Chapter 2: "A Circle of Friends"
My circle of friends consisted of two boys and three girls. The boys were not my boyfriends. The old tradition of dating in high school had vanished with the old order. In the new order, people started dating in college or in the trade schools. College graduates married college graduates. Trade school graduates married trade school graduates. That's just the way it was. The two boys were chess club geeks, but you'd never be able to tell by looking at them. They looked like athletes, the same as all the other boys. I had wanted to join the chess club and play on the chess team, but the chess club advisor told me that the chess club was boys only. I was baffled as to the reason why.
Fenwick - we called him "Fenny" - was the best chess player in the club and the team captain. It was his job to evaluate the strength of the other players and set the order of boards on the chess team. Fenny played "first board," the second strongest player played "second board," and so on. Fenny was openly in lust with me and let me know many times that he wanted to see me naked before I went in for "The Change." I had to keep reminding him that the child sex abuse laws would put both of us in prison if we were to take a peek at each other. After people had gone through "The Change," it was extremely rare for them to commit crimes of any sort, but the laws were still on the books, and I did not want to take any chances. My eighteenth birthday was in the last week of school. Fenny had his eighteenth birthday three weeks after graduation. I adored Fenny for his irreverent spirit and mischievous playfulness.
Mark was a schlub at chess. He was a real-life "Droopy Dog." He worried about everything and especially "The Change." He didn't want to go through with it. He was a believer in the conspiracy theory that "The Change" was actually about replacing people with robots. He claimed that the old movie "The Stepford Wives" was a warning about the future. I tried to console him by explaining that "The Stepford Wives" came out long before the technology existed for "The Change," and that there was no relation between the two. Nothing could convince Mark. He was genuinely terrified.
Amy was my best friend. Short, thin, and completely curveless, I sometimes wondered if Amy ever looked at me with any jealousy. Every time I asked her if she wished she had a body like mine, she would playfully grab the roll below my waist and ask, "And get stuck with this?" If I were wearing pants at the time, she would also grab the flesh spilling over the belt at my sides and ask, "And get stuck with these?" Every now and then, however, I would catch her scanning her eyes up and down my body with a wistful look on her face. I think she was a bit jealous of the attention that my body attracted from the boys. Amy claimed to be looking forward to "The Change." I remember that I used to nag her that she was too thin, but she mindlessly ate salad for lunch just like all the other girls. If she had had a little flesh in the face, she would have looked like Doris Day, a singer and actress from the old days.
Michelle was in my French class. Sometimes the boys sang the old Beatles song to her. She was pretty in a subtle way. She was another freckle-faced redhead like me. Her body was like almost every other girl in the school: slim with only slight curves. Her face was narrow and oval and her cheeks a bit hollow. Her nose was thin and sharp. Of softness and roundness there was no hint anywhere. She complained constantly that her butt hurt in the hard wooden chairs that we all sat in. I teased Michelle that her butt wouldn't hurt if she'd just eat like me at lunch. Michelle always gave me the same deadpan reply: "I'd have to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe." Michelle was fascinated by foreign languages and foreign cultures in general. She wanted to be a high school foreign language teacher in the future. "I can sure do the job better than these mindless page-turners here!" I had a deep suspicion that after "The Change," Michelle's ideas about how to teach a foreign language class would all disappear. All the classes in my high school were an unimaginative forced march through the pages of textbooks that seemed deliberately designed to be as mind-numbing as possible. "We're being trained to be parrots," I thought.
Lynette was a short, slim brunette with a face like the famous actress Vivien Leigh. She was the happy-go-lucky one of my circle of friends. Happy-go-lucky except where "The Change" was concerned. It wasn't the loss of her famously beautiful face that disturbed her. It was the undeniable fact that no ordinary citizen knew precisely what "The Change" did to us. Our overseers, an unelected council of scientists, technologists, and philosophers who ruled the entire world as a single state, knew what it did to us. For reasons that only they knew, they had elected to keep everyone else in the dark. Lynette did not want to undergo any procedure without knowing precisely what it was going to do to her body. I had no idea what Lynette wanted to do in the future. I suspect that Lynette herself didn't have much idea, either.
End of Chapter 2
This story is based on the Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." Viacom holds the copyrights.