Keely had never before loved her parents quite so much as she did, right then, watching Anya’s.
Keely walked down the hall and knocked on the first door she came to. Nobody answered, but emboldened, Keely shoved the door open and walked in.
Twenty-One
Anya didn’t even bother turning her head when she heard the door open. Was it lunchtime already? She’d have to muster the energy to tell Mom she wasn’t hungry.
“Anya?” a voice said, and it wasn’t Mom or Dad. It was Keely Michaels.
For one awful instant Anya thought someone had cooked up a scheme to bring the whole school to her, since she wouldn’t go to school. But it was just Keely, standing there alone. All the same, Anya pulled her cap down as far as she could.
“Anya, hi. I hope I’m not bothering you. Your mom and dad said it was okay to come in. I just wanted to tell you . . .”
Keely seemed to be having trouble figuring out what to say next.
“What?” Anya said.
“I just wanted to tell you, well, I was afraid that you thought that Stef pulled off your wig on purpose. I thought she did too, because, well, you know Stef. You know how she gets. But she swore to me that she had nothing to do with your wig coming off. It must have gotten caught on the Velcro on the mats or something. Or maybe someone just stepped on it by accident and didn’t know. So if that’s the reason you haven’t wanted to come back to school, because you’re afraid people will be pulling your wig off left and right, well, you don’t have to worry about that at all. You can come back to school and nobody will bother you.”
Keely made that whole speech without taking a single breath. When she stopped, the room seemed more silent than ever.
Anya blinked. She had never really thought about how her wig had come off. For three days she’d been trying to forget that it ever had.
“You thought everything was Stef’s fault?” she asked slowly.
“Well, yeah. Just because Stef noticed that you were wearing a wig, and she was really curious about it, and she wanted Tory or Nicole or me to tug on it, just a little, to see if it really was a wig—I mean, not hard enough to hurt you, of course. But—”
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew?” Anya interrupted.
“We didn’t want to be rude,” Keely said.
Anya suddenly saw how it must have been: Every single kid in her class—maybe even every single kid in the school—had known all along that she’d been wearing a wig. They’d probably been laughing at her behind her back from the very beginning. They’d probably even been laughing at her before the wig, back when she got her first few bald patches.
Anya felt her face go hot with shame.
“And we thought you might have cancer,” Keely continued. “We’d never heard of alopecia areata. So we thought you might be dying. And we didn’t know how to talk to someone who was dying.”
Anya remembered the rushed way Keely had spoken to her that one day at recess, when Anya had been terrified Keely would notice the wig. Keely had already known.
“How do you know how to talk to someone with alopecia areata?” Anya challenged.
Now it was Keely’s turn to turn red. She stared down at her shoes.
“I don’t,” she said. “I just wanted to make you feel better. I just thought—well, I don’t know, I was blaming Stef, and I thought you might too.”
Anya didn’t say anything right away. She’d been alone so much the past few days, it was kind of bewildering to try to carry on a conversation.
“Keely,” she finally said. “I never thought about it being Stef’s fault that my wig came off.”
“Then, why don’t you come back to school?”
Anya stared at Keely. Innocent, ignorant Keely with all that long brown hair.
“Didn’t you see me?” Anya practically whimpered. “Without my wig? Everyone saw. How can I ever go back—”
“But, Anya,” Keely said. “You were beautiful. I mean—this is the other thing I wanted to tell you. Maybe you felt weird because you don’t have hair—I guess I’d feel weird about it too. But when I saw you without your wig, it was like you were the prettiest girl in the class. You didn’t look ordinary, like the rest of us. You looked like a movie star or a singer, someone who looks really different from everyone else. Different good, I mean, not different bad.”
Keely was one of those kids who never said much at school. Like Anya herself. But whenever Keely spoke—even if it was just something like answering a math question—she always looked over at Stef, like she had to make sure Stef approved. Anya was so stunned by this sudden torrent of chatter from Keely that she could barely make sense of what Keely was saying.
Then the words sank in.
Beautiful? Keely thought I looked beautiful without my wig?
A harsh laugh escaped from Anya’s throat. Or maybe it wasn’t a laugh. Maybe she was crying again.
“Keely,” she said. “I lost my hair. It just fell out, for no reason. And now I’m scared to go back to school because I know everyone will make fun of me. Or, even if they don’t do that, they’ll stare. They’ll talk about me behind my back. They’ll be scared that being around me might make their hair fall out too.
“And at night I can hear my parents crying because they don’t know what to do, because they can’t fix what’s wrong with me, because . . .” She couldn’t choke out the rest of her words. Because they wish they had a daughter with hair. Because now they’re scared to have another child, because that one might not have hair either. Because they’re ashamed of me.
“Crying?” Keely said. “Even your dad?”
“Even my dad,” Anya said. “Have you ever seen your dad cry?”
Silently Keely shook her head no.
“And now you’re telling me you thought I looked beautiful? Is that supposed to make me feel good?”
Keely shrugged. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Can’t . . . can’t I do anything to help?”
