In this chapter, Jareth does a bit of gender bending, and I use the gendered pronouns rather freely after his (temporary) switch. As well as his name. Jareth = Judy.

This has not been proof read, so if you spot any grammatical errors, please let me know!

"This is so completely childish. I'm not doing this," Gabrielle complained as she crossed her arms over her ample chest.

"Very well, Ms. Ferriera," Sister Patrica said slowly as she stalked closer to the pouting teen. "In lieu of you attending the museum shut-in, you will be expected to write up at least one page for every single one of the exhibits that we will be discussing on our extended field-trip."

"Oh my go-"

"Watch yourself, young lady, unless you want to have to do two pages per exhibit."

"You can't be serious! There's like a thousand exhibits at the museum! There's no way that I'm going to do a thousand page report!" Gabrielle protested.

"Then I'll be seeing you at the museum next Friday afternoon," Sister Patrica said with a grin. Sarah hid a laugh behind her hand.

Sarah followed her classmates into the museum, her overnight bag hung across her bag and with her sleeping bag in hand. "Okay ladies! We're going to be sleeping in the dinosaur exhibit tonight!" the museum guide said as she lead the girls into the room in question. "I hope that nobody's afraid of some old bones!"

Sarah set her things down next to where Frankie and Iskra already had their sleeping bags rolled out on the floor next to one giant claw of the T-rex. "Pst! Pst!" Sarah straightened up and looked around the museum. Her classmates were happily setting up their sleeping bags for later, and chatting with their friends while they waited for the museum guides to take them on the private, guided tour of the museum. "Pst! Precious!"

Sarah closed her eyes and started to rub the bridge of her nose. "I'm going to count to ten and open my eyes and when I do so, you'd better be back in your own kingdom, Jareth," she muttered under her breath; she knew that Jareth would be able to hear her. When she opened her eyes, a mismatched pair of eyes stared back at her from one of the giant claws of the T-rex.

"Precious, you didn't think that I would just let you skip off and have a delightful night without me, did you?" Jareth asked.

"Go away," Sarah said through clenched teeth.

"No way, precious! You pretty much gave up your right to privacy the moment that we made that vow."

"Blue group! To me!" called one of the museum guides. Sarah spun around on her heels and marched over where the guide stood without another word to Jareth.

"Oh, this is going to be so much fun!" somebody exclaimed and leaned heavily on Sarah's left shoulder.

"Um, do I kno-" Sarah started, and then stared with slack-jawed horror at the young woman who stood next to her. It was like somebody had cut out Jareth's face and pasted it onto the body of a teenage girl.

"Just call me Jerusha Abbott (1)!" female Jareth exclaimed.

"You can't use that name!" Sarah hissed at him/her.

"Aw, why not? I love Judy's and Jarvis's love," Jareth said with a pout. "Fine, but you still have to call me Judy."

"I am not happy with you being here at all, and I'm sure as heck not going to call you Judy! You're such a pain!" Sarah said. She let out an annoyed humph and moved to stand closer to the guide.

"Okay, are we all set to go?" the museum guide asked. She consulted a clipboard with the names of everybody in her group. "Wait a second, we've got an extra." The girls looked around at each other to try and figure out who didn't belong.

"Wait, who are you?" one girl asked Jareth.

"Judy Abbott, obviously!" Jareth said and tossed his blonde hair over his shoulder. "There was a last minute group change."

"Um… okay. Well, we need to start on the tour right now if we're going to make it in time for the movie, so you guys can sort this out with one of the Sisters later, okay?" Sarah fumed as she followed in the footsteps of the tour guide, but the Museum of Natural History was one of her favorite places, so she tried not to let Jareth ruin her good mood. After they'd gone through the dinosaur exhibit and into the pilgrim exhibit, Sarah had even managed to forget that Jareth was even there in the first place.

"Eeek! That portrait just winked at me!" one of the girls in Sarah's group exclaimed.

"Don't be silly, it's just… OH MY GOSH! Did anybody else see that just now?!"

"What, what?!" the other girls in the group exclaimed. Before Sarah knew what was happening, everybody was pressed around the portrait except for Sarah, Judy, and the guide.

"Girls, girls! I promise you that the picture did not wink, blow a raspberry, or in any other way move!" The guide had to yell in order to be heard over the squealing voices of the girls. After a couple of minutes, the guide managed to get everybody under control, and they started to move on from the pilgrim exhibit.

"So, precious," Judy said as she came up next to Sarah and draped her arm over Sarah's shoulder. "Are you having fun yet?"

"No!" Sarah said and shrugged the Goblin King off. "I came here to learn, and you're just causing a massive distraction! We didn't even finish going through the pilgrim exhibit!"

