Chances Are Omnibus (Gender Swap Fiction)

by P. T. Dilloway

  “Presidents.”

  “That’s not so bad,” I say. I think of Madison, whose first name is the last name of a president, not that Debbie and I considered that when she was born.

  “So what are you doing?” Before I can say anything, Jamie snatches my biography of Sinatra away. She sticks a finger down her throat. “Yuck. That’s like the shit my grandpa plays in the car.”

  “Yeah, I know. Gag.”

  “Where’s the rest of your group?”

  “You already talked to him.”

  “That kid?” She pats my arm. “No wonder you came up here.”

  “Actually it’s because I don’t have a phone like everyone else to look stuff up.”

  “Oh, right.” Jamie smiles. “How about you come over to my place after school? You can use my computer.”

  “I don’t think my grandma would go for that. She wouldn’t want to wait around—”

  “Daddy can take you home after we’re done. Or we can call a cab.”

  “I don’t know—”

  Jamie presses a few buttons. A couple moments later she’s on the phone with Tess. “Hi, Mrs. Madigan. It’s Jamie, Stacey’s friend. Yeah. No, nothing’s happened. She’s fine. She was just wondering if she could come over to my house to do a little homework. What? Oh, that’s what she said. My father would be happy to drive her home when we’re done. We should be done by seven. What? She’s right here.”

  Jamie stops and then holds out the phone to me. “Hi, Grandma.”

  “Hello, dear. Are you sure you want to go with your friend after school?”

  “Yes.”

  Tess sighs into the phone. “I suppose it will be fine. I’ll keep some dinner warm for you when you get back. Just don’t be out too late, understand? I still want you in bed by eight-thirty.”

  “Yes, Grandma Tess.”

  “Good. Tell your friend goodbye for me, dear.”

  I hand the phone back to Jamie. “She said it was OK.”

  “Great. We can meet out front after school.”

  “All right.”

  Jamie pats me on the shoulder. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

  I wait until I see her go down the stairs before I turn back to my stack of old books. If nothing else, I’d really like to do well on this to prove to that little snot Keshia I’m not an idiot. That would serve her right. With that in mind I get back to work.

  Chapter 28

  From TV and movies I expect a stretch limo to show up for Jamie and Caleb with a driver in a black suit with a little hat. Instead it’s an ordinary silver Mercedes. The driver wears a dark suit, but no hat. He does open the back door so we can climb inside.

  I sit in the middle, so that I’m between Jamie and her little brother. Caleb hasn’t said anything since he joined us on the front steps of the admin building.

  “It’s great your grandma finally let you come over,” Jamie says. “We haven’t had anyone over since we moved here.”

  “It’s hard making friends,” I say.

  “Yeah, especially at a place like that.” Jamie’s phone beeps. She checks the screen. “I’m getting an update from one of my friends back in Miami,” she says. She lets me see the screen. It’s her Facebook account. Jamie has over five hundred friends on Facebook, but apparently none in the city who can hang out with her.

  With the afternoon traffic it takes about forty-five minutes to reach the glass tower Jamie and Caleb call home. From the look of it, it’s about as tall as the headquarters for Lennox Pharmaceuticals. There’s a lobby that’s just as opulent, complete with its own fountain that puts the one at St. Andrew’s to shame.

  “Some night I’d really like to go swimming in there,” Jamie says.

  “That sounds like fun,” I lie.

  Caleb has already trotted over to the elevators and pushed the button. When one of the elevators shows up, Jamie and I have to hurry in order to make it before the doors close. On the way up to the sixteenth floor, Jamie swats Caleb on the back of the head. “The little weasel is always doing that,” she says.

  “Do not,” he says.

  “You do so.” She sighs. “Is your little sister this annoying?”

  “No. Maddy is nice.”

  “Lucky you.”

  There’s a corridor inlaid with brown marble and gold. There are only three doors; Caleb races Jamie to the one at the far end of the hallway. “I win!” he shouts.

  “Only because you cheat,” she says.

