"Sue Ellen? That's you, isn't it?" asked the reflection.
"Yeah, it's me," she replied, a bit surprised that her voice seemed deeper than usual. "Who do I look like?"
"You're not gonna believe it when I tell you," said the girl who looked exactly like her. The next thing Sue Ellen knew, she was being lifted into a sitting position. She realized with alarm that her left arm was flopping about freely.
"My cast!" she cried out.
"I have it," said the other girl.
"Put it back on!" Sue Ellen urged. "My arm's broken!"
Everything seemed to be spinning in circles around her, but she managed to look down and discover that she was wearing a red jacket instead of her usual light yellow coat. Also, her skirt had been replaced with a pair of blue jeans.
"What's going on?" she asked groggily. "These aren't my clothes."
"I know. They're mine."
Sue Ellen turned her head, and saw that the lookalike girl was crouching by her side. "Who are you?" she asked.
"I'm Francine," was the reply.
"But...but you look like me," Sue Ellen pointed out.
"I know," the girl replied. "And you look like me."
"What?" Sue Ellen lifted her right hand to her head, followed by her left hand. In place of her curls, she found straight, shoulder-length hair. And something else had changed as well. "What happened to my ears?" she asked, horrified.
The other girl wordlessly pointed to the top of her head, grinned, and wiggled her cat ears.
Sue Ellen flexed her left arm back and forth, as if amazed that it was functional. "Wait a minute. If you're Francine but you have my body, then...oh, no, don't tell me..."
Francine told her. "You have my body. I mean, you have Francine's body. Whatever."
Sue Ellen put her hands over her face--Francine's face--and shook her head, groaning.
"That girl blasted us with some kind of knockout gas," Francine mused. "It must be causing us to hallucinate."
"I don't think that was Muffy," said Sue Ellen as she lowered her hands.
"Can you walk?" Francine asked her. "Come on, I'll help you up."
Within moments, Sue Ellen, who looked like Francine, had her left arm around the shoulders of Francine, who looked like Sue Ellen, and they were trudging slowly through the barn doorway.
When they had walked halfway up the hill to the forest, Sue Ellen (heretofore referred to as Fransue) pulled her arm away. "I think I can walk on my own now," she said to Francine (heretofore known as Suefran).
"Let's get out of here as fast as we can," Suefran recommended. "That girl may still be around. She may blast us again."
The two mixed-up girls walked through the forest, each marveling at the realistic nature of the illusion.
"So what do we do now?" Fransue asked.
"We go home and sleep it off," Suefran answered.
"But what if we're not hallucinating? What if we've really turned into each other?"
"Don't be silly."
"Did you see any little dolls lying around?" asked Fransue. "When I was in the Bahamas I heard of a voodoo spell that can make people switch bodies."
"I've heard of the same thing," Suefran replied, "only it was in Dungeons and Dragons."
They soon arrived in a residential neighborhood, and walked along the street together, growing more uneasy with each step. Even Suefran began to worry that this bizarre exchange might be more than a hallucination.
They didn't speak a word to each other until they arrived at the corner where they would part their ways. "Well, this is it," Fransue remarked.
"Yeah," Suefran said. "I'll see you...I mean, I'll see me later."
Fransue giggled and started down the sidewalk toward her house. Along the way she passed a light pole with a poster attached. On the poster was Muffy's photo, with the message, MISSING: MUFFY CROSSWIRE. $115,000 REWARD.
----
Only one person in the world knew where Muffy Crosswire was, and that person was Nigel Ratburn's twin sister, Angela. On the run from an investigation into a long-ago-but-not-forgotten act of sabotage, she hoped to evade authorities for three months, at which time the statute of limitations would run out. What she didn't expect was that Muffy, unhappy with her home and school environments, would tag along for the ride.
The same missing child poster had been taped onto many storefront windows in the town of Clinton, about two hundred miles from Elwood City. Muffy, who had bobbed her hair to avoid being identified as the girl in the picture, was in the process of inserting her card into an ATM machine. Behind her stood Angela, who was wearing a tattered old dress and an unconvincing blond wig.
"Any day now," Angela observed glumly, "your father will put a block on your account, and you'll have no way of getting money."
"Well, then, you'd better get a job pretty quickly," said Muffy, who was clad in a turquoise blouse and skirt that she had purchased at a thrift store since leaving Elwood City.
As the machine spit out several $20 bills into Muffy's eager hands, Angela glanced up and down the street at the various fast-food joints. "So, what's it gonna be, Muffy?" she asked. "McDonald's? Burger King? Chicken Licken?"
Muffy sighed. "Ah, poverty. So this is what it's like to not know where my next meal is coming from."
----
Oliver Frensky was replacing a lightbulb in the kitchen, while his wife was in the living room watching TV, when they saw what appeared to be Sue Ellen open the apartment door and march inside. "Hi, Mom, hi, Dad," she said glibly, waving her right hand. Surprised into speechlessness, they could only watch as the girl walked into Francine and Catherine's bedroom.
