[7:52 PM] Kat: Hey sorry running late tonight, be there in twenty

[8:18 PM] Kat: Here

[8:20 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[8:25 PM] Kat: Dude its fucking raining out here

[8:27 PM] Kat: (GIF meme of man pulling at gate, screaming “LET ME IN”)

[8:40 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[8:40 PM] Kat: Dude you good?

[8:42 PM] Kat: ???

[8:48 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[8:48 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[8:49 PM] Kat: Wtf is going on Allie, are you okay??

[8:49 PM] Kat: Everyone’s here outside

[8:54 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[8:55 PM] Kat: We’re going to Fer’s place

[8:55 PM] Kat: Call us ASAP

[8:55 PM] Fer: I hope you’re alright, Allie. We’re going to my flat since we can’t get ahold of you. Call one of us when you get this.

[9:03 PM] Missed call from Jess Parker

[9:03 PM] Jess: Is something going on? Please tell us that you’re safe. We’re worried about you.

[9:32 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[10:11 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[10:33 PM] Tim: Hoping everything’s good and you just forgot… Call me

[11:01 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[11:02 PM] Kat: Did you block me

[11:02 PM] Missed call from David Olson

[11:03 PM] Missed call from Tim Barnes

[11:03 PM] Missed call from David Olson

[11:03 PM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[11:03 PM] Missed call from Fer Martinez

[11:04 PM] Missed call from Fer Martinez

[11:04 PM] Kat: Dude I hope you’re fuckin okay jesus

[12:14 AM] Kat: Idk what to do here

[12:15 AM] Kat: If we haven’t heard from you tomorrow morning we’re calling the cops

[3:32 AM] Kat: I can’t fucking sleep

[3:32 AM] Kat: Please be okay

[6:55 AM] Kat: Fuck

[8:43 AM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[8:43 AM] Kat: Please fucking say something

[9:48 AM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[9:49 AM] Missed call from Kat Murray

[10:01 AM] Kat: We called the police

Matt locked the phone and wiped away his tears. There were more notifications, but he couldn’t bear to continue. The bathroom was fogging up from the hot shower that had been running for the past ten minutes without him so much as looking in its direction. He had meant to use it as white noise to clear the noise in his head, but it hadn’t helped.

The only tie to his world he had now was the data stored offline on his phone.

It was more than he’d had that morning, but since then, he’d come so close.

Talked with his Kat.

And then Amber disappeared.

Whatever the hell had happened outside, it had taken not only his only connection to his original world, but also his twin sister from this one.

Now, as before, he was left with nothing but memories.

* * *

Matt spun around on the sidewalk and faced back towards the dumpsters. He grit his teeth and dashed towards the puddle, jumping off the curb in an effort to recreate his fall not 24 hours prior.

Of course, that had been a fall, and this was a jump.

Too late, Matt realized that in his desperation, he’d launched himself too far from the sidewalk and his head was now hurtling towards the bottom of the dumpster pedestal.

He closed his eyes and braced himself for impact, but no matter what he did, he knew that this was gonna hurt.

Suddenly, he crashed into something much softer than he was expecting. It threw him off course, and he ended up twisting off to the side and only grazing his wrists on the edge of the foundation as most of his body plopped into the muddy water. It stung, but he knew it was minor damage compared to what he had been bracing himself for.

“God, ow, fuck!” He opened his eyes, planning to survey the damage, but was instead just in time to see the parking lot and alleyway engulfed in a bright yellow light, as if a flash of lightning was extended to an entire second. “What the hell?!”

Then, in complete opposition to how it had begun, the brightness suddenly disappeared with a pop from above, almost inaudible over the heavy rain. The parking lot was dark once again. Darker than it had been previously, even.

“Shit, was that the damn streetlamp? What the actual fuck just happened? Where's Amber?!” Kat yelled, struggling to make herself audible. Matt didn’t even process what was being yelled, instead getting to his feet and whipping his phone out from his pocket, where he’d left it with the screen still on.

The video call was frozen, with a loading circle stuck on Kat’s otherworldly face.

No signal, once again.

Matt gripped his phone hard enough for his fingers to discolor and started waving it around every which way. “God damn it, no!” He held it as close as he dared to the surface of the puddle. “Kat! Come back! Come back, damn it, fuck!” He stomped on the ground, trying to will the earth to open up underneath him. “Give her back! Take me back! God fucking damn it, don’t leave me!” With a cry of anguish, he collapsed onto his knees.

Tears began to stream down his face, mixing with the torrent drenching his hair and dripping from his chin. Suddenly, he heard the splashing of water before being enveloped in a hug.

