And then I thought about my own advice to my childhood friend, Sammy, after she and Austin broke up for the fourth time. I reminded her that he was only a teeny tiny little part of her life, that in five years he wouldn’t matter. No one in our school in Texas would matter to us. Not even the cool kids would matter when we were grown-ups. She said she’d never fully be able to forget him because he was my twin and our laugh was the same. We got distant after she and Austin split, and her marriage soon thereafter made it harder to keep in touch. Eventually she faded from my life like everyone else had.

I turned on the music and looked into the mirror. My dark hair washed out my tired face more than usual, and I thought about coloring it. I crouched down and opened the cabinet. Sure enough, I had a box of dye. A lighter brown than my hair was now, but not too drastic of a change.

Screw it, I decided.

I had the house to myself for the rest of the afternoon and I’d been thinking of changing my hair for a while anyway; it would be a few months until I could afford to go to the salon to get it done. I ripped the box open and followed the instructions, even though I knew how to do it by now. I mixed the dye, shook the bottle, and applied it carefully to my hair over the sink. I had lost count of how many times I’d changed my hair color in my life. My mom let me use temporary dye, a dark blue, when I was twelve. I would never forget the look on my father’s face when he came downstairs to see my mom and I both with deep blue streaks in our hair.

I set a timer for twenty minutes on my phone and rummaged through my cabinet to see what other luxuries I had. I found a face mask to use after the shower and grabbed my nail file and tweezers. I leaned my face to the mirror and brushed my eyebrows with a little brush meant for tooth flossing. My thick brows could definitely use a little shaping; I held the tweezers up and brought my face closer to the mirror. In my reflection, my hand was shaking, so I traded hands. The right hand was even worse, and because I had already committed to hair dye with no guarantee of the outcome, I didn’t want to risk messing my eyebrows up, too. I wasn’t that far gone.