Emmy's feet were, as advertised, ice cold.
Julian became aware of this before anything else — before the ceiling, before the fairy lights still doing their quiet amber work in the grey Saturday morning, before the full weight of everything that had happened descended back onto her chest like something that had been waiting patiently all night for her to wake up.
Emmy's feet, tucked against her calves under the teal throw, were approximately the temperature of a parking lot in January.
"Emmy," Julian said.
Emmy made a sound that was not a word.
"Your feet."
Another sound. Possibly an apology. Probably not. Emmy's relationship with the cold-feet situation was one of cheerful non-acknowledgment — she was aware of it, had been informed of it by multiple parties across multiple years, and had made a philosophical decision to consider it a feature rather than a fault. Julian had known this going in. He had gotten into the bed anyway, because the alternative was the floor, and the floor was worse.
He lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling.
The fairy lights were still on. Emmy had apparently not turned them off before falling asleep, which tracked — she had been asleep within four minutes of lying down, in the direct and total way she had of doing everything, and Julian had lain beside her in the dark listening to her breathe and thinking about rivers and photographs developing and the particular quality of warmth that another person's presence had in a small room, and had eventually, somehow, slept.
And now it was morning.
He became aware of his body in the order that was becoming familiar: the new weight, the new geometry, the hair against the pillow that was longer and softer than it should have been. He performed the inventory the way he'd learned to perform it in the last twelve hours — carefully, without flinching, from first principles.
Still. Everything was still different.
He had not, he realized, entirely believed it would be. Some part of him had apparently held the quiet hope that sleep would function as a reset — that he would wake to the ceiling of Emmy's dorm room and reach up to touch his hair and find it the right length, and the glasses on the nightstand would sit right again, and the morning would be ordinary. That part of him was now revising its expectations.
"Emmy," he said again.
"Mm."
"I'm still—"
"I know." She said it without moving, without opening her eyes, with the certainty of someone who had apparently been more awake than she looked. Her feet, against his calves, did not move either. "How are you?"
Julian considered the question. "Present," he said finally. "That's the best I can do right now."
Emmy opened one eye. The morning light — grey and indirect through the west window, nothing like the golden evening that had started all of this — caught the side of her face and she looked rumpled and warm and entirely herself, which Julian found, as he often did, both comforting and complicated.
"Present is good," she said. "Present is excellent, actually." She opened the other eye. Looked at him properly. He watched her take him in — the new face in the morning light, the reality of it reasserting itself after sleep — and watched her absorb it with the focused calm she'd been deploying since the bathroom. "Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said.
A beat.
"Still you," she said. Not a question. Confirmation, the way she'd said Julian in the bathroom doorway — the theory that made the most sense.
"Still me," he agreed.
She smiled at him, slow and certain, and reached out to push a strand of hair off his face with one finger. Her touch was entirely casual, the way she touched people — without forethought, without ceremony — and he felt it anyway, the way he always felt Emmy's casual touches, like a word he kept hearing in a language he hadn't quite learned.
"Okay," she said, sitting up. "Okay. First things first."
She reached for her phone.
Julian watched her type.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the teal throw around her shoulders, phone in both hands, thumbs moving with the focused speed of someone who had an idea and was executing it before she could second-guess it. This was also a reliable Emmy behavior. Julian had learned to either get out of the way or ask questions, depending on the urgency.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Experiment." She angled the phone at him. "Look this way. Not — yeah, like that. Just — be normal."
"I am being normal."
"You're doing the thing where you look at a camera like it personally offended you."
"Cameras have never done anything for me."
"They're about to." She took the photo. Looked at it. Her expression shifted into something that was trying to be neutral and wasn't quite. "Jules," she said. "I need you to know that this is an objectively excellent photo and I'm slightly annoyed about it."
Julian held out his hand for the phone. She gave it to him.
He looked at the photo for a long moment.
