Chapter 1: Waking Up Wrong
The first thing I registered was the smell. Not my stale pillow and old T-shirt smell, but vanilla and something sweet, undercut by a faint whisper of cigarette smoke clinging to fabric. Then, the weight. A strange, soft pressure on my chest, and an unfamiliar give to the mattress beneath me. I opened my eyes to a blur of pastel pink and sunlight filtering through a gauzy canopy.
I blinked, and the world swam into a focus that was entirely wrong.
My hand came up to rub my face, and instead of the familiar coarse scratch of my beard, my fingertips met only smooth, plump skin. My lips felt different—fuller, softer. I bolted upright, and the movement caused a dizzying, jiggling sway across my torso. I looked down.
Two perfect, rounded curves strained against the thin lace of a lavender camisole. They moved when I breathed. They were attached to me.
“What the hell?” The voice that left my mouth was higher, melodic, a complete stranger’s.
I flung the covers back. My legs were slim, pale, and hairless. My feet were small, with toenails painted a chipped turquoise. A panic, cold and sharp, shot through my veins. I scrambled out of the bed, my new center of gravity pitching me forward. I caught myself on a vanity cluttered with makeup tubes and jewelry, my smaller hands splaying across the smudged glass.
In the mirror, a beautiful young woman stared back, her eyes wide with my terror.
She had a delicate, feminine face framed by short, messy brown hair. Her lips—my lips—were naturally full and pink without any gloss. A small, intricate heart was inked behind her right ear. I watched, detached, as her hand—my hand—rose shakily to touch her cheek. The reflection mimicked me perfectly.
This was a dream. A fever dream.
I pulled the camisole away from my neck and looked down. The swell of my breasts beneath. A floral tattoo coiled over the left shoulder. I turned, seeing more tattoos—a swirling garden on the forearm, the hint of wings at the base of the spine where my shorts rode low. My backside felt… present. A soft, rounded weight that shifted with every tiny movement.
“Sabrina?” A woman’s voice called from another room. Andrea’s voice. “You up? I’m heading to the farmer’s market!”
Andrea. She was here. In this house. My mind, sluggish with shock, finally made a connection. The room. The vanity. The vibe. This was Sabrina’s room. Andrea’s roommate.
I was in Sabrina Mooers’ body.
“I’m—” I tried to call back, but my voice cracked. I cleared my throat, a delicate, feminine sound. “I’m up! Have fun!” It sounded all wrong, too high, but passably female.
“Okay! Door’s locked behind me!” I heard the front door open and shut. The deadbolt clicked.
Silence descended, heavy and screaming.
I stumbled toward the full-length mirror on the closet door, each step a lesson in a new physics. My hips seemed to want to move in a way my brain didn’t understand, a slight, inherent swing. The feeling of the thin cotton shorts against my skin was alien, the seam of the thong I was wearing a persistent, shocking line between my—
Oh, God.
I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to look. But I had to know. I hooked my thumbs into the waistband of the shorts and slowly pushed them down, along with the scrap of lavender lace beneath. I looked.
It was… an absence. Where my body should have been, there was something else entirely. A neat, foreign landscape. I felt dizzy. I pulled the clothes back up, my hands trembling violently.
My skin was all wrong. It was softer, somehow finer. The air in the room felt different on it, cooler. I raised my arm and sniffed. My scent was flowers and clean sweat, nothing like my own musky odor.
A sudden, violent hunger cramped my stomach, a sharper, more urgent pang than I was used to. My taste buds tingled strangely, as if begging for something specific—something sweet or tart, not my usual coffee and bacon.
“Okay, okay, think,” I said to the woman in the mirror. Her lips moved. My thoughts were my own, racing, jumbled, but the voice giving them sound was a soft alto.
I needed clothes. I couldn’t stay in this tiny camisole. I yanked open the closet door and was hit by a wall of color, fabric, and disarray. Dresses, crop tops, jeans with artful rips. Everything looked small. Insubstantial. I grabbed a simple black t-shirt and a pair of leggings.
Putting on the bra was a nightmare of frustration and horrifying intimacy. The hooks in the back were impossible. I finally clasped it in front and twisted it around, shoving my arms through the straps. The feeling of the padded cups encapsulating the weight on my chest was deeply unsettling, a constant, tight pressure. The leggings were like a second skin, stretching over the wide curve of my new hips and hugging every inch of my legs and backside. I felt naked, more exposed than if I’d worn nothing at all.
I had to get to my house. I had to see my body. Maybe I was there, asleep. Maybe this was some kind of projection.
I found a set of keys on Sabrina’s dresser, next to a half-empty pack of cigarettes. I pocketed them. Moving through the quiet living room of Andrea’s house felt like trespassing. Seeing her throw blanket on the couch, her books stacked on the coffee table, sent a pang of longing through me that was grotesquely amplified by this strange, trembling vessel.
I opened the front door, the sunlight blinding. The walk next door—twenty paces I’d done a hundred times dreaming of Andrea—was an odyssey. The concrete was rough under my small, bare feet. A car slowed slightly as it passed, the male driver’s head turning to follow my progress. The look in his eyes wasn’t one I’d ever received as Justin. It was appraising, stripping the leggings and t-shirt right off me. I hunched my shoulders, feeling a vulnerability so profound it was nauseating.
My own front door was locked. I fumbled with Sabrina’s keychain, heart hammering. None of them fit.
Of course. Why would Sabrina have my keys?
I went to the ceramic frog by the porch step, lifted it, and grabbed my spare. The normalcy of the action clashed violently with the reality of the delicate, tattooed hand that performed it.
The door swung open onto my dim, familiar living room. It smelled like me—like dust, old pizza, and man. It looked like a cave. A sad, nerdy cave.
“Hello?” I called out, my Sabrina-voice echoing weirdly in the space.
A gargled sound came from the bedroom. A sound of pure distress.
I rushed down the hall and pushed my bedroom door open.
There, in my bed, tangled in my sheets, was me. My body. Six feet of it, blonde beard scruffy against the pillow. It was sitting up, staring at its—at my—large, hairy hands with an expression of abject horror.
The eyes, my blue eyes, snapped to me. They were wide, frantic, swimming with tears.
The mouth, my mouth, opened.
“What did you do?” the voice that was mine, but thick with panic and tears, choked out. “What the fuck did you do to me? Why am I a guy?”
The words were mine, the vocal cords were mine, but the inflection, the cadence, the sheer visceral terror was all wrong. It was Sabrina.
She was in there. In me.
My body—Sabrina—scrambled back against the headboard, pulling the sheet up to cover its chest as if modest. The gesture was so fundamentally feminine, so alien on my frame, that it finally made the impossible truth solidify into a cold, hard knot in my gut.
“I didn’t do anything,” I heard myself say, Sabrina’s voice trembling. “I just woke up like… this.”
She stared at the woman in her body standing in the doorway. I stared at the man in my body cowering in the bed. The absurd horror of it hung between us, stifling.
My phone, on the nightstand, buzzed loudly. We both jumped.
On the screen, illuminated, was a name: Andrea ♥.
Sabrina-in-my-body looked at it. I-in-her-body looked at it. A fresh, shared panic erupted, silent and screaming.
The buzzing continued, insistent. Andrea was calling Justin.
Who was going to answer it?