Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  “So,” I said lightly when I got out, trying to sound calm, reasonable, careless as I made my way back to the chair. “I’m totally game—really, I’d be thrilled—I’m just wondering if we really think a full buzz cut is the way to go, I’m just not sure—” I faltered when I saw Bill’s face, stony and red, the same frightful mask he wore that night that I couldn’t let myself think of. “It’s just my face…” I trailed off, lost.

  “We really don’t have time to reconceptualize the entire shoot,” he said with obvious impatience.

  “Or if we just pulled my hair back really tight and—”

  Bill snorted in laughter, banishing the mask, though not entirely. I could still see it just below the surface. “Look,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder, and helping me into the seat. “I would be open to it. But, unfortunately, my dear lass, I get paid to take orders.” He leaned over so I could feel the heat of him right along my cheek, and spoke into my ear, his anti-freeze eyes locking on mine in the mirror. “And last time I checked, you do too.”

  I laughed nervously, his breath on my neck, the casual, even kind, derision in his voice spurring on a deep shame inside me. I was instantly embarrassed by how juvenile I must have sounded. I was lucky to be here at all. I would, of course, do whatever they wanted, anything, anything, anything, anything at all.

  He straightened up, satisfied in having elicited the appropriate change in my attitude, and smiled widely and warmly into the mirror. “Welcome to the big leagues, dearie.” He picked up the clippers, then nodded to two small round pills laid out on a towel on the vanity ledge in front of me. “Those’ll help with the nerves. And the pain.”

  Anything, anything, anything. Hands trembling, fully chastised, I scooped up the pills without even asking what they were—but the fear still churned in my stomach and frantically I reached for my phone, searching out its comforting solidity and clasping it to my chest where my heart beat against it.

  “You want to film it?” Bill asked brightly, softening, almost solicitous now that I was fully in his control. “Karma’s did really well. Even got some news coverage.”

  I nodded, recalling the video of Karma, head tilted, tongue pressed against her upper lip, her nose ring glinting, as her dreads were sheared away.

  “Here.” Bill handed me the clippers, and held out his palm for my phone. “It’s better if you do it yourself, and I’ll film. Authentic, you know? That’s how we did it with her.”

  I took a deep breath and delicately placed my phone into his palm.

  * * *

  —

  The girl smiles. Soft blond curls frame her face, ending in a jaunty choppiness at her chin. There is a buzzing in the background, an incessant insect. The girl cocks her head sideways, her smile faltering only slightly as her tongue flicks out across her lip. The smile returns; the girl’s smile is industrial strength. Her face is made of plaster. The clippers travel back again, cutting away a new strip of hair. Golden filaments, parts of her body no more, fall to the floor. A few are stuck to her neck.

  * * *

  —

  The girl, newly shorn, smiles maniacally at the camera. Without her signature blond curls, she is somehow more striking and also less distinct: her features, always malleable, are almost unrecognizable. Her eyes shine black in the overhead lighting.

  * * *

  —

  The girl presses her cheek into the shock-white beard of an older man with a ruddy complexion and kind eyes. He is wearing a cowboy hat. She is smiling the same industrial-strength smile. She pulls her head away and jerks a thumb at the man.

  “This is the man who deserves all the credit,” she says. “He’s the dude.”

  The man lowers his eyes briefly, then beams at the camera, clearly pleased with himself.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know when the drugs took effect, or what they were, but sometime during my shearing I began to feel as though my body was slipping away from me, a strange dislocation of self that was freeing and exhilarating and disorienting and terrifying. My head was weightless, practically floating. The hair on the floor was no longer mine, was alien to me. Bill swept it up and shoveled it into the garbage.

  Six thousand Views. Hundreds of Comments. So brave!, omg! Wish I was this brave!, badass, killer, fuckin hot, etc., etc. Who were all these people, and who were they talking about, I didn’t know.

  @BlakeyBlake: You DIDN’T! I’m DYING. Love it so much!

  Jules texted me: Um, not cool to buzz your hair when Blake said she wanted to and you were so not into it.

  It’s for work, I wrote, the New Me, the Buzzcut Me, adding, It wasn’t my choice and it’s not my problem. Also: She can get a life.

  Seven hundred new Views. Eleven new Followers. Twelve Comments.

  I went to the bathroom and cut two fat lines of coke on the sink, inhaling them sharply, one after the other. They interrupted, briefly, that sense of intangibility, of not-being-there, just long enough for me to catch my reflection and feel the slap of betrayal. I tried to picture Gemma’s face, but found that every time I thought I’d gotten hold of it, it slipped away. I would get glimpses—the curve of an earlobe, the way her nose upturned slightly—but they wouldn’t coalesce into a cohesive image, like trying to grab smoke in your hand, or maybe like trying to take a picture of the moon, only it just shows up blurry and super small and doesn’t even look like a moon at all, but more like a smudge in the sky, the most frustrating thing ever.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Leone—the absurdly attractive makeup artist who had taken Bill’s place—was waiting for me, and the fog swept over me again, and this time I was relieved, even pleased. Leone swiveled my chair so that I faced away from the mirror, her knees on either side of my knees as she leaned in close and attended to my face, rubbing all sorts of things onto my skin, even my scalp. My body pulsed and those white fireflies danced before my eyes as she mixed various skin tones of tan and light brown on the back of her hand. Was I seeing things? Surely I had to be seeing things.

