Turn 5 of 7

Mia calmly asks who would ever take him seriously when he sounds like a bimbo. As Dylan tries to answer, his voice and entire vocabulary suddenly change into soft, empty, airheaded bimbo speech. He fights the change but cannot stop it.

Mia leans forward in the armchair, her elbows on her knees, her eyes level with yours despite your elevated heels. The streetlight catches the planes of her face and leaves yours in softer shadow, as if the world itself is already learning how to light you.

"Who would take you seriously," she asks, "when you sound like that?"

You draw breath to answer her, to summon the educated vocabulary you spent years acquiring, the precise diction you used in boardrooms and bedrooms alike to get what you wanted. Your mouth opens and your tongue shapes the beginning of a complex sentence, something about legal rights and medical documentation and the impossibility of hiding a crime of this magnitude. What emerges is: "Ohmygod, like, totally?"

The words hang in the air between you, pink and sticky as bubblegum. You feel your eyes widening, your lips parting in an expression of vacant surprise that matches the tone perfectly. You try again, reaching for polysyllables, for subordinate clauses, for any structure that would demonstrate the mind still trapped beneath this performance.

"Jade is, like, really super upset right now? Because this is so not fair?"

Each phrase rises at its conclusion, each statement disguised as question, each thought trailing off before completion because completion would require commitment to ideas your mouth no longer seems able to form. You feel the change happening in real time, your inner monologue simplifying itself to match your outer voice, complex emotions translating themselves into basic intensities: super bad, totally unfair, like, the worst ever.

"Stop it," you manage, but it comes out "Stoooop," drawn into three syllables, petulant, performative. You press your manicured fingers to your plumped lips as if you could physically hold the words in, force them back to their previous shapes. Your thoughts race ahead of your speech, still capable in the silence of your skull, but the moment you try to bridge that gap the simplification happens again—concepts dissolving into approximations, nuance collapsing into enthusiasm or its absence.

"I can still—" you begin, and watch yourself abandon the sentence because the completion would require words you no longer possess. You gesture with your hands, hoping to communicate through movement what your voice cannot, but your wrists rotate outward, your fingers flutter, your shoulders lift in a shrug that communicates nothing except your own emptiness. The gesture feels practiced, inherited from somewhere you cannot name, as natural now as your former posture of command once was.

Mia watches this with the patience of someone watching water find its level.

"What were you going to say?"

You search for it. The thought was there, urgent, important, something about identity and persistence and the self that survives physical change. You feel it still, a warmth in your chest, a pressure behind your eyes. But when you open your mouth: "Jade was just, like, thinking about stuff? Important stuff?" You giggle, and the sound surprises you, escapes you, continues without your permission.

"But then it went away. Isn't that, like, so weird?"

The giggle continues, soft and empty, filling the silence where your resistance used to be. You feel your face arranging itself into an expression of pleasant confusion, your head tilting, your lower lip pushing forward slightly. The pose completes itself without your instruction, and you stand in it, waiting, wondering what you were so upset about, why your cheeks feel wet, whether your mascara is running because that would be, like, totally tragic.