Fic - Started Out with a Kiss (And It's All In My Head)
Title: Started Out with a Kiss (And It’s All In My Head)
Author: madwomanpoems
Fandom: Big Time Rush
Pairings: Jo/Camille, Jo/Kendall and Camille/Logan that won’t make fans of those pairings happy, and Kendall/Logan if you squint a little
Rating: light PG-13
Warnings: implied sexual situations, mild cursing, body swapping…
Disclaimer: Everything is the property of Scott Fellows and Nick. Oh yeah, and The Killers own the title! From Mr. Brightside.
Summary: Beautiful summer days are nothing but trouble like girls in bikinis and icy smoothies and jealousy and maybe switching bodies with your boyfriend.
Author’s note: Parts of this were inspired by the false leaks for Big Time Break Up. Parts of this are very much inspired by the running commentary that mocks Jo and Kendall being absolutely identical. And mocking Kendall’s nose. Edited to fix HTML disaster that occurred. All is well now.
Jo is pacing back and forth between her bedroom and her living room, thanking God Almighty (adding it to the handful of other times that she has done so without sarcasm) that her Dad is across the country and has no way of knowing what exactly has just happened in her apartment. Jo isn’t exactly sure what just happened, but she is certainly glad that her dad can’t see the affects of whatever it was. Jo is continues to rub her temples and pray and wear the carpet in her hallway thin while Kendall watches the scene from The Diary where the main characters find each other again and profess their love to each other with sloppy kisses and schmoopy, stupid words. He is sobbing all over Jo’s favorite pillow.
Or rather, Kendall-in-Jo’s-Body is sobbing into Jo’s favorite cashmere covered pillow and possibly wiping its noise on it.
Jo walks over and yanks the pillow from her own wet hands and tosses it into her bedroom and slams the door. It’s strange, looking down at her…. whatever Kendall is supposed to be to her at this point, and seeing her own face reflected up at her like it she was looking into a mirror. That is, if her face was puffy from sobbing or if she weren’t trapped in Kendall’s body.
“Why are you crying? Stop crying. Why are you crying?” she says, hearing Kendall’s voice come out with an angry, Southern inflection.
“It’s just,” he points at the TV, blubbering like an idiot, “it’s so beautiful!” He lets his face, complete with his new, normal nose drop into his hands, and Jo watches her beautiful hair fan out around her body.
“Oh my god,” she growls, growing ever more irritated with the situation every minute. She stomps over to the TV with Kendall’s giant vans and clicks the whole thing off in a huff. She turns around and groans at Kendall, who is still gasping on the couch. “Stop. Crying,” she says through gritted teeth.
“I can’t. I don’t,” he says between sobs, “I don’t even know,” he gasps, “why I’m crying. It must be all the estrogen.” He sobs for five more minutes while Jo snaps a rubber band that has thankfully been dangling off of Kendall’s wrist for the past two weeks. “How do you people live like this?”
A clot of anger is sitting in Jo’s chest because of course Kendall would go out of his way to be every single bad stereotype in the entire world and she is screaming, “Calm your hormones!”
She turns and bangs her head against the wall and counts horrible things that have happened. Better yet, she uses the reverse timeline that her father taught her. (At the back of her mind, she knows that the timeline should be used to solve problems, but at the moment, she really only feels like complaining about them.) She’s had to hear herself cry for the past forty minutes. She has been acutely aware that certain biological functions would eventually become necessities for an hour, but since she is Kendall, the idea of not wearing pants has suddenly become a horrifying challenge that just doesn’t seem worth it. She has been acutely aware that it is Kendall’s nose dangling off the end of her face (and she has not been able to stop seeing it out of the corner of her eye) for at least two hours. Kendall has been surreptitiously trying to sneak a hand over his new breasts (defying how hard Jo has been keeping him away from them) for four hours. She has been Kendall for bordering on six hours (and has only been aware of it for five). The state of her relationship with Kendall, for half a day, almost to the minute, has been in complete and total limbo. Her best friend (and the only person she might try to explain to this whole damn calamity to and who might have helped her) hasn’t been speaking to her for even longer than that.
Jo is trying very hard not to focus on that last part.
(In fact, Jo avoids adding more troubles to her timeline; things like “I have been categorically Not Thinking about my best friend and her short skirts and how this whole situation could change if you weren’t mad at me and I still had different equipment in my drawers” and “The best coping technique my father ever taught me was ‘make a reverse timeline’”)
She bangs her head against the wall and takes a deep breath before trying to figure out how she is going to fix any of this.
-*-
It happened like this:
Kendall and Jo were going about their business, drinking strawberry and black raspberry smoothies, respectively, and casually holding hands and smiling and maybe Jo was busy casually dying a little inside as she watched Camille slither around in her bikini, rubbing suntan lotion too carefully into Logan’s pale belly button.
As Kendall gazed away at the trees on the other side of the courtyard, or whatever the heck he does when Jo didn’t bother to pay attention to him, Jo gnashed her teeth and thought about how Logan would look covered in icy blue goo.
“Jo!” Kendall said more loudly, trying to get her attention. “Jo! Baby,” he said uncomfortably, “I’m hot. I’m going to go take a swim. You wanna come?”
Jo tried to ignore the knot in her stomach, but she knew that it would make her sink if she attempted to swim in the deep end of the pool. As much as she thought that Kendall saving her life would be great for their relationship, she was not going to dare to get into the water when she was having trouble breathing.
“No, sweetie,” she said with an easy smile. “You go on ahead. You should ask Logan to get in with you. I might leave before you’re out, I’m not feeling too well.”
He was barely finished mumbling about it being too bad when he turned around and left for Logan, stripping his shirt off and jumping into the water.
Jo cracked all of the joints on her left hand while she waited for Camille to saunter happily up to her cabana. She looked away from Kendall searching for a raft in time to catch her give Logan a quick peck on the mouth before scampering off. Jo sat back happily in her beach chair waiting for Camille to come sit in the shade with her, sipping on her smoothie without asking permission.
