“Wait, what?” I ask, as she moves to fasten the blue one on my head. “What on earth do you pack in your suitcases?”

“It’ll be fun,” Tai says with a crooked smile. “Role-playing!” Before I know it, she’s sticking pins into the wig and my scalp with (painfully) artful precision.

“Which … role, exactly?”

She holds out a hand mirror, and I look utterly transformed. I don’t even recognize myself. It sends a shiver of delight through me.

“I mean this in the most complimentary way possible, Tai, but I look like an intergalactic sex worker.”

“I know!” she squeals, clapping her hands. She puts on her own wig, pastel pink, and admires us both in the mirror, while I wonder—with bubbling excitement—what Tai has in mind. Even though her version of reality is chocolate-shell-deep, I can admit it’s sweet to the taste. A candy-colored dream of an escape, from a more bitter, dark truth.

“Take a photo of me, but like, with mirror-me and real-me in it,” she says, flinging her phone in my direction without a second glance.

“Tai, no.” I let it dangle in the air, this awful appendage of my sister’s. She’s posted every outfit she’s worn since we got here. They’ll worry if I don’t post anything, she offered in explanation, as if it’s the phantom “they” who have the problem. “We need to stay under the radar. You need to try, for once in your life. Okay?”

She sighs dramatically, locking the phone with a sharp click.

We pull up around the back of the old Grand Hotel, built into the basalt cliff bordering one end of town. We pay the taxi, and Tai strolls into the service entrance trailing the egg yolk–yellow edges of a silk and faux-fur coat (Rihanna-omelet-at-the-Met style, dahling) and me, as if she owns the place, seemingly oblivious to the fact this isn’t the lobby for guests. When we reach the service elevator, she whispers in the ear of the operator. He shrugs and presses the button for the third floor.

“Where are we going?” I ask. I’m woozy and light-headed from her surplus of energy, and I can’t decide if I love it or hate it.

“Killjoy. Killjoy, killjoy, killjoy,” she says in singsong, before practically bleating with joy herself. “You’re the one who told me Lady came here.”

I glance at the hotel employee, shifting from foot to foot. “So we’re calling her Lady now?”

“We are until we figure out who the hell she really is,” Tai replies with faux sweetness.

It dawns on me then that I’ve never mentioned this place to her, but it’s probably written in my notebook. “Wait, have you been reading my private journal?”