Pieces of Me (2 page)

So fast
. That happened so fast.

The bathroom door swung shut behind me, and I felt a storm of desolation threaten to cut off my air supply.
Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe
.

I leaned over the sink, unable to focus my eyes on the mirror’s reflection. Choking. My heart raced. My stomach clenched painfully, leaden, and burned.

Sounds of crying filled the bathroom with sniffles and snorts and sobs and … for a moment, I thought I’d lost my tenuous grip on my sanity.
No, it’s not me
.

I turned toward the stalls and my bag thumped against the paper towel dispenser. The sounds cut off as if the crier held her breath, knowing she wasn’t alone. I opened my mouth.
What do I say? “Wanna cry together?”

Instead, I ran from the bathroom and from the sadness that seemed to cling to me like a bad reputation.

I
wasn’t
watching where I was going, because next thing I knew I was sprawled on the ground and Vivian-the-monster-cough-girl bounced up, trying to pull me to my feet. Then she coughed like she was giving birth to an alien. Ew. She wiped her mouth with her hand.

“I’m sorry. I’m always too much in a hurry. Can’t sit still when I don’t have to. Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you, did I?” She gave the door a scathing look, as if it had gotten her in trouble on purpose.

I didn’t answer, just nodded.

“You sure you’re okay? I gotta get to chem lab—I’m so behind and there’s a test today—but I can walk you to the office if you want to see a nurse? Are you sick?” She whitened, then backed away a little, as if the thought of illness scared her.
I must look really terrible for her to give me that horrified expression
.

Shaking my head, I simply turned away and walked out of school. Mrs. Harding, the school’s ancient secretary, who had an amazing memory and name recall, shouted, “Stop! Jessica Chai, you do not have permission to leave school early today.”

My step hitched and for a moment I wondered about breaking the rules. I didn’t break the rules.
Ever
. But then, behind me, someone did me the favor of puking, hacking all over the reception desk, and diverted all attention from the front doors. From me. Maybe it was Vivian. Or the crier. I didn’t look back. I didn’t care. I needed out.
Now
.

I acted like a class-cutting pro.
Screw it
. I hiked toward the Metro bus stop.
I will get myself home. Get home and fix it. Borrow a hat from my brother. A scarf from my mother
.

If I’d had any idea what losing my hair meant, I wouldn’t have gone to school at all that day.

“Jessica?
Oh my good lord, what did you do?” The usual polite veneer flaked off my mother’s voice because my appearance shocked her.

What’s she doing home early?

I didn’t have to turn around to imagine my mother’s eyes bulging out of her head. The whites rolled back like a horse scenting smoke. I swallowed.
She’ll make this about her in … one … two …

“And I couldn’t go with you to the salon? To see my girl become a beautiful swan? Who did you see? This isn’t even a five-dollar discount cut.” She peered at me like I was a circus sideshow. Her perfectly manicured nails bit into my upper arms as she twisted and jerked me around.

“It happened at school. For little-girl wigs.” I’d been lying so long to my parents, before and after the divorce, about my life, that it never occurred to me to tell her the truth.

“Oh dear. Don’t they know who you are? How did this happen? I kept my hair long until my senior year.” She touched my head, my shoulders, as if trying to feel out understanding, rather than listening.

I know
.

I shivered, unused to her touch. Unused to her interaction.

“This is a mess.” She caught herself and backed up a step. Back into her own personal space. From there, she didn’t touch me but ran her hands around the outside of my space bubble. The more she studied me, the more disappointed she seemed. “Did they pay beauty school students to do this, or the special education department? Atrocious.”

“Mother.” I blinked at the venom spewed in that single word.
Atrocious? The hack job or me?
I wasn’t sure.

“Well, I’m sorry, but you did a nice thing and you should be prettier for it, not looking like a pile of …”

Insert excrement and wrinkled nose
.

She brightened almost instantly. “I know. I will call Dmitry right now. He’ll fit us in tomorrow morning and we’ll get you red-carpet ready and go to lunch and shopping afterward for a fresh wardrobe.”

“Tomorrow is a school day,” I reminded her, trying not to dampen her enthusiasm too fast. So little about me made her happy.

