I walked through town and found exactly no one. It was creepy as hell, almost nerve-wracking. The sun was directly overhead, which didn't stop things from seeming completely out of whack. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming, but of course I wasn't. That only made perfect sense.

I passed by cookie-cutter houses with minor differences. One house had a slightly different porch railing, another was yellow instead of blue, a third had an alternate slope to its roof. Cars were parked in front of every garage, running the full gamut from sports cars to sedans to SUVs to pickup trucks. If there was room for a semi cab, I bet I would have seen one of those.

I walked up to one house and peeked in the window. I couldn't see anyone inside, but what I could see looked an awful lot like my house. I recognized my mom's personal room style, with the chairs laid out almost theater-like in two rows facing the TV. Mom had this rule that if the family were sitting together watching TV, we shouldn't actually talk until what we were watching was over. It was annoying, which was likely why we always watched TV in our rooms, my siblings and I.

I walked over to the door and turned the knob. It opened easily, and bathed the room in light from outside. Almost immediately, the lamps turned on by themselves, like opening the door was a cue they'd been waiting for. The room was unmistakably the same as the family room at home, including the pictures on the wall.

The only problem was that I wasn't in any of the pictures.

I picked up the one that sat on the cabinet on the wall across from the front window. It was a party shot of me, my little brother and my older sister. Becca was two years older than me, and took after Mom to the point she looked like a clone. Same round face, same sandy blonde hair, same bright blue eyes. Travis was just under a year younger than me and looked like a male twin to Becca, though he kept his hair in a stupid 90s boy band look that most had hoped died out in the 90s.

The third person in the picture wasn't me, however. It was a girl that looked like me, and thus looked like Dad somewhat. She had short brown hair and a cute smile that resembled the one my sister wore all the time. Her eyes had that same blue-green, almost luminescent look that mine did, which people frequently told me would draw their attention.

All over the room, any picture that used to have me in it now featured this girl. Why? Who was this girl and why had she replaced me? She looked too much like my parents to be adopted, but I didn't have a twin sister and either way, none of the pictures in this house showed me, just this girl. What was going on?

I walked down the hallway and peeked in each of the rooms. On the ground floor, there were four rooms plus one of three bathrooms. The master bedroom, where my parents slept, had its own bathroom, and that was on the second floor. The third bathroom was in the basement.

On the west side of the house was Becca's room, and it looked just as grungy and out of order as it always had. She was never the tidiest person, and she and Mom had had more than a few arguments over cleaning her room. She liked to party and naturally that meant that she'd come home wasted and usually dragging a guy with her.

On the east side of the house sat Travis's immaculate bedroom, where not one single thing was out of place or even at the wrong angle. He was anal, and quite often in the annoying sense of the word, but he was also usually the first to make a joke about himself. He had such a good sense of humor that you couldn't help but like him despite his annoying tendencies.

There were two other rooms in the hallway. On Becca's side was Dad's office. He was a stay-at-home guy, an author of (his own words) cheap horror fiction that provided an alternative to Stephen King or Dean Koontz. He also did some freelance work for the local paper, but not often anymore. The room was very basic, with a desk, a chair, a lamp, a couch and a TV on the wall across from the desk.

On Travis's side, Mom's office was much more lively, with potted plants and wallpaper that made the room look like some cartoonish garden. Mom was a lawyer, and thus her office was full of legal books and non-fiction books about trials and assaults. Mom was also a 90s teen, and had been quite the hardcore gamer back then and never really dropped the habit, resulting in her having her own gaming PC that rivaled most streamers' supposedly powerful rigs.

The second floor was just the master bedroom. There wasn't much to say about that, but a brief glance at the photos of my siblings and I in the master bedroom once again showed that the strange girl had replaced me.

It was the same in Becca and Travis's room, too. Becca kept a photo album that was just as disorganized as she was, and I found photographs of this girl where there used to be photos of me. A picture of Becca and I at the beach now showed Becca with her arm around this girl's waist as they both flashed the camera a peace sign. Travis had a framed photo of all three of us on his desk, from when we were younger. He was blowing out candles on his birthday cake, I was sitting off to the side with a kid's guitar and Becca was furious at us because we'd dumped her slice of cake all over her then-favorite dress. Most of that was the same in this new altered photo, except that the girl replacing me was just holding her guitar while laughing at Becca.

I stopped in front of the stairway down to the basement. There was still one bedroom left, down there. I almost didn't want to see it, but I needed to see just how much this girl had infiltrated and stolen my life in this weird place. I took each step slowly, and I heard each stair riser creak loudly and annoyingly.

The basement was separated into three spaces. The open space that the stairway opened into was where the washer and dryer were. The door in the back and to the left was the third bathroom, that really only one person in the house used unless there was little other choice. The door in the back on the right was the one I was the most concerned about.

