Turn 2 of 7

Dylan panics and runs to the bathroom mirror to see what is happening. His body undergoes the full physical transformation in detail while he watches.

You lurch toward the bathroom, your gait unsteady on feet that no longer know their own dimensions. The hallway stretches longer than you remember, your perspective wrong from this diminished height, and you catch yourself against the wall with hands that feel padded and soft. Your fingers splay against the paint and you notice the manicure forming—pink gloss spreading across nails that taper to perfect ovals. You push through the bathroom door and the light flicks on automatically, harsh and revealing, and you freeze before the mirror because the person there is already not you.

Your jaw has softened to a heart shape, the stubborn line you always kept carefully shaved now dusted with something approaching delicacy. Your eyes stare back larger than before, framed by lashes thickening even as you watch, your brows arching into permanent expressions of mild surprise. You touch your cheek and feel the collagen blooming beneath the skin, smoothing away the weathering you earned through thirty-two years of living. Your hair, when you grab a handful of it in rising panic, comes away in your fingers lighter than you remember, the dark brown lightening toward honeyed tones that catch the bathroom light like spun sugar.

"No," you whisper, and the voice that emerges is unmistakably feminine—breathy, higher, with a valley lilt you never possessed. You watch your throat in the mirror as the Adam's apple dissolves, the column of your neck lengthening, your shoulders rounding into slopes that could never bear the weight you used to lift. Your shirt hangs from a frame that has lost twenty pounds of muscle in as many seconds, and beneath the fabric your chest is swelling, pressing forward with an insistence that makes you clutch at yourself in horror. You feel the weight of it, foreign and demanding, changing how you stand, how you breathe.

Your hands drop to your hips and find them wider still than they were in the hallway, your waist compressing inward to dramatize the contrast. You turn sideways involuntarily, checking the profile, and the movement feels practiced, automatic, the pose of someone who has always known how to present themselves for appraisal. Your mind rebels even as your body complies. You try to summon rage, to hammer your fist against the mirror, but your arm moves wrong—elbow bent, wrist loose, the gesture reading as petulant rather than threatening. The woman in the mirror pouts back at you, and you feel your actual lips shaping themselves to match, plumping further, the lower one growing fuller with each heartbeat.

Your jeans slide down your transformed hips and pool at your feet, revealing legs that have shortened and smoothed, the hair vanishing from them in patches you can actually watch recede. You step out of the denim and stand in your boxers, which now gap enormously, and beneath them you can feel the final changes beginning, the last physical truth of your body rewriting itself while you stand witness. You grip the sink with both hands and lean toward your reflection, searching for any remnant of Dylan in those wide, mascara-darkening eyes, any trace of the man who walked through this door an hour ago. The woman gripping the porcelain looks back with an expression of empty, glittering confusion, and something in your mind begins to soften toward her, to recognize her, to want what she wants.