It was 10am on the dot when I arrived at the front door of the photography club room. Despite it already being my fourth year at Deer Valley High, and despite the relative popularity of this club’s services, I hadn’t ever been inside before. The photography club at this school handles a wide variety of responsibilities.

They assist in the creation of school IDs, they’re in charge of taking photographs at school events like general homecoming festivities and sports games, and they usually work alongside the newspaper club by taking photos for their articles.

The person who created this proactive version of the photography club is none other than Zoey Brahm, thanks in part to her passion for taking pictures. Due to the quality of the cameras at her disposal and her use of other complicated types of equipment, her shots became quite popular among students for their personal use on social media.

You could argue that due to her influence, the social media profiles at this school on average are of a higher quality than that of normal high schooler’s. It’s easy to see how someone like that managed to become so popular despite not participating in any traditional extra-curricular activities.

But none of that mattered really. My reason for being here was far more important than Instagram photos. It was arguably a matter of life or death. After all, she had realized it before I did.

That what I did wasn’t just a dream, but had happened in reality.

I had become Zoey. For two nights in a row, I was the most popular girl at school.

I couldn’t think of any reason for such a supernatural turn of events. Was it possible that we had some kind of psychic connection? I wasn’t sure what else it could be. I did spend the last two nights obsessively thinking about her. But could that really have been it? I have never heard of crushing on someone so hard that you ‘become’ them. Still, it was hard to ignore the facts. She confirmed it right there in front of me by leaving me with the note I made in that dream. And in return, she asked for an audience with me.

To be honest, I was afraid to think about what would happen once I entered that room, but I couldn’t just not do it. There was no telling what would happen if I turned back. She had the upper hand. In my mind, my best bet would probably be playing the middle road and hearing what she had to say, all while maintaining plausible deniability. It was the safest option for getting out of it. Lance might be right about me always taking the easy way out, but it was all I could come up with on the spot.

Affirming my resolve to ride the line, I decided to take a deep breath before knocking on the door. The ringing in my ears wouldn’t stop. The reality of the situation was beginning to sink in. The girl of my dreams was going to confront me over my crimes. I was terrified. I didn’t want her to hate me for it.

The door slowly creaked open without warning.

I gulped and stood up straight, anticipating finally coming face to face with Zoey and repenting for my sins.

However, what I was greeted by wasn’t her face, but a pale arm quickly stretching out from the small opening in the door.

“Huh?” I felt my wrist being grabbed, and I was quickly tugged through that small gap. “I-”

Before I could say anything after being sucked into the room, my mouth was immediately covered by a small hand. The subtle cinnamon scent invaded my nostrils once more. Zoey held my mouth shut as she peeked through the crack in the door.

“Were you followed? Does anyone know that you’re here?”

It surprised me how careful she was about our meeting, but I decided to play along and shook my head.

“Okay.”

She released me from her grasp and quietly closed the door. I didn’t think anyone would be walking around the halls at 10am. There were usually classes going on around this time after all. In fact, the only reason I bothered to show up at all was because my life was in jeopardy over what she knew. She might be a bit too paranoid.

Once inside, I cast a cursory glance around the photography room.

There were sofas set up next to the door alongside a single table. The part of the room next to the door was probably a lounge area for guests and club members to relax at when they had nothing else to do. I also spotted a computer setup a few feet away from that, which I imagined was used for any digital tasks involving the photographs taken.

But the thing that stood out the most was the large, black curtain that sectioned off half of the room. It was probably used as a backdrop for taking photographs while masking off any unnecessary light, but it still stood out to me as eerie. It was like a black hole was sitting in the middle of the room. And at the center of all these things, stood Zoey.

The first thing I noticed was that she wasn’t wearing the glasses she wore that morning. I supposed that she must’ve switched back to contacts sometime in-between. She had her hand resting against her chin while she casted an inspecting gaze in my direction that left me feeling unusually self-conscious.

Really, I could do nothing but look away when faced with a look like that.

