Swap

The willowy teenage girl crept into the house, praying that everyone else was asleep. Her alabaster skin glowed in the ambient streetlight filtering through the window, emphasizing the dark curtain of her hair.

"I. Cannot. Believe you let it happen! Tonight!" her short, freckle-faced sister hissed from the shadows. Crap. "Tonight of all nights! I cannot believe you, Zoe! How could you? How could you?!"

Zoe winced. No one did righteous indignation like Bianca. It was one of the many obvious differences in their temperaments.

"C'mon Bia, you know it's not like I make it happen,"

" 'It's not like I make it happen,' " Bianca mimicked, round face twisted into a sneer. "Well you could try a lot harder to keep it from happening! I mean, do you know what I was doing when you pulled me away?"

Zoe's fine-boned face immediately flushed.

"Um, yes. It was kind of hard for me not to notice that I was suddenly kissing Derek Wagner."

The temperature in the room immediately dropped by several degrees.

"What did you say?"

Crap. Apparently Derek had gone in for the kiss the moment Zoe's anxiety had triggered the Switch.

"Er, nothing," she backpedaled, but Bianca wasn't having it. She grabbed Zoe by the arm, short nails biting deep.

"Are you telling me," this through gritted teeth, "Are you telling me that you got my first kiss with Derek Wagner-all-star-quarterback while I was getting your dumb body down out of that tree?"

Zoe's heart-rate shot up, and they Switched. Suddenly it was her nails digging into Bianca's arm. Which technically had been the case all along, but now her consciousness was back in it's home body.

"I didn't know it was your first kiss!" she protested, immediately releasing her sister. "I thought you'd been kissing him for ages! Besides, the last time I stopped doing whatever you were doing when we Switched you got mad at me!"

"That's because you made me look like a totally spastic freak by running off the football field in the middle of halftime! Do you have any idea how long it took me to repair the damage that little stunt did to my reputation?" Bianca stomped over to a mirror to check her face. She always did this after they got their proper bodies back, as though afraid that Zoe had somehow marked it during her brief possession.

"But Bia, if I'd dodged Derek's kiss, he would have thought you didn't want him kissing you!" Zoe could hear the whine in her voice: she hated that whine. Hated that she was the timid younger sister of Bianca the Bold. Hated that it was always her fear that caused them to Switch, forever putting her sister into dangerous situations while she screwed up Bianca's life with her awkwardness. When they were little the Switching hadn't been such a big deal- sometimes it had even been fun- but now that Bianca was in high school it was getting more and more inconvenient. And Zoe just didn't know how to make it stop, short of removing her adrenal glands as Bianca had once joking suggested. At least, Zoe hoped it had been a joke.