She hummed along with an old country song her sister used to sing whenever her boyfriend was about to come over. Jo thought sometimes about buying a beat up guitar and playing it on her terrace at four in the morning when no one else could hear. She thought for a while how nice it would be to actually open one of the bottles that Jett kept sending her, drinking as the sun rise.
Maybe she’d invite Camille.
While she was thinking about tipsy, humid nights, a small, dark haired person walked into her tent. Only it wasn’t the one she wanted.
“Logan.”
“Hey, Jo. I just-Camille thought that I should keep you company, you know. Because she wanted to take a swim. She said she was starting to sweat. She said she was with Kendall, so I should come over here and--”
“Keep me company? Yes, I got that.”
This whole thing was suspicious and not the way she was hoping things would go; Jo was not a pleasant lady when things didn’t go the way she had intended.
“I just-Uh, can I sit?”
Jo doesn’t so much answer, but he sits anyway. She thinks it’s a sign of solidarity, or that Camille is begging - or forcing-her to get along with Logan. She doesn’t really care. Logan has always been something that she never cared about-- except for occasional irrational pangs of jealousy that she forces down and tries to avoid analyzing. Instead, she watches the pool and how Camille’s body softly breaks the water around her hips, and how it bounces off of the indentations in Kendall’s stomach.
Something in the pit of her own gut feels like it is rubbing raw-like there is shrapnel in her abdomen and it is going to choke her with its twisting and knotting, like it is sending bile and blood up the back of her throat until she can’t seem to catch her breath.
When Camille and Kendall laugh and start splashing each other, Jo knows that she can’t possibly take it anymore. She tries to hold her voice steady when she turns to Logan and speaks, “Come help me get smoothies for the four of us.”
Logan rises with a nod and is polite enough not to notice the way Jo’s voice wavers when she speaks, just like Jo is kind enough not to point out that there is a sadness in his eyes that she can’t explain.
--
They are coming out of the line a smoothie in each hand, talking about nothing and pointedly ignoring the movement in the pool and the way that everyone is looking at Kendall and Camille awkwardly. Jo can feel a thousand pairs of eyes on her, and she ignores them in favor of looking around for a table for four.
She’s just about to yell over her shoulder at Kendall, when she sees Camille sitting on his shoulders, one thigh wrapped on either side of his head. Jo isn’t sure what she’s doing, but she feels tears pricking like pins in her eyes, in a way that she hasn’t felt for years; she can’t quite feel herself breathing, but she knows that there was a hitch that she couldn’t hope to control. Before she knows it, she has the pink smoothies in her hands on the table and her hands wrapped around Logan’s neck, pulling him forward and down to her.
Her eyes are squeezed tight, and she knows her lips are all over his. She can barely feel anything except what feels like a knife in her back and a fist in her stomach. She can’t describe anything about the kiss. Sensation is nothing but personal and there is no world to be had.
Until she feels the blue smoothies in Logan’s hands come crashing down - icy and jarring-onto her sandaled feet.
--
Jo barely is pulled back and breathless (and thinking that no kiss has ever left her breathless, and that this one isn’t leaving her breathless the way she thinks it is supposed to) when Kendall is rushing over to her, looking like he would very much like to start hitting things with his hockey stick. Jo can’t even process what she had done, and Camille was running into the lobby- eyes filled with tears and not stopping even though dozens of arms move to wrap around her.
Jo is shouting back at her, voice thick and words getting trapped deep in her throat. Jo is shouting anything she can think of, barely bothering to make any thing more precise than animalistic cries. Camille doesn’t even bother to turn around and acknowledge that Jo is there.
Standing becomes a challenge for Jo.
She walks away from the boys-Logan looking baffled and traumatizes, and Kendall looking like he’d like to tear anything in reach into pieces. Kendall is shouting at her not to go, but she is walking with persistence over to the beach chair that Camille was sitting in. Jo feels herself collapse and grab onto the towel that Camille forgot like it was the only thing that could anchor her to life.
It smells like fancy, tuberose perfume and baby powder when she lowers her face down onto it.
--
By the time she is looking up, Logan is no where to be found (and Jo is praying to god that Kendall didn’t hit him or anything idiotic, because she was the idiot and Kendall shouldn’t compound the problem, or blame Logan for it) and Kendall is sitting on the chair across from her, looking solemn and calm, resting his lips on the steeple he was making with his fingers.
“Jo.”
“Kendall, please…”
“Don’t. You’re in love with my best friend. That’s-“
“Logan? You think-Kendall, no.” Jo is on her feet, moving to put her hands on Kendall’s cheeks, stroking his temple with her thumb.
She hates that he looks hurt. She didn’t think he would. She never would have intentionally hurt him. Something inside of her wanted to make sure no one ever hurt Kendall, because it made her own heart hurt.
(She tried to convince herself that this was a Very Romantic Feeling, and not the exact same thing she felt for her little brother.)
“Then why Jo?”
Jo hates herself for asking because she can’t believe that she is still trying to protect her pride at this point, but everyone is staring at them and the words are slipped out of her mouth before she can catch them.
“Can we do this somewhere more private?”
--
The air conditioning is broken in the lobby, changing The Palmwoods Lobby from a place for young talent to practice their arts to a barren desert where only Bitters sat miserably, listening to self-help books in his ancient Walkman.
The air conditioning is broken in the lobby, changing The Palmwoods Lobby from a place for young talent to practice their arts to a barren desert where only Bitters sat miserably, listening to self-help books in his ancient Walkman as Buddha Bob stood on a scaffold and tinkered with paints on the ceiling.
Jo can't find herself. Jo can always find herself, or at least, Jo can find the face that she has created for everyone to see. Instead, she doesn't care and allows Kendall to pull her along by the hand, like her father had pulled her along to the circus when she was seven. (She hated clowns, but instead of crying and throwing a fit that could have saved her from years of nightmares, she convinced herself that it would be worth it to see the elephants and trudged along, clinging to her daddy.) Kendall is sitting down at one of the secluded tables along the side of the lobby, where he knows no one can see him. Jo feels her knees collapsing and knows, somewhere faintly in the back of her mind, that she is going to plop into the chair to hard and go flying backwards, shattering a glass table behind her. (And she can't help thinking that she was so deserving of it that she might even enjoy that rush of pain and the relief of physical agony.) But Kendall's hand is still holding hers tightly, and he's all sinewy forearms and loyalty, so it's something of a trust fall a she's sinking and he's lowering her down softly.
