The bathroom was empty.
This was the first thing Julian noticed, with the mild relief of someone who had visited Emmy many times and always had an awkward time explaining his presence to her dorm neighbors. It was technically a co-ed dorm, but this floor was predominately women, and his presence always raised eyebrows. His insistent use of the term “friend” to describe Emmy also wasn’t always easily believed. In general, he was happy to be alone this evening.
The bathroom was fairly unremarkable. Three sinks in a row along the left wall, their mirrors reflecting the overhead fluorescent in a way that made everything look slightly more clinical than necessary. Two stalls at the back, both unoccupied. The single window above the paper towel dispenser showed nothing but the dark September sky and the faint orange glow of a parking lot somewhere below.
Julian crossed to the middle sink. Turned the cold tap on. Let the water run over his wrists for a moment, which was a thing he did sometimes when the almost-words got too close — the cold was clarifying, grounding, a reliable reminder that he had a body and the body had sensations and the sensations were real and manageable and had nothing to do with Emmy Calloway's hair in fairy light.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
This was, he knew, the philosophical move of someone who had been writing about identity for too long. He was aware of that. He looked anyway.
Same face. The glasses, slightly smudged at the left lens because he'd cleaned them with his shirt this morning and apparently done a poor job. The particular arrangement of his features that had always struck him as adequate without being remarkable — he was not someone people looked at twice, which he had made a kind of peace with over the years, the peace of someone who finds invisibility more restful than its alternative. Dark circles under his eyes that were a permanent feature at this point, not a symptom of anything except his general tendency to read until two in the morning.
Are you the same person you were ten years ago.
He turned the tap off. Reached for the paper towels.
And that was when it started.
It began as warmth.
Not the comfortable warmth of a room or a blanket or coffee made with intent — something else, something that seemed to come from inside rather than outside, rising from somewhere in the center of his chest and radiating outward along his arms, his spine, to the tips of his fingers where they gripped the paper towel. Julian looked down at his hands. They looked the same. He felt — strange. He felt the way a room feels in the second before the power goes out: normal, entirely normal, and then not.
He gripped the edge of the sink.
The warmth became something more insistent. Not painful — he would think about this later, the fact that it was never quite painful, the way a profound change had apparently been negotiated without cruelty — but present, and insistent, in a way that made it impossible to think about anything else. He was aware of his body in a manner he was not usually aware of his body: every surface, every boundary, every place where he ended and the air began. Therapists talk about centering by analyzing your body from top to bottom, this sensation wasn’t a sequential travel, it was a parallel stream of information.
And then, slowly and all at once, those boundaries began to change.
He kept his eyes on the mirror. He could not have said afterward whether this was courage or simply shock — the inability to look away from the thing that was happening, the way you watch a glass fall from a table in the moment before it hits the floor. His reflection watched him back with an expression of perfect bewilderment.
It was not dramatic, in the way he might have expected dramatic to look. There was no flash of light, no sound, no particular moment of rupture. It was more like — he searched for language and found only inadequate things — more like watching a photograph develop. The image was always there, latent in the paper. The chemistry simply made it visible.
His face shifted.
Not all at once. In increments, the way ice thaws: the jaw first, losing a squareness he hadn't known was there until it wasn't, softening into a curve that was — different. More. The cheekbones rising slightly, or perhaps the face narrowing around them, he couldn't tell from the inside. The eyes, the same eyes, dark and bewildered, but the architecture around them rearranging itself into something that made them look larger, softer. A dimple appearing in the left cheek that he had never had before and which, in another context, at another time, he might have found interesting.
His hair — he noticed this with the detached observation of someone whose mind had split into the part experiencing the thing and the part cataloguing it for future analysis — was longer. Not dramatically, not cascading-down-the-back longer, but enough. Enough to brush his shoulders. Soft, where it had always been just hair.
He was still holding the edge of the sink.
His hands, he noticed now, were different. Slimmer. The knuckles less pronounced. The same hands, in the way that a river is the same river — the same water in the same channel, but the water itself new, always new, never the same water twice.
Does it matter, he had said, forty minutes ago, and Emmy had said she liked that better.
He understood now, with perfect useless clarity, why the question had wanted to be asked.
The warmth subsided. Left him standing in a bathroom that still smelled of institutional soap, under a fluorescent light that was still doing its clinical work, in a body that was — different. Comprehensively, quietly, undeniably different. He was aware of new weight and new absence, new geometry, the particular strangeness of a center of gravity that had shifted without warning. He breathed. The breathing felt different. The ribcage, the rise and fall of it, the — everything.
He looked at his reflection for a long moment.
His reflection looked back.
She was, objectively — and Julian's mind went here with the grim precision of someone whose only available coping mechanism was analytical distance — she was not what he'd expected, on the occasions he had privately and briefly allowed himself to imagine what a female version of himself might look like, back before he'd made a firm policy of not imagining such things. He'd expected something closer to his own face: the same adequacy, rearranged. What he had not expected was this. The softness of it. The way the features he'd always considered unremarkable had somehow resolved, in this new configuration, into something — he searched for a word that wasn't complicated and found only complicated ones.
He took a breath. The breathing still felt different.
He took another one.
And then, because the body knows when the mind has reached its limit, Julian Hartwell — who had spent eighteen years cataloguing the world from a careful distance, who had a policy about not examining certain things, who had written three drafts tonight about the continuity of the self — crumpled gracefully to the bathroom floor.
Emmy heard the shriek.
She was lying on her stomach across the bed, Erikson open in front of her, one foot swinging absently against the teal throw, composing in her head a list of objections to the concept of the identity crisis that she felt were both compelling and personal, when the sound came from down the hall.
Short. Sharp. Not quite a scream — more like the sound of someone who had started to scream and then interrupted themselves with shock.
