3

Sabrina arrived at school just a bit earlier the next day. From what she had derived from William's memories, he was particularly attracted to women who subliminally reminded him of an actress named Charlotte Henry, a 1930s actress whose movie "March of the Wooden Soldiers" had come out in 1934 and had left a large impact on his psyche when he watched it at five years old. The film had also starred comedy movie legends Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and had a huge fantasy concept; it had replayed on TV almost every year around Christmas for the last fifty years before fading into DVD accessibility, but the humor, the magic and lovely Charlotte Henry, they all had an impact on his preference to the other sex. Once at school, Sabrina immediately thought of Carolyn Montgomery from her biology class. Carolyn was blonde, cute and attractive, but she was now in a relationship with Dashiell Burnett from the debating team. Sabrina next turned to Demi Faireborn from English class, but she too surprised Sabrina by revealing she was not interested in any other boy than Mark Jamison, one of Harvey's teammates on the school football team. Maddie Hudgens, Nicole Anderson and Reese O'Connor also struck out for being in relationships or just not interested. Going through her list of classmates with long blonde hair and effervescent personalities, she finally reached the bottom of her list with Chloe Tisdale, who had started the new school year having dyed her brown hair from its natural collar to golden blonde.

"Hi, Chloe…" Sabrina slid up to Chloe's locker. A member of the school swim team, the cute brown-eyed ingénue looked up to Sabrina with amused curiosity.

"Sorry, Sabrina…" Chloe answered. "But I have a boyfriend. He goes to Wessington High."

"How did you know what I was going to ask?!"

"I ran into Reese and Kate at the bookstore."

"How did Kate know?" Sabrina checked her clipboard. She hadn't got to her yet.

"She and Maddie are both in the Drama Club." Chloe slammed her locker shut. "Sorry…"

"Thanks for nothing…." Sabrina slashed through her last two names as Chloe left for the gymnasium. "Crud… at this rate I might as well split myself in half and date both Harvey and William…." She mumbled under breath. Out the corner of her eyes, she noticed Valerie coming toward her dodging through the busy high school hall like a star ship through an asteroid field. Dodging an underclassman then avoiding crashing into Miss Anthony from the guidance counselor's office, Valerie once again pulled her books a bit tighter and postured into Sabrina's presence.

"Sabrina," She sounded upset. "Why didn't you try asking me if I'd like to go on a double date with you and Harvey and a guy? I'm hurt…"

"I hear he only really likes girls with long blonde hair." Sabrina admitted.

"I could be blonde." Valerie though about it, then recalled how bad her hair looked when she last tried bleaching it. "No, I can't…" She shook her head embarrassingly. "So, who's the guy?"

"William Samms…."

"The guy with the faded leather jacket who sits in the back of the room in our history class?" Valerie recalled him. He wasn't athletically handsome, but he did look cute enough to be a washed-up rock star down his luck with that unruly mop-topped head of dark hair that split apart just far enough for him to peek out and see where he was going. He was also on the reserve basketball team, but he was mostly the towel guy and assistant sports manager who handed out the sports gear. "I like him… He's kind of cute in a Johnny Depp sort of way…. But what's this sudden interest to get him a girlfriend?"

"I heard he might have a crush on me." Sabrina confessed. "I was just trying to get him interested in someone else…"

"You mean before Harvey found out?" Valerie jumped to a bold conclusion. "What do you think he'd do?"

"Before I find out what?" Harvey had glided up into Sabrina's blind spot and looked to her confused and interested trying to find out what they were discussing and why it concerned him. Sabrina and Valerie jumped into formation side-by-side and hemmed and hesitated out of sync with each other.

"What you're going to do for my birthday!" Sabrina lit up smiling.

"Your birthday was in September…." Harvey wasn't sure he believed her, but he thought he'd let it pass.

"Exactly! Why put it off to the last minute!" Sabrina grinned to him and looked to Valerie. Glancing toward the front of the school, Valerie turned and started prodding Sabrina to get her attention. William was coming toward them in that old fight jacket he always wore to school. There was no indication he had heard of Sabrina's match-making, but the evidence was truly around him. Chloe and Reese stopped before him, smiled secretly and started giggling secretly. Nate Russo and Justin Henniker must have heard about it too because they were laughing at the locker line as well. Suspicious and curious, he just stopped and looked around for a moment, hunched his shoulders up and buried his chin against his chest before striding toward Sabrina's group with the back of his hand pressed to the pit of his chest to ease his body of some discomfort.

