The Paper

Note: this section has no sex and is heavy with thoughts and introspection. If that's not your thing, skip to the end for the TL;DR

How can he assign a paper on the first fucking week? It's due on the second Monday of school! What the hell? Evidently, college was not the same easy ride as high school had been.

You sit in the library, alone at a table in the back, the harsh light from your laptop screen bathing your face as you stare at the blank page. Saturday night, and you haven't started. If it wasn't for the fact that Andy kicked you out of the room to fuck a girl, you probably wouldn't have started until tomorrow.

You turn back to the book you're supposed to be analyzing. The Kite Runner. Sure, it would probably be easy enough to write a paper on it, if you'd actually read it over the summer like you were supposed to. Instead, you fucked around with your high school friends all summer, partying and surfing, and now have nothing to show for it.

With a sigh, you close the book and resign yourself to the fact that you probably aren't getting anything done right now. Your computer reads 1:13 AM. You'd been down here for two hours, and all you have is three shitty deleted intros and some bullet point analysis basically copied from Sparknotes.

You feel a sudden urge to call your girlfriend, Isabella. Unlike you, she'd actually worked hard in high school, rather than skating by on natural intelligence, and she was at Georgia Tech studying Materials Engineering. You figure she's probably still awake studying or working at this time, and pull out your phone to call her.

"Hi, you've reached Isabella, please leave a message and I'll call you back soon!"

"Uh, hey, Isabella, what's up? I guess you are asleep after all... Anyway, just wanted to check up on you. I've had a pretty wild first week, a lot of stuff happening I wasn't really expecting or, like, prepared for at all... But anyway. Hope you're doing good. Love you, bye."

Another sigh escapes from your lips as you end the message and put down your phone. You watch as a group of three students get up from the table near you and leave the library. Now there's nobody anywhere near you, and you start to feel the crushing, overwhelming feeling of stress and panic wash over you. How could you be so stupid to think you could pull off this paper in just two nights? How much of a failure will you be when you literally fail your first assignment in your Literature class? It's not even that you care about Lit, really, you just feel as though you're way out of your depth. High school was your playground, you could put in the bare minimum and receive grades you were decently happy with, your teachers loved you, the basketball coach thought highly of you, most girls wanted you and guys wanted to be you. Now, though, you're just a face in a sea of faces, just another nobody, and the feeling seems to be washing away anything else from your mind.

You look down at your hand and realize that you had unthinkingly pulled your bronze ring from your pocket and are now turning it over in your fingers. The sight of the ring soothes you. Although you haven't used it since that first day, when you and Andy both became girls briefly, you had taken to carrying the ring in your pocket with you wherever you went. It quickly became routine, and those rare occasions when you were without your ring, you felt naked, ****, like you were missing some integral part of yourself. You know logically that this must be another power of the ring, some sort of attraction like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, but logic seems to be powerless in the face of the pure emotional reactions the ring elicits from within you.

Turning over the ring more, you start to feel an urge to put it on. You look around you; nobody is there, just as before. Only half-consciously, you slip the ring onto your right index finger. Immediately your vision goes black with pain, and you struggle to keep quiet as you feel your body twist and change unnaturally. Interestingly, the pain seems to be less pronounced than it was the first time. Perhaps it gets easier each time?

You glance at your hands. Smooth, hairless, smaller than your male hands. You feel your hair moving around, falling into your face rather annoyingly. You look around again, and, still seeing nobody, proceed to stand up and start packing up your things. You aren't sure where you're going or what you're doing, but for some reason the strong feelings of distress have disappeared, and left you calm, collected, and curious about experiencing life in this new body.

TL;DR, you're working on a paper, get stressed out, then slip on the ring.