“Uhm… Why did you call me here?” I barely got the words out, but I couldn’t just stand in silence while she inspected me with her all-powerful gaze.

“Why did I call you here…” Her eyes never left me. She merely uttered the words while in a daze of complete concentration, as if she never even heard me at all. “Why did I call you here… Why did I…” And as if snapping out of her trance, she blinked for what might have been the first time since I entered the room.

“Oh, right. Wait here.” With nothing but those words, she left me at the door and rushed behind the ominous, black curtain.

I couldn’t imagine what it was that she was doing back there, but seeing her disappear suddenly did nothing to soothe my anxiety. I twiddled my thumbs nervously, too uneasy about the situation to even take a seat. After a moment of shuffling occurred behind the curtains, she popped her head out.

She gestured for me to stay quiet by placing one of her index fingers on her lips, while using her other hand to beckon me towards the curtains.

After gulping nervously, I nodded my head and walked over to her.

As I made my way past that black barrier, I was greeted by a rather underwhelming sight. There was nothing there except for a camera sitting atop a tripod stand, with its lens pointed straight towards a stool that stood against the black backdrop of the curtain.

It was very likely that that place is where the school IDs are taken, but it was hard to imagine what she was planning by leading me there. Before I could even think to ask what’s going on, she stuck close to my back.

“Uh…”

“Shh.”

I felt her hand slip into my pants pocket. I hadn’t even realized that she had reached down there, but the sudden realization caused my face to burn up. She motioned me to hush once more then pulled out my cell phone, which she immediately turned off.

If I had to guess, she was worried about it ringing, considering the painstaking amount of effort she was going through to keep the room quiet. That sure took me by surprise though.

Still, I couldn’t imagine what was making her act like there was some big secret.

“Come,” she whispered as she walked toward the stool at the end of the curtains.

Once again, I was being led by the siren’s call. Even with a strange discomfort slowly welling up inside of me, I found the gentle whispers of Zoey impossible to resist. My face was bright red by the time I got to the end.

“Sit.” The soft exhale of her voice caressed my left ear as it escaped her lips.

I took a quick glance down at the stool, which was about a few inches away from the curtain that was clinging to the wall of the room. I wondered if she wanted to take a picture of me initially, but I decided that my answers would come soon and took a seat without bothering to ask.

And when I turned back to my right to face her, I found her wearing a puzzled expression.

And her confusion only served to confuse me as well. I had no idea what was wrong with what I was doing.

She looked down at her feet to take a moment to think, then looked back up at me and twirled her finger in a circle. It took a moment to realize that she wanted me to turn to face the curtain. The request confused me, but I simply obeyed for the time being and I turned around.

If this were a horror movie, then this would be the part where I get brutally murdered by the monster. But thankfully, I thought, Zoey Brahm is not a monster. She’s the girl of my dreams. And doing this much to appease her was nothing.

I faced the curtain, like she suggested. However, I was curious about what it was that she wanted. At first, I thought she was going to take a picture. After all, that’s what this part of the room was set up for, right?

But my entire perception of the situation changed when I found it.

That small ray of light pouring out from the curtain.

It looked like a hole, but it was about the size of a quarter.

It was beginning to feel like this was what she wanted me to find.

I decided to lean my head in towards the hole.

Slowly.

Like I was about to peer into a completely different world on the other side of the wall. And as I moved my head closer, strange sounds began to fill my ears. I was beginning to understand why she wanted me to stay quiet. There were people on the other side of this wall.

I was nervous about continuing to lean in to view through the hole, but my curiosity easily got the best of me. I finally took a peep through the looking glass.

“Mmn, mmf. Mnn…”

A muffled, feminine voice leaked out of the crevice. It took my mind a moment for my brain to process what I was witnessing. I was honestly baffled. Before me was the scene of a girl, one I had seen in a few of my classes but whose name escaped me, sitting on a desk with her back pinned up against a wall, letting out soft moans in-between kisses. Her mouth was being smothered by the lips of none other than The Law.

