She introduces herself: Beatrix Wright. Of course it’s fucking ‘Beatrix’, I think, already deepening my crush on her—the crush I totally didn’t have before yesterday. I mean before this morning. Before twenty minutes ago, really. Sarah Prime—the name I’ve assigned my counterpart in my inner dialog—gives me a ft look. I pretend not to notice.

  I’ve always loved the name “Beatrix”, and not just because of the st five letters it shares with “dominatrix”—though, in this case, I hope it might be an apt corretion. “Beatrix” tastes good to my synesthetic brain. The church I grew up in would frequently sing a song including the line, “Your name is like honey on my lips”. While I had infrequently found that line to be true of Jesus’ name, it is true of “Beatrix”. “Beatrix” doesn’t taste like honey, per se, but it doesn’t not taste like honey, either.

  Because my mind often expins things I already know when allowed to wander, I start to think of how I’d expin synesthesia to Beatrix. “It’s like… you know how sometimes you can taste a smell? Strawberries taste the same as they smell, while asparagus very much does not. It’s like that, but with all five senses. My brain’s wires are crisscrossed and input from one sensory organ ends up being interpreted by the part of my brain that’s supposed to only be attached to another. Almost all sounds and words have a corresponding color. Sometimes I can taste a singer’s voice. Some tastes feel ft or round or spikey. When I get high,” I’d confess, “my synesthesia goes into overdrive. Touch becomes a symphony that my brain composes on the spot. Music becomes a Fantasia-like animated movie.”

  Beatrix and I walk the short distance to Nash Hall, her dormitory, and I follow her up the steps to the fourth floor and down the hallway to her room.

  “Only had a roomie for a week,” Beatrix expins conversationally as we walk, “Then poof, off to live with her bloke. Not a peep since. Having the two-girl dorm to myself is alright, but I reckon I’d have bonded better with the rest of the floor if she’d stuck around.” I remain silent, nodding my head, spellbound by the satin taste of her accent.

  We get to her door and she opens it just enough that she can peek in. “It’s clean enough!” she decres, and opens the door wide to invite me in. “Take a seat.”

  There’s that domineering tone again, I think, as it yanks at my desire. I take a seat on her bed, and she takes the computer chair at her desk. She spins on it to face me, using her hands to propel her with her legs up on the seat as a child might.

  I have no idea what to make of Beatrix. One moment, she’s dominant and commanding; the next she’s a total goofball. I wonder if she notices, I think. I find that I like both Beatrixes. A lot.

  “Right,” she says conversationally, “here’s the thing. I have a special– Hang on, you haven’t got css now, have you?” A note of panic seeps into her voice.

  “Well, yes, but it’s just Linear Algebra. The prof’s cool, but seriously, every answer’s, ‘Put it in a matrix and row reduce.’” She gives me a skeptical look. “Once, I zoned out for a bit; totally missed the question. When I came to, the room was quiet, so I raised my hand and suggested, ‘Put it in a matrix and row reduce?’ Nailed it. Every time, I swear.” She stifles a ugh at this, shoving it into the confines of a grin. “And yeah, I already learned this stuff back in high school, at least everything so far. Trust me, I’m not missing anything.”

  Beatrix looks relieved and nods. “Alright, if you’re certain,” she says. I nod and she continues. “Got this special ability, not magic but it might seem like it.” Now it’s my turn to eye her skeptically. “Tell you what, I’ll show you.” Her voice turns formal. “Do you consent to let me invert the colors you see for five seconds?”

  “What?” I say, mostly out of habit, to stall for time enough to process the question. Somehow she intuits she needn’t repeat herself. “Well, okay, as long as you know what you’re doing.”

  “Don’t stress, as soon as your consent ends, I can’t affect you anymore. So do you consent?” she repeats.

  “Yes, I consent.” I try to prepare myself for whatever is about to happen before realizing I have no idea how one would prepare for such a thing.

  Then she Speaks. She speaks as naturally as ever, in pin English, and yet, there is something else I can hear. Some sort of soft, otherworldly resonance that overps her words, a resonance that I hear with my soul instead of my ears. “For the next five seconds, your mind will interpret colors inverted.”

  Immediately, every color I see inverts. The pine needles of the evergreens out the window turn burnt red. The ceiling light shines darkness. Beatrix’s blouse has turned olive green under a neon green scarf, while her skirt barely changes at all. Her face, usually ivory, is now navy blue, with green lips. Her emerald green eyes have become bck with irises of cosmic blue and nebulous red. Just as I begin to consider how strange it is to see a lightbulb “shine” darkness, my vision reverts.

  I sit stunned for a moment, exhaling the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  “Are you alright?” Beatrix asks cautiously with warm concern.

