The woman looking back at me from the mirror is not a woman I recognize.
Which is—objectively—the point. I understand that intellectually. I was there for the conversation where Elowen said the masquerade works better if you look genuinely different, not just dressed up, so why not start from the hair. I was there when I said fine, do something, I trust you, which was apparently the most reckless thing I have ever said in my adult life including the three years I spent with Dante.
The woman in the mirror has champagne blonde hair.
Champagne. Blonde.
It sits past her collarbone in soft waves that Elowen has been working on for the better part of an hour with a diffuser and three different products and the focused intensity of a woman fulfilling a creative vision. The color is—I will admit this once and not repeat it—genuinely beautiful. Not yellow, not brassy, not the particular shade of amateur dye job that turns orange at the roots and regret everywhere else. It's the real thing.Professional. The kind of blonde that costs money I don't have and requires maintenance I won't do and looks, right now, in this bathroom light, like it was there all along.
The green comes next.
She said the green comes next.
I look slowly at Elowen in the mirror.
She's already holding the ombre applicator. She gives me a smile that is performing confidence while actively containing a much smaller, much more nervous smile underneath it.
"Please," I say, very carefully, "for the sake of every lucky leprechaun over every rainbow—this will come out?"
The smile shifts.
There it is. There's the nervous one.
"Well," Elowen begins.
"Elowen."
"You did say?—"
"Elowen Bloom."
"—you wanted something new! Something that would make you look completely different, those were your exact words, and green ombre at the ends is very?—"
"I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING BARBIE."
The word echoes off the bathroom tiles. Elowen presses her lips together with the expression of a woman trying very hard not to laugh and failing at a cellular level.
"You," she says, with great dignity, "look hot."
"That is not the same thing as?—"
"You could walk into a Baywatch commercial right now. No preparation. Just walk in, they'd hand you a swimsuit, done."
"I don't want to be in a Baywatch commercial, Ell, I want to?—"
"Bikini model." She sets the applicator down and comes to stand behind me, hands on my shoulders, both of us looking at my reflection with very different expressions. Hers is theexpression of an artist surveying completed work. Mine is the expression of a person trying to locate the exit. "The blonde brings out your eyes. It genuinely does—I'm not saying it because I'm your friend, I'm saying it because I have functional vision and this is an observable fact. The green at the ends—" she picks up the applicator again "—washes out tomorrow. One shower. Gone. So tonight you are a champagne blonde with emerald tips attending a St. Patrick's masquerade, and tomorrow you are regular Mila with her life choices and her plank, and the two things are not in conflict."
I stare at my reflection.
My eyes do look different.
I'm not saying that out loud.
"I trusted you to give me a normal haircut," I tell the mirror. "A trim. Maybe some layers. Not a full dye process in your bathroom while my phone is in Narnia."
"Your phone is in my bag, which is in the car, because I know how you are."
"How I am is a person who likes to have access to their own?—"
