Chapter 3

The morning comes too fast.

I sit up in the borrowed dark, and Sienna's body is already doing the things her body does before I have decided to move. She's warm at the edges. Her hair is in her mouth. The sheets have twisted around her legs in the night, and when I kick them off, the air in her bedroom hits all of her at once.

For a second, I forget how I got here. Then I remember: the dissolve, the climb up her bedframe while she slept, the soft dark of her open mouth. I remember the taste of her last thought before I let go of my own shape. It was just a word: tomorrow.

Now tomorrow is here, and I'm the one inside it.

I push up onto her elbows. Her room is smaller in the daylight. The dresser with the loose knob, the stack of schoolbooks on the floor, the posters she's had since she was twelve — they're all still here, still hers, but I'm the one seeing them through her eyes. The clock on the nightstand says 7:14. It's later than she usually sleeps, but her body isn't alarmed. It's Saturday.

I sit there for a while, just feeling her heartbeat. It's steady. It's hers. It's mine.

The tension in her shoulders is a knot I inherit before I've even opened my mouth. She's been clenching her jaw in her sleep again. I roll her shoulders, testing the motion, and the knot loosens the way it always does when I pay attention. There's a particular pleasure in this: taking the small, invisible tensions of someone else's life and smoothing them out, like pressing a hand over a rumpled sheet. She'll wake up better today, whether she knows it or not.

I swing her legs over the side of the bed and stand. The mirror over the dresser is already waiting. I could go to it. I want to go to it. But I don't, not yet. I want the body first, the feel of it before the sight of it. I want to know her from the inside out.

The air in her room smells the way I knew it would — citrus and old paper and the faint, sweet residue of last night's candle. Her feet are bare on the floor, and the wood is cool. I walk to the closet the way she might walk, if she were alone and not thinking about it. The blue dress is exactly where I left it yesterday, still in its dry-cleaning bag. I take it down.

The bag rustles, too loud in the quiet. I pause, listening. No one in the hall. No one on the stairs. Just the house settling around me.

I unzip the bag slowly, because there's a particular kind of pleasure in the slow reveal. The dress is deep blue, the color of a bruise in the evening, and the fabric is cool and slippery under my fingers. I pull it out and hold it up. It's soft. It's expensive. It's the kind of thing Sienna would never wear to school, which is exactly why I want to put it on her.

I let her pajama shorts fall to the floor. I pull the sleep shirt over her head. And then I stand in her room, naked and unobserved, and I step into the dress the way she would, one leg at a time, letting it rise over her hips and settle against her ribs. The crepe slides against my skin like cool water, and when I do up the buttons, the bodice settles against my chest, snug and precise.

I turn to the mirror.

And there she is. Sienna Whitfield. The girl from the swim team. The girl whose cousin Harper is always watching her. The girl whose mother worries about her grades. She's standing in her own bedroom, wearing the blue dress, and she looks like she's already left the house.

I smile. It's not her smile. It's mine, using her face.

The smile changes everything. It's too wide, too knowing. I practice Sienna's smile, the one she uses when someone takes her picture. Smaller. Sweeter. The corners of her mouth turn up, and I hold it there, watching myself be good at it.

I've been waiting for this all day, I think, and the thought is true in a way that has nothing to do with time. I've been waiting for a body this clean, this easy. The last one was fine. The one before that was a struggle. This one is like slipping into warm water.

I do a small turn, letting the skirt flare. The dress moves the way it's meant to move. I stop, one foot pointed, a girl in a blue dress in a room full of ordinary morning.

Then I go downstairs.

The house is awake in the quiet way houses are on weekends. I can hear Sienna's father in the kitchen, the scrape of a pan, the low murmur of the radio. Her mother is somewhere deeper in the house, maybe the study, maybe the laundry room. I move through the hall with Sienna's practiced lightness, and no one looks up.

The kitchen is bright. Too bright, after the shaded darkness of her room. I blink, and for a second the world goes sharp and strange, the way it always does right after integration. First Breath, I called it once, back when I still had the words for these things. Now I just feel it: the shock of solid air, the weight of gravity, the particular gravity of being a girl in a kitchen on a Saturday morning.

"You're up early," her father says. He's at the stove, his back to me. He's making eggs, the way he does on weekends, and the smell of butter is thick in the air.

"Couldn't sleep," I say. Sienna's voice, low and a little rough. Perfect.

He turns. He looks at me, and then at the dress. His eyebrows go up.

"That's new."

"She's had it for months," I say, and the lie comes so easily it's almost not a lie. Sienna has had the dress for months. She's just never worn it. "I felt like being nice to myself."

Her father's face softens. He's the kind of man who wants his daughter to be nice to herself. He turns back to the eggs and says, "You should. You've been working hard."