(Kendall never would have done this to her, no matter how much he wanted to. He didn't have the drive to hurt someone. He lacked ambition-- even the kind to raise a knife to someone's heart.)
She wanted to cry, but she wasn't a girl that did that. She didn't do sobbing on her boyfriend's shoulder. She even thought it might be offensive, to sob and ask for forgiveness.
Jo didn't even know if forgiveness was something she wanted.
"Jo, I know you said that you don't like Logan..."
She couldn't tell if she was growling or begging, "Because I don't!"
Kendall gripped her hand a little tighter and softly hushed her. (Jo was a little baffled by the show of maturity, because somewhere in the back of her head, she had been expecting Kendall to act like an overgrown toddler.)
"Kendall, I was happy, I promise."
"No you weren't, Jo. Trust me. I should have been a man and done this a long time ago. Jo, I thinking we need to take a break."
Jo doesn't know to be relieved or depressed or insulted that he'd think it was his duty as man to set her free. She barely has time to sort out her thoughts before there is a bucket of paint crashing to the table between them, hitting Kendall with giant splashes on the way down. When it finally hits the tabletop, it turns over in a tidal wave that splashed onto Kendall.
He is sputtering and Jo can only manage to look confused and turn to look out the windows where everyone has come, after evacuating the pool, to smoosh their faces against the glass and watch her relationship unravel. She is glaring at all of them when she hears Buddha Bob shout from above her. She turns her head up and sees a can of paint falling down.
Jo Taylor makes a brief mental note that the paint is the same color of blue as her baby brother's first bike before it crashes down onto her skull with a crack and the whole world slips into the darkness.
--
Jo is up faster than she suspects that she should have been, the way all of the spectators had gasped in the moment before she had passed out.
She is shuffling out of the lobby and catching an elevator before anyone can catch her. She thinks that maybe she was wrong about the paint that fell on her head, because she is dripping Pepto pink onto the elevator carpets. Jo couldn't find herself to care, and instead of cleaning herself up or worrying about her head, she crawled into her bed and shut her eyes.
--
She figures out that she fell asleep when her front door shuts with a bang. Jo grabbed the baseball bat from under her bed, (It had been her father's first installment when he helped her set up the apartment.) and crept up to peek out of the crack of her bedroom door.
Before she saw it, she heard it. Jo was able to chalk it up to still being foggy from sleep, but the voice that was calling out her name sounded remarkably like her own.
(For a second she thought that it might be her sister coming for a visit, and was eager to relive her childhood, putting her face in her sister's lap and crying her eyes out. She shook that thought out of her head, because even if her sister knew where she lived without asking, Jo was far too old to have her hair stroked while she sobbed and drifted in and out of sleep.)
"Jo, we need to talk!" someone who still sounded like her. "Jo, come out from there, we have a problem. And leave your bat in there; it's Kendall."
Jo wasn’t exactly sure what to do, because, on one hand, the person speaking didn’t sound like Kendall. It didn’t even sound male. On the other, Jo thought that perhaps attacking Kendall with a bat would be adding a fair amount of injury to insult.
(In the back of her mind, she thought that maybe meeting her tragic end in this apartment wouldn’t be the worst way to clean up the horrible mess that she’d gotten herself into. This whole incident would certainly be forgotten in any eulogies.)
It didn’t matter much anyway what she wanted because she was dropping her bat, and someone was pushing open the door. Standing in the soupy yellow light that streamed in through cracks in the curtains was Jo Taylor, staring back at her.
A small, logical voice in the back of Jo’s head is proud of her for not passing out cold. However, she does not really bother to listen to it, because she is far to busy screaming because apparently she has stepped into some fifth dimension where she has a clone that is mostly still covered in blue paint.
Eventually replicas of her own hands are wrapped around her forearms with a great deal of confusion, and she stops screaming, takes a few deep breaths, and tries to think. Eventually she begins to think about how embarrassed she was to sit there screaming like a girl when there were problems with which she must deal.
Then she came to the starting memory that it hadn’t sounded at all like she was screaming like a girl.
She ran to her mirror and saw what she really was: Kendall, in all his lanky, plaid-wearing, pink paint splattered glory.
“Oh hell.”
“Huh,” Kendall said from the other side of her bedroom. “First time I hear you cuss, and you’re actually me. First time I’m in your bedroom, and I’m a girl,” he said with a little hint of frustration in his voice.
Jo glared over her shoulder and shot him a look, because this was no time to be thinking about her bed and this was no time to be so calm about anything.
Kendall plopped down on her bed and flung his feet up, and Jo tried not to be alarmed at seeing herself on her bed using Kendall’s relaxed posture.
“That wasn’t why you did it… you know, kissing things. With… you know. Because we talked about it before. Doing that. I didn’t-Did I?”
There was a way that Kendall forced panic out of his voice and instead attempted to convey a casual tone that Jo absolutely hated. Not to mention that this was not the moment to bring up that horrible conversation where Jo mostly sputtered along things about “waiting for marriage” and “not emotionally ready.”
(And had silently been terrified that she might eventually want to because she had no idea what she was doing beyond what she had seen in movies. It’s not exactly as if her family talked about these things. Her father pretended that these things didn’t exist, because Fathers Did Not Talk To Daughters About The S-Word. Her mother’s sex talk had mostly amounted to “being a beacon of Southern hospitality for your husband,” and “lying back and thinking of North Carolina and Confederate babies.” Her sister had promised to actually tell her something, but she still hadn’t come to visit her. Jo wouldn’t think of asking Camille, you couldn’t ask your best friend for advice on how to… It just wasn’t something she could do.
