Away for the Weekend

me.”

“But he has been following you—” Beth breaks off. “Oh. You mean…”

“Exactly. I dress as me. And you dress as you. We switch back! Manually. We’ll still be in the wrong bodies, but we’ll make them look as much like we really look as we can. So you can go to your writers’ thing and I can go to the fashion show.” She beams. “It solves all our problems.”

“But what about next week?” asks Beth.

Gabriela screws up her mouth for a second. “At least as far as this weekend goes, it solves all our problems. We can worry about next week after this is over.” She hugs herself. “Oh, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball…”

Shortly after midnight, it suddenly starts to rain. This is a surprise rain, unpredicted by any of the sophisticated weather forecasts for the area, and it falls so fiercely and thickly that the lights of the city seem to dim and instead of waking people it drives them deeper into sleep as if they’re crawling into a cave for safety.

Otto and his migraine have gone to bed, but Remedios stands at the sliding glass doors of the terrace, staring into the night. Thunder rolls down from the mountains – an avalanche of sound. Spears of light rip open the preternatural darkness. If you saw her there, you’d see a young woman in a striped cotton nightshirt and fluffy slippers watching a storm, but, of course, that is not who or what Remedios really is. She is formless and timeless; a traveller of centuries and galaxies; as real as light, as luminous as hope.

She is holding something in her hand and as another volley of thunder moves towards the valley, she takes her eyes from the glass to look at it. Sitting on her palm is the small clay figure of a dancer. A thousand years ago, when it was made, it was brightly painted and wore feathers and a tiny necklace made of shells. Then, if you looked at it long enough, it seemed to move; if you held it up against the sky, it seemed to shimmer with the stars. The shells and feathers and paint are all long gone, but as a wave of lightning bleaches the sky, the tiny figure shifts with the drumming of the rain. “The universe always seeks balance…” Remedios murmurs to the dancer. “That’s why it’s always changing.”

Another wash of purple light illuminates the skyline.

“Right now it looks like it’s seeking revenge,” says Otto from behind her.

She doesn’t turn round.

“Everything’s going really wrong, Remedios.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” He stands beside her, but what Otto sees as he looks out at the watery night is not what Remedios sees. “I don’t see that there’s any maybe about it.”

Remedios folds her hand around the dancer. If something is off-balance, it can only be righted by movement.

“You started this, Remedios,” says Otto. “And you have to end it. You can’t let them go into those award ceremonies tomorrow as someone they’re not. You have to straighten it all out.”

A breaker of rain smashes against the terrace doors.

“I will,” says Remedios. “But I’ll need your help.”

Another example of how things rarely go as planned

“Oh my God!” yelps Lucinda. “Will you look at the time? We have to get going. We don’t want to be late.”

She and Gabriela have been up for hours. Several miracles had to be performed: on Beth Beeby’s short, badly cut hair the colour of cardboard; on Beth Beeby’s plain face, as exciting as a boiled egg. And then they had to pick the perfect outfit for the first part of the morning’s programme – the awards’ ceremony.

“That’s it,” says Lucinda, fastening the last of a jangle of gold necklaces around Gabriela’s neck. “Let’s see how you look.”

Gabriela takes a gulp of air. She hasn’t felt this nervous since her first day at middle school, when she changed her outfit three times, brought an extra pair of shoes with her in case she’d picked the wrong ones, and decided to buy her lunch rather than risk showing up with a loser lunch box. “Well?” she asks. “What do you think?”

Lucinda steps back and gives Gabriela a critical appraisal. There was nothing they could do about the length of Beth’s hair, but they dyed it blonde and gelled it so that it circles her head like a halo. Gabriela, an artist not only with a needle and thread but with a make-up brush as well, has changed Beth’s plain features and sallow complexion into a face that might look at you from the cover of a magazine. The open-toed platforms and filmy dress in a patchwork of different patterns complete the transformation.

“It’s incredible,” Lucinda says at last. “I mean, I knew we could make you look better, but you look better than better. You look—” She hesitates for the bat of an eyelash, as if she’s afraid to say the secret words. “You totally look like one of us!”

Gabriela allows herself a few seconds of being pretty pleased with herself, then she puts Beth’s glasses on again so she can actually see and turns back to the mirror for a final check. “But I still don’t look like me.” She frowns at her reflection (in which, if you looked very hard, you might see the unremarkable face of Beth Beeby peering through). “Everybody’s going to know it’s someone else.”

“You look more like you without the glasses, so if they don’t get too close they probably won’t notice,” judges Lucinda. “Anyway, it’s only Taffeta who really matters. If you can keep out of her sight till the show starts, it’ll be OK.”

Gabriela raises one carefully brushed eyebrow. “You think?”

“I know. Everybody’s going to be all wrapped up in themselves. Besides,” says Lucinda, “even if somebody does say something, you are you, right? You’re not Beth pretending to be you. You made that dress. You did your face. You did your hair. You know what to say and how to act. Guaranteed, you’ll be able to talk them round.”

Gabriela makes an exaggerated gesture of relief. “Phew! At least I don’t have to pretend to know anything about books any more.”

“What are you doing in there?” Delila rattles the doorknob. “It’s almost show time. Professor Gryck’s going to go into meltdown if we get there late.”

“I’m coming! I’m coming!” Beth gives herself one last look in the mirror, puts her spare pair of glasses on, and opens the bathroom door.

Delila whistles. “Well, kiss my grits,” she says, laughing. “Will you look at you!” Slowly shaking her head, her eyes move up and down the girl in the sober grey dress and sensible shoes. “You look almost like you!”

Beth steps in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door. “What about the hair?” She squints at her reflection through the thick lenses. “You think the hair’s all right?”

Beth and Delila have also been up and busy for hours performing miracles while the rest of their group dreamed and snored, turning the silk purse that is Gabriela Menz into the sow’s ear that is Lillian Beeby’s only child. They cut off Gabriela’s blonde curls, darkened them with a box of henna from the hotel’s drugstore and flattened them with Gabriela’s electric hair straightener. Topped off with the understatement that is Beth’s wardrobe, it’s possible that Mrs Menz herself would walk by her without wondering, even for a nanosecond, if that girl reminded her of Gabriela.

“The hair looks dynamic. A little longer than it was, but no one’s going to notice that.”

“You mean because nobody looked at me that closely to begin with?”

“That’s right.” Delila puts on a deep, portentous voice. “It’s grey and brown and it’s wearing glasses – it must be Beth Beeby!”

Beth laughs. “I knew there had to be some advantage to being geeky and invisible. I just could never figure out what it was.”

Delila picks up her bag. “So I guess it’s time to strut our stuff.”

“At least I can walk without falling over,” says Beth.