Prisms of Change -- The Yellow Orb

         “You said you wanted to see me Mrs. Ryan?” Alison said as she hesitantly entered her English teacher's office.

         “Oh, Alison,” the older woman said, turning in her chair and resting a hand on her large, pregnant belly as she regarded her student.  Most people would have called the diminutive redhead 'cute' or 'pixie like' if they felt like being kind. Alison was the kind of girl who would never be the center of attention, but would always be right there at the edge of looks and popularity.

         In short, the pale skinned red head couldn't have been more different from her stunningly beautiful teacher, the tanned, leggy and busty blond who had always been the center of attention, always been the popular one. The successful and intelligent woman who'd married a handsome and successful businessman and was getting ready to have her first children.

         “Is this about my last paper Mrs. Ryan?” Alison asked, afraid of the answer. She'd put everything she had into that report, staying up into the small hours of the morning to finish it, and yet, she'd gotten another 'F', her fourth in a row in Mrs. Ryan's class. “I worked really hard on it, I just don't know where I went wrong.”

         “Well, I guess this could be about your paper if you want to think of it that way,” Mrs. Ryan said as she pulled a small yellow sphere from her desk drawer and set it on her desk. “Consider this something like... extra credit. If you can take on a project for me here, I can make sure that you pass my class. Would that interest you?”

         “Um, yeah.” Alison said, for the first time since hearing that Mrs. Ryan wanted to see her after school, feeling that there might be some hope for her. “What do I need to do Mrs. Ryan?”

         “Well, to start, why don't you call me Emily. I need to ask a favor of you, and it's very personal. I have to absolutely trust you, can I do that Alison?”

         “Of course you can Mrs., um, Emily. You know I'd do anything to have a chance to pass. I've been working so hard, and I've been trying to listen to everything you taught us, but somehow, whenever I try to use it all, it all goes sort of wrong.”

         “Does that happen with a lot of things you do?”

         “Um, yeah, almost everything. I'm getting a C- in math right now, but I'm in a class full of freshmen. And, um... I'm getting a D+ in Current World Events. I don't know why people are all bent out of shape about things like how the Canadian Dollar is worth more than the American Dollar now. It's not like you can spend Canada money in America anyway, so what's the big deal right?”

         Inwardly, Emily cringed. The weak American dollar was yet another sign that the economy was still struggling to recover, and the fact that for the first time in decades, the Canadian Dollar was worth more than the US Dollar put all sorts of pressure on an already strained community, like theirs, that lay so close to the border. For a moment, Emily considered backing out of her plan, not sure that she could trust such a... dense... girl with something so important. But already, she'd waited too long to get to this point, and she'd have to continue as planned if she had any hope of getting away from this burden.

         “Okay, this is going to be very important. It's about my babies, and I need your help to make sure that things go okay, all right?”

         “Okay,” Alison said, jumping quickly to a conclusion. “You need me to babysit for you this summer or something?”

         “Well, it's kind of like baby sitting. We're getting very close to the end of the year here Alison, Senior Projects are coming due, people are getting ready for college entrance exams, it's a very important time of year.”

         “Well, yeah, I'm like... so behind on my senior project. I thought I'd do one on helping the homeless or something, but I never got any farther than all the time I spent at the shelter passing out soup. And my advisor said that it wouldn't count if I didn't finish my paper about what I learned and stuff.”

         “Well, I can help to make sure you pass your senior project. But I need you to help me with my babies here. I'm due in just two months, right when people will be counting on me most. It's only my second year out of college, and I'm afraid that if I take my maternity leave right when people need me, I won't be able to come back to teaching like I want to.”          

         “Wow, that would really suck, you're such a great teacher and stuff. And you're young, and cool, and you get the rest of us. The older teachers don't have a clue, but you actually get it.”

         “Right,” Emily said, brushing her fingers over the yellow sphere again. “So, will you help me?”

         “Sure, I'll do whatever you need me to Mrs. Ryan. I mean, Emily.”

