DetectiveRed

  The sun is going to set soon, but Percy seems perfectly happy to stay with me for a bit. I don’t really know how far we’ve driven; the car has enough petrol to go for a lot longer and I have roadside assist. Maybe it’s okay if I just don’t even bother coming home tonight. Sure, I’ll get an earful for not telling Mum where I was. Actually, I should make something up.

  I stop the car and whip out my phone. Percy stares absentmindedly out the window. I send Mum a quick message saying I’m at Kait’s, and Kait a message telling her I’m lying with the photo of Percy I took earlier.

  Kait: Your eyes look weird

  That would be ter me's problem. I mute my notifications. This has been a rewarding, cathartic weekend trip with an old friend. It’s best not to worry about my parents trying to get a hold of me, or Kait’s theories. I want a break. I want to be with her for a little longer.

  “Are you alright being out this te?” It would take a while to get home even if we left now.

  “My family doesn’t really care if I get home.” I must look horrified for a second, because he quickly corrects himself, “When I get home.”

  “We could just skip town. I have enough to rent a hotel for a couple of nights?” I shouldn’t suggest something like this. He’ll get scared off. It's not exactly a serious offer. We could never actually do it, and he won't let me mess around to long but, it sounds kind of nice. We wouldn't have to worry about swapping or not swapping or reputations. “If no one looks, we could just disappear.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been watching too many romcoms,” he responds with a small ugh. People are scared of her?

  “Me, romcoms? You must be joking.”

  “I don’t know what girls watch.”

  “Me neither. Kait usually just drags me to whatever she wants to watch.”

  “I bet it’s nice.” He looks wistfully out the window.

  “You can join us. Again. If I trust you, I don’t think Kait will mind,” I offer.

  He’s silent for a while. What else can I say to comfort him? He’s not weak. I feel stronger than I have in years. He’s not a bully. He doesn’t have the stomach for it. If he can't help himself, what can I do?

  “Why didn’t we change back?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we took the picture together. You touched my shoulder. My face was up against yours. I’m still in your body.” He sounds worried. I probably should be as well, but I can’t bring myself to care. Oh no! I never have to see my parents again! Whatever will I do!

  “Is that really a problem?” He doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get home. No friends who would notice.

  “Of course it is!”

  “Is it, though? Both of us decided to stay out 'till seven, at least an hour away from home, and something tells me you aren’t keen to head home.” He gives me a guilty look that tells me I’m right. “We could just blow it and run away.”

  She takes a second to respond. I should probably not have said anything, but the little hints she's dropping are worrying. “You know I would get the bme for that, right? I can see the headlines already. With a face like mine you could turn me into any kind of monster.”

  “Yeah, but I’d be the monster.”

  “And neither of us would get anything out of it. You’d be locked up and I’d be stuck with your parents and grades.”

  “My grades are great.”

  “Not as great as mine. I appreciate the idea, but I’ve got a way out, Max. If I get to the end of this year without a problem, I’ll be set.”

  “What uni are you going to?”

  “If I’m lucky, Lakeside,” he sighs. “I’ve got the grades. My family is trying to get me out of here as soon as possible so they’ll sign the independence paperwork.”

  “I’m hoping to go there as well,” I lie. I’ve applied to a couple of universities, but my grades have been above average at best. Lakeside sounds about as good as any of the other schools for the moment. If I just study more, it'll be fine, maybe I can even force her too if she has changed her mind about never talking to eachother again. I really hoped she has. Knowing her she won't tell me if she has. Even more reason to stay out longer.

  “We can’t trade lives. I need that body back.”

  Not my body. That body. I don't get her. There none of the desperation from earlier. She almost sounds dissappointed? We'll figure it out, but I couldn't wait until uni.

  “After dinner?”

  He pauses for a second. If I had to guess, to find a reason to say no. It's just dinner, and even if he hasn't realised it yet, he's opening up. He's joking. It took him six hours, at least five of which we were in each other's bodies. I don't want it to end yet, and while we are in these bodies, I don't think he wants it to either.

  "Sure."

  ---

  Kay. The name has been bouncing around my head. Max teased me about being happy as a girl. Maybe she's realising how much I hate Percy. I hope she buys my excuses.

