With the first money she had earned, Flavia was able to join a gym. She had taken a liking to exercising, a complete novelty in her whole life as a deceased male and young woman.

On the machines, she unloaded her anger against the bubble of the past that caged her, and afterwards she also took the satisfaction of wandering around at will in the women's locker rooms and showers, where no other man would have gotten away with it.

Less simple was getting away with it with Fabrizio, who saw his daughter's presence thin out at home as the school year progressed. With Michela's complicity and the massive use of calibrated half-truths, she managed to disguise her outings as study afternoons.

To Gianluca's delight, Flavia was also allowing herself some evenings out with friends. She felt comfortable in his company, to the point where she would have liked to enjoy a friendship between males with him.

«You can't imagine how curious I am to see what you look like in your eye-candy doll attire» he had said to her one evening. «This weekend I could come and see you at the disco...»

«No way! It's already embarrassing enough without people who know you looking at you.»

«But I'm your desk mate!»

«So consider yourself lucky enough! I wish I had your chance...»

«What are you talking about?»

«You don't want to know, trust me.»

On the other hand, she felt that her friendship with Michela as a girl was gratifying her much more than the one she had had with Claudia as a boy. Seen in that light, it seemed to her that wearing a skirt could have other advantages besides getting into the women's locker rooms.

At that moment they were lying on Claudia's bed, with more clothes on than Flavia would have liked, and with more French to study than Michela would have liked. While Michela struggled to repeat aloud verbs that sounded all alike, Flavia was in charge of correcting conjugation and pronunciation.

On other occasions Flavia gave all her attention to Michela when she was alone with her, but this time, while she was there with her gaze lost among the soft curls that formed Michela's dark mane, she couldn't keep her attention outside the threshold of her inner world.

Absorbed in her own manicure, she took the nail file, rested it against the nail of her right pinky finger, and made a sharp stroke with conviction. She was instantly paralyzed by the vibrations that had climbed up her arm, intertwining her nerves. She dropped the nail file onto the bed. "It's not for me," she concluded. She took the nail clippers and sheared off at once the thin layer of keratin that protruded over her fingertip. The other problems were harder to uproot.

Flavia's health had not been the same since she died.

Not only did she have restless sleep, struggled to concentrate, and developed an almost deadly allergy to Flavio, but at that specific moment, a less evident though more persistent symptom worried her as she lay on the bed, supposed to be listening to her friend repeating the lesson.

«What's wrong? Your mind seems elsewhere,» Michela noticed, suddenly giving up trying to find meaning in the monotony of the French verbs she struggled to pronounce.

Flavia sighed. She had the furrowed brow of someone who had made a mistake in a Sudoku box.

«Yes, I'm a bit worried.»

«About what?»

Flavia looked at Michela like a rabbit that, at night and in the middle of the road, stares at a pair of headlights coming towards it from the darkness.

«I'm late,» she said, wide-eyed and unblinking. She hoped that Michela's experience, much broader in being a woman than her own, could reassure her. It was Michela, her best friend, the person most suitable to confide in and the one who could advise her best on feminine issues.

«What?!» Michela whispered in a stunned hiss. «I knew it! You have you been with Marco, haven't you?»

«No!» Flavia squeaked, offended in her masculinity more than her femininity. «I couldn't, I've already told you he's not my type.»

«Then who was it? Gianluca?» the other insisted.

«Michela, no! It wasn't anyone... I'm still a virgin.»

Michela raised an eyebrow to express her reservations on the matter.

«Are you sure?» she intoned, seeking a confession.

«Well...» Flavia pondered for a moment. It was a legitimate doubt that probably only Claudia would have a clear answer to. She got distracted, recalling something pleasant from the day before, and then shook her head.

«But of course, I checked last night...» she hurried to confirm.

«What?»

«Never mind,» she said, pushing the thought out of her mind. «I'm not pregnant, it's something else.»

«How many days is it? A week?»

«No. More than two months, according to my diary.»

«And you're telling me now? Have you talked to your mother about it?»

«Are you crazy? In the little time I see her I certainly don't talk to her about these things!»

And how could she? That was Claudia's mother, not hers.

«You need to go to the doctor!»