The two of them were making out in the middle of an empty club room. Their kiss was so intense that I could only assume that the romantic tension between them had been bubbling up for quite some time. It was a kiss so intimate, so passionate, that I felt like they were seconds away from tearing each other’s clothes off.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

And yet, all I could think was to ask myself one simple question.

Why was I looking at something like this?

Their bodies were so firmly pressed against one another that they may as well have already been in the middle of the act. Law, with his weight leaning in on the girl, grinded his leg rhythmically against her lower region as his lips continued to devour her feverishly. There was drool trickling down her face as she seemed to be deeply entranced by their kiss.

And just when I thought that it was getting a little too passionate, the sound of a phone buzzing filled the empty room.

“Mm, wait, hold on.”

Lawrence, with a surprising amount of self-control, pulled himself away from her to glance down at his phone. The girl’s face, while appearing hazy and red from the kiss, had soured from the unwanted development. However, she decided to stay quiet as Lawrence stared down at his phone.

“Ah, shit. It’s Ben. I might need to leave.”

“Huuuh? Come on, that can wait. I finally have you all to myself, I don’t want to let this chance slip...” She placed her arms on his shoulders and leaned in for another kiss. But all Lawrence did in response was leave her with a quick peck on the lips before pulling away.

“No, I should probably get this. He got dumped by Zoey and he’s been really down about it all morning.”

“Wait, dumped? Already? I thought they started going out yesterday?”

“Well, that’s how it goes with girls like that.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean? Zoey’s not a bad person. She goes out of her way to show up to our big debates and take pictures. She’s a real sweetheart.”

“Yeah, I’m sure Ben’s learning just how much of a sweetheart she really is right now.”

“Fair enough. Though I will admit, dumping someone after one day is a bit of a statement. She must really hate your friend, huh?”

Lawrence smiled while continuing to look down at his phone and typing.

“Sorry Suzie, you know how breakups go. We have the homecoming game on Friday, remember? I really need to get ahead of this so it doesn’t affect our performance.”

It suddenly dawned on me that the girl Lawrence was smacking lips with was Suzie Pesci, the head of the debate club. What shocked me wasn’t that Lawrence had gotten together with her, but that she looked completely different than normal. She wasn’t wearing her usual grandma glasses, plus she let her hair down.

Her face looked completely different too.

I could only assume that her new look was an attempt to seduce Lawrence, and it had apparently worked quite well, considering the situation I found myself gawking at just moments earlier.

“But… they were only dating for a single day. He can’t be that beat up about it, can he?”

Lawrence’s expression went dark at her words.

“Yeah...”

He maintained that difficult expression on his face as he continued to read the messages on his phone. Suzie could only stand by idly as she was forced to witness the scene of him tormenting himself by reading through the phone messages. It was so much that she eventually had to concede.

“Alright, fine. I’ll drop it. Go help your friend.”

He smiled. “Yeah, thanks. Let’s go.”

“You have to make it up to me later though, okay?”

Without looking away from his phone, Lawrence placed his arm around Suzie’s head and walked her out of the empty club room.

And I….

I was left flabbergasted at what I’d just witnessed.

I had just peaked into Lawrence and Suzie’s private life. It was something that I shouldn’t have seen them do. How could something like this happen? How could Zoey know that they would be in this room, at this specific time? Did they all plan it? Did Lawrence tell her?

Such questions crossed my mind, but I seriously doubted that it was anything quite that elaborate. Lawrence and Zoey never appeared to be on friendly terms, and it didn’t seem like he knew about our peeking at all.

The whole thing was just unbelievable.

“So, what’d you think?” Zoey asked.

I pulled myself away from the hole, and found her is squatting next to me, staring into another hole right next to mine. She was wearing her usual smile, a smile so prideful that you’d think she just got done presenting her magnum opus for some kind of photography award.

“Are you like, a pervert?” I finally asked.