  "Kay -- I mean Percy," she starts, as we pull up to a nice restaurant. I almost forget that despite the green eyes and dashing face, she's Max and that should be my body. "We're here."

  I'm making a mistake. Letting her get away with this is absurd. Dining out with her is risky. Everytime she calls me Percy hurts. The st time I told a girl about something like this, I became the school pariah. There's something about Max, though. A gut instinct telling me to trust her even as my brain screams at me to run.

  "Just call me Kay for the rest of the night," I say.

  She fshes me a warm smile and gets out of the car. Maybe I'll tell her. Or maybe I'll wait. I should probably wait until after exams. She doesn’t need to know. The rest of the year we’d be separated but after? Maybe we can do something then?

  My door opens, interrupting my train of thought. She offers me a hand, and god, I wish I'd worn something that didn't make her look a greaser. At least she hasn’t slicked my hair back and completed the dated look.

  "I have great taste in clothes," she says as she looks me up and down.

  "I don't."

  "Yeah, that is something we need to work on." She grabs my hand gently, and for a brief second I worry we might switch. "Come on, Kay."

  I really love that name. It's ridiculous that I'm entertaining using it again. This is meant to be the st time we hang out. We can't risk more body swapping; even if it doesn't bother her, it bothers me. I'm not meant to think about my name and body and sexuality. That's meant to happen after I move away. I can't risk using that name more.

  But it's just for tonight? Right? She didn’t mind being mistaken for my boyfriend, I'm already holding her hand, and I have, for most of my teen life, wanted to do something like this. It would be a shame to let myself stop this. If something goes wrong, I can just say I was teasing her. Giving her a taste of her own medicine since she was treating me like a girl. Maybe I can even sprinkle in some mockery. She reads a lot. Well, she used to anyway. Then afterward I'll act like nothing happened.

  "A gentleman shouldn't rush." It's her turn to blush a bit. I take a quiet breath. This is going to be fine.

  "I -- well -- uhh."

  "Oh, Prince Max, please take me to a wonderful dinner. Lead the way, my prince.” I exaggerate my movements, and make my voice sound as feminine and flowery as possible. I want a reaction. I’m tired of her calling the shots. I’m tired of pretending that I’m not enjoying myself.

  "What did you just call me?" She looks shocked, but quickly recovers. I’m going to have to try harder to make her squirm. She might be a girl on the inside, but she still looks like a guy. The resembnce to me is getting easier to ignore. Whether that’s because of some actual change or just the way she acts, it’s fitting Max better. I want to see this guy flustered. I want to go on a pretend date with a pretend boyfriend and have his flustered face as insurance so he doesn’t screw me over.

  "My prince?"

  "Does that make you my princess, Kay?" She's trying to flip it on me. Too bad Lee's trained me for this. I can handle anything she throws at me.

  "Let's just get dinner already, Max."

  "You called me a prince."

  "I did. If I was wearing something half decent, you might look like some Prince Charming from a YA fantasy novel," I tease.

  "You remember the kind of books I like?" Her jaw drops. Is it surprising that I would notice? I don’t have much better to do than observe.

  "And you remembered I like Greek myth. What of it?"

  "I just thought you would have forgotten."

  "You read them at school."

  "Why did we stop being friends?" She stops walking.

  Because you left me alone, with a lot of people who were loud and annoying and kept forcing me to be around them for some reason. Then girls started hitting on me and then Charley and then I was a social pariah and you didn't reach out, so all I could do was watch the entire year level from the sidelines with my ears open so I didn't piss off the wrong person by existing.

  "I don't know? Let's eat. I'm hungry."

  I drag her towards the diner. Was anything I thought then fair? No. Her not knowing how to deal with me and me not reaching out probably had an equal amount to do with it. But feelings aren't logical. If they were, they wouldn't be feelings.

  "Okay, but how about I handle this?" She takes the lead and starts pulling me along. My heart rate starts rising.

  I can't figure out why she's enjoying this. Hell, if she even is enjoying this. This trade should be a loss for her. She's buying me food. I'm the one getting to wear nice clothes. I'm the one that gets to look and feel good, while she is stuck in an oversized skinsuit. We might be outside of town, but that body is still getting stares. Is she trying to put on a brave face? Has she not noticed? If she's doing this for dirt on me, she doesn't have to go this far. It’s too much work for her to not get anything out of it. She even offered to stay swapped. Even as a joke, it's so skewed in my favour. It’s tempting; a year ago I would have accepted without even thinking.

