They’d never been close, not the way little sisters and big brothers were supposed to be—the way their parents described them to relatives, the way strangers always assumed. The three-year gap between them might as well have been a decade, and the difference only widened after both of them hit puberty, though in diametrically opposite ways.
Eli, the elder, grew puffy in the face and shoulders. Lily, meanwhile, was all angles and light. She radiated: her hair, her laugh. She was the kind of girl mothers in the neighborhood would coo over—oh, she’s going to break hearts—while their sons squirmed and blushed. And Eli, in the background, nursed a private, mortifying envy.
Shamefully, he pictured himself in her place, at the vanity, coaxing his own hair into those effortless waves, coaxing those impossible legs smooth and bare. He’d always been a little obsessed with the idea—what if he’d been born the girl, and Lily the oafish older brother? Would he have gotten to be pretty, too? Would he have gotten to be wanted? It was a thought he’d never spoken aloud, not even in the most desperate corners of his nighttime scrolling, but it refused to leave him alone.
One evening in July, while their parents were out at a wine tasting and the air conditioning rattled against the muggy dark, Lily flopped onto the couch, biting into a popsicle.
He fiddled with the remote, flicking through streaming services as she kicked her heels against the armrest.
“Do you ever think about, like…” Lily began, speaking around the melting blue slush, “what it’d be like to be the other one?”
Eli snorted, “The other what?”
“You know. Me instead of you. You instead of me. Like that movie with the mom and the daughter.”
He risked a look at her, “You mean Freaky Friday?”
“Wouldn’t you want to know what it was like?” She turned her head.
“You mean, like, we would swap bodies?” He made his voice flat, uninterested, even as his head burst with the possibilities, “I guess.”
“Seriously, though, I think about it sometimes. Not because I want to be you, just, like, how weird it’d be.”
She picked at the waxy wrapper, daring him to meet her eyes, but Eli kept his own fixed straight ahead, jaw tight. He looked her once over, t-shirt stretching across her chest.
He wanted to say, Me too. He wanted to say, I think about it every day. Instead, he said, “It’d be super weird, yeah.”
“If we switched, you’d have to wear all my girly clothes,” she teased.
“Yeah, and you’d have to do my algebra homework,” he shot back, but the banter was already colored by the image: him, slipping into one of her summer dresses, the fabric falling against his skin.
It didn’t stop there. Over the next few weeks, the joke came up again and again, each time a little more pointed. Every time Lily emerged from her bedroom in a new outfit, she’d pirouette in front of the TV and say, “You’d look so cute in this. Can you imagine? If you had my legs?”
Eli forced a scoff.
Lily trotted down to breakfast in a pair of cutoff shorts and a tank top so flimsy that their mother would have confiscated it on sight.
“If we ever did the switch,” she said, slinging herself into the seat opposite him, “I’d totally make you wear this.” She popped a grape into her mouth and smirked.
“You’d get to touch my boobs, too, Eli.”
She grinned around a mouthful of cereal, eyebrows waggling, and for a moment Eli forgot how to breathe.
“Lily! You’re my sister!”
She only laughed, “What? It’s true! If you were me, you’d have to wear all my bras, too. The lacy ones.”
But he imagined waking up tomorrow as Lily, stretching out those legs, running a brush through that curtain of hair. He imagined the bra, the cups filling under his hands…
Then, one bland afternoon in September, Lily burst into his room without knocking, her laptop balanced precariously in one hand.
“Dude, you have to see this,” she said, shoving the screen in his face.
A Reddit thread, buried deep in an arcane forum, claimed that anyone could swap bodies with the right ritual. All it required was a mirror, matching clothes, and a willingness to let go.
Eli laughed nervously, “It’s probably a joke, Lily.”
She rolled her eyes, “Of course it’s a joke. But what if it’s not? You chicken?”
“Sure… why not,” he gulped.
An hour later, they were in Lily’s room, the curtains drawn, the air pulsing with the smell of vanilla candle. They’d found clothes as similar as possible —white tees, black jeans— and stood shoulder to shoulder before the full-length mirror on the closet door. The instructions were simple: stare into your reflection, repeat the other’s name three times, close your eyes, and count backwards from a hundred. They felt like idiots and said so, giggling until their voices blurred together.
On the third repetition, something shifted. The light in the room flickered. Eli’s skin went hot and numb. He reached for Lily’s hand, but it wasn’t her hand—he saw his own meaty paw grasp a delicate wrist, pale and fine-boned. He looked down and saw Lily’s chest, Lily’s hips, Lily’s impossibly long legs. Then he screamed, and the scream was two voices, twinned and overlapping, before resolving into a single, unfamiliar timbre.
