Victim of Circumstance

“I think she was just shaken up…there is no sign of a bang to the head, no concussion…and no bones broken…you just had a fright…didn’t you, Olivia?” The huge paramedic said, lifting my chin with his gentle fingertips, and offering a kind and reassuring smile. But he was actually talking to Mrs Blackstone, who was standing right beside the desk I was sitting on, and I had not been paying much attention to him, or her. The museum people had shown us all into a little office, so that the man could examine me in private. Mrs Blackstone had carried me right back to the main entrance area, near the big gift shop and a café, and the paramedics had met us there, to give me, or rather give Olivia, the onceover. I nodded, feeling feeble, and he patted my shoulder.

“Thank you, that is such a relief…Olivia, you stay exactly where you are, I want to call your stepmother now that I know you are okay…is that clear, young lady?” Mrs Blackstone growled as the medic left the room, and I nodded again, not really sure why she was so clearly annoyed with me, but actually quite happy to sit quietly, and recover some equilibrium, because my brain was working overtime. “I said is that clear, Olivia? You are not to move an inch…once I have called Caroline, I really need to change you?”

“Yes, Mrs Blackstone.” I mumbled, hearing Olivia’s voice in my ears. She spoke all posh as Gemma would have described it, like the Queen or something. No, not like the Queen, but like the Duchess of Cambridge, maybe. I was not common, by any means. Mum was a nurse, with a degree and everything, and my dad, wherever he was, sold insurance. So, not exactly working class, although mum worked bloody hard, but maybe not middle class, either. And we lived in Redhill, in Surrey, so it was hardly the wild west, and there was no regional accent or anything to speak of, but Olivia was definitely a posh little girl, with perfect elocution, a proper cut glass accent, and it was coming out of my mouth, just like that. I could not believe that I was actually sitting there, me, Kelly, in Olivia’s small body, worrying about my accent compared to hers. It was all so surreal, so weird, but that was not the end of it, by any means. My head was all over the place, but it was slowly dawning on me that the Dream Stone had done something really bad to me. Or to us, probably. I thought that if my brain, or whatever, was inside Olivia, her mind had to have gone somewhere. I told myself that it was logical that her mind was inside my body, all of a sudden, but then I asked myself what logic had to do with anything, if I was seriously contemplating a magical life swap scenario. I was seriously thinking about believing that an old lump of rock had real supernatural powers, and that somehow, Olivia and Kelly had swapped lives. It was completely impossible, obviously. But there I was, just sitting on an old desk, heart racing and head spinning around like mad, so what other reason could there be than the darkest magic. I was certainly struggling to think of any plausible alternative explanation for it, but whatever, logic was really not going to have anything to do with it, one way or the other. I decided that it had to be a bad dream, a proper nightmare. I would wake up any minute and find that I had been knocked out or something.

The small office had windows on two walls, three looking out on a courtyard, outside, and three more internal ones, which would look out towards the gift shop, but they had white blinds pulled right down, so that no one could see in. And that effectively turned them into mirrors to me, because of the light behind me. Whilst Mrs Blackstone stood in the far corner, whispering into her mobile phone, I stared at my strange reflection in disbelief. It just had to be a dream, I was lying half-dead next to the Dream Stone, waiting for the ambulance, and I was having a crazy nightmare. Maybe I had got a bang on the head in the stupid rampage, and I was still out cold, and understandably freaking out. Because that made more sense than what I was looking at, far more sense to me. I wiggled my feet, looking at the little black shoes with the childish straps, and my virginal white knee socks. Olivia really was unbelievably small, and my little feet were seven or eight inches away from the carpet, maybe even more. I started to chew down on my bottom lip, moving up her slender little body with my eyes, taking in the dapper uniform and the showy blazer, and the neatly knotted tie. I had never actually worn a tie before. Boys at Redstone all wore ties, habitually at half mast, but not the girls. And my old primary school had polo shirts for both genders. It felt really funny to have something tied around my neck so tightly, like a noose. And I was not sure that I really liked wearing a blazer. I felt too warm and all bundled up in the jacket on top of the wool jumper, like a straightjacket or something. But the overall appearance was just about right, because it really made me look exactly like what Olivia was, a good little private school girl. No one could really ever mistake me for anything else, dressed like that, I thought, as I fingered one of my pigtails, feeling the ribbon tied at the end of it with my tiny fingertips. Blue, obviously.

