Chapter 1: A Stranger's Hands
The last thing I remembered was the smell of popcorn, the buttery grease on my fingers, and Andrea’s laugh cut short by a sound like the sky tearing in half. Then, white. Not peaceful white. A painful, cracking brightness that seared the back of my skull.
I came to with a jolt, my head ringing. The theater was dark, save for the frantic strobe of the emergency exit signs and the dead, gray static of the giant screen. A collective groan surrounded me, a chorus of confusion and pain. My own breath hitched—it was too fast, too shallow. I tried to sit up.
The first thing I noticed was the weight. Or the lack of it. I felt insubstantial, like a strong breeze could lift me out of the seat. When I pushed myself up, my center of gravity was all wrong. My hips swayed, and something on my chest moved independently, a soft, unsettling jiggle. I looked down.
A purple tank top. Strappy. The neckline plunged farther than I’d ever voluntarily worn. And beneath the thin cotton, two distinct shapes. My brain stuttered, a record needle skipping. I brought a hand up—a small hand, with slender fingers and chewed-up purple nail polish—and pressed it to my chest. The sensation was alien: the give of soft tissue, the firm nub of a nipple beneath fabric, the restrictive band of a bra underneath. A push-up bra, my mind supplied unhelpfully, feeling the wired cup.
“What the hell?” The voice that left my mouth was higher, softer. A girl’s voice, laced with a tremor.
Panic, cold and sharp, shot down my spine. I patted my own face. Smooth skin. A small nose. A hoop through one nostril that sent a weird metallic ping through my teeth when my finger brushed it. Long hair fell over my shoulders, tickling my arms—arms that were slim, hairless. I could feel every seam of my clothing: the tight band of the tank top under my bust, the whisper-thin line of a thong riding between my buttocks, the loose flutter of a skirt against my thighs. My feet, swimming in sandals, felt tiny and disconnected.
I tried to stand. My perspective was horrifyingly low. The world had grown. The seat back in front of me was at eye level. I was looking at a sea of shoulders and heads, all of them towering. I felt dizzy, claustrophobic.
“Andrea?” I called out, and the sound was a pathetic squeak. I cleared my throat, tried to force my voice lower. “Andrea!”
“Justin?”
The voice was Andrea’s—her cadence, her inflection—but it was all wrong. It was a deep, raspy baritone, strained with panic. It came from three seats to my left, where a tall, broad-shouldered man with a chiseled jaw and a dark tattoo snaking up his forearm was stumbling into the aisle.
He—she—was clutching at the front of a flannel shirt, hands splayed over a flat, muscular chest. He kept patting it, his movements frantic, familiar. They were Andrea’s movements. The way she’d tuck her hair behind her ear when nervous, except there was no hair, just a short, masculine bristle. The way she’d bite her lip, now on a man’s mouth.
“Andy?” I whispered, my new voice breaking.
The man’s head—Mark’s head, I’d later learn—snapped toward me. Those weren’t Andrea’s warm hazel eyes. They were a confused, stormy blue. But the expression… the sheer, undiluted terror etched there was hers.
“Justin? Oh my god. Oh my god, what is this?” The deep voice cracked. He took a step toward me and looked down, way down, his eyes widening. “You’re… you’re a girl. A tiny girl.”
“I feel like a helium balloon,” I muttered, the absurdity of it all cutting through the dread. My logical mind, the architect part of me, was screaming that this was impossible. The rest of me was just cataloging sensations: the brush of pink hair against my collarbone, the ache in my feet from impractical sandals, the weird, empty-muscle feeling of a body that couldn’t lift a sheet of drywall.
Andrea-in-Mark’s body reached for me, then stared at his own hand—large, veined, with short, clean nails—like it was a foreign object. He carefully took my smaller hand. His grip was overwhelming, swallowing mine whole.
“Your hand is so small,” he breathed.
“Your hand could crush mine,” I pointed out, and a hysterical laugh bubbled up. It sounded like a giggle. I hated it.