"Harvey…" William came up behind Harvey. "I won't be by the garage today; I've got to get a haircut."

"Haircut?" Harvey was confused. "I thought you had one last week."

"I did…" William looked uncomfortable. "How fast does hair grow?"

"I think about a centimeter a month or slower." Valerie guessed, looked at Sabrina then back to William.

"Really?" William scoffed a bit. "Well, last night I had short hair. This morning, I woke up with this!" He turned his back to reveal a long ponytail of dark hair almost a foot long he had hidden under the back of his jacket. He waved it up and down to show it off to Harvey.

"Maybe you ought to keep it." Harvey smiled before chuckling lightly. "It kind of gives you a cool hippie look."

"Thanks…" William smirked at his unhelpful comment. "I'm just hoping coach let's me out of…" He paused and slammed his hand to the locker to double over in pain. A deep groan came from out if him.

"William, buddy…" Harvey tried to help his best friend. "Are you okay?" He sounded concerned.

"I've just got a stabbing pain in my gut." William answered. "I think I accidentally swallowed the prize in my Chocolate-Covered Chewy Puffs this morning." His voice changed on him, and Sabrina suddenly looked worried. That was her voice coming out of him!

"Hey…" Valerie grinned about to laugh. "He hit puberty again; his voice is changing again."

"What?"

"William, I think you have to see the school nurse." Harvey tried to take charge upon seeing his childhood buddy in pain.

"My mom gave me bicarbonate this morning before I left." William had his voice back. "She said it just takes a while to work." His voice changed again.

"No, I think Harvey is right." Valerie now looked worried. "You sound exactly like Sabrina!"

"No, he does not!" Sabrina moved to take over this discovery. "Look, I think I have some sore throat drops in my purse." She started rummaging in her purse in her locker.

"William, let me take you to the school nurse." Harvey gave William a brotherly embrace and gently pushed him off down the hall. The final bell for class rang, and Valerie and Sabrina exchanged glances for a minute then Valerie started following Harvey to help William to the nurse. Stressing out, Sabrina placed her hand to her forehead and started reflecting on her record of bad spells and mystical mistakes.

"Please tell me I had nothing to do with this!" Sabrina asked the gods of fate. When Valerie got close to her math class, she went ahead and entered the room. Looking back for her best friend, she noticed Sabrina racing to catch with Harvey escorting William to the nurse's office. Once again, the blonde honor student was taking a strong interest in the lives of her classmates. In the back hallway past the stairway in the cafeteria, William was buckling over in pain, bracing briefly in the nurses office and sitting on the check-up table with the sterile paper on it.

"Maybe it's your appendix?" Harvey asked.

"I had mine out the same month you got yours removed." Holding his stomach and bending up into the fetal position, William had his voice back and groaned in pain as his insides twisted around and his skin crawled as if bees were crawling all over him. Moaning and wincing from the pain terrorizing his body and ascending into his head, he held his left hand over his head and clutched his stomach with his other hand. "Harvey, it feels like acid is burning me up from the inside out." He sounded like Sabrina again.

"I can't stand watching him like this." Harvey stood unsure what to do and looked to Sabrina. "Would you watch him as I go get Mrs. Stoddard?"

"Yeah, sure…" Sabrina promised as Harvey raced to the teacher's lounge and left Sabrina alone with William in the 225 square foot room with the lime green walls and medical posters. Looking back, she started fearing what she suspected. Was William turning into… herself? Did she stay too long in his dreams last night? Could she have left part of herself behind, or worse, did some of him get into her? She listened to him whimpering from the pain of whatever horrible stress her spell had caused for him. Between groans from the pain shooting into his head, she heard him sobbing from his discomfort and reached up to try and comfort him.

"William, do you want something to drink?" She noticed the dispenser of paper cups next to the water cooler.

"Do you have some cyanide in it to kill the pain?" When he sat up and spoke to her in his voice, his hair had become completely blonde. Sabrina shrieked lightly upon seeing him and realized the worse. He was turning into her! How worse could this get! She had to get him out of here and to her aunts to change him back. If only she had some of that "Boy Brew" potion left. Listening to him screaming like a pregnant teenager, she swung around and kicked the doorstop out from under the door to the hall. Slamming the door shut, she twisted the lock into place and paused. The room suddenly got quiet. William was no longer screaming or groaning or contorting in pain. She could hear his voice calming to a light trembling staccato. Unwilling to turn around, Sabrina forced herself to look.