“Oh my god,” Lily breathed, but it was Eli’s voice coming from her mouth, deeper and rougher than he’d ever heard it. She poked at her chest, then at her face, and then doubled over laughing.
To feel the impossible made real, to inhabit the body he’d coveted and resented for so long—it should’ve been terrifying, but instead Eli felt a wash of illicit satisfaction so intense it nearly buckled his knees. The world had not exploded. No one had died. Instead, he was inside her, behind her eyes, looking out at the bedroom with Lily’s own slightly nearsighted vision. He flexed her fingers—his fingers, now, slender and elegant instead of spatulate and awkward—and curled them experimentally around the hem of the borrowed white t-shirt. His stomach fluttered at the newness of every sensation: the unfamiliar tautness in the calves, the weight (yes, actual weight) on his chest, the subtle pull of hair along his scalp every time he turned his head.
Lily, in his old body, was doubled over with laughter, but Eli couldn’t join her. Not yet. He was too busy drinking in the miracle, the trespass, the way the air smelled a little different from this vantage, filtered through Lily’s sharper nose. He watched her—himself—cackle, hands slapping at thick thighs, and felt a shiver of vertigo: the world at a tilt, the axis inverted. He pressed a palm flat to his own—her—face, tracing the unfamiliar cheekbones, feeling the delicate tightness of the skin, the faint stickiness of leftover lip gloss. He was both mortified and exultant. It felt like being caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and then getting to eat the whole batch.
Eli kept expecting the spell to snap, to find himself back inside of his old limbs, but nothing changed. His—her—fingers trembled minutely as she touched her own face, cheekbones higher than remembered, mouth pink and plush where once it had been a thin, horizontal line. He shut his eyes, listening to the pulse in his own neck, steady and clean.
They agreed, without saying so directly, that they would not tell anyone. Not their parents, not their friends. This was a private thing, a loophole in the universe, and they both seemed to understand that whatever happened next would be theirs alone. Eli thought: if there was ever a moment to confess all the things he’d never said, it was now, but the words stuck.
“We’ll switch back tomorrow,” Lily said, her new voice light and untroubled, “Let’s just see what it’s like for a day.”
Before he could answer, Lily had already bounded from the bed, moving with a swagger that didn’t suit Eli’s old body at all, and left him standing alone in the half-dark, surrounded by the detritus of Lily’s real life: the heap of shoes by the door, the posters curling off the walls, the constellation of half-empty soda cans on the desk.
For the first time in his whole life, Eli stood in Lily’s room and it belonged to him.
He wandered the small territory, trailing her—his—fingers across the glossy magazine covers stacked in a leaning tower beside the bed, the rainbow jumble of hairbrushes and tubes and compacts on the vanity. He could see, in the low lamplight, the pale crescents clipped into her nails, the tiny constellation of freckles scattered high on the left hand. It was dizzying. It was electric.
“I’m Lily!!” he whispered into the dark.
A laugh—Lily’s bright, staccato laugh—escaped him, loud and sharp in the close air.
It was then, alone and unobserved, that Eli lifted both hands to his chest. He cupped them under the unfamiliar swell of his new breasts—Lily’s breasts—feeling the elastic give of the bra, the warmth and weight beneath his palms. He squeezed, gently at first, then more firmly, marveling at the way the pressure translated through his nervous system.
He rolled his shoulders, watched the way the bra strap dug into his new collarbone, the way the shirt stretched and bunched at the chest. He tucked a lock of Lily’s hair behind his ear, then let it fall forward again, watching the world through her slanted fringe. He turned in profile, twisting, arching, admiring the foreign silhouette. He was spellbound by what he saw: Lily’s heart-shaped face, her upturned nose—now his face, his nose, his body.
He shuddered. For the very first time, no one in the world expected anything of him except to be Lily.
He wanted to see it all. He wanted to know every hidden part, the topography of this new body. He lifted the shirt over his head and let it fall with a casual grace. The bra underneath was sky-blue, lace overlay, the kind of thing he’d glimpsed in laundry baskets but never dared imagine actually wearing. He marveled at the fragility of the straps, the way they cut twin divots at the shoulder, the way the molded cups cradled and displayed the flesh. He ran her fingers across the edge, gently plucking at the scalloped trim, then traced the arc of the breast itself. He squeezed once, experimentally, and felt a pulse of sensation that made him gasp.
She—he—couldn’t stop. He wanted to see the legs, the curve of the calves and the dip of the ankle bone, the places he’d always envied for their elegance. He shimmied out of the jeans. They fell to the floor in a puddle of black denim, revealing Lily’s legs in all their impossible smoothness. He flexed a thigh, watched the quad jump beneath the surface, and felt a sense of accomplishment wearing someone else’s muscle.
