Misfile fanfic: Awakening

Based on characters and situations created by Chris Hazleton. All misfile characters copyright Chris Hazleton

“Emily, get up – remember we are going shopping at 9”

Emily just pulled the covers over her head, drying to drown out her mother’s voice.

“Emily! You said you wanted to pick out hangings and linens for your dorm room and with the sale, they are likely to go fast. If you don’t get up, you won’t have much a choice.”

“Dorm room?” she thought. What dorm room? Was she going somewhere? Emily felt very disoriented, but she poked her head out of the covers and looked around. Her bedroom had been transformed with a new color scheme. Red and white predominated, along with an enormous Harvard pennant. Mystified, she sat up and saw a crumpled paper flutter to the floor from her pillow. Heart pounding, she reached down – yes! It was her Harvard acceptance letter! How was that possible?

She ran quickly to her mirror and inspected herself. She stared in shock at her reflection. She was 18 again! Mind racing, she tried to make sense of what could be going on. What about her lost two years, and… Ash? Had Rumisiel corrected the misfile? Had she imagined the whole thing?

“Emily? Are you coming down for breakfast?”

“I- I’m coming,” Mom, she called.

The shopping trip was a blur. All Emily could think about was talking to Ash and seeing if she – no he – remembered her. It would have to wait, she knew. Ash had gone to spend a week’s vacation with her Mom. Then she remembered – as a boy, Ash didn’t know his Mom, so there would be no vacation trip. Ash should be home now! Several times, Emily’s mother spoke to her sharply, as Emily mumbled answers incoherently. Somehow she found herself back in the car, on the way home and surrounded by piles of linens.

“Emily, are you listening to me? I said, I have some more errands to run – do you want to hang out with your friends or come with me?” Emily looked where her mother was pointing and saw Molly and the gang walking somewhere. With the misfile corrected, Emily realized, she and Molly were still friends, although she didn’t really care about the friendship much after seeing how Molly had treated Ash. Still, everyone seemed to expect it, so Emily waved good-bye to her mother, and approached Molly, who greeted her with her usual enthusiasm. The girls were still talking about the colleges they had chosen, and the shortage of boys on campus, and how best to ensure that they had their pick.

Katie was frankly envious that Harvard still had more male students than female students. “Assuming you still remember what boys are for, Emily, you may actually be able to find a boyfriend,” she joked.

Emily reveled in the camaraderie. She had missed this during the misfile, she realized. Ash was certainly a better best friend than Molly ever had been, but it was also nice to have a group of girlfriends to hang out with. Suddenly she realized that the girls’ path was going to take them past Ash’s house. She started feeling butterflies in her stomach. Had Ash been restored? Would he know her? Would he want to? Would she recognize him? Would she like the way he looked?

As they reached the house, Emily saw that there was indeed a young man in the driveway, seated on a folding chair and peering uncertainly into the open hood of a car. He looked up as they approached and her heart jumped. There was a definite resemblance between this boy and the girl she had known for the past several months. He was taller, and his features were harder, but it had to be Ash – he didn’t have any cousins, did he? Emily couldn’t remember. But her friends’ comments left her no more room for doubt.

“Hey XR4Ti Ash, did you lose something?” Molly called.

“Maybe if you took care of your toys, you would still have it!” That was Jen.

Katie added, “That’s what happens when you play with the big girls, Ash!”

Ash ignored them, and looked uncertainly at Emily. “Is it because he knows me,” Emily wondered, or because I am the only one not making fun of him? What are the girls talking about? How can I let him know I remember him without embarrassing myself if he doesn’t know me? Then she had an idea, and called out, “Did you ‘misfile’ something?”

The girls seemed to think that was a great addition. “Yeah, maybe you can find one in a file drawer – a picture might be safer for you than a real one!”

At her comment, Emily saw hope come into his eyes. Uncertainly he stood and said, “I think – I think we both got back what we lost.” And with that she was in his arms.

“You do remember”, she cried as she kissed him hungrily. All her doubts were forgotten as the two of them stood locked in a happy embrace, their lips flavored by Emily’s hot salty tears.

Her sudden move rendered her friends speechless for a moment. Then the catcalls began again.

“Hey Em, you’re not supposed to kiss a boy like that before he asks you out!”

“Em, that’s what happens when you stay away from boys for too long – even car-boy starts to look good.” Emily and Ash ignored them, and the girls walked on, shaking their heads at Emily’s apparent bad taste.

