“Hello! Girls are always fake. They wear makeup. They’re constantly dying their hair. They do weird things with their eyebrows. So what? Who cares?”
“Well, yeah, I guess . . .” He had a point. But those things didn’t seem quite the same as being bald. “But wouldn’t it bother you to think about how, underneath the hair, is just a . . . a scalp?”
Darren looked at me like I was a moron. “And what’s underneath everyone’s hair? Last time I checked, I’m pretty sure that would be scalp for, you know, humans.”
I didn’t have a reply.
“Are we done now?” Darren picked up the remote. “My next show’s on . . .”
“Uh . . . Yeah, I guess. Thanks for your help.”
Darren turned the volume up and resumed slumping.
Imagine that. Darren, of all people, knocked some sense into me.
“Gotta go,” I said as I headed out the door.
TWENTY-TWO
Meg
When I got home I was filled with a mixture of such strong emotions that I knew I had to stay on my feet, keep moving, keep doing. It didn’t matter what, as long as I did something—anything—to keep busy.
I paced aimlessly for a minute until my eyes landed on the laundry basket on the floor in my bedroom. I started loading dirty clothes into the washing machine.
What did I think was going to happen tonight? Did I really expect Josh to just shrug and say: Eh, I don’t care that you’re bald. I never really thought pretty hair was an important quality in a female. Hey, let’s go get something to eat. Or better yet, let’s stay here and make out. Please.
I poured detergent into the machine. As I hit the “start” button I realized that I was glad I’d told Josh about my hair. It felt like a burden had been lifted. I no longer had to wonder and worry and feel like a part of me was on guard all the time. It was done and I could move on. But I was glad that I’d given him the book. It ended up being a goodbye gift which wasn’t exactly the result I’d hoped for. Still, we left things on nice terms and he has something sweet to remember me by. Madison Middle was big and it would be easy for me to avoid him during faculty meetings if I had to. Anyway, it didn’t end badly so even if we ran into each other at work it wouldn’t be awkward. That was a good thing.
Let’s see . . . I know, I can pack my lunch for tomorrow. No matter how many times I promised myself that I’d pack my lunch in the morning it never seemed to happen. And when I didn’t bring my lunch I had to suffer the consequences which was eating re-warmed chicken nuggets, soggy salad, or some other delectable delight offered by the school.
I opened the refrigerator and looked in the meat drawer. There was one sad-looking slice of ham and no cheese of any kind. I obviously needed to go to the grocery store. But not tonight. Tonight I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the house. I grabbed a loaf of bread. I put two slices on a place and was unscrewing a jar of peanut butter when Scooter jumped on the counter and started sniffing the bread. “No Scoots.” I scooped him up and was about to set him down on the floor . . .
Knock, knock, knock.
It was loud. Who could it be? I wasn’t expecting a package and it was too late for deliveries anyway. I didn’t know any of my neighbors. And for as long as I’d lived here I’d never once had a kid come to the door selling gift wrapping paper or popcorn or any other fundraising items.
I carried Scooter to the door and looked through the peephole. Josh was standing outside. What was he doing here? Was he returning the book? Why would he do that? I shifted Scooter so I could scratch him under the chin and looked through the peephole again. Josh wasn’t carrying anything. I fiddled with the locks and opened the door, Scooter still in my arms.
Josh looked anxious. “Hi Meg. Can I come in?”
“Sure.” It sounded more like I was asking him a question.
Josh headed straight to my couch and sat down. I followed, placed Scooter in my lap, and braced myself for the worst without even knowing what, exactly, the worst might be.
Josh leaned toward me and took both my hands in his. “See, here’s the thing . . . I’ve had a lot of girlfriends . . .”
“Okay.” I wondered why he was telling me this.
“But I never felt close to any of them. Sure, they were pretty. They were fun. But there was nothing past that and the relationships never lasted very long at all. It’s probably a stretch to call any of them relationships, really. I mean, I could joke around with them, it would be fun for a while, but I couldn’t really talk to them. I never felt like I really knew them. And I never felt they really knew me.” He squeezed my hands gently. “And then I met you, Meg.”
Wait a minute. Was he saying. . . ?
“You’re so pretty and fun,” Josh went on, “but there’s one big difference between you and everybody else . . . and it’s huge. I can talk to you about real things. You understand me. You think the same way I do.” His voice softened. “I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.”
I nodded.
“And see . . .” He shifted his weight and eagerly leaned closer. “I just want to apologize for the way I reacted. I should have been more . . . understanding.”
I frowned. Was he only here because he thought he hurt my feelings and felt guilty? Or worse—because he felt sorry for me?
Josh looked at me and then looked down. “Yeah. I know. I know. It threw me for a loop and I acted liked a jerk, okay? But hey, can you blame me? How did you react when you first found out?”