  “Won’t that be too dark?” I asked, as she dipped a brush into the mixture.

  She shrugged. “That’s how they want it.”

  All of a sudden I was standing in a different trailer, shivering because of the artificial cold, or maybe it was the coke, or maybe it was this feeling of existential emptiness that was slowly choking the life out of me, but whatever it was, it was making my nipples stand up attractively, and it was with this observation that I fully recognized that my body (not me) was naked but for a pair of leather underwear that said Fuck the Patriarchy on the ass, only it wasn’t my body anymore, it was somebody else’s, somebody I recognized but could not place.

  “You’re so brave,” cooed Kim, who was unclipping something from a clothes hanger.

  “Oh, totally,” said a small man crouched at my feet, lacing up my boots, which were black leather and came up to my knee with a six-inch stiletto heel. “That’s some serious balls.”

  The man’s name was Andy, and he looked a lot like the Andy who had worked with me at my last shoot for Benoit, but I wasn’t sure. I was having trouble recognizing things unless they appeared on that beautiful crystal LCD screen, the portal to another world that was currently tucked away in my robe hung up on the other side of the trailer.

  “I mean, I would have cried, honestly, I know that’s pathetic but it’s true,” Kim went on.

  “You just look so…like, dangerous or something.”

  “Renegade.”

  They had painted my skin brown and dusted my hair with black powder. My eyebrows had been filled in with pencil. Freckles dotted my nose. A terror rose within me, and reflexively I reached for the locket, hitting bone instead, because of course they had removed it, of course, of course, they had banished anything left of her, removed all traces, replaced it with—What? Who? A profound loneliness tore through me, making me dizzy; I swayed fo
rward and braced myself against the mirror.

  “Whoa,” Andy said, his hands still on my boots. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” I muttered, peering at my reflection inches away, as an eerie sense of incongruity crept over me. “I just got lightheaded.”

  Kim helped me straighten up.

  “Do you think my skin is…?” Kim gave me a curious look, cocking her head to one side as I struggled to find the right word. “Too, um, brown?”

  “I think it looks perfect,” she said as she turned and went to retrieve something from one of the jewelry boxes laid out on the vanity shelf.

  “But—”

  “Cate and Hans are geniuses,” chimed in Andy. “You gotta trust their vision.”

  “You just look really tanned,” Kim said, briefly cupping her hands around my nose as she inserted a thin gold ring into one of my nostrils. “There,” she said. “Complete.”

  I heard something wail in the distance.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Andy looked up at me from his crouch. “Hm?”

  “I thought I heard a baby crying.”

  “Oh…” Andy glanced around vaguely before returning his attention to the laces. “Yeah, it’s for one of the shots. Benoit wants to use it as a…prop.”

  “Is it real? I mean, is it actually a baby or is it—” I shuddered involuntarily.

  He sat back on his haunches and knit his brows together. “I think it’s real,” he said, clearly considering the question for the first time. “I mean, I saw it earlier, and it looked pretty real to me.”

  Kiki came in at that moment, holding a clipboard and looking vaguely harried. “Ready?” she asked.

  “She’s good,” said Andy, standing up and dusting off his knees.

  Outside, I saw the baby, strapped into a soft pink Fisher-Price sleeper beside the fruit plate on the craft table. It was wearing a cream-colored hat, beneath which I could see little wisps of black hair, and was wrapped in a chunky blanket that looked hand-knit. It had light-brown skin and a small little plum for a mouth, and its eyelids, closed in peaceful slumber, were shiny like flower petals. Its singularity, how alone it was, positioned there on the table as if it were just another object, startled me.

  “Is its mother—”

  “Come on,” snapped Kiki. “Everyone’s waiting for you.”

  I walked slowly up the path to the house, trembling because of the shoes, which were incredibly difficult to walk in. Inside, the building was falling apart. Huge swaths of the drywall, painted a pale green, had been ripped away in white tears, revealing bare wood beneath it. Parts of the ceiling were hanging down, and the floor was covered in desiccated leaves and a thick layer of dust. The hall opened up into a big, open room, the former living room of the house, surely, with a once-stately fireplace and large-paned glass windows. The ground here was particularly filthy and mottled, and I wondered if they’d trucked in extra dirt for effect. Studio lights loomed like giant insects around a torn camelback sofa, their black spindly legs set at just the right distance, their massive umbrella heads angled down, ready to devour me. Cate and Benoit stood with their backs to me, studying a bank of monitors set just behind the lights. The screens showed an image of what was in front of them almost exactly—the shredded sofa with the musty fireplace in the background—so that it appeared as though we were looking through separate tunnels, and the screens were simply the rectangular mouths of those tunnels. Only on the screen the set looked haunting and romantic, instead of merely depressing. I was willing to be devoured then, if it meant stepping into that same light. Benoit murmured something to Cate and she walked over to the sofa, smoothed out its cushion, and flicked away an invisible piece of dust. Then she tended to me, while Benoit began pacing back and forth, muttering something to himself, seemingly oblivious to my presence. Cate touched me all over, fingering the buttons on my shirt, adjusting the rolled-up cuff on one of the sleeves. Circling me, she bent low and peered at my ass, gently shifting the leather underwear around my right butt cheek. The outfit that humanity, capital H, wears.