“You can’t go to school looking like this.” She shook her head and vetoed scarves and hats and hoods. “I’ll call in favors. We’ll go now instead. Right now.”

“But—”

“We’ll buy a new dress too. Wouldn’t you like that? You’ll take a mental-health day tomorrow. Then you can go to the gallery fund-raiser with me Saturday night. It’ll be fun.”

Her latest paramour must be busy.

She didn’t wait for me to say yea or nay. Simply dialed her cell and demanded to speak with Dmitry. Listening to her explain
what happened to me, she made it sound like I was both a saint and a victim of a terrible crime. She didn’t know how close she came to the victim part.

“We’re set up for three o’clock. Shall I make dinner reservations at Allehambra’s? Everyone’s talking about their tapas, and the chef is supposed to be Michelin-star-worthy.”

I didn’t have time to respond, not like it would have mattered, before she dialed again. Then she whisked me toward the door with a “We have to hurry.”

I had no idea who to expect. I’d never met Dmitry. Never been invited to my mother’s sanctum of beauty and potions.

The floating notes of flutes and smooth piano played throughout the salon via live musicians stationed in the lobby. Marble, chrome, and glass made the salon seem both modern and like Ann Boleyn might have had her hair done here. Right before they beheaded her, of course.

I have also never, ever, heard a man cluck and fuss quite like this
.

“Isn’t it awful?” my mother commented under her breath, but loud enough to draw sympathetic glances from middle-aged women around us who wore diamonds to get their hair done. They shared her pain.

Dmitry didn’t talk to me. He spoke directly to my mother … when he talked … but mostly he simply made sounds of a panicked crow trapped in a plastic bag. All hands and fingers, he tugged and yanked, lifted and stared at my hair. At my face. He called over other black-clad shiny airbrushed professionals, holding my hair just so while they fussed and babbled and studied each strand with emphatic nods and clacking combs. Finally, like a sports team, they broke apart and Dmitry turned me to face the softly lit mirror.

“You have Emma Watson cheekbones and Halle Berry lips,” he declared before huddling with my mother six feet away.

“Thanks?” I said, unable to even glance at my reflection.

“I’ll be in the spa. Dmitry will make you beautiful.” Mother disappeared behind frosted doors, and that was when the work began in earnest. Smiles were replaced by concentrated scowls; someone covered the mirror at Dmitry’s station.
Do I look bad enough to break glass?

I felt as if I was being readied to be sacrificed to the great hair god volcano.

There was a girl who washed, another girl who dried, one who rewet; there were several different applications of sweet-smelling glop, a rinse, another dry, until I closed my eyes and stopped counting. Then Dmitry hovered over me with flashing blades and lightning reflexes. I was afraid to move and thereby risk mortal wounds. We didn’t speak. He only stopped to repeat things I thought had already happened. Like everything else, my knowledge of hair care was insignificant and wrong.

He snapped. Literally snapped his fingers, and a team of hovering sprites, also head to toe in black and clicking in towering heels, bustled around my face. Applying brushes dabbed in potions and lotions and other applications of color to my face. I held my body immobile like a rabbit fixed in the gaze of a coyote. I watched with an odd detachment but never caught a random glimpse of my reflection.

Then, after three hours and twelve minutes, six different goop applications, pieces of foil and something that looked like it came off a spaceship, three shampoos, and four different products applied during the blow-drying process, Dmitry appeared satisfied.

My mother gawked at me with tears in her eyes.

I didn’t know if they were happy tears or horrified ones, because her face remained smoothly youthful and devoid of expression.

“Oh, my baby. She’s finally—”

“Supreme,” Dmitry declared. “Now close eyes and I spin you.” He made eye contact with me for the first time.

I squeezed them, bracing myself against the expectation that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room. All activity ceased; even the musicians seemed to hold their notes.

As Dmitry turned the chair around he commanded, “Open your eyes.”

The first thing I saw in the mirror was Mother standing behind me, her hands clasped in prayer-like fervor.

Then I focused on the woman reflected back at me.

Woman? Me?

