Twenty-Four Hours

The first thing is the ceiling, which is the wrong ceiling, or the right ceiling from further away. The second thing is the weight on your chest, which is not the duvet.

You sit up too fast and the whole room tilts. There is hair in your mouth. There is a lot of hair in your mouth, auburn, and it is attached.

The bedroom door is open. Three people are in it, jammed shoulder to shoulder, and none of them are saying anything, and then all of them are.

"Oh my god," says Kit, and her phone comes up. "Oh my god, it worked, Rosa, it actually worked—"

"It's my fault." Rosa has a hard case in one hand and the lid already off. She looks like she has not slept. She looks like she is going to cry and take notes at the same time. "It's entirely my fault. Okay. Okay, pulse. Can I have your wrist. Please."

Yara puts one hand flat on Kit's back and moves her aside like furniture and comes in and sits on the edge of the mattress, and the bed dips, and she looks at you for a long second with her head tilted.

"Breathe," she says. "In through the nose. Slower than that. Good. You're not dying, you've been smaller for eight hours and nobody told you."

You look down. The t-shirt you went to bed in is a tent. The boxers are somewhere around one knee. Your hands are smaller. Your legs are shorter and there is a great deal more of your hip than there used to be and it is all, unmistakably, a body you have never worn before.

"Twenty-four hours," Rosa says, quietly, to your wrist. "It's twenty-four hours and then it reverts. The reagent's at the lab, they open at nine, I've emailed them twice already. It's going to be fine. It's going to be absolutely fine."

Kit lowers the phone. "It's seven-forty. In the morning. On my birthday weekend." She grins so wide it looks painful. "We have the whole day. We have the whole day, dude."

Downstairs someone's car alarm goes off and gives up. The flat smells of last night's gin.

Eight-fifty. The courier has been ordered, the lab has been shouted at by Rosa in two separate emails, and Kit has decided that the first order of business is not being in a tent and yesterday's boxers.

The bedroom is a bomb site of her own clothes, and she is holding two hangers up like a market trader.

"Right. Options." She holds up a grey tracksuit and a sundress and shakes them. "Tracksuit's comfortable, dress is funny. Dress is funnier."

"Dress is cold," Yara says from the door, arms folded. "And it's got no pockets."

"It's got tits, though, look at it"

"The dress doesn't have tits, Kit, she does."

Rosa, cross-legged on the floor with a tape measure, does not look up. "Height's one-sixty-four, by the way. That's a loss of nine centimetres, which is more than I expected and I've written it down." She finally looks up and winces. "Sorry. Well done. That was well done."

Kit holds both hangers out to you, still grinning, and then her grin changes gear into something a bit less steady. "Okay, but seriously. Bra first. That's the actual first thing. Yara, you do it, I'll get weird."

Nine-fifteen and the bathroom door is the whole problem.

It is a bathroom. It has never been anything else. It is now, somehow, a different bathroom, and Yara is standing in it with the towel already over the rail and her sleeves pushed up, and Kit is sitting on the edge of the bath because she insisted, and Rosa is in the doorway taking notes she does not need.

"Right," Yara says. "Sit. Down. On the seat, don't hover, hovering's for people with practice."

"Is this weird?" Kit asks. "This feels weird. Should we be looking away?"

"She's got about ninety seconds before she works out that it doesn't just happen, so no, we're not looking away." Yara nods at you, once, entirely without ceremony. "Feet flat. Lean forward a bit. And don't panic when it takes a second, it takes everyone a second."

Rosa clears her throat. "For the record, that's a known effect. The reflex takes getting used to. It's in the literature."

"Rosa, it's a piss, not the literature." Yara crouches down to your level and lowers her voice. "You're going to be fine. Look at me, not at them. Ready?"

Eleven o'clock and it has to be done: the reagent has to be signed for in person and the pharmacy will not hand it to anybody but Rosa, and Rosa is on the rota as staff and cannot sign for her own lab's mistake without a witness.

Which means going outside. In daylight. On a Friday, on the high street, where Kit knows every single shopkeeper by name.

"Hood up," *Yara says, tugging it. "Hands in pockets. Don't look at anyone and nobody looks twice."

"She's going to be stared at anyway," Kit says, honest for once. "She's new. New people get stared at. It's fine, it's not a thing."

Rosa is already at the door with her bag and her lanyard on, and she turns round and says, carefully, like she has rehearsed it: "If anyone asks, you're my cousin. From out of town. Visiting for the day." A pause. She winces again. "Which is technically true."

The stairwell smells of other people's cooking. Three flights down and then the front door and then the street, and the high street is busy, and every single thing in it is suddenly a great deal louder and closer than it was yesterday.

Half past two. The oversensitivity has stopped being a fact and started being a problem.

It is nothing. It is the seam of the t-shirt across the chest, the waistband, the hem of the shorts, the chair. It is the air moving when somebody walks past. It is Kit sitting too close on the sofa with her knee against yours and not noticing, and it is getting worse, not better, exactly as Rosa said it would.

You shift. The seam moves. You make a small sound you did not authorise.

Kit's head comes round. "Was that—"

"Yes," Yara says, without looking up. "It's the four-hour mark. That's the peak of the nerve sensitisation." She turns a page. "It'll stay like this now until it wears off. It's going to be a long afternoon for her."

Rosa, at the table, actually puts her pen down. "I can lower the ambient temperature. In the flat. It helps. Marginally."

Kit has already got a hand hovering an inch from your shoulder, waiting. "Marginally's not nothing, Rosa." She looks at you properly, and her grin is gone and her voice is lower and she is asking rather than announcing. "Do you want me to stop touching you, or do you want more of it? Because those are different afternoons and I can do either."

Eight o'clock exactly. The reagent is on the table in a padded envelope, cold, one dose, drawn up in a syringe case with Rosa's handwriting on the label.

Nobody has said anything for a minute. The television is on with the sound off. Kit is sitting on the arm of the sofa with her feet on the cushion. Yara is standing. Rosa has not put the case down.

"It's twenty-four hours," Rosa says. "Nearly. Nine and a half to go. If you take it now you're back by tomorrow morning, and that's it, that's the end of it." She turns the case over in her hands. "Or."

"Or there's the other one," Kit says, and does not do the joke, which is how you know she means it.

Yara folds her arms. "There's the other one. Same vial, locks it in, no going back on Monday. And it's not a decision anybody can make for you, so don't look at me." A pause, and then, quieter, and entirely without pressure: "But if you want my honest read, you've been walking around in it all day like it was a sentence. And it hasn't been one."

Rosa sets the case down in the middle of the table, next to the cold envelope, and steps back from both of them.

Half past eleven and the day is nearly over and nobody has gone to bed, because going to bed ends it.

The flat is dark except the kitchen light. Kit is on the floor with her back against the sofa, half asleep, her phone face-down on her chest. Yara is at the table with a mug she has not drunk from. Rosa is standing at the window with her arms wrapped round herself, looking down at the street.

"Nine centimetres," Rosa says, to the glass. "That's what I keep coming back to. Nine centimetres and a whole day, and I still don't know if I've done you a favour or not." She turns round. "Eight hours left. The reagent's still on the table. Nobody's touched it."

Kit opens one eye from the floor. "'Cause it's not a reagent, it's a door," she mumbles, and then, more awake: "Sorry. That was almost profound. Gin's still in me."

Yara sets her mug down and looks at you across the table, steady, and asks the only question that matters.

"What do you want to do with the last eight hours?"