I sit at the kitchen table and fold my hands in my lap, the way Sienna does when she's trying to be good. The plate he puts in front of me is plain white, and the eggs are a little overcooked at the edges. I eat them anyway, because Sienna would eat them, because she loves her father too much to hurt his feelings. The salt is on the counter, but I don't ask for it.

The minutes pass. The radio plays something soft. I can feel the day taking shape around me, all the ordinary textures of a life that isn't mine.

After breakfast, I carry the plate to the sink. I rinse it, the way Sienna does. I put it in the dishwasher. And then I stand in the middle of the kitchen, feeling the blue dress move against my legs, feeling the private, sideways pulse of being seen and not seen.

This is the part I like best. The part where I'm doing the small, unremarkable things that belong to someone else's day. It's not the same as being seen. It's not even the same as being wanted. It's something quieter. It's the proof that I can be here, in the middle of this ordinary house, and no one will ever know.

The day is hot by noon.

Sienna's room has a window that faces the side yard, and when I go back upstairs, the sunlight is lying across the floor in a long, bright stripe. I take the dress off carefully and hang it up again, smoothing the creases. It's not mine to keep, but I'm not done with it yet.

I put on a plain white tank top and a pair of denim shorts from her drawer. They fit differently than the dress. They're older. Softer. They've been washed so many times they've forgotten they were ever new.

I sit on the edge of her bed and pull out my phone — Sienna's phone. The screen lights up with her messages. There's one from Harper: you busy later?

I don't answer. Harper will be busy enough on her own. But the message is a nice little pressure in my chest, the awareness that the world outside this house is still turning, still full of people who know Sienna and will want to know her later.

I think about the rest of the day. I could stay in her room, lying on her bed, listening to her music. I could go for a walk. I could take her bike and ride down to the river, like she used to do when she was younger. I could do anything.

Instead, I stand up and go to the mirror. I look at her face. It's a good face. It's not the prettiest face I've ever worn, but it's clean and honest and full of small, useful expressions. I practice a few of them. The one for when her mother asks if she's done her homework. The one for when Harper wants to talk about boys. The one for when someone says something she doesn't like but can't say so.

The last one is the hardest. Sienna has a way of keeping her face very still when she's angry. It's not a blank face. It's a held face. A face that is trying very hard not to be anything.

I practice it for a long time.

At one o'clock, I hear the front door open and close. Harper's voice, calling from the entryway. "Sienna?"

I go to the top of the stairs. Harper is standing at the bottom, looking up. She's wearing a yellow sundress and her hair is pulled back in a headband. She looks like summer, all bright edges.

"Hey," I say.

"You're home," Harper says. "I texted you."

"I saw." I come down the stairs, taking my time. The wood is cool under my bare feet. "I was going to answer."

Harper waits at the bottom, watching me. Her expression is careful, like she's trying to figure out if I'm in a good mood. Sienna is often in a bad mood when Harper shows up unannounced. I decide to be in a good mood.

"Come in," I say. "I'm just hanging out."

Harper's eyes flick to my outfit. "You look... relaxed."

"I am relaxed." I smile, and this time it's a little closer to Sienna's real smile. "Do you want something to drink?"

We sit in the kitchen, and Harper talks about the swim team and a party she heard about and a boy she's not sure about. I listen the way Sienna listens, nodding in the right places, making small sounds of agreement. The whole time, I'm thinking about how easy this is. How close I am to something Harper would never show me if she knew.

She's leaning into a body her cousin wears, and she's offering the soft thing she'd never offer if she knew. The thought is sharp and sweet, like the first bite of a cold apple.

At some point, Harper stops talking and looks at me. "You're being nice."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"No." She tilts her head. "It's just weird."

I laugh, and the laugh is Sienna's, low and a little surprised. "I'm allowed to be nice."

Harper smiles then, a real smile, and I feel something shift in the air between us. It's not attraction. It's something smaller and more dangerous. It's the shape of a trust I haven't earned.

I sit with it. I let it be.

After Harper leaves, the house is quiet again. I go back upstairs and put on the blue dress one more time. I stand in front of the mirror and smooth the skirt. I don't smile. I don't practice any faces. I just look.

I think about leaving. The window is open. The tree in the side yard is close enough to climb. I could be gone in ten minutes, out of her body and into the afternoon, free of this particular life. But wanting to stay in the dress is not the same as wanting to stay in the life.

I turn away from the mirror. I sit on the edge of the bed. The dress pools around me, blue and soft and heavy with the heat of the day.

Tomorrow, I'll let her go. I'll leave her sleeping in her own bed, with her own body, and she'll wake up with no memory of any of this. She'll put on the dress and never know I was the one who made it sing.

But right now, in the quiet afternoon, I'm still here. And the world is still turning, and no one knows, and that's enough.