Turn 13 of 17

You keep protesting, filling the silence with a light airy ramble. Mia guides you to a changed bedroom. Her side still the same, but yours altered beyond belief. The wardrobe someone who adores pinks and sparkles and doesn't understand how not show off her body. As you walk your manerisms have altered too now

"Like, Mia, baby, seriously," you babble as she steers you down the dark hallway, one warm hand at your lower back, "this is, um — this is so extra, okay? You know I love you, right? Like, literally so much, and this whole — " you gesture with a sparkling pink stiletto nail and your wrist flops, dainty, automatic, " — this whole thing is, like, so much?" You don't hear the ramble for what it is. It fills the silence nicely, and that's all you want it to do.

Your walk has changed too. You notice it only as a strange rightness: hips swaying with each small step, weight landing toe-first, shoulders back so the huge tight tits sit high, chin tilted. Somewhere in the last hundred steps your body learned to move like her, and it feels natural, and that's the worst part.

Mia opens the bedroom door and the light comes on before your hand can reach it.

Your side of the room is gone. Her side is untouched — same grey duvet, same stack of her books on the nightstand — but yours has been rebuilt in soft pink and cream: a vanity crowded with palettes and lit by bulb-lights, a perfume tray, a jewelry stand hung with gold, a full-length mirror leaning against blush walls. And the wardrobe stands open, waiting. Row after row of it. Tiny dresses in every shade of pink, bodycon and sparkle, crop tops, micro shorts, platform heels lined up like soldiers, sequins catching the light. Nothing in it covers anything. It is a wardrobe that doesn't know how to hide a body, because it was never asked to.

"Go on," Mia says, settling onto the end of the bed, her side, patient as ever. "Pick something. You'll know what goes, I think."

Your manicured fingers are already drifting toward a little pink dress on the nearest hanger — and you catch yourself, hand hovering, because you can't tell anymore whether that's you reaching, or her.