The chaos around us was solidifying into individual disasters. A middle-aged man a few rows up was wailing, “My back! My back is gone!” while flexing slender, manicured hands. A teenage boy was repeatedly punching his own thigh, shouting, “Wake up! Wake up!”
Then, my own voice—my old voice—rang out, loud and shrill with disgust.
“Ew! No, no, no, no! What is this? This is a dad bod! This is, like, a literal dad bod!”
I turned, pulling Andrea with me.
There I was. Or, rather, my six-foot-tall, thirty-six-year-old body was standing in the aisle, wearing my broken-in jeans and my favorite gray Henley. But the person inside was patting my stomach with a look of utter revulsion, then lifted my hands to my—his—face, feeling the stubble, the stronger jaw, the receding hairline.
“Is that… me?” I asked Andrea numbly.
“That’s your body,” Andrea said, her new voice low with disbelief. “Who is… what is that?”
The inhabitant of my body spotted the wedding band on its left hand. “A ring? Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” she—he?—they—shrieked in my voice. They started trying to yank the ring off, but it was snug. My knuckles had always been a little big.
“Hey!” Andrea barked, the command startling in its depth. “Stop that!”
The person in my body looked over, their eyes—my blue eyes—wide. “Do not ‘hey’ me, grandpa! What is this? Some kind of TV show prank?” They had a bubbly, petulant energy that made my own features look alien.
“That’s my husband’s body,” Andrea growled, taking a step forward. She towered over me now. The dynamic was utterly disorienting.
“Well, it’s mine now, and it’s disgusting!” the person shot back. “I feel like I’m wearing a meat suit! And where’s my phone? I need to film this!” They started patting my jean pockets.
A new commotion erupted closer to the screen. The young woman who had been here with Mark—a willowy blonde—was now crying hysterically in the body of a sixty-year-old usher. And the man who had been Mark was now Andrea, stumbling through the rows.
He—now she—was grabbing handfuls of the auburn hair that now fell past her shoulders, yanking it as if to pull it off. “Get it off! Get it off me!” he screamed in Andrea’s voice. “Where’s my strength? What is this?” He—she—looked down at Andrea’s chest, at the curves now filling the sweater, and let out a sound of pure, unadulterated panic.
It was bedlam. A symphony of wrong voices coming from wrong faces.
I squeezed Andrea’s—Mark’s—hand. The architect in me took over, pushing down the nausea from the constant, gentle sway of my new breasts, the chill of the theater air on my bare legs. “We need to get out of here. Now. Before this turns into a riot.”
Andrea nodded, her new jaw tight. “Okay. Okay. Lead the way.”
I took a step, my sandal flapping. My shorter stride meant I had to hurry to keep up with my own intention. Andrea quickly adjusted, a protective instinct I knew so well manifesting in this stranger’s form. We shuffled past a woman sobbing quietly into hands that were large and calloused, past a teenager marveling at the depth of his new bass voice.
We were almost to the main aisle when a large shape lurched in front of us. It was the man who used to be Mark, now in Andrea’s body. His face was a mask of confused anger. He pointed a finger—Andrea’s slender, ring-adorned finger—at his own original body.
“You!” he yelled at Andrea-in-Mark. “You’re in my stuff! Get out! I had tickets to Coachella! I had a date!” He grabbed Andrea’s—his—own forearm, the one with the tattoo.
Andrea-in-Mark yanked his arm back with a force that clearly surprised them both. The man in Andrea’s body staggered, off-balance in his new, shorter, softer form.
“Don’t touch me,” Andrea said, the low voice dangerous.
“That’s my arm! My tattoo!” the man screeched, his voice climbing into a register that sounded painfully wrong coming from Andrea’s mouth.
He lunged again, not to grab, but to shove. His hands slammed into Andrea-in-Mark’s chest.
And I watched, helpless in my five-foot frame, as my wife, in the body of a muscular twenty-four-year-old man, was knocked backwards into a sea of terrified, swapped strangers, disappearing from my sight.