Final Girl - part 1 (Patreon)

Hallway tile under bare feet that aren't mine. The soles are smaller, the arches push my weight back onto my heels in a strange way. Forty seconds ago I had a hundred and ninety pounds on a man's frame. Now I'm standing in a doorway with one hand half-up to my chest, covering something that wasn't there at breakfast, and I don't know why my hand went there. The body did it before I caught up.

I'm in Maddie. I'm in Maddie's body. The thought comes the way bad news does, in pieces, worst piece last. I had her bra unhooked sixty seconds ago. The bra is on the floor in the bedroom. I'm the one not wearing it now.

The man slumped against the wall in the hallway is wearing my shirt. My belt half-undone the way I left it. My throat opened across the front so the blood went straight down into the collar. My face above the wound with the mole on the cheekbone. The eyes are still half-open. That was me.

The masked one has stopped. Gold and green and purple, theatrical, a downturned mouth painted on, and the rest of the body hidden under a long dark robe so I can't tell anything — can't read the shoulders, can't guess at the height to within four inches. The machete is wet. The arm holding it doesn't move. It's looking at her. At the body the killer didn't come here for. Recalculating.

My nipples are tight from the cold. The hand I put over my chest is touching unfamiliar skin. I keep wanting to set the breasts down somewhere. Their weight is pulling against the muscles in my chest in a way I've never had to compensate for, and there is no setting them down, they go where I go.

I should run. In the old body I'd already be across the room and through the bathroom door and out the bathroom window before the killer finished the head-tilt. I had thirty pounds on him, easy, and I knew it. I'm a hundred and twenty pounds of college freshman now, breasts I'm holding the wrong way, and I can feel that my legs aren't going to push off the floor the way I'm asking them to.

The killer takes a step.

I take one backward into the bedroom and the arch lands wrong and I have to catch myself on the doorframe with the hand that isn't covering my chest. The doorframe is at the wrong height. Everything is at the wrong height. The killer is coming and I'm standing in a doorway working out the geometry of being five-foot-four.

Somewhere below the noise, an idea surfaces. Bathroom window. Maddie's, not mine — second floor, drops onto the porch roof, she'd shown me once when she was telling me about the time she snuck out in high school. I hadn't been listening for the floor plan. I'd been listening because she was the kind of person who told you stories like that and I wanted to keep her talking. The XSync is doing what it does, pulling threads I didn't know I had, and the thread it's pulling now is hers because the body is hers and apparently the body remembers.

The mouth I have makes a sound. I didn't tell it to.