“Matt, it… it’s gonna be okay…” Kat squeezed him tighter. “I dunno how yet, but you’re going back home, bud. We’ll find a way, alright?”

Matt sniffled. “She… she’s gone… I had one fucking connection and it’s gone…”

He felt Kat stiffen through her hug. “Gone? What do you mean…? Do you know what happened to Amber?”

Matt pulled his head out of the embrace to look at Kat's face, makeup now fully smeared all over. “…Amber? I was talking about other-you…” He looked around the dark alley, then towards the building. “Amber was over there with you, right?”

“She was, until she jumped in and tried to save you from a massive fuckin’ concussion. Then like… the alleyway lit up bright yellow, the streetlight exploded, and she just… fucking vanished into thin air or something!”

He stared at her.

“Vanished? Like… poof?”

“Yeah, like one moment she was there, then the yellow flash happened, and then she wasn’t!”

“Or maybe…” Matt looked down at the puddle they were both standing in. “Maybe she fell.”

Kat’s eyes shot wide open. “Shit, you don’t think…”

“Yeah.” It took all Matt had to not break down again. “I think she took my exit.”

* * *

Matt sniffled and stood up from where he had been sitting on the toilet. The whole bathroom was a mess of muddy footprints and leftover vomit from the day’s activities, and he figured he’d have to clean it up for Amber’s sake later. For now, he tried to focus on getting himself into the shower and taking his mind off the interdimensional mess between himself and Amber.

In the back of his mind, though, he couldn’t help but think back to what Jessica had told them earlier. It was going to be nearly impossible for them to return to their original worlds in their new bodies and still be recognized as themselves. As the situation stood, they could both stay where they were and simply live each other's lives, as Jess had suggested. He really hoped it didn't come to that, though. Even though he was technically Amber's counterpart and they'd taken very similar paths in life up to this point, it wouldn't be the same. It would be her family, her friends, her life he would be taking over. Amber was probably having similar feelings over in his world. He didn’t belong here, and she didn’t belong there.

Then another thought made his veins run cold with ice.

What if I can’t get back while in this body? What if that’s why it didn’t let me through and took Amber instead?

His heart threatened to break out of his chest. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, nauseous.

What if we have to switch back for us to get home?

His hands were shaking and his breathing was starting to become rough and ragged, and he realized he was falling into another panic attack.

He flashed back to when Amber helped him through the one earlier that day.

He closed his eyes, then took a deep breath in.

In, and out… In, out. Breathe. It’s okay. We’ll figure this out. We don’t know anything yet. Jess will come back. Just get through this and it’ll all work out.

He didn’t entirely believe his own words, but he held onto them with all the strength he could muster and just kept breathing. Once it became clear the attack was subsiding, he gave one last big exhale and pulled back the shower curtain to step in and finally get clean.

It’ll all work out.

* * *

Matt exited the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. It had taken a bit for him to realize it didn’t need to go around his chest anymore after trying and failing to keep it held in place in the usual manner. It still felt a bit foreign, leaving his chest exposed to the air, but definitely in a good way. He opened the door to the living room and poked his head in to see Kat sitting on the futon, buried in her phone.

“Hey, uh, Kat, where does Amber keep her undies?”

Without looking up, Kat answered, “In the drawers on the left wall of the closet, right above where you shoved your phone into-” Kat’s eyes widened as she looked up from her phone at him, mouth contorting into a wince. Matt felt a pang of homesickness at her words but took a deep breath and shoved it back down.

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” He gave her his best attempt at a steady smile, though he was never much good at faking those. “Right now, we just gotta focus on figuring out how to get Amber and I back to where we belong. Well, when Jess rejoins us with her big science brain, anyway. She’ll totally know what to do, ‘cause frankly, I don’t.”

“Yeah, totally…” Kat was unconvinced. She bit her lip and went back to her phone, and Matt wondered what she was so focused on. He decided that the towel would work fine to cover him up for now and wandered over to the couch, sitting down next to the concerned raven-haired girl.

He had to stifle a laugh when he realized she was on some webpage that looked like it hadn’t been updated since the late ‘90s, with a tiled mosaic background, Times New Roman font, and animated GIFs littering the screen. It purported itself to be the home of research on ‘inter-plane travel phenomena’ and seemingly documented cases of travelers claiming to be from other worlds, differing from this one by magnitudes ranging from the Berenstain Bears being written as the Berenstein Bears, to Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the ‘90s, to the US still being a part of the British Empire, all the way to nearly the entire world being lost to nuclear war in the ‘40s.

