Mr. Greco senior looked like an older version of Mr. Greco, and his mother looked a little like I could imagine Olivia looking when she got old. They had the same green eyes, and Mrs. Greco dyed her hair a color close to the blond that Olivia’s hair was naturally. To me it was always a little startling to see such bright blond hair on a seventy-five-year-old woman, but I guess she thought it looked nice.
Mrs. Greco Sr. came away from the stove and hugged me. “Zoe, honey, you’re soaked.” It was true. I’d walked over without an umbrella or a coat. She wagged her wooden spoon at me. “And you’re too thin. Both of you girls are too thin.”
“Mary,” her husband chastised her, “of course she’s thin. She’s had chemotherapy. Would you leave her alone? The poor girl can’t eat.” I went over to where he was sitting and shook his hand. The skin felt smooth, almost like paper. I was pretty sure he was older than his wife, but it might just have been that he didn’t dye his hair.
Mrs. Greco turned on her husband. “What chemotherapy? Zoe hasn’t had chemotherapy.”
He slapped the table with impatience. “I know Zoe hasn’t had chemotherapy. Olivia had chemotherapy.”
“You think I don’t know my baby had chemotherapy?” She sighed. For all the confusion, this was actually a relatively linear, lucid conversation to be having with the Grecos. Livvie said it was because they were Italian, but whenever Mr. Greco’s family was over, there were about ten conversations going on at once, and most people were participating in several of them simultaneously. Now Mrs. Greco pointed the spoon in her hand at her son, Livvie’s father. “I still remember the day you brought her home from the hospital.” Suddenly her eyes welled up with tears. “And now this.” She started crying. “Why is this happening? And why does she have to go back for more chemotherapy? Why are they torturing her?” Mr. Greco stood up, walked over to his mother, and put his arms around her. “Come on now, Ma. Come on.”
As soon as his wife started crying, Mr. Greco senior started crying. I didn’t know where to look or what to say, so I just stared silently at the kitchen floor.
Olivia’s mom came through the swinging door from the dining room. “Zoe! Olivia thought it might be you, but I said you were still at school.”
“Oh, yeah. I got out early.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” Mrs. Greco said. I couldn’t tell if there was suspicion in her voice. “Livvie’s so excited to see you, but we need to keep it short. I don’t want her getting tired out. And you’re feeling okay? You don’t have a cold or anything?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean, yes, I’m feeling okay. No, I don’t have a cold.”
“Good.” She took a deep breath and actually smiled. “It’s good to have her home, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s really good.”
“Wash up in the front bathroom, okay? Dr. Maxwell suggested visitors use their own bathroom.”
“Sure,” I said. After Livvie’s fever, I had a new understanding of the word visitor, and I could see how as long as my house had different germs from Livvie’s house, I was one.
I headed to the bathroom in the front hall. This was totally the visitors’ bathroom; in all the years of coming to Livvie’s house, I couldn’t think of one time when I’d used it. The faucets were gold-colored, the towels were thin linen with the letter G embroidered on them in pale blue, and there was a tiny soap dish with little seashell-shaped soaps. The last time I’d been in there it was spring, and Livvie and I had been sent to check that it was ready for a dinner party Livvie’s parents were having.
The seashell soaps were gone, replaced with two plastic dispensers, one of antibacterial soap and one of Purell. The embroidered towels were gone too. On the shelf next to the sink was a pile of paper towels. I washed my hands, dried them carefully, then doused them in Purell.
The light was on in Livvie’s room, and I slid the door open gently. She was sitting on her desk chair in a T-shirt and jeans, surveying her surroundings.
It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. “Hi,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Hi,” she said.
I’d been looking forward to this moment for so long, but now I wasn’t sure what to say or do. I went over to her bed and sat down at the edge of it. “I saw your grandparents,” I said.
“My grandmother keeps hugging me and crying,” said Livvie. “It’s starting to get on my nerves.”
“Yeah, I can see how that might be trying.”
Livvie gave a little smile. She was still looking around her room. My hair was damp, and I rubbed it between my palms, waiting for her to speak.
“I was just thinking . . .” She hesitated, then continued. “I was just thinking that the last time I was here, I wasn’t sick. I mean, I was sick,” she corrected herself quickly, “but I didn’t know I was sick. I just thought I had a virus or something.” She glanced at me. “Isn’t that crazy?”
“It is,” I agreed.
“Zoe?” Her head was down, and she seemed to be watching her toe, which she was using to trace the dark green pattern that ran through the rug’s pale green background.
“Yeah?”
She waited to close the swirl she’d been following. “Look.” Then, without raising her eyes, she put her hand on her head and ran her fingers through her hair.
When I had long hair, I was always shedding. I’d brush my hair and the brush would be full of strands, or I’d take off a sweater and find half a dozen long black hairs stuck to it.
But what I was looking at now was something completely different. In Olivia’s hand was a fistful of hair, more than I’d ever seen not on someone’s head. I thought of my haircut after we got kicked out of NYBC, how it had seemed that with all the hair on the floor, there couldn’t possibly be any left on my head.
This was like that.