Then there was something in the back of Jo’s head that was terrified that she wouldn’t ever want to, at least not with Kendall Knight. Not with someone that she should want to do those sort of things with.)
“Kendall, seriously, do you think that this is the time for that?”
“Oh yeah. We’re broken up, I forgot with the excitement of this all,” he said, gesturing to his new body. “And thanks for waiting for me to come to, by the way.”
Jo sort of wanted to hit Kendall in the face, but she was concerned about what exactly it would do to her nose. She hadn’t figured that he would have woken up in her body and didn’t want to be blamed for not foreseeing that particular consequence.
“Kendall, listen to me we have to get our bodies back. This is a problem. Unless you want to have tiny southern babies, and to have my mother dress you in a white wedding dress, we have to get out bodies back. I would prefer to do it sooner rather than later.”
“Jo, why are you so worried?”
There were eight thousand reasons to be worried. Mostly those accounted to her becoming male, being expected to play hockey, and being in a boy band.
“For one thing,” she said, walking over to the bed and picking Kendall up because she had muscles now and he had a tiny, girl’s frame, “this,” she said, plopping him in front of a mirror. “We are in the wrong bodies. For another, I just alienated both of our best friends and ruined their relationship so we might want to try and fix that.”
Kendall is sinking onto the bed with tears in his eyes, and Jo thinks that this might just be harder than she thought.
-*-
Jo feels so far gone from that kiss. She’s not exactly sure how they got to Kendall sobbing and watching romance movies. Somehow, she reaches a moment of clarity and knows that she must first make Kendall’s crying stop because it is really starting to give her a headache and is starting to make all of her belongings vaguely damp.
(Also, it is the easiest thing to fix, and that is one thing that her father taught her that she really thought she might need to thank him for one day.)
Jo makes her way to her freezer where she keeps her emergency rations of ice cream. She marches herself back over to Kendall and presses the carton in one hand and a spoon into the other.
"I don't really like chocolate," he says thickly, pushing the ice cream back to her.
She shoves it to him, "Yes. You do. Trust me. My mouth. My taste buds. My hormones."
"But won't it ruin my figure?"
Jo rolls her eyes so hard that she is shocked that she doesn't pull a muscle in her eye socket. "It's my figure. It'll be fine. Eat!"
Kendall munches away while Jo continues to think. Minutes later, Jo speaks, breaking the silence that is filling the room.
"I am going to apologize to Logan. And you are going to go get me my best friend back."
"I have to talk to Camille?" he asks with a gulp?
"Hold your horses, Josephine. You have to talk to Camille. Kendall has to talk to Camille. Jo," she says, poking a finger in his chest, "is going to have to go talk to Logan."
Kendall barely says "oh" before his eyes light up and he is practically running down the hall.
--
Jo takes a deep breath in some half-hearted attempt to gather her courage and raises her hand to knock on the door. There is a certain degree of finality as flesh and knobby, boy knuckles meet wood and paint.
When Camille pulls open the door her eyes are puffy and she is out of breath as she says, "Kendall."
Jo has to do everything she can to keep her voice from trembling when she sees Camille looking like she has been crying for hours.
"Can I come in?"
Camille is backing away from the door and crawling onto the couch, leaving it open for Jo to follow her. She looks so small and fragile, like a wounded animal, where she sits in her tiny ball that Jo wonders if her heart will stop pattering in her chest.
"Mi-- Camille, I just wanted to say that Jo is so, so sorry. She didn't-- Camille, Jo would never do anything to intentionally hurt you. Never."
"I know," Camille says, her voice breaking in her throat. She is dropping her face into her hands and sobbing in heaves that wrack her tiny body. "I know," she repeats, gasping.
Jo wraps her arms around Camille's body and holds her, losing track of minutes, until she loses track of hours and the sky is changing colors, dappling pinks and oranges on Camille's bare shoulders, turning her into art or angel or something that Jo is afraid to think.
Camille is sniffling and almost laughing when she pulls her head off of Jo's shoulder and looks straight into her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Jo said, "for everything that happened today."
"I'm sorry you lost your girlfriend," she said softly, putting a gentle hand on Jo's neck, feathering her fingers across Kendall's skin. Jo looked back into her eyes and cupped Camille's jaw in her hands and pulled her closer.
"Don't worry about that." Their lips were almost grazing when Jo was speaking without realizing, "It was always you, Camille. Always."
Jo and Camille are a tangled bunch of limbs and mouths and sweet smells, and Jo thinks she might be losing her mind, because this kiss is making her sigh into Camille's mouth and there is a thin fog forming in her mind, silver like mist and growing thicker with every breath she takes.
-*-
As Jo is rising from the mist like a child clumsily breaking through the surface of the pool after a deep dive, she can still feel Camille's slender fingers intertwined in her hair. She is lying on her back and the floor is hard underneath her. She is no longer on Camille's couch and more importantly, she is no longer being kissed by a beautiful girl.
But something else feels different, like has been working in the dark for hours and someone has finally turned a light on the subject. She is working on taking steady breaths when she feels fingers on her neck, poking around at the base of her throat. Her eyes flickered open to Kendall hovering over her. She lets out a scream.
She hears him murmuring, "Well, at least she's breathing," but Camille moves into her line of sight, smiling with tears in her eyes.
"Hey, pretty girl," she says, trailing her fingers through the curls of Jo's hair. "Welcome back to the land of the living."
Jo raises her hand up to touch the curve of Camille's cheek with her finger tips, "I'm so sorry, Mimi."
"Shhh... Don't. Don't worry about that now. Don't worry."
--
Camille is screaming with a nurse down the hall for longer than Jo can keep track of with her fuzzy head and memories of concussed delusions. But eventually she walks into Jo's suite with a smile plastered the width of her.
"Guess who's staying with you tonight?" she asked all languid limbs resting in the doorway and forcible calmness.
And as Camille is climbing into bed with her, Jo's dreams become clearer. Camille is staying with her forever, stroking her hair and keeping watch over her while she lets her guard down and dreams deeply. Jo knows one thing from her bungled memories; it has always been Camille.
