Our TG Caption

Shelly Draper was lounging barefoot on her dorm bed, leafing through an old print of The Golden Bough that wasn’t there yesterday — or maybe it had always been there. The walls of her room were pinned with band posters, candle wax dripped in hardened rivers down onto a faux-velvet altar. Smoke curled lazily from a clove cigarette in the ashtray by her pillow, next to an open notebook scrawled with Latin invocations and sarcastic to-do lists.

Opposite her, Jenny was finishing her mascara. Perky, tan, and smiling, she adjusted her sports bra under a thin white tank top.

"Hey, Shelly, could you clear out in, like, thirty minutes? Brendan's coming over. I promised him first dibs tonight."

Shelly raised a single black-painted eyebrow. "First?"

Jenny giggled, slinging her long blonde hair up into a ponytail. "Cam and Tom both have workouts tonight. Brendan's free, and I’ve got needs, babe."

Shelly set the book aside and sat up, letting her sheer mesh top fall off one shoulder. "You know," she said lightly, "you weren’t always like this."

Jenny didn’t hear the subtle gravity in her tone — she rarely did. "Uh, yeah, I’ve always been like this. Since, like, orientation week. Remember? I lost count after guy number sixty or something."

"No," Shelly said, smiling faintly, "you didn’t. You were dating Cody. One guy. Played guitar badly. You blushed when I mentioned sex."

Jenny blinked. Her face briefly stiffened — as if the logic engine behind her sunny smile had skipped a gear — then righted itself.

“Who the hell is Cody?” she asked, clearly amused. “Is that one of your poetry friends?”

Shelly's gaze darkened just slightly. Reality shimmered — almost imperceptibly — as she let the truth harden behind her tongue. She'd made a joke. An offhand, indulgent retcon. She’d imagined Jenny sluttier, meaner, unashamed — and Reality, ever the eager editor, obliged. But it hadn’t stopped there.

Shelly hadn’t noticed it all at once. She’d just felt... heavier, sexier, darker. Her eyeliner more dramatic. Her voice raspier. Her parents were now lapsed Catholic spiritualists who paid her tuition in exchange for monthly tarot readings. Her engineering problem sets had vanished; now, she wrote papers on Dionysian cults and Roman debauchery. And people — boys, girls, even professors — started watching her a little too long in the cafeteria line.

She still remembered who she had been, of course. But no one else did. That was part of the trick.

Jenny stepped into her platform sandals and winked. “You can crash in Cam’s room if you want. He likes goth girls. Probably wouldn’t even care if I joined in.”

“Noted,” Shelly said, voice smooth and velvet-daggered.

Jenny strutted out to meet Brendan in the hall — all bounce and confidence and oblivious power. Shelly remained seated, legs crossed, back straight. Her fingers idly twisted the silver ring on her thumb, a Wiccan pentacle wrapped in thorns.

This was her power. Not flashy, not loud. A whisper with the weight of an earthquake. She could speak changes into being, and Reality would scurry to rearrange itself, gaslighting everyone into accepting the new script.

She hadn’t intended to change herself — but Reality liked continuity. If Jenny became a thrice-dating, hundred-man record-holding sex hurricane, her roommate couldn’t still be the quiet, anxious girl in her hoodie and physics textbook. That would be a plot hole.

So now, Shelly was a black-clad mystery, rumored to have seduced the head of the Philosophy department and cursed the RA’s boyfriend with three weeks of impotence.

And, weirdly, she liked it.