"Please tell me he's okay…" She nervously mumbled to herself. "Please tell me he's okay…" Her blue eyes turned to look behind her and she saw a petite blonde young lady with her face trembling on the check-up table in William's leather jacket and blue jeans with her face against the paper.

"Why aren't you listening to me?!" Sabrina cried out to the ceiling. William looked up to her with her eyes and started lifting himself up. Why did he feel so much more… lighter?

"It's not hurting as much." He spoke inside his altered and trembling body. "I guess the bicarbonate finally kicked in." He still sounded like a girl and tried clearing the odd alto in his voice. "What's wrong with my voice?" He looked to Sabrina staring at him in shock and noticed long blonde strands of hair in his vision. When he reached up to pulled them away, he saw his hand. It was smaller, lighter and more slender, and as he sat up, he felt something weird move in his t-shirt and reached to his chest to find something that shouldn't be there. That was then his eyes rounded, and he jumped from the table to look in the mirror on the wall behind Sabrina.

"No, don't look… please don't…" She tried to stop him, but he dodged her effort to block his view and stood up to see his reflection in the mirror, but it was not his traditional Caucasian round head with his brown eyes staring back at him. Instead, he found someone blonde, blue-eyed and Aryan with slender features, a shapely and long golden blonde hair who looked exactly like Sabrina and who suddenly reacted with shock and dropped her jaw ready to scream. Was this a curse? What was happening here? His body started swaying back and forth from the stunned alarming distress.

"Don't pass out! Don't pass out! Don't pass out!" Sabrina watched him swaying and caught her clone dropping forward into her arms. She held her foot back to keep from dropping him just as the doorknob to the room rattled. "No!"

"Why is this door locked?" Mrs. Stoddard asked.

"Sabrina, are you in there?" Harvey knocked at the door. "Is William okay?" There was a rattling of a key ring, and Sabrina held on to William with his female head on her shoulder while working her right hand loose to cast a teleportation spell. Briefly crying out for her Aunt Zelda, she kidnapped William through the portal she mystically conjured and disappeared through points in space with him just as Mrs. Stoddard opened the door. Stepping through, Harvey looked around the hospital green-colored room and to the skewered paper on the table then back to the school nurse.

"And where is this dying student?" She looked at the seventeen-year-old school football player.

"He got better?" Harvey guessed.

"Aunt Zelda!" Reality shifted and warped back to normal as Sabrina appeared back home in her living room. On the back of the sofa, Salem lifted his head up to her presence erupting from inner space and watched as Sabrina pulled close and dragged the other girl in her arms with her, grabbing her by the loose back of her pants to turn her around and then grunting and heaving drop William to the sofa face up unconscious. Salem looked down to her duplicate.

"Let me guess…" He looked up. "Homework was building your own clone?" Sabrina made a face of annoyed shame at him as both of her aunts came down through the hallway to find her. Zelda stepped in the room ahead of Hilda and noticed her niece and then her niece in the boy's clothes sleeping on the sofa.

"Sabrina, what are you doing home in the middle of the day?" She looked to her extra niece. "Or do I not want to know?"

"Aunt Hilda…" Sabrina collapsed into the chair and tried to catch her breath after lugging William around the room in a duplicate of her body. "Five minutes ago, this was Harvey's best friend, William Samms, from over on Carrington Street, and thirty seconds ago, he turned into me, and yes, it just might be because of a spell I did."

"Let me guess…" Both Hilda and Zelda assessed this situation, but Hilda spoke first. "You wanted to show him how the other half lived." She folded her arms before Sabrina in amused frustration.

"It could have been worse." Salem spoke up. "She could have turned him into a cat!"

"Okay…" Zelda got over her initial annoyed anger. "What spell did you use?"

"Well," Sabrina sounded ashamed and repentant as she looked up. "When I was a guy, he told me he was in love with me… Well, me as Sabrina, and I wanted to try and find him a girlfriend. I mean, I like William, but let's face it… I love Harvey, so I used a dream spell to enter his dream to find out what kind of girl he liked."

Hilda and Zelda looked at each other and glanced over in unison to William passed out in a duplicate body of Sabrina's on the sofa. Salem blinked his eyes wondering what they were going to do.

"Well, that shouldn't have done anything." Zelda realized.

"What kind of girl does he like?" Hilda asked.

"Me…" Sabrina beamed. "After all, I am kind of awesome…" She slipped into a bit of vain pride.

