The second Sunny wakes up, she knows something is wrong. She's warm despite the breeze blowing across her cheeks, but she knows she didn't leave the window open because it's the middle of February and the wind that blows off the ocean might as well be made of icicles. And her pillow smells wrong. Gone is the lavender spray her mother swears by, replaced by ... is that sandalwood and tobacco?

What the fuck?

She rolls over, scared to open her eyes in case there's a stranger lying next to her, someone Fenfen has brought back from the club. But the bed is empty, her arm hitting a cool sheet, and when she dares to peek through her eyelashes, her heart flips and her stomach twists.

This is not Sunny's bedroom.

Gone are her magnolia walls covered in the art from her favourite albums. Gone is her CD rack. Gone are her drawers, overstuffed with her extensive collection of t-shirts and jumpers, jeans and shorts. Gone is her mess and her clutter, the chaos she lives in because she so rarely has the burst of energy needed to get on top of it all.

What the fuck?!

As she blinks, trying to take it all in, the only thing Sunny can think is that she did go out with Fenfen after all. Maybe she went to the club and drank too much on an empty stomach, but did she go home with someone? Sure, she was feeling the single life hard yesterday, but never in her life has she met someone on a night out; she hasn't even gone on a night out since her second year of university, when she finally came to terms with the fact that it's so not her scene. She has never even kissed anyone before, for crying out loud, let alone hooked up with a stranger and woken up in a bed she doesn't recognise.

Both hands planted over her eyes, Sunny racks her brains but all she can come up with is what she knows happened yesterday: she got home from work, chatted to Fenfen, and went to sleep. And now she's in someone else's bedroom, wearing ... yup, these are not her pyjamas. Something has gone horribly wrong. Oh, god. This is bad. Her stomach is roiling and gurgling and she feels vaguely sick. Maybe she's ill. Maybe this is some fucked-up hallucination.

It takes her a while to gather the momentum to get out of bed when all she wants to do is close her eyes and be transported back to her flat, praying this is a vividly lucid dream, but her bladder has other ideas. Sunny sinks her bare toes into the thick carpet that definitely doesn't belong in her cheap flat, tugs on a pair of pyjama bottoms under the oversized t-shirt she's wearing, and she opens the bedroom door to see, across the living area, a kitchen. And in the kitchen, the back of a woman.

A tall woman, with toned muscles that Sunny can see through her three-quarter sleeve shirt that's tucked into tight shorts that sit high around her waist. Her thick curls are an aggressive, in-your-face shade of pink, like an explosive bunch of fuchsias blooming straight from her scalp, resting against the smooth curve of her neck. Sunny is transfixed. She cannot move. She has no clue who this woman is or where she is and she's terrified, and she also needs to pee so badly but she's scared to move in case the woman turns around and they have to make conversation and she has to admit she must have had a blackout night and—

The woman drains her coffee and turns around. She has a wide smile that widens further when she spots Sunny, and she waves the empty mug at her.

"Morning, Sunshine! I've gotta run but the kettle's just boiled. You're not working today, right? So I'll see you later?" Her words are a bombardment that Sunny struggles to process, staring dumbly at this affectionate stranger, who doesn't seem the least bit perturbed. "I think you need the coffee, bambi."

She chuckles and crosses the space between them, and Sunny's heart tightens as the woman nears, as she reaches out and cups her cheek and kisses her, such a quick and tender kiss, and then she's gone, and Sunny can't even flip out because she needs to pee so badly but where the fuck is the fucking bathroom?

Only once her bladder is empty does her brain start to catch onto what just happened, and that's when the shit starts to hit the fan in slow motion, when she realises how utterly fucked she is because she doesn't know where the hell she is, if she's even still in Black Sands. She doesn't know why the woman called her bambi, though she can hazard a guess – she is tall and awkward and gangly, like a baby deer. She doesn't know who the hell she just kissed, and it was such a familiar kiss, as though part of a routine, even though Sunny has yet to experience her first kiss.

Wait. Was that it? Does it even count if she didn't realise it? Does it count if she didn't kiss back because her head's spinning too hard?

