Chapter 5

Five

M aple

The only thing preventing me from screaming until I pass out is the absolute worst headache of my life.

I rub my temples and plant my elbows on my mother’s kitchen table, hoping this nightmare will be over if I close my eyes and open them again.

If this is a nightmare, though, I doubt my mother’s homemade chocolate chip muffins would feature in it.

The scent of warm cinnamon and melted chocolate should be a cozy thing to come home to after a night of misadventures. Instead, all I feel is a lump in my throat. That is my mom taking a tin of muffins from the oven. That’s her coffee maker. This is my childhood home. And there I am, in my purple nightshirt staring back at me, looking confused, traumatized, and completely lost.

Same here, whoever you are.

“So, what are your theories? Bad drug trip? Somebody slip us some magic mushrooms?”

God, it’s so weird hearing what my voice sounds like to someone else. Also, I’m used to how I look in a mirror, but this is the opposite. My freckles and dimples are on the opposite side of where I’m accustomed to seeing them. This would be fascinating and far out if I weren’t on the verge of full-blown panic.

“I…” I stop and start a few times because I hate the sound coming from my face. It’s deep and too loud and not mine. The tongue and teeth are different and forming words is difficult. This is not the way I talk. “I have no idea. I can’t even begin to think. Imagine waking up completely naked in a strange hotel room, not knowing where you are!”

The face I know as mine nods. “I can imagine it because the same exact thing happened to me. Except for the naked part.”

I blink. “Do you always sleep naked?”

“I hardly think that’s relevant to the current crisis.”

“Butter?”

We both sit up straight, stomachs growling. Mom chucks two paper plates at us, and I help myself to one of the muffins. “Yes, thanks, Mom.”

“No problem, honey.”

My mother freezes, her back to us.

The person I assume is Hollis, pretending to be me, studies the muffin on his plate, not noticing my mother’s strange behavior.

Mom turns around and, with a stricken look, stares at me. “It’s you.”

“Mom?”

“You don’t look right. You don’t sound like Maple, but Maple is in there. The way you said it. I knew it was you before my brain registered the stranger’s voice.”

Oh boy.

She turns to the person who looks like me. “And you. Who are you? You are not my baby girl. I knew something was off the minute I saw you this morning.”

Touched that my Mom’s intuition never truly goes away, I bite my lip and whisper, “Oh. Mom. I’m so scared…I don’t know what’s happening.” This is hardly the time to get emotional and beg my mommy to help me out of a jam. But truly. I’m just feeling so damn lost.

She points to my hands. “That’s how you sit at the table, with your hands folded, just like that. And you bite your lip, just like that, when you’re nervous.”

I nod. “Yes. It’s me, Mom.”

Mom grips the back of a kitchen chair and breathes deeply once, twice. “Then, who is that?”

She addresses me and points to the body that belongs to me.

What must be Hollis shouts again, pointing at me. “That’s my body. I’m in her. Somebody knocked us over our heads, put us in a coma, and is pumping us full of goofballs.”

I’m in hell. And I’m stuck in that hell with someone as clueless as I am.

I stare at him, rubbing my throbbing temples and wishing I was in a coma.

Hollis takes a deep breath and rambles. “Or, or, or…we’re in the matrix, and someone came along and unplugged us and accidentally put me into your reality, and you’ve been plugged into my reality.”

Sucking my lips into my mouth to keep from swearing at the worst theory ever dreamed up, he tries again. “Virtual reality. We’re both tripping balls, and this is a VR headset game.”

Mom forgets about the butter and drops into the chair.

Surprisingly, she’s the only person in the room who remains calm.

“All right, children. Let’s retrace our steps. Start from the beginning,” she says. “I want to hear everything.”

I look at the Hollis-as-me, who seems deep in thought. He looks like he just woke up, and if that’s the case, I should go first. I’ve been awake since six a.m., and memories have been coming back in dribs and drabs.

I recount the fuzzy events of yesterday, from the time we left work. How I spoke to Hollis, how he more or less dared me to try some janky-ass beer because I was such a stuffy goody-two-shoes.

