He had succeeded without meaning to. He had learned to walk like a girl without even practicing. In hindsight, he realized what had happened.

Unlike him, Claudia was not used to walking like a man. Flavio had strained the wrong muscles all day long to follow his own habits, overloading them with efforts they could not tolerate.

The muscles normally used by Claudia, on the other hand, were still rested and well trained to walk or run. Since he had not been able to figure out how to move properly, he ended up finding out the hard way. Now he was forced to walk like a lady and the muscle pains were there to scold him at every mistake.

He put on the clothes he had not had the courage to wear in the morning and went to sit down at the table. There he found Fabrizio greeting him.

«Did you see, darling?» said Mrs. Giulia noticing his renewed step, «I told you that a shower would refresh you!»

«It's true, thank you Mrs. Giulia» replied Flavio silencing a twinge in the hip.

«Architect, I'll leave you to eat in peace and I'll go to lunch too. In the kitchen I left you something for dinner ready to heat up. Goodbye. Be a good girl and eat, Claudia» said the woman before leaving.

Flavio felt a sense of discomfort that had haunted him all day long. Every time someone called him Claudia, he struggled to understand that they were addressing him.

He wondered how many times during the day someone had called him to get his attention and, despite his exceptional listening skills, he had not even noticed. No harm done, he was the one who had the exceptional listening skills, not Claudia...

«I see you distracted, are you worried about something?» asked Fabrizio after a start of lunch that must have appeared unusually quiet.

Flavio began to think about his future, that is, for the moment, his past. How had Claudia managed to convince her father to let her change schools with a performance on the threshold of survival, after being failed and with the school year already started?

«Actually... yes, about a lot of things... dad. In fact, I wanted to talk to you about it.»

«Did something happen at school? You never left home so early...»

«By the way, I need you to sign the excuse slip, I was late.»

«What?!» Fabrizio tensed up.

«But I have good news, I got ten in physics»

«Ah... sure?» he relaxed suddenly, lost in disbelief.

«Yes, of course, you can ask the teacher if you want. Anyway, it doesn't matter much, I want to leave the scientific high school.»

«I... just don't understand you!» he exclaimed distressed. «What do you have in mind? There's no way!» Fabrizio sentenced, categorical.

«And why not?» asked Flavio, who knew it wasn't over there. After all, Claudia had managed to enroll in a linguistic school.

«Because... you should have thought about it earlier! The school year has already started, you can't do it.»

«It's all right, Michela too wants to enroll in the linguistics track with me, her mother knows the principal in a school. She told me she can enroll us without problems, even after the school year has started.

«And can you tell me how you will manage with the subjects? If you had a better performance, we could maybe consider it... but like this, you would jeopardize another year, do you realize that?» Fabrizio put on the face of the parent who desperately appeals to the hidden qualities of his child in order to save them from their own limitations because, after all, no one ever taught him how to be a parent and, more often than not, such parent will find himself in the blind alley of incomprehension between a teenager and any sentient being who is, instead, capable of sensible reasoning. «You're old enough, you should be able to understand what it means to start over!»

«Starting over is something I have some experience with...» revealed Flavio.

«Well, well! The experienced woman has spoken!» vented Fabrizio, restoring the face of resignation.

«I just can't do otherwise, believe me. I can't bear five more years of scientific high school, of mathematics, physics, computer science and everything else.»

Fabrizio was left with no choice but to play the card of catastrophic consequences reflected in the very short term, made up of about three or four months and which, in general, is the horizon that a teenager has of the end of times and the advent of the apocalypse.

«As a parent, I can't let you do it. On the other hand, I can't force you to reason. But you should know that if you change school, you will have to agree to dedicate yourself completely to your studies. You should manage with a minimal allowance, enough for the bare essentials, limited cell phone credit just for emergency communications, no evening outings with friends, no gym, no shopping... at least until you have shown a positive performance at the end of the quarter.»

In dictating his conditions, Fabrizio had regained the serenity of someone who has the upper hand. Knowing his daughter's habits, he could feel confident that his conditions would be unacceptable to her.

«Okay, I'm in!» Flavio agreed cheerfully.

He didn't know what conditions Claudia had managed to get from her father, but he was damn sure that whatever they were, those that Fabrizio had just offered him were much better for him.

Flavio had always managed to get by without any allowance at all, a minimal allowance would have been a luxury prize in his hands. He certainly didn't have friends to go out with in the evening, he had never gone to the gym, let alone gone shopping. And the most ridiculous part of the deal was that if he had wanted to have all that, all he had to do was present the bill as soon as he received his first report card.

