Turn 10 of 15

I try to fight the transformation and Call Rachel, but my voice and accent starts to change and she thinks I am making a joke.

I grab my phone from the desk, my new nails clicking against the screen as I scroll frantically through my contacts. Rachel. She will know me. She has known me since university. She will hear my voice and know that something is wrong. I press call and hold the phone to my ear, my heart hammering against ribs that feel like they belong to someone else. The line rings once, twice, and then her voice bursts through, bright and familiar and so painfully normal.

"Gemma! Alright, love? Wasn't expecting a call."

"Rachel," I say, and the word comes out strange, flattened, the vowels stretched and softened into something that does not sound like my mouth. "Rachel, something is wrong. Something happened to me. I went into that new tanning place and something—"

I stop. The voice coming out of my mouth is not mine. It is lower, smoother, the northern edge sanded off into something that sounds vaguely like a postcode nobody lives in. I try again, forcing the old pronunciation, the old rhythm.

"Rach, listen to me. I went into the Solaris and the machine did something. I'm changing. My face, my clothes, everything—"

"Hold on, love." Rachel laughs, a confused, half-annoyed sound.

"Are you doing a bit? Is this for your Instagram or something? Because honestly, babe, it's well weird."

"It's not a bit!" I shout, and the shout itself feels wrong, too loud, too aggressive, entirely unlike me. I hear Rachel pull the phone away from her ear.

"Rachel, please. I am serious. I am sitting in my flat and I have turned into—I look exactly like the women outside the salon. I am wearing a grey tracksuit. My face is—"

"Okay, okay." Her voice is patronising now, the way you speak to a drunk friend at two in the morning.

"Gemma, I think you need to calm down, yeah? You sound well stressed. Have you been working too hard? You always do this, remember? That time with the spiders?"

"This is not spiders!" I hear the accent shift as I shout, the vowels pooling and rounding, the consonants softening.

"This is real! I am—" I pause, searching for the words, but the vocabulary is shrinking, the precise, design-school language I have spent years curating dissolving like sugar in water. "I'm, like... properly freaked, babe."

The word babe slips out before I can stop it, and I clamp my hand over my mouth. Rachel goes quiet on the other end of the line. When she speaks again, her voice is careful, measured.

"Did you just say babe?"

I open my mouth to deny it, to explain, to fight, but what comes out is a sigh, long and slow, perfectly calibrated to communicate that this conversation is exhausting and entirely not worth the effort.

"Look, forget it. I'm fine. I'm, like, actually fine."

I hang up. The phone slips from my fingers onto the desk. I stare at my hands, at the long, nude-painted nails, at the bronze skin, at the grey velour cuffs of my tracksuit. The fight is still there, somewhere deep inside, but it is buried under layers of something soft and heavy, like sediment at the bottom of a river. I know I should be terrified. I know I should be screaming. But the screaming has been smoothed over, tidied up, filed away in a folder I can no longer access. I pick up my phone and open Instagram. My thumb scrolls with practised ease. The algorithm knows what I want to see now. Grey tracksuits. Long lashes. Tanning tips. It feels like home.