Author: madwomanpoems
Fandom: Big Time Rush
Pairings: Jo/Camille, Jo/Kendall and Camille/Logan that won’t make fans of those pairings happy, and Kendall/Logan if you squint a little
Rating: light PG-13
Warnings: implied sexual situations, mild cursing, body swapping…
Disclaimer: Everything is the property of Scott Fellows and Nick. Oh yeah, and The Killers own the title! From Mr. Brightside.
Summary: Beautiful summer days are nothing but trouble like girls in bikinis and icy smoothies and jealousy and maybe switching bodies with your boyfriend.
Author’s note: Parts of this were inspired by the false leaks for Big Time Break Up. Parts of this are very much inspired by the running commentary that mocks Jo and Kendall being absolutely identical. And mocking Kendall’s nose. Edited to fix HTML disaster that occurred. All is well now.
Jo is pacing back and forth between her bedroom and her living room, thanking God Almighty (adding it to the handful of other times that she has done so without sarcasm) that her Dad is across the country and has no way of knowing what exactly has just happened in her apartment. Jo isn’t exactly sure what just happened, but she is certainly glad that her dad can’t see the affects of whatever it was. Jo is continues to rub her temples and pray and wear the carpet in her hallway thin while Kendall watches the scene from The Diary where the main characters find each other again and profess their love to each other with sloppy kisses and schmoopy, stupid words. He is sobbing all over Jo’s favorite pillow.
Or rather, Kendall-in-Jo’s-Body is sobbing into Jo’s favorite cashmere covered pillow and possibly wiping its noise on it.
Jo walks over and yanks the pillow from her own wet hands and tosses it into her bedroom and slams the door. It’s strange, looking down at her…. whatever Kendall is supposed to be to her at this point, and seeing her own face reflected up at her like it she was looking into a mirror. That is, if her face was puffy from sobbing or if she weren’t trapped in Kendall’s body.
“Why are you crying? Stop crying. Why are you crying?” she says, hearing Kendall’s voice come out with an angry, Southern inflection.
“It’s just,” he points at the TV, blubbering like an idiot, “it’s so beautiful!” He lets his face, complete with his new, normal nose drop into his hands, and Jo watches her beautiful hair fan out around her body.
“Oh my god,” she growls, growing ever more irritated with the situation every minute. She stomps over to the TV with Kendall’s giant vans and clicks the whole thing off in a huff. She turns around and groans at Kendall, who is still gasping on the couch. “Stop. Crying,” she says through gritted teeth.
“I can’t. I don’t,” he says between sobs, “I don’t even know,” he gasps, “why I’m crying. It must be all the estrogen.” He sobs for five more minutes while Jo snaps a rubber band that has thankfully been dangling off of Kendall’s wrist for the past two weeks. “How do you people live like this?”
A clot of anger is sitting in Jo’s chest because of course Kendall would go out of his way to be every single bad stereotype in the entire world and she is screaming, “Calm your hormones!”
She turns and bangs her head against the wall and counts horrible things that have happened. Better yet, she uses the reverse timeline that her father taught her. (At the back of her mind, she knows that the timeline should be used to solve problems, but at the moment, she really only feels like complaining about them.) She’s had to hear herself cry for the past forty minutes. She has been acutely aware that certain biological functions would eventually become necessities for an hour, but since she is Kendall, the idea of not wearing pants has suddenly become a horrifying challenge that just doesn’t seem worth it. She has been acutely aware that it is Kendall’s nose dangling off the end of her face (and she has not been able to stop seeing it out of the corner of her eye) for at least two hours. Kendall has been surreptitiously trying to sneak a hand over his new breasts (defying how hard Jo has been keeping him away from them) for four hours. She has been Kendall for bordering on six hours (and has only been aware of it for five). The state of her relationship with Kendall, for half a day, almost to the minute, has been in complete and total limbo. Her best friend (and the only person she might try to explain to this whole damn calamity to and who might have helped her) hasn’t been speaking to her for even longer than that.
Jo is trying very hard not to focus on that last part.
(In fact, Jo avoids adding more troubles to her timeline; things like “I have been categorically Not Thinking about my best friend and her short skirts and how this whole situation could change if you weren’t mad at me and I still had different equipment in my drawers” and “The best coping technique my father ever taught me was ‘make a reverse timeline’”)
She bangs her head against the wall and takes a deep breath before trying to figure out how she is going to fix any of this.
-*-
It happened like this:
Kendall and Jo were going about their business, drinking strawberry and black raspberry smoothies, respectively, and casually holding hands and smiling and maybe Jo was busy casually dying a little inside as she watched Camille slither around in her bikini, rubbing suntan lotion too carefully into Logan’s pale belly button.
As Kendall gazed away at the trees on the other side of the courtyard, or whatever the heck he does when Jo didn’t bother to pay attention to him, Jo gnashed her teeth and thought about how Logan would look covered in icy blue goo.
“Jo!” Kendall said more loudly, trying to get her attention. “Jo! Baby,” he said uncomfortably, “I’m hot. I’m going to go take a swim. You wanna come?”
Jo tried to ignore the knot in her stomach, but she knew that it would make her sink if she attempted to swim in the deep end of the pool. As much as she thought that Kendall saving her life would be great for their relationship, she was not going to dare to get into the water when she was having trouble breathing.
“No, sweetie,” she said with an easy smile. “You go on ahead. You should ask Logan to get in with you. I might leave before you’re out, I’m not feeling too well.”
He was barely finished mumbling about it being too bad when he turned around and left for Logan, stripping his shirt off and jumping into the water.
Jo cracked all of the joints on her left hand while she waited for Camille to saunter happily up to her cabana. She looked away from Kendall searching for a raft in time to catch her give Logan a quick peck on the mouth before scampering off. Jo sat back happily in her beach chair waiting for Camille to come sit in the shade with her, sipping on her smoothie without asking permission.