“A little bit.” She stood up and walked over to the tripod camera, and looked at me through the viewfinder. “I’m like you in a way, you see. I enjoy the thrill of looking at people in their most vulnerable moments. The moments they try their best to mask, the secret sides of themselves that no one really knows.”

“What are you-” Before I could finish, a white light suddenly filled the room for an instant as the button on the camera was pushed.

“Oh, but you are. I could tell. I could feel it inside of me. That overwhelming desire to see everything I had to offer. It might have only been for a moment, but it was there. You wanted to own every inch of me. Do you deny it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh really? You’re actually going to deny it? Even after I showed you something that fun?”

She flipped through the digital camera, probably in order to find the picture she’d just taken.

“You know Tristan, no one else knows about this side of me. No one else knows about how dirty I am. About how I can only experience pleasure as an unaffected third party, looking on from the other side of a wall. It’s not something that someone should make a habit of telling people, you know? I only opened up about this to you, as someone who also knows the joys of such pleasures.”

“I don’t-”

“You don’t? Even though my underwear drawer was such a mess after what you did?”

I said nothing. I could only look away.

“The truth is, whatever that thing you can do is… It’s terrifying. Honestly, it should terrify most people. Humans have tried and tested countless ways of controlling one another throughout our history. It’s so embedded into our story that you could argue human history itself is propelled by the conflict of man’s desire for control, versus his desire for freedom. It’s all just a big game to decide who the rulers and the followers are. But no matter how you look at it, there is nothing remotely as controlling as what you did to me. Quite frankly I don’t even understand how you did it. But that doesn’t matter to me.”

“What… what are you talking about…?”

I kept avoiding her gaze with a nervous smile. All I could do was pretend. Pretend that I had no idea what she was talking about. After all, even though we were both on the same page, even though we both understood that what happened was real, admitting to it would put me in a predicament where I was responsible for those terrible actions. And the last thing I wanted to do was to embarrass myself in front of the girl I loved.

“Hmm, well I suppose you could play dumb. But then, aren’t you interested in those pictures I took?”

She finally mentioned them. When I was in her body last night, she lured me into checking the photos she had stored on her phone. They were pictures of me, taken casually in crowded places. The fact that she referenced them was the final nail in the coffin.

“It was actually real…”

My body slumped in the stool, and a cold shock ran through my body.

She had already given me enough evidence to believe that it was, but I might have been trying to hold on to the faintest hope that it was all a misunderstanding.

“Judging by that response... I suppose you also thought that it was just a dream? Well, your confused actions told me as much.”

“You… you saw everything?”

“Yep. I did. Every second of your little adventure inside of my body. I was right there in the passenger seat, having an intimate look at how much fun you had manipulating me as you pleased. Are you still going to deny that we’re the same after doing something like that?”

There was no point in hiding it anymore. She knew it was real, and she knew that I knew it was real. The adrenaline of being found out rushed me to my feet.

“I really don’t know what it was! I swear! I kind of just… ‘woke up’ in your body the first time. I thought it was a dream so I did all of those things that I really regret doing, and… I’m sorry.”

She grinned. “’Sorry,’ he says. Really? You did something like that and yet you’re apologizing?”

After uttering those words, she walked over towards me. I couldn’t help but stare blankly at her gallant figure. Her long, flowing hair swayed side to side as her eyes narrowed onto me the closer she got. I was terrified of being judged, and yet still, I couldn’t help but be captivated by her.

When she arrived, she leaned her body forward, as if to hand me my judgment. I held my eyes shut. Whatever was coming, I probably deserved it. To be denounced by Zoey would be the perfect way to end this high school crush of mine.

However, my expectations were betrayed as I was suddenly baptized by the feeling of Zoey’s warm embrace.

“Zoey?”

She spoke quietly into my ear. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Oh...”