Flavia squinted her eyelids, resisting a shiver of real men.

«That's what I was thinking.»

The first reflex she had had toward the insinuation made by Michela about Gianluca had been one of disgust. But so had the second reflex, and all the subsequent ones up to the time she had gone to sleep that night.

Now that she saw Gianluca in front of her in swimwear, she could not help thinking about the actions Michela had probably imagined at the origin of her delay.

«Come on in, didn't you say you wanted to learn to swim?»

The taunt of him talking to her from the water echoed far and wide across the empty pool. The tepid air soaked with the smell of chlorine filled the enclosed room and, like an enveloping, impermeable film, kept the drops of the freshly taken shower clinging to Flavia's body.

«I told you it wasn't easy for me. You have to give me time,» she hesitated.

«What kind of mishap could you have ever had with water?» laughed Gianluca. He walked to the edge to get out of the pool. «Look at me, I'm just fine,» he pointed to his own torso as he emerged from the blue pool.

Flavia had not thought that a first-year high school boy could already have such broad shoulders. As she watched him approach she noticed, amid the water sliding down his body, a slender and elegantly developed chest as well. He had an enviable body... she would have liked a similar one in the past. Who knew, maybe it would still be granted to her in the future.

The one-piece swimsuit adhered to her body and was so tight that it forced her to become aware of her physicality with a whole new sensation. The thick air around had made her so sensitive that she could feel the warm moisture condensing on her wet skin.

Gianluca walked toward her with a hypnotic smile so that Flavia could not resist going toward him.

She hugged him, driven by an animal instinct, an animal that was certainly very masculine. Then she surrendered to the attraction that was tossing her mind like a storm at the height of violence, a storm so thunderous that everything she perceived soon and inexorably became a blurred whirlwind.

The whirlwind closed in on itself, thickened, crashed against the void, in a very masculine way, of course, and the psychedelic image of what she was seeing faded until it disappeared, bringing her out of sleep, into the darkness of her room.

A taste of disgust in her mouth, also very masculine for sure, provided her with a suitably balance counter of repulsion to the attraction felt in the dream she had just had.

"I'm male" she repeated to herself a certain number of times and, with her stomach churned and a grimace carved from lips to nose, she tried to silence her thoughts in the impatient hope of falling asleep again as soon as possible.

When she woke up the next morning, a shadow of that grimace was still imprinted on her sleepy face. She got up, dragged herself to the bathroom still in her pajamas and noticed that her panties were stained with blood.

«Ah, so that's how it works» she complained on the brink of a yawn that, oppressed behind a feeling of bruising in her breast, had no intention to come out.

It didn't take Flavia too long to verify that it was not exactly "how it works", and that things were instead a little more complex. She also verified that the shoulders of first-year high school boys are that wide in dreams only, and that she was not at risk of seeing them come towards her stripped and dripping in public places.

Rather, she had to be careful about her own reactions. Female hormones were now circulating in her body, and she would have to negotiate as soon as possible a truce between them and her brain, still too accustomed to testosterone, no matter how much Wilol could find to joke about it.

She decided not to include Flavio too much in her life, which was already complicated more than enough at the moment. Moreover, it would have been impossible to do so without compromising the state of her lungs. She limited herself to exchanging with him some sporadic chatter, mostly to make sure he kept everything in order until the moment when she would have to reclaim her life.

She had the pleasure of participating in the consumerist rite of Christmas with relatives. Granted, it was Claudia's relatives, yes, but still blood of her blood, by now. While buying gifts, a special generosity seized her towards her closest friends, Michela and Gianluca first of all. Since she earned well and had parents to support her, she was developing that detachment for money so common among saints, philanthropists and spoiled girls.

But Flavia was not behaving like a spoiled girl, and even if Fabrizio could have doubts about it, the staff at Reflections had a clear understanding on that. Despite being so young, Flavia was a reliable, punctual, and committed girl. She was there every weekend to work, and her parents had never came to complain. If they gave her so much freedom, she must have had an exemplary behavior at home and enjoy the utmost trust from her family. What a responsible girl!