Catherine, who was sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, lowered her magazine (The Big Book of Popularity Tests) when Suefran entered the room and heaved herself into Francine's bed without bothering to remove her yellow coat. "Francine's not here right now," said the older girl. "I think she'll be back soon."
Suefran cast her an incredulous glance. "Do I look like Sue Ellen to you, too?"
"Uh, yeah."
Suefran closed her eyes tightly and began to mutter. "It's not real...it's not real..."
"If you're not Sue Ellen, then who are you?" asked Catherine curiously.
"I'm Francine," Suefran grumbled. "You know, your sister."
Catherine chuckled. "You are, like, so not Francine."
"Just let me sleep." Suefran adjusted her left-arm cast until it was lying on her chest. "I'll be Francine when I wake up."
Now visibly concerned, Catherine put down her magazine, leaped from her bed, and went to talk to her parents.
----
A similar reception awaited Fransue when she opened the front door of the Armstrong house and walked inside. Mrs. Armstrong was sitting in front of an easel, painting a picture of herself sitting in front of an easel painting a picture, while Mr. Armstrong was in his easy chair, smoking a pipe and reading a book entitled PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND OTHER FAIRY TALES.
Mrs. Armstrong was the first to greet Fransue. "Hi, Francine. Where's Sue Ellen?"
"I'm Sue Ellen," Fransue replied curtly as she walked quickly toward her bedroom.
"Right." Mrs. Armstrong grinned playfully. "And I'm Millicent Crosswire."
"I'd much rather you were Jane Read," Mr. Armstrong remarked.
His wife scowled at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Ignoring her parents' banter, Fransue strolled past the travel posters adorning the walls and climbed into her bed. After tying her left arm to the bedpost with a cord so she wouldn't roll onto the cast in her sleep, she closed her eyes and struggled to relax. The thought flashed briefly through her mind that she hadn't taken her usual battery of painkillers and anti-HIV drugs, but by that time she was irretrievably on her way to slumberland.
Where she didn't stay long. Awakened by a disturbance, she saw Mrs. Frensky standing at the foot of the bed, with Suefran and Mrs. Armstrong on either side. "Let's go home, Frankie," the woman said to her.
"Huh?" Fransue glanced around in confusion. "But...but this is home."
"It's not an illusion," Suefran informed her. "Somehow I've become you, and you've become me. Let's just play along until we figure it out."
"But that's impossible!" The frantic Fransue jumped out of the bed and approached Mrs. Armstrong. "Mom, it's me! It's Sue Ellen!"
Mrs. Frensky took her gently by the arm. "Come along, dear."
As she led Fransue out of the bedroom, the terrified girl cried, "Yo hablo espanol! Francine no puede hablar espanol! Eso verifica que soy Sue Ellen!"
Suefran and Mrs. Armstrong stepped out of the bedroom and watched as Mrs. Frensky and the still babbling Fransue exited through the front door.
The red-haired woman placed a hand on Suefran's shoulder. "What is this, a game you're playing?" she asked innocently.
"Uh, right," Suefran replied. "It's a game. I pretend to be her, and she pretends to be me. Only I guess she doesn't know it's a game."
"You must be hungry," said Mrs. Armstrong. "We're having pork chops tonight."
Suefran groaned. Mrs. Armstrong went into the kitchen to finish her meal preparations, while Suefran, with a little mental exertion, managed to find her way to the bathroom.
She had never been inside Sue Ellen's bathroom before. It appeared more or less like a normal bathroom, save for a few exotic touches, like a liquid soap dispenser that was shaped like a Buddha statue, and a framed picture of the Serengeti mounted on the wall across from the toilet.
For the first time since the incident at the barn, Suefran looked at herself in the mirror. The shock was milder than she expected.
She ran her fingers over her nose, over her ears, through her hair. She had always considered Sue Ellen to be one of the more attractive girls in the class, and looking like her wasn't a bad thing, although the hair was probably a nightmare to manage. And having a broken arm wasn't exactly a new experience. What worried her was the other questions running through her mind: What caused it? Was it reversible? Would she spend the rest of her life like this?
How long would the rest of her life be? Sue Ellen's last blood test had been a week earlier, and had turned up positive for the virus...
----
Blah. That was the only word Fransue could think of to describe Francine's apartment, her bathroom, and her hair. What could she do with such dull hair? And having ears on the sides of her head might make it easier to talk on the phone, but other than that...well, blah. She had never been inside of such an uninteresting body.
"Dinner's ready," Mrs. Frensky said to the girl who was staring sadly into the bathroom mirror. "And I changed the sheets on your bed after Sue Ellen lay down on them, so don't worry."
"I'm not hungry," moaned Fransue. In reality she was famished, but part of her feared that filling Francine's stomach would cause her to be trapped forever in her present form. She closed her eyes and wished that she would wake up in her own house, in her own bed, in her own body. She opened them again, and Francine's face was still scowling at her from the mirror.
There must be a way to stop this nightmare, she thought. It's bad enough that I'm in Francine's body, but Francine being in my body is worse. What if she learns my secret?
(To be continued...)
