Eric, a regular 22 year old guy

Eric lounged on the couch, idly spinning the cheap-looking plastic ray gun between his fingers. The strange old vendor at the Chinatown flea market had been insistent, "This no toy, boy. This special gun. Change how people see you... or how you see them." The man's yellowed teeth had grinned as he pocketed Eric's twenty dollars.

Not that Eric really believed in magic hocus-pocus. He'd grown up in a strict Chinese-American household where his engineer father preached logic and his pharmacist mother valued hard work above all else. But after dropping out of community college and bouncing between dead-end jobs, maybe a little irrational hope wasn't so bad.

The front door creaked open, pulling him from his thoughts. Lauren trudged in, her navy blue hospital scrubs rumpled, the dark circles under her eyes visible even from across the room. She dropped her overloaded med school backpack with a thud that shook their cheap IKEA coffee table.

"Rough shift?" Eric asked, though he already knew the answer. Their apartment walls were thin enough that he'd heard her 4 AM alarm blaring for the fifth day in a row.

Lauren didn't even look at him as she shuffled toward the bathroom, her Crocs squeaking against the linoleum. "Three code blues, an OD, and some finance bro screamed at me because we were out of turkey sandwiches," she muttered. "So yeah. Rough."

Eric watched as she paused in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, pulling out her cracked iPhone for a quick selfie, probably another "I survived another 36-hour shift" post for her Instagram story. The glow of her phone highlighted how exhausted she looked, how her usually sharp features had gone dull with fatigue.

He couldn't help but compare her to the girls he followed online, all lip fillers, BBLs, impressive racks and perfect angles, making more in a week than he did in a month from OnlyFans or selling their bathwater to some seriously depraved guy. Lauren wasn't ugly, not by any means. But between the stress-induced acne, the perpetually greasy hair, and the oversized scrubs that hid her figure, she might as well have been invisible.

His gaze flicked to the toy gun in his hand. The vendor's broken English echoed in his head. "Point, think, shoot."

Lauren sighed at her reflection, rubbing at a stubborn pimple on her chin. "Ugh, I look like ****."

You could look like so much more, Eric thought.

Almost without thinking, he raised the gun.

I wonder what you'd look like if you stopped killing yourself for a degree and just embraced what really matters in this world.

He pulled the trigger.

A blinding white flash filled the apartment. When the spots cleared from Eric's vision, the Lauren standing before him looked...