I felt panicky, as if Livvie had just shown me a gaping wound that I needed to close. We looked at each other. Her eyes were glassy with tears.
Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I just said, “It’s going to be okay.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back.
“What is? Being bald? Oh yeah, that’s really okay.” Olivia’s voice was as close to nasty as I’d ever heard it.
“Oh, Livs.” I got off her bed and walked over to the chair on my knees, then put my arms around her and waist and hugged her tightly.
“They told me it would start falling out after a few weeks, but I didn’t believe them.” Her voice was thick with tears. “I really thought . . . I think I really thought . . .” Now she was crying too hard to speak, and for a few minutes that was the only sound in the room. I started to cry also, the tears sliding silently down my face and onto Olivia’s shirt. “I’m so embarrassed,” she sobbed.
“What? What are you embarrassed about?”
“I thought . . .” She took a deep breath. “‘Not my hair. My hair’s too pretty to fall out.’” On the word out Olivia made a sound I’d never heard a person make before. It was like a howl.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” I whispered, hugging her still more tightly. “Please don’t be embarrassed. Your hair is beautiful. It’s so beautiful. It’s going to grow back and it’s going to be just as beautiful as it is now.” I didn’t know what to say, but I just kept talking.
“Why is this happening to me, Zoe?” Olivia whispered, her voice hoarse. “It’s so unfair.”
I could feel a huge sob growing in my chest, and all I wanted to do was let it out, wail as loudly as Olivia just had. I swallowed hard, pushing it down, down, down, scared that if I let it out, I’d never be able to stop.
“It is unfair, Livs,” I whispered back. “I hate everything because of it.”
“You hated everything before I got sick; you know you did,” she whispered.
And then, out of nowhere, Olivia started laughing. It wasn’t a slow buildup, like a giggle into a belly laugh. She just burst into laughter. It was slight
ly hysterical laughter, but it was definitely laughter. “I have no idea why I’m laughing,” said Olivia, catching her breath. “Maybe the chemo went to my brain.” The possibility must have struck her as funny because she burst out laughing again.
“This is seriously fucked up,” I said, and then I started laughing too.
“What, my having cancer or our laughing about it?” She swiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “Zoe, what am I going to do?” she asked, and now she was crying again.
My hoodie was damp with the rain, but I used it to wipe her cheeks. “What if we braid it? I could do a long French braid, like your mom did the other day.”
“Okay.” She sniffed. “Yeah. Let’s try that.” Her eyes were shiny, but she sounded relieved.
“I’ll get a brush,” I said, jumping to my feet. Livvie directed me to her cosmetics bag, and a second later I was standing behind her chair, holding her brush in my hand, a hair band snapped around my wrist.
But it was like herding cats. Every time I ran the brush through her hair, it would fill up, and I’d have to go over to the garbage can and dump a fistful of hair into it before trying again, at which point the whole process would start over. After about three strokes, Olivia snatched the brush from my hand.
“Forget it,” she snapped. “This was a stupid idea.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” I assured her. “It was worth a try.”
From where she was sitting, she couldn’t see into the mirror on the back of her closet, so she got to her feet and walked over to it. “I shouldn’t even care, right? I mean, it’s just hair.”
In the pale light of her bedside lamp, Livvie’s beautiful blond hair glowed, as if it were its own light source. She looked away from her reflection and turned to me. “Come on,” she said. She walked over to the door of her bedroom.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Her voice only shook a little bit. “We’re going to shave it off.”
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When Mrs. Greco, who we passed in the hallway, found out what we were about to do, she wanted us to go to the hairdresser’s, but Livvie said absolutely not, and she reminded her mom how many people would be in the crowded public space that was Hair Today Gone Tomorrow. In the end, Mrs. Greco agreed that as long as we used Livvie’s dad’s electric razor and not a disposable one that might give Livvie a cut that could get infected, we could do it ourselves. She said she was going to leave us alone, but you could tell she was hovering outside the bathroom door. It wasn’t until Livvie shouted, “Mom, you have to go!” that she finally said, “Okay,” and went downstairs.
While that would have been a pretty mild exchange between me and my mom, it was unprecedented for Livvie to snap at her mother that way. I didn’t comment on it, just ran a cotton swab doused with rubbing alcohol over Mr. Greco’s electric razor like Mrs. Greco had told me to.
Livvie had a beautiful bathroom. Technically it wasn’t hers; it was down the hall from her room, and there was a bedroom next to it, but that was a guest room, so she was the only one who really used this particular bathroom. It was very small, barely big enough for a sink, a bathtub, and the toilet, but there was a stained-glass window and these old fixtures and a huge antique mirror over the sink. When we were in fourth grade, without asking permission, Livvie and I hid out in her bathroom and shaved her legs, and before Livvie was allowed to wear makeup, she and I would come up here and experiment, slathering our faces with contraband lipstick, mascara, rouge, and eye shadow that we’d borrowed from girls at NYBC, and then frantically washing it off when her mom would call us to dinner.
