Chương 3: Best Pee of My Life

I woke up, but I wasn't in my car. My hands clapped over my ears. For a second, my vision blurred, and I didn't recognize where I was. Then the world snapped back into focus: the familiar water stains on the ceiling, the crooked bookshelf I installed myself... I was home in my bed. But the minimal relief didn't make it beyond thought. My body was still trying to figure out if I was in danger or not. My hands flew to my ears, probing for those fucking things.

My legs still ached from running down the street, and my heart was working overtime. My shoulders nearly reached my ears, muscles coiled, bracing myself for an inevitable ruin that had already passed. I sat up, still groggy, the... dreams (?) tendrils clinging to my memory. My phone sat in its usual spot on the nightstand. I snatched it up, unlocking it with Face ID. 7: 14 AM. The background photo stared up at me: Mom, Dad, and me at Disney World for my thirteenth birthday.

I rolled my shoulders, feeling the muscles loosen. It was the last picture of the three of us together: Mom in Mickey ears, beaming with joy, before it was replaced with the fake smile brought along by early Alzheimer's. Dad, wearing his old leather jacket that perpetually smelled like a Grateful Dead concert, had his arm wrapped around her. And I had wedged myself between them at the last minute. We were all caught mid-laugh, my parents looking down at me like I was the best thing they'd ever seen.

A year later, almost to the day, it was all gone. Dad was killed by a drunk driver three weeks before my fourteenth birthday. They said he never suffered. Like that's some kind of consolation for his senseless, violent end. Mom left me not long after. The sudden pressure in my bladder nagged me back to the present. I really had to pee. Adults don't usually have pee dreams. So, I took that as another sign I was awake, and the maggots had all been some weird-ass nightmare.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. It took me a second to realize I'd done it wrong. I hadn't paused or cringed from the neck tweak that years of sleeping in hospital chairs next to Mom had earned me. I paused in the open doorway, one foot on the carpet, the other on the floorboard in the hall. It creaked under my weight way louder than it should have. I peered down the upstairs hall, obviously still on edge. The sun hadn't fully risen, leaving the house semi-dark.

The floorboards sounded impossibly loud, I realized, because everything else was missing. No birds or garbage trucks or traffic or any noise outside. My room sat at one end of the second floor. The hall stretched before me; there was a bathroom on the right, past the staircase leading down to the foyer. At the opposite end was Mom's bedroom, its door closed since the day the paramedics wheeled her away. The distance from my door to the bathroom was maybe fifteen feet.

But as I walked, the arthritic hardwood creaked under every step, like the house was trying to spook me. After I finished what was one of the top five best pees of my life, I washed my hands. I turned on the faucet, reached under the water, and noticed my hands. They weren't my hands. My hands had a chipped right thumbnail I'd been meaning to file down for a month. My hands had a burn scar from grabbing a sheet pan bare-handed during one of Mom's particularly bad nights.

My hands had calluses on the heels of both palms from pushing Mom's wheelchair. All of it was gone. Normally, I avoided the mirror first thing in the morning. And usually throughout the day too. Who needs the reminder that they're a little overweight, or that their adult acne has returned with a vengeance? But the alien softness of my hands forced me to look up and prove to myself that it was my own flawed face looking back. As I gaped at my reflection, my hand reached for my face. But it was too fast.

The muscle memory was all wrong. The face in the mirror was technically me, but not the me I'd seen yesterday. All the thin lines around my mouth, proudly earned from smoking countless joints with Tre on his apartment's roof, were… gone. I touched my cheek, and my hand recoiled. My skin was taut, smooth. Way too smooth. My fingers searched for the familiar texture of old acne scars. There were none. Which was just wrong. Eighteen-year-old Nora definitely had pimples. The Accutane model in the mirror did not.

Still, she was— I was, somehow, eighteen years old again; the girl who had long ago been devoured by years of taking care of Mom. For years, I'd fantasized about getting back the girl who loved ballet at thirteen and exercised and ate salads more than once a month. There were days I'd have given anything to become the version of me still brimming with aspirations. It would've been a miracle. But this was a fucking curse. I raised my arms, rotating them to confirm they were still mine, and they moved, but even then…

it wasn't exactly me. I'd been changed into a physical reminder of everything I'd lost. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. My hands had no calluses from gripping the wheelchair handles, and the scar on my left index finger, the one I got opening a pill cutter with a butter knife, was gone. These new hands never held my mother's face to keep her still while I cleaned vomit off her chin.

They'd never gripped the bathroom door frame hard enough to leave tiny nail marks in the wood while they watched their mom struggle to wash herself in the shower. This body never slept in four-hour shifts or learned to shower in under three minutes because I couldn't leave Mom alone for much longer without risk of falling. It didn't carry the exhaustion I felt at twenty-two, filling out Medicare paperwork like it was overdue homework. This wasn't a younger version of me.

It was a me that could only exist if Dad hadn't died and Mom hadn't ever gotten sick. It was a version of me who kept dancing and went to college and had a life. It was a fucking lie. Stepping back to look at the rest of my body felt like being on a theme park drop ride, and left me similarly weightless and queasy. My boobs, never much to brag about, sat higher on my chest, perkier. And also… at least a cup size bigger than they had ever been. Touching them felt foreign.

Lifting my oversized Bears jersey revealed sculpted abs. I was in great shape at eighteen, but I wasn't a fitness model.

"What the fucking fuck," I said in a voice so much softer and higher than my own that it sounded alien. I'd become some creep's sexed-up version of a teenage girl. Even at my peak, I was never... whatever this body was. This can't be real. I'm dreaming. Gotta be. People don't just wake up with radically different bodies. But... I just… had a dream and I woke up? So, this can't be a dream. Maybe I was— A sudden burst of soft clicking hurried along the hall outside my bedroom door, silencing my thoughts. I froze.

