--Rachel--

I stayed in Marco's room for most of the day. I didn't want to have to deal with his dad or stepmom.

Ok, and the dog kind of freaked me out.

For a while I just stood in the middle of the room not touching anything. I was trying not to notice the dirty clothes all over the floor. The unmade bed. The piles of comic books. The overflowing trash can.

It was starting to give me a twitch in my left eye. I did the only thing I could think of.

I cleaned Marco's room.

About three hours into the job, his dad came up to ask me if pizza was alright for dinner. Well, he started to ask anyway. Halfway through the question he trailed off into silence and just looked around the room in speechless wonder.

"Marco," he finally said after several minutes of staring. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Uh, yeah, Dad," I said, giving the desk one last swipe with the Swiffer duster sheet. "Why wouldn't I be?"

He sniffed the air. "Do I smell furniture polish?"

Ok, so maybe I went a little overboard with the cleaning. Obviously this was not going to work out. I called Marco. It took him over three hours to call me back.

I don't know what he was doing. Probably I didn't want to know.

By the time Marco called, his room was spotless. I had even been brave enough to go under the bed and in the closet.

"So what have you been up to?" I asked Marco.

"Not much," he said with my voice. "You?"

"I, uh, did some laundry," I admitted.

Silence on the other end. "You did what?"

"Laundry."

"How much?"

"Oh, a couple loads, I don't remember exactly..."

"Rachel."

"Ok, four."

Marco groaned. "Did my dad see you? That's going to cause some questions. I don't know if my dad even thinks I can do laundry. Well, just tell him that you heard a mouse and thought it would be a good idea to get everything off the floor, and the freakout from the mouse should distract him from--"

"Can you?" I interrupted.

"Can I what?"

"Do laundry."

"That's not the point."

"Oh my God! You can't do laundry! I can't believe it, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard!"

"I can do laundry!" Marco protested. "I just don't, because I have this issue with sorting. Somehow, something red manages to work its way into every load, and everything ends up pink. But I can do laundry. I totally did all the laundry in our house for almost two years."

"So for two years all your socks were pink?"

"Can we just let this go?"

I didn't want to let it go because, honestly, I was comfortable with the conversation. It was stupid teasing friends stuff. None of the weirdness from earlier. Teasing like this, I could almost forget what had happened.

Marco jumping between me and a gun. And to make it worse, I was pretty sure I knew why. I'd had a suspician before, but being in Marco's body, now I knew for sure.

Because Marco's body was attracted to my body. Waaay attracted to my body.

Do you have any idea how weird that is? Being attracted to yourself? That is good for a serious case of the shudders.

It also made me cranky. Cranky enough to try and scare Marco like I had when we walked home. Because Marco wasn't allowed to like me. Oh, he could joke about it. That was fine. Marco's a funny guy. But that he actually did...No way. Not right. That was setting himself up for a big hurt. So I tried to cut the whole thing off quick. Avoid the big hurt by causing a small one.

I think I was harsher than I wanted to be. But that's what you have to do. And anyway, he seemed to have bounced back pretty quickly.

So that's why it was hard for me to let the laundry-teasing go.

"So I guess if you don't do laundry, you probably don't polish the furniture."

Marco gasped. "Tell me you didn't."

"I'll take that as a 'No.'" I'd let him find out about his room later.

"Most definitely not. Oh well. Just tell my dad all the cleaning is an early Father's Day present. Father's Day is coming up soon, isn't it?"

"About two months."

"Oh. Close enough. So was there actually a reason you called me?"

"Well, there was going to be some bitching, but in the three hours it took you to call me back, I lost most of my steam."

Marco laughed. It creeped me out. His laugh was my laugh...and Marco's ears liked hearing my laugh. Liked it a lot. "Well, in that case, I need to get going. It's close to 11, you know. School tomorrow. But first, it's time for your shower."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Would you really prefer that I didn't?"

That was a little too good of a point. Would I rather have Marco see me naked, or let my body walk around without a shower?

I sighed and gave in to the inevitable. "Fine."

Marco giggled. "See you tomorrow, Marco," he cackled.

I hung up on him. Cassie called me five minutes later.

"You left Baby Think-It-Through in my barn," she growled.

I guessed the growling meant Baby Think-It-Through had been wanting some attention. "Did you take care of her?"

"No promises," she snarled and hung up.

It's a good example of just how annoying Robo-Baby was that it would have Cassie hanging up on me.

I sat at Marco's desk for a while, trying to delay bedtime. I was going to have to sleep in Marco's room. In Marco's pajamas. In Marco's bed.

But first I was going to have to take a shower. In Marco's body.

Marco's naked body.

In the bathroom, I kept my eyes closed as I undressed. OK, I was thinking. This isn't so bad. I'll just keep my eyes closed the entire time and--

CLUNK. I ran into the sink.

It wasn't my bathroom. I couldn't remember where anything was. I was going to have to...open my eyes.

I opened one. Barely.

Oh, God, WHY WERE THERE SO MANY MIRRORS?

I jumped into the shower as fast as I could and closed my eyes again.

I didn't end up getting that clean because I didn't want to touch anything. It was unfortunate, because I really wanted to wash the 18th century off my skin. Marco's skin. Whatever.

It was definitely time for bed. I climbed in, too tired to even care that this was where Marco slept every night. Where Marco probably...well, let's just say that I found some very incriminating magazines when I was cleaning under the bed. Anyway, I was willing to try and forget about that when I realized that the bed smelled like Marco. Especially the pillow.

Two hours ago it would have been a major problem. Right now it was a minor annoyance. I dozed off before I had a chance to think about it too much.

And I had this dream.

In my dream, I was Marco. Really him, not just his body. I was seeing things through his perspective. His feelings, his thoughts, all of that.

It was a couple months ago. Rachel had morphed a starfish and been split in half into Nice Rachel and Mean Rachel. Nice Rachel let it slip that she thought I was cute.

I wondered about that for a while. Nice Rachel was part of the real Rachel. If nice Rachel thought I was cute, and Nice Rachel liked me, then the real Rachel...

But I didn't let myself think about that...

Marco's alarm went off at 7:00. I had to catch the bus at 7:20.

Seriously, who can get ready in 20 minutes?

Anyway, I lay in bed for a minute thinking about my dream (well, that and how I was going to miss the bus). It probably wasn't that weird of a dream. It probably just had to do with all the weird things that had been going on with me and Marco recently--getting blown back in time together, him taking that bullet for me, me realizing that he had a major crush on me, switching bodies...yeah, that stuff was bound to inspire some weird dreams.

There was one other nagging possibility. But it was just too horrible to even consider...