Turn 6 of 19

None of my old clothes fit. I bought a shorter skirt and a strapless top that clung. Standing in front of the mirror I whispered, “This isn’t me.” My reflection only smiled back, elegant and calm. I put a cardigan over everything before work and prayed no one would notice.

The cardigan is a joke. It's the same oatmeal-colored thing I've worn for three winters — shapeless, pilled at the cuffs, the kind of garment that says *please don't look at me* — and it's failing at its one job. The strapless top bunches underneath it, the fabric clinging to curves the cardigan can't flatten. Every time I move, the cardigan gaps at the front, and the swell of my chest pushes through like a confession trying to escape.

I bought the clothes yesterday. That's the part that scares me — not that I bought them, but how fast I bought them, how little I hesitated. I walked into the boutique on Maple Avenue that I've passed a hundred times without entering, and the saleswoman took one look at me and started pulling things from the racks without asking my size. She knew. Something about the way I was standing told her. The skirt is shorter than anything I've ever worn, black, and it sits high on the narrower line of my waist. The top is ivory and strapless and it clings like it was made for me, because it was made for the body I have now, not the one I had a week ago.

"This isn't me," I whispered to the mirror this morning. My reflection smiled back — elegant, composed, faintly amused by the protest. The woman in the glass has collarbones that catch light and shoulders that slope like architecture and a waist that dips inward before the dramatic flare of her hips. The cardigan swallows none of it. I look like Vivian playing at being modest, and the joke is so obvious I almost laugh.

At the bookstore, Dana looks at me twice during the morning shift. Her eyes catch on the gap where the cardigan falls open, on the line of my collarbone, on the way my hair falls in thick dark-blonde waves I haven't styled. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. The question is written across her face — *when did you become this?* — and I feel the flush crawl up my neck, which only makes me look more polished, more alive, more like someone who meant every inch of this.

The bag sits under the counter. I didn't put it in the locker today. I couldn't. The thought of the metal door closing on it made my chest tight, made my fingers curl, made something inside me whisper *not again, don't shut me out again* in a voice that was half mine and half hers. So it's here, two feet away, warm and patient, and every few minutes my hand drifts toward the counter's edge like I'm checking for a pulse. Mrs. Kwan comes in at noon and compliments my blouse. She calls it a blouse. I've never owned a blouse in my life.