“I never said you were stuffy or a goody-two-shoes.” I watch the words come out of my lips, but I get what my mom is saying. Something about the tone, hand gestures, facial muscle movements…it’s Hollis in there. I see me, but I also see him. A chill runs down my spine, and I shudder. This is too, too creepy.

“Anyway,” I continue, adding that the last thing I remember is winning the chugging contest and thinking it was really dumb to do that for a free mug. “And then I went home, feeling really strange and tired. Then this morning, I woke up in a hotel room, alone, with a gigantic hard sausage between my legs.”

“Gigantic, huh?”

“Hollis, this is my mother. Can you not?”

“Sorry. Continue.”

“And that’s it, really. I screamed and screamed until some other guest at the hotel heard me and called the front desk, worried. When the staff came up and knocked on the door, they saw I was fine, so they sent my driver to get me out of there as quickly as possible. Your driver. He came up and reminded me we have to check in at the airport soon, and then I remembered today’s trip. And then, I recalled the conversation about you picking me up from work. So I got dressed, swung by to pick up Brayden, and came here.”

Hollis-as-me cocks his head. “You stopped to pick up Brayden first? I don’t think it’s wise to include another person in this crisis.”

“Your brain trust bro doesn’t have a single clue that anything is weird, believe me. And it’s better if we play along like everything is normal. Until we figure out what’s going on, what’s causing this…whatever this is.”

Mom rises from the kitchen chair, looking thoughtful, then goes to her miscellaneous kitchen drawer and pulls out her address book.

“Mom?”

She ignores me, looking thoughtful as she flips through the pages. I can tell by the way she’s pursing her lips that she has an idea.

When I watch my own body in the purple nightshirt stand and leave the kitchen, I follow. This is my house, after all. What is he looking for?

He mutters something about talking to his driver, then unthinkingly opens the front door, only to get a blast of cold air from outside against his bare legs. My bare legs. “Gah!”

I watch him, amused, but then notice what other people see when they look at me. Wow, I have a cute butt. An adorable butt. When did that happen?

And why am I staring at my own butt like that? I watch as he waves at Brayden and the driver, still waiting in a warm car. His nipples grow hard under the nightshirt before he can close the door and cover himself, warming them with his arms.

And just like that, this man’s body that I’m stuck in reacts.

I don’t know how to describe how weird this is. I’m looking at my ass, and this dick I currently possess could pound nails.

And even though it’s my brain inside Hollis’s body, my brain can’t seem to send the proper signal to Hollis’s eyeballs to stop staring at my half-naked body.

“What is wrong with you?” I bellow.

“What do you mean?” Hollis squeaks, pressing his folded arms down over his breasts and bouncing back and forth on bare feet to warm up.

“I’m…you’re…this…” I gesture at the general zone of Hollis’s junk that I can’t get to relax—no matter how hard I think about smelly kitchen sink drains, or about seagulls stealing my French fries. Nothing is making it go down.

I shoot a disgusted, horrified look at Hollis, who, as me, is suddenly blushing. “Oh, no.”

“What?” I ask.

He lets out a curse and then says rather hurriedly, “It’s morning wood, and it happens almost every day.”

I don’t get a chance to ask a follow-up question because Mom is beckoning us into the kitchen.

I turn to the front room picture window and pull the curtain aside, shooting a thumbs up to the driver and Brayden, signaling that I’ll be ready to go in five minutes. The driver nods. Brayden waves excitedly and munches on a Pop-Tart, because his mom packed this grown man a bag of snacks for the plane. Not going to lie; something is endearing about the kid who stole the account from under me.

I follow Hollis into the kitchen, where Mom is gesturing us over to the countertop video phone. I bought her that years ago when she wanted to do video calls with my brother and his kids in California, but she refused to own a cell phone or use FaceTime. Turns out a landline with video is a thing and people still use it. Including the similarly aged woman who appears on the screen as we gather around.