  The door opens on its own. I recognize the young man from Dr. Macintosh’s office. “This is my friend Stacey,” Jamie says. “We’re going to do homework.”

  “Whatever,” he says.

  The condo is easily bigger than Jake’s entire house. Caleb runs over to the leather couch in the living room and turns the sixty-inch plasma TV to cartoons. Jamie takes my hand and leads me into the kitchen. There’s an old Hispanic woman in there to cook dinner. Jamie ignores her and opens the fridge. She takes out two bottles of Coke, one for each of us.

  “Come on, you got to see my room.”

  Her room is somewhat of a disappointment. It’s bigger than the one I share with Maddy, but it’s not that different from any little girl’s bedroom. The walls are pink and covered with posters for her favorite singers and bands. There are also posters of older boys, probably from the shows she tells me about. “You can leave your bag on the bed.”

  It’s a canopy bed with a pink comforter. It’s made up neatly, no doubt thanks to a servant. Though Jamie says her father isn’t that rich, he must do well to afford this spread. It’s a lot better than I could ever hope to do, no matter how smart I am.

  Jamie drops her bag on the floor and then flops into an office chair. She opens a pink laptop. While it boots up, she takes off her uniform jacket and shakes out her ponytail. I decide to take my coat off too.

  I hope to get to work, but Jamie has other things in mind. She logs on to Facebook, and browses through the messages her digital friends have posted on her wall. Some of these messages include links to videos. It seems every video is either about a hot boy or a cute cat.

  The former seem to interest her a lot more. “I can’t wait until that comes out,” she says after she watches a movie trailer someone linked to her wall. “I hope he takes his shirt off.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” I say.

  I sit next to Jamie and fidget in my seat. I didn’t come here to watch her answer her messages. An hour goes by before she says, “OK, got all that out of the way. Now I guess we should get down to business.”

  “Good idea.” I tell her some of the albums I want to look up. She goes to a website where we can listen to the albums for free. Two minutes into the first track, Jamie starts to make gagging gestures. I giggle at this. “I know. It’s so lame.”

  “I don’t know how old people can listen to such garbage,” she says.

  “It’s weird,” I say, though I know it’s because the “old people” grew up with that music and don’t think it’s shit, like me with my Creedence.

  Jamie retreats to her bed so she can play Angry Birds while I do some research. The music continues to play in the background as I track down links to music from the ‘30s and ‘40s. I find some Glen Miller stuff too, since I figure Darren won’t do anything.

  Another hour later there’s a knock on the door. Travis the male nanny opens the door. “Esmerelda says five minutes to dinner,” he says. “Make sure you and your friend wash up first.”

  “We will,” Jamie says. She sounds much sweeter than usual. After the door closes, she tosses her phone aside and sighs. “God, he is so hot.”

  “Yeah, he is,” I say. Even if I were a grown woman I wouldn’t go out with Travis. I’m not into the hairy hipster type. For Jamie I doubt it matters a whole lot.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I opened the bathroom door and he was in there shaving? He had his shirt off and everything.”

  “Wow,” I mumble, though I imagine Travis’s chest is pale,
scrawny, and hairless.

  “I could have just died from embarrassment,” she says. Then she adds, “I just wish I’d had my phone with me so I could get a picture.”

  “That would have been great,” I say.

  She gets up from the bed. “We’d better go wash up.”

  She leads me to the bathroom. It has a tub that could have easily fit me when I was still six-three and over two hundred pounds. The tub has whirlpool jets too. My face warms as I remember the hot tub upstate where I masturbated for the first time as a woman while I thought of Grace, my daughter’s lover.

  I come back to reality as Jamie snaps her fingers in front of my eyes. “Hey,” she says. “You in a trance or something?”

  “What? No. I was just thinking of something.”

  “Must be something pretty interesting to get your face all red.”

  “It’s nothing important.” I turn to the sink to wash my hands. When I look up at the mirror, I see what Jamie meant; my face is still red from when I thought about Grace. I splash a little cold water on my cheeks. That doesn’t help a whole lot. “Maybe I should go home,” I say.