When I first moved into the room in the basement, I'd put a poster for X-Men Origins: Wolverine on the door to label it as my bedroom. The poster was still there, but it wasn't alone anymore. On the upper left and lower right corners were flower stickers that I could only assume were put up there when this girl was younger. Slapped over the poster itself was a sticker that read Keep Out! and another underneath that was No Boys Allowed!. I was terrified of what I would find in that room. This wouldn't be my bedroom, no, this would be the bedroom of a sixteen year old girl that had replaced me.

I felt every air particle hit me as I reached for the doorknob, just about to break the rule on the door. I turned the knob and opened the door slowly, almost hesitantly. As I pushed the door inward and exposed the bedroom to the outside world, I found...

...that the room didn't look much different from mine at all. Yes, there were feminine things placed haphazardly around the whole thing, from a small make-up kit on the dresser to some magazines on the floor that I would never once consider reading, but the bulk of the room looked exactly as it always did. This girl, whoever she was, shared attributes of my siblings just as I did. The place wasn't a mess, but wasn't tidy. The clothes in her dresser and closet were clearly meant for a girl who liked to show off her assets, but none of it was particularly girly. If I had to tag her in any specific way, I'd say she was a tomboy.

"Taylor, hurry up!" I heard my mom's voice from upstairs. Strange, I hadn't seen her anywhere, or anybody else for that matter. The place had been deserted when I walked through it. Also strange in that she was calling my name, but there wasn't any proof that I even existed in this whatever it was.

That was when I put the pieces together. She wasn't calling for me. Taylor could be a boy's name, yes, but it was also just as if not more commonly a girl's name.

And there was a girl here who held every aspect of my life.

I hadn't seen her there when I'd walked in the room, and I wasn't quite sure I really was seeing her. She was translucent, almost ghost-like, but undeniably the girl I'd seen in the photos around the house. She walked into the room through the door I didn't remember closing.

She rummaged around in her closet, looking for school books, it seemed. Just like me, Girl-Taylor kept her books underneath a laundry basket with dirty clothes overflowing out of it. A lot of her clothes looked similar to mine, though naturally there were added things like bras and skirts and the occasional dress. At one point, she dropped a book on her foot and shouted something...

But I heard nothing.

I hadn't heard any noises since Girl-Taylor's mother called her upstairs. Nothing from the closet, where the laundry basket had toppled over and dumped dirty laundry all over the floor, nothing from when she dropped the book, not even her presumably loud cursing. It was like I'd gone deaf for no reason at all.

But despite the lack of sounds, I could still see Taylor as she scrambled to collect her things and finish getting dressed. I'd experienced this same scenario a dozen times myself, though I was never wearing Victoria's Secret at the time. She hurriedly pulled a pair of jeans off a hanger and fought to pull them on. Just like I had the day before, she fell flat on her ass just shortly after getting her left leg in the right pant leg. That was so much funnier to watch than experience.

I saw many similarities between Taylor and myself, and not just our actions. She was, in every way, my female clone. Same slight frame, same baby face (though it looked more natural on her), same scars along her left arm from that time I accidentally got my arm caught against a circular saw and lost an alarming amount of blood. It was just her gender that differed from mine.

She shouted something at her mother upstairs. I could barely make out what she was saying by reading her lips, something like Just about! or maybe something similar. She still didn't have a shirt on, though she was running through what was hanging in her closet. She threw more on the floor than she considered wearing.

Finally, she grabbed something off a hanger and walked over to the full length mirror that now hung on the wall opposite where my bed was in my room. I'd missed that in my examination of the room. She held the shirt up to herself as she looked in the mirror, a critical look in her eye. "Crap," she said, and this time I could only just hear the word. My hearing must've finally been coming back. She threw the shirt back at her closet and grabbed another that she'd discarded.

Seconds later, a nearly translucent Becca burst into the room. I could hear her speaking, but she sounded so far away. ”What's taking so long?” she asked.

Taylor sounded louder now. “I just... don't really know what to wear.”

Becca grabbed a random shirt from Taylor's closet. ”How about this one?”

Taylor shook her head. “It doesn't feel... right, y'know?”

”You're taking this too seriously. C'mon, it's just a normal day, you're just going to school, remember that.”

Taylor gave Becca this look of pure disbelief. “It's not just a normal day!”

Becca smirked, then grabbed a different shirt. “Well,” she sounded closer now, too, “you'd better put a shirt on or the boys will love you.”

Taylor looked surprised, then flush. “That's... don't say crap like that, please...”

Becca put her arm around Taylor's shoulder. “Just remember, you treat this like it's nothing and it'll be nothing. Let the world see Confident Taylor, the girl who proved them all wrong.”

Taylor didn't look enthusiastic. “What if I don't know how to be Confident Taylor?”

Becca glared. “You've been Confident Taylor your whole life, you just didn't know it.” She took the shirt she had handed Taylor and pulled it down over the girl's head, but not too far. “Now, get a shirt on and let's get going, understood?”