“Hi, Magda,” I say in Hollis’s voice without thinking. Of course, my mom’s old high school chum in her pink satin morning muumuu doesn’t recognize me in this body. And yet, I’ve underestimated her.

Magda wags her wispy red hair, looks at me, and covers her mouth. Her eyes dart between me and the one in the purple nightshirt. Behind her is, I assume, her kitchen, which is a lot different than my mom’s. Flowers, dried roots, and bulbs hang in long, chaotic bundles from the rafters, and something bubbles in the fireplace behind her. I don’t want to call it a cauldron, but it’s big and black and metal, and…alright, fine, it’s a cauldron. Magda is a nut who fancies herself a witch. A priestess, if I vaguely recall my mother mentioning once or twice.

Magda lives an hour away in Salem and has always been my mom’s go-to with the weird and unexplained. I don’t know why the woman would need such a go-to in her life, but many odd things happen around here in Birchdale from time to time. A few years ago, a religious cult moved in and tried to burn down an entire historic village of re-enactors. Magda believed they were possessed by demons. Another time, there were rumors about the local blood bank getting burgled, and Magda said it was vampires. Personally, I think Magda has spent too long entertaining tourists in Salem, Massachusetts, and hitting the cooking sherry. But who am I to disagree with her?

And despite how hard I disbelieve all of this woman’s hocus-pocus, she knows immediately what’s going on before Hollis or I say a word.

“Who did this to you? How? What was the spell? Was it Morgan? Was Morgan playing around with spells and making you switch bodies? I told her to give the craft a rest until the kids are older, she’s too tired and unfocused, but does she listen?”

I am vaguely aware of her daughter, but we’ve never spoken, so I’ve no idea what she’s talking about.

“So you believe it’s a spell?”

Magda leans forward, stares into the camera, and tells me to do the same.

“Let me smell you,” she orders.

“But you can’t smell people through the phone….” I start.

Mom shoots me a warning look right before Magda snorts. “Young lady, you switched bodies with another person. Are you going to stand there and tell me magic isn’t real?”

My mouth dries up because I know a hallucination wouldn’t be like this. And I also know that I’m not having a nightmare. And still, I protest. “That’s not possible. None of it is.”

Magda waves me off. “That’s fine, dear. I don’t need you to believe in magic for the magic to be real or for me to help you, for that matter. I just need you to do as I say. Lean forward.”

I do, and she pointlessly sniffs the air in her kitchen.

She lifts an eyebrow as I back away and gesture for Hollis to do the same.

When all the sniffing is done, she volleys her gaze between us. “That’s not the smell of witchcraft.”

I look at Hollis, and he looks back at me with what’s likely the same weirded-out expression.

“What does that mean, ma’am?” Hollis asks politely, though somehow I can feel him wanting to wring her neck through the phone.

Magda switches her gaze to me. “Was there an incantation?”

“A what?”

She sighs. “Did you or anybody near you speak in Latin, Greek, Sumerian, or any other ancient language at you or near you last night?”

“Not unless ‘chug chug chug’ is ancient Babylonian,” I say.

“I don’t know that spell,” she says, pressing a finger to her chin. “What time of night was it? Last night was a waxing gibbous, so a lot hangs on your position in relation to the moon.”

Hollis throws up his hands and blurts, “It wasn’t a spell. The man in the beer tent challenged us to see who could drink their beer the fastest and make their wish come true. She,” he points at me, “wished for me to live one day in her shoes.”

Magda gasps, her eyes widening. “A wish demon!” She then takes a step back from the camera and mutters some words I don’t understand. The three of us stand there confused while we watch her traipse back and forth through her kitchen, lighting candles and dumping salt on the floor.

I glance up at Mom with a questioning look. She shrugs and murmurs, “I have no idea.”

Once again painfully polite, Hollis asks, “Ma’am, what was that reaction for? What does this mean?”

When she’s finished muttering and fussing around her kitchen, she pulls up her stool close to the camera, sits, and leans in.

“What does it mean? It means you two are fucked.”