«Merry Christmas, Giuseppe, see you in January» Flavia greeted him. It was dark and she had to hurry to get to Michela's to change clothes so as not to raise suspicion from Fabrizio.

Giuseppe did not yet have the tattoo that Flavia remembered from Valdaora, and his arms were slimmer.

«Are you not coming the next weekends?» he asked her.

«Renato gave me a funky break for the holidays. What about you?»

«I asked him to stay» Giuseppe replied. «It's extra money,» he added in response to the curious look thrown at him by her.

«I see.»

Flavia paused and wrapped herself in the long coat she was wearing. In those weeks at Reflections, she had realized that this wasn't the Giuseppe she had known. He had the potential, though. Maybe he needed help. And it occurred to her that maybe she could give it to him. Or maybe it wasn't her task to do so. "Risking and trying", she remembered. It was becoming her mantra since she had found herself learning to live Claudia's life.

«Tell me, you still go to school, right?»

Giuseppe smiled embarrassed. «Yes, I'm not so old to be finished. Why?»

«Even though you study, you've started working almost every evening, and now you're even working during the holiday period. I bet you have some big project in mind...»

«What?» he asked, with a smile that Flavia read as coming from both surprise and distrust.

«Well... I mean, it's clear that you're not short of money. Maintaining a physique like yours is quite expensive. And you don't seem like the type who would want to continue being "Juicy Pear" when you grow up...»

«On one hand I like the environment...» he justified himself.

«...but on the other hand you would like to work in a place of your own, right?»

Giuseppe, amazed by Flavia's intuition, felt like opening up with her.

«It's a somewhat far-fetched idea that came to my mind recently.»

«It's your dream, as long as you hold onto it, it's not far-fetched» Flavia corrected him.

Giuseppe sighed, and seemed to screw his red head back on his neck.

«Yes, but maybe it's better to keep the savings for something else. I don't even know if I would be able to run such a business.»

«Why not? You're enterprising, sociable, optimistic...»

«Do you think so? You should know me better before saying that» he doubted.

«Talk to your brother, maybe he likes this far-fetched idea.»

«And you...» Giuseppe asked with a sudden attention, «how do you know I have a brother?»

«Someone must have told me» Flavia dodged. «I really like the idea of you running your own place. If you decide to do it, I promise I'll help you with the promotion.»

Giuseppe's face lit up. Flavia's words sounded naive to him, yes, but he realized that the dream he had was a treasure worth keeping polished.

«Alright, partner, if I ever have the money I'll let you know!» Giuseppe laughed.

Flavia saw that he was still skeptical, but it seemed to her that the spark of hope was about to ignite a fire in him.

Pleased as if she were watching a good movie whose plot she knew by heart, Flavia enjoyed the light in Giuseppe's new expression. She still felt gratitude for him, for how he had behaved in Valdaora.

«I have to go, or my father will lock me in the dungeons.»

«Watch out, there's always some crazy people out there,» Giuseppe warned her.

«Don't worry, what could happen to me?»

«You never know...» he said with a scruple dictated more by affection than by a sense of duty. «Merry Christmas!»

Among the gifts Flavia received, those from Michela and Gianluca caught her attention more than the others. They had each given her a book: Michela gave her The Grammar of Fantasy by Rodari, and Gianluca gave her Invisible Cities by Calvino. She had already noticed them in Claudia's meager library when, as Flavio, she had given her repetitions for the first time. Despite the titles having intrigued him, he had never read them. Now that she had received them, she devoured them both in a few hours. She drew some ideas from them that she immediately associated with what she imagined could be the work at the Defense's secret project.

As if it were a fever that regains strength during a relapse, the ambition to make an impact on society arose to stimulate her intellectual activity.

She identified the genesis of original thought and attention to details that no one considers as key elements of both works. Somehow, she sensed that those very elements would be decisive for her success if she ever had the opportunity to work on the project. She knew, however, that the project itself had not yet been started, and probably did not exist except as a bud of an idea in the mind of some researcher or intellectual.

She wanted to chase away the impatience and restlessness that those gifts had injected into her veins. In due time, she decreed, she would have allowed herself – or himself – to give space to the old obsessions. For now, she had Claudia's life to carry on and Flavio's to uphold.