It was a few days of awkward waiting before Morgana sat a tray of small bottles on the counter. Each was filled with a different liquid ranging from still and clear to a viscous swirling rainbow. Scribbling notes as she went, Morgana poured them into a blender along with a smoothie mix. The following cacophony woke Riley up, and by the time he’d dragged himself into the kitchen in only his pajama pants, the smoothie was finished and sitting in a cup on the table. Somehow, Morgana was already finished cleaning the blender.

  The smoothie had an overwhelming metallic, borderline alcoholic taste that made Riley gag. Morgana pushed him to finish the whole thing, taking even more notes as he choked it down. Riley sat the cup down and waited for further instructions, but there really was nothing more to do but wait.

  Morgana spent the next few days dragging Riley out of bed to take measurements of his entire body. She also took pictures to “document the process.” Riley had never liked being in pictures, and being treated like a science experiment didn’t cure him of that. Maybe estrogen would dumb him down enough to stop caring; perhaps that’s what Morgana was testing for. The thought gave him pins and needles.

  “I need to buy you new clothes if this is going to work,” Morgana kept insisting. Every time she brought it up, Riley’s stomach dropped.

  “Not yet,” he’d tell her. “We don’t even know the potions are doing anything.”

  She had also started training Riley to get used to she/her pronouns. “This is my cousin Riley. She’s staying with me for the summer before starting college. No, she hasn’t picked a major yet. I think she’d look gorgeous as a model, don’t you?” It took all of Riley’s willpower not to snap at her during these sessions. Sometimes he did anyway.

  “Why are these measurements so important, anyway?” he finally asked her on the fifth day. “Won’t it be obvious if it works or not?”

  “I need data to make future batches more precise,” she expined, not looking at him directly.

  He rolled his eyes; her perfectionism got on his nerves.

  She added, “It would be easier to see how effective the results are if we got you more appropriate clothes.”

  “It would be a waste of money at this point,” he insisted, squirming and disturbing her tape measure. “You said this was going to be expensive, so isn’t it better not to rush things?”

  But looking at himself in the bathroom mirror ter, Riley couldn’t deny that his hair was growing out, covering his ears and getting into his eyes. Even his body hair was thinner even if it was still obviously man hair. He was a man and not a girl, but he didn’t look as manly as he had.

  At the end of the week, Morgana sat down across from Riley as he was eating cup ramen for lunch and told him, “We need to get you new clothes.” He tried to interject, but she pressed on. “Come on, Riley! Shopping is fun, and I could help you figure out your fashion sense! You look androgynous enough to convince people with the right clothes.”

  Riley snorted and stared into the cup. It was getting harder to deny the effects of the potions. As much as he wanted to tell her to fuck off, he’d need to look enough like a girl to convince Lynn. Morgana’s warning that he couldn’t make people think he was trans if he tried to be a tomboy tched tighter onto his anxiety with every passing day.

  “I want a say in what you buy for me,” he told her. “We’re not going shopping in person. The st thing I want is people recording us and putting it online.”

  Morgana rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “Fine. More and more concessions, but at least we’re actually doing something. Let me get my ptop.”

  The screen was too small, and the two were jammed shoulder to shoulder with several different tabs open. Riley questioned if they really needed more than Amazon for this, but Morgana insisted that they shouldn’t buy shoes from anywhere but a real shoe store. Fortunately for her, she already had Riley’s measurements written down.

  “Just need a couple of shirts and a new pair of sneakers,” Riley insisted. “What more does Lynn actually need to believe it? I’m absolutely not wearing jewelry or makeup.”

  “In order for this to work, people can’t mistake you for a feminine boy. Every college guy was wearing skinny jeans for a while. You need to repce everything down to the panties.”

  “No! No fucking way!” He sprang to his feet, knocking the chair over in the process. “She’s not even going to see that! Probably. At least not at first.” Riley’s face burned.

  “You promised me that you’d commit if you wanted my help. This is what commitment looks like.”

  Riley snorted and rubbed his temples. For a moment, he considered calling the whole thing off. This was a hassle, and he hadn’t even had a second conversation with Lynn. But that feeling he’d gotten while standing at the edge of the neighborhood, staring out at a world that didn’t want him, still lingered.

  “I’ll let you repce everything only if I can veto things for being too girly. I want pin shirts, no graphic tees or blouses, no tights or leggings, and absolutely no high heels.”

  “I need some decision-making power,” Morgana insisted. “I’m the expert on being a woman, here. And I did my research: trans women often go extra hard on feminine stuff early because they’re experimenting with things they never got to explore growing up. We can convince people you’re just shy about makeup and piercings, but without some feminine flourishes, people will be skeptical.”

  With a groan, Riley said, “Nothing in pink.”

  “Maybe not as the main color, but no pink at all removes too many options.” She looked lost in thought for a moment. “Compromise on the pink, and if that’s all your objections, then I’ll let you order some boy stuff to decorate your room while we’re at it.”

  “Alright, let’s just get this over with.”

  Riley couldn’t “commit” as long as his old clothes were still around for him to wear. Once the new clothes were in transit, Morgana gave Riley a couple cardboard boxes and asked him to pack everything he could. They would put his boy clothes in storage so as not to tempt him.