The person in it was sitting on an unmade bed in a grey hoodie, morning light soft on her face, a loose braid coming undone over one shoulder. She looked — he searched for the word again and found the same problem as the night before — she looked like someone. Not like nobody. Not like a version of himself rendered in a different key. Like a specific, actual person, with specific, actual features, that happened to be wearing his glasses and Emmy's hoodie and an expression of resigned uncertainty that was, he had to admit, extremely him.
He handed the phone back.
"Send it to Rob," he said.
Emmy's eyes went wide with delight. "Yes," she said. It was a very small word delivered with considerable feeling.
"Tell him—" Julian considered. "Tell him you have a mysterious new roommate named Juliet."
Emmy was already typing. Her grin was the kind that arrived when she had been given permission to do something she had already decided to do. She typed, read it back, added three question marks in the way she always added three question marks when she wanted to convey a tone that punctuation alone couldn't manage, and hit send. The wait was unbearable, as they both wondered if maybe they were just hallucinating.
They waited.
The morning settled around them — the grey light, the fairy lights still holding their quiet amber against it, the chip bag on the desk, the succulent on its corner. From somewhere down the hall came the ordinary Saturday sounds of a dormitory coming slowly to life: a door, running water, someone's phone alarm going off and being silenced with evident prejudice.
Emmy's phone buzzed.
She read it. Her expression arranged itself with great effort into something that was not the thing she wanted it to be.
"Well?" Julian said.
Emmy turned the phone around.
wow sis where did you find her? she's hot
Julian stared at the screen.
Emmy made it approximately four seconds before she lost the battle entirely and dissolved into laughter — real laughter, the too-loud kind, her whole body involved in it, one hand pressed over her mouth as a formality. Julian looked at the ceiling. Then at the phone. Then at the ceiling again.
"He thinks—" he started.
"He absolutely—" Emmy wheezed.
"I'm his—"
"You were his—" She pressed her hand harder over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking. "Oh god. Oh this is — Julian, he called you hot."
"I'm aware."
"Your best friend's brother just—"
"I'm aware, Emmy."
"He has no idea—" She dissolved again. Julian waited with the patience of someone who had learned that Emmy's laughter ran its own course and intervention was both futile and unnecessary. When she had mostly recovered, wiping at her eyes with the edge of the teal throw, she looked at him with an expression of pure, helpless delight. "Okay," she said. "Okay. Do you realize what this means?"
"Several things," Julian said. "Most of them alarming."
"It means it works." She gestured at him, at the general fact of him. "You pass. The world is going to see — Juliet. Not — it's going to see Juliet." She said the name with a slight question in it, offering it. "Is that — okay? For now, at least?"
Julian thought about it.
The name was not a strange choice. It had arrived with a certain inevitability when Emmy had floated it in the bathroom last night — Juliet, she'd said, testing it, and it had sat in the air between them with the quality of something that fit. Not a transformation into someone else. A — translation. The same text in a different language, which meant the same thing and sounded different and was, in some essential way, the same.
"For today," he said. "I have to be Juliet today. If we go out and you call me Julian that would be—"
"Weird," Emmy agreed. "Very weird. Zero out of ten, do not recommend." She was watching him with the serious-underneath-the-humor face. "We don't have to figure out more than today right now."
Juliet — and the name settled, carefully, like sitting in a new chair and finding it fit — nodded.
Emmy nodded back. Then she swung her legs off the bed, stood up, and turned to the wardrobe with the purposeful energy of someone moving to the next item on an unwritten list. "Okay," she said. "We need to get you into something that isn't — " she gestured at the hoodie, the jeans " — last night's emergency outfit. And before you can put anything on, we need to address a practical matter."
She turned around. She was holding a sports bra.
Juliet stared at it.
The sports bra was grey, moderately worn, with the slightly faded look of something that had been laundered many times. It was, objectively, just an object. A common object. An object that half the population interacted with on a daily basis without incident.
Juliet felt, looking at it, a very specific kind of dread that she suspected was visible on her face.