"Lose the ego, Sabrina…" Zelda was trying to figure this out. "What other spells might you have used?" She sat on the arm of the sofa next over Sabrina's latest disaster.

"Well…" Sabrina winced at the repercussions. "I might have entered his subconscious…"

"Sabrina!" Zelda was shocked. "That was a violation of his privacy…"

"Any good stories?" Salem was intrigued.

"I learned that boys can be psychologically cruel, and that getting your underwear pulled over your head in public is incredibly embarrassing…"

"Sabrina, last night was a full moon." Zelda took a light breath and spoke. "It's the one day where the physical world, the dream dimension and the astral plane are the closest." She paused. "It's possibly the worst night in the month to use a dream spell." She paused to catch her breath. "But even then, that still doesn't explain that!" She pointed at William whose spirit suddenly stirred from with the female body copied from Sabrina and opened his now blue eyes. Trembling a bit, he started lifting himself to sit up half awake and partially delirious, looking around the room with its mixture of Old England furnishings and modern furniture wearily and half asleep from his frightening ordeal. Sabrina jumped to her feet and stressed unprepared to deal with this bizarre turn of events. Zelda and Hilda gasped separately as William turned his now female head remade in Sabrina's image to notice Salem staring at him from the back of the sofa with his tail twitching annoyingly.

"So, what's it like in there?" Salem spoke.

Did that cat just talk?

"Salem!" Sabrina chided him. William could hardly speak. His voice sounded like a scared little whimper as he looked around the room. Pulling her now long hair back behind one ear, Sabrina looked to her aunts and came over to the sofa to assure his trust. "William…." She tried to sound sorry. "Look, there is a logical explanation for all of this!"

"How…." He was trembling as if he was cold. "Did I get… here?"

"Sabrina helped you here…" Zelda spoke slowly to calm him. "Look, I am sort of a specialist…"

"… in fixing Sabrina's disasters." Hilda smirked and added. Her sister and niece looked up to her as William slowly turned his head up to her.

"And I'm going to change you back." Zelda lowered her head to William inside a duplicate of her niece's body and caressed his back to assure him just before looking to her real niece. "I've got an undo potion that can cancel out any spell, and it's also got an amnesia back-up on it that will make him forget everything! He'll think it was all a dream!"

"What a shame…" Hilda was musing again. "And Sabrina has always wanted a twin sister."

"No, I haven't!" The seventeen-year-old sorceress shrieked as her aunt rose to her feet to head to her laptop potion lab in the dining room. Hilda followed along after her as Sabrina looked at William once more. His clothes hung loose on him, he was still trembling and his expression reeked of full terror. He picked up a spoon from the coffee cup on the table and looked into it. Instead of his face, a concave mirror upside-down image of Sabrina peered back to him and duplicated his motions of moving his head. He had turned into Sabrina! He looked exactly like his teenage crush now, and the experience was making him feel like a terrified young… girl?

"William, is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?"

"Do you have any…" He looked around confused and puzzled and spoke in her voice. "Iced tea…" What had happened to his voice?

"I can get that…" Sabrina started rising as a shimmer of mystical energy appeared on the coffee table before her and turned into a shimmering glass of ice tea before her. She didn't conjure that, but she was worried William had. He was turning into a duplicate of her! Sabrina looked at it and felt her jaw drop in shocked surprise. Even Salem's eyes widened in shock.

"Gee, I wonder what caused that." Salem sarcastically responded.

"Aunt Zelda!" She raced to hasten her aunt's potion expertise and surprise her in the midst of pouring pre-measured ingredients. "Aunt Zelda!"

"Sabrina!"

"He's developed my witchcraft too!" Sabrina was freaking out. "He's becoming a witch!"

"What?!" Zelda, Sabrina and Hilda peeked out to the living room. William had looked around the room once and again confused and disoriented, looking at his hands once more and then nervously palming his chest again to determine if he really had a female body. This was all seeming very real, a bit too real to him unfortunately. Finally noticing the glass of tea, he leaned forward and lifted it to his lips to take a sip then stopped. His mind did not recall Sabrina bringing it.

"This wasn't here a minute ago, was it?" He asked Salem in Sabrina's voice.

"It depends on your definition of a minute ago." Salem answered, and William placed the tea back down. Breaking from this unfolding scene, Zelda started re-measuring more bezoar and wolf-root ingredients for her anti-potion. Continuing to break down, William whimpered in fear and put his hands up to his now blonde hair trying snap out of whatever spell or dream he was having.

