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the darkness of the sleeping campus, Heidi grieved for her father’s lost watch, tossed into the wastebasket for the hotel maid by a spoiled playboy. She would give anything to have it again. Sometimes she felt the shame inside her might swallow her up.
    But she was going to change that. She was going to be good. To help Doreen, that was the right thing to do. She could even tell her father about it. I used my gifts to help a sad, lonely girl make a better life, a fresh start. Aren’t you proud, Dad? Isn’t it just what you would have wanted?
    â€œMornin’, Pops,” she whispered, allowing herself to relax into her natural accent.
    â€œâ€™Nighty-night, Heidi-bear,” she imagined him saying back. She was tired, too tired to think. Her thoughts were getting all jumbled. She stretched out on the sofa and faded off.

As soon as Doreen opened her eyes, she felt possessed by a weird feeling. Probably from spending her first night in a new place, she thought. She lay back on her pillow and replayed the events of the previous evening—how happy she’d felt, reveling in the attentions of Heidi, a girl prettier than even the most popular girls at her old school. But then the memory of the doctored picture brought her right back down to reality and she felt rotten again.
    Biz was just trying to be nice, she reminded herself, though she felt a sharp pang at how much Biz needed to change her image in order to make her presentable. Still, Doreen was anxious to look at the picture again. The fantasy of it delighted her. She pulled it from the drawer in her nightstand where she’d placed it the night before. “I’ll look one more time,” she said to herself. “And then I will rip it up into a hundred pieces.” She knew better than to waste her time on what could never be. But she would indulge one final glimpse. She turned on the reading lamp beside her bed to get a better look.
    The picture looked nothing like she remembered it. She brought it closer to her face. Instead of the beautiful stranger, she saw that the subject of the photograph was the real Doreen, sitting self-consciously in a chair in the woods, in an unflattering dress and too much makeup, her smile strained with effort. Doreen blinked at the image. Had she imagined the pure-skinned angel? Could her eyes be playing some sort of trick on her? She launched herself out of bed and opened the blinds. But the light, now everywhere, only confirmed that the girl in the picture was no ideal of grace and beauty but Doreen as she knew herself to be—utterly, painfully flawed.
    Doreen cried out. How could she have mistaken her own pathetic body for the goddess in her imagination? Oh, how she hated her looks, her face, her skin. She stepped in front of the mirror to relish in her own disgust. She looked up at her reflection with a scowl on her face. And the scowl returned to her—on the face of the perfect-looking girl she remembered from the photograph.
    What? Doreen couldn’t compute what she was seeing. The beautiful mirror-girl had on the purple flannel pajamas Doreen’s mother brought back from Nashville that time, the same pajamas Doreen had worn to bed. When Doreen moved her hand, the girl also moved her hand. The surface of the mirror was hard and smooth as any mirror, but her own skin, when she touched it, was soft and creamy. She watched the girl in the mirror touch her own face, her lovely mouth agape, her perfectly arched eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
    Slowly, slowly it began to sink in. She’d made a wish, hadn’t she? She wished she could be the girl in the picture, the stunner Biz made out of pixels and light. She stood staring at the image of herself in the mirror, afraid to look away and make it all go back to the way it was. She wanted to hold on to that moment, to make it stretch on for the rest of her life. She put her hand against the glass and took it all in.

    By nine o’clock