They looked at me and then their faces seemed to soften somewhat.
“Okay,” one said. “As long as you drive off, no harm done.”
“Yes! Yes of course.” I was so happy to hear this that I had to fight the urge not to run up to them and hug them both. “We’ll move now. Thank you. We won’t do it again.”
The policeman began to move off. They climbed into their car and pulled away. I smiled and nodded at them and then, when they were out of sight, I turned my attention back to the blond man who was asleep in the car.
Who the hell was he?
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I slowly, tentatively walked up to the car and looked in again. He was the same size as Alex. Same muscular physique, but his hair was a bright, brilliant bleached white. I stuck my head into the car again . . .What the hell was that sound?A faint, clinking. Like a wind chime.
I cleared my throat, hoping to make the person stir. They did not. I leaned in a little more . . .What the hell was that sound?I cleared my throat again, much louder this time. Still nothing.
I picked up an empty can and very softly tossed it at the sleeping back. The can hit and bounced off. The back flinched and stirred. The man moaned sleepily. He wiggled. He moved his legs and then he slowly turned.
I gasped. The sight was so awfully horrifying. It was a nightmare. The worst thing I’d ever seen in all my living years. It was shocking and terrifying and truly utterly undoubtedly horrendous. It was Alex. But not like I knew him.
It was Alex with a full head of bleached white hair. He looked like a nineties raver en route to Ibiza. I started shaking my head from side to side; the shock of it was so overwhelming that I—what the fuck was that sound?
I looked around. I could distinctly hear the loud clinking of a wind chime, but coming from where? I turned my head again, and that’s when I caught sight of myself in the mirror.
“NOOOOOOOO!” I screamed. “Nooooooo!” I put my hands on my head and felt them instantly. “What have I done?” I wailed, running my fingers over the tight cornrows in my hair. My hands trailed down, down, down and I felt something attached to the hanging ends. I lifted the ends and was utterly nauseated with what I saw . . .
I wanted to cry. Hanging from the bottom of each braid was a luminous collection of plastic beads. Pink, yellow and green, just dangling there.
“Whyyyyyy?” I wailed, looking at Alex, who was staring at me in total horror. “What have we done?” I asked, pointing at his hair.
Alex scrambled to his knees and moved to the front of the car. He looked into the rear-view mirror and gasped. And then he turned to me.
“What have we done?” he asked, looking pale. More pale than I’d ever seen him. Pale as a corpse without a drop of blood in it.
I shook my head, tears welling in my eyes. “And why didn’t anyone stop us?”
The previous night . . .
“Oh my God, this place issoooooobeautiful,” I said walking into the salon. It was not beautiful, though. Let’s be clear about this. I was obviously seeing things through rosy-rainbow, weed-tinted glasses and had I been even vaguely in my right mind, I would have seen the signs immediately. The signs that I should have run and left. There were several signs . . .
1.The interior of Salon Très Chic was painted pink. Not a trendy dusty-rose color with cute gold accents or anything like that. It was bright, hot pink! Candy, Barbie, bubble-gum pink.
2.The heart-shaped mirrors were wrapped in bright purple LED lights, making it look more like a cheap disco than a place to get your hair done.
3.At the hair stations, they had those old-school hair-dryer things. Those bulbous big ones. The ones that came out on arms and were placed over your whole head. They looked more like UFOs from a bad sci-fi film. And they were also a bright turquoise.
4.The floors also were covered in fluffy zebra-skin-patterned carpets.
I should have immediately looked at those four simple signs and run straight out the door. But we did not. We didn’t run, instead we told “Salome,” the owner of Salon Très Chic,also the only woman I’ve seen still rocking a perm, that we were there for makeovers. And what is worse than all that, was how we chose our makeovers.
“What should we do?” Alex looked as excited as I felt. “I’ve never had a makeover before.” He was almost squealing now.
And then I said it. The stupidest thing I’ve ever said before, but at the time, it seemed like the most brilliant idea on the planet. My mind was just swirling with “brilliant” ideas, and I felt like the love child of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and was seriously wondering why no one had picked me out as the next creative genius who would revolutionize the world.
“We should ask the magazine,” I said in a strange, deep and poignant voice. One that had a sense of gravitas to it. A smack of the mysterious.
Alex gasped. “Yes! Let the magazine guide us.”(Who says that? No one who isn’t stoned, that’s for sure!)
But we continued and what happened next would be the ill-fated thing that would land us in this braided, bleached mess.
