vu, if that helps”.
“Eventhough I write about language for a living, I don’t know if it does."
"You write about language for a grade. Which is different."
"Functionally identical at this stage."
The corner of her mouth moved. Progress, Julian thought. They were finding the rhythm of it — the particular call-and-response of their conversation, the one that had been established over five years and apparently survived even this. He found he was slightly less cold than he'd been a few minutes ago.
"Can you stand?" Emmy asked.
He could. It required concentration and a steadying hand from Emmy that she offered without ceremony and he accepted without comment, and then he was upright, which was a new experience in a very old sense of the phrase. He stood for a moment, taking stock. Weight distribution was all off. More in front on top. More in back on the bottom.
The mirror was directly in front of him.
He looked at it for one second — the briefest possible acknowledgment — and then looked at Emmy instead.
"Dorm room?" he said.
"Dorm room," she agreed.
She opened the bathroom door carefully, checked the hall — the hall was empty, Priya apparently having done her work — and they walked the four doors back to room 312 with Julian slightly ahead and Emmy slightly behind and neither of them talking, which was its own kind of conversation.
Emmy's dorm room received them with its usual warmth.
The fairy lights did their amber work. The textbook was still face-down on the teal throw where Emmy had left it when she'd run for the bathroom, which felt like a very long time ago and had been less than fifteen minutes. The chip bag was still on the desk. The two coffee mugs were still there, one still sending a thread of steam into the air.
Julian sat down in his chair. It felt different.
Emmy sat down on the bed, cross-legged, facing him. She pulled the teal throw across her lap without thinking about it, which was, Julian knew, her settling-in gesture — the thing she did when she was preparing to be present for something that required presence.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"So," Emmy said.
"So," Julian agreed.
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "How do you feel? And I mean actually — not the philosophical answer. The real one."
Julian thought about this with the seriousness she was asking for. "Numb," he said, after a moment. "I think. And — physically different. In ways I'm not sure how to describe yet. Everything feels like it's in the wrong position and also the right position simultaneously." He paused. "Moving around is strange. I keep — overcorrecting. Like I'm used to taking up a certain amount of space and I'm taking up a different amount now and my body doesn't know where the edges are."
Emmy nodded slowly. The focused attention again — her whole body oriented toward him, processing, cataloguing. "That makes sense. Proprioception. Your brain has a map of your body and the map just changed without warning." She paused. "Does anything hurt?"
"No."
"Nothing at all?"
"Nothing." He considered this. "That seems like it should be more alarming than it is."
"Painless impossible transformations are probably preferable to the alternative."
"Philosophically, I agree."
Emmy was quiet for a moment. She was looking at him with that expression again — not the cataloguing look, something else. Something he couldn't quite read even now, even from this close. "Jules," she said. "Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to anyway."
"I'm going to anyway," she agreed. "But I want you to know I mean it seriously." She met his eyes. "Do you want this to be reversible?"
Julian looked at her.
The question sat in the air between them — warm and specific and not at all what he'd expected. He had expected logistics. He had expected let's google this or should we call someone or even just the next step forward, the Emmy approach of assessing in motion. He had not expected her to sit on her bed in the fairy light with the teal throw across her lap and ask him the one question he was least prepared to answer.
The honest answer was that he did not know.
The slightly more honest answer was that he had been not-knowing it, quietly and persistently and without examining it directly, for a very long time.
"I don't know," he said.
Emmy nodded. As if this were a reasonable answer. As if it were, in fact, the right answer, the only answer worth giving. "Okay," she said. "That's okay."
"Is it?"
"Jules." She leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees. The fairy lights caught the side of her face the way the evening sun had an hour ago, and she looked at him with an expression that was entirely, unambiguously certain. "Whatever the answer ends up being — we'll figure it out. Okay? You and me." A beat. "You're not doing this alone."
Julian looked at her for a long moment.
"You are aware," he said, carefully, "that it is nine-fifteen on a Friday evening and you were lying on your stomach objecting to Erikson forty minutes ago."
"I contain multitudes."
"Apparently."
"Also," she said, and the warmth in her voice shifted slightly, tilting toward something that was trying to be casual and wasn't quite managing it, "for what it's worth? You're — I mean, objectively—" She stopped. Started again. "You look good, Jules. Like. That's just a fact that I'm stating."
Julian looked at the ceiling.
"Thank you, Emmy."
"I'm just being honest."
"I know you are. That's not making it less strange."
"Strange is fine," she said. "Strange I can work with." She reached out and picked up his coffee mug from the desk — her reach across the small space between them entirely natural, entirely habitual — and held it out to him. "Here. It's probably still warm."
Julian took the mug. It was bigger than it seemed before. He wrapped both hands around it. The ceramic was warm, which was simple and good, and Emmy was looking at him over the rim of her own mug with an expression that was complicated and good in an entirely different way.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," she agreed.
Outside the window, Crestfield continued its Friday evening. The chip bag sat on the desk. The succulent persisted on its corner. The fairy lights did their amber work, as they always did, as they always would, and the room held them both in its small warm space while the impossible settled quietly around them like snow.