Emmy was off the bed before she'd made a decision about it.
She was, her mother had always said, a person who moved toward things. Not reckless — she'd been called reckless and she didn't think that was right, because reckless implied not thinking and Emmy thought constantly, her mind was practically a liability. But she moved toward things that needed moving toward, always had, even when she was five years old and the neighbor's cat was stuck in the tree and everyone else was deliberating about ladders. You assessed in motion. Standing still was just slower.
She was in the hallway, bare feet on the linoleum, before the sound had finished echoing.
"Julian?" She was already moving. The bathroom was four doors down, the door still slightly open, the fluorescent light spilling a pale rectangle into the dimmer hallway. "Jules—"
She pushed the door open.
The bathroom was not empty.
There was a person at the middle sink, hands gripping the porcelain edge, staring at the mirror with an expression that Emmy's psychology training would later catalog as acute dissociative shock, though in the moment she had no training available to her at all. Just the immediate, physical reality of what she was seeing.
The person at the sink was not Julian.
Except —
Except they were wearing Julian's jacket. Julian's glasses, slightly smudged at the left lens. Julian's shoes, slightly scuffed at the right toe where he'd walked into a curb last spring and never gotten around to polishing out. Same hair color, though the hair was — longer. Same particular paleness of skin. Same dark eyes, wide now and fixed on the mirror with the expression of someone watching the glass fall and still unable to move.
The same hands on the edge of the sink, but smaller. The same face, but — not.
Emmy stood in the doorway.
She was, in the accounting of her life, a person who prided herself on taking things in stride. She had taken a lot of things in stride. She had taken her parents' anxiety about university in stride, and Rob's arrival at Aldenmoor with a total of two cooking skills and boundless confidence, and Cara's text this afternoon, and Erikson's developmental stages, and five years of not quite knowing what Julian was to her.
She looked at the person at the sink.
"Julian," she said. Not a question. A confirmation of the only theory that made any sense.
The person at the sink turned to look at her. The movement was slightly unsteady — a new relationship with a center of gravity, Emmy would realize later. Those dark familiar eyes found her face and in them she saw, looking back at her with perfect clarity from an entirely different face, the expression she knew better than almost any other: the Julian expression of a person who has encountered something they have not yet found the right category for.
Emmy's mouth opened. She had several things she could have said. A number of them were kind and useful and appropriate.
She laughed.
She couldn't help it. It arrived before she could decide not to, the way her real laughs always did — the kind that was too loud for the room, that crinkled her eyes, that had no business being here in the third-floor bathroom of Pemberton Hall at nine o'clock on a Friday night with whatever impossible thing had just happened still reverberating in the fluorescent air between them.
"Holy—" she wheezed, and then: "Jules. You're—" and then she couldn't finish that either because she was laughing too hard and also because she had absolutely no idea how the sentence ended.
The person at the sink — Julian, it was Julian, she was certain of it in the way she was certain of very few things, the certainty sitting in her chest like a stone — stared at her with an expression that was slowly shifting from shock into something that might, under other circumstances, have been indignation.
"Emmy," said a voice that was not Julian's voice and also somehow entirely Julian's voice — higher, softer, but with that same careful enunciation he used when he had something important to say and wanted to make sure it was received correctly. "Emmy."
Emmy straightened. Got the laughter mostly under control. Pressed her hand over her mouth as a precaution.
"I'm here," she said. "Hey. I'm right here. Breathe."
The person who was Julian breathed. It was visibly effortful — not because breathing was difficult but because the breathing itself was new, the mechanics of it newly strange, and Emmy watched her manage it with the focused determination she recognized from watching Julian work through difficult problems: methodically, from first principles, one step at a time.
"Emmy," Julian said again. And then: "Oh god."
"Okay," Emmy said, stepping forward.
"Oh god," Julian said again, with slightly more feeling.
Emmy crossed the bathroom in three steps. She reached out — hesitated for just a fraction of a second, the unfamiliarity of the new face making her hand uncertain — and then put both hands on Julian's shoulders, solid and deliberate, the way you anchor someone.
"Look at me," she said. "Not the mirror. At me."
Those dark eyes found hers.
Emmy held them. She was close enough to see the dimple she had never seen before — left cheek, faint, only there when the face moved — and the way the familiar glasses sat slightly differently now on a nose that was the same nose, and she thought, with the part of her brain that never fully stopped being a psychology student: he's in there. Exactly as much as he has ever been in there.
"I've got you," she said. "Whatever this is. I've got you."
Julian's mouth opened.
Then Julian's eyes rolled back, and Julian — in a gesture that managed to be both alarming and, somehow, entirely in keeping with how Julian approached most overwhelming situations — fainted.
Emmy caught her on the way down.
They ended up on the bathroom floor, which was cold and not particularly clean and absolutely not where Emmy had expected to spend her Friday evening. Julian's head was in her lap. She had her back against the cabinet under the sink, her bare feet flat on the linoleum, one hand resting lightly on Julian's shoulder and the other pressed against the cool of the cabinet behind her.
She looked at the ceiling.
The fluorescent light hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a door closed. The ordinary sounds of a building full of people who had no idea that something had just happened — something impossible and intimate and without any available category in any framework Emmy had been taught — continued as if nothing had changed.
Does it matter, Julian had said.
Emmy looked down at the face in her lap. The face she knew and did not know. The familiar features in their new configuration, softer now in unconsciousness, the glasses slightly askew, the longer hair spreading across her thighs.
She reached out. Carefully, with one finger, straightened the glasses.
"Okay, Jules," she said quietly, to the empty bathroom, to the fluorescent light, to the impossible Friday evening that had swallowed the ordinary one whole. "Let's start from the beginning."