“He said you’ve changed your name to Artemis? Why? Jamie works fine for a girl as well as a boy.”

 

Better for a girl than a boy, I thought, remembering some of the teasing I’d had to put up with. No sense bringing that up now, though.

Night and Day

part 3 of 12

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. Thanks to Morpheus, epain, and Karen Lockhart for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I was standing near the merry-go-round watching Jasmine spin on it; Mom was sitting on a bench a few yards away.

“He said to check your email,” Mom said. “And we need to talk about this name business.”

“Sure,” I said. But Jasmine said:

“Keep spinning me!” I couldn’t resist, and neither could Mom; we stayed out there playing with Jasmine for another half hour before we went in and ate supper.

“Can I use the tablet to check my email?” I asked Jared, who was reading from it when we sat down to eat.

“I’m doing some reading for my term paper,” he said. “You can use it after I go to bed.”

“Okay.”

“The daytime Jamie told me some of what you said to him in your note,” Mom said. “He said you’ve changed your name to Artemis? Why? Jamie works fine for a girl as well as a boy.”

Better for a girl than a boy, I thought, remembering some of the teasing I’d had to put up with. No sense bringing that up now, though.

“It’s got to be confusing for you and Jared, though, and Bobby — somebody mentions Jamie and the other person doesn’t know which one of us you mean unless you say ‘boy Jamie’ or ‘night Jamie’ or something. And right now you can say ‘Jamie’s good at Knight of the Living Dead’ and it’s true of both of us, but in another year or two there won’t be many things you can say about both of us and have them be true.”

“Well... but Artemis is such a pagan name! And Apollo is maybe even worse.”

“Isn’t there a guy named Apollo in the Bible, too?”

She looked thoughtful. “Yes — or something like it. Apollos, I think. But the only Artemis in the Bible is the pagan goddess, when those worshipers of her made trouble for the apostle Paul in, what city was it? Ephesus or somewhere like that.”

I remembered something else I’d read last night. “What about Diana?”

“That’s much better.”

I smiled. If Mom didn’t know that Diana was the Roman name for Artemis, I wasn’t going to tell her. I could be Diana in real life and use Artemis as a screen name.

Jasmine wanted me to read her a bedtime story after supper; usually Mom did that. I looked through the tattered books on her little shelf. “What do you want me to read you?”

“Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” she said loudly, and giggled. So I read that to her, and she still didn’t look sleepy; she kept reciting bits of the book along with me. “What about another story?” I asked when I closed the book.

“I Belong in the Zoo?” she said, but I said:

“What about something new and different?”

“Yay!”

“Okay. So, a long time ago there was a lady named Diana.”

“Like you.”

“Yes, like me. She was a magician —”

“Like Maleficent?”

“No, she was good. Mostly. More like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz.” I wasn’t going to say she was a goddess, or I’d get in deep shit with Mom. “Or, you know, more like Bugs Bunny than either. Kind of a cross between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd,” (Jasmine giggled uncontrollably), “because she liked to play tricks on people like Bugs Bunny, and she liked to hunt like Elmer Fudd. Only not wabbits, but deer, wild boar, lions, bears, things like that.”

“Bang!” Jasmine shouted, and giggled.

“No, she used a bow and arrow, because this was a long time ago before guns were invented. She’d go hunting every night with her gal friends, who also liked to hunt.

“Then one night they’d been hunting a while and they got tired and sweaty, and they came to a place where a river made a wide pool, and they decided to take a bath. In those days people didn’t have bathtubs and showers, they just went swimming in a river or lake when they wanted to get clean.”

“Gross!”

“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Anyway, they took off their clothes and went swimming slash bathing, and they were having a good time laughing and talking about the deer they’d shot, when suddenly this guy named Siproites comes along and sees them.”

“Oh. Who was he?”

“Just some guy. I think maybe he was out hunting too? Anyway, Diana and her gal friends weren’t happy about a yucky boy seeing them with no clothes on. And Diana used her magic on him — what do you think she did?”

“Made him blind so he couldn’t see them?” Jasmine said after a few moments' thought.

“Wow, you’re a vindictive little squirt.” Though Artemis had done a lot worse than that to Actaeon. “No, what she did was she changed him into a girl —”

“Like you.”

