Free The Transformation of Things by Jillian Cantor Page A

gave up and gave in to what I already knew: I desperately needed a haircut.
    There was no way in hell I was going to go back to Pierce Avenue, back to Jo. There would be too many stares, too many questions. So instead I went downstairs and I called this little salon called Cuts ‘n Stuff that I’d seen right across from the park. It didn’t appear they did a brisk business because I booked myself an appointment, under the name Jennifer Daniels, for later that afternoon. I knew the place was a little tacky, but I was also positive I wouldn’t run into anyone who might know me.
    The lady whom I had an appointment with was named Cheryl, and I was a little skeptical when I first laid eyes on her. She was short and overweight, with shoulder-length, jaggedly cut hair that had chunky strips of bright red running through it. Whenever a hairdresser had seriously awful hair, I tookthat as a bad sign. But my split ends were, well, so split that I was starting to have seriously awful hair myself, so I stayed.
    “What are we doing today?” she asked. She chomped on her gum, blew a bubble, and then popped it near my ear. She pulled up strands of my hair and held them up in her fingers. “You know,” she said, “you should go shorter.”
    “How much shorter?” I’d only had the intention of getting a trim, but for some reason her gum-chewing assessment intrigued me.
    “Like seriously shorter.” She folded my hair up three times, so it went from shoulder-length to somewhere midway between my chin and my ears. “You totally have the face for it. You’re lucky. Not everyone does, you know.”
    I turned my head to the side and tried to envision it. My hair had been basically the same length since high school. Sometimes I wore it curly, sometime I straightened it with a flatiron or a round brush, but the length had always been just around my shoulders.
    She dropped my hair and looked at her watch. “But it’s totally up to you.” She shrugged. “It’s your hair.”
    “Yes,” I said, surprising myself even as I said it. “Cut it short. I could use a change.” My words rang distantly in my ears, as if they weren’t even coming from me, but from someone else, because my brain hadn’t actually processed what I was telling her.
    As she washed my hair, as I leaned my head back in the sink and heard the water rushing, rushing through my ears, I closed my eyes and remembered that morning at Pierce Avenue, that morning I’d heard about Will. When I sat up, I felt this odd sense of déjà vu, and for a minute, I was just as dizzy and disoriented as I had been that day.
    I closed my eyes while she was cutting, to try to containthe dizziness, the awkward feeling of nausea, and then when I heard the click of the scissors stop, I opened them again and looked in the mirror. My hair was short, really short, just below my ears, and angled slightly toward my face. Tears immediately welled up in my eyes because looking back at me was someone else, some entirely different woman whom I’d never met before. Cheryl frowned and held up her hands. “You said it’s what you wanted,” she said.
    “I know,” I said, trying to force a smile, though the feeling, the urge to start running, just to get out of there, rose in my throat like bile.
    Once I got in the car, I thought about calling Kelly. Her house was only five minutes from here, and I hadn’t talked to her since the morning I’d called her and begged for a job for Will. I knew she’d been working on a photography project, and I’d been resisting the urge to call her, as if bothering her when I normally wouldn’t have was a confession of how un-fine I really was.
    But it had been a while, longer than we usually went without talking, so I dialed her number. “How you doing?” she asked when she picked up, not sympathetic exactly, but matter-of-factly, as if it was a foregone conclusion that I should still not be doing well.
    “I’m okay,” I said. But I felt this haunting