Me and my friends went to Disneyland last month — now my boyfriend isn’t acting like himself

So, we went to Disneyland Paris last month – just me, my boyfriend Leo, and our friends Mark and Chloe. It was the trip of a lifetime. For a few days it felt surreal, in the best possible way – endless giggling, ridiculous photos, way too much sugar, and that strange sensation that real life had just been temporarily switched off.

It all started at Phantom Manor.

We queued for nearly 40 minutes. Inside, it felt both cold and stuffy at the same time, smelling vaguely of dust, air conditioning and something sweet that I couldn’t quite place.

We were about to be directed into our doombuggy when Leo suddenly stopped dead.

Completely dead.

He grabbed the me tightly with both hands, his knuckles turning white.

‘I can’t do this,’ he whispered.

I laughed, thinking he was joking. ‘You’re kidding? Phantom Manor scares you?’

But he didn’t laugh, he just kept his gaze fixed above us, as if he were trying to hear, or perhaps recall, something. ‘I have a really bad feeling,’ he murmured. ‘A really bad one.’

Mark chuckled. ‘Mate, it’s practically a kiddies ride.’

Leo shook his head. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

I tried to talk him round, but it was no use. Eventually he just nodded and said, ‘I’ll be just outside. Promise.’

I watched him go,

black hoodie on,

hands jammed into his pockets,

without looking back.

We went on without him.

The ride was just a few minutes long, but from the beginning it felt… Wrong. I knew Phantom Manor – it was always supposed to be theatrical, not scary. This was somehow different. The sounds were muffled and slow; the animatronics seemed to twitch rather than glide.

And when I looked in one of the mirrors, seeing the doombuggy behind ours appear in the reflection, I could have sworn that, for a split second, Leo was sitting in it. Empty space. I blinked, and then he was gone. Just shadows and glass. I told myself it was the mirrors and the lighting.

When we got out, Leo wasn’t waiting outside. Nobody worried, not at first. Disneyland is enormous and you can easily lose people; maybe he’d gone for a drink or a wee.

But fifteen minutes later, I had this horrible heaviness in my stomach and I asked Mark and Chloe to check Frontierland while I went back toward the ride exit one last time.

And then I found him.

Standing outside the exit by a popcorn cart, staring straight at the castle.

Not moving.

Not on his phone.

Not even looking like he was waiting for anybody.

‘Leo!’ I nearly shouted. ‘What are you doing?’

I touched his shoulder and he jumped, as if I’d pulled him out of a deep sleep. Then he turned, and he looked… calm. He smiled that normal smile again, almost too normal, and said, ‘Hey. Where were you guys?’

‘Where were we? We’ve been looking for you everywhere!’

He frowned a little. ‘I’ve been right here. By the exit.’ He sounded so natural that for a moment, I almost felt silly.

When Mark and Chloe rejoined me, he said the exact same thing to them. ‘I’ve been right here.’

But that’s not what frightened me. It was the fact that he sounded so perfectly rehearsed, as if he were repeating lines from a play he’d learned an hour ago.

Still, the rest of the trip was fairly normal, or so I thought at the time. The strangeness really only started when we got home. First it was small things. Leo had been drinking black coffee since he was nineteen. The other morning I saw him spoon three teaspoons of sugar into his cup and when he noticed me staring he shrugged, ‘Guess I’ve developed a sweet tooth.’ Then he started forgetting things, our things. On our first date, a pigeon had swooped down and snatched a whole hotdog out of his hand and we’d laughed so hard we’d both cried and passers-by stared at us as if we were clinically insane. The last time I brought it up, he just stared at me with a blank expression. ‘Oh… Right.’ He didn’t recall anything – not the ketchup stain on his shirt, not that I’d called the pigeon ‘the bandit.’ Nothing. Then it got worse. He started humming melodies I’d never heard. I’d find him staring at himself in mirrors for prolonged periods, as if checking that all his features were still in place. And his laugh… God, it still sounded like Leo, but it was delayed, like an echo. It was like he’d memorized how to laugh but not the timing.

I tried convincing myself I was overreacting. Until last night.

We were on the sofa watching a movie when I made a joke about the ‘cheese drawer’. It was our own private little phrase for the emergency chocolate stash in the back of the cupboard. Leo looked at me blankly. ‘What cheese drawer?’

My body went cold. ‘You know… The cheese drawer.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He really didn’t know, there was no faking it.

I fled to the bathroom and called Chloe. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the phone. ‘Chloe… There’s something wrong with Leo.’

‘What happened?’

‘He’s been so different since Disneyland. He’s been forgetting things, acting completely unlike himself. I feel like he never came back.’

There was a long silence on the line, too long. ‘Chloe?’

When she finally spoke, her voice was barely a whisper. ‘Sarah… Leo rang me last week.’

I froze. ‘What?’

‘He said he was worried about you.’

My chest tightened. ‘Worried about me?’

‘He said that since Phantom Manor you’ve been different. Forgetful. And he’s seen you staring at him like you were trying to imitate him.’

I couldn’t breathe. ‘That’s crazy!’

And then Chloe said the words that made my stomach lurch: ‘Sarah… All of us remember it the same way.’

My throat seized up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You were the one who was worried and saying you had a bad feeling.’

Cold flooded my body. ‘No.’

‘You stayed outside,’ Chloe whispered. ‘Mark and I went on the ride with Leo.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘We spent nearly an hour looking for you afterwards.’

My mind went completely blank. Because that wasn’t the most terrifying thing. The most terrifying thing was that Chloe had always agreed with me. Every time we’d talked about the trip, she remembered Leo staying outside. Now suddenly… She didn’t.

‘Then we found you stood by the popcorn stand,’ Chloe said, her voice very quiet. ‘Just repeating that you’d been there the whole time.’

The phone nearly slipped out of my hand.

I’m sitting in the living room trying not to panic. I can hear him in the kitchen. Still humming the same new tune. Cabinets opening and closing with excruciating slowness. Just a minute ago, he called my name but for a split second his voice sounded… Doubled. Like two people talking at once. He thinks I’m in the shower.

And I can’t stop thinking about one thing. If Leo remembers that I stayed outside… And I remember that about him…

Then who actually went on the ride?

And which of us is home?