After the peroxide had been rinsed from my hair and my locks had been lopped into an unsubtle pixie cut, Axl spun me around in the chair to face the mirror. “What do you think?”
The change was startling, almost dissociative. My hair, or what was left of it, had not gone quite as platinum as I’d hoped, settling instead into a light butter-yellow. Without the distraction of hair around my face, my eyes looked enormous and the dark, bruise-like circles under them were suddenly that much more apparent. My eyebrows, still ink-black, were a pair of aggressive crescents above my eyes. I looked unhinged. I felt unhinged.
“The eyebrows,” I managed.
Axl nodded, and soon peroxide was burning my eyebrows and I was worrying about chemically induced blindness. But the momentary terror was worth it: when she presented me with the mirror again, I looked eminently more reasonable. I studied my reflection and noted with satisfaction that I looked nothing like Josephine Buhrman.
Even though Axl wasn’t a very skilled colorist, I tipped her 80 percent and then walked out onto the street, unshackled from the concern that people were staring at me. Or at least knowing that any stares were likely due to my extreme hairstyle and not because I looked like a member of the Elm Park Buhrmans, that cursed family. Whether my spontaneous makeover was a direct result of paranoia or the reasoned adoption of a disguise, I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I was finally able to stop thinking about the podcast for at least a few minutes—finally able to feel once again like the person I had worked so hard to become.
From Twitter, posted September 18, 2015
chapter 3
When Caleb returned from the DRC on Monday night, he was shaggy and skinny, just like he had been when I first met him.
“Honey, I’m home,” he called as he pushed open the door, the joke trailing off into a ragged cough. My heart squeezed. I could hear the weeks of antimalarials, mild food poisoning, and eighteen-hour workdays in his hoarse voice. I wanted to usher him straight to bed, tuck him into the sheets I had freshly laundered for his homecoming, my instinctive desire to tend to him so strong I forgot I had been awake all night obsessing over the podcast and sick knowing it was only a matter of time before Caleb learned about it.
“Just tell him,” Ellen had said, sounding irritated about my repeated post-midnight phone calls the past several days. “It’s not like you can keep it a secret at this point.”
“I thought Peter was going to sue her. Get her trash off the internet. What happened to that?”
“Apparently it’s more complicated than I thought. Anyway, even if it weren’t, too many people know about it now. Did you know it was spoofed on SNL last weekend? There’s no way Caleb won’t hear about it. You’re going to have to tell him.”
“But how?”
“Josie, you’re a grown-up. I’m sure you can figure it out. Maybe now’s the time to come clean anyway.”
I knew Ellen had a point, but the idea of owning up to my lies filled me with dread. When I first met Caleb, I had told him my parents had passed away. It was a careless, throwaway line I had been using as I backpacked and hitchhiked my way across Europe, Southeast Asia, Europe again, and then finally Africa. Those relationships had seemed disposable; there was no need to ruin the mood with stories of my murdered father, my insane mother, and my despised sister. But Caleb had turned out to be the furthest thing from disposable, and then the lie fed upon itself and grew, and I had never known how to tell him the truth.
The evening of Caleb’s homecoming I was caught up in a vigorous debate with myself over whether I should confess—and, if so, how—but once I heard him walk in, all the arguments I had made and the anguish I’d felt over making them faded away. I needed to be in his arms. The shadows of the past could wait.
Caleb was dropping his dirt-stained duffel bag in the entryway as I rounded the corner, my heart thundering giddily.
“Hey, babe.”
He looked up at me, his gray eyes weary and ringed, and his smile froze on his face. “Fucking hell, Jo. What happened to your hair?”
I startled, realizing that I had spent so much time thinking of how to break the news to Caleb (“I have something to tell you” sounded too ominous, too much like I had been having an affair, but “So, have you heard about this podcast?” didn’t carry enough gravity) that I had completely forgotten about my drastic makeover three days prior.
“Oh,” I said with a forced laugh. “I saw this hairstyle on someone else and decided to give it a try. You know me, impulsive.”
He blinked. “It’s . . . jarring.”
“Exactly the look I was going for,” I said, my voice thinning to an unnatural pitch.
Caleb was too exhausted to do anything other than take my words at face value. He told me that I was still beautiful, kissed me on my head, and then proceeded to sleep for the next thirteen hours.
I had not always hated my sister. For the first fifteen years of our lives, she had been an inextricable part of myself; I existed only as one half of a matched set. I had once truly believed I would cease to be if I were separated from her.
That was back when she still cared about me, though, before she traded my respect and love for booze, drugs, and low-grade anarchy. Back then, she had been daring rather than rebellious, just a pigtailed girl with scabbed knees and a sense of adventure. She led me on countless escapades, up into the loft of our grandparents’ barn and down by their pond; she showed me the hole in the wall behind the sink in our small backyard playhouse where she hid her illicit treasures, the candy pilfered from the cabinet, broken costume jewelry stolen from Ellen, and tawdry novels lifted from our mother’s bedside table. (It was the last of these items that led our mother to ransack our bedroom and playhouse until she discovered Lanie’s hiding spot. Books and jewelry were returned; candy was confiscated.)
But for every act of mischief, for every night of sleep Lanie ruined by telling me stories of men with hooks for hands and hitchhiking ghosts, my sister was also the first one to come to help me, to comfort me when I was sad. We had once so delighted in our twinship that we felt sorry for our mother, who had a sister, my Aunt A, but not a twin, and our cousin Ellen, who had no siblings at all. We thought we were special; we thought our bond was invincible.
But then Dad was killed and Mom abandoned us and Lanie went completely off the rails. I tried to hold on to her, but Lanie didn’t want to be saved. She made that perfectly clear.