He turned one way, then the other, twisting to see the back, the high shelf of hip, the gentle inward collapse at the waist. A quick glance at the mirror confirmed it—he looked, for all the world, like a girl just home from school, trying on her own clothes.
“…I’m a girl…” he whispered, barely audible. But the words set off a tremor in his spine, a shockwave of possibility, “I’m a girl. I am. I really am.”
He stared at the reflection—his reflection, Lily's face split in a crooked, toothy grin, eyes wide and almost frightened with delight.
He ran his hands down Lily’s—his—neck, along the fine line of the jaw, up through the spill of hair so much finer and lighter than anything he’d ever felt before. Every movement sent a wild shiver of recognition through him, as if he were simultaneously a trespasser and the rightful owner of the flesh. He leaned in, so close that the glass fogged beneath his breath, and mouthed his new name, feeling the softness of Lily’s lips and the subtle shift in facial muscles.
Then, emboldened, he folded his arms beneath the new breasts and squeezed, marveling at the reality of their presence, their heft.
There was no catch, no caveat, no uneven seam at the edge of reality—Eli was Lily, wholly and completely, right down to the half-healed scar at her hairline and the tiny mole above her left elbow. No one in the known universe would ever be able to tell the difference.
"Of course," he gasped into the mirror, "Of course I am. I’m her. I’m the actual Lily. Nobody else."
Eli opened her closet. It was full to the gills with color and pattern: summer sundresses gone slightly yellow at the armpit, cardigans in every shade of the Target rainbow, the dress she wore to that wedding. She had her old Halloween costumes—the bunny, the nurse, a flapper dress. There was a whole segment of the rack devoted to tank tops and crop tops and another for gym clothes.
The swim team windbreaker hung at the far end of the closet, obscured by a sequined jacket and a raincoat with a busted zipper. The windbreaker was Lily’s, obviously, but now it was his. The name stitched above the breast—L. ROSS—felt more like a claim than a label. Eli traced the letters with a trembling finger. He pulled the jacket off its plastic hanger and shrugged it over his new shoulders. The weight and texture were memory-laden: the windbreaker had always seemed impossibly cool when Lily wore it in chilly gyms or at after-school meets, the sleeves rolled up and the fit slouchy. Eli zipped it to the throat and examined himself in the mirror, mouth agape, half-expecting the universe to correct the error at any moment.
A whole history of Lily’s adolescence hung before him, and he was allowed to slip it on. He found last year’s soccer jersey, red and gold, with its armpit stains and lingering scent of detergent and sweat. He tried that, too, and then a series of outfits that spanned the various epochs of Lily’s life: a faded t-shirt from a One Direction concert, a pair of cut-off shorts with a rip at the pocket.
He wanted to try everything. He wanted to be every possible Lily, inhabit each version, a thousand times over. Not just the showy or glamorous ones—the prom dress, the Halloween costumes—but the boring, everyday clothes, the things that made Lily herself in the world. He handled the cardigans, the tank tops, the battered hoodie with its constellation of bleach spots. He put on a pair of Lily’s leggings, feeling them compress the new legs, and he marveled at the effect.
He found her one-piece swim suit at the bottom of a drawer, still faintly smelling of chlorine.
The thought of wearing it—of putting it on his new body, on Lily’s body—sent a spike of nervous energy through him. He peeled off the sundress and the bra, tossed them onto the bed, and stepped into the suit. The fabric clung, cool and slick, and as he shimmied the straps over his shoulders. He could see every contour: the flatness of the stomach and his crotch, the flare of the hips, the sudden, gravity-defiant lift of Lily’s breasts. He turned and saw the sliver of his new back, the way the suit framed the shoulder blades. He had never, ever looked like this before.
He pulled the suit tighter against his chest and felt the way it cradled Lily’s breasts, the way they sat—suddenly so high, so round, a strange and gorgeous burden.
He caught his reflection in the full-length mirror and nearly laughed with disbelief. The old, gawky Eli was obliterated; in his place stood a girl who looked nothing like a joke or a boy in drag or a half-finished painting. There was nothing to betray him.
He blinked. The girl in the mirror blinked back, a second behind. He raised his hand and watched the elegant fingers unfurl, the pink polish catching the golden hour light from the bedroom window.
He wrapped his arms around himself, hugging tight, and let out a long, shaky exhale.
He realized he had been tensing his muscles. He tried to relax into it. He took a step toward the mirror, and then another, breathing in through Lily’s nose, out through Lily’s mouth, letting the rhythm lull him into ease.