My naturally white-blond hair seemed to be spun of gold and sunlight and moonlight. A fairy pixie with huge eyes framed by long full lashes stared back at me. Brows of melted gold arched in question, and in statement, above them. My skin glowed as if polished and dusted with light. My hair was so short, it served as more of a cap of fringe around my face. Facets of diamonds seemed to float and caress the air around my head. Twin curls caressed my cheeks and cradled my ears. My lips were shiny and pink, as if I’d gorged on the freshest berries. Even my hated upturned nose seemed itself a cute addition to an otherwise orchestrated collection of perfected features.

“That’s me?” I asked, my voice breathy and unsure.

The salon broke into amazed applause, subdued and polite,
but I saw the expressions on the faces of the stylists—not at my surprise beauty, but at Dmitry’s astonishing skill in finding it. As if they’d decided there was nothing that could be done for me when I’d first walked in.

My mother had never seemed so proud to claim me. She walked with her arm around me to Allehambra’s and treated the crowds to a deferent tolerance, as if she were the Queen of England.

From our corner table, Mother scanned the restaurant as if waiting for someone more important, or at least more interesting, than me. I saw the flash of panic when she realized she hadn’t spent this kind of time with me since I was a baby. Why had I let her reel me in this time?

Silence stretched until even the waiter filling our water glasses looked like he wanted to present a conversation topic to break the ice. I nibbled on a cracker. Turned out we weren’t eating tapas at a tapas restaurant.
How many Michelin stars does a salad rate?

“So, Jessica, have you thought about your college major? As a legacy, you have options.”

I think it was always assumed I’d go to college, but the closer I got, the more I felt as if my parents were sizing me up to see if I was worth the quarter-of-a-million-dollar investment that their private alma matter required.
Assuming I get in
.

I nodded. “Um, sure. I took the PSAT last week.”

“I thought you had to be a junior to take that?” Some people’s foreheads creased with questions, but not my mother’s.

“They have sophomores take it too—they say it helps the school with scheduling.” Basically, they used it to weed out
the vocational kids and the borderline mediocre ones from the smart and genius ones. My high school had close to two thousand students—most of us tracked classes based on how smart we appeared on tests. It was acceptable segregation.

“Oh, well, how did you do?” She sipped her water as if to make it last.

“It went okay.”
Say something else, tell her more, make up something if you have to
.

The waiter set down the half-size house salads in front of us. Hers without dressing and mine with a barely there vinaigrette. I saw Mother’s half sneer as I dripped the dressing over the lettuce. The plate was barely larger than a teacup saucer, and there were maybe six bites of produce, total. We never lingered over dessert, not even birthday cakes, and heaven forbid we have a substantial lunch. My mother wasn’t fat, but by all memory I’d never seen her indulge in anything fatty, or hearty, for that matter. It was as if she was so tightly controlled that any given bite might mean the whole of her soul unraveling.

A dozen deep breaths later, she offered a new topic. “I have my book club meeting Monday night.” She spoke while cutting a lettuce leaf into sixteen tiny pieces. One so small it barely stayed on a single fork tine long enough to make it into her mouth.

Grab and hold on
. “Oh? What’s the book?”

She blotted her lips with the napkin and finished chewing. I almost counted along with her. Sixteen chews, then swallow. She’d tried to instill this magical number in me from toddler time on. “Some novel about friends and divorces. It got wonderful reviews on Amazon.”

“You didn’t read it?” I knew she hadn’t. She didn’t read. She
went to book club for the gossip and the wine. She left the reading to online reviewers. I highly doubted anyone in her club actually read the book itself.
Ever
.

“No time. You know how busy I am.”

I nodded, trying to keep my mouth full. I didn’t want to hear about weight creeping in when I wasn’t watching.
Ninja calories
.

Mother shooed away the dessert tray and set her credit card on the table without even checking the bill. “Shall we go find a lovely outfit for us?” She seemed relieved to move again.

We hadn’t been inside the city’s oldest, and most notable, department store ten minutes before she tried to make me into her, one piece of clothing at a time.

“This would look lovely on you.” Mother held up a pair of slacks and a beige blouse that had the personality of a uniform and the ability to insult no one. Of course, they cost more than most car payments, and we were two floors from any department my peers might frequent. Was money the reason my parents split? All Father talked about was saving, and Mother seemed to shop as her hobby.