         “Good, then let me explain what this little yellow ball does. You'll have to believe in magic, but I'll show you how it works and then you can help me. First, you have to put your hand on the ball, then I put my hand on top of yours, okay?”

         “Okay,” Alison said, slipping her hand onto the small ball, then feeling the warmth of her teacher's hand settle on top of hers.

         “Now, because my hand is on top, I'm in control. I can pick something of yours that I would like to trade with you. Once we trade, everyone but me, including you, will think that things have always been that way. History will be rewritten so that things are different. Do you get it?”

         “I think so... but what would you want of mine?”

         “Well, let's say I wanted to be a pale skinned Irish red head like you,” Emily said, concentrating briefly. “The orb would make that happen.”          

         “But Emily,” Alison said, confused as she used her other hand to brush her long blond locks out of her eyes. “You've always been a red head.”

         “Right, you see, everyone, including you, thinks I've always looked like this. But the truth is, when you walked in here, you were the one with red hair. I know... I know, it's hard to believe. But, if your hand was on top, you could pick something of mine and everyone would think it had always been yours.”

         “Okay... if you say so,” Alison said, wondering if perhaps the pregnancy had made her teacher a little crazy or something. They said a woman's hormones went all nuts when she was pregnant, maybe that was making her see things or something.

         “Here,” Emily said, taking her hand off the young girl's. “Take your hand off the orb and put it on top of mine when I touch the orb. Then, just pick something of mine that you want to have... like, the color of my eyes or something, then you can see the trade for yourself. And then I'll explain how you're going to help me.”

         “Okay,” the short, tanned blond said, looking over her teacher for something that she wanted. While Emily's face was pretty, and her blue eyes were  nice, Alison thought her green eyes looked really special, as not many blonds had them, and she didn't want to give those up. As she scanned lower; however, her eyes stopped on the one thing, or two things rather, that would prove that the magic ball could do the impossible.

         And no sooner had she thought about it, than she found herself staring at her teacher's small chest in wonder.

         “You see,” Emily said to the busty teen, oblivious to the change that had just taken place, but assuming the young girl had taken her hint about eye color. After all, Alison didn't seem bright enough to make decisions without being led by the hand, and who ever saw blonds sporting that deep of a tan with green eyes? “It works, just like I said it would. And with eyes like those, I'm sure you'll catch even more attention that you did with your chest alone before. Now, take your hand off mine so that I can explain what I want without any accidents. As long as my hand is on the bottom, I can't let go of the orb.”

         “Oh,” Alison said, still in shock at how much she'd just changed. And how the picture on Mrs. Ryan's desk had even changed to show her, arm in arm with her husband, and sporting a much reduced chest. Removing her hand, she looked at her teacher with rapt attention, waiting for what would happen next.

         “You see... and this is where I have to absolutely trust you, I need your help. I need you to become the mother of my husband's babies. You have to look at me and think 'Bruce's babies' for that to happen. Then, you'll become the one who's pregnant. I promise, I'll make sure you pass your classes and your senior project. Even if all I do is change your grades to make sure you graduate, I'll do it. Then, after they're born, I'll just 'adopt' the twins, and you can go to college, or whatever you want to do, and I can raise my kids. Can you do that for me Alison?”

         “Well, okay Emily,” she said. “But couldn't we just use the orb to trade back after school ends?”

         “No, I've thought about that a lot. If we use the orb to trade back, then things will get re-written so that I had to take time off for my babies. You have to be the one to have them. But I promise, I'll adopt them, and you won't have to spend your life starting as a teenage mother. Okay?” Emily finished by laying her hand back on the orb.

         “Okay,” Alison said, laying her hand back on top of her teacher's and thinking about the children growing inside her.