“What are you doing on some crackpot Mandela Effect website?” Matt asked, perhaps a little derisively. “You know that stuff’s bogus, right?”

“Okay, yeah, most of it, sure… But like, check this out!” She switched tabs to another page she had open from the site, which purported to document the claims of an ‘Edgar Lund’. Apparently, in 2003, he fell into a puddle created by a clogged sewer grate near his home and appeared in a world where he didn’t exist. Details about the actual dimension-hopping were sparse, but the page described various differences he encountered from his own world, such as Apple going bankrupt in the ‘90s instead of being bailed out by Microsoft, and Al Gore winning the 2000 presidential election. They certainly seemed like too big of changes to be marked down as simple ‘Mandela Effect’-type memory lapses, and the whole ‘falling into puddle of water’ thing was way too similar to be coincidence.

“Holy shit…” Matt whispered.

“I know, right?” Kat responded, switching back to the tab she was on previously. “I’ve been trying to dig up some more details about this Edgar guy, see if he talked more about what he thinks happened, but I can’t find any fucking info anywhere else online. I was also trying to find other similar incidents on the site, but this is really the only thing that even comes close to what happened with you.” She squinted at the tiny text on her screen; the site was not formatted for anything other than 800x600 displays using Internet Explorer. “Think we could use your computer to keep researching? I’m getting another fuckin’ headache just trying to focus on this.”

Matt gave her a confused look. “…It’s Amber’s, not mine, but I can try to guess her PIN?”

“Right, yeah, sorry…” Kat cringed. “We’re alone in her place, and you look and sound just like how she used to, can you blame me?”

“Considering what we’re currently discussing… yeah, a little.”

The two moved over to the bedroom, where Matt sat at Amber’s computer while Kat sat behind him on her bed. When he jiggled the mouse to wake the computer, they were greeted by Matt’s face paired with Amber’s deadname, and both winced. Wanting to dismiss it quickly, Matt punched in the first PIN he could think of, the one he used for his computer back home, and it worked first try.

“We’re in,” Matt said, unable (and unwilling) to resist saying that in a stereotypical ‘movie hacker’ impression. Kat snorted.

Surprisingly, Amber’s computer was more different from his own than he was expecting once he got to the desktop. The wallpaper and color scheme were different, of course, but he had expected Amber’s file organization to be more like his own mostly-organized system, not this random mess of ‘test5.png’, ‘askdlfhas.txt’, and ‘Document1_FINAL_ACTUAL.docx’-type filenames just scattershot over the entirety of the desktop.

Guess her computer’s the one place she feels she can be messy…

Discord popped open automatically and logged into an account yet again containing Amber’s deadname. It reminded Matt of just how many accounts he would have to change for himself once he got back.

“I’m sending the link to Amber’s Discord,” Kat said, right as he heard the telltale boo-doot of a new message arriving. Trying his best to ignore any of Amber’s message history with Kat, he clicked on the link.

The page describing Edgar’s fall into this world loaded really quickly, as expected for Web 1.0. He scanned the entire thing a few times, hoping to find something that Kat had missed, but there was really almost no information about the actual incident; it was more about the differences between their worlds and how Edgar was having trouble adapting. The short ‘article’, if one could even call it that, ended with a brief mention of Edgar’s continued attempts to pass between worlds again, and well-wishes for his safe travel. The publish date for the page was in late 2005, with no updates since then, so who knows if he’d been successful. If he had, it’s not like they would ever know about it, anyway. Still, this was their best lead yet, so Matt knew they had to keep digging.

That’s when he saw something that it had been easy to overlook on Kat’s phone: a small link in the footer that purported to connect to a ‘Sources’ page. He clicked on it and found a disorganized mess of links to various ancient web forums and mailing list archives, with no way to know where any article in particular got its specific info from. Worse still, when he tried clicking on some of the links, they were nearly all broken, with only one linking to a working site that still hosted an old bulletin board style forum.

“Shit… nice find, but now what?” Kat had leaned over to look at the monitor, but flopped back onto the bed upon seeing all the broken links.

“Now…” Matt opened a new tab and pointed it at the site of Paparazzi Pizza, his favorite local pizza joint. “We’re gonna get some pizza and settle in for a night of Internet Archive trawling, and I’m going to finally wear Amber’s goddamn suit because I deserve to enjoy myself at least a little after everything today.”

Kat smiled. “Hey, might be too formal for pizza or whatever, but like… who fuckin’ cares? Not me, not you, and definitely not Amber.” Then her smile turned into a lopsided grin. “Oh and hey, don’t be afraid to do a little self-investigation, if ya know what I mean? It's your body now, after all.” She winked in an exaggerated fashion, and Matt gave her a look that he hoped expressed that he was not impressed. He took this awkward opportunity to get up from the seat and duck into the closet, with Kat immediately taking over the PC in his wake.