“Yes, except it just happened to me, it wasn’t a tricksy magician doing it. So now that Siproites was a girl, it was okay for her to see other girls taking a bath. And she joined Diana’s hunters, and lived happily ever after.” The mythology site I’d been reading hadn’t said anything about what happened to Siproites after Artemis changed him into a girl, but I decided any story for Jasmine had to have a happy ending.

“That was nice,” she said, finally sounding a little sleepy. “I’m glad you’re my sister.”

“I’m glad you’re my sister too,” I said, kissing her goodnight.

After Jared went to bed, I checked my email, and found this from daytime-Jamie:

“Give me a break! I’m in school or riding the bus for most of my waking hours; let me have some fun when I get home before I have to let you take over. I’ll do some of the homework on the bus, but you need to do your share too.

“And what’s up with posting to social media about how I turn into you at night? You may not care about privacy anymore but I do. Stop it! I’ve changed the passwords on my accounts, since you decided to make your own.

“P.S. ‘Artemis’ is a good name, even if Mom doesn’t like it. I’m not sure if I want to go by ‘Apollo’, but I’ll think about it.”

I was mad, and I got up and paced back and forth for a while before I let myself answer it. I said:

“You can’t expect to keep my existence secret forever. I’m not going to hide in the apartment all the time, especially in the winter when the nights are longer. If you wanted control over how our friends found out about me, you should have told them yourself. They’re my friends too and I deserve to keep in contact with them even if we can’t go to school together.

“Mom’s probably already told you by now, but we compromised on ‘Diana’. I’m still going to use ‘Artemis’ as a screen name.”

I had no other personal emails, but there were several automatic notifications about new feedback on my social media accounts. I read them, and also the latest posts and comments on Jamie’s account. He had unfriended me (I’d friended both accounts from each other after I created the new one), but we were still almost the same person, and it only took me two tries to guess his new password. I didn’t do anything with it except read his recent posts and comments; hopefully if I didn’t abuse my access by posting anything, he wouldn’t notice.

He’d deleted my posts from last night, and claimed somebody had hacked his accounts; but a number of people must have seen them while they were there, judging from the posts and friends requests on my personal account. There were a couple of comments along the lines of “You turn into a girl? Lamest superpower EVAR” and similarly sophisticated bullshit, but others were more sympathetic, and one, from Aidan Turner, my closest friend other than Bobby, seemed to be really trying to grapple with what had happened to me. He asked questions about how we switched places, and whether we really remembered nothing of what happened to the other one. A few hours later, presumably after daytime-Jamie deleted my post and claimed he’d been hacked, Aidan posted to my account challenging me and asking me to prove I was really the night version of Jamie.

I re-read what I’d written the night before, and saw it wasn’t as clear as I’d wanted it to be; I replied publicly to Aidan’s questions, and added:

“If you want me to prove that I’m real, that daytime-Jamie turns into me at night, and I turn into him in the daytime, just ask the Jamie you see at school if you can come over and visit. He might say yes, but he’ll come up with some excuse for why you have to leave before sunset. Try to stay until sunset, or come over at or after sunset, and you’ll see.”

Then I read a little more of each textbook, and did the remainder of daytime-Jamie’s homework that he hadn’t done on the bus. I still had half the night before me, and no game system. I started to look through the list of free movies on the TV utility, but then I remembered what I’d been reading about before, and tried filtering the list of movies looking for the keywords “Artemis” and “mythology.” I found no movies about Artemis, but several about mythology, and watched Jason and the Argonauts, which was pretty fun.

Three more hours to go. I went back to the mythology site I’d visited the night before and read more, clicking on the links from the page about Artemis, and reading about Callisto, Zeus, Zeus’s other kids, the mortal women he and his sons seduced, their half-god kids, and so forth. I ran into a couple more myths about guys turning into girls or girls into guys; those Greeks were into some freaky shit. Tiresias, this guy who got turned into a girl for seven years because he messed with some snakes (seriously, what?), later on saw Athena bathing. Deja vu, right? She struck him blind, which made me wonder if I should give Jasmine the nickname “Athena” — no, Mom would blow her top. Maybe “Minerva,” but that probably wouldn’t fly either; it didn’t sound as normal as “Diana.” Too bad Tiresias didn’t happen upon Athena while he was a girl; talk about terrible timing...!

