A few days earlier…

The worst part of the day is when I wake up, slink over to the bathroom, and see myself looking back at me in the mirror. Someday, I thought, when the world is fair, I’ll wake up and see him in the mirror, instead of me. Until then, I’d have to make do.

I hopped in the shower, braced myself, and set the water as cold as it would go. My heartbeat rose, and my breathing quickened, but I just managed not to scream when the water hit me. I hated cold showers. Despised them, in fact, but it was part of the routine. He took cold showers, after all. I scrubbed myself with the same soap brand he used, and used the same shampoo, even though I hated the smell and it made my head itch.

When I got out of the shower, I dried myself off, wrapped the towel around my waist, and continued the ritual. I pulled a small box out from a drawer, hidden beneath some old clothes. I had previously stored it under the bed, but he started sleeping on the ground, so I had to move it. I also had to start sleeping on the ground, naturally. My back was still adjusting. I unlocked the latch, and pulled out my supplies.

Pictures of him. Twelve, to be exact. Each one representative of a different feature which would need to be corrected. There were also notes. “Say good morning before noon, and say hello after.” “Laugh at your own jokes.” “Always be smiling.” They were important reminders.

I arranged my references and notes around the outside of the bathroom mirror, so that they surrounded my own, inferior image.

First, my hair. I had to get to it before it dried too much. He didn’t worry about his hair, wore it in a sort of perpetual bedhead style that made him look somewhere between a homeless person and a male model. It took me twenty minutes of styling to achieve the same look. I was getting faster.

Then came skin care. Again, he wasn’t the type to use any sort of product, but I had slightly worse skin than he did, and needed to soften up to get the look right.

I also slipped in a pair of contact lenses. My vision was fine - so was his - but his eyes were a slightly brighter shade of blue. A simple fix.

After that, I pulled out my phone, punched in my password, opened up a disguised app, punched in another password, and started playing my morning playlist, which I had made personally. It was full of shitty shoegaze songs - his favorite genre - over which I had edited in recordings of his voice. You can never hear the lyrics in those songs anyway, so I saw it as an improvement. As I worked, I spoke along with the words, trying to match his tone, intonation, accent, pronunciation, everything.

I applied his brand of deodorant, and brushed my teeth with the same brand of toothpaste. I didn’t know which details were important, and which details weren’t, so I didn’t take any unnecessary risks.

Then came clothes. I picked out a muted-blue button-up shirt, and a dark pair of jeans that was nearly black. He would be wearing the green shirt today, I predicted. It used to be, on occasion, that we would end up wearing the exact same outfit, which was much too suspicious, but I had recently noticed that he seemed to cycle through his clothes one after another, in seemingly the same order, so I was testing that theory and trying to stay on the opposite side of the cycle. He hadn’t noticed this about himself - it was something he did subconsciously. But I noticed.

When that was done, I returned to the mirror and practiced my expressions. The smile. The eyebrow raise. The scrunching of the face. He was a very expressive man, and I was not, by nature, so this step took the longest. Then, I paused the playlist.

Finally, the affirmations.

“You are Tom. You are happy. You are successful. You are effective. Things work out for you, and always will work out for you. You are optimistic. You see the bright side in everything. You are special. You are Tom.”

I said the words aloud, over and over again until I almost believed them.

I also did one thing that was not part of the plan. I did it every day, but still, it wasn’t part of the plan, wasn’t part of him. I took the final picture out of the box.

It was a photograph that I had printed out. To the right was the edge of a large wooden house - two stories, spacious but still cozy. You could just see the chimney in frame, and just looking at it gave me visions of snowy days spent indoors around the fireplace, sipping hot cocoa and reading. But it wasn’t snowing at the time of the picture. In the left two-thirds of the image, a field of flowers was blooming. Behind them, far off in the distance, a wall of trees. Above that, a precious blue sky.

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Right in the middle, there were people. Children, running out into the field of flowers. I could practically hear them, laughing and yelling and playing. A little behind them, trying to keep up, was a beautiful woman in a sun dress. Her head was turned back towards the camera, as if asking the person taking the picture “aren’t you coming?” She was smiling. She was happy to be there, with her family, with the man taking the picture. She loved them all, unconditionally.

And if you looked very, very closely at the one window visible on the house, you could see the reflection of the man taking the photo. You probably wouldn’t ever notice it unless someone pointed it out to you, but it was there. It was my face. My real, actual face. That had been the hardest part to get right, when I was creating this image on my computer. It took hours and hours of editing before I got everything looking right. Before it looked just the way it did in my dreams.

“Someday,” I said to myself.

Then I gathered my supplies, returned them to their box, locked it, double-checked that it was locked, and returned it to its hiding spot. On the way out of my room, I made sure to lock the door as well. Just to be safe. Then I double-checked it. Locked.

