Chapter 1: When you have a Doppelgänger

Jackson and Amber are two different people. They don’t even look alike.

And really, they don’t. Not when they first started working at Buzzfeed anyway. A year ago, Jackson was a black haired well-built adult man with a penchant for all-black sweaters, hoodies and joggers. A year and seven months ago, Amber was an adult woman (secretly a girl child) with dark brown hair that reached her chin in an asymmetrical cut, and a tendency to wear loose t-shirts and jeans to work (since the dress-code at work is pretty relaxed). They are about the same height, making Amber a relatively tall Asian woman, and Jackson a relatively average height Asian man, they are both ethnically Chinese, and they both live in LA, but that was about it. Oh, and they are both really friendly. But really, that is where the similarities end.

Today though, people kept calling Jackson Amber. And he has absolutely no idea why, because he had just taken a week’s vacation to visit his parents back in Hong Kong where they still live, and this is his first day back in office since then.

“Ambe – ” A shadow falls in front of him, and Jackson senses someone at his back.

“Not Amber.” Jackson repeats, for what has to be the fifth or sixth time today, standing up from the squat he was in to pick up his bottle cap, and looks up to find Amy looking at him. He takes in her somewhat surprised face at realizing he’s not Amber, and sighs, a bit more dramatic than necessary.

“Ah, yea, Jackson, sorry. I just thought you were her. You two kind of look alike right now.” Amy grins, holding a stack of files and a tumbler.

Right now? “What do you mean, ‘right now’” Jackson stares at her. He didn’t have time to ask the others who mistook him for his tomboyish colleague, but seeing how Amy was holding a tumbler, he figured they might both be heading for the pantry. The walk there would give him some time to unravel the strange case of being mistaken for Amber today.

“Oh, you don’t know?” Amy gestures towards his hair, freshly dyed platinum blond and messily styled, “Amber dyed her hair blond too.”

“That’s news to me.” Jackson rinses his bottle under the tap. He had gotten his hair bleached when he was in Hong Kong because his mum wanted to get a perm and wanted him to accompany her to the salon. Over there, he got convinced by the sweet-talking hairstylists to bleach his hair because it’ll make him look more handsome (“Oh, not that you aren’t already!” the girl had quipped with a wink and a smile, totally unaware of how useless her feminine charms were on Jackson). And he had figured he might as well do something while waiting for his mum’s perm job, so why not?

“I take it you’ve not seen her yet, then?” Amy was by the coffee machine, loading the capsules. “I would show you a photo, but it’ll be funnier for you to see her yourself.”

“Do you mean she looks funny?” Jackson teases, then frowns slightly, “Wait, do you also mean I look funny?”

The guffaw that comes out of Amy’s mouth has her almost in tears, and she lightly pats Jackson’s shoulder in consolation. Jackson blinks. Once. Twice. He does not look funny with blond hair! Not when he’s paid more for it than his mum’s perm.

“Jackson, you’re thinking too much. You look pretty cool, actually. Totally a chick magnet, if you were actually into chicks.” Amy wipes the almost tears at her eyes from laughing previously.

“But alas, this y body will over ever react to guys,” Jackson flexes his biceps at Amy, who gives a cursory glance (maybe he’s been doing this whole flexing thing way too often that it’s losing its effects…), and decides the easiest way to find out why the office thinks he’s Amber’s doppelganger is to find Amber herself.

That plan got delayed when he got back to his desk and was mobbed by his senior editor about some articles he swore he sent off before his vacation, and later bombarded by a bunch of interview questions about whether he has ever measured his size and whether he would do it for a Buzzfeed video, just to check how Buzzfeed employees compare to the national average (better than average, Jackson was told, if you want to know). All in all, a pretty typical in a day’s work in Buzzfeed. But he still has to find Amber, who’s in the video department, a floor up from where he works in the writing department.

He is at the top of the stair