I was floating on my back in warm water. Calm, peaceful, I’d finished my laps in the physiotherapy exercise pool and was just lying there, content to feel the placid pool waves gently rocking my body. Just being. After a while I felt pressure, a tide beginning to lift me, slowly, then more urgently as stronger waves rocked me. I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t anything, and the more turbulent the waves the more relaxed and yet excited I became. The tide crested with me atop an impossible bursting swell of water and the warm waves started to retreat, feeling almost as if they were draining through me, through my still-floating body, until the water was gone to leave me with a wonderful lassitude on the damp warm beach. Which turned into cotton sheets as my eyes flew open.

  Oh my God.

  What was that? Had I just— Reaching beneath my sleep shorts I touched wetness. A lot of it, a lot more than what I’d felt between my legs the previous night. Had I climaxed and peed? Was I incontinent now?

  Sitting up and feeling below me to find a wet spot on the bed, I groaned. Turning on the bedside lamp, I got up and pulled the blanket and top sheet away to stare in dismay at the dark spot. It . . . wasn’t that big? It didn’t look like I’d unloaded the contents of my bladder in my sleep.

  So glad I gave May her nanny cam back. I shuddered just to think I might have given another nighttime performance. Quickly stripping the bed showed that the waterproof and bugproof mattress cover (May had had a story to tell about bedbug infestations and preemptive countermeasures) wasn’t damp. When I sniffed the sheet it didn’t smell like urine, not really, but it was still just one more thing and I felt like crying.

  Damn hormones. I’d figure it out in the morning.

  Taking a quick shower, I changed into a fresh nightshirt and sleep shorts, got fresh sheets from the linen closet in the hall, and remade the bed. Crawling back in, I climbed right back out and went back to the bathroom and sat on the toilet until I was sure my bladder was absolutely empty. Then I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour before I finally fell back to sleep.

  ******************************************

  The second morning I tried on the high-waisted jeans shorts May had bought me, found that they too dug up into that vast unoccupied expanse that was my sackless crotch to make me one-hundred percent aware of my new vulva, and put on the summer dress instead. Like the top I’d worn yesterday it was shoulderless with stringy straps. Again it had a built-in bra and bloused over my chest, gathering at its elastic waist before flaring out below. Its hem rose higher than yesterday’s skirt had, just brushing my fingertips, but I’d showed a lot more leg before in my old workout shorts and I could keep practicing my knees-together.

  Breakfast was a repeat of yesterday without the jump-scare or Carl’s awkward exit (we fist-bumped this time). I felt more right with him after last night; I’d won the first game quickly when he’d fallen into a Dutch Defense, and since it had ended so fast we’d set up another one and played into the evening while May watched with Steph. The alcohol and trash-talk had been missing, but something in my chest had clicked back into place.

  I put my dishes in the dishwasher after he left and, sucking it up, told May about last night.

  “Oh, hun.” She hugged me but she was laughing a little. Pulling away she kept her hands on my arms. “First of all, look at you having your first wet dream already.”

  “I wet the bed!”

  “Yes, well squirting from a wet dream is a little unusual but that sounds like what you did.”

  “I squirted? What does that even mean?”

  “Oh my. Come over here.” She sat us back down at the breakfast counter and took my hands. “I’m going to get real explicit now, you ready?”

  Cringing inside I nodded.

  “Okay, to take it from the top, girls have wet dreams just like boys do. Usually not as often, maybe two or three times a year, but a lot more for some women. It’s kind of hard to know, because lots of time they just don’t wake us up. It’s not like with guys—when they ejaculate in their sleep it always leaves a mess that gets noticed, you know?”

  Flushing at her forthrightness I nodded, remembering waking up with sticky underwear in those teen years—forever ago now—and occasionally later, but . . . “Like the one I made?”

  “No. If you woke in a large wet spot I doubt it was just female lubrication. That’s why I think you squirted. That’s something different, not all women do it, most of the time it comes from intense g-spot stimulation or a . . . knack, for lack of a better word. It comes from your urethra, but it’s clear fluid though there might be a little urine in it. You did not pee the bed. I’ve really never heard of it happening from a wet dream, but it’s a normal sexual response.”

  “Why didn’t it happen the first time I—I orgasmed, then?”

  “Anybody’s guess, really. You did say how freaked out you were when you were masturbating, squirting usually requires intense stimulation and sort of relaxing into the whole thing? Maybe?”

  I nodded, biting my lip. “Do you? Squirt?”

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  “No. Like I said not all women do, and most women who can don’t do it all the time anyway and why would we want to? It’s messy! It’s really just one of those things, part of the variation of female sexuality.” She looked thoughtful. “Are you worried about the future? About doing it all over a partner?”

  I cringed. “What—no! Just, no, I’m not even thinking about that yet.”

  “Okay, it’s alright.” She patted my hand.

  “So, what do I do about it?”

  She sighed. “There’s not really anything to do. If it happens again, you change the sheets and your nightclothes and you’re done. Or—” she overrode my protest. “Or if you feel very worried about it, you can always wear a heavy menstrual pad to bed. That should take care of it.” Then she laughed.

  “Or you could always just masturbate just before you go to sleep. I’m pretty sure that prevents wet dreams and if that’s the only time it happens your problem’s solved . . . sorry, stop blushing I’ll stop teasing. No, wait, as long as you’re already embarrassed, what did you dream about? What? What? What?”

