Lights, Camera, Sunglasses
Fiona Graves was not a woman to be messed with. She was, after all, the epitome of lights, camera, action.
Fiona looks up from her dropped gaze into the never ending array of cameras. Like stray cats, she walks, and they follow, ducking and weaving— but always observing.
The aviator sunglasses that were gifted to her from some French model the other week lay atop of her dark, cascading locks; she drops them onto her eyes to shadow them. ‘Stars,’ her mother used to tell her, ‘never reveal their eyes. It’s the only humanity in them.’ And then she’d walk off to do another fashion shoot, without a care in the world.
But then again, Mother never broke that rule.
Fiona’s leather boots clack heavily against the ground as she makes her way towards the backstage bathroom of her most recent interview, in t-minus three minutes, slipping her way past the multiple groups of people who smiled and asked for a picture or just rolled their eyes in audaciousness.
And suddenly, something changes.
Fiona feels a dip in her stomach, a whip of wind that seemingly didn’t exist, and she is no longer Fiona.
Little did Fiona know she has now entered the body of Natalie, the terrified and forever distraught seventeen year old who hated Fiona’s kind, celebrities, and Fiona vice versa.
Natalie no longer has the never-ending bundle of blonde hair that fell to her hips. She no longer has the greenest eyes out of the valley. Her dark hair and dark eyes are just as much as a revelation to her as when her parents found out she had quit band practice in tenth grade.
She feels the need to scream, glancing at herself in the mirror. Every single action she can taste of her tongue— the way the aviator glasses dig into her nose, the way a sweat bead trickles down her forehead, the way that the hours worth of makeup on her face seems to be melting off of her face in the brightness of the cream-white bathroom, despite wearing very nice, very expensive, bright-blocking sunglasses.
And even the way she notices that there’s constantly a feeling that somebody is watching her. Fiona herself knows this from experience.
At this moment, a woman enters the bathroom and makes direct eye contact with Natalie—in Fiona’s body— with an indescribable look on her face.
“You’re on in one,” the woman says, eyes scarily penetrating through the darkness of the sunglasses. “Better get out there.”
Without any reply, Natalie shifts her way out of the bathroom and immediately notices the racks and racks of cameras, the multicoloured spotlight, the bright blues and whites and greens of the interview room. Her pulse quickens, the heat of the room now becoming significantly hotter.
What is happening?
She glances down at her palms, darker than her usual pasty white ones— and not just because of the sunglasses— and straightens her posture.
The intensity of the lights never stops.
She is in someone else’s body.
Natalie doesn’t know why it takes her this long to realise this.
The faint, flickering voice in the back of her head is now a reality when she hears the words:
“And next on the show, Hollywood’s next best thing, Fiona Graves, ladies and gentlemen!”
An applause that Natalie has only heard on television rings throughout her ears as a man, dressed in all black, supposedly a camera crew member, tells her to enter the room and into the frame.
Natalie bristles. Her seemingly chill, Netflix and strawberry ice cream Friday evening is not going to plan.