48 Hours as a Boy

It's 9:42 on a Saturday morning in April, which means you thankfully managed to sleep in after staying up until 1AM chatting with some friends online, then rewriting a message to your bestie multiple times to make sure your compliment about her new haircut landed right.

Your arm feels heavy and hard to coordinate as you reach for the phone, then turn the screen toward you. You don't recognize the number. Normally you'd let it go to voicemail, because anyone that doesn't text before they call probably want something from you, but you're a college freshman and the rules are all different, sometimes people call you now and it's Important and you can't just rely on them to do the sensible thing like text or email you, so you answer it and clear your throat (which feels weird) as you say, "Hello?"

Your voice sounds wrong.

This is the first thing. Before the voice on the other end speaks, before any of it, your "hello" comes out deeper, rougher, a voice you'd hear across a coffee shop and absently think, huh, nice. More than that, your throat feels wrong, thicker, somehow...

You sit up, and everything else is wrong too. The geometry of you. Your center of gravity has migrated somewhere it shouldn't be. Your shirt is tight across the shoulders and loose across the chest and lower down... something's... there's a...

You are suddenly and acutely aware that the topography of your body is not normal--

"Good morning," says the voice on the phone. It's pleasant. Unhurried. It sounds like a customer service representative for a company that ruins lives. "Your wish has been granted, and you have forty-eight hours. Enjoy your time."

"My... what?" Her words are having a strange effect on you. You believe her, instantly, even though you don't understand what she's saying. Somehow you know, because she said so, that you made a wish, and it was granted, and you have forty-eight hours...

"Forty-eight hours," the voice repeats, warmly, like you should be writing this down. "Starting now. This isn't a dream, or a hallucination. You will return to your normal self in exactly forty-eight hours, so long as you don't get anyone pregnant in that time."

Your stomach is cold, your heart hammering in your chest as you blink, rub your eyes, wake up more and more with each moment as the strange certainty continues and gets added onto... "So long as I don't what?!"

The line goes dead.

You sit there for three seconds. Then you look down, and make a sound that's approximately halfway between a scream and a yelp, except it's all deeper than it should be and you feel suddenly, acutely aware of just how much extra stuff your body has, while conspicuously missing two things.

Extra hair, just all over the place. Extra mass, everywhere but your chest, which is flatter but thicker. Your hands are bigger, your feet are bigger, you're taller, broader, more muscled...

And of course something between your legs that was inward is now outward. Three somethings, to be specific.

Okay. So. Not a dream. Not a hallucination. You can't tell why you believe that so firmly, but somehow the voice on the phone saying it makes you sure of it.

You do the reasonable next thing, take a breath, and look in the mirror on the back of your closet door.

A boy looks back.

He's... you're... pretty good looking, actually, in a way that you register with the detached, academic interest of someone whose brain has decided that it will take whatever is happening in stride. Same color eyes, same color hair, tousled from sleep, but that's about all that's the same. Your face is like someone used AI to imagine... not a twin, or even an older brother, but maybe a cousin? A cousin with very mature, broad shoulders that would actually fill out a jacket properly...

Your phone buzzes. A text from the unknown number.

The clock is ticking! :)