After everything else, dinner, with Aunt Sophie arriving for it with all her luggage, was practically anticlimactic.

  I barely heard anything she said at the table, hardly noticing what I was eating. May somehow sensed how distracted I was and fielded every question or comment that came my way, intimating I was stressed over Wednesday’s exams. It was a good excuse but in reality I didn’t have a single shit to give about Wednesday; even hours after getting the news, I was still drifting in a cloud of unreality. This morning I’d found out I was more different than I could have imagined, that I had an alien sense that might be shared by a few thousand other people in the world (and presumably by the aliens), and this afternoon I’d found out I was a completely new human being and as much a Seever as a Ross. Neither of these two things really changed me, but it still felt like I’d woken up in the tub again somehow. Like I should look different in my mirror. Again.

  April Seever. I’m April Seever.

  David felt well and truly dead, like a set of memories that didn’t really belong in my head anymore. I wasn’t him, I was his literal genetic progeny. David had died and I’d been born; it felt like an instant, perverse kind of reincarnation, like a butterfly growing from the corpse of a caterpillar.

  And if I wasn’t David, who was April?

  Bursting into tears over the dessert, I got it under control and stood with an “I’m fine, excuse me,” and fled the table. Hearing Aunt Sophie’s “You would think that with six decades of experience she’d know how to deal with stress better—” didn’t make me slow down before I reached my room and was leaning against my closed door. Again.

  Because apparently April was a weepy little girl.

  And God this was stupid. Nothing had really changed since this morning, and now May and Carl would be worried about me. I didn’t give a flying fuck what Aunt Sophie thought of my little scene, but they didn’t deserve this. Texting May an I’m sorry I’m fine I’m going to study and sleep don’t come up, I immediately felt worse for sending it, like I was rejecting her, rejecting them. I almost ran back downstairs. Get a fucking grip! Fuck!

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to get any studying done, so instead I showered and brushed my teeth and dressed for bed. Turning out the lights, I sat at my new study desk, feet on the seat and chin on my knees (I really was amazingly flexible now), surfing the net on my laptop looking up everything I could about Changeling Syndrome and brain research. Sitting there, awhile later I heard Aunt Sophie come upstairs and close the door of the guest room, and then the house was quiet. May didn’t come up to tuck me in and I buried the stupid hurt of that—You told her not to!—in my searching.

  And it really was what Grace had said; there wasn’t a whisper, not a hint that anybody online knew about the alien sense. Telepathy, what Grace could do, they knew about; it wasn’t a common changeling gift but the first one had been documented years ago. Just one more thing to make the conspiracy theorists more paranoid, and a great reason for Grace to never out herself.

  I was amazed she’d talked to me.

  And I wondered if there was more for me to learn about my new “gift.” I’d read somewhere about children who’d been born deaf and had been given hearing later in life with an implant. Because their brains hadn’t had any aural input to decode and make sense of during development, their adult brains weren’t plastic enough to fully adapt. They had learned to an extent but never really mastered hearing and couldn’t tell a lot of sounds and tones apart.

  So could there be more to my new sense than what I felt now? Maybe I’d never be a telepath like Grace—and I didn’t want to be, it sounded horrible. But maybe if she’d been born with it her brain would have learned how to filter or block unwanted thoughts?

  Realizing I was just spinning in circles and not even making a whole lot of sense anymore, I finally closed my laptop and looked at the clock. Shit. At my new developmental age I needed eight or nine hours minimum to fully function and now I was going to have to sleep in if I could. Setting my alarm for later than I liked, I sent May another text apologizing and letting her know I’d be sleeping in and went to bed. For the first night since “wetting the bed” I didn’t masturbate. I also didn’t even consider the pad; I knew the way I felt I’d be perfectly safe.

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  I thought I’d lie awake for the rest of the night, but I was asleep in minutes of my head hitting the pillow.

  *****************************************************************

  The ache woke me before my alarm, not strong but enough to pull me from sleep. Climbing out of bed—the queen-sized mattress seriously dwarfed me—I stumbled into the bathroom and dropped my gray night shorts to look. Yup, spotting.

  Well, May had prepared me for this, showing me the tampons and sanitary napkins she’d bought and walking me through how to use them. Taking a quick shower with all the steps except my hair, I dried off and, still wrapped in my towel, pulled out the box of tampons. I’d already decided not to mess with pads unless I absolutely had to—I hadn’t liked the feeling of the pad I’d had to use after Dr. James’ procedure at all. Putting a foot up on the side of the bath, I unwrapped the applicator, stretched the cord out, took the proper grip, gently parted my labia and positioned it at my opening—and stopped.