She hummed along with an old country song her sister used to sing whenever her boyfriend was about to come over. Jo thought sometimes about buying a beat up guitar and playing it on her terrace at four in the morning when no one else could hear. She thought for a while how nice it would be to actually open one of the bottles that Jett kept sending her, drinking as the sun rise.
Maybe she’d invite Camille.
While she was thinking about tipsy, humid nights, a small, dark haired person walked into her tent. Only it wasn’t the one she wanted.
“Logan.”
“Hey, Jo. I just-Camille thought that I should keep you company, you know. Because she wanted to take a swim. She said she was starting to sweat. She said she was with Kendall, so I should come over here and--”
“Keep me company? Yes, I got that.”
This whole thing was suspicious and not the way she was hoping things would go; Jo was not a pleasant lady when things didn’t go the way she had intended.
“I just-Uh, can I sit?”
Jo doesn’t so much answer, but he sits anyway. She thinks it’s a sign of solidarity, or that Camille is begging - or forcing-her to get along with Logan. She doesn’t really care. Logan has always been something that she never cared about-- except for occasional irrational pangs of jealousy that she forces down and tries to avoid analyzing. Instead, she watches the pool and how Camille’s body softly breaks the water around her hips, and how it bounces off of the indentations in Kendall’s stomach.
Something in the pit of her own gut feels like it is rubbing raw-like there is shrapnel in her abdomen and it is going to choke her with its twisting and knotting, like it is sending bile and blood up the back of her throat until she can’t seem to catch her breath.
When Camille and Kendall laugh and start splashing each other, Jo knows that she can’t possibly take it anymore. She tries to hold her voice steady when she turns to Logan and speaks, “Come help me get smoothies for the four of us.”
Logan rises with a nod and is polite enough not to notice the way Jo’s voice wavers when she speaks, just like Jo is kind enough not to point out that there is a sadness in his eyes that she can’t explain.
--
They are coming out of the line a smoothie in each hand, talking about nothing and pointedly ignoring the movement in the pool and the way that everyone is looking at Kendall and Camille awkwardly. Jo can feel a thousand pairs of eyes on her, and she ignores them in favor of looking around for a table for four.
She’s just about to yell over her shoulder at Kendall, when she sees Camille sitting on his shoulders, one thigh wrapped on either side of his head. Jo isn’t sure what she’s doing, but she feels tears pricking like pins in her eyes, in a way that she hasn’t felt for years; she can’t quite feel herself breathing, but she knows that there was a hitch that she couldn’t hope to control. Before she knows it, she has the pink smoothies in her hands on the table and her hands wrapped around Logan’s neck, pulling him forward and down to her.
Her eyes are squeezed tight, and she knows her lips are all over his. She can barely feel anything except what feels like a knife in her back and a fist in her stomach. She can’t describe anything about the kiss. Sensation is nothing but personal and there is no world to be had.
Until she feels the blue smoothies in Logan’s hands come crashing down - icy and jarring-onto her sandaled feet.
--
Jo barely is pulled back and breathless (and thinking that no kiss has ever left her breathless, and that this one isn’t leaving her breathless the way she thinks it is supposed to) when Kendall is rushing over to her, looking like he would very much like to start hitting things with his hockey stick. Jo can’t even process what she had done, and Camille was running into the lobby- eyes filled with tears and not stopping even though dozens of arms move to wrap around her.
Jo is shouting back at her, voice thick and words getting trapped deep in her throat. Jo is shouting anything she can think of, barely bothering to make any thing more precise than animalistic cries. Camille doesn’t even bother to turn around and acknowledge that Jo is there.
Standing becomes a challenge for Jo.
She walks away from the boys-Logan looking baffled and traumatizes, and Kendall looking like he’d like to tear anything in reach into pieces. Kendall is shouting at her not to go, but she is walking with persistence over to the beach chair that Camille was sitting in. Jo feels herself collapse and grab onto the towel that Camille forgot like it was the only thing that could anchor her to life.
It smells like fancy, tuberose perfume and baby powder when she lowers her face down onto it.
--
By the time she is looking up, Logan is no where to be found (and Jo is praying to god that Kendall didn’t hit him or anything idiotic, because she was the idiot and Kendall shouldn’t compound the problem, or blame Logan for it) and Kendall is sitting on the chair across from her, looking solemn and calm, resting his lips on the steeple he was making with his fingers.
“Jo.”
“Kendall, please…”
“Don’t. You’re in love with my best friend. That’s-“
“Logan? You think-Kendall, no.” Jo is on her feet, moving to put her hands on Kendall’s cheeks, stroking his temple with her thumb.
She hates that he looks hurt. She didn’t think he would. She never would have intentionally hurt him. Something inside of her wanted to make sure no one ever hurt Kendall, because it made her own heart hurt.
(She tried to convince herself that this was a Very Romantic Feeling, and not the exact same thing she felt for her little brother.)
“Then why Jo?”
Jo hates herself for asking because she can’t believe that she is still trying to protect her pride at this point, but everyone is staring at them and the words are slipped out of her mouth before she can catch them.
“Can we do this somewhere more private?”
--
The air conditioning is broken in the lobby, changing The Palmwoods Lobby from a place for young talent to practice their arts to a barren desert where only Bitters sat miserably, listening to self-help books in his ancient Walkman.
The air conditioning is broken in the lobby, changing The Palmwoods Lobby from a place for young talent to practice their arts to a barren desert where only Bitters sat miserably, listening to self-help books in his ancient Walkman as Buddha Bob stood on a scaffold and tinkered with paints on the ceiling.
Jo can't find herself. Jo can always find herself, or at least, Jo can find the face that she has created for everyone to see. Instead, she doesn't care and allows Kendall to pull her along by the hand, like her father had pulled her along to the circus when she was seven. (She hated clowns, but instead of crying and throwing a fit that could have saved her from years of nightmares, she convinced herself that it would be worth it to see the elephants and trudged along, clinging to her daddy.) Kendall is sitting down at one of the secluded tables along the side of the lobby, where he knows no one can see him. Jo feels her knees collapsing and knows, somewhere faintly in the back of her mind, that she is going to plop into the chair to hard and go flying backwards, shattering a glass table behind her. (And she can't help thinking that she was so deserving of it that she might even enjoy that rush of pain and the relief of physical agony.) But Kendall's hand is still holding hers tightly, and he's all sinewy forearms and loyalty, so it's something of a trust fall a she's sinking and he's lowering her down softly.