"It's stretchy," Emmy said, with the careful neutrality of someone who was being very deliberate about their tone. "It'll fit. Probably."
"Probably."
"Almost certainly." Emmy held it out. "Do you want to—"
"I'll try," Juliet said, with more confidence than she felt.
She took the sports bra. Turned it over in her hands. It was, she established, a loop of fabric with straps attached, which in theory meant you put your arms through the straps and it went over your head, which in theory was straightforward. Emmy turned politely, as to give Juliet a bit of privacy.
Taking off her hoodie and t-shirt, she put her arms through the straps.
The sports bra went over her head. Partially. It stopped approximately at nose level, stretched across her face in a configuration that bore no relationship to the configuration it was supposed to achieve, with one strap twisted behind her and the other dangling somewhere near her left ear. She could not see anything. She could not move her arms. She was making, she was aware, a small sound of distress that was entirely involuntary.
Emmy made a sound that was also entirely involuntary but was a different kind of sound entirely.
"Don't," Juliet said, from inside the sports bra.
"I'm not—" Emmy's voice had the compressed quality of someone holding something in through sheer force. "I'm absolutely not. Hold still." Hands appeared — warm, practiced — and gently untwisted the strap from behind her head, and guided the bra to a configuration that was approximately correct, and smoothed the fabric down with a matter-of-factness that was probably costing Emmy even more than the neutral expression had last night. "There," Emmy said, stepping back. "See? Fine."
Juliet looked down at herself. Then at Emmy.
"Backwards," she said.
"Backwards," Emmy confirmed. "Common mistake. You go in from the top — head first, then arms." She demonstrated in the air. "Like a — you know. Like putting on a shirt, but smaller and more determined."
"More determined," Juliet repeated.
"They have a lot of opinions about where they go." Emmy's mouth was doing the thing it did when she was preventing herself from smiling, which involved a very specific tension in the corners. "You'll get used to it. It’s even worse trying to get them off sometimes.”
Juliet looked at her. "You're enjoying this."
"I'm being extremely supportive."
"You're enjoying this."
"I'm being supportive," Emmy said, with more conviction, "and if there is any enjoyment occurring it is entirely incidental and I apologize for it." She paused. "You look good, by the way. Practically speaking. The hoodie is — it works." She said it with the objectivity she'd been applying to all of her observations about Juliet's appearance, the tone of someone reporting a fact rather than offering a compliment. "Once we get you into something that isn't my clothes from 2022, you're going to be fine."
The something turned out to be: her own jeans from last night, which fit well enough; Emmy's PSYCH MAJOR hoodie, which was slightly less enormous than the grey one and had the advantage of making them match in a way Emmy seemed to find genuinely pleasing; and the bra, now correctly oriented, which Juliet was choosing to think about as little as possible.
Emmy re-did the braid with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided the first one wasn't good enough and wasn't going to let it go. She did it quickly, standing behind Juliet in front of the small mirror on the wardrobe door, her tongue slightly between her teeth in the way it went when she was concentrating, and when she finished she stepped back and assessed.
"Good," she said. "That's — yeah. Good."
Juliet looked at herself in the mirror.
The person in the mirror looked back. Still the same disorientation as the bathroom — the face that was hers and wasn't, the features rearranged into something that kept not quite being what she expected. But slightly less disorienting than the night before. Slightly more — present. The braid helped, she thought, obscurely. It was a thing Emmy had done, which made it partly Emmy's, which made it feel slightly less like looking at a stranger.
She was aware that this logic was not entirely rational. She was also aware that she was eighteen years old and had been female for approximately eleven hours and was allowed some latitude on the rationality front.
"Juliet," she said, quietly, to the mirror.
Emmy appeared behind her in the reflection. She had changed into her own clothes while Juliet was in the bathroom — dark jeans, a worn soft t-shirt, her golden hair loose, barefoot as always. She put her hands on Juliet's shoulders, lightly, looking at both of them in the mirror with an expression Juliet couldn't quite read from the reflection.