  Benoit ceased his pacing, finally, turned and saw me.

  “Goll-lee!” he exclaimed. He came over and kissed me on both cheeks, ran a palm over my scalp, and I felt my stomach drop and then rush forward like a roller coaster. I was just so excited to have his adoration again. “Wow,” he said, grinning. “Astonishing, really, almost uncanny, how close it is. Cate, I told you, did I not?”

  Cate nodded.

  “Cate, come feel her head, it is like velvet.” His palm was warm and heavy against my naked scalp, and I felt a crick in my neck as I tried to hold my head as straight as possible.

  “I’ve felt a shaved head before, Hans,” Cate deadpanned.

  “Divine.” He slid his hand down the back of my neck, all the way to my ass.

  “You like, my peach?”

  “I love it,” I said, trying to convince myself I did, that it was all okay. Cate and Benoit were geniuses, after all. What did I know? But something in my tone apparently did not satisfy Benoit.

  “Be honest, peach,” he pressed.

  “Well the makeup—I was a little worried—”

  “Nonsense, nonsense,” he cut me off. “You look marvelous. Just right. Cate was a little skeptical at first. We were so, so close to booking—” He hesitated sourly over the word, “someone else, but you have proved my point beautifully.” He cocked his head, as if I’d asked a question, and added, “That I can create anything, anyone I want.” But I was hardly listening, the words someone else having upended the floor beneath me, making me suddenly afraid. The casting that seemed so long ago, the one with Julio Ronaldo, swam into my head, and I thought about all those girls staring vacantly in that hallway, their images repeating ad infinitum on either side of them. I felt something sharpen inside of me, that instinct for survival. I could not go back to that place. I could not fuck this up.

  “Totally,” I said, trying to recover, forcing my smile as wide as it could go, and stumbling all over myself, telling him what a visionary he was, how grateful I was to be working with him. As if to emphasize the point, I brandished my phone. “Should we take a selfie?” I asked, still grinning.

  “Bien sûr.”

  He reached around my waist, and pulled me close. I held the phone away from us, tilting it slightly down, my best angle, and held down the Capture button so it would take a burst of images while I moved my head from side to side, smiling, pouting, looking at Benoit.

  “We should get started,” Kiki said from somewhere behind us, and Benoit broke away and patted me on the butt one last time.

  “I am curious about the reaction,” he said, nodding at my phone screen, and smiling mischievously. “No doubt there will be some shock, but shock is what we love, right?” Without waiting for a reply he continued, more gravely, “But, now dear, be clever about hiding my face.”

  He strode away and immediately, the grin vanished from my face, and I bent over my phone and rushed to upload one of the images into Instagram.

  “Mickey?” Kiki asked, clearly not pleased.

  “Just one sec.” My heart raced as I frantically cycled through filters, trying not to notice what was so glaringly obvious in the photo, telling myself it would look different under the professional lights.

  “We really need to get going.”

  I opened up my keyboard and selected one of the classic happy-faced emojis. Then I spread my fingers wide, enlarging it to cover Benoit’s head. Guess who’s shooting me today? I added a winky face.

  Kiki cleared her throat dramatically.

  “Coming, coming,” I said, trying not to feel too irritated as I dispatched the image to my Stories, even though I wasn’t sure the filter was exactly right.

  I slid the phone into my robe pocket, and Kiki took the robe off my shoulders with cold hands and hung it up on a rack in the hall. Then she led me over to
the sofa, as if no one expected me to find it myself. Benoit dragged a stool over and sat, one leg tucked up on a rung, his face half covered by the camera.

  “What is humanity?” Benoit began, his tone suggesting that he’d prepared this little speech. “What does it mean to be human? Sit back now, lie, with your arm up like that, yes. Why do we venerate only the noble emotions? Are we our most human when we’re at our best, or when we’re at our worst?” Kiki stuck a light reader next to my face. The room exploded in flashes. “What about ugliness, death, decay, piss, and shit—those are the cornerstones of the human existence, or if not cornerstones, then integral…how do you call it…essential parts…” Benoit was distracted by something on his LCD touch screen. “Kiki, can you turn the light down—I want her to look really dark, tormented…impoverished.”

  Kiki made a few adjustments, held the light reader to my face again, more flashes. “Birth, death, love, suffering, sex, loss: the entire human experience, that’s what we’re after today. Nothing sanitized. Nothing left out. Everything: even the gross and the grotesque and the gritty.” He started taking pictures. “Can you look a little more…bleak? Trauma, I want trauma, I want you to go there in your mind. Think of a time when you were powerless, abused, in pain…”