Not that I had anything against kids from private schools. Reigate, the next town to Redhill in Surrey, where Kelly lived, had four of them, and there were loads more, in the surrounding towns, because it was a rich area. If people had the money, and wanted to spend it on school fees for their kids, that was up to them, and I could see why no one with the cash would want their children to go to Redstone. I suppose I was jealous of all the things they had, but that was about money, not schools. Not having the money to buy decent stuff annoyed me, because we were always struggling to pay the rent, or fix the car, or afford the gas bills. Sighing to myself at my inability to focus on the present, my little legs swinging away, I stopped thinking about private schoolgirls in general, and started thinking about Olivia Montague specifically, and the Dream Stone. I had been shocked, obviously, but not by those idiot boys barging into us. It was the magic that had stunned me, knocked me out, and it had taken me that long to even get close to thinking straight again. It seemed quite impossible that I was suddenly inside Olivia, but it was true, or at least it seemed to be. If it was a dream, it was the most realistic dream that I had ever had, and it was going on for such a long time. Somehow, I knew it was true, my head was almost screaming it at me. And once I accepted that simple fact, which was literally staring me in the face, I started to think about how, and about why, and then what I could actually do about it, which was absolutely nothing constructive, as far as I could see. But I forced myself to think some more, nevertheless.

How was easy on one level, harder on another. Magic was the easy answer, but I had no idea what had been done. I did know that my brain seemed to be Kelly. Everything else, from my body to my voice, was Olivia, but all my thoughts and memories were Kelly Hughes. But there was something beyond that, another presence, that seemed to be helping me. For instance, when Miss Cooper had started talking to me, bringing me around after the magic or whatever it was hit me, something had told me that she was my teacher. And then when Mrs Blackstone quickly got involved, I just knew that she was a family friend of the Montagues. I had heard their names during their conversation over me, but I also just knew exactly how they were both connected to Olivia, which made things easier. So, I thought that suggested that something of Olivia was still there, deep inside my head, with me, somehow. But beyond that, I had no real answers, at all, so I moved onto the why bit of the problem. I had read all of the display boards, and they had suggested that the Dream Stone granted wishes. According to the legend, you made a wish whilst touching the ‘heart’ of the stone, which was accessible via the viewing platform we had been on, and then your wildest dreams might just come true. But although I had been intending to touch it, and to make a stupid wish, I did not remember actually doing it. I hit the rock with my shoulder, as the boys basically ran over us, and I grabbed Olivia’s little hand, or maybe her arm, to pull her out of the way, and I had a feeling we might have both touched the rock in the middle of the scrum, because it was right there next to us and I was trying to hold us both up I thought, trying to protect the poor little kid I had just stamped on from getting trampled to death by Danny bloody Brown. But I was also fairly sure that I had not touched the actual heart of the wretched stone, and the only thing I was actively wishing at the time was that Danny and his idiotic gang would stop being such twats. Maybe I had been daydreaming a bit, just before the accident, about Olivia’s perfect life, but that was not actually a wish, and I was definitely not touching the stone when I thought about that, so I did not see why anything had happened to me, unless Olivia had wished for something and she had somehow touched the heart of the Dream Stone during the fracas. But if she had, why on earth had Kelly’s brain, my brain, ended up inside her tiny body? It did not make any bloody sense. However, at that moment, I had to stop worrying about it all, because Mrs Blackstone had finished talking to Olivia’s stepmum on her mobile, and was returning to me, to deal with another thing that was really confusing me. Olivia’s sodden pull-up.