Chapter 1: Dead on the Gym Floor
The iron was warm from my grip, the knurling biting into familiar calluses. Up. Hold.Down. My rhythm was metronomic, a focused burn in the triceps that felt like progress. The gym’s stereo thumped a generic bassline beneath the clatter of plates and the rhythmic sigh of treadmills. In the mirror, I saw myself: six feet of concentrated effort, beard damp, a guy named Justin Zygarski willing the last rep into existence.
I pushed.
A sharp, white-hot crack erupted in the base of my skull. Not pain, exactly. A silent detonation. The world didn’t fade to black—it snapped off like a switched-out light.
Consciousness returned as motion. A frantic, jarring, alien motion.
Slap-slap-slap-slap.
The sound was all wrong. Small, sharp impacts. My vision swam into focus on the digital display of a treadmill console. 6.5 mph. The belt blurred beneath me.
But I wasn’t running. This was a pathetic, stuttering trot. My legs were…short. My center of gravity was all in the wrong place, too low, too far forward. A heavy, aching bounce tugged at my chest with every frantic step, a resonant jiggle restrained by intense, sweaty pressure. A sports bra. I was wearing a fucking pink sports bra.
I stumbled, grabbing the rails. The machine beeped in protest. My hands—small, with slim fingers and chipped pink nail polish—clutched the rubber. A silver ring with a tiny heart gleamed under the neon lights.
“Whoa, you okay, Sabrina?”
The voice came from my left. I turned my head. The movement sent a cascade of long, blonde hair swinging over my shoulder, the strands sticking to the sweat on my neck. A guy on the elliptical was looking at me, concerned.
I opened my mouth. “I’m—” The voice that came out was a higher register, lightly melodic, edged with a gasp. It stopped me cold. “Fine. Dizzy.”
“Hydrate,” he said, nodding sagely before returning to his magazine.
Sabrina.
Panic, cold and electric, shot down a spine that felt too delicate. I needed to get off this thing. I jabbed at the stop button and staggered onto solid floor. The world tilted. My balance was off—my hips seemed to want to swing with each step, a side-to-side sway that felt exaggerated and ridiculous. I could feel every separate…part. The soft, unsettling shift of weight on my chest. The different pull of muscles in my thighs. A faint, unfamiliar ache between my legs that was just…there. The pink yoga pants clung to me like a second skin, and I was hyper-aware of the narrow strip of fabric riding up in the back. A thong. I was wearing a thong.
I moved, a wobbling rush towards the free-weight area. My size-five sneakers whispered on the rubber floor. Everything felt lighter, weaker, the air itself a thicker medium to push through. The scent of the gym—sweat, rubber, cheap disinfectant—was sharper, more layered.
Then I saw the crowd.
A semi-circle of people stood near the bench press where I’d been. Where Justin had been. I pushed through, my new small stature letting me slip between bodies.
On the floor, my body—his body—lay splayed. A big guy with sleeve tattoos was doing compressions on his chest, his own face grimacing with effort. “Come on, man. Breathe.”
I stared. From this low angle, my own face looked like a stranger’s. Pale. The blonde beard I’d trimmed this morning was just…hair on a slack, waxen mask. My eyes were half-open, seeing nothing. A thread of saliva trailed from the corner of my mouth onto the rubber mat.
“What happened?” my new, female voice piped up, thin and strained.
“Just collapsed,” a woman next to me murmured, not taking her eyes off the scene. “Mid-rep. Nobody saw it coming.”
The paramedics arrived then, all efficient noise and nylon kits. They took over compressions, slapped leads on his chest, spoke in low, quick codes. I watched, detached, as if observing a procedural on a very high-definition screen. They worked for what felt like an hour. The tattooed guy stepped back, wiping his forehead, his gaze falling on me. He gave me a sympathetic, half-hearted nod.
One of the paramedics, a woman with a severe ponytail, finally sat back on her heels. She checked her watch, then looked at her partner. She shook her head, once. A quiet, terminal gesture.
“Time of death, 7:14 PM.”
The words were clinical, clean. They dropped into the pit of my stomach and vaporized there. Justin Zygarski was dead. I was standing right here, hearing it declared, a scream trapped in a throat that wasn’t mine, behind lips that felt too full.
People began to drift away, murmuring. The body—my body—was zipped into a black bag. The mundane horror of the zipper’s sound. They lifted the stretcher and wheeled it away. Just like that. The space where I’d died was just empty floor again.
A fog descended, muffling the gym’s sounds. My thoughts moved like sap. Identification. Wallet. Keys. Car. I turned, my hips automatically doing that swaying thing, and walked toward the locker rooms. The Women’s sign was a forbidden barrier a second before I pushed through it.
The locker room was humid, smelling of perfume, shampoo, and damp concrete. I stood, alien and terrified, scanning the rows of locks. My—her—locker. What number? I had no idea. I started walking, my eyes drifting over the combinations, the stickers, the scratches.
Then I saw it. A small, peeling sticker of a cartoon kitten. Something in this new, jumbled head—Sabrina’s head—gave a faint pulse of recognition. Locker 42. I reached for the combination lock, my pink nails obscene. The numbers came to me not as memory, but as muscle twitch in my fingers. 12-24-36. It clicked open.
Inside was a small leather backpack. I pulled it out, fumbling with the clasp. My movements were clumsy, the fingers lacking their former strength. A wallet. I flipped it open. Sabrina Parker.18. Her address. Her smile in the DMV photo was bright, expectant. A future now horrifically co-opted.
My breath hitched. A sob? I clamped these new, full lips shut.
Beneath the wallet, a set of keys. A Toyota fob. And a phone, her phone, its case bejeweled and slippery in my damp palm. I shoved everything into the backpack, slung it over a shoulder that felt too narrow for the strap. The weight of it was different.
I didn’t change. The idea of navigating more of this unfamiliar clothing, of seeing more of this body in the mirror, was impossible. I just had to get out.
Pushing back into the main gym felt like stepping onto a stage. I kept my head down, the blonde hair a curtain, and beelined for the glass doors. The night air was cool, a shock on my damp skin. The parking lot stretched, vast and poorly lit.
I hit the unlock button on the fob. Two rows over, a Corolla’s lights blinked obediently.
The walk towards it was the longest of my life. Each step was a negotiation with this new physics. The jiggle.The sway. The vulnerability. I slid into the driver’s seat and had to pull it far forward to reach the pedals. The rearview mirror showed me her face—Sabrina’s face—wide-eyed and ghost-pale, a stranger wearing my panic.
I sat there, the keys dangling from my tiny, polished hand, the silence of the car pressing in. Justin Zygarski was dead in a body bag. Sabrina Parker was alive, holding her car keys, trapped in a locker room of her own flesh.
The engine started with a quiet purr. I didn’t know where to go. But I knew I couldn’t stay here. I put the car in drive, my foot tentative on a pedal that felt too sensitive, and pulled out into the stream of traffic, leaving the neon glow of the gym behind, a corpse and a life dissolving in its wake.