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Mark sighed, placing the pen on his desk, feeling the tension in the room rise. The whispers behind him and Lauren’s icy stare, which he could feel burning into his back, gnawed at him. He tried to ignore it, but one thought slipped into his mind: “Why has everything gotten so weird?” It felt like the world had flipped even more than it had when he first realized that the attention he was receiving wasn’t what it seemed just yesterday.
Things had already been strange before, but at least they had some boundaries—some kind of clarity, if it could be called that. The Jester hadn’t shown up again, despite Mark’s attempts to summon him. He always carried that book with him, hoping the strange figure would reappear and say, “Just kidding, haha, it’s over,” and he could go back to being himself. But nothing happened. Instead, the Jester’s mocking parting words haunted him, growing sharper with time: “You’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out.” Mark kept trying to decipher what he meant. That eerie smile kept flashing in his mind, and Emma’s memories increasingly felt like his own, creeping in bit by bit.
“What does it mean, ‘adulthood returns where it belongs’?” he had thought one day, pacing his room after school, staring intently at that book. “If all this is temporary, when does it end? And how will I know if I did something right or wrong? Damn it, who even is he to decide who I am or what I should do?”
At some point, he resolved to stop thinking about it. Dwelling on the Jester’s cryptic words seemed pointless. Maybe he was right: the answers had to come from within.
Months later, just the day before today, he held the book again, but with a different mindset. He reflected on how the Jester hadn’t given him clear instructions or guidance, and his words now seemed different, pushing Mark to think about himself. About how he had lived before and now, how he responded to people, how… he clung to the past, refusing to accept his new reality.
“Maybe… maybe he’s never coming back. And I… I’m still holding on to who I was before, even though… Everyone sees Emma in me, and even when I act like myself, they chalk it up to teenage angst. And these memories… Maybe he wasn’t even real, and I made all this up?” Looking at himself—his now-familiar body, the girlish clothes that had already become routine—he thought then, feeling a despair tinged with… resignation?: “No. I know who I was, even if now… I just keep thinking I’ll go back to my old life, to my old body. But what if that never happens? Or worse, what if it only happens when I accept who I am now?”
That thought had tormented him for days. He felt his insides twist, the battle between his past and present reality tearing him apart.
“Adulthood returns where it belongs,” he had repeated in his mind. What did it all mean? Accept Emma’s life and become her? “No way, that can’t be it. I’m not her—I know that. How can I become her? That’s absurd… right? I’m so sick of these doubts. I wish he’d never appeared in the first place. He’s just messing with me. This is some twisted test from a strange being. His joke. I’m still me, even if everything on the outside has changed. And if this ‘adulthood’ returns and all this is ‘temporary,’ then is it possible Emma will come back, and I’ll be myself again? What’s his game, and… is there even a game?”
The sharp ringing of the bell shattered the silence, signaling the end of the class. Mark flinched, as though waking from a long, exhausting dream. Miss Hendricks carelessly stacked the notebooks on her desk, and the students began packing up, the sound of zippers and chatter filling the air. He glanced at the clock—it was time to leave. Now, he had to figure out what to do about Dan.