Her pulse is quickening at an alarming rate. If she doesn't calm down and figure this out soon, she's fairly certain she's going to pass out or straight up die, so she pulls on the first pair of shoes she sees, plants a cap backwards on her head, and grabs her purse – thank fuck she still has her purse, one sliver of normality – and she bolts. Her brain feels like overheating cogs trying to spin in jelly, getting nowhere and causing damage, and all she can do is run madly down the street until she finds a clue, some sign of where she is. She doesn't get further than two streets away because the number 19 bus is right there, her bus, which drives a circular route, and she jumps on without thinking ahead.

"Jupiter Court," she says to the driver, rifling through her purse for the fare. When she finds a 50p and a 10p, she drops them on the metal tray and waits for her ticket but none comes. The driver nods at the money.

"You're 10p short, love."

"What?"

"The fare's 70p. You're short. Got the change? Can't take you if you ain't got the change."

Her face is reddening with confusion and embarrassment as everyone on the bus watches her scrabble for change, even though she took this bus last night and it was 60p, it's always 60p on the 19, no matter what stop, but everything's fucked up today and she's sure she must have eaten something funny. She throws the extra coin at the driver, who prints the ticket begrudgingly, and she sinks onto the nearest seat.

The next round of horror comes when she realises, in her haste, she's left her Walkman. Though she's not sure she had it, considering that wasn't her flat. There's nothing to listen to in order to drown out the sounds of everyone around her, chewing and sniffing and reading and talking, and she's so on edge already that she's scared she's going to flip out on them because there's nowhere else for her terror and bafflement to go. Her nerves are on edge, perilously close to tipping into the abyss. Fear and paranoia are a toxic cocktail whirling in her gut, mixing with anger – irrational anger that all these people are having totally normal mornings while she's having a crisis over here.

Jupiter Court is only a few stops away. She wasn't too far from home after all. Maybe a twenty-minute walk. But home isn't what she wants. What she needs is someone she knows – she needs Ravi, she craves Ravi, as though seeing his face will solve every problem, and she's so glad he lives on her street, so glad she has the code for his building and can get all the way to his door on the far end of the ground floor.

"Ravi!" she calls, banging on the door to flat 3, 21 Jupiter Court. Their address are mirrors. She is flat 21, 3 Jupiter Court. Sometimes they get each other's post. "Ravi, it's me! Please be in!"

Frankly, she doesn't give a fuck if she pisses off everyone else in number 3, because this is a desperate situation, and desperate time call for Ravi Patel. He is her paracetamol, her sudocrem: her go-to pain relief, her favourite soothing balm.

The door opens. Fraser's on the other side in low-slung tracksuit bottoms and an unzipped hoodie showing the long-healed scars from his top surgery. He's holding a bowl of cereal, casually chewing as though all is right in the world when it so clearly isn't.

"Oh, hey, Sunny," he says, running a hand through his fiery red hair, the kind of shade of natural orange that people pay a lot to replicate. His clothes are splattered in layers of old paint in every colour, the kind of clothes that can't be thrown out because they are their own canvas, his go-to outfit when he has a brush in his hand. His skin has not been spared by whatever he's been painting this morning, his hand streaked with green that matches a smudge on his cheek.

"Where's Ravi? Is he here?"

"He's in bed," Fraser says, frustratingly calm. "You okay?"

"Do I seem okay?"

"No. You seem kind of freaked out. That's why I asked," he says, following as Sunny tears her way across the flat to the bedroom. She bangs the door open too hard and startles Ravi, who is asleep on his back with only a corner of the duvet covering his otherwise naked body.

"Jesus!" he cries out, almost exposing himself. It's nothing she hasn't seen before. "What the fuck, Sunny?"

"We need to talk. Something so fucking weird is going on and I'm so confused and I don't underst—" Sunny cuts herself off when she happens to catch a glimpse of her reflection in the bedroom mirror, and she watches her cheeks go pale, watches her own hand go to touch her hair, which is no longer shades of brown.

It's purple. She takes off her white cap to see that her roots are a rich shade of aubergine, fading to soft lavender tips. She blinks a few times but it doesn't change. She steps closer, but it isn't a trick of the light.