He finally found the suit hanging at the very back, enclosed inside a protective cover. He picked out a silvery-gray dress shirt to go with it but wasn’t able to track down a tie; he didn’t know how to tie one yet anyway, so no big deal. Dress socks were in one of the drawers below the boxer-briefs, and he picked out a pair with purple diamonds. Amber’s guess about being a bit too big for the suit was correct, but thankfully it was only a little tight in certain places on him, at least as long as he didn’t try to stretch his arms all the way forward. There was no mirror in the closet, so he went to the bathroom to get a look at his upper half in the mirror there.

His hair was a bit of a mess, and the suit jacket bulged out a bit too much in the stomach area, but other than that… he looked damn good. He started to mess with his hair a bit, trying to make it settle down into something more purposely styled without having any product on hand, and as he did, he thought back to his time at prom a few years ago.

Having been forced to go in a stupid-ass fancy-ass dress, he couldn’t help but look on at the guys in their nice suits with envy. At least that’s what he realized it was now; at the time, he just got really frustrated and confused about his sexuality all over again, having thought he had put this internal debate to rest years prior. And now, he was relieved that he finally had the answer: his gender was what was stopping him from ever having been comfortable in a ‘straight’ relationship in the past.

He frowned.

Wait, am I even attracted to women? Or was that just me wanting to be gay in any way I could?

Then he remembered how he felt about Kat, and his automatic physiological responses answered that for him.

Yup, so… pretty sure I’m bi, then. Neato.

He gave the mirror one last smile before exiting the bathroom. Kat was intently focused on the screen when he reentered the bedroom, so he cleared his throat and struck a pose, which caught her attention.

“Damn, Matt, lookin’ sharp!” Kat wolf whistled at him, which made him blush. “Amber’s old body really suits ya!”

Matt groaned reflexively.

“Oh yeah, half Hawaiian, half veggie lover’s is mine and Amber’s usual order, you good with that?” Kat asked, turning back to the screen.

Matt shrugged. “More of a meat lover’s guy myself, personally. And who the fuck gets pineapple on a pizza?”

“Damn, if I didn’t already know y’all two were otherworldly clones, that would have totally thrown me off right there. Because Amber fuckin’ lives for that sweet and salty mixture.”

Matt made a face. “Gross. Can I disown her? Is that allowed?”

A few clicks later, the order was modified and placed, and Kat swiveled the chair around to face Matt once again. “Seriously dude, you really rock the shit out of all that. I’ve seen photos of high school Amber wearing that thing, and even though it fit her better physically, you fit it better… attitudinally? If that’s a word? Like you fuckin’ own that shit, you look confident and like you’re actually enjoying yourself, whereas Amber just wanted to damn near cringe herself out of existence in nearly every photo I saw. And now it makes sense.”

Matt blushed a little and smiled, feeling his stomach fill with warm and fuzzy euphoria. “As it turns out, people don’t want to be forced to present as a gender they’re not.”

Kat chuckled a bit, then started lazily spinning herself around in the swivel chair. “You know, I don’t really get get why the shit anyone would want to be a guy, but… I think I kinda understand it a bit now, after being stuck in Amber's old body – I guess we should just call that your body now? – for a couple minutes today. Even just that short stint was enough to make me feel uncomfortable, like I put on the wrong size top and nothing fit right and everyone was trying to tell me I look good but what the fuck does that matter if it makes me feel like ass? And y’all have been feeling that shitty your whole lives? Like… fuck, dude.” She stopped spinning and leaned back in the chair, hands clasped behind her head. “If we could give all transphobes just a taste of dysphoria, like have them stuck as the wrong gender for a week, then I fuckin’ bet there would be no more transphobes anymore.”

“People would still find ways to rationalize things away and be shitty no matter what,” Matt responded with a sigh. “Hopefully it would lead to less shittiness overall, though. Lots of people are just ignorant, not malicious. Although…” He winced at memories of how he’d acted in the past. “Some of those malicious people act out of self-hatred they're ignorant of.”

“We’ve all got shit to work out, I guess. Some things shittier than others. For what it’s worth, I think we worked out a lot of shit today, and not all of it in the bathroom. Now…” She clapped her hands onto her legs and stood up.

“Now to dive into the archives!” Matt grinned.

“No, now can you pretty please drive me to my place so I can get showered and changed? I feel gross as shit.”