Page 45 of How to Walk Away

In the long silence that followed, I deflated.

“Okay,” Kit said after a while, in a quiet voice. “Okay, that’s fair.”

I sighed, long and slow.

“You don’t have to sing,” Kit went on, shrugging, and looking at me with new eyes.

I matched my voice to hers. “Damn right I don’t.”

“I hear you,” she said. “I’ll back off.” But then she peeked up from under her eyelashes. “Can I at least do the haircut, though?”

***

AN HOUR LATER,hair was all over the floor. I’d transferred into the chair so that I wouldn’t have to sleep in a bed of “hair fuzz,” and we’d made a carpet of hair sprinkles all around the wheels.

Kitty fussed and fussed, and it took far longer than it should have, as all her genetic perfectionist tendencies kicked in. At last, she declared victory and handed me a hand mirror. I started to lift it, but then I hesitated.

“Take a look,” she urged.

I wrinkled my nose.

“You don’t want to see?”

I did want to see the haircut—but I didn’t know how to do that without also seeing my face.

“You know what?” I said then, shaking my head. “I’m good. I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Are you afraid you look terrible? Because you don’t.”

Yes. I was afraid I looked terrible. Of course. When your own mother can’t even look at you, you have to be a monster. But it was more than that. Once I knew what I looked like now, I would always know. There are things you can’t unsee.

It would be like the time my aunt walked me up to my grandmother’s open casket to “say good-bye” and I looked down to see an embalmed, flattened, just-plain-wrong version of the face I’d known and loved so long. For a long time after that, the only face I saw when I thought of my grandmother was that wrong one. It had erased the face I wanted to hold on to.

I didn’t want to look in that mirror to find that I was gone.

Kit seemed to read my thoughts. “You look just like you. A little sunburned, and with a few scabby blister things on the jaw…” She touched her jaw. “And with the cutest haircut you’ve ever had—you’re welcome. But still the same you.”

I tilted the mirror a little.

“Don’t be afraid,” she urged.

But I was. My hands felt cold.Don’t think,I told myself. It was time to face the future, whatever it looked like. I held my breath, and lifted the mirror, and tilted it, one centimeter at a time, until my whole face gazed back at me.

My same face. A little roughed up, but familiar as an old friend.

“See?” Kit said. “You’re still the beauty.”

A ragged sigh escaped my chest. “I don’t need to be the beauty. I just want to be recognizable.”

“You are,” Kit said. “Just way more stylish.”

I’d never had bangs, but this cut flopped down over my forehead in the front and was short and spiky in back. Pixie-ish. I’d never had anything but long hair—out of fear, really, that I’d cut it all off and then hate it and have to wait forever to get back to my old self. Also, my mother thought short hair on girls was ugly.

But this haircut wasn’t ugly.

Kit was grinning wide now. “How cute are you?” she demanded. “This is the haircut you’ve been waiting for all your life!”

“I don’t hate it,” I said.

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