The weird thing was, this almost felt like one of those crazy afternoons from elementary school. First of all, we couldn’t figure out what to do at all. We tried just shaving the hair, but that was impossible—it was too long, and the razor kept getting stuffed with hair and then jamming or pulling on the strands so hard it hurt. The third or fourth time I tried and failed to shave off more than a strand or two at a time, Livvie started giggling.
“You seriously suck at this, you know?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had a PhD in head shaving.” Laughing, I handed her the heavy black razor. “Here. You do it.”
“I can’t see the top of my head,” she said, pushing the razor away. “Just . . . try again.” But it was impossible. Finally I asked Mrs. Greco for scissors, and together Livvie and I started cutting. Once we got into it, there was something satisfying about the work, the sharp snap of metal on the long, delicate strands.
“When you think about it, they’re just dead cells,” I pointed out. The more hair we cut away, the bigger Livvie’s eyes looked, exactly what had happened to me. Her ears were small and delicate, which I’d never noticed before.
“Yeah,” said Olivia. She had a towel draped over her shirt. There was hair everywhere—on the counter, in the sink, all over the floor. My hoodie was covered with long blond strands.
The only place there weren’t long hairs was on Olivia’s head.
“We could leave it like this,” I offered. A spiky, somewhat uneven layer of hair covered her skull. “I mean, I’d even it out and everything.”
Olivia stared at her reflection. At first I thought she was considering what I was suggesting, but then I saw that she was looking into her own eyes and wasn’t seeing her head. “No,” she said, dropping her eyes to the counter and feeling around for her dad’s electric razor underneath all the hair. “It all needs to come off.”
Twenty minutes later, we were done. Olivia’s scalp was shiny and smooth, her forehead running up to the top of her head without any way to tell where her face ended and her scalp began. A small blue vein showed just above where her hairline must have been. Her eyes were even bigger than they’d been when her hair was short, but overall she looked small and fragile. We made eye contact in the mirror.
“So,” she said. “This is me bald.” Her voice shook a little, but it didn’t break.
I pulled on a lock of my hair and held the scissors to it. “I think I should join you. Sisters in baldness.”
But Livvie’s hand shot up. “No!” she said.
“I don’t care,” I assured her, not letting myself think about whether or not I cared. How could I care? “We’ll grow our hair back together.”
She took the scissors from my hand. “It’s only hair, anyway.” She looked at herself in the mirror, staring hard at her reflection. “Dr. Maxwell said I can go to school next week if I wear a surgical mask.” She paused briefly. “Bald with a surgical mask. Look! There goes that girl with cancer.” Her eyes welled up again, but then she shook her head, forcefully and took a deep, audible breath. “I’m going to get a hot pink wig.”
“Fantastic!” I said quickly. “I love it already.”
Livvie surveyed the hairy bathroom. “What a mess.”
“You go lie down,” I told her. “I’ll clean it up.”
Olivia hesitated for a second, but then she said, “Okay. I am kind of tired.”
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked quickly. “I could clean it up and just go so you can sleep.”
She shook her head. “I want you to stay. If I fall asleep, just wake me, okay?”
“Okay,” I promised.
Hair apparently has a life of its own. No matter how many times I went over the bathroom with a broom and a wet paper towel, there was still hair everywhere, almost as if each individual strand split into a dozen more every time I turned my back. Finally Mrs. Greco came by the bathroom. When she saw Olivia’s hair all over the place, she pressed her lips together into a tight, thin line, but she didn’t say anything and she didn’t cry. Then she disappeared, and a minute later she came back with the vacuum.
“How is she?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Mrs. Greco
put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m so glad she has you.”
I was scared I was going to start bawling. But I swallowed hard. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m lucky to have her, too.”
“We all are,” her mom said. “I thank God for her every day.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. How could you thank God for Olivia when God was the one who’d made her sick? That was my problem with religion. It didn’t make any sense.
When I went into Olivia’s room, she was curled up on her bed, fast asleep. Even though she’d told me to wake her, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I went over to her desk. On it I placed a thick lock of Olivia’s hair that I’d salvaged from the bathroom.
The room was dimly lit, but the hair in my hand seemed to gather whatever light there was, glowing—just as it had on Olivia’s head—with an intensity that almost made it seem alive. I glanced from the hair to Olivia, her shiny head all that was visible of her body, which was buried under her comforter.
I wished I could think of what to say to her. Maybe if I could have, I would have woken her up. But all I could think was, It doesn’t matter. And even though I knew that was true, I also knew that it wasn’t.
I grabbed a pen from the Lucite holder on the desk and slid a piece of paper out of the top drawer of her desk.
For the memory box. Call me when you wake up. Love ya.
xoxo, Me
I put the note next to the hair. Then I slipped out of the room and downstairs, leaving the house without saying goodbye to anyone.
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“Don’t forget to get your car washed on Saturday! All proceeds go to fight leukemia! Bake sale and car wash!”
There was a phalanx of cheerleaders around the front entrance to the building, all of them wearing their uniforms and handing out bright pink flyers. Stacy was standing on the bottom step, and when she saw me coming up the walk, she gave a yelp of joy, ran down, and threw her arms around me. Then she stepped back and handed me a flyer.
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