“You have payment for the time since we last spoke?” the asshole asked me. It took a few weeks to sort out before I could tell Malik I got the money. I would take the camera a take a photo of all the pages I thought I would still need, which took a few hours per book. Not surprising there wasn’t much of a bidding frenzy, but I managed to sell a few tomes. First I thought he was perhaps only joking, but at least being rash and change his mind later, but a week later I came to the conclusion that he was stubborn enough to keep my body until I paid.ĭesperate I put up my textbooks for sale. It wasn’t a huge amount but without an income I was already penny-pinching to get by. He sent a text message back saying “I’ll do nothing but chest now. I tried to call him back, but he rejected it. He was accusing me of stealing or at least fraud, and said he wouldn’t do any more swaps until he was paid.įine, I shouted back and disconnected the call, only to realize I was sitting in his body in the dorm room. He got really pissed at me, our first real fight.
I told him that everything was closed down and I wasn’t getting any Jarod’s Burger money. After about a month he asked when he could get his money? I first didn’t understand what he meant, but then realized he still expected his PT fee. We were still swapping bodies for him to train in the improvised gym he had set up in the garage. I didn’t have internet good enough for zoom at home, and staying one per dorm room was allowed under the rules. Malik moved back to wherever his parents were and I stayed in the dorm. Then came the lockdown and remote learning. All I had to do was pay him money and endure the sore muscles. I can’t imagine a trainer being more personal than that. Anyway, I paid Malik a PT fee out of my salary for keeping my body in increasingly good shape. Or they just didn’t care that two students used the same slot under the same name. Since it was really me all the time they wouldn’t be able to know based on differences in knowledge or speech. I worked extra at Jarod’s Burgers, and luckily everyone there were racist enough to not see the difference between me and Malik. We made an arrangement that I would take his body on his rest days so he could do workout with my body. Malik was a bit of a jock, though never really good at sports, always wanted to run or lift weights or whatever. Over the following months we got to know each other’s bodies well, sometimes spending several days in each other’s bodies. Your consciousness on the other hand wouldn’t, so suddenly your body is across the room while you are still standing in the same place, but in Malik’s body. If you were standing in one end of the room and he in the other, once he finished the spell your bodies would have swapped places with each other. It works completely differently than any way I would have imagined, but also in the most literal sense of the description.
There was one thing he was good at, although he had few opportunities to use it. He hadn’t been properly taught, since he was only two when they fled, but to someone who had never before seen real magic or even considered it possible every little was impressive. It was on the 58th day living together, and yes I have a diary, that he revealed he could do magic. It was nice to have something in common, though our backgrounds were vastly different. Weird how the two immigrant boys “randomly” end up sharing a room. I’ve known Malik since we shared dorm in high school. Similar stories and bonus material on my Patreon.