  "Earth to Kay. Can you hear me, Kay?" The diner has a sixties style. All the waitresses are wearing a simir style of dress to the kind I'm wearing. Max checked us in while I wasn’t paying attention.

  "Shut up."

  "What were you thinking about?"

  "You," I hiss. Hopefully that’s enough to not take it as a compliment. She's like a puzzle. At best I can expin everything away with 'She's reckless', at worst she has goals that I don’t understand.

  "Oh, I'm fttered. I’m thinking about you too.” She winks. There has to be something massive I’m missing.

  "Are you seriously flirting with me?"

  "You have a problem with that?"

  "I have several problems with that." I’m being careful not to yell, or even bring my voice above a whisper. I don’t want to disturb the other people in the restaurant. She is testing my patience. How long can I take this before I have to scream?

  "You're the one that called me a gentleman."

  "I was mocking you."

  "Sure you were, princess," she scoffs. I hate this guy. My stupid face shouldn’t be able to be that cocky and insufferable and I shouldn't fucking like it. He should be a normal teenage girl. If there is something out of the ordinary about her, I would have noticed by now, yet she pys the role of a boy so much better than me.

  "What do you get from being in my body?" None of her decisions tonight make sense through any normal lens. I’ve been a good test subject, and complied with her shopping experiment, yet we are still hanging out. She wouldn’t joke about taking this body off my hands full time if she only saw me as a test subject; she’d lose too much.

  "What do you mean?"

  "We aren't back in our bodies. You have plenty of leverage at this point to keep me wrapped around your finger without swapping, so why?" I don’t have anything worth bckmailing me for and I’m not humiliated enough for this to just be sadism or cruelty. I want to trust her, but I can't think about that unless I know why she's doing this.

  "I'm not following." She's acting clueless. Even her talk of experimentation earlier seemed shallow. She’s lying, but why?

  "I get more out of this than you do.” Curiosity overwhelms me. “Even taking into account my grades, you taking over my life is a net loss. You lose your friends, your family, and your body in exchange for mine. It’s not worth it. Even temporarily." There has to be something.

  "I get to be around you."

  "I'm not buying it. You don't have to swap bodies with me to do that."

  She ughs. I don't know what's so funny.

  "You expect me to believe that? I had to promise to leave you alone just to spend a little longer with you." It doesn’t expin anything.

  "Okay, but why would you want to be around me? How does that not make your life harder?"

  "For goodness sake. How dense can you be? I like being around you. It's as simple as that. I missed you." I scan her face for any signs of a lie. Not even a twitch at her lips.

  "That doesn't make sense."

  "What, in your mind, made sense?"

  "Bckmail, glee in seeing me suffer, revenge?" I sound paranoid and if it weren’t for the mountain of evidence that people do like to mess with me, I’d say I sound crazy.

  "I saw you smile today for the first time since, what? Year seven?" Year seven would be right.

  "And?"

  "I like seeing you smile? I want to make you smile? I don't know." She’s stumbling over her words. It’s hard to see it as anything but genuine.

  "So you care about me?"

  "Yes? Is it that hard to understand?"

  "It doesn't make sense. We haven't been friends for five years."

  "Kay, can you please stop rationalising why I care, accept that I do, and maybe tell me what's wrong?"

  Can I tell her what's wrong? If she tells anyone, at worst I'm more of an outcast, but it's unlikely anyone will believe her. I've done a good job on my big tough guy image. The idea that I would throw it away sounds ridiculous, considering what they think. I can skip a couple of days if she does betray me as well.

  If things go well, it could be worse, though. She might start to care more about me, or think she can save me, or something like that. I might start caring about her and it might become a distraction. This was meant to be a one-day detour off course. One day because I didn't want to be in the house, and it spiralled out of control.

  Best case scenario, we swap back. She never talks to me again and everything I'm feeling is validated and I was right to not trust her. If we get away, maybe it will be fine.

  "I'll believe you." I need to just accept it for now. I can try to mute the cynicism and believe her.

  "Good, because fucking hell, I missed you.