  Okay, be a guy about this. You’ve been up in yourself a half-dozen times already and it’s barely bigger than your finger.

  But it wasn’t my warm finger, I wasn’t wet, and all I felt now was squicked out by it all.

  Oh, come on! Where Dr. Blake and her fingers and speculum could go, I could follow.

  Straightening up, I closed my eyes. I needed to relax, right? Relax and just do it. May had shown me all about the proper grip and angle, laughing a bit at my embarrassment, and I imagined her here, walking me through it again. It didn’t help but imagining her laughing about this did. Keeping my eyes closed, I did it with a smooth push against the tightness, shuddering a bit at the feeling. Deciding I was as far in as I needed to go, I pressed the plunger until my index finger touched my opening and withdrew the applicator. Wrapping it up in the packaging, I threw it away and then remembered to check for the string now hanging out of me and found it.

  I did it! Take that! And I didn’t feel anything inside, which May said meant it was up where it was supposed to be. A wide grin split my face. It was such a minor victory, but it felt good—at least until I felt another dull twinge low inside me.

  Fuck.

  Still it really hadn’t gotten much worse since Sunday and I’d felt much worse body pains and played through them. Brushing my teeth before applying deodorant and lip balm and curling the ends of my hair in (I was finally getting the hang of it), I dressed and went downstairs.

  Carl had already left but May was still in the kitchen with Steph, Aunt Sophie nowhere to be seen. She smiled brightly as I came around the corner. “Feeling better?”

  I nodded. “I don’t know why, since my doom is upon me.”

  “It’s today?”

  I told her all about my morning so far, skipping over how I’d had to nerve myself up to inserting my first tampon. “How’s your tenderness?” she asked.

  I blinked, realizing I hadn’t noticed my breasts at all. “Gone.”

  “And on the Pain Scale, how do you feel down there?”

  I thought about it. “Right now? A two, maybe three? Uncomfortable but tolerable.”

  “Okay, well don’t be stubborn about it—like I said there’s always ibuprofen and hot packs. But the pain should peak today and be gone in two or three. So, fruit and yogurt for you for breakfast, and we’re having fish tonight! Period foods.” She suddenly hugged me, then pushed me to arm’s length to examine my face. “And how are you feeling?”

  “I—” I hadn’t been lying about feeling better, which was odd since nothing had changed except to add this. “I really am good. I’m sorry about last night.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “You were hardly horrible. I hit you with a big thing yesterday, and I suspect . . . well don’t take this the wrong way but it is your time of month.”

  “Huh?”

  “’Huh?’” she mimicked me, laughing. “You read all the material, and you missed the bit about pre-menstrual mood changes? PMS?”

  “But—really?” I thought back on yesterday. I wasn’t used to thinking about my mood; before it had changed when I was hungry, tired, or stressed, and I knew what affected it and how to deal with it. Food, sleep, decompression. Yesterday had been . . . pretty stressful, but had my reaction to everything been different than it would have been? Was this the “crazy” that Carl had been talking about that first night?

  “Mm-hm,” May said. “Hun, I really can’t say since nothing you’re experiencing feels normal to you yet.” She rolled her eyes at the mere suggestion that it could. “But, well, one of the most common pre-menstrual symptoms is, let’s just call it greater sensitivity to stressors. Tack on anxiety, aggressiveness, irritability, even moodiness and depression, but mostly that all comes back to our heightened response to stressors we experience on those days.” Rifling through the fridge, she presented me with a water bottle and yogurt cup and started peeling an orange. “It tends to peak just before our flow starts, at least it does for me.”

  “So . . . I was PMS-ing?”

  “Maybe. Point is, don’t be surprised you’re feeling better even if part of you is feeling worse. Which is good, because, the test! And even if the cramping is worse today you should be coming down off it tomorrow. If it’s not bad now, you’ll be able to study.”

  The test. For obvious reasons, it had completely slipped my mind this morning. I never had gotten around to studying the incorrect answers and taking a second trial test, and she laughed at my panicked look. “Don’t worry, you’ve got this. One more day. Shut yourself in your room, I’ll wait on you hand and foot, and you’ll be fine.”