Boy turn girl

Boy turn girl -

The first thing he noticed wasn't the light, but the weight. It felt as though the gravity in his bedroom had shifted, pulling at him differently, more softly. He reached up to rub his eyes, but the hand that met his face was startlingly small, the fingers slender and tapering, lacking the callouses he had earned from summer basketball games.

He sat up abruptly, the sheets sliding down his chest. His breath hitched. The broad, flat expanse of his torso was gone, replaced by curves that felt entirely alien under his touch. Panic, sharp and cold, flared in his chest. He scrambled out of bed, his legs feeling longer and more delicate, stumbling slightly as his center of balance had migrated.

He lunged for the full-length mirror bolted to the back of his closet door. In the dim morning light, a stranger stared back.

It was a girl. She looked to be his age, with a cascade of chestnut hair that spilled over shoulders far narrower than his own. The face was undeniably his—the same slightly upturned nose, the same splash of freckles across the bridge of the nose—but the jawline was soft, the eyes framed by long, dark lashes that he had never possessed.

'What?' he tried to scream, but the sound that escaped was a melodic, high-pitched gasp.

He collapsed onto the edge of the bed, his mind racing through impossible explanations. Was this a dream? A fever hallucination? He pinched his arm; the sting was sharp and undeniably real. He looked at his bedside table. His comic books, his half-finished Lego set, his messy collection of smooth stones from the creek—they all sat there, indifferent to the metaphysical catastrophe that had occurred in the dark of night.

He stood up again, walking toward the window. The world outside looked exactly as it had yesterday. The neighbor was walking his golden retriever; the sun was beginning to bake the dew off the driveway. The universe hadn't reset; it had simply rewritten him.