Francine's eyelids slowly rose. The familiar, grinning face of David Beckham greeted her from the poster on her ceiling. She slowly turned her head and noticed that Catherine was no longer in her bed, and had left her quilt in disarray. Rubbing her eyes, Francine bent herself into a sitting position. It was Monday, a school day. Everything seemed normal, including the cold draft coming through the window. Yet she felt that something was wrong...something had changed...
As her pajama-clad feet hit the cold floor, she remembered something strange, even humorous. She had spent the past week under the impression that she was Sue Ellen in Francine's body. Sue Ellen's parents had suddenly departed, leaving her emotionally devastated. It had been painful and difficult, but surely not real. She was, and always had been, Francine Frensky, after all.
But wait...it was all true...her parents were gone, and she would never see them again...this wasn't her real bedroom...
Suddenly confused, Francine rushed to the bathroom and glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Straight brown hair, ears on the sides of her head, a monkey nose...the same face she had always seen looking back at her. What had she expected? Cat ears and curls?
That's exactly what she had expected.
Something was going in in her brain, and she could make no sense of it. This was her real face, her real bathroom, her real apartment. So why was she staring into the mirror in surprise, wondering what had happened to her cat ears and curly hair?
Then she remembered. She was Sue Ellen in Francine's body, and had been for over a week.
No, it wasn't true! She was Francine, and she was in her own body...
"You done in there, Frankie?" asked Catherine, who was standing inside the bathroom door frame, wearing a green robe.
"Um...uh..." said Francine to her sister. She had known Catherine forever, but for some reason had to convince herself that she really had a sister.
Wandering out of the bathroom, Francine headed toward the kitchen, where her mother was frying eggs on the stove. She recognized the apartment as the place where she had always lived. But somehow she knew that she had lived in India, Costa Rica, Nigeria, and countless other places. How could this be true? Was her brain telling her lies?
"Hungry, Frankie?" Mrs. Frensky asked her with a smile.
"Famished," Francine replied. She knew that this woman was her mother, but there was another woman, a red-haired woman who she might never see again, who was also her mother. Did she have two mothers?
"Did you get all your homework done?" Mrs. Frensky inquired.
As she stood in the entrance to the kitchen, Francine pictured two sheets of math homework in her mind...one signed with her name, the other with Sue Ellen's. She had finished both of them. So that was it...
"Mom, I need to call Mavis," she blurted out.
"Well, don't take too long," her mother responded. "You'll be late for school."
Without waiting a moment, Francine grabbed the phone, base and all, and carried with her into her bedroom, closing the door on the cord. She anxiously dialed Mavis' number. "Hello, is Mavis there?"
"Hold on," came Dr. Cutler's voice.
A few seconds passed. "This is Mavis."
"Mavis, something weird's happened to me," said Francine with urgency. "I don't know how to describe it."
"Let me guess," Mavis conjectured. "Part of you thinks you're Francine, and the other part thinks you're Sue Ellen."
Francine was stunned that Mavis had guessed so accurately. "Yeah, that sums it up. Do I have, like, multiple personality disorder or something?"
"No, then you'd have only one personality at a time," Mavis replied. "You have two people in your head now, like I do. The Opticron was supposed to permanently erase Francine's memories from your brain and replace them with Sue Ellen's, but it didn't work. Which means the same thing that's happening to you is probably happening to Sue Ellen right now, wherever she is."
"Great," Francine grumbled. "How do I fix it? How do I go back to having just one person in my head?"
"That depends," said Mavis. "Which person do you want to erase?"
Francine thought for a few seconds, then her eyes widened with panic. "Omigosh, I don't know! I think...I mean, Francine thinks Sue Ellen should be erased, because she's in Francine's body...but Sue Ellen doesn't want to be erased...she wants to be put back in her own body...oh, now you've got me talking about myself in the third person!"
Mavis sighed. "Just as I expected. Neither part of you wants to die. And, to be honest, I'm not sure if I can help you. To erase Francine from your brain, I'd have to erase everything, since your Francine memories go all the way back to when you were born. But erasing Sue Ellen is risky too, because your Francine memories may not have resurfaced completely."
"So what do I do?" Francine asked desperately.
"The two of you will just have to learn to get along," Mavis replied calmly.
"What?" Francine sputtered. "But...but..."
