I blink groggily.
I’m standing in a version of Tim’s apartment that isn’t quite right. The proportions are off. The ceiling is too high. The lamp throws light in the wrong direction, and the city outside the windows is just a smeared suggestion, no streets, no movement, no sound. I don’t remember standing or where I’ve been the last few minutes. Am I dreaming? I never remember my dreams or at least never aware I’m in a dream.
A man is sitting on the couch.
He looks exactly like me. Not a funhouse-mirror version. Not a shadowed, distorted echo. Just… me. My jacket. My posture. My particular brand of tired-around-the-eyes that my mother calls “chronically unbothered” and my bank account calls “accurate.” The one major difference between him and me was the smile. He has a creepy smile.
“There he is,” he says.
His voice is my voice. That’s the most unsettling part. Not uncanny valley. Just mine. Like hearing a recording of yourself and hating it.
“You’re the box,” I say.
He tilts his head, mildly impressed. “What gave me away?”
I shrug. “Lucky guess. If anything weird happens to me, I’ll automatically assume it’s the box.”
He laughs unrestrained. I’ve never liked my laugh, and this reinforces that opinion.
“I’m glad you’re the one I bonded with.” He leans back, crossing an ankle over his knee. “You’re so entertaining.”
“What do you want?”
His jovial mood swaps to annoyance in an instant. “You’re using me wrong.”
“Oh, excuse me. I’ve had you for, what, a few hours, and you don’t exactly come with an instruction manual.”
“You used me, ME! To transform clothes. Something you could just go to the store to buy.” He leans forward. “It’s beneath me.”
“I don’t even know what you can do.”
My doppleganger smiles menacingly. “Oh, yes, yes you do.”
I take a step back. “I- I’m not going to transform people. Do you know how difficult my life would become?”
His smile is unnerving. He stands and walks towards me. He towers over me. He grabs my arm in a vice-like grip.
“Quinn, my bonded soul, you don’t have a choice.”
I come back to consciousness the way you fall off a curb: suddenly and without dignity.
The first thing I register is warmth. Not ambient, not the blanket, not the apartment’s central heating. The specific, concentrated heat of the box in my palm.
The second thing I register is Tim.
She’s crouched beside the couch, one hand on my shoulder, her hair falling forward in loose, sleep-tangled waves. She’s in the nightgown. Her expression is frozen in shock.
Because my hand is pressing the silver box against her forearm.
We both look at it.
“It’s morning. I was just trying to wake you up,” she says. Very carefully. The voice of someone who has stepped onto cracked ice and is now reassessing every future footstep. “You looked like you were having a nightmare. I touched your shoulder, and you grabbed my wrist and-” She swallows. “Quinn. Don’t activate the box. Please.”
I pull the box back, but it’s already too late. My arm doesn’t respond immediately, the way it sometimes doesn’t in those first thick seconds of waking, like the signal is traveling a long way. In that moment, the heat spikes.
The connection opens. I sense the box stronger than I ever have before. I can almost see it smirk in my own creepy smile right before the box goes ice cold and the connection fades.
Tim inhales. Sharp. Involuntary.
She rocks back onto her heels, her free hand catching the edge of the couch cushion. Her knuckles go white. The color drains from her face and then floods back in, a deep, spreading rose that climbs from her throat to her cheekbones in a single, rushing wave.
“Not again.”
She squeezes her eyes shut. A low, shaking breath escapes her, not pain, not quite, something more like the sound of being overwhelmed by a feeling too large for its container. Her fingers dig into the couch cushion.
A feeling of dread settles in my stomach. I did it again! And something scarier burrows into my mind: curiosity. An eagerness to see what will happen with a third dose of the silver box.
The transformation is subtle this time. Tim was like painting before, made with broad strokes. But now, it’s like a master painter came in and added incredible details to enhance and smooth out the flaws.
Her face, which had already been striking, refines further, some barely visible tightening and smoothing in the same motion. Her jaw softens another fraction. Her cheekbones lift. Her lips, slightly parted with unsteady breath, gain a fullness that tips from pretty into something I don’t have a tactful word for. Her lashes, already dark, thicken imperceptibly, and her eyes, when they flutter open, are deeper. Luminous in the low lamp light. The kind of eyes that make you forget what you were saying mid-sentence.
She looks down at her hands. They tremble slightly. Slender and elegant and trembling.
The nightgown, already not doing any favors, does considerably fewer favors now. The silk redistributes with quiet, merciless efficiency around a silhouette that has deepened at every curve. Her chest swells and presses against her now tight nightgown, making her valley deeper and enchanting.
Beneath her nightgown, her thighs tighten and soften at the same time, giving her butt a fuller figure.
