Chapter Text
You start your day being rudely awakened by your sister, which is routine. That quickly takes a turn for the worse when you realize your sister looks nothing like she usually does, and the woman who pokes her head into your room at your offended noises is not your mother.
She does, however, bring you pancakes, and tells you to hurry up, Stan, or you’ll miss the bus again .
You don’t know who Stan is, but you already hate him.
*
You end your day exhausted, confused by the city lights and city talk, and fortunately your confusion seems to have manifested in a way earns only stares from the landlady and little else. Your erstwhile parents, if you have any, are away, leaving you to a sister younger than yourself but with a tongue just as biting as Shelly’s. Perhaps you should consider yourself also lucky that you have currently caught a cold, and hiding under blankets that smell like someone else and a ceiling full of stars is acceptable in your state.
At least the guinea pig next to your bed is cute. But even it seems to know you’re not its real owner, and you watch it back into a corner as soon as you reach a hand into its enclosure.
You probably should’ve seen this coming.
Still, before you go to bed, you wonder in your chicken scratch on the notepad next to your bed: Dude, who the fuck are you?
*
Stan’s bedroom is annoying. His bedsheets, his wall decor, his clothes. You suppose you are lucky you didn’t exchange bodies with a girl (though you wonder what it would be like, and then stop wondering because, well), but the fact of the matter is this makes no sense whatsoever.
Normal people don’t just switch bodies after falling asleep, a couple times a week. But there is nothing you can do, and nothing this tiny mountain town can do, to stop it. You put down instructions for him to not fuck up your life in a notebook and head on out to school, ignoring the parents who are still arguing in the kitchen.
Stan Marsh, age 17. That’s your name when you are asleep, trying to navigate the rowdiness of South Park High. Occasionally you eat with Kyle, who you assume Stan has been harboring deep, unrequited feelings for since you met, or Wendy, who seems like the type to want to have nothing to do with you short of a lingering childhood friendship. Both have become noticeably uncomfortable about your change in behavior and your erratic performance on the football field, but really, what is it to you?
(Until the day you wake up in your own body, and there it is in angry red marker all over your desk: stop fucking up my life, dipshit .)
*
Your next-door neighbor, the boy who grins widely and claps you on the back, is Clyde. He’s your best friend here, you knew immediately, from the way he laughs with you when you succeed in making a comment snarky enough for it to sound like Craig, and from the way he stops and asks you, seriously, if there’s something wrong the moment you stop sounding like you perpetually have a stick up your ass.
You fidget a little in your seat, palming the phone you frustratingly can’t open because Craig’s an asshole and refuses to write down his passcode for you. The only thing he ever seems to write in a notebook for Stan revolve around Stripe’s diet.
“Would you believe it,” you tell him—them, the entire lunch table—slowly in that nasally drawl that’s become something skirting familiar over the course of these two weeks, “If I told you I’m not Craig?”
“Agh! I knew it was aliens—“
“It’s not aliens, Tweek,” Token says, shaking his head. “It’s probably crab people.”
They start squabbling, which seems like a normal occurrence. You hadn’t really believed in any of this shit until this all started happening, and by the way Clyde’s throwing you concerned looks while arguing with Jimmy over how to best get a hot alien babe, maybe it’s better to keep your mouth shut after all.
*
It’s strange what being in someone else’s body brings.
South Park is a little town in the middle of fuck-all, Colorado where nothing ever happens, but you were from a small town once, and you too had hated the city. Still hate it, actually, and Stripe and your friends are almost the only bearable part of it.
Stan leaves notes for you almost every time the switch happens, on a notebook he keeps on a particular side of his desk, in his phone (mostly messages telling you to stop cracking his passcode and sending prank texts), and in the form of Wendy, who one day looks you in the eye and says, “I know you’re not Stan.”
You ask her why, hoping Stan’s face is as unreadable as your own. It isn’t.
“You seem miserable,” she says, and something catches inside you, unexpectedly. “But not in his way. You laugh at jokes differently. Kyle won’t ask because you’ll think he’s crazy, but—”
“Yeah, because he is,” you blurt out, turning away. It does nothing to contain the heat in your cheeks. “So are you, Wendy. I’m fine .”
She doesn’t leave convinced, and neither are you.
*
All families are alike, in some way or another. You know this objectively, but from the lens of what happens in your own home, it hadn’t seemed like such.