He had a point. I’d had lots of time to deal with this—to be in denial, to fight it, to cry, to rage, to feel hopeless, and to finally try to accept it. Wasn’t it only fair that I allowed Josh more than thirty seconds to process everything?
“Meg, look at me.” Josh tilted my chin up.
I was forced to meet his gaze.
“I love you Meg Caldwell. Not your hair, not your scalp, and not even those beautiful green eyes of yours. I love you. And none of that has anything to do with whether or not you have hair growing out of your head.”
I felt my eyes sting with tears. He said he loved me! He’d never said that to me before. And now he’s saying it even though—or maybe because—he knows the truth about me. He loves me! Me, just as I am!
“I love you too Josh.”
He picked Scooter up. “Excuse me Scooter, but it’s time for you to go play.” Josh gently set him on the floor. He put his hands on the sides of my face and moved them up toward the edges of my wig. “May I?”
I nodded.
He slid the wig off my head and gazed at me for a moment before tilting my head toward him and kissing the top of it. His worked his kisses over my forehead, down and around my face, nose, cheeks, and then finally to my mouth. And we stayed on the couch together for a long time. . . .
TWENTY-THREE
Meg
None of the students ever made any comments about me wearing a wig, at least not that I was aware of. And who knows, maybe they never would have.
But I decided that I wanted to tell them about it. It would save them having to ask if they ever noticed. And I knew, statistically at least, that a few of my female students were going to lose their hair someday and some of the males would have a woman in their life who loses her hair. I was hoping that when that day comes they’ll feel better knowing that androgenetic alopecia isn’t unusual . . . and that it isn’t anything to be ashamed of.
A few weeks later I told my sixth grade class. “It’s called androgenetic alopecia. It affects thirty percent of women of all different ages. So it’s more common than you’d think.”
Brooke’s eyes were wide with shock. “So you have no hair at all?”
“I grow some scraps here and there, but they look pretty bad. So I just shave them off.”
“No way!” Michael yelled.
“Yes way.” I was enjoying how entertaining this was for them.
“I think my aunt has that too,” BJ said. “She doesn’t have any hair at all and she doesn’t even h
ave any eyebrows. She got some permanently tattooed on.”
“Ew!” Lindsey whipped around and made a face at BJ. “Does that hurt?”
BJ shrugged. “I dunno. I wouldn’t even know about it except my mom told us.”
“BJ, your aunt probably has something a little different than I do,” I said. “It sounds like she has alopecia universalis. That’s an autoimmune disease and it’s more like your body is allergic to hair, in a way. Androgenetic alopecia, what I have, has to do with the hair follicle itself. But both are completely harmless. It doesn’t mean that we’re sick, or dying, or contagious. It just means we don’t have hair on our heads . . . or wherever.” I grinned and clutched the ends of my wig with my left hand. “In my case, it doesn’t even mean that. I do have hair on my head. I just have to buy it.”
I found that my health insurance covers part of the costs of my condition, so I bought another wig. The second one’s a little shorter and curlier, because, hey, why not? If you have to buy your hair you might as well have fun with it. After all, how often do you hear women say that they wish their hair was different? My hair can be different every day if I want it to be.
Occasionally, when I’m running errands or just hanging around the house, I wear a scarf because it’s a little cooler, temperature-wise, than a wig. I have several scarves and it’s fun to grab one that matches my mood or the color I’m wearing. But I don’t wear scarves, however handy and comfy they are, that often because of the cancer patient-vibe it gives off. People have given me uneasy or sympathetic glances when I’ve worn a scarf in public and I don’t like to make other people uncomfortable.
I wear my green beret a lot, with and without my wig. Just never at work, of course. Because you never know. It could lead to total anarchy. . . .
***
We were at Chinatown Gourmet celebrating our six-month anniversary. I’d eaten everything with chopsticks and hadn’t even thought twice about it.
The waiter set down the little tray with the bill and two fortune cookies.
“Ah, fortune cookie time,” Josh said. He picked up his cookie and broke it open. “You will read this and say, geez, I could come up with better fortunes than that.”
I laughed. “It does not really say that.”
“Of course it does.” He crumpled the paper in his hands. “I take my fortune cookies very seriously.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head as I opened my cookie. “Great adventures await those who are willing to turn the corner.” I looked at him and smiled. “I like that.”
“I do too.” Josh reached across the table and took my hand. “Happy anniversary Meg Caldwell.”
“Happy anniversary,” I said, gazing into his eyes.
I was only twenty-five and I had a long, wonderful life to look forward to.
End of Book Stuff
I got this idea for “End of Book Stuff” from New York Times Bestselling Author J.A. Huss, although of course she has a more colorful name for it. It’s basically any final thoughts that I want to share after the edits and right before the book is released.
First of all, thank you so much for reading this book. If you enjoyed it – and even if you didn’t – I’d appreciate it if you left a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon. Even if it’s a sentence or two, it really does help other readers make better decisions about whether or not a book is for them.
