Gabriel

GAbrIEL

“Ahh!” the other shouts and jumps back from the mirror.

My mind is going a hundred miles a minute trying to make everything make sense. Only it doesn’t, and I can’t make it make sense because everything about this situation is absurd and ridiculous and impossible.

I’ll spell it out for myself anyway, because sometimes it’s easier to just face a complicated situation head on with all the facts in mind.

If I’m here, and I look like Josh, it means the man losing his shit in front of the bathroom mirror right now… is Josh. In my body.

That did not make it better. This is not real life. It can’t be. Something like this simply doesn’t happen. It’s impossible. Two people can’t switch bodies. We’re not in a fucking teen comedy for fucking fuck’s sake!

The other looks at me, eyes moving up and down and right and left and all over me. His jaw clenched, he holds his forearm in front of his face. He pinches the skin on the inside of his wrist between his fingers and starts to twist and turn it viciously, all the while muttering, “Wake up, wake up, wake the fuck up,” to himself.

I wince as the twisting and pinching turns almost feral. I wouldn’t put it past him to run headfirst into a wall next in his effort to wake up, and I’m sure as hell not going to let him do that, because he’s doing all that shit to my body .

“Hey!” I snap. “Stop it.”

Josh’s eyes meet mine, and his jaw clenches. My jaw clenches, only I’m not the one doing it. What the hell kind of nightmare is this?

Josh slumps against the wall and slowly slides down until his ass is on the floor. He puts his head between his raised knees, clutching the back of his head, and straight-up starts to hyperventilate.

This is just embarrassing. Seeing myself like that, I mean. I do not behave like this. I’ve worked very hard to cultivate an image for myself, and this… wheezing and gasping does not work with that.

I wait for a bit, but he doesn’t snap out of it himself, so eventually, I go to him.

What’s the plan here, ?

The plan, it seems, is to pat him on the shoulder and say, “There, there.” Stiffly. Yeah, I’m not cut out for this. At all. Being compassionate and empathetic? Nope. Not my forte. But there’s nobody else here I can pawn him off on. And he’s me , so I have to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid to my body.

After way too much time, which I spend keeping my hand on Josh’s shoulder and just standing by him awkwardly, he shakes his head with the most bewildered expression I’ve ever seen on anybody’s face and leans against the wall. “I guess there’s no point asking you to knock me out?” he asks hopefully

“We’re not asleep.”

“We might be.”

“We’re not.”

He rolls his eyes. “My bad. I didn’t know you got the manual to this stuff. Care to share with the rest of us?”

I sigh and drag my hand through my hair. Josh’s hair , I correct myself. It’s really soft. I quickly pull my hand away and stuff it into my pocket. A pocket which, I suddenly realize, is really close to other body parts. Body parts that aren’t mine. Hand comes out again. This is going to get very complicated very fast.

I gingerly lift his arm—my arm—and point to the already-forming bruise.

“You gave my arm a bruise. Ever done that in a dream?”

He stares at the skin with a deep frown.

“Now what?” Josh asks after we’ve both spent a substantial amount of time staring at opposite walls of the bathroom.

“No clue.”

He throws me a look. “That’s a first.”

“It’s nice to know your personality hasn’t changed at all. Gives a bit of comfort in this crazy world.”

He takes a deep breath and relaxes his shoulders. I know him entirely too well because I can predict what he’s going to say next.

“I’m sure there’s a bright side somewhere,” he says. “A solution.”

Called it. I let out an exasperated harrumph. “There isn’t.”

“There is. There always is.”

“I don’t think I have the mental strength or fortitude for your brand of optimism today.”

“Now you’re against optimism?” he asks.

“Do you know what optimism is?”

“Yes, but I have a feeling you and I have wildly different definitions.”

“Optimism,” I say, “is the anticipation of optimal outcomes regardless of data. It’s idealistic, unreasonable, and irrational to expect an ideal outcome. It never happens. What you should be concentrating on is a realistic outcome.”

He studies me with his head tilted to the side for a little while before he squeezes his cheeks together between the heels of his palms and lets out a loud fart noise.

“Very mature,” I say dryly.

“It’s a realistic sound effect to go with all your bullshit. I thought that was what you were after.” He shrugs.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a realist.”