  The problem Riley hadn’t anticipated was that his bedroom had become a garbage dump in the couple of weeks he’d been living there. Some drawers wouldn’t open because too many of his high school collectibles were in the way. For a few hours, Riley had to focus on just rearranging the room in hopes of being able to find his clothes at all. It was still a mess when he was finished, but he was confident he’d gotten every st stray sock.

  New clothes arrived in cardboard boxes, individually wrapped in pstic. Morgana tore them open and id everything out on the kitchen table. To Riley’s surprise, she put all the pstic wrapping into a canvas bag instead of the trash. She expined, somewhat abashedly, that synthetic polymers made for cheap substitute ingredients in alchemy.

  Spread out across the table were several crew cut and V-neck T-shirts in soft pastel colors alongside a few simple tank tops. Two pairs of Bermuda shorts sat atop two pairs of skinny jeans, and next to them was a pair of soft, thick white sweatpants decorated with pink flowers. Morgana had also bought Riley a fluffy bathrobe and two pairs of colorful long pajamas; no more sleeping in just boxers or pajama pants. Next to a white knit beanie (with a detachable sunflower pin) and studded leather belt was a pile of new underwear: bikini briefs and camisoles, as well as a “swim-friendly” gaff. Riley picked up a pair of colorful socks to discover that they felt much thinner than he was used to.

  The shoes didn’t stand out as very feminine on first gnce, to the point that Riley wasn’t sure they’d needed to buy them at all. The flip flops could believably have come from the men’s section except that the size on the tag looked wrong. There was a pair of pin brown sandals with buckles that Riley wouldn’t have immediately pegged as belonging to a girl if he saw a guy wearing them. Morgana had also bought a pair of hi-tops, the most feminine of the shoes, but they looked more childish than girly—dark blue with white stars across the canvas.

  “Seems fine,” he decided, putting the socks down.

  “I certainly hope so, with the amount of restrictions you pced on me,” Morgana replied, handing over several rolled up posters. “Here, start putting these things in your room. Then get in the shower. You’ve got some work to do before you get dressed.”

  The moment Riley had been dreading most of all had come. He carried out his orders with all the gravitas of a death row inmate on their way to the electric chair. Once he’d migrated everything to his bed, Riley picked up the necessary toiletries and locked himself in the bathroom.

  He stared at himself in the mirror while the shower ran. Riley had been shaving every day, but the beard shadow was still there. The hair on his chest was still there. Getting out of the shower, he’d still be the same person. He didn’t know whether to hold onto that fact or feel repulsed by it.

  Riley climbed into the shower and let the water cascade over him while he mustered up the courage to do what must be done. First came the vender shampoo, followed by vanil-scented conditioner. The body wash promised him he’d smell like an orchard, whatever that meant. Morgana hadn’t bought Riley new shaving cream or one of those girly razors, so he’d used his own to shave his armpits. Multiple times, he had to stop to clean hair from the bde, even nicking his finger once.

  That much hadn’t been too hard, but Riley was hesitant to go further. Shaving his legs was an undeniably girly act. If there was ever a st chance to back out and accept being a loser, it was this moment. He didn’t want that life, but it was familiar and predictable.

  Taking a deep breath, Riley thered his lower leg with shaving cream, making sure to position his body so the water didn’t wash it away. It didn’t take him long to settle into a rhythm, but shaving his legs was an agonizingly slow process. The water grew cold multiple times as he methodically tackled each leg, forcing him to repeatedly stop and raise the temperature.

  When he was done, rivulets of blood rand own his legs and mixed with the water on the floor of the tub. Riley scrubbed off the remaining shaving cream, feeling stupid. The bleeding didn’t stop while toweling off, and he found himself sticking little pieces of toilet paper all over his legs to keep them dry.

  Only once the bleeding had stopped did Riley throw out the toilet paper and start getting dressed. He decided against wearing the gaff, so the panties were ill-fitting but not as much as he’d feared. Riley put on the new girly deodorant and used the moisturizer as Morgana had asked, then pulled on the soft, thick sweatpants that felt like he was wearing a cloud. Since he was no longer allowed to go bare-chested but didn’t have boobs himself, Riley wore a camisole in pce of a bra.

  He wiped the condensation off the mirror to get a good look at himself. There he was in all his glory: some guy wearing some girl’s clothes. No magical transformation despite the alchemy involved.

  Morgana was waiting for him outside the bathroom.

  “How do you feel?”

  Riley shrugged. In his head, he recited, “This is Riley. She’s my cousin. This is Riley, and she’s my cousin.” The phrase made his stomach churn. He was Riley, and she was Riley, and they were the same person? It felt more like he was trying to change something on the inside than everything on the outside.

  “Still just me,” he decided, a little sad but not surprised that no magic switch had been flipped.

  “Well, it’s a first step,” Morgana replied. “Keep working at it, and Lynn will be head over heels for you in no time.”

  Riley nodded absentmindedly.

  He entered his bedroom and started throwing the new clothes haphazardly into the appropriate drawers. Once that was done, he picked up the posters and unraveled them: Batman, My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, Twenty One Pilots. Riley taped them to the wall, spreading them out to make the pce look a little less empty.

  His name was Riley, and he was making this his pce to live, preserving his masculinity even if he was going to wear girl clothes. But also: her name was Riley, and she was putting up posters that showed she wasn’t like those other girls; she was cool enough to date Lynn. They felt like different actions from parallel universes; incompatible, water and oil, matter and antimatter. Only one could be the actual truth.

  QuillRabbit