Storyline 4 - Standalone Chapter

My phone screen glows in the dark of my room, and Chloe Vance is looking at me.

It's an old photo. Last autumn, outside the bookstore where she works. She's laughing at something off-camera—probably Maya, her best friend, the one who quotes poetry at her—and the wind has caught her dark curly hair, and her dimples are showing. She's wearing a plum cardigan and a forest green corduroy skirt, and there's a silver locket glinting at her throat. The afternoon light is golden on her face. She looks like someone who doesn't know she's beautiful. She looks like someone I've wanted to be for as long as I can remember.

My hands are shaking. Not from cold—the heat's on, and through the wall I can hear Kyle's video game, the muffled explosions and gunfire that mean he'll be on the couch for another three hours at least. I'm shaking because I know what happens next. I've known for weeks, maybe my whole life, in the way you know something without being told. If I focus on this photo—if I push everything I've ever wanted into it—something will answer.

I've spent years aching. Not the ache of wanting someone. The ache of wanting to be someone. Every girl I've ever looked at, every soft sweater and pleated skirt and pair of tights, every laugh I've heard from across a room and wished I could make with my own throat—it's all been leading here. To this photo. To this girl. To this moment.

My thumb hovers over the screen. Her face fills the frame. Her smile. Her dimples. The way the wind is in her hair.

I let the longing sharpen into focus. I let it become everything I am.

And the world goes white at the edges.

It starts with the photograph—the image of Chloe blurring, the colors bleeding outward, the frame dissolving into light. My dark room fades, my desk, my bed, the sound of Kyle's game, all of it receding as the photo expands and swallows me whole. For a heartbeat I am nowhere, a consciousness suspended in brightness, falling through a frozen moment into somewhere else.

Then the flood.

The air hits me first. Cold. Autumn-cold, with a bite that wasn't in my room. It fills my lungs—her lungs—and the chest that rises with the breath is smaller than mine, the space tighter, the rhythm different. I taste coffee and dry leaves and the faint, sweet trace of rosewater perfume. The light is golden, slanting through the trees outside the bookstore, and I can feel it on my skin—her skin—warm where the sun hits, cool where the shade falls.

I look down. Breasts. I have breasts. Full, round, soft breasts pushing against the cream blouse I'm wearing, and there's a plum cardigan over them, and a silver locket resting in the hollow of my throat. My throat—narrow, smooth, no Adam's apple. My hands fly to my chest and cup the weight of them, and I make a sound. A gasp. It comes out sweet and high-pitched and nothing like the voice I've had for twenty years.

"Oh my god," I say. The voice is Chloe's. Sweet. Slightly breathy. It resonates in a throat that's shaped differently, a mouth that's smaller, and the words stumble out the way Chloe's always do. "Oh my god, okay—"

I'm her. I'm inside her body. The photograph worked.

I'm standing on the sidewalk outside the bookstore, exactly where the photo was taken. The wind is in my hair—her hair, dark and curly and wild—and I can feel it on my neck, my shoulders, the way it moves when I turn my head. The corduroy skirt brushes my knees, and the tights are warm on my legs, and my boots are slightly scuffed at the toes. Everything is at the wrong height. The world is taller than it should be, or I'm shorter—I'm five-four, and the door handle of the bookstore is higher than I expect when I reach for it.

I'm shorter by four inches. I'm softer everywhere. There's weight on my chest that pulls me forward, a new center of gravity I don't know how to balance yet. My hands are small and soft, the nails painted pale pink, a silver ring on one finger.

"Chloe," I say, just to hear it. "Chloe Vance."

The voice. The voice. It's so different from my own that I laugh—a bright, startled, slightly stumbling laugh that sounds exactly like her. I press my hand to my throat and feel the vibration, and my skin is smooth. No stubble. No roughness. Just softness all the way down.

