Attempting a Rewrite

When I was 12 there was an after-school writing club that got to use these laptops with a display that showed a whole two lines at the top of a keyboard. Enamoured, I wrote a story that I enjoyed, printed it off and decided that it was a bit... private. So I never showed anyone and hid it in my wardrobe. At some point between then and going to University the story was lost. Naturally, this year, I resurrected it and am attempting to rewrite it.

Here's the first foray.

       Something was definitely not right: in fact I would go so far as to suggest that the feeling suggests something was, in fact, very wrong. Much as a logical inconsistency throws me out of a dream no matter how asleep so it is that I was aware enough of something having changed that I wake and take a quick stock. Before my eyes are open I know this is unfamiliar, I can feel my heartrate quickening, my breathing is shallower, faster, standard feelings of fight or flight are swinging into motion – but that’s the rub. It feels off, wrong, false, unfamiliar. The air sucking in through my open mouth is moving differently, the sound of it is higher; my heart beats differently, maybe faster and harder but dulled somehow, as though from far away. Before my hands are moving I know they are wrong.

       Eyes open, take in the light from the wrong direction: right time of day, morning, but it comes from my right rather than my left. The sound of my nails against the bedclothes different, sensations implying… what? Hair on my face, over my forehead, catches my eyelash – alarm bells ringing in the distance in my mind – and my legs feel… “What?” Not as loud as I want, groggy, and that’s not my voice, it’s not what I sound like.

       “Honey?” There’s a knock on a door nearby, the voice is muffled and male. Older, concerned but hurried. “It’s time to get up, we’ve got a long journey, I know I heard your alarm.”

       A hem? On my thighs? Worse, I feel a dull ache, my stomach roils over itself, and an unusually urgent sense that I need to be a bathroom now asserts itself. “Uh…” Not my voice, but definitely my syllable. I said that, I thought it and I said it. It is imbues with my confusion, my hesitation. So not a dream, not a nightmare. At least, not like that.

       “Just- Bathroom’s free, get yourself dressed and I’ll see you downstairs for breakfast. Okay?”

       Not my bed. Not my sheets. Not my room. Not my hair falls across not my face as I sit up on not my mattress and look around. Small box room, light pink colour motif, thin curtains, a white desk by a chimney breast, a white painted wooden door behind which the voice’s owner clearly waits. “Breakfast, yeah.” Not my voice carries my words: repetition working. I hear someone walk away from the door. I’m dressed in a light coloured fabr- no. My eyes take in the body I see. So, bear with me, this is a cliché that even I know is a tawdry one and I like a good cliché. This is not a good cliché.

       I stand, there’s a mirror on the back of the door obscured by a hanging white dressing gown. White is a bad colour for a dressing gown, I can practically hear my mother saying in my mind, it picks up all the dirt and grime. “It would need washing far too often,” she said, and I had to yield to that logic. I didn’t want to be cold between washes. But this one is clean and almost shining in the morning sun. I take it from the hook, push my arms through the relevant holes and tie it at the waist, which is too high, to face the mirror properly.

       Looking back is a girl. She’s shorter than I am expecting against the door and I am remarkably bad at estimation of measurements. I guess five foot tall. She has brown hair, mostly straight with evidence of having been tied back I suppose, that falls past her shoulders. Beneath the white dressing gown, a little too big for her frame, she’s wearing a nightgown in green with small pink printed flowers in little clusters in a repeating pattern. She’s got a fringe over her forehead and her hands are playing nervously with one another at her waist. Barefoot, I can see some slippers by the bed behind her, and with a pained expression. Maybe she feels the same warning cramp I do.

       She moves her head when I look around, her brown eyes matching where I’m looking as they dart. She raises her hand to her face when I do and, yes, that’s what I mean about it being a bad cliché. It is clear that she is me and I am her. And that cramping. For the avoidance of doubt this is not what I expected to see in the mirror because it’s not what I look like in a mirror. I mean, okay, it is now but it’s not… whatever. I have a choice: dwell on all the myriad sensations (I have a decent vocabulary, I’ve read a lot of books) or deal with the immediacies. I choose the latter.