  Now I was laughing. “Nothing! The physiotherapy pool! Really, and then it became an ocean I think. Just floating and nice pressure and then it rose and I came and woke up. Well, I came and came down and woke up because I was wet.”

  She looked disappointed. “So nothing to indicate what really cranks your engine, yet. Too bad.”

  “May!”

  “What?” She poked me in the side, making me flinch and laugh. “Hey, it’s something you’ll want to know.”

  *******************************************

  After breakfast it was time for me to finally take steps. I needed to secure my new identity—not least because of school but also because I needed to start moving my money. David Ross needed to disappear, yes, but I couldn’t just abandon my pile of savings and investments to be eventually be transferred in my will if I couldn’t keep up the pretense of handling my affairs from Tahiti. Fortunately I had contacts of my own, so I was the one who reached out and found a source for my new identity.

  With virtually all vital documents entered into databases, anything could be instantly duplicated and sent around the world. They could also be faked, and the fakes would be perfect; if you could get them into the right databases, the only way to detect the fakery was to go to the source for the original document. In my family business, which had really been nothing more than a construction equipment purchaser, warehouser, and supplier, I’d met more than one individual who I could talk to when I needed to make necessary documents happen. On anything. I’d never made use of them myself of course (except a time or two when a good employee had needed papers showing them to be a natural-born American citizen), but now I did. A text, an email exchange, a money transfer, and I was staring at a list of questions that needed answering.

  Which is when the fight started.

  First, May had been rather shocked to find out I knew how to get this done; she’d expected to have Carl do it through sources of his own in the cybersecurity industry, which was hilarious. Carl’s business had nothing to do with building fake identities or even identifying them, and I’d told her that her naivete was kind of cute. But when I explained that I wanted to create a new identity with minimal involvement with their family—they’d need papers establishing guardianship, that was it—there she’d put her foot down.

  “That’s not going to work,” she argued, glaring at me over my laptop screen at the dining room table. We’d been going back and forth on it for a good half hour. “The school, any school, is going to need school transcripts, and those are going to show original guardianship. If they have any questions, any concerns about your status, they may reach out to the original guardians and if they don’t find them . . .”

  “If they go digging beyond the records we give them, I’m fucked anyway so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Language,” she said automatically. I ignored it.

  “But there’s no reason for them to dig. We can just—”

  “No, there needs to be someone who can pick up a phone if they call to ask after your history. I have an idea.”

  “What?” I wasn’t liking the gleam in her eye at all.

  “Hear me out. My family is big. I’m an only child but my mom has eight brothers and sisters, all but one married, and all but the one of them has got lots of kids. And that’s the generational norm.”

  “Yeah, you’ve told me about them before.”

  “And that’s always been the norm. The Chandlers are thick across five counties, we’re the kind of backcountry family there are jokes about—you know, big enough that back in the day our feuds were small county wars. There’s Chandlers of every class, damn near every occupation though most of us are farmers and truckers. Some Chandlers are wearing badges but more of us are in jail.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “And we’re very old fashioned. This will work. We’ll claim that I was pregnant with you when I was just fourteen, went for a summer to live with my Aunt Sophie, she’s the black sheep of Momma’s generation. I gave birth to you in secret from even the rest of the family in the next state over, she raised you—homeschooled you—and I went and saw you every summer as your “older cousin.” But she’s retiring and you’ve been getting big for your britches and I’m a married woman now, so we’ve decided that you should live with me for your last year or two of school!”

  I’d listened in silent horror as she spun up the whole fable, smiling triumphantly, and now I sputtered. “Who’d—who’d believe it?”

  “Honestly? Anybody who knows my family. Most of my family, too. There’s a reason why Carl and I came to the city and stayed. Lord how I love them, but Momma had her problems with them all and I didn’t want those fights.” She scooted around to grab my hand (she’d been doing that a lot since Dr. James’ office). “Aunt Sophie would go along with it in a heartbeat, believe you me. And with the right documents, that’s all that matters, nobody would be calling around to anyone else but us and her.”

  “But you’d be— But—”

  “But I’d be your momma? It’s already the most believable story, sweetheart. Look at us, both beautiful gingers. You look so a lot like me as a girl, any picture with the two of us together is going to look like a family picture. It works much better than trying to pass you off as a younger cousin—they’d want to know why you were with us now and not with your parents.”

  “But—” There was something wrong with this plan, there just had to be. “Carl!”

  “Carl and I were senior year sweethearts, you’d have been long born and my little secret. Anyone who hears the whole story will just think him a good man for taking a teenager into the family. But nobody at whatever school you attend will have any reason to dig, then. You’ll just be introduced as our daughter.”

  “Your—” The word stuck in my throat. Because she was right, it would work. And she was right; fabricating an identity as an adult was a lot easier than what we’d be doing, simply because under normal circumstances nobody would have any reason to check it. With the way schools were about proper documentation and adult contacts, what we wanted to do was a lot chancier and having an original Guardian of Record to reassure them would go a long way. But—

  I stood up fast, almost knocking the chair over. “I’m. I’ll. I’ll be back.” And I left, out the back door and through the yard gate to my place.