I need to get off the street. I need to go somewhere private. Her memories are already there, waiting—I know her address, her route home, the key code for her apartment. I know that Ava is at work and won't be home for hours. I know which books are on her nightstand and which poems she's been working on and what she had for breakfast this morning.

The walk to the apartment takes ten minutes. Every step is a discovery. My hips sway in a way I don't tell them to. My skirt swishes. The cardigan is soft against my arms, and the boots have a small heel that changes my posture, and a man outside the coffee shop glances at me and smiles and I realize—he's looking at me. At a girl. At Chloe. At me.

The apartment is empty when I arrive. Ava's photography prints are on the walls—black-and-white shots of the farmers' market, the park, Chloe reading on the couch. There's a stack of Chloe's books on the coffee table: Middlemarch, a collection of Emily Dickinson, a worn paperback of The Secret History. The air smells like coffee and vanilla. I lock the door behind me and stand in the living room, breathing, being her.

Then I go to her room.

The room is organized chaos, exactly the way her profile described it. Books stacked on every surface. A twin bed with a patchwork quilt. Fairy lights strung around the window. The desk is covered in notebooks and pens and sticky notes, and there's a half-empty mug of cold chai next to her laptop. The smell hits me: paper, old and new. Chai spices. And under it, the faint, sweet scent of rosewater.

I walk to the mirror on the closet door and pull it open.

The girl in the mirror is Chloe Vance. Dark curly hair, wild and untamed. Round brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. Warm olive skin. Dimples that appear when I smile—and I am smiling, I can't stop smiling. The plum cardigan over the cream blouse, the green corduroy skirt, the brown tights, the scuffed boots. The silver locket. She's cute. She's really, genuinely cute—the kind of cute that makes you want to know her, be her friend, be her.

I lift my hand. She lifts hers. I touch my cheek—her cheek—and trace the curve of my jaw, the softness, the slight bump on the bridge of my nose where I broke it falling off a swing when I was seven. I know how I broke it. I was there.

The memory surfaces like a wave—triggered by the locket, by the photo inside it of me and Ava at the beach.

I'm eight years old, and Ava is ten, and we're at the ocean for the first time. The waves are bigger than I expected, and I'm scared to go in, but Ava takes my hand and walks me into the surf. "I've got you," she says, and her hand is warm and steady, and the water is cold around my ankles. "I'm never going to let go." I've worn this locket every day since she gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday. The photo inside is from that trip. The only one where we're both looking at the camera.

The memory fades, and I'm standing in the mirror, my eyes stinging slightly. The locket is cool against my collarbone. I've worn it every day. I know this. I was there.

I turn to the closet. I've been waiting to do this for years. My whole life, maybe.

The wardrobe is a world. Jewel tones—plum, forest green, mustard, burgundy. I run my fingers along the hanging garments: the oversized cardigans, the corduroy skirts, the printed blouses, the fit-and-flare dresses. The burgundy one catches my eye—a deep wine color with a subtle floral pattern, the fabric soft with a slight stretch. I pull it off the hanger and hold it up.

I undress slowly. The cardigan. The blouse. The skirt. The tights. The boots. Then the underwear—a simple white bra, pale pink cotton panties with a tiny lace trim. I leave them on. The room is warm, and the fairy lights cast gold across my skin—her skin—warm olive, smooth, the curve of my waist, the fullness of my hips, the round, soft breasts in the white bra.

The dress settles over my head and onto my shoulders. I zip it up at the side, and the fabric wraps around me like it was made for me—because it was. The bodice is fitted, snug against my ribs, and the skirt flares out from the waist, ending just above my knees. I turn, and the dress swirls. It swirls.

"Oh my god," I whisper. The voice is Chloe's, and it's mine, and the dress is moving around my legs like it's alive. I spin once, just to watch the hem rise, and a laugh bubbles up—bright and giddy and unstoppable.

