"I swapped our bodies for our own good!" Jason defiantly asserted through tears –he’d swapped bodies with his step-mom, Christina, "You two are always fighting around the house, and I've had enough! I'm sick of being treated like a little kid, and sick of you two acting like I'm not even here when you have your stupid arguments. So now I'm Christina, and you're going to have to listen for once."
Dad just blinked.
"Jason," he said, "What the fuck?"
"That’s Christina to you," Jason-as-Christina said, and felt something lurch inside, "I'm not switching back until I believe you’ll stop fighting."
Jason watched his new fingers—Christina's delicate, painted hands—curl into fists around the chair back.
He expected Dad would start yelling. Instead, he kept blinking, his mouth moving but not forming words, like someone had hit the mute button.
Now, standing in heels on the kitchen linoleum, every muscle tight, Jason realized he’d never thought of what he’d do next. He’d told himself, when he found the spell, that he’d swap them, negotiate the truce, and that would be that. And yet, with Dad blinking at him like a broken robot, Jason felt suddenly—wildly—unprepared.
“You okay?” Jason said, and the words came out in Christina’s voice, soft and jittery.
He clamped the mouth shut, feeling the tickle of lip gloss against his teeth.
“How’d you even do this?” Christina-as-Jason muttered.
“Is that really the priority?” Jason asked, feeling the trembling in his calves, “Because I’m standing here, and this is me now, and—”
He trailed off, abruptly noticing his step-mother’s womanly form, her curves, her …breasts.
He flexed his left hand—Christina’s left hand—and watched the silver ring glint on her slender finger. Jason had always thought of his step-mom as a little severe, always looming over him with the threat of rules and banishment, but he’d never considered her softness, the fact of her being a woman.
He tried not to look down at the shirt he wore—her shirt, a white button-up, tucked tightly into jeans that hugged her hips in a way that now felt more than snug. But the shirt strained around the outline of her—his—breasts, and there was something about the downward tug of gravity on them, the subtle sway when he shifted, that made the whole situation unmistakably real.
He’d been motivated by the argument, the desperation to make his dad and Christina quit fighting, but now, standing there in her body, he understood there were layers to this he’d never imagined.
He tried to focus on his plan. Nothing had changed: he’d force them to negotiate, he’d only change back once they agreed to stop fighting. But even as the thought formed, a part of him—some buried, traitorous part—wondered what it would be like to have time alone, to explore the new boundaries of his identity in private. The idea was shameful but insistent.
Jason squared his—her—shoulders, aware of the hair tickling the back of his neck, of the weight on his chest, of everything.
He glared at Christiana and his father and found his voice, clear and cold, sharper than he’d intended, “I’m not swapping back until we can act like a real family. If I have to be Christina for the rest of my life, I will. I’m not afraid of that. Are you?”
Christina’s mouth pinched, “You’re joking, right?”
Jason folded his—her—arms under the shelf of her new chest and cocked a hip, settling into the stance like a dare, “Does it look like I’m joking …Jason?”
“What do you mean, ‘like a real family’?”
What I mean,” he said, with a clarity that surprised even himself, “is that I’m not doing this as some stunt. It’s not a game. You two have been treating me like a fucking child for years, like I don’t know what’s going on, like I’m a pet that lives here and not a human being caught in the crossfire every time you decide to hate each other’s guts. If you can’t get it together, then I’ll get it together for you. From now on, I’m Christina. She’s me. And until you can prove to me that you can act like the adults you’re supposed to be, this is how it stays.”
There was a long silence, punctuated only by the tick-tock of the wall clock and the distant hum of the fridge.
Dad opened his mouth, closed it, then finally said, with a strange, hollow quiet: “You’re really not kidding.”
Jason’s eyes darted between them, “I’ll leave you two alone now.”
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