She reached out and took a teddy bear from a shelf. Allie secretly loved fluffy things, but being a nonfluffy girl, she never kept her stuffed animals the way nature intended; she always tweaked them somehow. This one was “Winnie the Punk,” with Sharpie-drawn tattoos on his fur, and a safety pin through his eyebrow. The bear seemed larger than she remembered, but then she realized that it wasn’t larger, she was just in a smaller body.

Allie clutched the bear to her chest, and felt herself becoming emotional. She blamed it on the boy’s physiology— after all, little kids are quick to turn on the waterworks—but who was she kidding? These tears were all hers. She sat down, and let the tears flow gently and quietly.

Why had she come back here? Did she really think she could just walk into her parents house in the body of this boy, and talk to them? And yet she was already angling on ways to return tomorrow—perhaps in the body of someone selling alarm systems. Would that be her life now? Returning each day in a different body, pretending to be someone else, just so she could be near her parents?

She curled up on the bed clutching the bear—a remnant of a life that was lost. Then something happened that she wasn’t expecting. She should have realized it could happen, because, after all, it was the middle of the night, and she was in the body of a small, exhausted child. As she held tightly on to the bear, her thoughts began to swim together, and in an instant, without warning, Allie fell asleep.

Allie awoke at 7:45 in the morning.

Unfortunately the boy she was skinjacking had woken up at 7:41. It’s amazing what can happen within the span of four minutes.

“It’s all right, don’t worry—it will all be all right. We’ll get you back home.”

It was her mother’s voice. She was in her mother’s arms. They were rocking back and forth. She was out of breath, her vision was blurry, her chest was heaving, and a God-awful wailing sound was coming out of her. Allie’s whole body was shivering with the force of her own sobs. What was going on here? Where was she? Who was she?

“I wanna go home,” she heard a child’s voice say. It was all nasal and stuffy so it came out “I wadda go hobe.” Then she realized it was her own mouth speaking those words. All at once it came back to her—she was in the body of a boy she had skinjacked. She was in her parents’ home, in her own room. Her mother was holding her, her father was standing nearby, phone in hand.