Coming up for breath, Emily rested her head on Ash’s chest “‘… and never let go’, I said” she murmured. As Ash shifted his weight to hold her, she felt him grimace in pain.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in concern.

“Apparently my ankle hasn’t quite healed yet,” he answered.

“Your ankle,” she echoed in confusion. “When did you hurt your ankle?”

“Can we sit down?”

She watched him limp as he led her inside to the couch. His pain was obvious.

“Em, I am so glad to see you. I needed desperately for something to go right for me today. With everything else that happened, I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me.” He took a deep breath. “It’s funny. I was in Florida last night, on vacation with my Mom as a girl. I told you about that dress she made me wear and the guy I met who might be willing to sponsor my racing, didn’t I?”

Emily nodded. They had had a long phone conversation two nights before.

“I woke up in my own bedroom this morning and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized – I was a boy again! Em, I can’t tell you how great that felt. My room was back the way it had been, the pictures all showed me as a boy and all those girl clothes were gone from my closet. My ankle hurt, but I didn’t really care all that much.

“I thought I would drive over to your house and surprise you – see if you remembered, too. So I got dressed and ran out to the garage… It was gone, Em!” And now Emily saw a greater pain in eyes than she had ever seen. “My car, Em – my XR4Ti. It was gone! I tried to figure out why I might have left it somewhere. I do all the repairs myself. I never let anyone else touch it. But it was gone!

“I ran inside and asked my Dad if he knew were it was and he gave me a funny look. Asked if I was having a ‘relapse.’ Then he told me – ‘reminded me.’”

He took a deep breath. “Em, do you remember when I raced Kate the first time?”

“Yes, you said she treated you as though you couldn’t drive. You said it was the worst thing she could have done.”

“Well it wasn’t the worst. She went easy on me because I was a girl – stopped the race and offered me a second chance. When I raced her as a boy…”

He was as close to tears as Emily had ever seen a boy get.

“Em, I fucked up – really bad. I totaled my car – I – they pried me out – I had a concussion, lots of broken bones, lost a kidney. It’s a wonder I survived. My Dad – it’s not that he doesn’t care, Em – he just doesn’t know how to show it with me. He said they had to restrain him and escort him out of the hospital, he was so afraid I wasn’t going to make it. He was causing a scene.

“He hasn’t actually said I can’t race – but he’s not going to help me at all. The insurance doesn’t come close to paying what I would need to replace my car. They disallowed a lot because they said I was driving irresponsibly. It covered my medical expenses, but…”

“But it wasn’t your fault, Ash! You know it was that dark spirit hanging over Kate that confused you.”

“Sure I know that now, Em! But the boy-me didn’t know that when I raced her. As a girl, the aura made me shake in fear, and I slowed down. As a boy, I guess, when I was afraid, I just drove faster – and crashed. I suppose one blessing of the misfile is that I didn’t have to live through it. I just woke up with a hurt ankle and no car.”

“The monster car…?”

“It has no engine, Em. The misfile put an engine in it, but there’s none there now. I’ve been staring at it all morning, trying to figure things out. And I don’t have anything close to enough money to finish it. All it’s good for now is parts – parts for a car I don’t have anymore.”

Emily stared at Ash in shock. She had seen Ash depressed before as a girl, but nothing like this. He seemed totally defeated.

“Can’t you save up money from your summer job and start again?”

“Maybe. But I’m through, Em. The way Kate demolished me, I’ll never be taken seriously on the Mountain again. I can’t even think what it would take to reestablish my reputation as a winner. And I need that if I want any kind of sponsor so that I can race professionally one day.”

“The guy you met…”

“The guy I didn’t meet, you mean. Remember, I only met him while on vacation with my Mom – as a girl. But I’m not a girl and I haven’t seen my Mom since I was three, and I didn’t go on vacation with her this year or any other, so I never met him. What am I supposed to do, call him up and say, ‘hi, you don’t know me, but if I was a girl you would have met me in Florida this week…’?’”

Ash got up from the couch. Despite the pain in his ankle, he was clearly too agitated to sit still. “And I haven’t forgotten about my Mom, Em. I think… I hope that she really would like to get to know me, but she once told me that she had been afraid that I wouldn’t want to know her. I need to make the first move. So I tried to write a letter to her again. I can’t do it, Em. I’m just so mixed up and upset right now that I can’t write the kind of letter that she responded to before. I thought I could call her, but I don’t know her number and it’s unlisted. And she’s probably still on vacation without me, anyway.

