“Stop moving!” Jules growled, her curling iron dangerously close to my ear. “Is this what you do at whatever one-percenters salon you go to? I hope you tip well.”

I scowled. “I haven’t even gotten a haircut since last year.”

“So that’s the problem.” She set down the curling iron and shimmied to the side, bobby pins sticking out of her mouth.

I sat staring at Jules’s cracked cabinet doors to keep from squirming, and a memory sprang to mind. Mom, getting me ready for my eighth-grade dance. She’d built it up in her mind for some reason, insisting on staying behind while Dad traveled to a conducting clinic in Japan, going to four shops with me to pick out just the right dress, doing my hair and age-appropriate makeup, taking pictures of me and my date, Wally Lew. We were firmly Just Friends—he would come out to me and Farrah a few months later—but Mom had acted like we were getting married, hands clasped to her heart. It was too much. She was trying so hard that I’d felt a weird kind of vicarious exhaustion that I couldn’t shake the whole night. I didn’t go to any dances after that. I think she was secretly relieved.

If she were home now, would she be ready with her camera?

I never even saw the photos she took of me and Wally. She’d probably deleted them.

The realization hit me like a slap, forcing a blink—so I didn’t notice Jules’s scissors heading for my face until they were already snipping, hair cascading in black spirals to the floor.

“What are you—?”

“Shhhhh,” Jules whispered, snipping the other side. “This is all we’re doing.”

She gathered my hair high, set it into some odd position with the pins, and once her mouth was empty, picked me up by the armpits, pivoting me like a puppet until the mirror loomed—and there I was.

My hair hung in loose ringlets, not frizzy-curly tangles. My face was fresh and rosy, eyes huge and smoky. I didn’t look anything like that little girl playing the piccolo or the one going to the eighth-grade dance. Maybe, just maybe, nobody would recognize me. I could just be Oscar’s plus one.

Before I left, I added one last touch—a silver pendant in the shape of an oak tree, a gift from Nora when I was ten. After the Lincoln Center photo shoot with the piccolo, etcetera, all the usual Amberley suspects had come here for drinks. Later, while Mom performed, Nora drew me into the kitchen and handed me a blue box, whispering, “This reminded me of you. All the incredible ways you’re growing up. Wonderful shoot today, sweetie—I am really, really proud.”

It was a tiny moment, no more than a minute, but it had saved me that night. I wondered if she knew how much.