Turn 6 of 17

You open your mouth to object to Mia, to beg, but your voice cracks as your neck slims. Your coice now matches your new giggle. Your skull changes shape from the jaw up, becoming smaller and heart shaped, with eyes that seem too big, a nose that has a paegect little tilt and lips that ere plush, but natural. The face of your sister if she was the model for a new doll

You open your mouth to object — to beg, to bargain, anything — and your voice cracks in the middle of the first word. Not the way it cracked at fifteen, dropping. This is the opposite: a thinning, a lift, your throat tightening around the sound and reshaping it mid-syllable until what comes out is high and breathy and soft, a voice that matches the giggle perfectly. You try again.

"Mia, please—" and it comes out sweet and light, a voice made for pouting, and your hand flies to your neck, which is slimmer under your fingers than it was a moment ago, longer, graceful, the tendons of the man you were smoothed away.

In the mirror, your face begins to go.

You watch your own jaw narrow, the squareness of it dissolving like sugar in water, the chin drawing in smaller and softer until the whole shape of your head from the jaw up is something else — small, delicate, heart-shaped, the angles gone and replaced with a softness that has no argument left in it. Your cheekbones rise and round. Your eyes widen, growing large and luminous in your shrinking face, lashes thickening until they frame each one like a doll's painted gaze. Your nose refines itself into a small, perfect, upturned tilt, and your lips — already fuller — settle into a plush, natural pout that no lipstick has touched because it doesn't need any.

It is a beautiful face. That's the horror of it. It is the face of a pretty doll, flawless and symmetrical and faintly vacant, and it is making your expressions now: the fear in it registers as wide eyes and a tremble of the plush lower lip, and even that looks posed, looks cute.

"Please," you say again, in the little voice, and it comes out with a helpless upward lilt at the end that you never put there.

Mia steps into the bathroom light at last, and even taller than you remembered, she looks down at the face in the mirror over your shoulder. Something almost tender crosses her expression, and it is the coldest thing she has shown all night.

"There's the face," she says quietly. "The one that made everything forgivable. The one they all forgave." She reaches past you, and her fingers brush the hair at your temple — still yours, still short, still dark — and it stirs under her touch like it's listening.