On a lazy Saturday afternoon, all Brian Keller, 16, really wanted to do was to relax in his room and play video games. Unfortunately, the mysterious force behind swaps had other plans as Brian found himself transported away from the world of Super Mario, and into a supermarket, where he was suddenly pushing a cart full of groceries.
Victoria Worth, a 36-year-old single mother, found herself dressed in Brian's grungy System of a Down t-shirt clutching his Nintendo controller.
"I didn't understand it, and then I remembered... the first news report of a swap had just aired the week before and everyone was talking about it," remembers Victoria.
"I didn't know where I was or what I was doing," says Brian, "I was holding onto the cart and my hands weren't my own. I couldn't breathe. Something was wrong. It was like I was having a panic attack."
Supermarket patrons saw the brown-haired mother of one fall to her knees and begin rifling through her purse. as she sorted through her things, her cellphone started to ring.
"Well what would you do?" Brian asked rhetorically, "I answered it."
The phone call was from Victoria, now many thousands of miles from her body in St. Paul, MN, calling from Brian's room. "Who is this?" the now-teenager asked.
"It's... Brian," she replied, uttering her first syllables in a new voice.
"Brian, have you heard of swapping?" he asked. Brian hadn't. "Well I think that's what's happened to us."
Brian says, "When Vick explained it to me, my first thought is, 'This isn't fair!' I'm only a kid, I've got my life ahead of me. She's got a 13-year-old daughter, and a career. Then I took a little liberty with whatever alcohol Vick had lying around, followed by, oh, maybe six hours of vomitting."
As they made their arrangements to return to their normal identities, Victoria muses, "She gets my silk blouses, leather shirts and lace panties, and I have to wear ugly loose jeans, old faded t-shirts, and grungy boxer shorts. Who really comes comes out on top here?"
Over the long-distance call, Worth directed the boy in his former body home, and directed her on what to pack. More than somewhat overwhelmed at the situation, Keller followed the suggestions of the voice on the line, packing up every article of clothing from the woman's dresser, and trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach.
Says Keller, "I remember picking up a pair of panties and thinking... it's not the boxers I'll miss, it's what I kept in them."
Brian also recalls the moment something very startling happened. "I remember nearly dropping the phone and saying... 'A girl just walked in.'"
The girl in question was Worth's daughter Sabrina, 15, and who had some very serious questions about what was going on.
"I ended up having to stay until finally Vick got home," Brian says, "It was awkward, but at least she wasn't married or anything."
"We still keep contact, I talked her through her first period, just like I did my daughter," Victoria says with an impish teenage smile, "Sabrina didn't take the swap so well, she doesn't think I'm her mom anymore."
While Brian got a very scholarly lecture on her biology, she had less enlightened advice to offer when Victoria came to face his own physiology.
"He calls me up," laughs Brian, "And says, 'I'm at the office, and I just saw the receptionist straighten her leggings and your thing - my thing won't go down!' When I finally stopped laughing, I told him he's got too choices. Take care of it, or don't."
"Once I accepted I'm not who I used to be, I began to fall quite willingly into the role," Victoria muses cheerfully, "I'm definitely hormonal, and I'm definitely out there. Looking. Sabrina can't bring her little friends over, I made her promise!"
While Victoria has assumed the role of teenage boy, Brian's new body is giving her mixed signals.
"Nothing seems more revolting to me now than the idea of sex," she says, "I'm sick of looking at a naked woman in the mirror, and I hate the idea of some clumsy, hairy, sweaty guy putting his hands on me. And I think dad's happy about that."
Since Brian's mother left six years ago, the young man has been cared for by his father, Theo, who says "[Brian's] whole persona hasn't changed much. He used to squrim a lot, and he still does that, always tugging at those blouses, trying to stay loose. I don't think [she] is very comfortable dressed like that. But it's so funny to see [her] get carried away at a Canucks game."
He adds, "It's also very uncomfortable watching your teenage son sort bras. I'm really not prepared for this."
When Theo asked what she intended to do in the body of a 36-year-old mother, Brian was evasive.
"I want to keep going to school," she mused, "But I guess I'm kind of old now, so how much time do I really have? If I'm a woman now, do I want children? Do I want a career? Things are different now. I just want to be me. [The swap] has made things so much more complicated."
Untilt he swaps become reversible, young Victoria continues to work in St. Paul as a data processor, and provide for his daughter. In Vancouver, there's a grown woman in a Rolling Stones t-shirt sitting in the back of History class, trying to keep to herself.
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