"Oh, come on, precious!" Judy said with a roll of her eyes. "How many times have you been here before? Hundreds? Thousands?" Sarah only just continued to scowl at the King turned school girl. "Look, what I'm saying is that you know all of the exhibits here backwards and forwards. Besides, it's after 4 PM on a Friday! You made me promise not to bother you while you were at school, but you're not at school anymore!"

"It's a field trip!" Sarah snapped at him. "It's an extension of school!" Judy gave Sarah a dry look.

"And you're seriously telling me that you're willing— neigh, HAPPY even— to give up the rest of your Friday as well as half of your Saturday?"

"Yes! It's interesting and a change from the normal!"

"And what exactly are the weekends that you spend with me, precious? Chopped liver?"

"Oh, quit being such a baby, Jareth!" Sarah snapped and then gave the girl a side-glance. "Judy."

"Well, maybe I will be good, Sarah," Judy said with a scowl. Sarah quickly looked over to the blonde with a look of pure surprise on her face. "After all, I wouldn't want to make you angry at me. Besides, I have bigger things planned than just bringing to life overly perverted and overly childish paintings." With a faint hint of glitter, Judy vanished, but Sarah was in no way appeased by what passed for a truce.

After all, that did not sound like Jareth was going to stop his games at all.

The rest of the tour passed without further incident, and by the time that the guide started to usher the girls downstairs where they'd have their dinner, the girls were even starting to talk about how they might have imagined the entire incident with the paintings in the pilgrim exhibit.

Sarah laughed along with her peers to put on a grand show as she followed everybody to the three-story staircase that would take them directly to the lobby. But a second later, the air was filled with horrified shrieks. Sarah ran over to the balcony and looked down— the stairs had turned into a giant slide and both students and nuns were sliding down it with mixed reactions of horror and glee.

"Jareth," Sarah said through clenched teeth. A moment later, Judy reappeared at Sarah's side.

"I told you that I had bigger things planned tonight, didn't I, precious?" Judy asked with a wink.

"Wha… What is this? What's happening to my museum?!" the curator was screaming in the middle of the lobby amongst those who had slid down the giant slide.

"Come on, Sarah!" Judy exclaimed as he pulled the girl over to the top of the slide. "I did this for you! You need to learn how to loosen up every once in a while!"

"Jareth, wait! WAIT!" Sarah screamed. Judy pulled the two of them down onto the slide, and Sarah let out an ear-piercing scream and clung to the girl the entire ride down. Once they reached the bottom, Sarah had expected to come to a stop, but apparently, the overly-polished marble floors made for an extension of the slide, and the two of them barreled into a group of Sarah's classmates that were just getting to their feet before they came to a stop at the feet of the Mother Superior.

Sarah looked up at the Mother with pure terror. She was probably the only person on earth who was older than Jareth. But after a long, drawn out moment in which Sarah died a thousand times, the Mother finally smiled brightly at the two girls before her on the floor. "Me next!" And then she picked up the hem of her habit and hurried over to the elevator.

Sarah threw back her head and let out a laugh that quickly turned into a sob. Judy stood and helped Sarah to her feet. "See? Everybody needs time off every once in a while." Judy said.

After about an hour, all of the girls and nuns had tired themselves out on the slide, and went outside to their overly-delayed dinner, which had grown a little bit cold. Judy sat pressed next to Sarah on the picnic bench and laughed and joked with Frankie and Iskra like they'd known each other their entire lives.

As everybody started to head back into the museum for the behind the scenes part of the tour, Frankie pulled Sarah aside. "Okay, I'm not going to say anything bad about Judy because I really like her and everything… but it's a little weird how I've literally never seen her before now and she just starts to talk about things that she was never privy to. Like what happened on our first day of school."

"But Judy was there," Sarah said with a frown. "After I ran out from the cafeteria, I went to a bathroom on the other side of the school, and Judy was in there. She comforted me."

"Does she just enjoy hanging out in the bathrooms all day or something?"

"No, she just… keeps to herself, that's all. She's awkward and doesn't know how to deal with people that aren't me," Sarah said quickly. Frankie gave Sarah a look of disbelief, but then rushed inside and over to her own group.

"So, she's suspicious, but thanks to your quick thinking, precious, she's not going to bring it up again for the rest of the field trip," Judy said as he hung off of Sarah's arm.

Much to Sarah's surprise, Jareth did not transform the staircase down into the basement into a slide, nor did he make any of the paintings start to talk or make the artifacts start to dance or any of a million other options that Sarah would have thought he would have done. Instead, he remained by her side while the guides told them about the things that the museum was studying before they put them upstairs on display.

