...you get a text from your best friend, Pam.

You are not in love with Pamela Mercer.

This is important to establish because people get weird about it. People have always gotten weird about it, ever since Marcy Keller told everyone in sixth grade that you were "obsessed" with Pamela, which... okay, you had just spent an entire weekend making her a friendship bracelet with individual letter beads that spelled out an inside joke from a movie you'd watched together four times, but that's just what good friends do, Marcy, and it's not your fault that your concept of friendship has always operated at a frequency that other people apparently consider "intense" or "a lot" or "totally lesbo" or whatever.

You are not in love with Pamela. Really.

You just think she's the most fascinating person alive. You know her coffee order and her backup coffee order and the secret third coffee order she only gets when she's sad. You just noticed, at a party sophomore year, some guy grab her arm a little too hard and crossed an entire house in what a bystander later described as a sprint to insert yourself between them and dump the contents of your Solo cup on his head.

You know, best friend stuff.

And yeah, fine, there was The Experiment. Junior year, Kayla Marsh's birthday party. You'd been losing an argument with yourself for about six months by then, so when a game of spin the bottle gave you plausible deniability, you kissed a girl (Grace Huang, specifically, who was really sweet and used strawberry lip gloss that always made you wonder how it would taste but not enough to buy your own and maybe it would be weird to ask her to try it) and waited for the fireworks.

Nothing.

Conclusive. Case closed. You are a heterosexual woman who simply has a very intense best friend and also cannot stop thinking about the way Pam tucks her hair behind her left ear (only ever the left) when she's about to say something risky or passionate or confrontational, like she needs a moment to brace herself.

That's just noticing things. You're observant.

You are not in love with Pam, and this has been your position for approximately seven years, and you have defended it with the kind of consistent, unwavering energy that definitely does not suggest you are trying to convince yourself of anything.

Up until the phone woke you up, anyway, and you found yourself in a boy's body, and...

...and now you're staring at a text from Pam and feeling all sorts of new feelings...

heyyy are we still on for today? i have SO much to tell you about last night's date lol

Right, the date. With Marcus, who is tall and plays club soccer and has, in Pam's words, "a really solid vibe," which is a phrase that makes you want to put your fist through drywall for reasons you have filed under "protective best friend instincts." What's so great about--

She sends you a picture, and your whole world contracts.

You've seen pictures of her before. You've even stared at them, maybe a bit longer than you should have. You noticed the way you felt warmth in your chest, the way your lips curled into a smile as you studied her face and eyes. Just friendstuff.

But this time, looking at Pam's picture in this body, what you feel is not warmth.

What you feel is heat, down below your stomach, spreading, aching, hungry.

It hits you like a freight train, heart leaping into double-speed. Your breath catches, actually catches, like something has physically snagged in your throat, and your skin prickles with heat, not a flush but something more systemic, more metabolic, like someone has cranked a thermostat you didn't know you had, sparks jumping around your body and continuing to spread the hungry heat everywhere in their wake.

Your heart is pounding in your chest, your throat, your ears. Your mouth is dry, and there is a... definite stirring... in a region you have owned for approximately four minutes and feel abruptly, bizarrely afraid of. Especially because the stirring, against your suddenly-too-tight pajama shorts, feels holyfuckingshitgood in a mildly painful way that makes you immediately shift and reach down to adjust...

Pam's just sitting in her car. That's all the picture is. She's in the driver's seat with her seatbelt on, holding up two coffee cups with a grin that says I know I look cute right now, and her hair is doing the thing, the thing, the loose curl over her left shoulder that she pretends happens by accident but absolutely does not, and the morning light is catching the edge of her collarbone where her shirt has slipped slightly off-center and--

You put the phone face-down on the bed. You're breathing like you've been running.

What the fuck. What the fuck.

Okay. Okay okay okay. Process. Think. You are a rational person. You have a 3.7 GPA and you've read actual books about psychology and you can think about this.

What just happened was a physiological response. Testosterone is a known quantity. You learned about it in AP Bio. It does things to your brain, to your limbic system, and it is entirely, completely, one hundred percent reasonable that a sudden flood of male hormones would cause you to respond to visual stimuli in ways that are unfamiliar and overwhelming and have absolutely nothing to do with your actual feelings about...

Your phone buzzes again, still face-down. You don't pick it up.

Because here's the thing. Here's the thing you are not going to think about. Here's the thing that is pacing around the edges of your awareness, muscles taut and ready to pounce:

The warmth was always there. The warmth was always there. Every time she sent a picture. Every time she leaned into you on the couch and you could smell her shampoo. Every time she laughed at something you said and looked at you with her whole face and you felt that glow in your chest that you'd catalogued under friendship, very intense, see also: extroversion, shared history, platonic soulmates.

The warmth was always there. What's new isn't the signal, what's new is that in this body that signal is a tidal wave of noise. Like you've been hearing a song through a wall your whole life, you thought you knew the melody, you could hum along, it was muffled and kinda pleasant, if often distracting...

...and now someone has kicked the wall down, and the music is so loud your teeth are vibrating, and it is very, clearly, not the song you thought it was, it has never been that song, it is a full rock concert playing live and you are sitting on the stage-sized-base.

You pick up the phone. You look at the picture again. The freight train hits you again, right on schedule, new heat spreading, making you swallow and shift again.

But this time you don't put the phone down, because you're trying something. An experiment. A real one, deeper than the spin-the-bottle one.

You're looking at her face and you're trying to... isolate it. Trying to identify what part of this feeling is the testosterone, the new, male, endocrine interloper, and what part of it is yours. The original equipment. The thing you came in with.

The hunger is... newish. The heat is newish, stronger than the warmth you'd always feel... the way your eyes track to her collarbone is new, or at least newly obvious, newly impossible to dress up as anything other than what it is.

The way your eyes trace lower, wishing the photo showed the full curve of her breasts... definitely, very new.

But the ache? The way your chest constricts, just slightly, just a half-breath's worth, when you look at her grin and know it's directed at you? The way your brain immediately, reflexively, without any conscious input, starts composing the reply that will make her send another picture? The way the thought last night's date sits in your gut like a swallowed coal?

That's not new. That's not testosterone. That is yours, a familiar groove in your soul, and you have been feeling it this entire time, every day, for years, and you have been calling it "best friend stuff."

"Oh," you say, out loud, to nobody at all, in a voice that doesn't belong to you. "Fuck."

You have forty-seven hours and fifty-three minutes.

Then you return to normal, and all... this... returns to something you can manage.

But if you do that... if you go back to being yourself...

Well. Pam's straight. Or at least, if she's bi, she hasn't realized it yet or said anything.

Which means you'll go back to feeling whatever you were feeling, with... very little chance, statistically, to ever be with her.

Unless.

Unless you...

Unless you, somehow... with someone...

Your thing stirs again, stirs and grows painfully erect against the fabric of your soft, elastic shorts, and the thoughts that fill your mind are so intense you can't help but reach down and shove the material away so your shaft can spring free, full and throbbing and holy shit how do boys not go crazy feeling like this...

Your eyes stare at it, wide and unblinking. It's so... long. Thick. Alive. Like a small animal, attached to your body and twitching with a mind of its own.

Except you can feel each twitch. Feel the air against its sensitive surface, feel the way the foreskin is peeling back as the head grows, and grows...

Your foreskin. Your head. The animal is you.

You swallow, throat dry, as you feel urges taking hold of your body, urges you can barely recognize. You want to grab it. Touch it. Stroke it. It would feel good. You know, somehow, that it will feel good...

You want to hold it, and stroke it, all while looking at Pam's picture...