Author's Note
This is an idea that came into my head the other day. It's not entirely original as anyone who has seen the recent TV drama series Boy Meets Girl will testify. However I thought it might be fun to try to apply the basic concept to the Skins characters and see where it goes. I'm not sure whether to develop it into a full blown story or not. It all depends on what reaction I get to the first couple of chapters, I suppose. If enough people like the idea and want me to carry on with it, then I will, so it's over to you guys for your reviews!
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Hi! I'm Emily Fitch and I have a horrible feeling that something is seriously fucked up here. Now there could be any number of explanations for what seems to have happened to me and I'll gladly take any one of them right now. After all, there has to be a bloody good reason why I appear to have gone to sleep last night as a normal, cripplingly shy, insecure, sixteen year old, closet lesbian virgin and woken up this morning inside the body of my mate Cook, a normal, arrogant, overconfident, sexually overactive, seventeen year old, macho, Jack the Lad guy.
Firstly, I could still be dreaming. No wait, let me rephrase that – I could be having a nightmare. Because if there is one person amongst my circle of acquaintances and friends who I would least like to swap places with for all the money in the world it is a certain James Cook. Of course I use the terms 'mate' and 'friend' incredibly loosely to describe my relationship with Cook or 'The Cookie Monster' as he so charmingly and humbly likes to refer to himself.
Wanker. Arsehole. Dickhead. Fuckwit. Any one of those epithets would be a much more accurate description of my feelings towards Cook. He is just one of a small handful of students I hang around with at sixth form college but to date I have to admit he has spectacularly failed to 'turn me'. Turn my stomach, absolutely, many times already in the short period of time that I've known him, but turn my head, make me question my sexuality? Sadly for him, not yet! Nor is he ever likely to!
It's also possible that I could still be hallucinating wildly from a really bad trip after last night. I mean, there was a fair amount of seriously good shit being passed around amongst us and I'm pretty certain I didn't turn my nose up at it. Put it up my nose, yeah, almost certainly, not that I'm a habitual user by any means. Just a little bit every now and then, purely for recreational purposes but nothing heavy, you know. I leave that to the likes of Cook and Freddie, his best snorting mate. So that possibility seems somewhat remote.
The only other likely explanation for this apparent gender transformation I seem to have undergone is that I'm still pissed out of my brain from last night's party. It was Cook's seventeenth birthday and after a spectacularly dull and tedious start round his uncle's pub where Cook displayed all the charm and grace of a chimpanzee on heat, we managed to gatecrash some private party for a friend of Freddie's sister where we all got royally hammered on the free booze that was on offer. So I could be suffering from the mother of all hangovers which has seriously warped my normally keen perception of what's going on around me.
Now, if I am dreaming this, then surely I'll wake up in total agony but mercifully still as Emily if I stick something really sharp into, let's say, the side of my leg. I search around the room for something fitting for the job and my eyes come to rest on a knife and fork lying on a plate on the window sill. I contemplate the two implements briefly before choosing the fork. I take a deep breath, brace myself, shut my eyes firmly and then jab the fork as hard as I dare into the side of my leg.
The scream –inducing, excruciating pain and immediate torrent of blood gushing from my leg and running unchecked down onto the carpet on which I have collapsed in agony would seem to have disproved my theory that I am still asleep and that this is all a bad dream. Fuck me, that hurt….. and the body of Emily has not been returned to me as I'd hoped.
That would only appear to leave the twin possibilities of the side effects of substantial drug and alcohol abuse. But I have been as pissed as a fart and as high as a kite on a number of occasions in the past and have NEVER to my certain knowledge woken up afterwards wearing someone else's clothes AND someone else's face and body. There would appear to be only one logical, rational explanation for this curious state of affairs. Somehow or other, I say to myself, in my drug induced, alcohol-fuelled sleep I have turned into Cook!!
The moment I repeat out loud that undeniable conclusion, the second those very words come out of my mouth in Cook's instantly recognizable dulcet manly tones, I feel my head go dizzy and my legs completely give way beneath me as I crash to the floor in a spectacular display of fainting.
I come to some time later in a heap on the floor. God only knows how long I was out for. I gingerly climb to my feet, rubbing the side of my head where I can feel a slight bump forming from where I must have made a heavy impact with the carpet. I walk across the room and look in the mirror for the second time since I woke up this morning but the result is devastatingly, appallingly and depressingly the same. It is Cook's ugly mug that is looking back at me, not my own familiar, reasonably pretty (though I say so myself) and very feminine features.
I am close to hyperventilating and passing out again so I grab a tight hold of the sink unit to support myself while I confront the awful stark reality of the situation. I look down at myself and take in once again the undeniable fact that I am wearing exactly the same clothes that Cook was wearing all day yesterday at his birthday party.
So, let's just sum up the position quite simply as I see it. These are my thoughts, my feelings and my fears whizzing around my head on the inside of me but quite unmistakeably Cook's body and Cook's voice hosting them on the outside of me. I start to feel my legs shaking uncontrollably again so I sit down on the bed and try to calm myself down.
But this is easier said than done when my stomach is doing a hundred somersaults, when my hands are shaking so violently it almost seems like they're going to drop off the end of my arms and when my heart is beating so hard and loudly that I could almost imagine that the alien is going to burst out of my body at any moment.
I close my eyes and the tears start streaming down my face as I struggle to comprehend what the fuck has happened to me. Sure, my life has been pretty shit most of the time, what with Katie bullying the hell out of me for the last ten years or so and Naomi, the girl I'd completely fallen in love with ever since I saw her in junior school, virtually ignoring me since term started. But nothing on God's planet could be as totally and utterly shit as suddenly finding out that for no possible rational reason whatsoever I had become Cook!!
As this awful, unreal, yet conversely apparent reality started to take hold of me by the throat and threaten to suffocate what little remained of my will to carry on living, I also begin to appreciate that not only do I appear to have turned into Cook, not only am I wearing Cook's clothes but I also seem to have woken up in Cook's own student room!
Clearly this is not my own little bedroom that I have had the privilege of sharing with Katie ever since I can remember. It in no way resembles the sort of bedroom you would imagine two teenage girls would be likely to sleep in, full of lots of examples of feminine touches and objects which would leave the casual observer in no doubt as to the sex of the people who live in it. On the contrary, it is very much the type of living quarters inhabited by a typical teenage boy; moreover the sort of boy who doesn't give a flying fuck about cleanliness, neatness, order and a certain sense of style.
No, it is quite apparent, now that I take a good, measured look around me with a rapidly increasing feeling of disgust and revulsion, that I have woken up in Cook's body AND in his fucking hovel of a room. So, not only do I no longer know who the hell I am, I also appear not to know where the hell I am! I go and sit down on the bed again and a thought passes through my mind. If, by a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, Cook actually lives on the sixteenth floor of a high rise student accommodation building, I might as well just take the opportunity to throw myself off the top of it and finish this living hell before it can get any worse.