It still catches me off guard.
Every morning, I open my eyes expecting to see my aging hands, my thinning hair in the mirror, the slight stiffness in my joints from years of standing at a podium. Instead, I see his face—young, clean-cut, sharp-featured—and a body that’s twenty-five years younger than mine ever was. I’m in the body of one of my freshman English students, Carter Vasquez, thanks to a freak explosion in the science department’s experimental consciousness transfer lab.
One moment, I was sipping burnt faculty lounge coffee and grading essays about The Great Gatsby. The next, I was disoriented, sprawled across the quad lawn in someone else’s body.
The entire campus was in chaos that day, hundreds of mismatched souls running around in unfamiliar bodies. They’ve stabilized things now—classes resumed, the dean’s issued daily “progress” bulletins—but the damage is done. For now, I’m stuck as Carter.
I still teach, though not in my usual button-downs and slacks. Now it’s knitted polos, faded jeans, and yesterday’s bedhead. I have to hold office hours in a body that students mistake for a peer. Do you know how hard it is to maintain authority in a seminar on Shakespeare when you look like the guy who vapes behind the dining hall?
Walking across campus today, phone in hand, jacket under my arm, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It’s still surreal. The face staring back—his messy brown hair, the careless scruff—isn’t mine. Not really. I even caught myself adjusting to it, flexing the jaw, squinting the eyes, wondering if I could learn to live like this if the science department never figures it out.
But I don’t let myself dwell too long. I have a lecture on metaphors at 10 a.m., and despite everything, students still need to learn.
And I still need to teach.
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