“Let’s open it randomly and whatever pictures we see, we get,” I said.Oh God, it had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
At this stage, you would have thought Salome would have had the sense to stop us. You would have thought that even she could see that we were in no way sane enough to be making any kind of aesthetic choices. But she didn’t. In fact, she seemed only too excited to be a part of this insanity.
We flipped the magazine open and . . .
Bands We Loved In The Nineties.
I wish the voice had screamed at me again.I might have listened.I wish it had told me that Beyoncé’s Destiny’s Child braids would not be a good look on me, no matter how much I liked Beyoncé and had belted out “Say My Name,” in my bedroom with a hairbrush with the door closed. And I really wish the voice had spoken up when Alex and I had pointed at Justin Timberlake’s over-bleached mop of NSYNC hair and I wish I hadn’t egged him on when I shouted, “Oh my God, I had such a crush on Justin when I was younger.”
Why had no one stopped us . . .why?I ask with tears in my bloodshot eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Present day . . .
We both sat in the front seats holding our heads in our hands. We’d driven up the road and found a legitimate parking spot for the car. Neither one of us could remember why we’d been looking for a campsite the night before.
“It’s notthatbad,” Alex said, breaking the long silence that we’d been sitting in.
“Are you kidding?” I wailed. “It isthatbad. In fact, it’s worse thanthat bad!That badwould be if I’d cut bangs which everyone knows would not look good with my face shape, that would have been bad. This, however, is so much worse than bad.”
Alex turned and looked at me. I stared at his head. It was hard not to stare. It was almost all you could see. It was so bright and reflective that it almost changed the lighting inside the car. The bleach job was a very bad one to begin with. It was white in some parts, fading into a yellowish color, radiating outwards to bright orange. All these colors, coupled with his gorgeous gray eyes, slightly olive complexion and chiseled face that was now sporting some very sexy stubble just looked so damn . . .wrong.He looked like a rubbery Malibu Ken doll!
“Oh my God, I can’t take you seriously with that hair!” I slapped my hands over my eyes, which caused my braids to clank together and the car was filled with the sounds of wind chimes once more. I cringed and then wanted to cry.
“My hair makes a noise,” I whimpered weakly.
“My hair blinds people,” Alex offered with a resigned sigh.
I kicked something with my foot and looked down at the floor, and there it lay. The thing that had caused all the trouble. I picked it up and it fell open on the page. There were fresh scribbles and notes all over the page.
“Uh . . . Alex?” I asked nervously. “Why have we got lots of multiple ticks next to number two again? Commit murder on social media as if we did something else last night? Oh God, did we post pictures of ourselves?”
Alex and I stared at each other and then both jumped at the same time.
“Oh my God!” I scrambled into the back of the car looking for my phone. Alex did the same, finding his phone under a seat.
“We didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t. . .” I pleaded with myself out loud as I opened Instagram. But I had a bad feeling about this.Very bad.
“We did!” Alex held the phone up for me to see.
“Oh God,” I gasped as I looked at the picture of the two of us and started shaking my head. “How bad does it get?” I was terrified to know the answer. Alex looked back down at his phone and started flipping through the pictures.
“A lot worse,” he admitted, holding the phone up for me to see.
This time I didn’t gasp. A gasp was not adequate for this moment. A gasp would not have sufficed, even though I was fully aghast and it was a very gaspy moment.
“How many did you post?” I asked, my voice quivering.
Alex started counting and he only stopped when he got to six.
I looked down at my own Instagram and simply shook my head in utter disbelief. I’d posted about ten selfies of the three of us in various places around town. And when I saythree, I mean Alex, myself and “Sally,” which is clearly what we’d decided to name the sex doll who was in every picture with us. It wasn’t bad enough that we had actually documented our very ill-conceived makeovers and posted them on social media, but to have done it with a sex doll . . .
“We changed our Facebook profile pictures too,” Alex said.
I bit my lip and opened my Facebook App, terrified of what I was about to see. And when I saw it an awkward silence filled the car.
I finally spoke once I’d taken it in. “Well, it can’t get much worse than that.” I pointed at the picture of me kissing Sally on the cheek, her big, gaping mouth staring into camera.