“It really sucks, Em. For months, all I wanted was to be a boy again, and now that I am, I’ve lost everything else.”

“Not everything,” Emily said quietly. “You have me.”

“Oh yes, Em. You’re right. I am so glad you’re here.” He knelt in front of her, and took both of her hands in his. “You’re all I do have. But… in September, you’ll be leaving, won’t you? You’re going to Harvard after all?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“So you’ll be on the other side of the state, surrounded by lots of guys who were successes in their own schools and have great prospects… and what are you going to want with a racing loser who can’t do anything else, who’s a year younger than you are and a hundred miles away?”

“No,” she said suddenly, standing up and pulling him to his feet. “I am not going to let you do this to yourself. You’re not a loser, Ash! You’ve had a bad shock and you’re depressed. OK, so you need some time to grieve over what happened. But your life is not over. You’re just as good with cars as you were yesterday. Maybe you can’t race, maybe you can. You don’t need to decide that now. Right now we’re going to do something different. We’re going to have a date. You’re going to take me out and…”

“… And do what? Go dancing? Not with my ankle, I think.”

“Then we’ll do something else. We’ll go to a movie. Or dinner. Some place where you can think romantic thoughts and not get down on yourself. I’ll go home and get ready and you can pick me up – or – I guess – I’ll drive this time. Just until you get another car. Will that be OK?”

“I don’t know, Em. I mean… I’m really down.” He sat back on the couch, facing away from her. “And I’m sorry to be such a drag – it’s just not what I expected when this got fixed. I think I need time to deal with this. I’m kind of in shock. You wouldn’t expect me to go out if – I don’t know – if something happened to my Dad, you wouldn’t expect me to just go out and try to have fun. I need time…”

Emily was silent for a moment. She realized that she had been trying to move Ash a bit too fast, trying to shake him out of his depression. Trying to focus on what she wanted. “Do you want me to leave?” she asked him.

“No. No… I just don’t think I want to talk. Just knowing you’re there for me is a lot. I guess I’m not going to be very good company for you. I would understand if you wanted to go, but I think… I would like it if you stayed.”

She sat behind him and put her arms around his shoulders, resting her head on his back. After their months together as girlfriends, she had become accustomed to talking things out with Ash, but now that he was a boy again, he seemed to be having trouble talking about his feelings. She could tell that he was devastated. The XR4Ti had been a major part of his life – it was even part of his name to most of the kids in school. And he was right – it was almost as though he had experienced the death of a very close relative. She’d had no experience with death – her mother had been her whole family all of her life, and she had never lost a relative. She’d never even been to a funeral. She had no idea how to help Ash – and if he couldn’t even talk about it…

After a few moments of silence, he did find something to say. “You know, Em, if I knew about this yesterday, I probably would have been in tears. But now – now that I’m a boy again, nothing is coming. I feel like I should be crying, but instead I just feel numb. I don’t think I could cry now if my life depended on it.” He reached back to placed his hand of top of hers and two of them sat together quietly for some time longer.

Sighing, he started again. “I must have sat staring at that empty engine compartment for two hours before you came by. That was such a sweet car. If only… but Harry only extended me credit because of the race, and even with the engine, it was really too much money. Now… it’s not something I can even come close to.”

He turned to face her, misery plain on his face. “I’m sure, somehow I’ll find some way to get things back together. And we’ll have a couple of months together, before… I know how much Harvard means to you, Em. I’m so glad you got it back, and I don’t want to drag you down. You deserve to be happy, and that’s not going to be possible if you have to nursemaid me through this. You go home and think about next year. I- I’ll be all right. I just need… time.”

Securing a promise that he would call within a few days, Emily kissed him goodbye and walked slowly home, thinking. “It’s so unfair. Here, my life is fixed – everything I dreamed of is going right again. I’m going to Harvard, and I have a boyfriend who is crazy about me and also my best friend – but how can I be happy when he’s so miserable?”

And that night, as she drifted off to sleep, she had one last, desperate, thought. “Rumisiel was so sure that once the misfile was corrected, we wouldn’t remember it at all. So this shouldn’t have been possible. We shouldn’t have remembered each other. But we do – was he wrong? Or maybe… this isn’t real. This has to be just a dream – a horrible, mixed up dream … mustn’t it?”