(Kendall never would have done this to her, no matter how much he wanted to. He didn't have the drive to hurt someone. He lacked ambition-- even the kind to raise a knife to someone's heart.)
She wanted to cry, but she wasn't a girl that did that. She didn't do sobbing on her boyfriend's shoulder. She even thought it might be offensive, to sob and ask for forgiveness.
Jo didn't even know if forgiveness was something she wanted.
"Jo, I know you said that you don't like Logan..."
She couldn't tell if she was growling or begging, "Because I don't!"
Kendall gripped her hand a little tighter and softly hushed her. (Jo was a little baffled by the show of maturity, because somewhere in the back of her head, she had been expecting Kendall to act like an overgrown toddler.)
"Kendall, I was happy, I promise."
"No you weren't, Jo. Trust me. I should have been a man and done this a long time ago. Jo, I thinking we need to take a break."
Jo doesn't know to be relieved or depressed or insulted that he'd think it was his duty as man to set her free. She barely has time to sort out her thoughts before there is a bucket of paint crashing to the table between them, hitting Kendall with giant splashes on the way down. When it finally hits the tabletop, it turns over in a tidal wave that splashed onto Kendall.
He is sputtering and Jo can only manage to look confused and turn to look out the windows where everyone has come, after evacuating the pool, to smoosh their faces against the glass and watch her relationship unravel. She is glaring at all of them when she hears Buddha Bob shout from above her. She turns her head up and sees a can of paint falling down.
Jo Taylor makes a brief mental note that the paint is the same color of blue as her baby brother's first bike before it crashes down onto her skull with a crack and the whole world slips into the darkness.
--
Jo is up faster than she suspects that she should have been, the way all of the spectators had gasped in the moment before she had passed out.
She is shuffling out of the lobby and catching an elevator before anyone can catch her. She thinks that maybe she was wrong about the paint that fell on her head, because she is dripping Pepto pink onto the elevator carpets. Jo couldn't find herself to care, and instead of cleaning herself up or worrying about her head, she crawled into her bed and shut her eyes.
--
She figures out that she fell asleep when her front door shuts with a bang. Jo grabbed the baseball bat from under her bed, (It had been her father's first installment when he helped her set up the apartment.) and crept up to peek out of the crack of her bedroom door.
Before she saw it, she heard it. Jo was able to chalk it up to still being foggy from sleep, but the voice that was calling out her name sounded remarkably like her own.
(For a second she thought that it might be her sister coming for a visit, and was eager to relive her childhood, putting her face in her sister's lap and crying her eyes out. She shook that thought out of her head, because even if her sister knew where she lived without asking, Jo was far too old to have her hair stroked while she sobbed and drifted in and out of sleep.)
"Jo, we need to talk!" someone who still sounded like her. "Jo, come out from there, we have a problem. And leave your bat in there; it's Kendall."
Jo wasn’t exactly sure what to do, because, on one hand, the person speaking didn’t sound like Kendall. It didn’t even sound male. On the other, Jo thought that perhaps attacking Kendall with a bat would be adding a fair amount of injury to insult.
(In the back of her mind, she thought that maybe meeting her tragic end in this apartment wouldn’t be the worst way to clean up the horrible mess that she’d gotten herself into. This whole incident would certainly be forgotten in any eulogies.)
It didn’t matter much anyway what she wanted because she was dropping her bat, and someone was pushing open the door. Standing in the soupy yellow light that streamed in through cracks in the curtains was Jo Taylor, staring back at her.
A small, logical voice in the back of Jo’s head is proud of her for not passing out cold. However, she does not really bother to listen to it, because she is far to busy screaming because apparently she has stepped into some fifth dimension where she has a clone that is mostly still covered in blue paint.
Eventually replicas of her own hands are wrapped around her forearms with a great deal of confusion, and she stops screaming, takes a few deep breaths, and tries to think. Eventually she begins to think about how embarrassed she was to sit there screaming like a girl when there were problems with which she must deal.
Then she came to the starting memory that it hadn’t sounded at all like she was screaming like a girl.
She ran to her mirror and saw what she really was: Kendall, in all his lanky, plaid-wearing, pink paint splattered glory.
“Oh hell.”
“Huh,” Kendall said from the other side of her bedroom. “First time I hear you cuss, and you’re actually me. First time I’m in your bedroom, and I’m a girl,” he said with a little hint of frustration in his voice.
Jo glared over her shoulder and shot him a look, because this was no time to be thinking about her bed and this was no time to be so calm about anything.
Kendall plopped down on her bed and flung his feet up, and Jo tried not to be alarmed at seeing herself on her bed using Kendall’s relaxed posture.
“That wasn’t why you did it… you know, kissing things. With… you know. Because we talked about it before. Doing that. I didn’t-Did I?”
There was a way that Kendall forced panic out of his voice and instead attempted to convey a casual tone that Jo absolutely hated. Not to mention that this was not the moment to bring up that horrible conversation where Jo mostly sputtered along things about “waiting for marriage” and “not emotionally ready.”
(And had silently been terrified that she might eventually want to because she had no idea what she was doing beyond what she had seen in movies. It’s not exactly as if her family talked about these things. Her father pretended that these things didn’t exist, because Fathers Did Not Talk To Daughters About The S-Word. Her mother’s sex talk had mostly amounted to “being a beacon of Southern hospitality for your husband,” and “lying back and thinking of North Carolina and Confederate babies.” Her sister had promised to actually tell her something, but she still hadn’t come to visit her. Jo wouldn’t think of asking Camille, you couldn’t ask your best friend for advice on how to… It just wasn’t something she could do.