She stands. It takes her a moment to do it, her center of gravity recalibrated again without her input, and she straightens slowly with one hand still on the couch. She is noticeably shorter, just a hair above five-foot-two. Her hair falls around her shoulders, heavier than before, softer, catching the lamplight in warm, honeyed waves that she doesn’t appear to notice.
It’s like all of her features were dialed up to a 12.
Tim looks at me.
“Why did you do that?” she asks. Her voice is even more melodic now, with a low, clear resonance that belongs in a radio station or a dimly-lit jazz bar where the entire world can enjoy the sound.
I wince. “I didn’t mean to… the box made me do it.”
She stares at me with intensity. I think she meant it to be threatening, but on her innocent face, she’s downright adorable.
I continue. “The box invaded my dream. It wants me to use it on people, not clothes. I don’t remember taking it out of my pocket.”
A long silence sits between us.
Tim looks down at herself, then back at me, then at the box, completing the triangle of blame with practiced efficiency. She pulls at the neckline of the nightgown. It doesn’t go anywhere helpful.
“The box invaded your dream?” she repeats. “And told you to use it on people?”
“Um, yes.”
“And then made you use it on me in your sleep.”
“…Yes.”
She exhales through her nose, long and slow, the specific exhale of someone doing arithmetic on how much energy they have left for being upset, and concluding: not enough. She sits on the edge of the couch, tucks one leg underneath her, and looks at me with a tired, resigned expression.
“There’s nothing to do about it now,” she says finally. Less angry than I expected. More defeated than I’m comfortable with.
I agree. “Not right now.”
She props her chin in her hand as she stares at the corner of the room. The nightgown strap slips off one shoulder. She fixes it absentmindedly, like she had done it countless times before. I study the ceiling again. The ceiling and I are developing a real relationship at this point.
“So,” she says, with the brightness of someone pivoting hard away from a feeling they don’t want to have. “What’s the plan? Are we still going to the alley?”
“Yes,” I say, “but first I want to do something.” I pull the box from my pocket and set it on the coffee table between us. Tim flinches back.
“Go get your old clothes.”
Tim blinks. “You want to change my clothes again?”
I nod. “At least three outfits this time. Underwear too.”
She looks at me. Looks at the box. Looks back at me with the expression of someone running the calculation and not loving the result.
“Didn’t the box specifically tell you not to change clothes?”
“That’s exactly why I want to do it,” I say. “We need to drain it, run it down before it pulls another sleepwalking stunt. Show it there are consequences.” I look her up and down. “And you need clothes that actually fit.”
She glances down at the nightgown, at the silk doing its best and failing valiantly. “Fine. But I’m betting this blows up in our faces. Especially mine.”
She disappears down the hallway. When she returns, her arms are piled high, and she drops everything onto the couch in an avalanche of fabric: shirts, pants, shoes, underwear, things I don’t have names for.
“That should do it?”
“Perfect.”
The box is already warm in my hand when I reach for the first article of clothing. The connection opens immediately. I touch a simple t-shirt and feel it again. That faint, low-grade irritation, the specific energy of a concert pianist asked to play Chopsticks. But underneath the annoyance, something new this time: a warning. A promise of repercussions.
I mentally flip the box off.
The fabric tightens like a Chinese finger trap as it reshapes itself, pulling in at the waist, softening at the shoulders, until it fits a considerably more feminine figure. Words bloom across the chest: Kiss Me, I’m Cute.
I can’t help it. I laugh.
Tim looks over my shoulder and gives me a flat look. “Really, Quinn?”
“I didn’t choose it.”
“Sure you didn’t.”
She reaches for the shirt. I hold up a hand.
“Hold on. Let me finish the first outfit.”
I work through the rest: pants, shoes, the works. As I do, I pay attention to the flow of energy between the box and clothes. The box spends on clothing is significant. What it gets back is almost nothing; a trickle, barely worth measuring. Like spending a hundred dollars to find a dime. No wonder the box doesn’t like me using it on clothes.
I also notice something else: a faint current running between the box and me each time I use it. Not just flowing into the clothes. Into me.
I file that away. Something to worry about later.
Tim takes the finished outfit and disappears into her room with a loud click of the latch.
As she changes, I finish the rest of the clothes in the pile. It completely drains the box of all the energy. The box sends one more warning and insult before falling into a deep slumber. Serves you right for taking over my body.
Right when I finish, the door opens.
Tim walks out awkwardly as she tugs on her new clothes.
The tight jean jacket sits open because it has no choice in the matter. The shirt beneath stretches heroically across her chest, the pink lettering curved and distorted by the geography of the hills beneath it. The baker boy cap sits slightly tilted on her head.