Finally I got up, changed into our loose changing-clothes, and went out to greet the dawn.

That evening I woke sitting on one of the benches in the playground. Jasmine was swinging by herself, but as soon as she saw I had changed, she jumped down, ran over and hugged me.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“The boy you was mad at me. He wouldn’t push me on the swing or anything.”

“Why, that —! Here, I’ll push you or spin you or whatever.”

“Thank you!” She hugged me again. “You’re the best sister.”

So we played for a while longer, until Mom sent Jared out to call us to supper. During supper, Mom said:

“I finally got around to calling the numbers on those flyers the emergency room doctor gave me. About people doing research into kids who change like you did...”

“Okay?”

“This may not concern you, since probably all the research will be in the daytime, but I’m taking you — the other you — Jamie, out of school Friday, the next day off I have, and taking him to the university hospital where some doctors want to examine him and ask us some questions. It will be at least a hundred dollars, more if they ask us to come back again.”

“Tell them for completeness they should interview me too,” I said. “With any luck we can get them to pay us twice, once for him and once for me.”

I thought briefly about telling Mom that Jamie was pretending I didn’t exist, but decided against it. I could handle this on my own.

Bobby came over after supper.

“Dude, daytime-Jamie was mad as hell about you posting on social media about changing back and forth. He kept telling everybody who asked him about it that his account had been hacked. I’d already promised I wouldn’t say anything, but... man. He’s being kind of a dick.”

“Yeah, he can’t keep me secret forever. It’ll get easier for a few months while the days are getting longer, but then they’ll get shorter, and watch out! By winter, I’ll be changing into him on the school bus.”

“I don’t think he can keep it secret that long, but I’m not going to break my word and tell anybody. I wish I hadn’t promised, though.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”

“What?”

I told him about my post to my Artemis Sullivan social media account last night. “Friends are going to start asking if they can come over, and he’ll make up lame excuses why they can’t, or why they have to leave before sunset. And sooner or later somebody’s going to come over around sunset and see us switch places.”

Bobby shook his head. “You two need to call off this feud. He can really make your life hell if you get him mad.”

“He’s already pretending I don’t exist and trying to cut me off from all my friends but you. How much worse can it get?”

After Bobby went home, and Jared finished his term paper research and went to bed, I checked my email and social media. There was a brief email from Jamie:

“Maybe you haven’t thought this through from my point of view. You’re safe at home all night, you never see anybody outside the family except Bobby. I’m the one who’s getting bullied at school because of rumors that I turn into a girl at night! I’m strong enough now to stand up to the bullies, at least one on one, but when they gang up on me, being taller than most kids my age isn’t enough. Cut me some slack here.”

I thought about that for a few minutes before I replied.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize how bad it was for you. But try to look at MY point of view too. I get turned into a girl, and I’m not allowed to go anywhere because Mom says it’s not safe around here for a girl at night, and she’s probably right. At least let me have some contact online with the friends I can’t see at school anymore.

“And don’t take it out on Jasmine! I don’t know what was going on between you two, but leave her out of this.”

I saw that a couple of people — acquaintances, not close friends — had unfriended me, probably because they believed Jamie when he said his account had been hacked and the person posting under “Artemis Sullivan” was a prankster. I sighed and decided to be patient; the truth would come out sooner or later.

I finished our homework, and watched another old mythology movie — Clash of the Titans, which wasn’t as good as Jason and the Argonauts. My daytime self would probably like it, as it had some naked ladies in it, but they didn’t do anything for me. But they weren’t disgusting like the women in weird poses in Bobby’s porn mags, either. Then I read about Greek mythology for a while longer, until I got too restless to sit still. It still wasn’t near dawn, but I wanted to go out. I was still a little scared to go out by myself as a girl, but somehow not as much as before. After pacing back and forth for a while, I decided I’d stick to busy, well-lit streets and wouldn’t stay out very long, in case Mom or Jared or Jasmine woke up in the middle of the night and saw I was gone.

I walked as far as the 24-hour convenience store, and read from a couple of magazines until the night clerk ran me off. Then I came straight home. None of the streetlights along that stretch were out, and nobody messed with me; I felt a lot more confident about going out again.

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.