Taylor said, “Okay...” in a defeated tone of voice.

I couldn't help but laugh at the whole situation. It was almost like watching a sitcom while on the set and the actresses were directed to ignore me, though I honestly didn't think either Becca or Taylor could see me. It was so odd, watching Becca with a little sister instead of with me. The two of us got along, but there was something... different about the relationship I saw between those two.

My amusement at the two sisters' interaction didn't change the fact that I was watching an alternate version of myself, a version of myself that seemed so comfortable and yet so anxious. Taylor and I weren't much different, and yet she seemed so much more at ease than I ever did. I almost wished I could ask her what her secret was, but at the same time, I really wanted to get back to my world.

I watched Taylor finish putting her shirt on and then give herself a once over in the mirror. She looked as though she still wasn't happy with Becca's choice in shirt for her, but accepted defeat and kept it on. She brushed some hair away from her eyes, then let out an exhausted sigh.

"You're gonna make it through this."

I wasn't sure why she was talking to herself, but it was something I did every now and again, as well.

"I'm not talking to myself, I'm talking to you."

I blinked twice.

She turned around and looked directly at me. Her eyes followed me when I moved, stayed on me as I tried to walk past her. She could actually see me, and that felt disconcerting.

"Yeah, tell me about it," she said in an amused tone. She spun back around and faced the mirror again. "Take a good look. This is what'll happen when you start being honest with yourself."

I took a step forward. "What?" I asked, suddenly aware I had a voice. I hadn't said word one the entire time I'd been wandering around this world.

She shook her head. "It's not a world. At least, not one anyone would want to stay in. This is you, Taylor." She pointed to her head. "This is up here." She reached for the make-up kit on her dresser and pulled out a tube of lipstick. "This is your imagination, putting together what it would be if you just admitted to yourself that you've never been a boy."

"Whuh..."

She applied the bright blue shade to her lips. "Oh, you look like a boy, you've tried to act like a boy, but the both of us know it's not who you are." She turned back around. "Take a closer look."

I did as she suggested and realized it almost immediately. I'd recognized everything of myself in Girl-Taylor for a very good reason: Girl-Taylor was a boy. A sixteen year old boy, dressed in girl clothes and having applied make-up to smooth out her face a bit. I glanced at her chest and realized she didn't actually have a bust at all, just the illusion of one thanks to the bra she was wearing. I didn't take a look toward her crotch because I knew exactly what I'd find. The thought made her smirk.

"You're not wrong." She folded her arms over her chest. "This is you, Taylor. You know it is. You've been living as something you're not, someone you're not, for so long that you couldn't even recognize it right away."

As much as I wasn't sure I could admit it, she wasn't wrong. For so long, probably going back to my earliest memories, something had been wrong about me. Like every kid, I'd tried to believe it was just that I was misunderstood by everyone around me, everyone except my family. That phase didn't last very long, but the feelings did. Eventually, I realized that the one who misunderstood me was me. That who I was and who I should be were two different things.

But none of that explained the differences in the photos, in my room. If this was all just my imagination and the girl in front of me was how I wanted to see myself, why were other things different?

She shrugged. "Your head, not mine. Well, okay, I guess it really is, but you get what I mean. You're probably seeing pictures of the life you would have had if you'd been born right." She stepped right in front of me and grabbed my shoulders. "Please, though, when you wake up... do what's right. Be the Taylor that's confident in herself that Becca says you are."

I felt an unease in my stomach. "Be Confident Taylor..."

She nodded.

I looked her in the eyes. "What if I don't know how to be Confident Taylor?"

I saw a tear slide down her cheek. “You've been Confident Taylor your whole life. You just didn't know it." She pulled me in for a hug, the kind of hug that only sisters know.

I awoke in my bedroom, stripped of what few things had made it Girl-Taylor's bedroom. Things that I fully intended to bring back as soon as possible. Starting, most likely, with that mirror. I wanted to have something I could use to see my eventual progress.

I took a shower, dried off, got ready for my big moment. It was Saturday, so everybody would be home for a good couple hours at least. I wanted to just burst out there and let it out immediately, but I knew this wasn't something I could take lightly. I wasn't even sure how to break it to them calmly, so just shouting it at them probably wouldn't be a smart idea.

I walked upstairs and made my way to the kitchen, where Becca and Travis were already sitting there, talking to each other at the dinner table. Dad wandered into the room next and patted me on the back for some reason. He didn't know what I was going to do now, did he? No, there was no way for him to know, so of course he didn't. Finally, Mom walked into the kitchen, still wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair with a towel.

"Hey," Travis said, "what's up with you?"

Be Confident Taylor, I told myself. Or maybe Imagination Becca had said it to me, I didn't really know. The point was that I needed to do this, because everybody deserved to know who I really was.

I cleared my throat. My voice was shaky as I said, "I've got something I've been meaning to tell you for a really, really long time..."