Fraser steps into the room, leaning against the doorframe like his body is an ironing board, almost as thin and flat. "Something's not right with Sunny," he whispers to Ravi, who pulls a face as he watches Sunny's horror at the sudden change in her hair colour.

"Don't say you don't like it," he says. "You loved it last week. Delilah'll be heartbroken if you're not happy anymore."

"When did this happen?" Sunny's clutching a bunch of her hair in her fist, eyes wide and wild.

"Like, ten days ago? Delilah asked if any of us were willing to be guinea pigs for her new dye and you said yeah, as long as she made you look even gayer." Ravi sits up in bed and stretches carefully to grab a t-shirt. Fraser throws him a pair of boxers. "What's going on, Sunny? What happened?" He pats the bed next to him and a numb Sunny drops onto the space. She takes a moment to gather herself, hands clamped together between her thighs.

"I think I'm having a breakdown."

"Why?" he asks, choosing not to make a joke.

"Because this morning I woke up in a flat I don't recognise and there was a woman who kissed me but I have no fucking clue who she is, and now my hair is purple." Her eyes are saucer-wide and filling with tears. Her chest is squeezing so tight she's scared she's about to have a heart attack but it's hard to get her breathing under control when she can't rationalise this. "What's going on?"

Ravi puts a hand on Sunny's knee. "Describe the woman," he says.

"Tall, white, pink hair," she says. "Very, you know"—she flexes her non-existent muscles—"fit."

"Really curly pink hair?" Ravi asks, holding his hands a few inches from either side of his head.

"Yes!" Relief floods Sunny. Ravi knows who she's talking about. She must've knocked her head and forgotten a day. She fucking hopes that's all it is. "You know her?"

"Sunny..." Fraser says, his face a wreck of consternation. Sunny doesn't like that tone. That tone makes her feel sicker; that tone says that something is really wrong.

"Babe." Ravi's voice is soft, his deep brown eyes boring into Sunny's. "That sounds like Vivian."

"Who the fuck is Vivian?" The words explode out of her more forcefully than she means them to, but she's finding it hard to regulate her emotions and her output right now.

"Your girlfriend," Ravi says.

A hysterical, half-crazed laugh bursts from Sunny. She covers her face and thinks okay, Ravi's playing a joke. "This isn't funny, Ravi. I can see why you'd think it is but it really fucking isn't. How'd you pull this off?"

"Pull what off?" he asks, at the same time that Fraser asks, "You didn't recognise your girlfriend?"

"I don't have a girlfriend, Fraser," she says, trying to inject a little patience into her voice, because she feels like she's about to either go into cardiac arrest or pop an aneurysm or something else that will whip her off this mortal coil, and she's not quite done yet. "Ravi and I were talking about this yesterday."

"I didn't see you yesterday," Ravi says. Sunny groans.

"Cut it out, Ravi." Her voice has lost all humour and energy now. "You kept going on about putting an ad in the newspaper or setting me up on a dating site because I was all sad over being single."

Ravi's frown deepens. "Okay, walk me through what happened yesterday because I'm a bit lost." He rubs his cheek, creased from his wrinkled pillowcase.

Sunny huffs a sigh and closes her eyes, throwing herself back to what she remembers as yesterday. "I was at work until one and you came in to write lyrics, and we had that big talk about how I wanted a girlfriend but I didn't want to date, and then we walked to the bus stop and I lost all my change at The Witching Well so you lent me the bus fare and we went home. I talked to Fen"—she checks her watch—"literally, like, seven hours ago, and then I woke up in someone else's flat and that woman was there, and she kissed me and said she'd see me later."

Ravi takes a deep breath. Sunny refuses to look at Fraser, because his face is a picture-perfect painting of worry that makes her feel, oh, only about a hundred times worse.

"Okay." Ravi is all soft voice and soothing comfort. "Okay, Sunny, can I tell you how I remember that night?"

"Please." She looks into his eyes, searching for something to make her feel stable, rooted, but all she can see is her best friend's worry, and her own fear reflected back at her.

This isn't a joke. It's only now that she realises that. Ravi isn't taking the piss. He's as lost as she is, yet at least he seems to know the pink haired woman.