You’d spent nights crawling through Kyle’s window, or Kenny’s occasionally, back when things were worse and you were young. Now you spend nights wondering whether or not you have it in you to leave this shithole town behind. Go somewhere else, though you don’t know where.
The lights of New York are brighter than the stars, it seems, at first. It’s hard for you to not notice the tone of Craig’s mother’s voice when his father asks, a little too quickly, about girls at school. Your own father has been too drunk and in his own world to notice what you’ve been up to, but the question makes you hesitate and look down, almost instinctively, and slink back into your room.
Maybe this is why Craig’s all taut skin and sharp edges, physically or otherwise.
(You wonder when you go to bed that night if that was all you, but it is a question you don’t pose in ink.
Maybe you are afraid of the answer too.)
*
Stan’s phone is full of surprises.
(If he were smart he’d change his passcode every time you switch, but he isn’t, and in some way you’re grateful for it.)
His background is a grainy picture of a dog which you do not recognize, but is present in family pictures from years ago. You don’t usually do more than go through his contacts list and the messages he leaves you, and in any case there isn’t much there otherwise. A couple of old photos, blurry selfies and an ugly sweater picture probably taken at Christmas. Old grocery lists here and there, reminders for events that happened weeks ago. Several pictures of town, nicer pictures, probably for a school project. You’re starting to become familiar with these ugly buildings despite yourself.
“He’s kind of like you,” you say to Clyde when you’re back in your own body, and he pats your arm in understanding. He’s the only person you’ve told so far, though you suspect Clyde also thinks it’s a dream. But everyone else might as well have noticed from the way Stan seems to have laughed while in your body. You almost wish you could hear it, just once. “But an even bigger idiot.”
“He’s got a better sense of humor than you, that’s for sure.”
“Fuck off.”
You think about sending one of Stan’s pictures to your own phone for potential blackmail purposes, but you never get around to doing it.
*
Craig loves the stars. It’s obvious from the posters in his room, the NASA pins in his drawer, the little telescope propped up against his wall. The traffic outside, as with all traffic in New York City, is shit, and the light pollution make it impossible to see much of anything even when you tried to climb up the stairwell to look at the sky above.
(You miss Colorado then, even though you know soon you will fall asleep and wake up under a million sparkling, familiar lights; and you wonder, because Craig won’t tell you whether or not he’s ever tried climbing up to your roof to see for himself.)
You catch something on television about an upcoming comet that will pass into Earth’s orbit in July, something that happens once every five hundred years. Craig is freaking out your friends, possibly sabotaging your chances at a football scholarship, but not too bad otherwise, you've found—you shake those thoughts out of your head as you tap into his shitty phone.
You can see meteor showers pretty well from Stark’s Pond.
*
“It’ll be the same no matter where you see it.”
That’s what Stan told you, and goddamn him, you thinks as you arch your neck to look up at the sky. You’d taken the train, which you fucking hate, to get to Central Park on the night when it’s supposed to happen.
You wait for two hours, the limit of your patience even for the stars, and the bastard still doesn’t pick up. No such number exists? Wow, Marsh.
You shouldn’t have listened to him. It’s not like you could switch at will, and besides, he’s probably having fun with those assholes right now looking up at a clear sky instead of grey clouds smothered in air pollution. There hadn’t been any indication on any website you looked at that anything of this sort was going to happen tonight.
You don’t even know what brought you here on his words, when you were content with simply trying to ignore everything about the person who you just happened to occasionally switch bodies with.
As your footsteps leave the grassy knoll behind, you have a feeling you’d forgotten to ask something you always wanted to ask.
You wake up the next morning feeling oddly light, like you’ve slept for far too long and feel heavy instead of refreshed. You crawl out of bed; it’s still dark outside, though you could hear the city come alive slowly in the form of an occasional car honk or the flitting wings of a passing pigeon.
Slowly, you walk to your desk with an urge to flip through the notebook there—small and red and unassuming, but full. You open it to the latest page just in time to watch the chicken-scratch insults, once familiar, fade before your eyes.
From the living room you hear the television turn on; it’s your father flipping through morning news channels. A disjointed newscaster’s voice starts talking about the three-year anniversary of a disaster.
The notebook falls to the floor, spilling weeks of ink into nothingness, and despite the July heat outside you suddenly feel very cold.