«See? I was right!» Flavio threw back at Michela's face when, on Monday morning, they heard the bell ring at the start of classes at Montecristo Linguistic High School. «You have to leave home a little earlier if you want us to get there on time.»

«Sorry, I didn't think the bus could be so late,» Michela justified herself, looking around.

«Come on, let's hurry up, first A is on the second floor,» Flavio said pointing at the stairs.

«Wait!» Michela stopped him. «How do you know that's our class? We have no idea which section we've been assigned to. They told me they left us a note at reception.»

Michela went to the door of the cubicle where the janitor with a broomstick mustache sat, flipping through a sports newspaper.

«Good morning...» Michela spoke up.

«Good mornin', no doubt about it! This year ain't nobody gonna stop Roma...» The janitor turned on his stool and looked at Michela with a smile on his face, then he noticed Flavio. «Ya got lost again, huh?» he teased him.

«Just so you know, Roma won't win the championship for another six years at least...» Flavio retorted.

«What d'ya know? You better not be one of those Lazio fans or somethin', right?» snorted the janitor. «Whatcha doin' in here?»

«Excuse us...» Michela stepped forward, embarrassed, «we are new students, we are Felicetta and Varano, the principal told me they left us a communication...»

«Oh, it's you then,» remembered the man rummaging in a drawer from which he pulled out a sheet of paper with stamp and signature. «Here ya go, new students Felicetta and Varano, first grade, section A.»

Michela raised her dark eyebrows.

«How did you know?» she whispered in Flavio's ear.

«Come on, I'll take ya two to your class,» said the janitor lifting his massive figure from the stool. «I'm keeping an eye on ya, smartpants. Now that you gotta spend five years in here, if Roma doesn't win, I know who I'll be comin' after.»

They climbed the stairs and, upon reaching the second floor, they turned right. After passing some doors lined up along the deserted corridor, the janitor stopped to knock firmly on the door of 1A and, without waiting for a reply, entered the classroom.

« Good mornin', ma'am,» he said as he approached the desk, followed by the two girls.

«Good morning, Mario,» answered the teacher amiably.

«I've brought ya these two new students.»

«Oh...» the teacher exclaimed in surprise without losing her courteous smile. «I wasn't aware of that.»

«There's this note from the administration for ya,» Mario informed, handing the paper.

The teacher put on her reading glasses for a moment while she skimmed through the communication. Then she turned her angelic smile to the three who had just come in. «Well, thank you, Mario.»

«Oh, no need to mention it. I'll just leave it with ya, then,» said the janitor and, with a gesture of farewell, left closing the door behind him.

«Well then, welcome to our class,» she said with precision and otherworldly composure. She was a lady close to retirement age, with a slender figure and short blond hair. «My name is Agata Danieli and I'm your French language teacher. But maybe your classmates would rather hear your introduction than mine.»

«My name is Michela,» said the girl fighting her shyness.

«Michela, you are...» asked the teacher as she put on her glasses again to peek at the paper. «Varano, right?»

«Yes...» confirmed Michela eagerly.

Somehow Flavio felt his friend's tension in his own body.

«I'm Flavi...» he began to say, horrified by what his nerves had made him blurt out. «...a» he managed to finish. That uterus he had now, he thought, was something he would better learn to handle as soon as possible.

Michela was looking at him with furrowed eyebrows and clenched jaw. But by then the damage was already done. Rather than showing indecision about his own name, Flavio would have tied the sleeves of his own straitjacket himself.

«Very well» smiled Professor Danieli. «I think we can take our seats now, if you like» she said. Then she extended a hand to indicate the desks in the classroom, occupied by eighteen girls and only three boys. «As you can see, there's not much choice...»

Flavio went to occupy the seat in the second row, next to the only familiar face in there.

«You'll explain later, Flavia!» Michela whispered to him as she passed by.

«So you came back here... can you explain how you knew me?» Gianluca greeted him.

«And can you explain to me how you don't have a desk mate in a class full of girls?» Flavio dodged.

«Who cares... in the end she came anyway, it seems» Gianluca laughed.

Meanwhile, the teacher had settled at her desk, with a pen in one hand and the paper from administration in the other.

«So, before we start the lesson, let's write down the names of the two new arrivals in the class register right away» she announced after briefly checking the text of the communication. Then she began to write at the bottom of the list of names. «We have Felicetta... Flavia, and Varano... Michela.»

As Michela pressed a palm on her forehead and Flavio bit a lip that tasted like cold sweat, the teacher repeated the operation on her own register.

Flavio had officially become Flavia.