I wanted to blurt out, You still think I’m beautiful, right? I bit the words back. “Still being beautiful” was not the point – not that I’d ever really thought I was, anyway; it was Alex who thought that. But the important thing now was just staying alive. In the bedroom, I could still hear the newscast that had been playing non-stop ever since we’d turned on the TV: “Police are searching urgently for the pair for questioning... Again, if you see them, do not approach them yourself, but call our special hotline... They are suspected to be armed and dangerous...”

I knew without looking that they were showing my sophomore school photo again – and that it was probably on every Church of Angels website in the world by now. So to be honest, changing my most noticeable feature hadn’t exactly been a tough decision. At least no one knew what Alex looked like. There was a police sketch, but it was laughably wrong: the security guard who’d been at the cathedral had remembered him as being about ten years older and fifty pounds heavier than he really was, bulging with muscle like a football player.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl in the mirror. It was like a stranger had stolen my face. I reached for the red eyebrow pencil I’d asked Alex to buy and traced it over my eyebrows. The effect was much more dramatic than I would have expected. Before, I barely even noticed my eyebrows when I looked at myself. Now they seemed to jump right out at me.

This was me, now.

Feeling oddly shaken, I put down the pencil and ran my fingers through what was left of my hair. Half of it spiked up, the other half flopped down. Someone, somewhere, might pay good money for a haircut like this – like the type of runway model who’d wear a garbage-bag dress held together with safety pins, maybe.

“I’m glad you don’t want to be a hairdresser,” I said to Alex. “Because I don’t think your work is very mainstream.”

He smiled and touched the back of my neck; it felt weirdly vulnerable to have the skin there so exposed. “No one will recognize you, that’s what’s important,” he said. “Christ, I almost wouldn’t recognize you.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound quite so forlorn, but the thought of Alex not recognizing me was just...wrong.

Catching my look, he wrapped his arms around me from behind and drew me close against his chest. The top of my head came up just past his chin. “Hey,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. “We’ll both get used to it. And you’re still gorgeous; you know that, right? It’s just different, that’s all.”