Chapter 1
When I was five, I swapped bodies with James Carter, the heir of Carter Holdings.
From then on, we kept swapping. Sometimes I was him, sometimes he was me.
His childhood friends spent fifteen years feeling guilty, thinking they'd pushed him into the water and made him messed up in the head.
That was until I got into his school as a special recruit.
Those three guys had been watching me for a month, and finally, they couldn't hold back anymore. They cornered me.
"Spill it. What kind of spell did you put on James?" one of them demanded.
Before I could even explain, that familiar dizziness hit me.
When I opened my eyes again, they said to me, "James, we don't want you to get played by that girl."
They didn't know that I was actually the girl they were warning James about.
*****
My name is Whitney Brooks.
My parents let me use my grandma's first name, hoping I'd grow up smart and well-behaved like my grandma. But honestly, the two words had nothing to do with me.
Ever since I was five, my life had been anything but orderly.
And the reason? Believe it or not, I switched bodies with a guy named James Carter.
Yeah, that James Carter, the only son of Carter Holdings. His family's power could reach many countries.
Of course, when I was five, I had no clue about any of that. All I knew was, that day while messing around by the little pond outside my house, my foot slipped.
And I fell straight in.
When I opened my eyes again, I was lying in a bed bigger than my whole living room. A woman in an elegant dress, dripping with jewels, stood in front of me, giving me a look so complicated that I'd never seen anything like it before.
"James?" she called out tentatively.
I blinked, then looked down at my hands.
They were tender, with clear knuckles and perfectly trimmed nails.
These definitely weren't my hands.
I let out a loud wail and started bawling.
It took me ages to piece together what really happened that day.
James was in his garden too, playing with his three best friends, Alex Mason, Ryan Blake, and Ethan Cole. The four of them were horsing around when one of them accidentally knocked James into the fountain.
Even though we were on opposite sides of the city, we both fell into the water at the exact same moment. And somehow, we ended up swapping bodies without even knowing how it happened.
For the next whole month, I pretended to be the heir at his place, while he got a crash course in being a regular kid at mine.
At the Carters', I couldn't even recognize their family members, had no idea of table manners, and kept calling James' dad "Mr. Carter". I even managed to piss off the piano teacher so much that she stormed out. Alex, Ryan, and Ethan kept hovering around me, and finally thought James must've lost his mind.
Meanwhile, the real James was at my place, learning how to sweep the floor, do the dishes, and even wash his own socks.
When we swapped back, we thought it was just a dream. But after that, every couple of weeks, we'd spend a week living each other's lives, then switch back. Eventually, it just became our routine.
After more than ten years, his parents became mine, and mine became his; his brothers were my brothers, and my sisters were his sisters.
To outsiders, it probably looked like we'd been acting a little off ever since that childhood accident. James' three childhood friends were convinced he'd lost his mind and felt so guilty, so they'd always offer up their rarest, limited-edition toys to share with me.