The Switch

Chapter 1

Emory

The sound of the my body entering the water echos through my head before instinctually my body goes into action and I take off. I flip around and kick off the wall of the pool making my way back. Normally I don't hear the whistle blow while I'm still in the middle of the pool, and usually not followed by my name either. That means one of two things, either I did something wrong and my coach wants to talk to me immediately, or... It's time.

About a little over three years ago I was in a car accident with my aunt. It wasn't too bad we both lived, but I had to get surgery. Before the surgery though, they asked my aunt if we had the same blood type, since mine was so rare and they wanted to make sure that they had enough just in case. That's when she got confused, everyone in my family was o+, so if i was AB, it was either a rare mutation that accured, or...... my parents weren't who i thought they were. After the surgery my aunt decided to look into it. Not because she really wanted to know, but because she felt I might one day. If her brother wasn't really my Father, then there might be a man out there that was and one day I might want to  meet him. She told me it was my choice before looking into anything, I told her to go ahead but I had no interest in knowing at the moment. I figured if I did decide I wanted to know, it would be better to have the information available instead of having to wait. So she sent my DNA off and discovered that I wasn't her brothers child. That my father's real name was Anthony Jacobs. She wasn't expecting to find an actual person so fast, she assumed that it would just show common relatives and she would have to reach out to people and track down the man who my mother must have cheated on my father with. 

Instead what she found was news articles about a missing later found dead girl exactly my age. Evelyn Jacobs, that's when my aunt realized something was off, looking more into the DNA site she then read the name under my maternal parent, and it wasn't Hellen weeman, it was Jessica Jacobs, the wife of Anthony Jacobs. My aunt's first instinct was that Evelyn and I were twins, because there was no way I was secretly Evelyn. Then she thought about the fact that she was there at the hospital when I was born, mean that there was only one explanation, we were switched. I remember for about a month before she told me, she would just stare at me. Wouldn't say a word, but just watch me.

It was maybe a few months before I turned thirteen that I had decided I wanted to know. I didn't want to ask her though, I thought it would hurt her, if I wanted to find out if she wasn't my aunt really and if I wanted to meet my biological father. So I snuck into her room and pulled out the box of  files she kept under her bed. That's when I read everything she had read and printed out. An entire family that I "belonged" too. It felt like my heart had dropped out of my chest.  I wanted everything I had read to disappear. I shoved everything back into the box and hid it under her bed once again. If I just pretended I never read it, then maybe it wouldn't have to be real.

But then just a few weeks later was when my aunt got the call. I guess the DNA sites work both ways, and the Jacobs had finally decided to check in on their new DNA match. It wasn't my parents, but my paternal grandmother actually. She was the one who had apparently given them the test kits and managed their "family tree" neither of them had ever actually looked at it. Not until she called them frantic about the same conclusion my aunt had made. They then looked into it, called the hospital and contacted lawyers and exactly three weeks from my thirteenth birthday the hospital finally contacted my aunt to inform her of the switch. It wasn't long after confirming that I was their biological daughter that the lawyer showed up. The Jacobs wanted custody and they intended on taking my aunt to court for it.

Around this time it was also discovered that Evelyn wasn't my parents child either, leading to more questions. That's when everyone found out what happened, a nurse who had been at the end of an eighteen hour shift had been left in charge of the three infants born with in an hour of each other, all having the same initials. The odds of it felt so immensely fragile.  What exactly happened for the three of us to be switched, no one will ever know. Because Carol knightly, the nurse responsible, died of lung cancer two years prior, leaving everyone to wonder what exactly happened.