  “You can’t yet. Daddy’s not home.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess I can stick around.” Since I’m only ten I can’t just hop on a train like I used to do. I could, but Tess would have a fit; she didn’t like me to go out by myself when I was eighteen.

  Jamie practically skips out to the dining room. The table is already set. Caleb slouches in one chair, probably annoyed to be dragged away from the TV. Jamie and I sit on the opposite side of the table from him.

  The Hispanic woman from the kitchen brings in a tray loaded with tiny chickens. Game hens, I think they’re called. “Thank you Esmerelda,” Jamie says. Esmerelda puts a chicken down on my plate. It’s got some kind of stuffing in it. I poke at the thing with my fork. “It’s great,” Jamie tells me.

  I take a cautious bite. As the old saying goes, it tastes like chicken. It makes me think of the chickens I used to barbecue in the backyard for Debbie and Maddy. They usually complained my chicken was dry, but this stuff is pretty juicy.

  Besides the chicken we have mushrooms in some kind of sauce. I don’t usually eat mushrooms even on pizza, but these are delicious. While I scarf down my meal, Jamie talks more on her favorite subject: boys. There’s one boy in sixth grade she’s particularly fascinated with who has the unlikely name of Thurston. He’s captain of the JV lacrosse team. “I didn’t even know what lacrosse was until I saw him,” she says. I share in a giggle with her.

  We eat carrot cake for dessert, which is Jamie’s favorite, when her father gets home. As if she’s still a toddler, she bolts from the table to meet him at the door. “Daddy!” she cries out and hugs him around the waist. He’s only about six inches taller than her, maybe five-seven at most. He’s mostly bald with a fringe of black hair left. His glasses are about as thick as mine, which is more an indictment of my bad eyes than his.

  He kisses her on the top of the head. “Hello, sweetheart,” he says in a gruff voice that sounds like it could use a throat lozenge.

  “Come on, Daddy, Stacey’s here!”

  “Who’s Stacey?”

  “My friend.” Jamie’s voice loses its little girlish quality. “I’ve been talking about her for over a week now. We met at the doctor, remember?”

  “Oh, that Stacey,” he says. He follows Jamie into the dining room. His eyes narrow at me, to size me up. My face reddens again under his gaze. “This must be the famous Stacey. I’m Gary Borstein, Jamie’s dad.”

  I take his proffered hand to give it a slight shake. “Stacey Chang.”

  “So you go to school with Jamie?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Jamie says, “but she’s a grade below me.”

  “Oh, I see. How old are you, Stacey?”

  “Ten.”

  “That’s a good age,” he says.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Jamie turned eleven two months ago.”

  “Six months ago, Daddy.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, sweetheart.”

  Jamie’s father sits down at the head of the table. Esmerelda has already fetched his dinner from the kitchen. He starts to dig in. “So you two met at Dr. Macintosh’s?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s great. Jamie needs friends.”

  “I had plenty of friends, Daddy.”

  “I know, honey.” He takes a bite of his chicken. Then he asks me, “What do your parents do?”

  “I live with my grandparents.”

  “Her parents died.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. It’s good of your grandparents to take you in.”

  “Yes. They’re very nice.”

  “Her grandma is super-duper nice,” Jamie says.

  “Yeah, she is,” I say. “My grandpa is nice too. He’s a cop.”

  “Really? Maybe I ran into him at court,” Jamie’s father says.

  “Dad-dy,” Jamie says. She stretches the word out. “Stacey doesn’t care about that. She’s just a kid.”

  If Maddy had talked to me like that I would have sent her to her room. That was a lot more of a punishment fifteen years ago, before there was the Internet and smartphones everywhere. Jamie’s father must not mind because he says, “I suppose you’re right, sweetheart.”

  Jamie takes my hand and pulls me from the chair. “Come on, let’s go back to my room.”

  Once inside, Jamie plops on her bed and sighs. “Daddy is such a nerd sometimes.”

  “He seems nice.”

  “He’s always nice to company. Too nice really. He starts trying to butter up everyone like they’re a client.”

