The next time Karyn "woke up" she was standing in front of her closet, holding a clothes hanger that carried a skirt which was much shorter than any she could recall owning. Everything else in the closet was as she remembered, it was just the item she was holding that was new.
"Things change when she needs them," Karyn considered out loud. "But only the exact things that she needs. My locker. The makeup." Karyn turned to look around her bedroom, and sure enough everything was as she'd left it the night before. "If I can minimize the number of things she needs to change, then maybe I can minimize the changes."
Karyn began looking through her closet for something that was within the spectrum of what she would normally wear, but which was revealing enough that she judged her other self wouldn't feel the need to change it. Then her eye caught her own reflection in the full-length mirror on the door of her closet.
Her face was beautiful. Fully done-up with a bold lipstick, perfect contours, and a smokey eyeshadow over those sharp wing tips she'd seen in her bathroom mirror. She'd never seen her face look this way before. The thoughts from after cheer practice returned to her: every time she'd changed, even if it felt bad in the short-term, it gave her something good in the long-term. Her decision to go to Sarah's house had earned her a boyfriend. What would happen if Karyn didn't try to minimize changes? What would happen if Karyn took actions which would force her other half to take action?
Karyn's brain worked quickly, and her hands followed suit. She didn't know how much time she'd have before she lost herself once again.
She donned her most comfortable pair of jeans, a big loose T-shirt, and... her heart stopped beating for a moment. Was she really about to make this sacrifice?
Yes. She was. She pulled her big green sweater overtop everything. The one that had become her signature look. The one that basically defined how she saw herself and how the world saw her. This she donned, knowing that it would be sacrificed to the bitchy goddess who was just waiting to take back control of Karyn's body.
Sarah held up the hair trimmer and clipped a large piece of plastic to the end. "I'm not, like, an expert at cutting hair, but again, this is just to get you acceptable for today, and we'll put in the real work when we've got some time over the weekend."
"Are you going to shave my head or something?"
"Pfft, no. Then what will they have to work with at the barber's once I'm done? I'm just trimming up your sides so it doesn't look like you've got a rabid groundhog living on your head." Sarah paused. "Where's your bathroom? We need to do this over a tile floor."
"Do we need to do this at all?"
This earned a glare from Sarah. "Yes. I'm telling you, Jon, I'm doing you a favor here. I know you don't trust me, but... just trust me."
There was a sincerity in Sarah's voice that Jon wasn't used to hearing from her as she said this. "Just trust me." It wasn't teasing, it wasn't condescending. It was almost pleading. Not quite. It still had more of the edge of a command than a plea. But it had a weariness to it. Like Sarah knew that this line of discussion could blow up and go nuclear, and she explicitly didn't want that to happen.
In this small way, but in a way that he'd never experienced before, Jon realized that Sarah was giving him power. The power to reject her, on this one little thing. A power that most people will freely offer to the people they consider friends and family on a regular basis. But coming from Sarah, it felt like a seismic shift. He could choose to keep arguing. Or he could choose to put himself into her hands, and trust her.
"Okay," Jon acquiesced after a pause. "But be quiet in the hallway, my brother and sister are still asleep."