Anya stared at Keely. Keely had been in the same class as Anya since kindergarten. Keely had learned to read the same time as Anya, had learned her multiplication tables the same time as Anya. Keely brought in chocolate-iced cupcakes every year on her birthday, just like Anya did. But Keely also had long, thick brown hair flowing halfway down her back, and Anya didn’t.
Anya turned her face toward the wall.
“You can’t help,” she said. “Not unless you want to give me your hair.”
Twenty-Two
Keely stumbled out of Anya’s room and back into the Seavers’ living room. Keely was almost surprised to see bright sunlight streaming in the living-room windows. She felt like she’d been in Anya’s room so long it should be night by now. Days should have passed.
Anya’s parents were standing there, waiting. They rushed toward Keely.
“Did you . . .”
“Were you able . . .”
Keely looked from Anya’s mother to her father and back again. She remembered what Anya had said about hearing her parents crying at night. They looked like such nice, ordinary people—both of them in jeans and sweatshirts, the same kind of clothes Keely’s parents wore on the weekend. But their faces were taken over with worry. Anya’s mom was wringing her hands; Anya’s dad had his fists clenched.
Keely suddenly wondered if her own parents would be as strong and invincible as she’d thought if she ever got something like alopecia areata. Maybe she’d want them to cry, too.
“Anya’s still upset,” Keely reported. “I . . . I don’t think I helped at all.”
Anya’s last words still echoed in her ears: “Not unless you want to give me your hair . . . Not unless you want to give me your hair . . .” Anya had looked so sad saying that. So defeated.
“Oh,” Anya’s dad said. His shoulders slumped. “Well, thanks for trying.”
“We’re going to take her to a counselor,” Anya’s mother confided. “She’s not coping very well. And really”—she glanced at her husband—“neither are we.”
“You should join a support group,” Keely said.
Anya’s parents just looked at her. Keely felt weird all of a sudden. She wasn’t used to giving grown-ups advice. She scrambled to explain.
“When Mrs. Hobson told our class what was wrong with Anya—that she has alopecia areata, I mean—she made us do some research about the disease. I read all about this group called the National Alopecia Areata Foundation—National Foundation for Alopecia Areata?—something like that. And they have support groups all over the country for people with alopecia and their families, and a Web site and stuff. I don’t know. There were just a bunch of people on the Internet saying it helped to talk to other people who knew what it was like.”
“Maybe we should try that,” Anya’s mom said.
Keely couldn’t tell if Anya’s mom was serious or if that was just one of those things grown-ups said to kids—“Sure, sure, we’ll give it a try.” Maybe Mrs. Seaver was even being sarcastic, like Anya. “Not unless you want to give me your hair.” It wasn’t like Keely could really do anything to help Anya and her family.
Or could she?
Suddenly Keely had an idea.
“Is your mom coming back for you?” Anya’s dad asked. “Or do you want us to drop you off somewhere?”
Keely looked him straight in the eye.
“I’ll walk,” she said. “Just let me call home and tell them I’m on my way.”
Keely hoped Mom would let her walk by herself. Because Keely had something to think about now, and she wanted to figure everything out before she told anyone else.
She’d remembered something else she’d read on the Internet, and something Tory had said.
Maybe, just maybe, she could give Anya her hair.
Twenty-Three
Anya could hear her parents’ muffled voices. They were talking to Keely. Then she heard the front door open and close, which probably meant Keely was leaving. Why did Anya feel disappointed? What had she possibly thought Keely could do for her?
“But, Anya. You were beautiful. . . .”
If Anya had thought about it ahead of time, those would have been the last possible words she would ever have expected Keely to say to her. Beautiful. Beautiful. Stef Englewood was beautiful, with all that wavy red hair swirling around her face. Nicole, one of Keely’s other friends, always looked pretty great too because she had long blond hair that curled up at the ends. Or, no, you couldn’t really say she was beautiful, because she had kind of a crooked nose and her eyes were a little too close together. She just had beautiful hair.
Could someone be beautiful with ugly hair? Or—no hair?
Anya sat up straight. She eased her legs out of bed and walked, very slowly, over to her dresser. Her dresser with the mirror. The wig stand and the wig weren’t there anymore; Mom and Dad hadn’t put them back after Anya threw them out in the hall. So there was nothing between Anya and the mirror she’d barely glanced in since November.
Really she hadn’t glanced in it much before that either. Anya had never been someone who cared much about how she looked. Not before, anyway.
And since—since she lost her hair—she’d looked in the mirror only when she had her wig on, or when she had the cap pulled down so far over her ears that no one could ever have known what was underneath.
But now she stood squarely in front of the mirror. She grasped the bill of her cap and lifted it a centimeter, an inch—all the way off. And still she kept her eyes trained on the mirror, staring into the eyes of her own reflection. And then she looked above her reflected eyes to where she’d once had hair.
She was bald. Completely bald.
