Turn 4 of 17

You slip out of your oversized clothes as you stumble to the bathroom as you go you don't notice your feet shrinking, your hips widening, your skeleton below your head shifting. When you look in the full length bathroom mirror your skeleton has changed entirely, wth small shoulders and wide hips. As you watch your toenails and fingernails gain an expensive, pastel manicure and pedicure

You can't stand in them a second longer. The clothes that fit the man you were slide off your diminished frame — jacket shrugged to the floor, shirt billowing down past your hands, trousers pooling at your ankles — and you kick free of your shoes, which you leave where they fall, and stumble down the hallway in your socks and underwear, one hand on the wall. Mia's voice follows you, unhurried.

"Run along, Dylan. I'll be right here." You don't answer. You don't trust what would come out.

The bathroom light is blinding after the dark hallway, and you squint into it as you lurch to the full-length mirror on the back of the door. What you don't notice, because you're moving, is your feet: the socks going loose, your toes rearranging themselves into smaller, neater architecture inside them. You don't notice your hips, because you can't see them yet — the slow, insistent widening that changes the way each step lands, your pelvis tilting, your balance shifting lower and softer into your core.

Then you're at the mirror, and you stop breathing.

The body looking back at you is not yours. It has your head on it — your tanned, smooth, fuller-lipped head — but below the neck it belongs to someone else entirely. Narrow shoulders, delicate, sloping down into thin arms. A slim waist that flares out into wide, unmistakably curved hips, thighs soft and shapely, a figure that no amount of gym hours ever built. Your skeleton has been redrawn while you walked, every bone below your jaw rewritten to a new blueprint, and the body in the mirror sways slightly when you sway, breathes when you breathe, and waits.

Movement pulls your eyes downward. Your fingers, resting on the doorframe, are brightening at the tips — and you watch, helplessly, as each nail lengthens and shapes itself into a neat almond, coated in a flawless pastel pink that catches the bathroom light like lacquer. A manicure, salon-perfect, appearing on your hands one nail at a time. You lift one foot and peel off the loose sock, and your toes are already smaller, prettier, each nail blooming with the same glossy pastel as a pedicure finishes itself without your permission.

"Look at you," Mia says from the doorway, leaning against the frame, taking you in the way someone appraises a finished room. "You picked those nails out yourself once, you know. For the one with the acrylics you laughed at all through dinner. You told me her hands looked cheap." She smiles, small and cold.

"Do they look cheap now?"