Once I was aware of Reconsidered, I saw it everywhere. Anyone wearing headphones became a potential (or, depending on the level of my anxiety at that moment, probable) listener; anyone uttering anything that sounded even vaguely like Buhrman gave me pause. On line at Trader Joe’s, I thought I heard someone say Reconsidered and tensed. But a fearful glance over my shoulder revealed the speaker’s companion shaking her head vehemently and saying, “Stop telling me to reconsider. Your roommate’s a barbarian and I’m not setting him up with Denise.”
Deep down, I knew the extent of my paranoia was unwarranted, but I was unable to shake the persistent sensation that people were staring at me. I stopped leaving my apartment for any reason other than to go to work. I ordered all my meals in, and when I ran out of toilet paper, I ordered that in, too, because in the modern era you could order in anything. I stopped sleeping. I sat up all night, reading everything I could find about Poppy Parnell and her podcast.
Sometimes I wondered what would happen when Caleb returned from Africa and heard about Reconsidered. Sometimes I was terrified he had already heard about it, that he had put the pieces together and understood that I had lied about my past, and that he was never coming back to me. We had talked only once since I first heard about the podcast, and that call had been an unsatisfying five-minute conversation in which our words echoed back at us and the delay was so severe it was almost comical. Certainly not the right moment to mention that there was a hot new podcast reexamining your father’s murder.
But thinking about Caleb made my heart hurt even more violently than thinking about my father, and so I pushed those concerns from my mind. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. For the time being, there was the podcast to think about.
By Friday afternoon, I had managed only a few hours of intermittent sleep over the last two days, and the demarcation between asleep and awake had blurred until the only state of consciousness I could muster was a lethargic near-trance. I was attempting to shelve a new shipment of books at work, but my brain was so sluggish that I stared at a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude for a full five minutes, unsure how to alphabetize Gabriel García Márquez.
Clara watched my pitiful progress for a minute before gently taking the book from my hands and saying, “You okay, Jo? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re looking kind of rough.”
“I haven’t really been sleeping,” I admitted, blinking.
“Do you want to, like, run to Starbucks or something? I can cover for you, no problem. Some coffee might do you good.”
“Thank you,” I managed, my throat closing. “But I’m going to be all right.”
Whether I was actually going to be all right remained to be seen. The podcast was frighteningly pervasive, even infiltrating the aisles of the bookstore, a space usually reserved for arguing whether commercial success equated literary achievement and debating whether Hemingway was a misogynist or a misanthrope. If these lit snobs were bickering about something they heard on the internet rather than playing chicken with arcane literary references, I felt doomed.
On my walk home, my body vibrated with lack of sleep and itchy panic. I kept my head down, certain that everyone I passed had been listening to Poppy’s drivel and now knew everything about my painful past. Years ago I had changed my name legally, officially leaving Josephine Buhrman behind, but that was a mere technicality that would provide little comfort once podcast fans began running image searches. Now that their interest had been piqued by my father’s face on the Reconsidered website, how long would it be until they sought out images of all of us? What if they had started already? Had I been na?ve to convince myself that a podcast was nothing more than modern radio, just words floating through the air? It existed on the internet, alongside Google images, just waiting for groups of dedicated web sleuths.
I stopped at the wine store but abandoned the bottle I had intended to purchase when a girl joined the queue behind me and immediately began tapping away on her phone. The suspicion she might know who I was overwhelmed me, and even though I knew I was acting crazy, I rushed out of the store. Back on the street, I spotted the painted window of a previously unnoticed hair salon and ducked inside.
“I need a haircut,” I said, my voice sounding too loud in my own ears. The young receptionist looked at me uneasily. I was aware I should lower my voice, try to soften my frazzled edges, but that seemed beyond my capabilities and I doubled down instead, leaning forward and adding, “Immediately.”
“All right,” she said slowly, her voice as careful as if I were waving a gun in her face. “Let me see if anyone is available.”
She rose cautiously from her desk and walked to the back of the salon, glancing over her shoulder at me twice, clearly distrustful. She held a whispered conference with the three black-clad stylists gathered in the back of the salon before one of them, a whippet-thin platinum blonde, shrugged and stepped forward, her armful of thin bangles clanking together.
“I’m Axl,” she said. “I can take you.”
“Cut it off,” I commanded, sitting down at her station. “Cut it all off.”
I had a sudden, jarring flashback to an afternoon almost ten years ago, a damp, drizzling late-May afternoon that found me sitting in a chair in a discount hair salon in London. Cut it off, I had said in what I had hoped passed for a brave voice. Just cut it off. That stylist had taken one look at my red, puffy eyes and the days-old makeup crusting my face and shook her head. I don’t think you’re in the right mind-set to be making any drastic decisions about this beautiful hair, pet, she’d said. How about I give you a nice trim instead? Freshen you up? Lacking the energy to disagree with her, I had nodded meekly and walked out looking like a more well-groomed version of the same person I had been when I had entered. Weeks later, there had been a similar experience in Paris, with a cigarette-scented woman holding my hair in her hands like it was a sentient animal and bemoaning the idea that I would heartlessly destroy it. Wash, rinse, and repeat in Amsterdam and Barcelona. I finally convinced someone in Rome to give me a bob, but by the time I met Caleb in Africa four years, fifteen countries, and more short-term, paid-under-the-table food service jobs than I could count later, I had stopped thinking about my sister whenever I saw my own face and had let my hair grow out. It had been long ever since. I was out of practice for negotiating a haircut, and I steeled myself for disagreement.
But Axl just lifted her shoulders in an indifferent shrug. “Whatever you say.”
“And dye it,” I directed, emboldened. “Like yours.”
Her magenta-colored lips twisted up into an amused smirk. “You’re the boss.”
I regretted my decision almost immediately. The peroxide stung on contact and gradually warmed until it felt as though my scalp were covered in a carpet of fire ants. Tears streamed from my eyes and I wanted to beg Axl to take mercy on me, but I clenched my teeth and suffered through the pain. My previous attempts to erase Josephine Buhrman had lacked conviction; I needed to chemically scrub at her vestige until nothing remained.