"Emerald," Juliet said, looking at Emmy's reflection. Trying it out. "Your full name is Emerald."
Emmy's expression shifted — something moving through it, the way things moved through Emmy's face when she wasn't guarding it. "Yeah," she said.
"Why do you go by Emmy?"
She was quiet for a moment, the way she was quiet when she was choosing carefully. "Because Emerald is—" she stopped. "My parents named me that because they looked at me and it was the first word that felt right." Her voice had the quality it got when she was saying something true that she didn't usually say. "It's a lot of name to carry around every day." A pause. "So I'm Emmy. Mostly."
Juliet looked at her in the mirror. "It suits you though."
"The name?"
"Both. Emmy and Emerald." She held Emmy's gaze in the glass. "Emmy for every day. Emerald for—" she thought about it "—when it matters."
Emmy looked at her for a moment with the expression Juliet had seen in the bathroom, the one from the floor, the one that had moved through her face when she'd straightened the glasses. Then she squeezed Juliet's shoulders once and stepped back.
"Come on," she said. "Breakfast. I know a place."
They were halfway to the door when it opened.
Not their door — the door at the end of the hallway, the one that connected to the stairwell, which swung open to admit a young woman carrying a coffee in each hand and a phone between her teeth, who stopped dead in the doorway when she saw them.
She was, Juliet registered: roughly Emmy's height, dark hair pulled back, wearing a Aldenmoor psychology department hoodie that had seen better days, with the sharp-eyed look of someone who missed very little. She took the phone out of her mouth.
She looked at Juliet. At Emmy. Back at Juliet.
"Emmy," she said.
"Priya," Emmy said, with the careful calm of someone who had had forty-five minutes to prepare for this moment and had used them productively.
"Who is this."
"This is Juliet. She's—" Emmy paused for a fraction of a second, which was the length of time it took Emmy to make a decision. "She's a friend. She needed a place to crash."
Priya looked at Juliet with the frank, unblinking assessment of someone who catalogued things for a living. Juliet, under this gaze, did what she'd been doing for eighteen years in rooms full of people she didn't know: she went slightly still and waited.
"Hi," Priya said.
"Hi," Juliet said. Her voice came out at the right register — higher than Julian's, softer, which she was still getting used to — and Priya's expression registered it and moved on, which Juliet found, unexpectedly, like setting down something heavy.
Priya turned to Emmy. "You," she said, "owe me a full explanation. But not in the hallway." She held out one of the coffees.
Emmy took it. "You're the best person I know."
"I know." Priya looked at Juliet again, with the expression of someone making a decision. "There's a third cup downstairs," she said. "If you want."
Juliet looked at Emmy. Emmy looked back with the expression that meant: your call.
"I want," Juliet said.
Priya nodded once, satisfied, turned back to the stairwell. Paused with one hand on the door. "Also, Emmy," she said, without turning around.
"Yeah?"
"Next time you have a migraine situation, you can just say you have a friend who needs help." She pushed the door open. "I do know the difference."
The door swung shut behind her.
Emmy looked at Juliet. Juliet looked at Emmy.
"She knows," Juliet said.
"She suspects," Emmy said. "Which with Priya is basically the same thing." She didn't look particularly worried about this. "She also won't push until I'm ready to tell her." She tilted her head. "Which I will be. Soon."
Juliet considered this. The thought of another person knowing — of the circle of knowledge expanding beyond the two of them — was both alarming and, underneath the alarm, something that might have been relief. Another person. Another set of hands, metaphorically, on the problem.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," Emmy agreed. She held out her arm, elbow crooked, with the slightly theatrical gesture she used when she was offering something without making it a big deal. "Breakfast, Juliet. The world awaits."
Juliet took her arm.
They went down the stairs together — Juliet still recalibrating with each step, Emmy matching her pace without mentioning it — and out through the main door of Pemberton Hall into the Saturday morning, which was cool and blue-skied and entirely unprepared for either of them.