I pull more clothes from the closet. A mustard cardigan, chunky and soft. A forest green corduroy skirt. A quilted jacket lined with fleece. A vintage tweed blazer she never wears but can't get rid of. And on the top shelf, folded carefully in a small cardboard box, the silk scarf. Her grandmother's. The one she used to wear as a headband. The one she stopped wearing because it's too fragile, because she's scared of ruining it.

I press it to my face. Old perfume. Faded roses. The grief is there, but so is the love—her grandmother's laugh, her kitchen that always smelled like cinnamon, the way she called Chloe azizam. My dear.

I wrap the scarf around my neck and look in the mirror. The girl looking back at me is Chloe Vance, dressed in a burgundy dress and her grandmother's scarf, her dark curls wild, her dimples showing, her glasses slightly askew. Behind her eyes—behind my eyes—is me. The boy who wanted this for years. The boy who's finally here.

I don't wink. I don't grin. I just look at myself for a long moment, and the girl in the mirror looks back, and something settles in my chest. Quiet. Certain.

I'm her. I'm finally her.

The afternoon passes in Chloe's routines. I make chai in the kitchen—the cardamom is in the jar with the blue lid, the tea is in the tin that says "CHAI" in Ava's handwriting. I take the mug to her room and curl up on the bed with Middlemarch. The words blur and then steady, and I read for an hour, lost in the story, the chai cooling beside me, the fairy lights glowing gold above.

The body is starting to feel less strange. The weight on my chest is still there, but I notice it less. The voice in my throat is simply my voice. When I think I, I mean myself—not Chloe, not the boy I was this morning, but whoever I am now, in this body, in this room, in this life.

Later, I stand in front of the mirror again. The burgundy dress is rumpled from lying on the bed. The scarf has slipped off one shoulder. I'm tired in the way you get tired after a day that has changed everything. My hands move before I tell them to—tracing the curve of my waist, the softness of my hips, the weight of my breasts in the bodice of the dress. My breath catches. My heart beats a little faster. The girl in the mirror watches me with those dark, steady eyes, and I feel the warmth spread through me like honey.

The cut comes at the peak—not a scene break, but a shift. The warmth recedes. My breathing steadies. I sit on the edge of the bed and just breathe. Just exist. The body is warm and real and mine, and the room is quiet, and the fairy lights are gold, and the scarf smells like someone else's grandmother.

I don't want to leave. But I know I have to. This is the first time. I need to know I can come back.

I undress and fold the clothes on the bed. The dress. The scarf. The tights. The underwear—I leave it on. I stand in the middle of Chloe's room in just her bra and panties and locket, and I look at the mirror one last time. The girl in the mirror is flushed and soft and real.

"I'll be back," I say. My voice. Hers. Ours.

And I close my eyes and will myself to return.

The branch dissolves. The world snaps back.

And I'm in my room, in my body, in the dark. The phone screen is still glowing. Chloe is still smiling at me from the photograph. The same photograph. The same moment. As if no time has passed at all.

But something is wrong. My hand—my real hand—is resting on my thigh, and it feels like a sack of meat. Heavy. Rough. The knuckles catch on the fabric of my jeans. The air has no taste. Just oxygen. Just nothing. Through the wall, Kyle's game is still going, the same explosions, the same gunfire. But they sound flat. Like they're coming through a wall made of something denser than drywall.

I close my eyes. For a second—less than a second—I smell rosewater. The faint, sweet trace of Chloe's perfume. It's gone before I can hold onto it.

I lie back on my bed. The ceiling is white and blank. My chest is flat under my t-shirt, and the weight that was there an hour ago—a lifetime ago—is gone. The world is gray. The colors have drained out of everything, not metaphorically, like someone turned a dial. The fairy lights are gone. The scarf is gone. The girl in the mirror is gone.

But I was her. For one perfect, impossible day, I was her. And I know how to go back.

My phone is still in my hand. The photo app is right there. I look at it for a long moment. Then I set it down on the nightstand and close my eyes. Not tonight. Tomorrow. I'll go back tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

For now, I just breathe. And I remember what it felt like to be her.