Free Whatever Happened to Janie? by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

time to anybody.”
    “I’m running out of options,” said Mrs. Spring. “Pretty soon I’ll have to go out of state for a trim.”
    “When did you have it cut last?” asked Janie. Mrs. Spring’s hair was fluffy and ill-kempt. Her real mother, elegant and perfect, never had a hair out of place. And yet Janie felt a touch of affection for Mrs. Spring because her hair was a mess.
    “Eight weeks ago,” said Mrs. Spring. “Or ten. Or twenty.”
    “Twenty?” repeated Janie, laughing. “That’s four or five months.” Her real mother went every six weeks.
    “Well, it gives me a chance to see if the beautician knows how to deal with disaster.”
    Scissors was exactly like any hairdresser’s Janie had been in. The same perfumed air, the same shampoo-y scent. The same rows of wet-haired women without makeup, smiling at their yet-to-be-made-pretty selves in the huge mirrors. Even the same beauticians: two incredibly thin girls with strange and impressive hair; a heavyset matron fresh from her cigarette break, her hair dyed an impossible blond; and an amused young man, notsurprisingly named Michael. The familiarity was soothing.
    While they waited, Janie chose
Cosmopolitan;
this was no doctor’s office where the only choice of reading material was
National Geographic
or
Sports Illustrated.
She and Jodie examined the cover for some time, wondering how the model had been laced into her bizarre gold gown.
    “Three? Trims all around?” said the heavy beautician, bored. “I only got two on the schedule but we could fit the third in.”
    Fit in.
    I could fit in, thought Janie, touching the wilderness of her hair. I could get this cut. It would make me more Jennie and less Janie. “Okay,” she said. “Cut mine like”—she felt like a dentist extracting the word—”like my sister’s.”
    “No!” shrieked Jodie, blocking the hairdresser as if she were armed. “You’d look terrible, Jennie. This isn’t your cut. You have such beautiful hair.” Jodie said to the hairdresser, “Absolutely not. Don’t touch a hair on her head.” She turned back to Janie. “See, I hardly have any hair. I have to cut it pixie like this because I am not hair-endowed. You, on the other hand, have to display your hair the way the
Cosmo
model displays her cleavage.”
    They giggled.
    Like sisters.
    Mrs. Spring and Jodie went in the back to be shampooed. Janie finished the magazine.
    It’s happening, she thought. Everybody told me that all it would take is time. Time alone. Days passing would turn me into Jennie Spring.
    She stared at her watch. How incredible that time—invisible, lost-forever time—marked by little changing hands on a tiny decorated circle, could change her family, her name, and her thoughts.
    I can lean into it, thought Janie. I can take this turn in the road. Become a Spring. Or I can step back.
    “You can’t play?”
said Jodie, as if Janie had said she couldn’t speak English. “I’ll teach you. You’ll love it. It’s very addictive. We’re crazy about it.” She handed Janie a joystick. Janie had played plenty of computer games, of course, just not Super Mario. She and Stephen and Jodie sat on the edge of the couch staring at the TV screen.
    It took her a while to figure out how to make Mario fly and swim and bounce high enough. Janie was determined to keep up, but it was impossible; Stephen and Jodie had mastered the game ages ago and were wonderful.
    When Stephen played, he sat completely still, eyes riveted on the screen, moving nothing but his fingertips.
    Jodie, however, played sitting on the edge of her chair. She looked like the top half of a ballet dancer. Her legs and feet lay still, but her arms curled and leaped as she lifted Mario up a cliff. She sank down into her own lap when Mario slid on an ice floe and she rotated herself desperately as she tried to hurl Mario over boiling lava. Janie loved watching her. Jodie was a remarkably unselfconscious person in play and in sleep: thrashing and