She holds her arms out. A gesture of defeat.
“I cannot close the jacket,” she announces.
“I can see that.”
“It won’t even come close.” She tugs the lapels toward each other. They don’t come close. She releases them. “This is ridiculous.”
“I mean,” I say carefully, “that’s less a jacket problem and more a-” I pause to think of the right word. “-a containment problem.”
“You’re the worst. Who do you think gave me these?” She crosses her arms, which pushes her chest together and makes it more prominent.
“The box?”
She sighs. “I’m not wearing this one out. With my luck, some random dude will actually kiss me. And it’s too tight to be comfortable.”
“Perfect,” I say excitedly. “I’ve got another outfit ready to go. With this one, it went through two doses of the box.” I hand her a stack of clothes.
She takes the clothes with a huff and saunters back to her room. I might be imagining things, but she moves a lot more naturally now than before.
She’s gone longer this time. I begin to sweat. I sort of gave her this one as a joke and expecting her to rush out and get mad at me. But, nope. It looks like she’s actually trying it on.
I’m halfway through mentally composing an apology to her when I hear the door click open.
I look up.
Then I look at the ceiling. Then the wall. Then a spot on the coffee table that needs very close attention. And then after I gain my composure, back to Tim.
Tim stands in the hallway in the pink mini skirt and white tank top, the sheer blush cardigan hanging loose off her shoulders. Her breasts don’t just peak out the top of the tank top, but they look like they are barely being contained as they try to climb out. The outfit looks like it was designed specifically for her current proportions, which I suppose it was. She looks great, like one of those models who I’d admire from a distance, but never in a million years be confident enough to approach.
Tim sees my mouth hanging open and smirks. “Too much for ya?” She poses with a hand on her hip. My stunned silence is answer enough.
She drifts toward the full-length mirror on the far wall. She stops in front of it. Tilts her head. Turns slightly to one side, then back. Her hand rises and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear in an unhurried, automatic gesture. She doesn’t appear to notice she’s done it.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “Okay, I can admit…” She pauses, searching for the word. “I look freakin’ hot.” The admission comes out almost bewildered, like she’s surprised to find herself meaning it. She turns slightly more, angling her shoulder toward the mirror. “Like, unbelievable hot.”
“Yeah,” I say, with supreme neutrality, which for some reason comes out as a squeak.
She bites her lip. The reflection bites its lip back. She tips her head, watching it happen. Then a slow, wondering smile spreads across her face. Genuine. Unguarded. The kind that starts somewhere behind the eyes before the mouth catches up. Her chin drops slightly, and she peeks at her reflection from under her lashes.
Something about the gesture makes me clear my throat. “Tim, you doing ok?”
She doesn’t look away from the mirror. She tucks a stray stand of hair behind her ear. She distractedly says, “Fine, fine, just fine.”
“Tim, we’ve got to get going, but I don’t think you should wear that.”
That got her attention. She turns sharply towards me. “What? But I look so cute!” Her pout tugs at my heartstrings. And also creates a pit in my stomach. Tim’s acting so… girly. She doesn’t seem to notice.
My eyes gravitate to the ceiling once again; hello, my old friend. “That’s part of the problem. You’ll be hit on by every guy we pass, and maybe even cause an accident or two.”
Her shoulders drop in defeat. “I guess you’re right.” She glances at the mirror again and adjusts her tank top. Her cheeks turn bright red, and she laughs awkwardly. “What was I thinking? It’d be super embarrassing going out like this.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Tim’s personality seemed to return to normal. A giggle escapes Tim’s mouth as she looks at her reflection. Well, mostly normal.
I quickly distract her. “Lucky for you, I’ve got one more outfit for you to wear.” I hand her another pile of clothes. “Only one does on these ones.”
With one more longing look at the mirror, Tim grabs the clothes and returns to her room.
Her changing session finished much quicker this time. She steps out of her room to reveal a very professional-looking young woman. She’s wearing a V-neck shirt with a tan jacket and loose-fitting jeans. Even her hair is tied back in a comfortable ponytail that hangs over her shoulder. A little cleavage was peaking out, but compared to the last outfit, it was like night and day.
Practical and casual.
She stops in front of me and holds her arms out at her sides. She does a little spin. “So, what do you think? Too plain?” The way she moves is too natural. Too feminine. She’s probably doing it without thinking, so bringing it up will only cause confusion and awkwardness.
“You look great. If anything, it’s still too nice. You know, because we’re going dumpster diving. But I don’t think the box does low-quality clothes.”
“So, are we good to go?” she asks.
I place the metal box on the coffee table. Since I drained the energy, the compulsion to always keep it with me faded drastically. Might as well not risk another accident.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
TheXtra Path 
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