The bell at the end of the hour brought Flavio back to the reality of his inescapable new adolescence. He waited a few moments in front of the door to see if it opened, until it was obvious that the teacher inside had a double hour.

He had to break into another unknown class and, as an additional difficulty, he also had to interrupt a lesson in progress. He decided, this time, to do it by knocking. He had always hated knocking on the doors of school classes: he could never hear the answer from inside, so he entered after a reasonably polite time.

«Good morning... excuse me» he said with the face of someone who had just placed his last chips on red nine.

«Felicetta... it's true that you already attended first grade last year, but it's not by entering at nine that you can get a passable idea of my subject.» That teacher had it in for Claudia. Out of pure desire to make himself important he was belittling her. And the uterus that Flavio had found himself with was screaming at him with a sinister grin: "Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!". He couldn't stand that lack of respect for Claudia. Something inside him made him imagine that man in the shoes of an old envious gossip.

«I have premenstrual syndrome, professor. But it's not by being a bitter old maid with me that you can get a passable idea of what it means.» The faint buzz that hovered in the classroom died out like a match overwhelmed by a tidal wave.

«Your state of health is not a relevant topic, in here!» snapped the indignant teacher. «Your physical conditions do not justify the lack of manners towards a teacher!»

Flavio glanced at the blackboard and realized he had just missed a physics lesson on work and an extremely simplified version of the kinetic energy theorem.

«Thank you for pointing that out to me, professor» he replied with calm and seraphic humility, «in fact, I was wondering what could justify that you first failed to answer my greeting and then decided to mock my ability to understand.»

«Very well, now I should write a disciplinary note on the register under your name and close the matter there...» boiled the threatening teacher, «instead I want to give you an opportunity.»

Flavio returned the fake courtesy by mimicking a smile of gratitude, as sarcastic as indifferent, which the teacher did not have the perspicacity to appreciate.

«Let's see right away your ability to understand my subject, you are the first one to be questioned this year» decreed dryly the physics teacher. «You should be able to solve exercises on the whole program, lesson of the first hour of today included.»

Flavio shrugged and snickered at the thought of milking some more bile from the teacher. He went to the empty desk next to the only familiar face to arrange his backpack.

«Hi, Michela!» he whispered, winking at her.

The freckles on the face of Claudia's friend tensed into a mask of anxiety.

«Are you crazy?» she scolded him under her breath.

Flavio approached the blackboard. The teacher, venting all his heat, asked him to solve a problem about a ball shot in the air by a cannon, adding as many pitfalls and difficulties as the covered program allowed him to include.

«See what you can do with this problem, Felicetta, it's your only chance because I don't intend to ask you anything else.»

«Is that all? It doesn't even seem like a problem worth seven out of ten...» Flavio remarked, trying to look as arrogant as possible.

«Besides being rude you are also presumptuous» the teacher prodded him displaying a confident smile. «If you were able to solve this problem correctly and in all its parts in the next fifteen minutes, I would even give you ten. But if I were you I would worry about limiting the severity of the failure. I'm not willing to forgive the slightest mistake from you.»

«That's fine with me...» Flavio said before arming himself with chalk.

During the following five minutes, the teacher was forced to endure the torture of his own anger grewing inexorably. Flavio had exposed the solution with fluidity and impeccable formalism, without hesitating, without even taking a moment to reason or a pause to choose the words to use.

«...so the answer to question d) is half of the initial mass M» Flavio concluded, putting down the chalk. «Since it took me ten minutes less than the quarter of an hour that you gave me, I would be happy to use the time I have left to earn myself the highest praise.»

«Go to your seat, Felicetta» ordered the teacher with a gloomy face.

As the teacher resumed the lesson, Flavio went to sit next to Michela. His desk mate stared at him in astonishment.

«I can't believe it...» she whispered excitedly. «How did you prepare so well?»

«Never mind, if I tell you, you wouldn't believe me anyway» Flavio replied.

«You're weird today... I mean, more than usual» Michela chuckled. «What happened to you this morning?»

The teacher slammed his fist on the desk, muting the class on the spot. The echo of the blow reverberated in a tomb-like silence.

