Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 64th cycle. Now cycle 65!

"One Day We Were Changs"
8yo Mike & Tina
Chang Squared series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

It always started when their names would be called in the gym. There used to be Samantha Clint in between them for the alphabetical call, but she had moved to Arizona over the summer, so now, the call would go "Michael Chang, Tina Cohen-Chang." And then it would begin.

It didn't matter how many times they explained that Chang was a very common name, all they cared about was that they had boy Chang and girl Chang, and to a bunch of eight-year-olds, this was enough. They would make fun of them, and it didn't really bother Mike most of the time, but Tina had more difficulty hiding her frustration with the running gag.

For a while, she had tried to convince her teachers, even her parents, to just let her go by Tina Cohen. Her teachers had all said it wasn't that simple, while her parents, for reasons she couldn't understand, almost seemed hurt about the suggestion. Eventually, she'd been forced to drop it.

She didn't hate this boy Chang at all, far from it. Of all the boys in their class, he actually seemed to be one of the nicer ones. But he was able to let the joke roll off of him, and she didn't know if it was envy over that shrugging mechanism, but she was starting to get frustrated with him. Why did they have to have the same name, and why did it have to be so funny to everybody else?

But then one day, Mike had come to her with an offer. He had an idea to get them all back, to get the joke to run its course and go away for good.

"What if we pretend that we really are related?" he told her, one day in the schoolyard.

"What do you mean?" Tina frowned.

"We'll tell them we're brother and sister."

"They know we're not," she pointed out.

"Do they really?" he smirked, and she couldn't help but match his look. This might actually be fun.

"Okay," she finally relented. "How do we do it though?" This he hadn't actually figured out yet, and he stood there for some time, considering their options. "Have you ever seen that Parent Trap movie? There were sisters and their parents split up, so the mother took one sister and the father took the other. We could say that's what our parents did, like your dad and my mom used to be married?" her face scrunched up at the thought, but still he was excited again.

"That could work."

"How do we get them to think it?" she wondered, and this required more thinking.

It had taken some work, but when they'd come back to school on Monday, Mike had signalled for Tina to follow him in an isolated corner. There he reached inside his bag and pulled out a photo. The Thursday before, he had asked her to bring a picture of her as a baby with her mother, which she'd given him on Friday morning. He would give it back to her later, after she saw why he'd needed it.

"Wow, is that you?" she pointed to the baby boy on the picture, along with a man she recognized, having seen him at the school a few times, as Mike's father. "How did you do this?" she stared at the picture, stunned at the way his picture and her picture had been melded, to the point where she couldn't see how they had ever been two pictures instead of one.

"I didn't do it, I asked my cousin, he's really good with these things," Mike explained.

"He's not going to tell, is he?" Tina asked.

"No, he just thought it was funny. But it looks good, right?"

"It's amazing," she nodded.

"Okay, so at some point today, you take that and drop it from your bag, somewhere with a lot of people, can you do that?"

"Sure," she smiled.

"Wait, the best part, turn it around," he told her. "I had my cousin write it on the back, he writes better than me," he went on, as she read what had been written in blue ink.

"Michael and Tina's first day at the beach," she giggled.

Later that day, while running down the crowded mid-day halls, a picture had fallen from Tina Cohen-Chang's bag, to be picked up by a boy in her class. It had not taken long before the rumor started going around that 'boy Chang' and 'girl Chang' were really brother and sister. When they would be asked about it though, they would say they had no idea what they were talking about.

It had gotten to the point where it disrupted the class, and while Mike and Tina played innocent, the others were this close to driving their teacher insane. By the end of the day, she had stood up and declared that the next person who suggested these two were brother and sister would have to stay after school to copy lines. The running gag had hit a crack in the floor and fallen flat on its face. The shame would keep it from rising again.

For years still there would be people who believed the two were brother and sister. The evidence had mysteriously disappeared from the desk of the boy who had found it, so all they had was his word against theirs.

The next day, Mike had appeared next to her in the yard and slipped her the picture. "How'd you find it?" she gasped, slipping it discreetly into her things.

"I swiped it out of Puckerman's desk," he shrugged. "I thought you might want to keep it."

"Thanks," she smiled. "What do you think she would have made them write? 'Mike and Tina are not brother and sister, Chang is a popular name'?" she offered, and he chuckled.

"I guess we're not related anymore."

"I guess not. But it wasn't so bad," she admitted.

"Yeah, I kind of liked it," he admitted back. "Now I'm kind of happy we have the same name."

THE END

A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!