Sarah McMillan woke up the next morning in a cold sweat, an hour before her alarm was set to go off. She threw off her bedsheets and made her way quickly to her en suite bathroom, silky pink nightgown swishing around her thighs. Her breathing was ragged as both her palms slammed against the marble countertop at either side of her sink and she took a moment to look at herself in the mirror.
Clammy skin and hair a mess, her quick self-assessment wasn't great.
The cheerleader opened the faucet and splashed her face with cold water, then brought a few handfuls to her lips to drink, but the tension that buzzed through her body did not die down. She gave teh face in the mirror another hard look.
It was blurry. No, the whole face wasn't blurry. It was just her hair, like an Instagram filter. In a moment, her hair came back into focus, and Sarah breathed a sigh of relief, but then it went blurry again.
Her nerves worsening, Sarah brought a lock of hair to her face. It wasn't just the mirror, the real-life hair was blurry, too. It pulsed a few more times in and out of focus before Sarah realized that with each cycle, it was changing.
Step by step, pulse by pulse, her hair was darkening from its pristine (if slightly matted from sweat) blonde into a deep orange hue. But it was also... softening? The wetness dissipated pulse by pulse, and a curliness wound its way into the strands as they wrapped themselves around the fingers that held them.
Another pulse, another change. Sarah's focus returned to the mirror. Her hair was red and full of kinky curls, and it kept pulsing and deepening and curling, and it started to feel... comfortable in her hand. The feeling of this hair was like the feeling of a child's hand around a cherished stuffed animal.
Another pulse, and Sarah saw that her hair wasn't all that was changing. The cleavage that she saw in the mirror was smaller than what she was used to seeing when she wore this nightgown, and it became smaller still with each new pulse of her hair.
Frozen in shock, Sarah could only keep watching as her hair turned red and her bust reduced to half of what it had been just minutes before. Sarah's anxiety kept growing as pulse after pulse changed her body, until finally her entire body went blurry and the sight of it made her so uncomfortable that she forced her eyes closed.
By now she had a feel for how long the pulses lasted, and she held her eyes closed until the precise moment when her reflection became clear again.
There she was in the mirror: Sarah McMillan with curly, red hair and breasts that she thought she would be ashamed of, but somehow did not bring her shame.
And she wore a green nightdress. Not a nightgown, not silky or pink. It was made of a thick cotton and was cut like a long T-shirt that came down to her knees. And it was a deep forest green. The thought briefly crossed Sarah's mind that it matched her new complexion.
She waited for the next pulse, but none came. She wrapped her hands around herself, hugging her arms around this new body. The cotton was... comfortable. Why did that word seem to keep popping up in Sarah's head?
After a few more breaths, she started to feel, not quite better, but like she was on the way to getting better. It was the feeling you get after you vomit. The bad thing, the thing that was making you sick, has been expelled. But you're still feeling sick. She heaved one last large breath and stumbled her way back to her bed, burying herself under her sheets, under her curly red hair, inside of her green cotton nightdress, clutching her suddenly-manageable bust.
And she fell asleep. Not to wake up again until her alarm went off, an hour after the time she had set it for.