"It's not as hard as it sounds," Mavis went on. "You'll get used to it after a while. And it's better than being Sue Ellen alone in Francine's body, and never seeing your parents again."
Francine felt herself starting to choke with fear. She knew in her heart that Mavis was right, that there was no turning back, that she would have to learn to cope with being Francine and Sue Ellen simultaneously, that it was preferable to the alternatives...
Her mind was still reeling with confusion as she trudged down the sidewalk through the three inches of snow that had fallen the previous evening. Her backpack seemed lighter than before...perhaps because there were now two people carrying it. Inside her head, Francine and Sue Ellen were learning things about each other that they had never expected or wanted to know, and much of it was rather unpleasant. How they longed to be separated, but it wasn't possible...they had to coexist.
Sue Ellen could swear in five different languages. The most vulgar words imaginable. Francine had never dreamed this of her. On the other hand, Francine generally considered underwear to be optional, a fact which amused Sue Ellen to no end. Still, Francine had to admit, she found Sue Ellen's memories of her many travels to be much more entertaining than her own drab existence.
"Hola, Alberto," she said to Alberto Molina as he passed on the street. "Que pasa, amigo?"
"Estoy bien, Francine," Alberto replied, smiling. "Usted habla espanol? Yo no sabia."
Francine felt tempted to engage in a lengthy conversation with the older boy, but knew she could easily end up late for school.
The first person she talked to at Lakewood was Beat, who had returned to the school after an absence of almost two weeks. "Hey, Beat," she greeted the girl. "Have your memories come back yet?"
"No, still a blank," Beat answered as the two girls passed through the door into Mr. Wald's fourth-grade classroom. Arthur, Fern, George, Binky, Van, and Adil were seated at desks, while the teacher was sketching the details of the day's homework assignment on the blackboard.
Francine and Beat occupied two adjacent desks. "My memories are coming back," Francine related. "The device didn't work like it was supposed to. I woke up this morning with Francine in my head as well as Sue Ellen. So if I act really weird or confused today, you know why."
"An intriguing dilemma," Beat mused. "Two personalities inside your mind, vying for supremacy. What did Mavis say?"
"She said I'll just have to learn to live with myself," said Francine gloomily.
Beat grinned, reached over, and rubbed Francine's back. "Well, it's good to have you back, Frankie." Her overly friendly gesture made the Sue Ellen part of Francine's mind feel uneasy.
"Our lesson today is on cells," Mr. Wald announced as he drew an amorphous object on the board. "All living things are made up of cells. The center of a cell is called the nucleus..."
Francine spent most of the first period gazing at Arthur, who sat two desks ahead of her and didn't notice her attention. She despised herself for feeling the way she did, but she could do nothing about it, as she had inherited Sue Ellen's heart as well as her mind. "I can't believe how much she pined for him," she thought. "She was miserable. And now it's my turn...unless...oh, who am I kidding? Arthur's like a brother to me." She tried to distract herself by jotting down notes on Mr. Wald's lecture, but found it difficult to avoid mixing Francine's and Sue Ellen's handwriting styles, resulting in an unreadable scribble. On top of that, every picture of a cell she drew invariably featured an unmistakable pair of aardvark ears. On one occasion she was shocked to discover that she had absent-mindedly drawn a heart-shaped figure with Arthur's name inside.
Finally the bell rang, and Francine's torturous hour came to a close. As the kids filed out, Arthur and Francine found themselves facing each other in the doorway. "Hi, Francine," said Arthur glibly.
"Hello, Arthur." Warm, fuzzy butterflies filled Francine's stomach as she smiled wistfully and involuntarily. She recalled how hard it had been to overcome her crush on Beat. This would be infinitely worse. If only this had happened to me during AGF III, she thought bitterly.
She turned away from Arthur and walked hastily after Van, who was speeding toward the boy's room. "Hey, Van, got a minute?" she called out.
Van stopped and quickly turned his chair around. "Sure, Francine."
"Let's go where nobody can hear us," said Francine when she had walked up alongside him. The duck boy nodded knowingly, then steered his chair toward the rear exit of the school building.
They soon found a secluded corner against which a snowbank had been thrown. Van stopped his chair and looked up at Francine with an eager smile.
"Okay, Van," she said seriously. "It's time for your first test as an honorary girl and member of our sisterhood."
(To be continued...)
