After a stressful week of dealing with people, Ellis liked to lay down on his bed and silence his thoughts with deafening rock music. Only after Friday night's sunset would he be able to forget all the ways he messed up over the previous seven days and start over again. With his eyes closed he envisioned a version of himself undeterred by what others thought. His door was closed, so it came as a shock when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He started out of his music-induced trance and saw a woman he didn't recognize raise a finger to her mouth. Normally, Ellis would have screamed, but in her eyes he detected no malice.

“I hate to startle you like this, but what I have to say is kind of – do you mind if I turn this music down?”

Ellis's head pivoted from side to side unconvincingly.

“That's better. What was I saying?”

“Who are you?” Ellis's voice rang out louder than intended.

“That would be a good place to start, wouldn't it? Sorry. I'm Ellis.”

Emotions and words intermingled in Ellis's mind. The best his mouth could make of them was, “I'm Ellis.”

“There can be more than one Ellis in the world, you know.”

Given the fact that she was trespassing in a stranger's bedroom, the self-professed female Ellis seemed relatively unfazed.

“Oh, right.” The teenage boy's mouth was still lagging.

“That isn't the case here, though.”

Ellis was sure that he would be able to make sense of the situation and formulate a meaningful question by tomorrow, at least.

“I'm really setting new records for vagueness here, aren't I? Sorry again. I'll just spell it out. From the look of things, you can't get much more freaked out than you are now. I'm you... from the future.”

Ellis amended his estimation to two weeks.

The idea that the beautiful woman standing by his bed was himself ten years hence was absurd. Even setting aside the existence of time travel, he saw nothing in her that could be traced back to himself except, perhaps, the eyes. They rang familiar enough for him to not dismiss the woman-Ellis as a crazy person.

“You know, this is almost as weird for me as it is for you. It's not often one sees oneself from the outside.”

Ellis swiveled his body so that his feet hit the floor and stood so he was eye-to-eye with his strange visitor. He was an inch shorter than she was.

“If I weren't wearing these shoes, we'd be exactly the same height.”

Ellis had had enough.

“Shut up. I'm going to inspect you, and if I find one thing that proves you're not me, which you're absolutely not, you'll leave, or I'll call the cops.”

“Or, we could bypass the airport security bit, and I could just show you my driver's license.”

She reached in the back-left pocket of her fitted jeans and handed the plastic rectangle she found to Ellis. The image depicted the woman in front of him, but the name and birth date belonged to him.

“It's a good fake. It hasn't even been issued yet.”

“Time travel, remember? Never mind. You're not distracting me. Do you have a birthmark that only you and your closest family members know about? Don't answer that. I'm going to point right to it.”

The Imposter reached her hand around the back of the boy in front of her, lifted his shirt up slightly and touched his birth mark without being able to see it.

“Now, look at mine.”

The girl turned so she was facing away from Ellis.

“Go ahead.”

“I'm not doing it.”

“Why not?”

“This is stupid. I'm not doing it. I'm just going to get in bed and go to sleep, and in the morning none of this will have ever happened.”

“You just don't me to prove you wrong.”

“No, I don't want to be a girl.”

She-Ellis turned back around on a dime, eyebrows knit.

“What's wrong with being a girl?”

“You tell me. I don't have much experience in that department.”

The woman's face relaxed. For the first time, Ellis detected a twinge of empathy in her mouth.

“Are you happy? Is your life everything that you want it to be?”

“That's a complicated...”

“No, it's not. Are you happy more often than you're not?”

The teenager's eyes wandered to the floor.

“You don't have to answer that either. Can I...?”

His head nodded, gaze still directed at her shoes. He felt a pair of arms wrap gently around him. His chin rested on the girl's shoulder. The pair remained interwoven.

“Thanks.”

The boy's voice sounded weirdly resonant because of how he was pressed against her. Female-Ellis gave her male counterpart a final squeeze and carefully moved his shoulders back so they were once again eye-to-eye.

“You can be happy. Truly happy. You'll have to deal with some shitty stuff other people do, but...”

“It's worth it?”

A smile swept her face.

“Exactly.”

They embraced again, but, this time, the hug was no longer sad. It was one of those hugs that spun around and around and ended up with the two parties involved giggling and dizzied on the bed.

“I'm going to throw up,” Ellis managed to get out between laughs.

“Me too.”

“If I end up being you, I think I'd be okay with that. Even if you are a girl.”

Other-Ellis stifled another laugh.

“Sure, kid. I think it's about time you went to bed.”

A moment of contented silence passed between the Ellises.

“I don't want to forget this.”

“If this is a dream, it's not the kind you'll forget any time soon.”