Chapter 2
There’s a moment, as I stare down at the dress draped over Sara’s bathroom towel rack, where I think: maybe it won’t fit.
Maybe this is all a hilarious mistake, and I’ll be let off the hook by a simple failure of physics.
But then Sara appears at my elbow, armed with a Ziplock bag of foam inserts, padded shapewear, and a look of grim determination.
She hands me the bodysuit complete with gel padding around the hips. “Put this on.”
After I don the padded curves she holds up the dress. “In,” she says, and gestures for me to step into the sequined sheath.
The fabric is cool against my skin, heavy and deliberate, clinging in places I’d rather not contemplate. I wiggle the thing up past my gel insta-hips and realize with mounting horror that the cinched waist is nonnegotiable. If I breathe in too deeply, I might lose consciousness.
“Turn,” Sara commands.
Grunting, I oblige, bracing myself on the sink while she tugs the zipper.
The bodice snugs up, and I’m suddenly aware of how much of my chest is exposed—not that there’s anything to see.
She slips the foam into a pair of built-in cups, then uses some kind of medical tape to anchor the silhouette, and I’m thankful in this moment for the fact I don’t have much chest hair.
I don’t want to know what happens if I sweat.
“Stop squirming,” she says, pinching the fabric at my sides. “The more you move, the worse it gets.”
“Does it have to be so… tight?” I hiss.
Sara shrugs. “That’s the price of glamour. Now—heels.”
She produces a pair of purple stilettos from under the vanity. I stare at them the way a condemned man stares at the guillotine.
“I’m going to break my neck,” I say, but she’s already crouching, easing them onto my feet with surprising tenderness. She pats my ankle, then stands, folding her arms.
“Try walking,” she instructs.
I put on my glasses, so I can see the floor meet my face when I fall, and attempt a step.
My center of gravity lurches forward. The wig swings in my face and my knees knock together.
I catch myself on the counter, palms clammy against the laminate.
In the mirror, my reflection is a fever dream—red hair, redder dress, cheekbones that could slice deli meat.
My mouth is a precise, perfect bow of glossy color.
“I can’t do this,” I whisper.
Sara shakes her head. “Of course you can. It’s just muscle memory. Watch.”
She demonstrates in bare feet: one foot directly in front of the other, hips rolling with a practiced sway. She makes it look effortless, predatory, almost mechanical. “Your turn.”
“Maybe you should just go without me,” I say, stalling.
“Not part of the deal, Monty!” Hunter’s voice echoes from the hallway. “You done yet? I wanna see.”
I glare at the door, then back at Sara, who’s waiting with her arms crossed and an eyebrow cocked. “If you break your ankle, I’ll carry you,” she says. “Now walk.”
I take a breath, then another. I try to imitate her stride, planting my heel, rolling onto the ball of my foot, and almost topple sideways.
The first few steps are agony—like learning to walk on stilts while wearing a straitjacket.
The dress constricts every motion, the heels force my calves into unnatural flex, and the gel and foam padding is a constant, squishy reminder that my body is not my own.
Sara nods. “Not bad. Now give me your hand.”
I do, and she leads me through a half-dozen more steps, pivoting and turning, forcing me to recalibrate each time. She moves to adjust the wig, tucking a strand behind my ear. The gentleness surprises me.
“Are you nervous?” she asks, her voice softer than before.
I try to laugh. “Is it that obvious?”
She smiles. “Only to me. You’ll do fine. They won’t recognize you.”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” I ask.
She looks at me for a moment, her expression inscrutable, and then says, “Depends what you want out of it.”
Before I can answer, Hunter bangs on the door. “Come on, man. Let’s see it!”
I step into the hallway, heart pounding, and try to do the walk the way Sara showed me. The sequins catch the overhead light in epileptic bursts. I keep my arms glued to my sides, terrified of tripping or worse, exposing something indecent.
Hunter stops mid-cheer, eyes wide. “Holy shit, Monty.”
He circles around me, mouth open in admiration. “That’s… insane. You could rob a bank like that. No one would ever catch you.”
Sara grins, adjusting the neckline a fraction. “See? I told you.”
Hunter whistles. “Do the voice.”
I scowl. “No.”
He pouts. “Come on. You have to.”
“Ugh.” I close my eyes, recall the YouTube video Hunter made me watch, and summon the nerve. “I’m not bad,” I say, pitching my voice low and sultry, “I’m just drawn that way.”
There’s a beat of stunned silence, then Hunter whoops and doubles over laughing. “Perfect!” he says. “You are going to own this party.”
Sara laughs, but there’s something else in her eyes—a kind of pride, but also a warning. “Ok, outta the dress before you ruin it.”
I waddle back into the bathroom to collect myself. I stare at the stranger in the mirror—her, me—and feel something unexpected. Not just dread. Not just embarrassment. There’s a flicker of thrill, an electric charge at the sight of my own transformation.
Maybe the party won’t be so bad after all.
—ΠΩ—
The chemistry building after dark is all echo and stale coffee, a mausoleum of bad lighting and overachievers.
I know the corridors by heart—the stains on the floor tiles, the way the vending machine flickers sporadically, the burned-out EXIT sign above the men’s room.
