She Wants to Be Me Chapter 1

My shift ended late, so I split a rideshare with a coworker.

The second we got in, the driver started giving us a weird, twitchy once-over.

"You ladies have it good, huh? Working in a place like the Apex Tower, you must be rolling in it. Not like me, breaking my back for peanuts."

I remembered the horror stories I'd seen online and immediately started laying it on thick. "Don't even get me started. We're just contract workers. I take home maybe twenty-eight hundred a month, and my boss treats me like dirt!"

The driver's expression softened a little, and he even muttered a few words of sympathy.

But then my coworker piped up. "That's not true at all! Our Ivy is a total winner. Graduated from a top university, makes a six-figure salary, and her parents are both professors. The biggest hardship she's ever faced was probably a bitter iced Americano!"

The driver's face contorted with rage. "Goddamn it, I can't stand you people born with a silver spoon in your mouth!"

He floored it, sending the car plunging off a cliff.

Amid the explosion, I was blown to pieces.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the office.

My coworker, Hailey, walked up to me with a smile. "Ivy, I called a car. Let's go home together!"

* * *

The memory of the heat tearing my body apart left me drenched in a cold sweat.

A low groan escaped my lips, and a colleague next to me called out in concern.

"Ivy, are you okay?"

My eyes shot open. I felt like I had just clawed my way back from hell.

I… wasn't dead?

I patted my arms and legs, all blessedly intact, then glanced at the time on my phone.

It was real. I was alive.

The first thing I did was grab my bag and make a run for it.

"Weren't you going to finish that report before you left?" my coworker, Mark, asked, looking puzzled.

I shook my head vigorously. Who cares about a report when your life is on the line?

"Hey, wait," Mark called out. "There's a number I can't figure out. Can you take a quick look? The client's in a hurry."

I had no choice but to go back and quickly sort it out for him.

But that small delay was all it took. A chillingly familiar voice, like the sound of my own doom, echoed from behind me.

"Ivy, I called a car. Let's go home together!"

It was Hailey.

Hailey was an intern who had started in the spring, and I was assigned to mentor her. She was diligent and sweet-talking, but she had a fatal flaw: no filter.

Our department head was dealing with a classic bald patch and one day showed up wearing a toupee. Hailey immediately rushed over to compliment him. "Mr. Davison, you look so young today!"

Before he could even smile, she added, "The hairpiece really suits you! Without it, everyone says you look like an old bald coot!"

Mr. Davison’s face fell. "Is that so?" he asked, his smile frozen. "When do they say that?"

Hailey whipped out her phone and showed him our private team chat group. "See? Just today, someone was asking if the 'old bald coot' was coming in!"

That incident got every single person in the group called into his office, and our promised heatwave holiday was canceled. We had to apologize to our innocent colleagues one by one and walked on eggshells for weeks.

Another time, I took Hailey to a client meeting. The client was picky, and we revised the proposal seven or eight times before finally getting it approved. As we were leaving, Hailey chirped happily, right in front of the client, "That's great! Ivy, you're so experienced. You just used the first draft, and they didn't even notice!"

The client blew up on the spot, stormed into our boss's office, and our entire team's bonus went up in smoke. Three months of work, all for nothing.

After that, I started keeping my distance. There's a saying: a fool's impulse can cause more damage than a villain's calculated plot. I knew Hailey's unfiltered mouth would get someone seriously hurt one day.

I just never thought it would be me.