"Please wake up… please wake up…" He rocked himself back and forth holding his head. This all felt way too weird. "You're not turning into Sabrina… you're not turning into Sabrina…" He looked around again and started fidgeting in terror. "Oh, God, what's happening to me?!"

"Who used up all my powdered chrysanthemum blossoms?" Zelda looked to Sabrina and Hilda. They were busy watching William lose it. "Fortunately…" Zelda continued. "I have more in the kitchen." She looked at Hilda and raced through the dining room into the kitchen.

"Maybe you should help him." Hilda looked at Sabrina. "…Or is it "her" now."

"How do you help someone having a nervous breakdown?" Sabrina was starting to freak as well.

"I mean…" William jumped up on the sofa to talk to Salem. "If this is a dream, I can just ask for… Oh, I don't know… shrimp cocktail, right?"

More magic was invoked and a glass chalice of shrimp with cocktail sauce appeared on the table. Salem turned his head to watch it appear, looked William once more and then back to the seafood snack on the table.

"I've just got one thing to say to that." He spoke. "Dibs!" He launched his limber cat body off the sofa to the table and nearly slid off of it before correcting his flight pattern and pulling out a piece of shrimp with his front paws to handle the shrimp he was chewing. Above him, William's blonde female head with the face of his infatuation twitched and shook once as Sabrina forced herself to try and calm him down from getting hysterical. There was a small puff from an explosion of powder as her Aunt Zelda raced to combine ingredients in the right order, but thanks to Hilda, nothing was ever in the Mystical Periodic Chart in which she kept her ingredients. All she heard was Sabrina's voice trying to keep William from freaking out in front of her.

"William, I swear…." She repeated herself. "There is a logical explanation for all of this!" She waved her hands dramatically in front of him.

"What's happening to me?" William was screaming back to her from her face and in her voice. "Why am I hallucinating all these weird things?" He wasn't sure if he was dreaming or not, and if he was dreaming, why didn't it end? "Am I going crazy? I mean… look what I can do! I want a blueberry banana split with cherries on it!"

On the table, a banana split with blueberries and cherries on it appeared behind Salem.

"Dessert, yes!" Salem was halfway through the shrimp.

"Oh, my god!" He was losing it. "Sabrina… is this real?! What's happening to me?!" William rose to his feet and faced Sabrina. He was close to tears. "Are you a witch or something? Did you put a curse on me?"

"No! It was an accident! I swear!"

"What?" William's Sabrina face twitched again. "You're a witch?" He finally deduced the truth. "And now I'm one too?"

"Not for long…" Zelda was carrying a laboratory test tube of a small violet-colored vial that was smoking as she carried it out to him. "William, drink this and it will be like none of this ever happened?!" She handed it to her niece's clone in the masculine clothes. William took it, smelled it and nearly threw up in his mouth before extending it to arm's length. It smelled like what he pictured the bathroom in a haunted house smelled like. He could only guess what it tasted like.

"I tried cutting the bad taste as far as I could!"

"Try cutting it again." He handed it to her. "Then bury it!"

"Sabrina…" Zelda looked annoyed after racing to make an anti-potion to change him back. "Hold her. I'm pouring it down his throat!"

"What?" William looked at Sabrina, but she grabbed him and kept him from running. Hilda held on to William's other arm as his female body struggled and fought, but down on the floor, William clamped his mouth shut trying to be dosed against his will. Recalling that trick when Sabrina did it as a kid, Zelda pinched William's nose as he gasped for air and poured her potion down into William's mouth. Upon the rancid taste of something close to zombie decomposition being poured into his gullet, the new Sabrina started choking and struggling. On the floor of the foyer, Zelda was sitting on the younger girl's chest with her hand over his lips. The moment she removed it, William's gag reflex choked it up, and his female body fell limp.

"She's – He's passed out again." Sabrina gasped and stood up. "Why isn't he changing back?"

"He only got part of it…" Both Zelda and Hilda stood trying to catch their breaths. "Boy, he's stronger than I thought…. Sabrina, get back to school and cover for him. I'll mix more anti-potion and have him ready for you to take home later. Just say… William went home sick…."

"I think I'm going to be sick." Hilda slumped back after the fighting on the floor into the big chair and held her head.

"You think you're sick…" Salem groaned from the platter that once held the fruit-covered banana split. He was covered in cream and cherry syrup. "I can't believe I ate the whole thing."