Ronald, long forced by the cruelties and pranks of adolescent society into developing swift instincts for detecting danger, knew something was wrong far before Rebecca.
His tiny body was shivering.
Ronald had always been a bit pudgy – husky, his mother called him. But he'd never been small or light enough to shiver from a simple cool, morning breeze in the early air. Something had happened to the small ridge of fat he usually had padding and protecting his body from a chill.
Bolting upright in bed, Ronald blinked his eyes to full alert status.
“My spidey sense is definitely tingling,” he said to no one in particular.
His voice was all wrong. But that could wait. At the moment, Ronald was more immediately consumed by the fact that his bedroom was even more wrong!
Everything was pink and girly (not to mention neat and tidy!)
And Ronald himself was laying under some expensive looking, pink and white satin sheets in a big, plush bed that was for more comfy than the one he was accustomed to.
“I'm not me anymore,” he said simply. “And this isn't my bedroom. What, oh just what, is going on here?”
Calmly, Ronald climbed out of bed and began to examine his own body.
“Confirmed,” he said to himself, looking down at a pair of perky, firm breasts and creamy, smooth skin clad beneath a skimpy, white negligee with lace trim. “This is most definitely not my body.”
He began walking around the room, searching for clues to his identity. Passing a wall-mounted mirror, Ronald caught a glimpse of reflection and actually stood still, genuinely surprised.
“Rebecca Ward?” he said, a bit shocked. “Of all the people in the world, I somehow … I mean, I really switched bodies with Rebecca?”
Long a fan of science fiction and fantasy books, films, and television, Ronald had found it easy to swallow that something incredible had happened to him: he had magically swapped bodies with another person. But what Ronald wasn't prepared for was that the person he had switched with would be the gorgeously beautiful yet shallow and superficial Rebecca Ward – the same person Ronald had secretly harbored an unrequited crush on since grade school … and the same person who had always treated him with nothing but cruel, mean-spirited contempt.
“Why am I Rebecca?” he said, softly touching his cheek while still gazing into the mirror.