30-year-old Lewis had never been able to puzzle out what really happened that impossibly strange afternoon, the day he stopped being Lewis and started, with a sort of reluctant terror, to exist as Sarah. He did know the date, and he remembered the exact arrangement of the clouds in the sky, a high thin mackerel pattern above the drab roofs of the apartment blocks. He had left the fluorescent gauntlet of the convenience store with a single bag of groceries—milk, eggs, some kind of off-brand cereal he’d never liked but bought out of habit—and was halfway up Jefferson, passing the high school and its constant froth of teenagers, when the world tilted on its axis.
He was walking, minding his own business, when he found himself moving through a phalanx of girls in short pleated skirts and demure blouses, their voices rising and falling in a mocking harmony. The sidewalk seemed to narrow, or maybe it just felt that way, with all those bodies pressed together, the acrid perfume of their hair and the itching gossip of their laughter. Lewis hunched his shoulders, trying to shrink himself into invisibility, but one of them bumped him—deliberately, he was sure—and then something in the air vibrated, some frequency only he seemed to register. He blinked, stumbled, and—impossibly—felt the spine of the world snap and realign, as if he’d been dropped into a different body midstride.
He staggered. He looked down and saw his own hands, except they weren’t his hands anymore: the fingers were slimmer, the nails bitten down but painted a faint, trembling pink. He groped for any sense of self and only found an avalanche of new sensations—the itch of nylons against his thighs, the press of a too-tight shoe, the sudden, humiliating weight on his chest. For a second, Lewis was sure he’d been drugged or knocked unconscious, and then the realization landed with a queasy thud: he’d become one of them.
He whirled. The girls ahead of him—his new cohort, he thought in horror—turned to look back.
One of them, a squat, freckled blonde, grinned nastily and said, “You coming, Sarah, or what?”
Sarah. Of course. That was him now, or at least the shell he’d been poured into.
Lewis tried to speak, but only a thin, unfamiliar voice emerged, airy and uncertain. The girls didn’t seem to notice. They rolled their eyes, turned away, and continued down the block.
His old self was nowhere to be found.
Faced with no other option, he decided to follow the girls.
Lewis—Sarah—looked down, expecting to see cargo shorts and his standard-issue thrift store button-up, but instead his chest (her chest?) jutted outward in two impossible hemispheres, straining the neon crop top like a science experiment gone wrong. The high-waisted shorts clung to unfamiliar hips.
Passing a parked SUV, he caught his own face reflected in the tinted glass, and for a moment the world stuttered. There she was—he was—staring back with an expression of wild, animal panic, pupils blown wide, the delicate swoop of her cheekbones, the fanned lashes—it was all wrong, and yet so right it made the hairs on Lewis’s neck stand up. The reflection felt like a deepfake, a magazine cover, a fever dream of some high school bottle-blonde, but it was him, it was inescapably him.
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