Only Twenty-Five was a lot of firsts for me. (For one thing, it is the first book where I am including “End of Book Stuff.”)
November 2016 was the first time I’d ever participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and this is the book that came out of it. For the entire month of November the document was called “Meg Caldwell Story.” On my NaNoWriMo dashboard, however, I called it “The Mysteriously Disappearing Hair of Meg Caldwell, even though I knew that would absolutely not be the final title.
Doing NaNoWriMo was really good for me. It re-connected me with the awkward twelve year old who was constantly scribbling in notebooks (many of which I still have); the kid who just wrote without thinking about it or worrying if someone else wouldn’t like it. What was also fun about it was that my middle child, Rebecca, unofficially did it as well, and put in about 20,000 words on the story she was working on. We went to a few local write-ins together, and it made the whole thing more of an adventure and more of a challenge. I hope to do it again next November.
It’s kind of ironic (is that the right word?) that I officially “won” NaNoWriMo by writing 50,000 words in a month, yet the finished product was barely 29,000 words. I spewed a lot of words in November, wrote scenes from different points of view, wrote the same scene twice in different settings, and wrote several things that turned out to be dead ends, so a lot of stuff from November was cut.
I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, though.
Another first about Only Twenty-Five was that it’s the first time (like, ever, even in my short stories for magazines or silly things that I wrote when I was a kid) that I’ve written in multiple points of view, or from a male point of view. The writing from a male POV was a little tricky for me. It’s like that Seinfeld episode where Jerry had trouble writing for the Elaine character in the pilot script because he had no idea what women were thinking.
This is also the first romance story that I’ve ever written. In a way I hate to even call it a romance, because it implies that it’s either smutty or sappy, which I don’t think it is.
I got the bare-bones idea for Only Twenty-Five when I was still working on Confessions of a Wedding Musician Mom (which is not surprising, since it took me four years to write the thing; it would be sad if I never came up with a new idea during that time). Several years ago I went through some very difficult and serious medical issues, and among other things, took a chemotherapy drug called Cytoxan. It made me lose at least a third of my hair within less than a month.
One of things about being a woman with hair loss is that it feels like there’s nowhere to go and no one to talk to about it. Of course I got on the internet, and it was striking what a common problem this was, for all ages and for various reasons. It felt like a “dirty secret” because in real life you just don’t hear talking about it.
I thought the experience of a woman losing her hair would be an interesting idea to explore, since most people would probably say, “Huh, I never knew that ... I never really thought about that. Wow, that’s something.” And it seemed like a logical extension of that idea to make the main character a young, single woman who is in a new romantic relationship.
I came up with the name Meg because I had recently read a book by Meg Cabot, and thought it was a cute, perky name. There was no significance to “Caldwell;” I just liked how they sounded together.
I got the name Josh from some internet list of good male lead names for a romance novel.
I didn’t give a Josh a last name until the book was finished. I decided on Hartter because I had a big crush on a boy at school with that name when I was sixteen. (I am not very subtle.) I’m not planning on hunting him down on Facebook or anything to tell him that this book exists (I’m not even sure he would know who I am), but if for some bizarre reason he ever found out, well, that’s fine too. Interestingly – and unintentionally – the only class I ever had with him was the one semester in English class that we studied Catcher in the Rye, which is one of my Favorite Books Ever.
I always have a little fun with the names of minor characters in particular.
I believe all of Meg’s students are given last names after someone I went to middle school with when I was a kid in Pittsburgh.
While I was finalizing the edits, I took a screenshot of one of the pages and shared it on Facebook, and Jim Cavalier, a very clever and funny guy who can appreciate the finer things in life like Weird Al and Michael Nesmith’s Elephant Parts, saw it and told me I could use his full name in the book. So I did.
Mrs. Kirk was sort of a hybrid, in my mind, of two different administrators I worked for when I teachin
g. One was very cold and unfriendly, and the other was very tall with a high hairdo, full makeup, and impeccable dress. While writing the story, I used the name of the tall one, knowing I would have to change it later. (That’s too blatant even for me.) When it was time to give the character her final name, I named her after a teacher I once had that seemed to fit.
Scooter and Pudding were named after two very beloved cats of mine who, very sadly, each died right around their first birthday.
So what am I working on next?
I have a bare-bones idea for the next book taking place at a community theater in Madison. They’re going to put on a production of RENT, or Godspell, or something. I haven’t decided yet. In a way it would be fun to have it be a made-up musical, kinda like The Simpsons sometimes does, but I’m not sure if I’m clever enough to do that. Plus, some musical theater fans are sure to enjoy the references to a real show.
In closing, I want to thank my editor Tara at The OCD Editor for her very thorough and helpful edits and Rebekah Sather for the beautiful cover design.
And a special thanks to you, my readers. Let’s keep in touch!
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Jennifer McCoy Blaske
Only Twenty-Five Page 9