She’d kind of suspected that before. In the rare moments she’d been without the cap or the wig, she’d felt no tickle of hair against her head in a long time. She’d seen so much hair come out—on her pillow, on the carpet, in the shower—she would have been surprised to have any left. And Mom, attaching the wig with the toupee tape so precisely every morning, had never once moaned, “Oh, this is going to pull out what little hair you have left. . . .”
But Anya had been very careful never actually to touch her hairless scalp; she’d been very careful never to look and see what everyone else had seen in gym class.
She looked now. She reached up her hand and touched her bare skin, almost stroking it, not quite daring to think about how it felt.
She was bald. Completely bald.
No matter how long she’d suspected that, no matter how long she’d known, it was still a jolt to see her familiar face without any hair above it, not even the wig. It was like looking at one of those trick photos—an ordinary face on an alien’s head. Or like a Halloween costume—“Amazing,” people might say, “it looks so real.”
It wasn’t a costume. It wasn’t a trick. She really was bald.
Keely’s words teased at her again: “Beautiful . . . You were beautiful. . . .” Was that true?
For a second Anya could almost see it. Without the distraction of hair, her eyes looked bigger, her nose straighter, her mouth redder. If she still had hair, if she’d never heard of alopecia areata and she’d been flipping through one of her mom’s magazines and seen a picture that looked like she looked now in the mirror, the word beautiful might have flickered in her mind.
But so would strange. So would weird. So would what’s wrong with her?
Twenty-Four
How did Stef do it? How did she get other people to do what she wanted them to?
Keely had a plan now, but it depended on convincing her friends to do something they probably wouldn’t like. In her head everything made sense, but the plan started going shaky the minute she opened her mouth and started explaining to someone else. To Mom.
“Oh, honey, are you sure?” Mom asked. “Are you sure it would do Anya any good? This isn’t something you can change your mind about. Especially not if you talk any of the other girls into going along with you.”
“I’m sure,” Keely said in a voice that sounded anything but.
They were talking in the kitchen while Mom washed dishes. Mom had let Keely walk home by herself—miracle number one. And now Mom was listening closely and nodding and shaking her head and answering and never once changing the subject or saying she didn’t have time or commanding, “Go get ready for . . . ,” or, “Go do your homework.” That was miracle number two. Keely just needed a few more miracles.
“Well, it’s up to you,” Mom said, putting the last dish in the drainer and rinsing out the sink. “I think you’re old enough to make a decision like this on your own.”
Hearing Mom say that, Keely felt thrilled and scared, all at once.
She sat down with the cordless phone and two lists. One had the names of girls in her class with long hair. The other was the list of girls with short hair. She started with the second list first. All she wanted from them was a promise.
An hour later Mom walked through the family room with an overflowing laundry basket balanced on her hip. By then Keely had dropped the phone on the floor and crumpled both lists.
“How’d you do?” Mom asked.
“The best answers I got were ‘I’ll think about it’ and ‘I’ll let you know later,’” Keely said in a muffled voice. “Nobody said yes.”
Mom sat down on the couch.
“It is a lot to ask,” she said gently. “You can’t blame the other kids for wanting to think about it.”
“That’s just an excuse,” Keely said sulkily. “None of them are going to do it.”
“So, what are you going to do?” Mom asked. “You don’t always have to do things in a group, you know. Is this important enough that you’ll do it alone?”
Keely wanted to squirm away from Mom’s gaze. She thought about Anya sitting in her dark room all by herself, not even able to be comforted by her mom and dad. She thought about how Anya had looked that day in gym, so frightened and alone, even though she was surrounded by other kids.
“Yeah,” she said. “This is important enough tha
t I want to do it alone.”
Mom looked straight at Keely for a long time. She didn’t reach for the laundry at her feet; she didn’t slide forward on the couch to prepare for standing up and walking away. She just stared into Keely’s eyes. And then she said something she’d never said to Keely before in Keely’s entire life.
“Keely, I am so proud of you.”
Twenty-Five
Keely was coming back to Anya’s. It was weird. Before today Keely had never been to Anya’s house even once in the entire five years they’d known each other. And now she was about to make her second visit in a single day.
“Why?” Anya said when Mom hung up the phone and told her.
“She says she has a surprise for you,” Mom said.
“Oh,” Anya said. Any other time she might have asked for details, might even have called up Keely herself and demanded to know what was going on. But Anya was still feeling shaky from staring at her bald head in the mirror for so long. And she’d actually forced herself to leave her room. She’d had lunch with Mom and Dad in the kitchen, and now she was playing solitaire on the living-room floor.
“When’s she coming?” Anya asked, laying a red two on a black three.
“In about an hour,” Mom said. “Do you . . . do you want to put your wig on first?”
Anya turned over three more cards while she considered the question.
“No,” she finally decided. “She’s seen me without a wig before. The cap’s good enough. I don’t think Keely cares.”
It was strange to say that. Anya wondered if it was true. What if nobody else in her class cared either? What if she went back to school and didn’t bother wearing a wig or a cap, just went as she naturally was?
Because of Anya Page 6