Augury

Time marched on and by the time I was in high school we had all pretty much forgotten about the weird videos. For most of that time, I was a nerd and proud of it: I spent my Friday nights at the game store, Deck ‘n Bones, playing board games with Corey and the regulars. On Sunday afternoons we played Dungeons and Dragons there. The Deck ‘n Bones crowd was made up of people of all ages, but Corey and I were the youngest, and it made us feel mature to be accepted by them.

In my sophomore year I made a school friend - Tia - who took me under her wing and tried to introduce me to regular teen life. One Friday night I skipped board game night, dressed like a teen girl was supposed to, and went with Tia to a party. Corey was upset that I was abandoning him, but he wouldn’t admit it.

I wasn’t even sure if it really counted as a party: there were only eight of us there. But there were no parents, and there was beer, which was a first for me. Near the end of the night we all stripped down to our underwear and went swimming. Rico gave me a back rub in the pool: a perfect gentleman, his hands never ventured anywhere they weren’t supposed to. I rewarded him with an innocent but lingering kiss - my first. It was a good night.

The next day Tia and I were on FaceTime gushing about what a great time we’d had. She mentioned the song that was playing before we went swimming, saying how much she liked it and remembering when she had first heard it. That’s when it hit me: that song had only been released a month before, but I had heard it three years prior, in my doppelganger’s strip tease video.

I freaked Tia out by hanging up on her. I found the video and watched again. It was me, from the party. That girl had my face and my braids, and she was taking off my green roped-knit sweater, my pale blue jeans; and she was left standing in my sea foam green bra and black panties. I freaked Tia out again when I started texting her, asking if anyone had been capturing video while I was stripping at the party.

It honestly really screwed with my head to think that I could be the girl in the video. She was beautiful, and she had a mature body. I still thought of myself as the rectangular-bodied twelve year old. My uncle Mike - the one who had been married to Aunt Deb before he cheated on her and ran off to Australia - had always told me when I was younger that I would grow up to have a white girl’s ass. He had meant it as a compliment: that’s the kind of girl he was into. Aunt Deb was white and while she was pretty, she was as beanpole as they came, no ass at all. So between that, my brother Lee’s teasing, and my dad always calling me his baby girl, I had just sort of missed the fact that I was developing a woman’s body.

I even sort of tricked my self. Outside of formal occasions, before Tia, all I ever wore was jeans and T-shirts with designs from games or comics. Sure, my bra size had gone up a few cups, but somehow it never became part of my self-image.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this weird time-travel video event “meant”, but I kept it to myself.