         “Now,” Emily said, looking across her desk at the mother of her husband's children and her large, swollen belly. For a moment, she wished she'd used the orb in the beginning to take the young girl's breasts. It was bad enough that she'd caught her husband with her young student, and she'd known that he had a weakness for busty blonds, but she was determined to make this arrangement work... and that meant trusting the girl that was carrying her husband's children to do the right thing. “I promised I would help you to make sure that you could graduate, and pass your senior project, I was thinking, now that you understand the orb, we could work to find someone who has the intelligence you need to be a success here.”

         “Right,” Alison said, thinking how nice it would be to be as smart as Mrs. Ryan. Moments later, her eyes widened as she realized what that idle thought had done to her. It was as though a ball of wool had been pulled from between her ears, or a constant white noise had been removed. She could think, clearly, and on the heals of that realization came others.

         Mrs. Ryan, on the other hand, blinked in confusion. She trusted that Alison was doing the right things with the orb. She had to be, after all, in the past seven months, Emily had come to rely on the assistance of her star student, both in her increasingly strained love life, and in the subtle ways that Alison helped her to preform her job's duties here at the school. After all, Emily had barely managed to graduate college, and without her husband's help and influence, she never would have secured her current position teaching high school. More likely, she'd have wound up teaching elementary school, or worse, pre-school.

         “Is something wrong Alison?” She finally asked after a long pause.

         “Well, I was just thinking, isn't it going to be a bit scandalous for your husband to have gotten a teenage girl pregnant, and then for you to adopt her kids? I mean, the marital infidelity that's implied, even if it weren't true, would haunt you for years.”

         “I know. We're making the best of a bad situation here. Maybe I should have left Bruce when I caught you with him... but I just love him so much, and he promised that he loved me. Then, when you told us you were pregnant... it's just the best idea I could come up with. You don't want to be a teenage mother after all, you have such a bright future ahead of you. You're smart, and sexy, you could probably go to any school you wanted, get any kind of job. I'm just lucky to have made it this far in life.”

         “See,” Alison said smiling. “I think I can help with that. Make some of the scandal, well, go away.”

         “And how would you do that?”

         “Oh, I was thinking that to start with, it's really not appropriate for someone to be bearing Bruce's babies who isn't married to him.”

         “I don't get it,” Emily Thompson said, her no longer nimble mind getting lost in the changes Alison was making to her reality. “You and Bruce got married as soon as the ink was dry on our divorce papers. I just... I couldn't stand to be married to him after what he did... with such a young girl. You were barely eighteen when he got you pregnant....”

         “Oh, I don't want to hurt you Emily,” Alison said, amazed at the large diamond ring that had appeared on her hand and the other changes taking place in Emily's office. No longer was the tall, skinny red head depicted in pictures with a smiling husband. Instead, her only companionship seemed to be that of a large scruffy dog, or a pair of cats. “Maybe it would be better if we gave you a chance to start over. Would you like that? A chance to not have to be hurt by it all? No one would look at you for losing your husband to a younger woman... we can use your orb, make it all go away.”

         “Could, could you really do that Alison?” Emily asked.

         “Of course I can dear,” she said, blinking rapidly as her position in the room changed. Across her desk from her sat the much younger Emily Thompson, who looked somewhat dazed at everything that had just transpired. “There you you go now, isn't that better?”

         “Thanks Mrs. Ryan, I don't know what I'd do without your help. It's bad enough that I have such a hard time passing my classes.... but when I come to your office, it really feels like you take a weight off me. Honestly, I can't really even remember what was bugging me so much when I got here...”

         “Nothing important,” Alison said. “I remember what it was like to be teased for being short and flat chested too.” She continued, looking at the now diminutive teen across her desk from her. “You'll have your day soon, I promise. And when you find the right man, he'll love you for just the way you are. Now,” she finished, taking her hand off the young girls and plucking the orb off the desk, hiding it back away in a drawer. “Why don't you head home for today, and when you come back tomorrow, we'll sit down and work on writing that final paper of yours, just like I promised. After all, we can't have you start off fresh if you don't graduate high school.”

         “Thanks Mrs. Ryan,” Emily said, bounding around the desk and giving her teacher a hug. “I don't know what I'd do without your help.”