“Never said there was.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “You know, it’s much easier to be an optimist when you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”

Seeing that Josh now looks exactly like me, I think I should be able to read his expressions very well. That’s the theory, anyway. In reality it doesn’t seem to work that way. I have no idea how to interpret the look on his face, and for some reason, today it bothers me more than it should.

“Luck of the draw,” he eventually says, smirking. The fact that he’s never been able to comprehend the amount of privilege he was born into is one of the things that annoys me the most about him. There are other things, but that one’s top of the list. I’ve had to work my ass off for all the opportunities that just fall into his lap courtesy of being born into the right family. I know nepotism is everywhere. All this talk about ‘if you just work hard enough, you too can achieve your dreams’ might as well be a fairy tale. In reality there’s always somebody who knows somebody, and since I know nobody, I’m at a major disadvantage with everything. Some days I don’t know why I even make an effort when I just keep losing, and yet I still keep going. Which just proves my point that optimism is stupid.

One of us is going to get a job at the end of this internship. I don’t think I have to explain that there’s very little chance this job will go to me, knowing the surname Josh comes with.

“Must be nice,” I mutter.

Something flashes in his eyes. “You’re amazingly judgmental for a person who knows shit all about my life.”

“I’ve known you since middle school. Believe me, I’ve caught on to the basics.”

He throws me a look but doesn’t say anything in response to that. For some reason, I feel bad. I stomp the feeling down.

We’re both quiet for a long while, and I have no idea what happens now. How do I solve this? I’m not used to having no answers and no idea what to do. My whole life, I’ve been the problem solver, the one my brothers and sister turn to when they need help. I’m the one who has everything together.

“We should probably touch the wire again,” Josh says thoughtfully.

I whip my head toward him. He did not just suggest giving ourselves another electric shock. On purpose! “I’m sorry. I must’ve misheard because, you can’t seriously be considering that.”

“I’m just saying, you electrocuted me once, maybe doing it twice will fix this shit.”

“I did not electrocute you. Firstly, if I’d electrocuted you, you’d be dead. And secondly, those are your lights, so if anybody electrocuted anybody, it was you.”

“That’s a fun conversation.” He gets up. “Come on. Time to give you another electric shock.”

“That’s the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard,” I say, but I follow him out of the bathroom anyway.

“Do you have a better one?”

I ignore the question. “We’re both lucky we didn’t die the first time. What makes you think we’ll get so lucky this time around?”

“Would you prefer to be stuck in my body for the rest of your life?” he asks.

I think about it for a second before I nod. “Good point.”

In the conference room, we both climb on top of the table again, shoulder to shoulder, looking up toward the ceiling.

“Ready?” Josh asks.

“No,” I grumble before I look at him. “On the count of three?”

He nods in response. We both hold a hand up.

“One. Two.” I brace myself. This is stupid, and we’ll most likely kill ourselves. “Three,” I say, and we both grab the exposed wire.

A zip goes through my body… and the lights turn on.

That’s it.

I look at Josh. He has his eyes squeezed shut. Or my eyes, seeing as nothing happened.

“Did it work?” Josh asks.

“Not on you, but I’m now Ryan Gosling, so all in all this experiment has been a success.”

He opens his eyes and frowns at me before he glances toward the ceiling. “Oh hey! The lights are on.”

“Yeah. Because that’s what’s important here.”

He sighs, and his shoulders slump. “The nightmare continues. Guess we should go home and see what happens in the morning. Maybe we can just sleep it off.”

He hops off the table and stalks toward our office. I follow him as a realization hits. Home?

“I can’t go home like this!” I say as I watch him zip up the suitcase he brought with him earlier and push it into the corner of the office.

He stops gathering his stuff. “Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because people will have some questions when I march in looking like a whole different person.” I gesture up and down my body.

Josh frowns. “I’m guessing you don’t live alone?”

“You guess right.”

“Okay. That does complicate things a bit.”

We eye each other, neither of us seemingly willing to come out and just say the obvious.

“I live alone,” Josh eventually says. “You can come to my place for tonight.”

He seems to like the idea about as much as I do, which is to say not at all, but what other option do I have? Going home is out of the question, and I can’t really afford to waste money on a hotel.

I sigh and rub my forehead. This night is just getting worse and worse.

“Lead the way.”