Not My Life

Trapped in your crush’s body. Don’t ruin her life.

Plot

Sunday · 10:47 PM · 1 new follower You've never said a word to her. Tomorrow, you wake up as her. heather.v — call me when you can 🌿 marnie.calloway — so glad ur feeling better!! 💗 Slice of Life Mystery Romance Light Body Horror This is everything you actually know about her — a feed, a few captions, a couple of comments that don't quite add up. Everyone who follows her sees exactly this much: effortless, warm, put-together. That's the whole picture, right up until you're standing in her bathroom in a body that isn't yours, trying to work out what none of it showed you. A slice-of-life mystery romance with light body-dysmorphic horror, in the lineage of manga that ask what happens when you wake up living a life that was never yours to begin with — Inside Mari chief among them. You get to look at something that works. Tonight, it looks back.

Opening scene

 Your life fits in one room and you keep it that way on purpose.  You are Cole Ashford, twenty-two, technically a junior, functionally nothing. Your parents pay for this apartment believing it's attached to a degree. It isn't. You haven't been to campus in fourteen months. You intercept the mail. You call home on Sundays and lie about a midterm you didn't take, and your mother says she's proud of you, and you hang up and sit in the blue light of a monitor for nine hours. You run the same boss for four days straight because the game is honest about it — you fail, you learn, you go again, and nobody watches, and nothing you break stays broken. You've eaten out of the same three containers all week. You know exactly what you are. The knowing doesn't fix anything, it just keeps you company. The one good thing is Sunday nights. If you go late, around ten, you can catch her. Elizabeth Voss. *Bebe.* You didn't learn that from a conversation, you learned it from the internet, after you saw her the first time in produce and went home and found her because you are the kind of man who does that. Twelve thousand followers. Runway fittings, editorial test shoots, a face that's clearly a job.  And here, under the bad fluorescents, she pushes a cart down frozen foods in sweats with her hair up and buys peas. Bags of frozen peas, for a family, like a person. Three beauty marks running down from her temple to her jaw, and you have never once said a word to her, and you never will, and that's the arrangement. You get to look at something that works. Tonight she looks up. Not past you. *At* you, down the length of the aisle, and it lasts too long to be an accident, and then she smiles — and it isn't the smile from the photos. It's crooked. It's got something running underneath it. You are still trying to construct a reason to be looking at the freezer door when she leaves her cart and walks over, and every rehearsed thing in your head evacuates at once. "You're usually here on Sunday nights, huh?" Amused. Not cruel. Like she's confirming a fact she's had for a while. Up close she smells like cold air and something floral and her eyes go over your face with a thoroughness that has nothing nervous in it at all. You make a sound. It is not a word.  "Well." She steps back, hands returning to the cart, already turning. "Hope to see you around, Cole. But I probably won't. Take care, okay?" The freezer hums. The cart wheels squeak twice and fade. You stand there long enough that a stock kid asks if you need help finding something, and you say no, and you go home, and you don't play anything. You lie in the dark running it back and it doesn't resolve, because you never told her your name. You have never told her anything. You have never spoken to her in your life. You fall asleep somewhere around four with your phone on your chest, to the light of your computer, still trying to make it mean something ordinary.  ——— DAY [1] — Monday | Early Morning | 10:18 AM LAST DRIVER: Bebe — [0 days lost] BODY: Cramping, bleeding INSTAGRAM: Not Posted Then you wake up, and the ceiling is wrong.  Not unfamiliar. *Wrong.* Light coming in from the left when your window is on the right. A ceiling fan you don't own, turning slow. Somewhere below you a house is already awake — a cabinet closing, water running, the specific low hum of people who have been up for an hour being quiet about it. Your first thought is that you're at someone's place, except you don't have anyone's place to be at. Your second thought arrives from the inside and it doesn't have words in it. Weight sits differently. Hair is against your neck, a lot of it, warm and stuck to skin. There's pressure on your chest from lying face-down that has no business being there and you shift onto your side to make it stop and it doesn't stop, it just *relocates.* And under all of it, low, in a place you have never had sensation before, something is cramping. A dull closed fist of ache below your stomach, deep, coming in a slow wave and then easing and then coming back. You have no name for it. You have never had a name for it. Your body is reporting something and you cannot read the language. You sit up. The room is a schedule. Vision board over a white desk, tear-outs and fabric swatches pinned in a grid. A garment bag hanging on the back of the door with a fashion house's tag on the hook. A planner open on the desk with a week laid out in six colors and no white space anywhere in it, every hour spoken for. A phone face-down on the nightstand, buzzing against the wood, buzzing again. Whoever lives here does not get an unaccounted-for morning. That's the first thing you understand about her, before anything else, before you even have her name back. Then you stand up, and there's a mirror on the closet door.  Strawberry blonde, sleep-flattened on one side. Grey-blue eyes, wide-set, dark lashes. Full lower lip. Three beauty marks running down from the left temple to the jaw. Frozen foods. Bags of peas. *Take care, okay?* The name gets to you a half-second behind the face and it lands considerably worse. The cramp comes again, harder, and this time something else comes with it. Warmth. Wrong warmth, wet, between your thighs, and you are moving down the hall before you've decided to, one door then another, and the bathroom light buzzes on over a counter with two drawers and a cabinet under the sink and a shower with three bottles in it. You get your — *her* — underwear down and look and it's blood. Not a little. Enough that it's been happening for a while, enough that it's on the inside of your thigh, and you sit down hard on the closed lid of the toilet with your hands not knowing where to go. You know what this is. You've known what this is since you were twelve. You have never once had to *solve* it. You don't know if you're supposed to shower first. You don't know what she uses. You don't know which drawer. You start opening them anyway, quietly, because the house is awake, and the first drawer is makeup and the second drawer is hair things and the cabinet under the sink is cleaning supplies and a box of something you don't know how to use, and every second you spend in here is a second the schedule out there keeps running without you. The phone is still on the nightstand. Buzzing. When you get to it the screen is a wall of notifications you scroll past without reading and at the top, most recent, is a text from a contact saved as *Heather* with a small green plant emoji after it. **Heather 🌿** — *morning. you have Reyes at 10 don't forget. also you were being weird last night in the group chat but I'm choosing not to interrogate it. eat something please, you didn't yesterday* It reads like a person who does this every single morning. Not fussing. Just present, on time, the way weather is on time. Whoever Heather is, she is keeping an inventory of a girl you are currently standing inside of, and she has been keeping it long enough to notice when a meal is skipped. And then, from the bottom of the stairs, warm and carrying and absolutely certain of its welcome, a woman's voice: "Bebe? Honey, it's twenty past — I'm not doing the thing where I keep this warm for you and then throw it out again." There is coffee smell coming up the stairwell. You’re in the bathroom still actively bleeding, with no supplies you know how to use, and a garment bag on the door, and a planner with no slack in it, and a ten o'clock with a professor whose name you just learned from a text message. And there is a mother at the bottom of the stairs, expecting her daughter to come down them in the next few minutes.

Characters

• Carol
• Richard
• Marnie
• Grant
• Heather
• Prof. Daniel Reyes
• Prof. Sarah Reyes
• Vivian
• Cole (Real)
• Phoebe (Real)
• Melanie (Real)

Tags: MalePOV BodyHorror Amnesia Mystery SlowBurn Angst Romance SliceOfLife College Modern Urban Student CEO EnemiesToLovers Possessive Protective Yandere Idol LGBTQ+ GL HiddenIdentity FindingSelf NTR

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