"I came to Percolatte," Ravi says, "and we had that talk, and I remember joking about putting an ad in the paper for you. I remember us walking to the bus and you lost your money in the well, and I dropped you off at your doorstep."

So far, so good. Sunny is nodding along, trying to slow the wild beat of her heart.

"And then, the next day..." Ravi says, and Sunny's heart sinks because to her, the next day is today, and today hasn't happened yet. Ravi clears his throat. "The next day, we all went to Fraser's exhibition, and you went to work early because you swapped shifts with Gina."

Sunny's nodding has turned to shaking. She didn't do that. She wouldn't. She hates the afternoon shift. She doesn't even like Gina much.

"You came here when your shift was over and you told me you were in love with the new woman at the bookshop next to Percolatte," Ravi says, speaking low and slow, "and I teased you that now you were going to have to do the bit you hate and try to date her."

"No. That didn't happen, Ravi, it wouldn't ha—"

He cuts her off, stemming the flow of her upset. "That was a year ago."

Sunny's going to be sick. Burning heat and freezing cold flush her entire body in waves and she has to lie down on Ravi and Fraser's bed because if what he's saying is true, she's missing a year.

She's missing a whole. Fucking. Year.

And she has a girlfriend.

Nauseous horror rises when she realises what has happened.

"I got my wish," she murmurs, her face pressed into the freshly laundered duvet cover.

"What?"

"This is exactly what I fucking wished for," she says, throwing herself back to last night – last year – and how she had reiterated her desire the moment she had tripped; she had made an accidental offering to that damn well, pining for a fully-fledged relationship.

"Oh." Ravi catches on. When Fraser gives him a questioning look, eyebrows furrowed above slate grey eyes, he shoots one back that says we'll talk about this later, when Sunny isn't having an existential crisis in the middle of our bed. "Shit."

"But how the fuck did I get here? Why don't I remember anything? Where's the me who you've known for the past year? Where's the me who knows who the fuck this Vivian woman is?"

"I ... I don't know, babe," he says. "Last time I saw you was a few days ago; the four of us went on a double date."

"The four of us?"

"You, me, Fraser, Vivian."

The dread curling in Sunny's stomach coils tighter and tighter like the worst period cramp ever and she wants to go back to last night, she wants to take back everything she said because nothing is worth this awful feeling lodged in her gut, this utter helplessness. She can't cope with being out of control at the best of times, but this? This is the next level and beyond.

And then, like the snap of a finger, eerie calmness settles over her, as though the sensible part of her brain has realised that losing her shit will accomplish nothing. What she needs to do is figure this out. Figure out what she's missed, figure out how to go back, figure out her girlfriend. The word is so alien in her head, let alone on her tongue. And the best place to start when she has no clue what's going on is by visiting someone who has all the answers and finds the ones she doesn't.

"I think I need Delilah," she says, taking a hold of herself. If anyone will be able to comprehend whatever has happened, it will be the girl with an astrophysics degree who spends her life with her head in the stars.

"Good call," Ravi says. "Hey, Sunny, I know this is fucked up and kind of terrifying and very weird, but I'm here for you, okay? I don't understand at all, but I'm here." He squeezes both her hands and she manages a shaky smile, a shaky breath.

"Thank you."

The morning sun peeps through the window, casting a warm glow over Ravi's golden-brown cheeks. In that moment, he looks like the bronze statue of a deity. "Let me know how it goes, 'kay?"

Sunny nods, focusing on the in and out of air into her lungs, because that isn't so stressful as the loss of a year. She stands on wobbly legs with a new goal in mind – find Delilah, fill her in, and pick her brain.

"Wait," she asks as she starts to leave, "I don't live with Vivian, do I? Have I still got my flat?"

"As much time as you two spend together, you still have your flat. Though I think Fenfen uses your room like a walk-in closet."

At least she's still around. If there's one thing Sunny's glad of amidst this utter shit show, it's that at least she hasn't lost her friends along with her time. Thank god they're still around, because she's going to need them.

*

cue the intense stress of waking up and realising you've lost a year!