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fingers were thicker, the nails slightly ridged. The pattern of veins on the backs of his hands was wrong. They weren’t his hands. Yet when he filled the basin and immersed those alien hands, his brain registered the sensation of warm water. When he bent over to wash the face that wasn’t his face, he felt the water splash against skin that wasn’t his skin. He straightened up again, blinking, watching the droplets trickle down mirror boy’s face and onto his T-shirt, which was becoming damp, just as Alex’s was.
    It wasn’t possible. It absolutely could not be possible.
    But there it was, literally staring him in the face. This boy was Philip. He was Philip. And if this was Philip—if this was what Alex looked like now—no wonder the woman, Philip’s mother, had flipped her lid at him for claiming he was someone else. No wonder she’d told him he was behaving like a seven-year-old.
    I’m not Philip! You’re not my mother! No wonder she didn’t believe him. What chance was there of her believing him now if he emerged from the bathroom and told her he was trapped inside her son?
    He wasn’t sure he believed it himself. Kept hoping that the next time he stole a peek at his reflection, Philip’s features would be gone, replaced by his own.
    But each time, Philip was still there.
    Alex dried himself clumsily, shaking so much he dropped the towel. His legs were hairier and more muscular, too, he noticed. When he went to pee, he had the next shock. Two shocks at once: a) pubes; b) size. No. No way. It’d be like holding another boy’s thing for him while he peed. He did it sitting down, like a girl, hurriedly brushed his teeth and left the bathroom as quickly as he could so that he wouldn’t have to look at himself in the mirror any longer.
    But the image wasn’t easily erased from his mind. Nor could he get rid of the thought that if he had—somehow, impossibly, incomprehensibly—woken up inside another boy’s body, with another boy’s face, then what had happened to his own? And what had happened to “Philip”? In Alex’s house, right now, was this other boy, Philip, staring into a mirror, just as Alex had been, in numbed disbelief at the face staring back at him? Was a woman who wasn’t his mum chivvying him off to school?
    * * *
    Outside in the street, in Philip’s school uniform (black blazer, not green; plain gray tie, not green and gray diagonal stripes), Alex watched Philip’s mother set off in her bright blue Punto for wherever it was she worked. No lift, then. She’d done her bit, hurrying him out the house—the rest was down to him. No problem there, apart from his having no idea which school to go to. Or where it was.
    Not that it mattered. Alex had no intention of going to school that morning.
    He fished Philip’s mobile from the blazer pocket. He’d spotted the phone on a shelf in the bedroom along with a handful of change and an expensive-looking watch, which he checked now. Eight-twenty-five. If it was a Monday, Dad would’ve already left for work and Mum would be dropping Sam at breakfast club before heading to work herself. Alex sat on the wall at the front of the house and switched on the phone. It was a slimmer, flashier model than his, but simple enough to figure out. The trouble was he didn’t know his parents’ mobile numbers by heart—they were logged in his own phone’s “contacts.” Same with Mum’s work number; Dad’s, he’d never been given. (Phoning Dad at work was strictly forbidden.) Alex knew the home number, naturally, but no one would be there to answer and any message wasn’t going to be picked up until the evening. So he dialed directory inquiries and got the number for the college where his mum worked, called that number and asked to be put through to the library. She didn’t start till nine but Alex could at least be sure of getting a message to her soonest this way.
    Hearing her voice on the tape caught him unawares and he was too choked up to speak