  “I guess so,” I say. I don’t want to press the issue.

  Jamie rolls over. I think at first she must be mad at me, but then she opens the drawer to her nightstand. From this she takes out a smartphone. She tosses it to me; I fumble the catch so the phone lands on the floor. “That’s only an iPhone 3, but it should still work.”

  “Wow,” I say as I pick the phone up. “This is so expensive. I can’t accept a gift like that.”

  Jamie snorts. “Oh please, that’s like two generations old already. You could probably buy one for ten bucks on eBay.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I say. The catch-22 is I would have to have Internet access to buy a phone like this online. This I suppose is much easier. Then Keshia and her cronies won’t have any reason to make fun of me. “Thank you so much.”

  Jamie shows me how to turn the phone on and how to access the Internet. She brings up her Facebook page. “You should get one of these and then you can friend me.”

  “I’m already your friend.”

  “Well duh, but then we can share messages and pictures and stuff like that.”

  “I don’t think my grandparents would like that.”

  “Why? It’s not like you’re going to be using it to talk to pedophiles. Are you?” She gives me a wink and then slaps my arm. “I’m just kidding.”

  “I’ll ask them.”

  “Why do you have to ask them? It’s not their phone. My dad is paying for it.”

  I don’t want to keep secrets from Jake and Tess—or any more than I already keep from Tess—but what Jamie says makes sense. It’s not their phone or their money. Besides, they aren’t my real grandparents and I’m not really ten years old. I can take care of myself. “I’ll do it,” I say. I turn the phone off and then slip it into my backpack.

  I see on the clock it’s after six. “I should be getting home. I promised to be back by seven.”

  Jamie rolls your eyes. “You’re such a goody-goody.”

  “I don’t want to worry them. They’ve been really nice to me.”

  “I’m just teasing,” Jamie says. “Hey, do you think your grandma would let you sleep over this weekend?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Is your father going to be home?”

  “Most of the time. Travis will be around too.”

  “Does he live here?”
<
br />   “I wish,” Jamie says and sighs like a romance book heroine. “He has some grubby little place in the garment district. He lives with these two stupid girls. They’re actresses or something stupid like that.”

  From the way Jamie says the latter part, I know she’s jealous. She would give anything to share an apartment with Travis, not that she would know what to do with him once they were alone. To some extent it was the same way for me when I was a boy; my friends and I would stare at Playboy centerfolds though we wouldn’t have had a clue what to do if the model on the page had sprung to life and asked us to fuck her.

  “I’ll ask her about the sleepover when I get back,” I tell Jamie. We share a brief hug and then she takes me out to the dining room, where her father works on his carrot cake.

  “Daddy, Stacey needs to go home.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “In the suburbs,” Jamie says.

  I give him the address and he winces. He knows it’ll be probably ninety minutes round trip at a minimum. “All right,” he says. He pats me on the head. “Let me get my keys.”

  ***

  I’m surprised Mr. Borstein drives himself. He has a silver Audi sedan with a vanity plate that reads, “BORSTEN1” in an underground garage. I sit in the backseat, on the passenger’s side to make it easy for him to see me. This is the first time I’m really alone with an adult stranger since I became little; I’m not sure how to act. So I stare out the window and watch the scenery as we make our way towards the suburbs.

  We’re stuck on the bridge off the island when he says, “I was really glad to see you were real. The last ‘friend’ Jamie had turned out to be some seventy-year-old retiree in Boca Raton she’d been chatting with online.”

  “Gross.”

  “My Jamie’s a good girl. She’s just headstrong. That’s why it’s hard for her to make friends.”

  “She had some in Miami, didn’t she?”

  “A few. It broke my heart to have to move her and Cal up here. There wasn’t much choice. Someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” Mr. Borstein shakes his head. “You’re too young to know what that means.”

  I wonder if that means he was run out of Miami or someone up here offered him a really good job? Either way, it’s clear his children aren’t happy about it. “I’m glad you did,” I say. “I’m new here too. We used to live in California.”