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Amity faced the mirror in Viney’s crowded bedroom. She inspected herself, her eyes tracing the line of her jaw. It felt different, smoother, less like a sharp cliffslope. It had been six months on the hormone-blocking drugs, during which time every little change was a surprise.
“Shoulders look smaller,” she said almost to her reflection.
Viney lay on her stomach at the edge of the bed, doing a drawing of a griffin without bothering to lift her head. “They are smaller. Your old jacket almost swallows you whole. I told you we could let it in.”
Her hand reached out to touch her newly colored, now lilac-colored, hair, so smooth and fluid in her hand, nothing at all like the coarse, brunette hair she’d hated before. A moment of perfect happiness swelled within her.
'I think I look—' she began, but the word shattered as it was spoken, her voice wavering from a tremor into a croak that was mortifying.
It burst. Heat rushed into her cheeks. She balled her fists. “Ugh. Stupid.”
Paper rustled, and in an instant, Viney appeared, by her side, a warm, constant presence in the mirror. At sixteen, Viney had a confidence Amity could only envy in herself. While Viney had completed her transformation, reached the summit of the mountain, Amity was barely excavated from the rock.
'Hey,' Viney said, softly but surely. 'No.'
“It’s gross,” Amity muttered, observing her image becoming distorted.
“It’s a sign,” Viney said, slipping his arm around Amity’s thin shoulders and squeezing. “Your voice is literally reaching for where it wants to be. It’s stretching. Just practicing,” he said.
“Practicing embarrassing myself,” Amity teased, although she pressed into the hug.
Viney rested her chin on the lilac-colored hair of Amity. "Remember when I had a voice like that? I sounded like... you know... a dude with a cold for like, three months straight. You never laughed."
'I thought you sounded brave,' she admitted.
“You're brave.”
Viney held her reflection’s gaze in the glass. Their reflections were a tangle of each other.
“Look at you. Your hair is like silk. Your jaw is soft. Your shoulders are just the right fit. And your voice is fighting its way home. You're growing into this, Mittens. And it is beautiful.” The flush in her cheeks was no longer born of shame. Euphoria had returned, and this time it was warm and swaddled in Viney’s conviction that she was becoming something, and she was doing it with company.