EunjaefollowedJiyeonintothe salon, where almost all the lights were dimmed, the other five stations deserted. Each space bore a stylist’s name in custom neon signage. She led him to the one markedEmma. Her sign appeared to be newer, slightly different in lettering style than the others.
Eunjae was no stranger to salons; he and his brothers had to have spent a century in hair and makeup by now, nine years since their debut. He'd seldom seen a place so immaculate. Magazines were fanned out on a glass-topped table, ordered by color. Products for sale had been meticulously shelved in rainbow order, and the chairs in the waiting area were upholstered in blinding white leather, no scuffs or signs of wear.
The stations were just as tidy. Various certificates took pride of place at each one. Most of them looked to be of an official nature, diplomas and credentials. But Eunjae also noticed that the other stylists had lavish floral arrangements on display, along with ribbons, stuffed animals, and even trophies, as if they'd medaled in some kind of salon Olympics. On nearly every mirror, a message had been scrawled in dry erase marker, saccharine and loaded with cheer:So jealous of your lucky clients, babe! You're making the world so beautiful! Top stylist for the third week in a row!
It became painfully obvious that Jiyeon's station was the only one without a single ribbon, trophy, or plaque beyond the requisite credentials. No words of praise were scrawled across the mirror. She had no flowers, no stuffed animals. It made her workspace seem strangely bleak and clinical when compared to the warmth he associated with her presence. If not for the big, neonEmmaemblazoned above it, he might have theorized that she was borrowing someone else's spot temporarily.
“Hurry up,” she chided Eunjae, drawing a comb out of her apron pocket. “I've been waiting to do this since I met you.”
“You’ve been waiting to cut my hair…?”
Their eyes met in the mirror. “Oh my gosh, yes,” Jiyeon replied, with feeling. “Did you think you could hide this situation under a hat?”
“Maybe…?”
Jiyeon ran a hand through his hair, grimacing. “So much damage. What have you been doing to it? Switching colors every two weeks? Are you trying to bleach it ‘til you go bald?”
Her stern expression brought out the opposite sentiment in Eunjae. He cracked a smile and then a laugh, relaxing into the chair and forgetting everything he'd been worrying about. “You really want to know?”
“Not only do I want to know, I need to know. This is depressing and I'm gonna fix it. Otherwise it's on my conscience.” She held up her right hand. “Hairstylist’s oath.”
“Okay. So last month it was still purple on the ends. A really dark purple, almost black. And before that, it was silver.” Apollo had released an EP in Japan that dominated the Oricon charts for weeks.
Jiyeon regarded him with something like despair. “Silver.”
“And it was long, too. A lot longer than this.”
“I feel like I’ve seen this anime before.”
“I think everybody has,” said Eunjae.
“Hmm. I’ll regret asking, but what came before the silver?”
Eunjae had to roll back his memories to early January, when Apollo was promoting an album and its title track,Never Too Late. “Oh, my hair was normal then.” They’d let him go back to the natural color on tour because it suited the concept for the music video anyway.
Jiyeon lowered the chair, pumping the pedal with one foot. “What do you mean by normal? And just know that if you tell me it went from dark to silver, and then from silver to dark again, I'll have to go into that break room over there and cry for an hour or two.”
“Don’t cry,” he hastened to tell her. “The normal color is brown.” A lighter brown, shot through with hints of gold that intensified under summer sunshine. Eunjae didn't have to describe it in great detail because Jiyeon seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.
“The kind of hair with highlights built in? The kind that clients are constantly paying me to recreate?” She shook her head. “They should arrest the people who told you to bleach such a gorgeous color.”
“We could send an anonymous tip to Interpol,” joked Eunjae, absently. The sound of his mother’s voice echoed back to him through years and across long miles. Every memory left him feeling bruised.
In childhood, compliments on Eunjae's looks were usually met with a lamentation about his hair — the way it hadn't managed to be black as ink, like his father's, nor the sunny blonde of his mother's. Instead, it was something of both. A drab and uninspiring brown, Leila would say. Caught between the two and failing to manage the brilliance of either, not nearly striking enough for her tastes.
“He came so close to having it all,” she’d joke with friends and strangers alike, a sharp glint in her eyes even as she smiled. “Either color would've been perfect. Oh, well. Hair can be dyed, right? With his face and that voice, he might just make it anyway.”
His younger brother was born with the same hair. Eunjae was twelve, listening to Leila complaining about this to his father, Simon, who neither agreed nor disagreed. And in his heart, Eunjae had discovered a deep seam of anger that he’d always been able to bury, before.
He was still trying to clear his head when the phone went off. Eunjae hadn't remembered to silence it or change out the default ringtone. As a result, the explosion of sound scared both Eunjae and Jiyeon half to death. He yanked the phone out of his back pocket, accidentally swiping the screen in the wrong direction as he did so. Now he’d answered instead of hanging up. Too late, Eunjae realized it was a Korean number, and not one of the two he'd saved to contacts.
He brought the phone to his ear but couldn't bring himself to utter a single word. And then, coming through on a terrible connection, he heard his name being spoken. His other name.
“Ari? Hey, Ari, come on. It's me.”
That was a voice he knew very well. It belonged to Jungwoo.
17