       Stepping back, the girl dons the slippers; one hand holds her stomach as it cramps again, the other reaches for the door. She seems the same age as me, maybe younger? It’s hard to tell and there are no context clues leaping out from the wall and no time to look more closely. The carpet is soft and thick pile, easily better quality than the one at home, and the slippers feel barely used. Certainly they don’t have the worn moulding to the girl’s feet that comes from extended wear. And, okay, I’m describing my thoughts so I’ll stop pussy-footing around: I really need the toilet. As she walks out onto the landing it occurs that I have no idea where that is. But the landing is small. A room off to the right, a second door almost immediately afterward and, then, almost immediately opposite and with the stairs to the left, a final door. This is white, like all the rest (the walls are a soft yellow), but looks older and less detailed – a bathroom door if ever I saw one.

       Pushing through, it is the bathroom and I feel immense relief, I spin round and pull the dressing gown out of the way to sit as I lift the seat cover with my other hand. Oh, the night gown isn’t trousers, I can’t pull it down. I hitch it out of the way, it’s not thought-through, I’m in a hurry, and I let the bladder do its thing. I don’t quite know what I am expecting, but the feeling is not it. I mean, sure, it feels good to let a full bladder empty, but there’s something else there as well. Now, I paid attention in my sex education lessons in Science back in Year 7, so I have some inkling that certain things happen as well as a list of possible symptoms. Not that I ever expected to feel them, in this case quite literally, in the flesh but here I am and so, huh. I get it. It hurts. And the feeling, well, down there, is like nothing I have ever known. I simply don’t know how to put it into words, because I have no point of reference. Oh, I think, great.

       So, to recap: I appear to have woken up in not my body in not my house living not my life and that body is having a period. Great, just peachy. Again, I paid attention. I’m not that kind of 13 year old and I like to think of myself as practical: pads or the other one. The one that goes in. My mother uses the latter and she stores them in her bedroom, I know because she’s had me go fetch them for her once or twice in the past. Little plastic wrapped bullet things, impossibly small, with the same sort of opening that her cigarette packets have where you grab the red bit and pull. Behind me is the boiler, there’s a bath by the wall to my left, opposite the door, and a frosted window there. A shower and some tiling fills the bit where the boiler cupboard is by the side of the bath, and there’s a sink opposite me with a medicine cabinet above it, small mirrored door, standard issue.

       My business completes, but that other feeling remains and there’s another cramp. The hissing noise I make through the teeth and mouth is louder than I intend and sounds almost self-pitying. Maybe this girl is the same? I don’t know, I don’t recall ever noticing girls being self-pitying. Hey, I do my best to pay attention and I’m hard pushed to recall a time any girl I know has been obviously on a period. Like, I assume they talk to one another about it, but no one talks to me.

       I check, it feels really odd, but a quick wipe (again, I pay attention, I know which way you go to avoid infection) seems to work for now. The noise of the toilet flush mercifully covers me rifling through the cabinet over the sink, that girl’s face is flushed now and I’m certain I can detect an air of panic from the redness in her cheeks and the ways her eyes are moving. I don’t find any plastic wrapped white bullets, for which I’m grateful in one sense, and I retreat back to the room I started off in. Under the window there’s some shelves, mainly books and a couple of teddies; by the desk there’s a wardrobe in pink and white wood, above the bed there’s some shelves with doors on them like cupboards but clearly a DIY job.

       Where would a girl keep things? She seems to have a room that is far too tidy for my tastes, it’s not right that the floor is clear, that the desk seems unused, that the tape racks are tidy or the books look neatly placed. On the plus side, she’s not a barbarian, none of the spines have been abused but I think she’s maybe taken refinement too far. The wardrobe seems curiously uncluttered, very few clothes on the left side with the coat rack and the shelves on the right seem strangely empty. Midway down, in a small drawer, I find what I’m looking for. I think. Cardboard box, already opened, white folded things inside. There’s a bit with backing paper and a bit without. I can work it out, and I already found underwear. It’s over mercifully quickly. It does nothing to deal with that very odd feeling but it does seem to deal with the immediate problem of making sure this body isn’t leaking fluids everywhere. A sudden thought and I check beneath the duvet – there’s a pair of knickers there with a pad inside, scrunched up and near the wall. Ah, I think I see now, well, at least there’s no laundry just… clearing this up. And I am going to describe that in no further detail. In fact, forgive me, but I’m going to skip ahead to breakfast!