He looked back at himself in the mirror, made a face, stuck out his tongue, and then tried to smile with a practiced, Lily-like nonchalance.
He took off the swim suit and lay down on Lily’s bed, the same bed he’d sat on dozens of times as a visitor, and listened to the unfamiliar hush of the house settling around him. The sheets were cool against his bare legs, and the sensation made him shiver. He looked at himself—at her—again in the mirror, this time studying the flatness of the stomach, the line of the thigh, the delicate geometry of hips and ribs and clavicle.
He started, shyly, by touching the chest—first just resting the palm against the gentle rise, feeling the heartbeat thump through the warm, malleable flesh. Then he cupped the breast, just to feel the way it fit in his hand, the way it shifted and yielded under pressure. He squeezed, tentatively at first, then with a growing boldness, pinching the nipple. His breath hitched. The sensation slithered up his spine.
He ran both hands over the chest, flattening the flesh, then letting it spring back, amused and shocked by its elasticity. He pushed the breasts together, then apart, marveling at the way the body obeyed.
But that didn’t satisfy him for long. He let his hand drift downward, across the smooth plain of Lily’s stomach, past the gentle dip at the navel…
His fingers encountered a slickness that made his pulse race. He followed the anatomy by feel, delicately tracing folds and contours he’d only ever imagined. He gasped, louder than he meant to, and bit down on the corner of Lily’s pillow to stifle the sound. His other hand found its way back up to his—her—chest, and he managed both at once, orchestrating a duet of sensation that was at once shocking and instantly addictive.
He wondered what it would be like to live out her whole life, to slip on her skin and inhabit all the minute humiliations and secret exultations that made up Lily Ross. He imagined waking up every morning in this room—her room—bathed in the grainy sunlight that always found its way through the blinds. He imagined stretching, a feline arc of the hips and ribcage, the way her body would feel after a long night of sleep. He saw, in a vivid rush, the morning ritual: stumbling to the bathroom in a haze, peeing (would she sit, of course she’d sit, but how would it feel?), brushing Lily’s own teeth and spitting white foam into the sink, pressing at the tender flesh beneath her eyes to check for bags. He pictured opening Lily’s closet and picking out some well-worn ensemble, wriggling into her socks, tracing the seam of her tights up the length of her shin. He pictured pulling on her shoes, the little pink Keds with the worn-down heels, and skipping breakfast because she always skipped breakfast, and then walking out the door as her for the very first time.
He pictured eventually going to college as Lily, joining her clubs, making her friends, living her life. He’d sit cross-legged on a dorm bed, wearing borrowed pajamas, painting his—her—nails with the other girls, letting the fumes make him a little giddy. And, inevitably, he’d date. Could he fall in love as Lily?
But this was the problem, wasn’t it? Lily was into boys, exclusively, and everyone knew it. She’d dated them, texted them, made fun of them with ruthless precision, but at the end of the day, she wanted them—she wanted to be wanted by them. There was no ambiguity about it—Lily’s fantasies were distinctly heteronormative.
So what did that make him—her—now? Did Lily’s body come with its own instructions for desire, some chemical override that would teach him how to want what she wanted?
He let himself imagine what it would feel like to be into boys. Not just to tolerate them, or to think of them as rivals or objects of envy, but to be possessed by a real hunger for them.
He tried to simulate the progression in his head, as he continued rubbing her clit, to imagine Lily’s real experiences as if they belonged to him. He saw himself—herself—at a party, some crowded, humid basement with music rattling the walls, and a boy leaning in too close, his breath hot against his—her—neck. The sensation was so vivid it made him shudder. He imagined wanting to be touched, craving it, welcoming the friction of skin on skin. He tried to conjure up the chemical rush, the dopamine spike, the certainty that this—whatever this was—was the only thing that mattered. Could he do it? Could he want a boy, the way Lily did?
He thought about sex. He wondered about the boys who came after her. He imagined being with them, as her, and the thought was strange, intoxicating, and a little bit horrifying. Eli shoved his fingers deep inside of himself.
He realized with a jolt that he had the power to know exactly what it felt like.
He shoved his fingers deep inside himself. He didn’t have any idea what he was doing, but his body seemed to know. He tried to stay quiet, but a little whimper escaped his lips, a sound he’d never made before, a sound that belonged only to her.
He wondered if she’d ever done this to herself, here, in this bed.
He kept going, desperate to chase the feeling to its end. The pressure built, a tremor running up his thighs and through his core. He pressed harder, changed his angle, and something inside him detonated—a bright, silent explosion that left him wrung out, shaking, gasping for air.
He fell asleep with his hand still between his legs, dreaming that he was Lily Ross, and nothing else.
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