Page 6 of Fall for Me

Outside, I heard a deep male voice. Someone agitated.

Eli.

Shit. I only had a moment before he’d be here.

I turned the handle, pushing the bathroom door open without a sound. There, across from me, was a full-sized mirror stretching from the counter to the ceiling.

I was backlit by the comparative brightness of my room, but I could still see.

Even as I reached up for the bandage, something in me screamed, Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look!

Footsteps pounded down the hallway. “This way?” The voice sounded. Definitely Eli. He’d probably heard that Cass had left me alone.

I was out of time. I closed my eyes, reaching for the light switch at the same time as I used my other hand to claw at the tape affixing the bandage to my skin, ripping it free.

Then, taking one quick, bracing breath, I opened my eyes.

The woman in the mirror wasn’t me. I was a monster.

A scar, a raised, angry red gash stitched with black sutures, ran from the right side of my forehead over the bridge of my nose and across my left cheekbone. Both my eyes were puffy and bruised black and purple. An ugly brown bruise pressed over one side of my mouth and chin, and a split ran right down the middle of my bottom lip.

My hair was the only thing that looked like me—long brown waves hanging over my shoulders. It felt wrong, seeing that hair with this face. It felt incongruous, like the Chelsea that hair belonged to was someone else. Someone who died in that wreck.

Now I knew why Cass hadn’t let me turn on the light in the bathroom. Why she hadn’t let me use it alone.

“Sir!” A woman’s voice stopped Eli.

I strode to the counter. There was my cosmetic bag, unopened. Cass brought it with aspirations that I might clean myself up. I pulled down the zipper, feeling around in the bottom for what I knew was in there.

“Sure,” Eli was saying outside. “So how much longer?”

I couldn’t hear the response.

I pulled out the scissors.

If I was gone—if the old Chelsea was gone—I wanted no part of her here. There was no point.

I held out a chunk of my hair and closed the blade over it, snipping without hesitation.

The length left in my hand belonged to her. The remaining inches that flopped back onto my skull were me.

I kept going, chopping and slicing until a blanket of hair lay on the counter and I was left with hair only a few inches long; an uneven mass of brown.

I smiled, feeling a hot tear slip from my swollen eye, stinging as it rolled over the gouge in my face.

Maybe seeing myself like this should have alarmed me. Maybe what I’d just done should have alarmed me. Instead, for the first time since I woke up, I felt like I had control over one small part of me once again. I couldn’t control what had happened to me or what would come next, but I had hold of this. I backed up until I was standing in the bathroom's doorframe once more.

Now I was someone new.

Eli came through the door then.

“Chels!” he exclaimed to my back. “What are you doing out of bed?”

His voice was incredulous, but it was nothing compared to his expression when he came behind me to stand in the doorway. He didn’t look at my face in the mirror at first. He was staring at my shorn scalp. “Chelsea? Did they do this to you?” His normally strong voice had gone crackly. Then he looked into the bathroom; the mess of hair on the counter and sink. Then at me.

“Jesus Christ,” Eli said.

Then my big brother began to cry.

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