Turn 4 of 19

Overnight my hair thickened and lightened toward blonde. Lips plumped. Skin looked polished. “Sophie?” my boyfriend called from the bedroom. “You okay in there?” I forced a normal voice. “Fine.” The mirror showed a woman who was already leaving me behind. I hated how good she looked.

I grip the edges of the bathroom sink and stare. The woman in the mirror stares back with an expression I don't recognize — composed, faintly amused, the kind of face that expects to be looked at. My hair has changed overnight. The mousy brown I've lived with since adolescence is thicker now, richer, with strands of dark blonde catching the fluorescent light like threads of honey spun through caramel. I touch it and it feels different too — silkier, heavier, falling past my shoulders in a way it never has. My lips are fuller. Not swollen, not injected — full the way a woman's lips are full in a lipstick ad, the lower lip plush and curved. My skin looks like someone buffed it while I slept.

"Sophie?" Marcus calls from the bedroom, his voice muffled by the door.

"You okay in there?"

"Fine," I say, and the word comes out in a register I haven't heard from my own throat before. Lower. Smokier. There's a vibration at the base of it, a resonance that used to belong to someone else. I clear my throat and try again.

"Just washing my face." That's better. Almost normal. Almost me.

But the mirror doesn't agree. The woman looking back at me has cheekbones that could cut glass and a jawline that narrows to a point I've never possessed. My eyes are the same brown but larger somehow, set deeper beneath brows that have thickened into something sculptural. I lean closer and watch her lean closer and for a vertiginous moment I feel like I'm looking at a stranger who broke into my apartment and is wearing my skin as a disguise.

I hate her. I hate how good she looks.

That's the part that makes my stomach drop. Not the change itself — I could process the change, file it under impossible and move on — but the fact that this face, this polished and angular and devastatingly confident face, is beautiful in a way I have never been. My whole life I've been soft. Forgettable-pretty, the kind of girl who blends into a crowd and doesn't mind. The woman in the mirror doesn't blend into anything. She commands a room by walking into it. She is Vivian at forty, and she is looking at me like she's already won.

The bag sits on the bedroom chair where I left it. I locked it in a metal locker for eight hours yesterday and I came home looking like this. Distance doesn't matter. The metal didn't matter. Whatever the bag is doing to me, it doesn't need proximity — it just needs permission, and some part of me I can't reach has already said yes. I press my palms flat against the sink and feel the cool porcelain under skin that is smoother than it was twelve hours ago. My phone sits on the counter, screen dark, and I don't want to look at it. I already know there will be a message. There is always a message now.