He guessed he must be eight years old. Small, skinny, and totally unrecognizable. He had longish black hair and typical almond-shaped brown eyes, with large front teeth and ears. Staring open-mouthed, it took a minute before his mind finally caught up and started to process what his eyes were telling him. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes in disbelief before trying another look.
The Chinese boy was still staring back at him. "Holy shit!" The sound of his thin, reedy voice helped convince him that this was real, no matter how impossible it seemed. Josh ran his hands over bronze skin and slender limbs. It all felt so different, but also oddly normal. This wasn't him, wasn't his body, but as he explored it and looked at himself in the mirror he was having a harder time seeing it as new.
"Josh?" A new voice startled him and he spun around to see his roommate staring at him with a bemused grin. "Um, you know that standing around naked in the living room is not normal in America?"
Josh stared at him. "Not 'normal'? Are you fucking kidding me?"
That made his roommate blanche. "Aw, come on, Josh! You start cussing like that and everyone is going to blame me. Not to mention the trouble I'd be in if anyone else came in and caught you parading around with no clothing! I mean, prodigy or not you're still just a kid!"
Josh had to fight back an urge to scream, frustrated and bewildered by Eric's reaction. The truth hit him harder than the change. "So, my being an eight-year-old Chinese boy doesn't bother you?"
His roommate rolled his eyes. "Well, it sure hasn't been all fun and games, but having your parents pay for this place sure makes it worth being a babysitter." He grinned at Josh's flare of temper. "Just kidding. Sorta. You're pretty cool for a kid, and I probably would be failing Calculus if you weren't helping me. But Dude! Get some clothes on!"
Flushing in sudden embarrassment, Josh trudged back to his room and shut the door. How could Eric, who had been his roommate for more than two years, not see that he'd dropped more than a decade and changed race? But wait. Some of the things Eric had been saying finally got processed in Josh's mind. A prodigy? His parents paying for the apartment? Being a babysitter? As he started to put all that together, he turned around and saw 'his' room. The layout and furniture were the same, but everything else was different. A mix of superhero and anime posters covered the walls, and the framed pictures on his dresser showed a Chinese couple and then pictures of the boy he seemed to be with them and with other Chinese kids the same age.
Dazed, he spotted the pile of clothing he'd left on the floor and picked it up. It looked wrong. How had this stuff fallen off him? Josh started pulling it on - everything fit perfectly - pretty much kid-sized versions of what he had been wearing before. A check of his closet and dresser showed the same thing - everything was his new size. And when he found the nylon flip folder that had replaced his wallet, the ID card inside showed his new face and the name 'Jo'shu Lin Po', along with a birth date eight years earlier. Something else was different - the vial was gone.
The vial! He turned and ran back to the main room, where Eric was looking through the Netflix movie menu on the TV. "Eric! Where are the vials you got in Chinatown?"
His roommate gave him a puzzled look. "Huh? What are you talking about?"
"The rack of vials with the weird labels, all different colors?"
Eric frowned, then said "Oh, right! You were with me. But we didn't buy them - you said they were probably silly fake stuff."