"That was fun," Judy said as she and Sarah walked back upstairs. "I didn't know that there was so much history to be learned from bones even that old. It sort of makes me wonder what humans would think about my bones should I die here."

"No, don't die, Jareth," Sarah said with a pout.

"Aw, are you worried about me, precious?" Judy asked with a sly smile. "Well, not to worry, because you won't be able to get rid of me that easily!" He leaned over and pecked Sarah's cheek before he skipped off and vanished.

The second that the Goblin King vanished was when the screaming started. "Oh lord, what now?" Sarah muttered under her breath. The entire museum seemed to shake around her, and Sarah watched with wide-eyed horror as the once-still skeletal remains of the T-rex came charging around the corner. It barreled right towards her— Sarah knew that she had to get out of the way or else she'd be flattened by the massive feet, but she was glued to the spot by fear.

Sarah closed her eyes and a second before it would have run her down, the T-rex stopped and let out a fierce roar that flung Sarah's hair and clothes back. Something wet smacked against her forehead and fell to the ground with a plop.

Sarah cautiously peeked open first one eye, and then opened the other when she realized that the skeleton obviously had no desire to kill her. She tentatively reached up to wipe whatever goop was on her forehead off— it was booger green and had the consistency of glue— before she looked down to see what had hit her: a tennis ball that was covered in the same green goop.

With confusion, Sarah bent down and picked the ball up with the tips of her thumb and pinky. The t-rex hunkered down low on its hind legs and frantically wagged its tail back and forth. It was a pose that Sarah had seen Merlin do many, many times before.

"You want the ball boy?" Sarah asked as she tossed the ball from hand to hand. Even though the scull no longer had eyes, Sarah could tell that the thing was eagerly watching the ball. "Well go get it!" Sarah threw the ball as hard as she could against the far corner, where it bounced off and could be heard bouncing into the lobby of the museum.

As Sarah had expected, the t-rex turned and scrambled after the ball like a giant dog. Sarah and the others who'd been behind her in the hall hurried into the lobby, where most everybody was frozen in fear and pressed up against the wall. The dinosaur had caught the ball and was easily turning it into shreds in the middle of the room. But, when Sarah came in, the t-rex scrambled to its feet and dropped the remains of the ball at Sarah's feet. "Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy?" Sarah asked as she rubbed the dinosaur's scull. If the thing had a tongue, it would have lulled out in pleasure.

"How did you know that it wasn't going to hurt you, Sarah?" Frankie asked as she edged closer to the t-rex.

"I didn't," Sarah said honestly. "But I saw the ball and I thought that it was acting an awful lot like my own dog."

"Too bad that it destroyed that ball," Iskra said as the other students hesitantly began to approach the creature.

"Then I suppose that it's a good thing that I have plenty of spares!" Judy said. She opened up an overnight bag and dozens of brand new tennis balls came spilling out.

The girls started to pick up the balls that rolled across the floor, and the dinosaur didn't know which way to turn.

Everybody spent several hours tossing ball after ball for the skeleton to catch— they quickly found out that he could fit at least a hundred in his massive jaw, so several people would throw their balls all at the same time.

Some time after midnight, the t-rex went back to the stand that it had been on originally, curled up like a dog and fell fast asleep. Exhausted from first the slide and then playing fetch with the dinosaur, everybody drifted off to their own sleeping bags and the room was soon filled with the sounds of snores.

"That was a lot more fun than I thought that it would ever be," Sarah whispered to Judy, who lay next to Sarah in her own sleeping bag.

"I told you, precious," Judy said and stuck out her tongue. "You need to learn to trust me more. Even stuffy old Mother Superiors like to cut loose every once in a while. It's good for one's mental health."

"Yes, yes, okay. But what happens in the morning? Will everybody just forget?"

"Of course, precious," Judy said. She reached out and grabbed Sarah's hand and cupped it to her chest. "Do you really think that I'd just let people walk around thinking that the Museum of Natural History has a button to turn the main staircase into a giant slide and the technology to turn a bunch of bones into a living creature?"

"No, of course not," Sarah said softly. "I'm beat."

"Yes, you've had quite an eventful evening. Sleep now."

Sarah was awoken by the sounds of the other girls as they awoke. She lay on her back for a moment and stared up at the scull of the t-rex, which was exactly as it had been when they'd first gotten to the museum.

"Man, I had the strangest dream last night!" Frankie said as she sat up in her sleeping bag.

"Me too!" Iskra exclaimed. Sarah could only laugh.

1) Jerusha Abbott is the main character in the novel Daddy Long Legs. After Jerusha goes to college, she changes her name to Judy.