  “Yeah. It was just a bit surprising, is all. No offense, but I hadn’t expected anything to actually happen.” I think for a moment before speaking again. As a scientist—even a computer scientist whose field of study is not strictly reted to nature—I don’t believe in magic, and, as she said it would, that experience definitely looked like magic. On the other hand, as a scientist, I cannot deny the evidence of my own experience. “Okay,” I say, making my decision, “I believe you. You have a special ability.”

  Beatrix rexes as I calm myself, and her pursed lips pull into a small smile.

  After another moment, I say, “You said we could help each other?”

  “Yes!” Beatrix replies excitedly. Then her voice turns businesslike, “I hope it isn’t too forward or rude to ask this but, are you transgender?”

  I smirk. “How could you tell?” I ask with mock surprise. Beatrix giggles.

  “If my assumption is wrong, tell me, but I assume you wish you had the body of a cisgender female, yes?” I nod. “I have the ability to give you this.”

  I start, sitting up straight. “Really?” I ask, awed and hopeful.

  “Well, at least for a time. I don’t know for certain, but I think right now I could transform your body for… mmm, maybe two thirds of a day, so about sixteen hours.”

  “Try it!” I excim, then, “umm… please?” Please, Mistress? I add in my head.

  She smiles—“I’ll take that as consent.”—and then Speaks the way she did before, the way she Speaks to alter nature itself. “Your body is that of a person born with two X chromosomes, the body that matches your identity.”

  My body begins to change, and I have never before felt anything so surreal nor so wonderful. My pelvis widens and my butt fills out, becoming rounder; my shoulders soften; my pencil of a torso takes on a vaguely hourgss shape. My tiny, charitably A-cup breasts grow out to palm-sized, perky C-cups, the sudden growth adding noticeable, but welcome, weight to my chest. I feel my body shorten from 5’10” to 5’5” (from 177cm to 165cm)—somehow the exact height I always wished I was, felt I should be—and, to my delighted surprise, my bright blue dress shortens and widens to match my new shape. My semi-gaunt, masculine face fills in and softens, the tiny facial hairs I can never shave close enough to completely hide fall out and disintegrate before they touch the floor, and my Adam’s apple dissolves, leaving a smooth recess in my neck. My fine, dirty blonde hair lengthens and gains body. I experience the strange sensation of growing ovaries. And, most importantly, I feel my dick and balls pull into me, and in their pce, a slit opens up. I can feel my bia, my clit, and the mild dampness inside my vagina. The process is a little uncomfortable but not painful, and the discomfort doesn’t hold a candle to the tidal wave of sheer relief that comes from finally fitting in my body, finally feeling like me.

  I begin to cry, and Beatrix rushes over, unsure of what she did wrong; she pces one hand on my back and the other on my knee. So overwhelmed am I that the intimacy of the touch scarcely registers. I grab the hand on my knee with my own, and look her straight in the eyes, tears streaming down my face. “I’m me. At st, I finally know how it feels to be me. The… the joy of it.” Despite my tears, I give her the biggest smile imaginable, and hug her tight for several euphoric seconds. “You have no idea how much you have blessed me, even if for only sixteen hours. You have given me so, so much hope, Beatrix. Thank you. From the depths of my soul, thank you.”

  We pull apart again. Beatrix remains seated beside me on the bed rather than returning to her swivel chair. She gives me a look over. “Wow. You’re so pretty,” she says quietly. Unsure if I was supposed to hear that, I smile at the compliment. She startles, apparently realizing she had spoken what she’d intended to be a thought. “I mean, umm….” she stammers sheepishly.

  I ugh disarmingly and she rexes again, though her blush remains. She retrieves a hand mirror for me to examine myself. My jaw drops. I am a babe. My smile, impossibly, grows wider, and I hug her again. “Thank you so, so much,” I tell her, and, no longer so overwhelmed as before, I notice for the first time how feminine my voice sounds. It’s like I instinctively know how to talk like a woman, not merely pitch register and resonance—which I had been practicing—but things like emphasis, a feminine voice’s melodic quality, and the slightly altered vocabury. My tongue just knows how to speak, I think, and suddenly realize even my thoughts have gained that singsong, pitch-moduted method of emphasis: the word “knows” in my previous thought was higher pitched rather than louder than its neighbors.

  She returns the mirror to her closet and sits down next to me again. My newly shaped hips are wide enough that they brush up against hers, and I feel a pang of desire rush through me.

  Something occurs to me. “You said we can help each other. What do you get out of this arrangement, aside from a grateful new friend?”

  Nervousness washes over her face, and just as quickly, vanishes. “For that,” she says, “you need to know how my ability works.”