Turn 3 of 11
Check Sasha's texts before answering anything else
You look down. Just for a second. Just long enough to thumb through the message thread that's been accumulating while you've been busy becoming someone else.
The texts are a cascade. The earliest ones are still Sasha's voice — *PRIYA, what is happening, I can hear you talking in there* — but they sharpen fast. *You just said you quit Nelson & Crane? I watched you come home from that office YESTERDAY.* Then: *I'm in the kitchen and I can see your door and your hair is different. Like actually different. Not styled different. LONGER.* Then: *Your face looks different. I'm not joking. I'm not joking. I'm not joking.* The last three messages are just the stop-sign emoji repeated, a girl hammering a button, and beneath them, the most recent: *whatever you're telling him it's making it worse. every time you say something it CHANGES you. please just hang up. please.*
Your reflection catches in the phone's screen for a moment — not the laptop camera, just the glass, just a flash — and the face looking back is yours the way a portrait is someone's. Higher cheekbones. A jaw that could cut paper. Eyes that sit differently in the skull, wider-set, brighter, as if the bone itself has been politely rearranged. You don't look like Priya Nair anymore. You look like Priya Nair's older, sharper, more expensive sister, the one who got out.
"Pri?" Theo's voice, mild and curious. "You still there?"
He's waiting. He's patient. He has all night, apparently, and so do you — so does this version of you, this glossier creature with the comp card and the garment bag and the Garment District address that didn't exist ten minutes ago. The question is still hanging: where were you scouted? Your mouth already knows the answer. You can feel it building behind your teeth like a word in a language you're suddenly fluent in.
From the kitchen, the sound of Sasha setting down her phone with a deliberate, careful click. The kind of sound someone makes right before they stand up.