Kids used to kid about Opposite Day. There was no rhyme or reason to it. On some random day, some popular person would decide, Hmmm, let’s make today Opposite Day. Then everyone would go around saying things like I love you! when what they meant was I hate you! Or they’d say Want to share my lunch? when what they meant was Get your own lunch, you lousy creep!
Of course, no one ever truly meant these things. It was all harmless fun. And it wasn’t real. Until it was.
One sunny morning in April, Felicia Bromley woke up underneath her bed instead of on top of it. This is odd, she thought. Perhaps I was sleepwalking. But it wasn’t that. It was that things were flipped. Opposite. Not everything, of course. But enough things that it caused the world to go haywire.
In Felicia’s closet, all her clothes had changed to the opposite colors. Reds were now greens, blues were now orange, and so on. In the kitchen, instead of cereal in her ceramic bowl, there were pieces of ceramics in a bowl made of cereal. They did not taste good. They were sharp.
A kid was driving the school bus that morning, while a bunch of bus drivers were sitting in the back. Felicia thought it best to walk. When she reached school, she found that school was inside out, with the desks and blackboards all surrounding the building and the grass and sports fields inside of it.
“Can you believe it?” Felicia’s friend Marcy said. “Opposite Day has become a real thing!”
“Well,” Felicia replied, “if you say that’s true, then wouldn’t it make it false, and if it’s false, then…”
It was a confusing time, to say the least.
As the day went on, madness was the norm. Felicia failed a test in math (she always aced them), dunked a basketball in gym (she’d never even been able to dribble), and ate the most delicious meal of her life (from the school cafeteria, of all places). Some kids loved the changes. Others hated them. No one could deny that the day was interesting at least.
School schedules must have been immune to Opposite Day, because classes let out the same time they always did. But instead of going straight home to do homework (which was her daily obligation) and to sew sock puppets (which was her daily hobby), Felicia spent the afternoon making out with Lance Garrison under the bleachers at the football field. Lance Garrison was the coolest kid in school, not the type of guy who would normally give Felicia the time of day.
“I love you,” Lance told her as he caressed her face.
“I hate you,” Felicia told him as she stroked his chest.
“What?” he said.
“It’s Opposite Day,” Felicia said. “We mean the opposite.”
“So I don’t really love you?” Lance asked.
Yep. Confusing.
“Let’s just appreciate this moment for what it is,” Felicia said.
“So, we’re not supposed to appreciate it?” Lance asked.
“I don’t know, just—” And instead of talking, Felicia went back to kissing, because she knew if she woke up the next day and things were back to normal, then she might never get this chance again.
That realization led to other realizations. All the things that used to not go Felicia’s way had a chance of going her way today. So she went to the bank, where she had an account with $142.85 in it.
“I’d like to deposit a million dollars,” she told the teller.
“Very well, ma’am,” said the man behind the glass, and he walked into the back and returned a few minutes later with a bag full of cash. “One million dollars. Please don’t come again.”
He handed the bag to Felicia, who said, “A bad day to you, sir,” and she walked out whistling a tune. She’d never been able to whistle before.
She planned to use the money to buy the one house in town she had always loved, a mansion that looked like a castle, with a moat, a parapet-lined tower, and a steel gate at the front. But when she showed up at the gate, she didn’t even need to negotiate with the owner, an old man with a big puff of white hair and a mustache that was so long that it drooped.
“It’s all yours,” he said, handing her the deed and grabbing the cash as he sped over the drawbridge, his mustache flopping as he ran. Delighted, Felicia went inside, only to find that the place was jam-packed with awful things. The moat was made of stinky pea soup. The beds were covered in poison ivy. The showers sprayed blood.
Her dream house was a house of horrors. That was the problem with Opposite Day: bad things became good, but good things became bad. Some things stayed the same. All in all, there was a balance, like in the normal world. Only this world was much, much weirder.
Felicia decided it wasn’t worth experimenting and trying to get exactly what she wanted. There were too many contradictions involved. She decided to go about the day and hope for the best. Or hope for the worst? Even the most basic things were beyond confusing. Which gave her one more idea.
What would happen if she tried to kill herself?
If it truly was Opposite Day, would she end up immortal in the end? Immortality lasts more than a day. Was it worth the risk?
She decided it was. She climbed to the top of the tower in her new mansion. It was at least fifty feet to the ground. Jumping would normally have killed her. But now? There was only one way to know for sure.
Felicia was not a risk taker. At least not on an ordinary day. But today was Opposite Day, and she was impulsive and more than a little bit nuts. Without hesitation, she ran across the top of the tower, handsprang off of one of the parapets, and threw herself into the air.
The opposite happened. But the opposite of falling from a tower isn’t immortality. It’s flying upward. So that’s what she did. Felicia shot straight to the clouds, straight through the clouds, and into the atmosphere.
It being Opposite Day and all, the change in temperature and pressure didn’t bother her. It made her joyous, euphoric, happier with life than she’d ever been. But when she was beyond the atmosphere and beyond Earth’s pull of gravity, something strange happened. Without gravity, there was no up or down. No east or west.
Opposite Day got confused. Which way was Felicia supposed to go now?
Felicia bounced around in space like a rubber ball. Contradictions kept piling up. If this really was Opposite Day, why wasn’t everything opposite? Why only some things? What was the opposite of outer space? What was the opposite of Felicia?
Even the most omnipotent of entities couldn’t answer these questions. And so, Opposite Day was pronounced over.
Felicia’s body froze in the cold air of outer space and she floated there for a while, until she was struck by a frozen cloud and sent on a trajectory that led her straight into the Sun.
Which is the opposite of having a nice day.