The clicking stopped.

"Old house," I said, cringing at the unintentionally tropey horror-movie brush-off. I tried to laugh at myself, wiping damp palms on my jersey. But the unfamiliar curves of my own frame made the gesture feel like touching a stranger. And suddenly there was nothing funny about any of this. tap, tap… tap, tap, tap… tap. Closer. Right outside the bathroom. Slower too, trying to stay quiet. Don't. Don't do this to yourself. I eased the door open and peered into the hall. Nothing.

Just a long stretch of shadows, my bedroom a dim shape at the far end. The other end of the hall was empty too. Exhaling, I shook my head. I'd been pretty skittish since Mom's funeral, scaring myself more often than I cared to admit. Sometimes, I'd come downstairs still half-asleep in the early morning and could've sworn the oxygen machine was hissing in the living room. In those moments, somewhere between asleep and awake, I'd see Mom sitting in there… in her recliner, only it wasn't her.

The creature looking back at me had sunken skin and swollen, bloody lips. Plastic tubing ran up its body, snaking around its slack jaw, embedding in its nose. Long dead, but still sitting upright, watching me shuffle past as if waiting for me to grab her another glass of water. I'd blink, and then it would be gone. I shook off the memory and headed to my room. As I passed the stairs, a soft squeak, like the sole of a shoe scuffing the floor, stopped me in my tracks.

My muscles clenched as I glanced over my shoulder, praying there was nothing there. There wasn't. But— Mom's bedroom door was wide open! I didn't think. I bolted, stumbling, in a hectic sprint down the hall. My fingers fumbled at the knob. Why is it so hard to turn a fucking kno— Once I got the door open, I hurled myself inside, slamming it shut behind me. Jesus Christ, someone's in the house. Before I could unlock my phone to call 911— scuff. shuffle. I jumped, dropping my phone.

It skidded to a stop a foot away from the gap under the door. Fuuuck meee. Whatever made that noise was right outside the door. Pulse thudding in my ears, I slowly lowered myself to hands and knees. Moving at a crawl, locked onto the half-inch gap under the door, I forced my shaking body forward. As I snatched it up, a blur zipped past. Too quick to make sense of it. I lurched back, clutching my bare arms, and realized I was only wearing an oversized jersey, underwear, and some socks.

The dresser was right there, but my body seized up, refusing to move. Then, two tiny feet appeared, right outside the door. My heartbeat quickened, every nerve screaming: GETUPGETUPGETUPGETUP! The knob rattled once. Panic ripped through me. I launched forward, slamming my weight against the door, fumbling the lock into place. A second later, something hit it from the other side. Hard and fast. Then it happened again. And again. And again. It was relentless.

I staggered back, searching for anything I could use as a weapon. An old skateboard was wedged between my desk and a bookcase. It's not exactly a shotgun, but it was better than nothing. I shoved the phone into my underwear's elastic waistband in a classy, survival-chic way, diving across the room to the desk. My fingers wrapped around the skateboard's grip tape. For a split second, an absurd thought cartwheeled through my mind: If I die like this, they'll find me pantsless with a phone in my underwear.

The door burst open, revealing a two-foot-tall doll holding a butcher's knife. The doll spilled into the room, head cocked at an unnatural angle. He was a boy doll who had brown vinyl skin, wild curls sprouting everywhere, and eyes made of glass that almost looked human, especially when he blinked.

"Hi!" It chirped in a tinny sing-song.

"I'm your new best friend!" His tiny molded hand raised the butcher's knife above his head.

"NOPE!" I screamed. Then whacked the creepy doll with the skateboard. Lifting a few feet in the air, the tiny plastic murderer was knocked back out of my room, slamming into the railing overlooking the foyer. I could've sworn it yelled "Dude" when I kicked it. But I couldn't hold onto the thought. My brain was too busy screaming DOLL KNIFE DOLL KNIFE DOLL KNIFE on an endless loop, drowning out everything else. Hitting the hallway at full speed, I headed for the stairs. Is it following? Is it right behind me?

I couldn't hear anything over the rush of blood in my ears. Taking the stairs two at a time, I hugged the skateboard to my chest like a shield, while my phone bounced in my underwear's elastic waistband, threatening to slip out. I saved the phone, taking my hand off the railing to grab it. But this body wasn't the same as my real one. My foot extended a bit too far, missing a step. Flying forward, I tried to plant my foot, but my socks betrayed me, and both feet slipped. I was airborne.

The skateboard and phone flew from my hands, clattering down the stairs into the foyer, as I reached for the banister… and missed. I fell. Three, four, five steps, all the way down. My left shoulder broke the fall, and my right elbow banged against the edge of a step. A lightning bolt of pain shot up my arm. I screamed once. Then my head bounced off the foyer floor, cutting it short. After that, I just kind of lay there in a heap, gasping for air.

My heart was a drum machine set to maximum temp, matching the throbbing radiating from my injured elbow. A fuzzy silhouette of the killer doll appeared on the bottom step, still holding that too-big knife. He stood there, watching me. Probably thinking of all the fucked up ways he's going to mutilate me. I tried to sit up, but the world went wavy, and I put my head back down.

"Dude, are you okay?" This time, the voice wasn't tinny or pre-recorded. It was human. I screamed my lungs bloody. And so did he. A duet of high-pitched, piercing shrieks bounced off the walls, probably waking every neighbor within a three-block radius. The doll's shriek was higher than mine; it sounded like someone had auto-tuned a panic attack. He backpaddled, tiny arms windmilling, and fell off the bottom stair. I backed away on my ass, palming the floor, until my back hit the front door. We froze. Staring.

Panting.

"Nora?" The doll asked.

"... Tre?" I croaked.