I cut through the main hallway and hear Aaron Thompson before I see him.
His usual flock of physics majors surround him just outside Lab 207. Exuding more confidence than should be legal after sunset, Aaron’s voice reverberates louder than a glass beaker crashing on tile through the otherwise empty corridor.
“So she stands up,” Aaron says, “and she’s shaking so hard, I think the Bunsen burner’s gonna fall off the table.
Collins goes, ‘Ms. Greene, would you care to explain?’ and she just—” He pantomimes someone getting whiplash, jerking his head left, then right.
“—she’s like, ‘I… um… it’s… uh…’ and then silence.
You could hear the electrons screaming.”
The crowd loses it. There’s a brittle, predatory quality to their laughter, the kind that feeds on shared superiority.
I speed up, pulling my backpack tighter to my chest, praying that my footsteps don’t echo too loud. Aaron’s eyes catch mine for a microsecond, but I look away, focusing on the railing for the stairwell.
Behind me, he keeps going. “Seriously, does she even have a nervous system? It’s like watching a jellyfish try to do calculus.”
My teeth clench. Natalie Greene is in two of my discussion sections.
She’s not a genius, but she tries harder than anyone in that room, and even I know she’s terrified of public speaking.
For once, I wish I was the kind of person who could say something—who could stop and, I don’t know, call out the social-Darwinist bullshit.
But instead, I keep moving, letting the hallway swallow me.
At the bottom of the stairs, Hunter’s already waiting, leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee that’s probably half whiskey.
He sizes me up, then glances over my shoulder at the commotion upstairs. “What’d I miss?”
I shake my head. “Just Thompson being a dick.”
Hunter’s jaw tightens behind his smile, his eyes flat, glacial. “Anyone ever tell you that guy peaked in high school?”
“He still thinks he’s peaking,” I say, managing a weak laugh.
Hunter downs his coffee and tosses the cup in a trash bin as he pushes off the wall.
Falling into step beside me, we head toward the quad.
He’s unusually silent, hands jammed in his pockets, his gait rigid.
Usually, he fills the air with plans or pranks or unsolicited advice on my love life. Tonight, he just simmers.
We cross the moonlit quad, and he finally breaks the silence. “You know what?” he says, voice lower than usual. “I think our little Jessica Rabbit stunt is about to get way more interesting.”
I side-eye him. “How? I thought the whole point was to humiliate me.”
He stops, turns to face me, and for a second, I see the old Hunter, the one who orchestrated fake scavenger hunts and left notes in library books for the cleaning staff to find. But now his grin is colder, sharper.
“It’s not about humiliating you, Montgomery,” he says. “It’s about giving the world a show they’ll never forget.” He nods back in the direction of the science building. “And if Thompson is there to see it—well, that’s just the cherry on top.”
I blink, unsure whether to feel relieved or even more horrified. “You want to—what, upstage him? Use me as a distraction?”
Hunter’s teeth flash. “That’s the beauty of it. He’ll never see it coming.”
I shiver at the gleam in his eyes. “And I’m the bait.”
“Think of it as payback for how he treats Natalie.”
I do want that. “I suppose I should just trust you.”
Hunter claps me on the shoulder as we walk. “After all these years, now you’re gettin’ it.”
We reach Sara’s place, and in thirty minutes, she has me all dolled up again as the ultimate cartoon pinup girl.
She slips into a vintage flapper costume as Hunter dons an Indiana Jones getup.
Sara grabs a clutch and her keys, while Hunter checks his reflection in the microwave and runs a hand through his hair.
“Let’s go,” he says, and for once, I don’t argue.
I totter down the hall, every step a potential disaster, but I’m still standing by the time we reach the elevator.
“Ready for your big debut?” Hunter asks.
I glance at Sara. She winks.
“Let’s get this over with,” I say, and as the elevator doors slide shut, I catch one last glimpse of myself in the polished steel—a living, breathing chemical reaction, ready to detonate.
Flanked by the two of them, I practice my walk across campus, focusing on keeping my shoulders back and my hips loose like Sara showed me. With each step, I'm terrified someone will recognize me, but also strangely exhilarated by how invisible I am in plain sight.
“Heard Thompson was being a prick earlier,” Sara says, voice clipped.
“Whole building heard it,” I reply.
“And I have a plan to snuff him out a little,” Hunter says.
Sara’s smile turns predatory beneath the pathway lights. “Good. He could use a little humbling.”
Hunter slips into the middle and puts an arm around both our shoulders, steering us toward the distant thump of bass from Pi Omega. “This is gonna be lit,” he says.
The closer we get, the more the nerves come back—the makeup, the wig, the skyscraper heels, all the ways this could go wrong.
But there’s also a sense of anticipation, the charged air before an experiment.
I don’t know if I’ll survive the night, but I do know that whatever happens, it won’t be boring.
We round the corner into party territory, and I catch my reflection in a dark window. For the first time, the face looking back doesn’t seem like a stranger—it’s me, but refracted, all nerves and potential energy.
Hunter squeezes my shoulder. “Ready?”
I nod, even as my stomach does a backflip. “Let’s get this over with.”
Inside, the music rises, the lights shimmer, and the next phase of the reaction is about to begin.