“I have to go out,” she says. “Please don’t leave the house until I get back.” Then, before we can question her, she’s gone.
“Perfect,” mutters Jeffrey.
I toss him the remote and retreat upstairs to my room. I still have a lot of unpacking to do, but my mind keeps flashing back to that moment under the archway when it felt like the whole world was trying to crawl inside my head. And my hair! Unearthly.
The look on the lady’s face when she saw me that way: puzzled at first, confused, then a little frightened, like I was some kind of alien creature who belonged in a lab with scientists looking at my dazzling hair under a microscope. Like I was a freak.
I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I know Mom’s standing in the door to my bedroom. She tosses a box of Clairol hair dye on my bed. I pick it up.
“Sedona Sunset?” I read. “You’re kidding me, right? Red?”
“Auburn. Like mine.”
“But why?” I ask.
“Let’s fix your hair,” she says. “Then we’ll talk.”
“It’s going to be this color for school!” I whine as she works the dye into my hair in the bathroom, me sitting on the closed toilet with an old towel around my shoulders.
“I love your hair. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think it was important.” She steps back and examines my head for spots she might have missed.
“There. All done. Now we have to wait for the color to set.”
“Okay, so you’re going to explain this to me now, right?”
For all of five seconds she looks nervous. Then she sits down on the edge of the bathtub and folds her hands into her lap.
“What happened today is normal,” she says. It reminds me of when she told me about my period, or how she approached the topic of sex, all clinical and rational and perfectly spelled out for me, like she’d been rehearsing the speech for years.
“Um, hello, how was today normal?”
“Okay, not
“My angelic side. Great. Like I don’t have enough to deal with.”
“It’s not so bad,” Mom says. “You’ll learn to control it.”
“I’ll learn to control my hair?”
She laughs.
“Yes, eventually, you’ll learn how to hide it, to tone it down so that it can’t be perceived by the human eye. But for now, dyeing seems the easiest way.”
She always wears hats, I realize. At the beach. At the park. Almost any time we go out in public, she wears a hat. She owns dozens of hats and bandanas and scarves.
I’d always assumed it was because she was old school.
“So it happens to you?” I ask.
She turns toward the door, smiling faintly.
“Come in, Jeffrey.”
Jeffrey slinks in from my room where he’s been eavesdropping. The guilt on his face doesn’t last long. He shifts straight to rampant curiosity.
“Will I get it, too?” he asks. “The hair thing?”
“Yes,” she answers. “It happens to most of us. For me the first time was 1908, July, I believe. I was reading a book on a park bench. Then—” She lifts her fist up to the top of her head and opens her hand like a kind of explosion.
I lean toward her eagerly. “And was it like everything slowed down, like you could hear and see things that you shouldn’t have been able to?”
She turns to look at me. Her eyes are the deep indigo of the sky just after darkness falls, punctuated with tiny points of light as if she’s literally being lit up from within. I can see myself in them. I look worried.
“Was that what it was like for you?” she asks. “Time slowed down?”
I nod.
She makes a thoughtful little
“What did you do, when it happened with you?” Jeffrey asks.
“I put on my hat. In those days, proper young ladies wore hats out of doors. And luckily, by the time that wasn’t true anymore, hair dye had been invented. I was a brunette for almost twenty years.” She wrinkles up her nose. “It didn’t suit me.”
“But what
She pauses like she’s considering her words carefully. “It’s a part of glory breaking through.” She looks slightly uncomfortable, as if we can’t quite be trusted with this information. “Now, that’s enough class for today. If
