My name is John. I’m in my thirties, married to a beautiful woman, and we have two children. A respectable life. A good life, by most standards, and not without effort, because I was born defective: a sullen, heavy kid who learned early to mask his appetites.
My sister Elle was two years younger, bright and competitive and totally at ease in her skin. When she hit puberty, it was like the rules of gravity changed in our house. I envied the effortless way she crossed into womanhood, envied how even my own friends stammered when she walked by, the way our parents seemed to crowd around her light.
I obsessed over Elle with a devotion that disgusted me—so I shaped it into hate. I called her names, poked at her softness, hid her favorite things, made her cry. Still, at night, I couldn’t stop myself. My mind reran the way her tank tops clung to her, how she leaned over the sink brushing her teeth, the damp shine of her lips and the dark gold of her hair.
I’d masturbate to photos of her at the beach or in a dress. Photos of the two of us together, imagining what it would be like if I was her instead. The only honest thing about being a monster: you’re always hungry, and you always know it.
We drifted into adulthood—Elle to the city, me to the suburbs—each following our predestined orbit, our paths only crossing at compulsory family events. I told myself I’d outgrown the obsession, that my marriage had scrubbed away the stain. That was before I found the device.
The idea formed, ugly and instant: what would it be like to be her, just for a little while? To touch the world with her hands, to see what I looked like through her eyes? It was vile and selfish and instantly addictive.
That’s how I justified it—this would be a victimless crime. Just a few days, incognito, in the past. I’d be careful not to alter anything important. I’d skate through those moments in her skin, memorize the feeling, and return to my own timeline none the wiser. Nobody—not my wife, not my sister, not my parents—would ever have to know that I’d borrowed Elle for a long weekend.
I’d put on the cap, think really hard about a time and place and a person in my past, and then wake up there, in their eyes, with their hands, their body. To return, all I had to do was want it hard enough.
The question of when to go was never really a question: I wanted the apex, the very height of her girlhood, when her beauty was raw and unformed, when even she didn’t know what to do with all that attention. Fourteen. The year she learned what she was.
That year, I was sixteen, suffering from the darkest pits of shame and jealousy. My body was wrong: too soft, too eager, too prone to sweat and stammer. My thoughts were wrong, too, as if my mind was a tuning fork set always a half-step off from the world around me.
I cued up a random memory from that year—a vague recollection of her sprawled on our living room floor, listening to a burned mix CD, the summer night pressing through the window screens. I tried to remember the music, the patterns of her breathing, the way her bare feet curled against the carpet.
I put on the cap, dialed a date, and let the charge build in my skull until my vision flickered.
I came to in a rush of vertigo, body slumping forward across a tangle of bedsheets. I heard the lazy whir of a box fan, the dense tropical funk of coconut shampoo and plastic beads and cheap perfume.
For a moment I thought I’d botched the jump, landed in some dream version of her room, but when I blinked and steadied myself, the world returned: band posters crooked above the dresser, dirty laundry bermed against a pink beanbag chair, a ceiling spackled with glow-in-the-dark stars.
My hands—her hands—were small and a little chapped, picked at around the cuticles. My arms felt impossibly light and hairless, the wrists narrow enough to touch thumb and pinky around. I ran them over the sheets and then up into my—her—hair, which was heavier, thicker than expected, a little greasy at the roots.
I caught myself in the vanity mirror, a glint of movement across the room. My heart banged in my chest. Her pale face—my face now—looked back at me, lips swollen and bitten at the corners, hair exploding out from a messy bun. I could see her—collarbone, the shock of breasts under a ribbed tank top.
I had done it. I was her.
I hugged myself—her self—tight, feeling the smother of arms across chest and the press of breasts against forearms, a contradiction of sensations that made my mind nearly white out.
I was Elle. I was teenage, female, and arranged like an hourglass, hips and thighs and a chest that didn’t exist in my old body.
I slid my palms down over the gentle curve of my stomach, over the dip and ridge of my hips, and cupped one butt cheek. It was both less and more than I expected—firmer, rounder, shockingly alive to the touch, and so different from the inert jelly of my own adolescent body. I squeezed experimentally, felt the resistance, the bounce.
I let out a nervous, delighted gasp, then clamped both hands over my mouth, biting down on a giggle.
A voice down the hall: “Elle! Dinnertime!”
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