Then there was something in the back of Jo’s head that was terrified that she wouldn’t ever want to, at least not with Kendall Knight. Not with someone that she should want to do those sort of things with.)
“Kendall, seriously, do you think that this is the time for that?”
“Oh yeah. We’re broken up, I forgot with the excitement of this all,” he said, gesturing to his new body. “And thanks for waiting for me to come to, by the way.”
Jo sort of wanted to hit Kendall in the face, but she was concerned about what exactly it would do to her nose. She hadn’t figured that he would have woken up in her body and didn’t want to be blamed for not foreseeing that particular consequence.
“Kendall, listen to me we have to get our bodies back. This is a problem. Unless you want to have tiny southern babies, and to have my mother dress you in a white wedding dress, we have to get out bodies back. I would prefer to do it sooner rather than later.”
“Jo, why are you so worried?”
There were eight thousand reasons to be worried. Mostly those accounted to her becoming male, being expected to play hockey, and being in a boy band.
“For one thing,” she said, walking over to the bed and picking Kendall up because she had muscles now and he had a tiny, girl’s frame, “this,” she said, plopping him in front of a mirror. “We are in the wrong bodies. For another, I just alienated both of our best friends and ruined their relationship so we might want to try and fix that.”
Kendall is sinking onto the bed with tears in his eyes, and Jo thinks that this might just be harder than she thought.
-*-
Jo feels so far gone from that kiss. She’s not exactly sure how they got to Kendall sobbing and watching romance movies. Somehow, she reaches a moment of clarity and knows that she must first make Kendall’s crying stop because it is really starting to give her a headache and is starting to make all of her belongings vaguely damp.
(Also, it is the easiest thing to fix, and that is one thing that her father taught her that she really thought she might need to thank him for one day.)
Jo makes her way to her freezer where she keeps her emergency rations of ice cream. She marches herself back over to Kendall and presses the carton in one hand and a spoon into the other.
"I don't really like chocolate," he says thickly, pushing the ice cream back to her.
She shoves it to him, "Yes. You do. Trust me. My mouth. My taste buds. My hormones."
"But won't it ruin my figure?"
Jo rolls her eyes so hard that she is shocked that she doesn't pull a muscle in her eye socket. "It's my figure. It'll be fine. Eat!"
Kendall munches away while Jo continues to think. Minutes later, Jo speaks, breaking the silence that is filling the room.
"I am going to apologize to Logan. And you are going to go get me my best friend back."
"I have to talk to Camille?" he asks with a gulp?
"Hold your horses, Josephine. You have to talk to Camille. Kendall has to talk to Camille. Jo," she says, poking a finger in his chest, "is going to have to go talk to Logan."
Kendall barely says "oh" before his eyes light up and he is practically running down the hall.
--
Jo takes a deep breath in some half-hearted attempt to gather her courage and raises her hand to knock on the door. There is a certain degree of finality as flesh and knobby, boy knuckles meet wood and paint.
When Camille pulls open the door her eyes are puffy and she is out of breath as she says, "Kendall."
Jo has to do everything she can to keep her voice from trembling when she sees Camille looking like she has been crying for hours.
"Can I come in?"
Camille is backing away from the door and crawling onto the couch, leaving it open for Jo to follow her. She looks so small and fragile, like a wounded animal, where she sits in her tiny ball that Jo wonders if her heart will stop pattering in her chest.
"Mi-- Camille, I just wanted to say that Jo is so, so sorry. She didn't-- Camille, Jo would never do anything to intentionally hurt you. Never."
"I know," Camille says, her voice breaking in her throat. She is dropping her face into her hands and sobbing in heaves that wrack her tiny body. "I know," she repeats, gasping.
Jo wraps her arms around Camille's body and holds her, losing track of minutes, until she loses track of hours and the sky is changing colors, dappling pinks and oranges on Camille's bare shoulders, turning her into art or angel or something that Jo is afraid to think.
Camille is sniffling and almost laughing when she pulls her head off of Jo's shoulder and looks straight into her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Jo said, "for everything that happened today."
"I'm sorry you lost your girlfriend," she said softly, putting a gentle hand on Jo's neck, feathering her fingers across Kendall's skin. Jo looked back into her eyes and cupped Camille's jaw in her hands and pulled her closer.
"Don't worry about that." Their lips were almost grazing when Jo was speaking without realizing, "It was always you, Camille. Always."
Jo and Camille are a tangled bunch of limbs and mouths and sweet smells, and Jo thinks she might be losing her mind, because this kiss is making her sigh into Camille's mouth and there is a thin fog forming in her mind, silver like mist and growing thicker with every breath she takes.
-*-
As Jo is rising from the mist like a child clumsily breaking through the surface of the pool after a deep dive, she can still feel Camille's slender fingers intertwined in her hair. She is lying on her back and the floor is hard underneath her. She is no longer on Camille's couch and more importantly, she is no longer being kissed by a beautiful girl.
But something else feels different, like has been working in the dark for hours and someone has finally turned a light on the subject. She is working on taking steady breaths when she feels fingers on her neck, poking around at the base of her throat. Her eyes flickered open to Kendall hovering over her. She lets out a scream.
She hears him murmuring, "Well, at least she's breathing," but Camille moves into her line of sight, smiling with tears in her eyes.
"Hey, pretty girl," she says, trailing her fingers through the curls of Jo's hair. "Welcome back to the land of the living."
Jo raises her hand up to touch the curve of Camille's cheek with her finger tips, "I'm so sorry, Mimi."
"Shhh... Don't. Don't worry about that now. Don't worry."
--
Camille is screaming with a nurse down the hall for longer than Jo can keep track of with her fuzzy head and memories of concussed delusions. But eventually she walks into Jo's suite with a smile plastered the width of her.
"Guess who's staying with you tonight?" she asked all languid limbs resting in the doorway and forcible calmness.
And as Camille is climbing into bed with her, Jo's dreams become clearer. Camille is staying with her forever, stroking her hair and keeping watch over her while she lets her guard down and dreams deeply. Jo knows one thing from her bungled memories; it has always been Camille.