«Felicetta and Varano, shut up or I'll send you out!» he thundered.

After a few moments, Flavio began to feel trapped in a foreign life again. The physics lesson proceeded on notions that he knew by heart and he had before him the prospect of a tedious repetition of his school years, tormented by the idea of having lost his own body, his own identity and everything that he had managed to build in his twenty-one years as Flavio Mancini.

He cast his gaze out of the window, aware that no matter how hard he tried to escape with his mind, he couldn't bear the idea of living trapped in a woman for his whole life.

If only that morning he had met his younger self, he could have had more information about what was happening. But maybe, on second thought, it might not have been a good idea. The fifteen-year-old Flavio Mancini was out there living his life of six years earlier. Did he have the power to change his own past?

The hypothesis terrified him instantly. Did he risk changing or even losing his own memory? Changing his experience, the life that had made him who he was, could have disintegrated his identity: it could turn into a suicidal action.

If that was how things stood, he had to avoid radically changing his past life. He had already lost almost everything that he considered his own future, the last thing he wanted was to lose part of his past as well. That fifteen-year-old boy who bore his name had six years of life left, then he would drown...

No! He didn't have to drown, he had to avoid it! That was what he was trying to figure out... how to recover his own life. If he hadn't died, then he couldn't have resurrected in Claudia. It was so obvious! It was clear, it was his only choice.

He had the chance to change that event, an event that would happen... more than six years later. Flavio felt his stomach plunge into an abyss. Resisting six years in a girl's body seemed like a hellish perspective to him.

However, it was less hellish than the prospect of spending the rest of his life playing Claudia. It was his only hope of fixing things. He could hope to recover his own life, to recover everything... even Claudia!

Now he was Claudia and he had the chance to fix everything about the worst night of his existence. He certainly would never have gone to bed with another man, let alone Franco. He had the chance to spare himself that suffering as well.

He weighed up the pros and cons and convinced himself that, after all, sparing himself the agony of that night could well be worth six years of exile from his own life. "In every catastrophe there is an opportunity", he remembered reading somewhere. He had an opportunity and decided to do everything he could to take advantage of it.

He had to do things carefully. As a first step, he decided to meet his other self in order to allow Claudia to be part of his life. He had to change schools, just like Claudia had done, so he could cross paths with himself on that bus.

Maybe he could neglect the small details, but in the big picture he had to make sure that Claudia was part of his life more or less in the way he remembered. He couldn't repeat everything perfectly, he wasn't a god after all. As for the details, he could only take risks and give it a try. Risking and trying.

«I hope that window is teaching you more things than I'm explaining, Felicetta» the teacher called him out.

With his head still six years in the future, Flavio turned to answer him.

«I'm following along, professor. You just said that in elastic collisions momentum and kinetic energy are conserved.»

«If you're following along then do me a favor and...»

The teacher's reprimand was interrupted by the end-of-hour bell.

«For next time, complete the entire next chapter of exercises» he told the class breaking ranks. Then he approached Flavio to continue the admonishment.

«Just because you did well today doesn't mean you can afford to neglect the lessons. You don't think it will be that easy next time, do you?»

«No. I'm thinking that even with a two out of ten, I will still have a passing grade in oral.»

«We're only in September, Felicetta. There's still half a year left until the quarter that counts» the teacher warned him before leaving the classroom.

And that would be just the first of five years of high school. Every day he would spend half a day listening to things that had already failed to keep his mind occupied the first time around.

As Flavio shuddered at the perspective of the abyss of boredom that lay ahead of him, a calm and gentle-looking teacher entered, with a pair of half-moon glasses tied by a chain and a biology textbook under her arm.

«Today, kids, we start with cell theory...» she said in a quiet tone, as if she were starting a conversation in a tea room.

In less than five minutes, the litany with magical powers of that teacher had thrown a class of twenty-five restless kids into an invincible drowsiness.

No, Flavio wouldn't tolerate a life as a high school student a second time. Not in the terms he had already lived it.

This time he would make sure to get himself an extra-curricular life nothing short of exciting.