In the kitchen, I prepared no food, even though I was starving, even though I had a headache, even though my stomach was growling and my mouth was watering at the thought of eggs or bacon or anything. He didn’t eat breakfast. I took a moment to curse his name, and poured myself a glass of water.

Just then - as always - my roommate walked in. “Good morning, Miles,” he said, with that dumb fucking smile on his face. “Good morning, Tom,” I replied, with the same dumb smile. He was wearing the green shirt, just as I had predicted.

-

At work, people in suits told me to jump, and I asked how high. I was responsible for looking over the meeting transcripts, call transcripts, and other material generated by our in-house AI. Which means I was training my replacement. That day, like every day, I thought that I should go to my manager and ask for that promotion. But I didn’t. It’s a startup, I told myself. I’m lucky to have gotten in at the ground floor. The money will come. Tom said it’ll come.

When there weren’t transcripts to review, I got the coffee. It isn’t worth dwelling on.

After work, Tom dropped me back at the house. He was going to hit the gym. I wasn’t.

I didn’t copy literally everything Tom did. As I said, I couldn’t know for sure which parts were important and which weren’t, but I could make some educated guesses when necessary. Tom lifted weights, but he hadn’t done that in the past, and the change didn’t seem to have had any major effect on his success - in any field - compared to before, when he had just been rowing and doing body weight exercises. With other things, I could see the change. Ever since he’d started sleeping on the floor, his posture had improved, for instance. Besides, I hated lifting weights. It made me feel like a slave building a pyramid, and not even getting paid for carrying the stones. That hit a little too close to home.

But I had to do something. I couldn’t just let Tom get muscular, and not be muscular myself. That would obviously mess up the whole plan. So I used steel mace training instead.

Tom dropped me off, and I went inside, changed into my workout clothes, and went into the backyard. I grabbed the mace on the way out.

It was a simple, pure-black mace. Really just a big metal stick with a big heavy ball on the end, not like some medieval weapon or anything. But I found it much more enjoyable than lifting weights.

I swung the mace around my head. The movement involved gripping it in both hands, lifting it up over one shoulder, swinging it like a pendulum behind my back to be behind the other shoulder, then pulling it over back to the front, now on the other side. Then, reverse. The pulling motion worked the same muscles you would use trying to flip someone in wrestling or judo. Other movements I did during the workout were more similar to swinging a sword, which is apparently what the exercises were made for way back when. Not that I was a martial artist. And I certainly never expected to swing a sword. It was just a fun workout.

I screamed during the entire thing. I screamed especially loud when I was smashing the mace into an old tire. Being Tom was stressful, and I needed the release. That was the main reason I did steel mace instead of lifting weights, if I’m being honest.

That day, as occasionally happened, one of our neighbors stuck his head over the fence. I knew he wanted to complain. I ignored him, and continued swinging, and screaming. Internally I dared him to say something. He must have thought better of it, and ducked back behind his fence. Coward, I thought, but I didn’t mean the neighbor. I was mad at myself for being so meek out in public, and so hypocritically brash when swinging a hunk of steel around.

When I was finished, I went back inside to play videogames. I played mostly puzzle games, strategy games, and especially anything that required planning, resource management, or any sort of crafting. When I was younger, I had some naive idea that playing these games would somehow make me smarter, or better at planning. Now I just played them to relax. Luckily, Tom also liked videogames, so I didn’t have to try to justify this one to myself. This time, we played a multiplayer game together in the living room. I didn’t have other friends. Not even online pseudo-friends. Neither did Tom, though, so it was fine.

When it was getting late, I retreated into my room, locked the door, and began to search for questionable videos online. You know the type.

I would usually try to find ones that featured women who looked like the woman in the photo. Blond, thin, bubbly. That wasn’t hard. Some nights, however, my loyalty waned, and I went for novelty. Things got very strange on those nights. That night, though, I went with the former.

I didn’t know what Tom watched. I’d broken into his room while he was at the gym once, checked his computer. But either he knew how to cover his tracks, or he didn’t watch them at all, which I thought was more likely. I had tried that before. It didn’t work. I hoped that wasn’t the key.

After abusing myself to the videos, I cried. I almost always cried. If I had watched a video for novelty, I cried out of shame. If I watched a video with a photo-woman look-a-like, I cried out of loneliness. And also shame.

I deleted my history, shut my laptop, and prepared for bed. I wiped my tears away.

In bed, I stared at the ceiling, trying to sleep, but unable. After fifteen minutes or so, the melancholy passed, and I was able to calm down. I reviewed the day, comparing myself to Tom, checking to see where things had lined up, and where they hadn’t. Then I cheered up. I had copied him well today. I smiled to myself. I thought about the money I’d be making at work soon. The success that was coming my way, because I was sticking to the plan. Soon, Tom would make me rich, and I could afford to buy that house from the photograph. “Good job today, Miles,” I said. I fell asleep, content. I knew that I was on the right path.