“I told you didn’t I? We’re similar. We get a thrill out of looking into the worlds that others keep secret.” She pulled away and flashed me that blinding, thousand-watt smile of hers. But her eyes didn’t carry that clear, joyous gaze that it usually did. There was something more calculating hiding behind those eyes. As if she were intrigued

“Uh, well, like I said earlier, I’m really not like that! Sure, I might have done a few things out of curiosity, but I didn’t feel good about them at all. In fact, knowing that it was all real has just made me feel guilty about it.”

“And what about that thing you just saw earlier? With Lawrence and that girl?”

“Yeah, and what was that all about? How did you know they’d be there?”

“Never mind that. How did you feel?”

“What?”

“Watching the two of them go at it like that. Knowing that they were doing what they were doing in private, with the expectations that this secret side of themselves would only be shown to one another. How do you feel about looking into that world?”

“How…”

Honestly, my mind was too rattled to think clearly.

“Come on, tell me.”

She pulled herself away and retreated to her camera.

“Weren’t you excited? Didn’t it make your heart beat with anticipation? Didn’t it make you want to jump into Law’s body and feel it for yourself?”

Jump into his body?

In the first place, I can only do that while I’m sleeping.

And…

“I…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know. This has all been… A lot to take in,” I muttered.

And as I did, her expression of joy almost immediately dissipated.

“I see.”

All that was left was a neutral expression, dyed with a tinge of boredom.

No, that’s not it.

It wasn’t neutral at all.

It was pained.

The pained expression of disappointment with me.

“I, I mean, I’m glad that you’re not upset with me, but…”

“Oh, I am upset with you.”

“What? I thought you said-”

“I said I’m glad that you did it. I’m still upset that you made me go out with Ben for an entire day. I don’t like him at all.”

“Oh. Well, I’m… I’m sorry.” I scratched my head.

“Well, it’s fine. After all, you’re probably going to suffer for it too.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?” She paused.

“Why, you’re a butterfly, Tristan. A butterfly that flapped its wings three times. The first time was when you accidentally hacked my body two nights ago and made me go out with Ben. The second time was yesterday, when you approached me at lunch. And the third time, is when you hacked me again and made me break up with him. If it weren’t for these three actions, if it were only one or even two of them, then perhaps you could have continued your normal high school life. However, you flapped your wings three times. And now, you’ll be forced to live with the consequences of that.”

I didn’t respond.

“To be less cryptic, I did break up with him kind of suddenly yesterday. It’s a slim chance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he started knocking on doors to find out what really caused it.”

She meant, of course, that ‘I’ broke up with him suddenly.

“And it shouldn’t surprise you that he’s going to come asking the only guy who spoke to me yesterday. And if that does happen, then you’re going to need to know what to say to him.”

“I’ll just tell him that I don’t know anything.”

“That’s not going to work. Benjamin is a snake. If you don’t fly carefully, he’ll swallow you whole. You saw our text history, didn’t you? He’s relentless. And because of your text message, he’s even more invested in a relationship with me than ever. You think he was scary yesterday? You’re not going to last just by saying that you don’t know anything.”

Ben was relentless with how he treated people he had problems with. She was right about that much.

“Then... what should I do?”

“Hmmm…” At my words, she paused to deliberate. “Well, I suppose I could help you out. But then, what would be in it for me?”

“In it for you?”

“Well, you’ve already caused me so much distress thanks to what you did two nights ago. I think it’d be strange if I didn’t resent you for it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But, I won’t. Because you didn’t know what you were doing back then, did you? You thought it was nothing but a dream. And when you realized the consequences of your actions, you tried to make things right. For what it’s worth I admire that.” Her words filled me with warmth. Her acknowledgment of my actions was everything I could’ve asked for in that moment. “You’re interesting to me Tristan. I’d like to learn more about you and those powers of yours.”

For her to learn more about me and my powers… it could only mean that we were going to start talking regularly. It was a prospect that was completely unrealistic to me.

“I… I’d like that too.”

“Good.” She clapped her hands together, as if we had just signed a contract. “Now, as for Benjamin...”

And with that, Zoey Brahm explained her strategy for dealing with Benjamin Otto to me.