He looked away, glaring off into the distance for long seconds. “You’re my friend,” he said at last.
I reached up and pulled him down to me and he wrapped me up in a hug.
* * *
Back upstairs, Doctor Franklin started talking me through the operation. “We need to shave the bone a little here,” he said, drawing on my nose with a magic marker. “And your chin needs to come in just a touch.” He was almost gleeful and I found it unnerving. I’m just a project, to him.
“Will it be... permanent?” I asked.
He tilted his head to one side as if he hadn’t even considered that. “Some of the changes could be reversed, in theory. But with each surgery, there’s a risk of weakening the underlying bone structure….”
I nodded, feeling ill. I was going to look like Christina forever. Why did that bother me? It wasn’t as if I was pretty.
“We’ll tweak your cheekbones,” said Doctor Franklin, still drawing. “And... here and here and... there!”
He handed me a mirror and my stomach lurched. My face was a mess of marker lines. I could barely see me, anymore.
I glanced down, remembering something. “I, um...I think my breasts are bigger than Christina’s,” I said awkwardly.
Doctor Franklin shook his head.
I bit my lip. He was the doctor, but I knew my own body. Her hips and waist might be the same, but I swore I was at least a cup size bigger. “Maybe we should check—”
“I assure you,” he said stiffly, “You’re exactly the same.”
I nodded meekly.
“You’ll need laser eye surgery,” he told me. “Christina has 20/20 vision.”
I hadn’t even considered that. No more glasses.
“At the same time, we’ll use a different laser to destroy the brown pigment in your eyes, turning them blue.”
There was a sudden, unexpected wrench, deep inside me. My dad had always loved my brown eyes, saying they matched my mom’s. “Okay,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. “That’s fine.”
* * *
For three days, while Doctor Franklin made his preparations, I sat behind the one-way mirror and watched Christina. A whole host of FBI interrogators tried to question her, but none of them could get anything useful out of her. I didn’t understand why she was being so loyal to Konstantin, since she didn’t love him. Fear of what he’d do to her?
I put my weird brain to work, noticing the details that made her her: the way she ran her hands through her hair when she was thinking, the way she walked, slinking around the room, trying to distract the male interrogators with her ass. Out of sight of everyone, feeling ridiculous, I started to mimic her.
At first, I had no luck imitating her voice. She’d grown up in a very respectable Boston neighborhood, a long way from Wisconsin. Her accent shone like a polished scalpel, making mine feel clunky and dull. Then there was the confidence: where I mumbled and ummed, the words poured from her mouth easily, seductive and teasing one moment, cruel and cold the next.
But one thing I’ve always been is patient. I recorded her talking, put on some headphones and played it on loop with my eyes closed, repeating each sentence as if I was learning a language. And slowly, very slowly, my tongue learned the new shapes of words.
The mimicry became almost abstract, like a game. I almost forgot why I was doing it. Then, on the morning of my operation, something happened that brought it all home to me.
Carrie called me aside and pressed a rectangle of foil into my hand. “We found these in Christina’s luggage,” she told me. “I thought you should know, in case you needed to make an appointment with your physician.”
I looked down at my hand. It took me a few seconds to recognize them as birth control pills. “Mm-hmm,” I said, all cool professionalism. “Thank you.”
But when I walked away, my legs were shaking. Suddenly, it was all real: I’d be having sex with Konstantin. And not the tentative, let’s take it slow, step-by-step sex of a new couple. He thought we’d been lovers for months. He’d expect me to just jump into bed and—
Heat mingled with fear rippled down my body and I had to stop and lean against the wall for a second. Am I really going to do this?
At that moment, Calahan ran up to me, holding a phone. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “Konstantin called the hospital in Italy, demanding to speak to Christina. The doctors have told him she’s about to have surgery, but he’s insisting. Says he’ll send someone over there if he doesn’t get to speak to her.”
“We could let him speak to Christina,” I said. “Tell her to say everything’s fine.”
But Calahan grimly shook his head and I realized he was right. Once she had the phone, we wouldn’t be able to stop her shouting a warning to him. She didn’t know our plan, but she could tell him she’d been arrested. That would blow the whole thing. But what other choice did we have?