I'm laying on the floor in my bedroom, really fucking high, zoning in and out and in and out. Something electronic and weird is playing on the computer loud and as I'm blowing little circles of grey smoke into the air, I feel my skull crack open and my stomach split. I'm unravelling, falling through vast empty space; nebulas, stars, planets. There's blood and guts everywhere and I pass out.
The clock on the wall reads 42:19 when I open my eyes. I feel wet and there's a lot of pressure, like I'm underwater. I trip up twice on the way to the bathroom, grabbing at my head, my knees, anything – before throwing up in the sink. The taste of vomit and pot in my mouth, and then I see Her. The girl. Big eyes and big teeth and blonde hair, staring back at me from the mirror, expressionless. Everything sort of compresses, like in horror movies when something gory happens, and my nose starts to bleed, and so does the girl's. Nonchalantly we wipe it away with the backs of our hands; my right and her left.
A sad, creaking sound, and I realize I know this girl. I've seen her before. My life in fragments: my mom asking me "what the hell is a Pokémon?", a toy fire truck, an actual fire; a building ablaze in the middle of the woods. My dad jumping behind me into the pool at Freeson the day I almost drowned. A coffin; my mom's, my father's hand in mine, the graveyard behind my house, and the girl, staring back at me with the same big blue eyes and teeth, only her blonde hair is tied up in a ponytail with a black ribbon. We're both ten years old. In the bathroom our eyes widen and our jaw starts to slack, and then we're just gaping at one another, swallowing my blood.
I'm travelling at the speed of light inside my own head. Flowing under and over and through everything I've ever experienced. What is happening what is happening. My eyes are rolling up inside of my skull. I'm shaking; a boy earthquake. Or a tremor. This terrified little girl staring back at me, hands shaking, frenzied, and I know who she is now. She's me.
I'm sobbing, screaming "What the fuck, what the fuck, oh my God," and she's screaming too, our noses gushing with bloody rivers. My skull splits again but this time I don't pass out, and the lights in the bathroom are flickering and the walls are edging closer. The girl's eyes are black, and so are mine, and then she's just gone, as quickly as she came, and staring back at me crookedly is an old man with scars and a white beard. Bloody nose. No no no. It's darker than before.
Time slows and stops. In slow motion I can see myself falling to the bathroom floor. The cold tile hits my cheek and electricity spazzes through me, relentless. I just stay still for a while, not moving or thinking or even existing really. Inside my head centuries pass; whole fucking eras of white nothing, skull throbbing.
I stumble back into myself hours later when it's light out and the birds are awake. Pushing myself up from the floor is when I realize something terrible has happened; my right eye is missing, and I only have one leg. Just a gnarled stump growing out of my body like an old tree in the forest. I'm terrified. Crazy. I throw up all over myself, and then the lights start to dim, and my skull cracks open again and basically my brains spill out. I'm screaming "No no no no no," but it doesn't matter, I pass out anyway and when I come to, I'm native American and I look sad. We're both bleeding.
Every day I'm somebody different, at first anyway. People I know or used to know, people I've never met before. People from the past, grey and scary. People from the future wearing weird clothes. A bear. Nothing too crazy. Two weeks later and it isn't so scary anymore, and I've stopped passing out when I'm in a change until one night, when the pain is so bad I wish I was dead, I actually split in two and the room is black with nothing. I open my eyes, shaking hard, dazed, and my mother is staring back at me with hollow eyes from the dresser in my room, and I have to look away.
I can't speak or move, or even blink, so I just sit there for a while at the dresser, not looking at the mirror until I don't feel anything. I look up and I'm still her and now, bizarrely, I can't look away. She looks exactly like I remember while at the same time, not at all.
Things I had forgotten about my mom: the way the new, short hair curls just behind her ears, the freckle on her forehead that looks like the word "sky", the size of her earlobes, the exact shade of her eyes, almost the same as mine but less brown. The little scar on her lip, faded now, that she never told me how she got. She mimics everything I do. I stick out my tongue and so does she. I give myself antlers and she does too. And suddenly it's not so bad that I'm wearing my mom's face because at least I get to see her a couple more times, and this time I'm memorizing everything perfectly. Taking down whole bibles of information inside my head. Studying hard for a test I'm forever gonna be taking.
I smile, she smiles, and a great overwhelming anxiousness seeps into my skin and I'm shaking again. She looks terrified, my mom, sitting there in the mirror and buzzing nervously. I'm crying, she's crying too. I can't breathe. It feels like all the oxygen just vanished, and now I'm getting heady and weird and "Just stop, mom!" she screams. I smash the mirror. The lights dim and everything fades to black and then I'm just me again, alone, surrounded by broken glass and then nothing. My nose is bleeding.
If I hold my breath and concentrate really hard, sometimes I can control it. I'm horny so I phase in and out of Lydia, guilt tripping, debating with myself whether this is morally wrong or not but I already know that it is. I'm so horny that I don't care anymore, so I rub myself off wearing Lydia. My whole body is smoking, burning hot and I feel like I'm covered in dirty ooze, or slime – what's the difference? - but I'm so turned on and I hate myself. Later, when I'm laying in bed in my body and my stomach is coiling in guilty knots and I'm tossing and turning I try to hold it all in but it's too much, and my head hurts and then I'm the bear.
The first person to see the change is Derek. We're fucking in the bathroom at Burger King, wet toilet paper everywhere, shit on the floor, and I can feel it rising, spilling, overwhelming me fucking completely. The neon light tube, basking everything in a trippy monochrome filter, explodes and my eyes fill with ink. I'm screaming. He thinks I'm really turned on, but I'm twisting inside out, in agony; my bones are snapping and realigning in new, foreign shapes. I'm vaporising. Ceasing to exist.
Heart throbbing, on the verge of utter anxiety, I turn to face him. He just blinks a few times, pulls out of me, says: "What was that? Stiles?" like it's fucking nothing. Like I'm fucking nothing. "Stiles?" he says again, eyebrows hardly raised. "You're- you're a girl." Then: "And, uh, black." I don't say anything, just stare at him with a vague expression on my new, black face. My tongue feels weird inside my mouth and my teeth are too big and my eyes are too bright. I stumble back into the cubicle. He tries to catch me but I push him away, furious. "Are you okay? Stiles. It's okay. What just happened? What are you?" I'm burning up I'm blushing so hard and I want to die.
"A fucking terrorist," I mutter, barrelling into him and slouching from the bathroom. There's toilet paper stuck to my shoe and my pants won't stay up. He doesn't chase after me and I kind of hate him for that but I'd hate him if he came, too. Three missed calls later, and I'm really high, in my bedroom. Me again.