“Oh my God,” I breathe. “I’m—I’m gonna have to buy a wig, or maybe I can just convince everyone I’m really into hats now, or I could shave my head and pretend I had brain surgery—”
“Dylan,” Mary says.
That stops me.
“How do you know my name?” I ask her.
She rolls her glassy, bloodshot eyes. “Just because you choose not to talk to me doesn’t mean I can’t still hear what goes on in this house. Your mom watchesBarefoot Contessawhen she does laundry and your dad has had ‘Eye of the Tiger’ stuck in his head for the past week. Also, your mom said it the morning after we met, and I was standing right here. Let me help you, okay?”
It’s never occurred to me that she actuallyliveshere.
“Okay,” I say.
“Get your hair wet,” she says.
I dunk my head under the faucet and turn it on.
“Then comb it out.”
It takes a disturbingly short amount of time to get that done. It’s really, really short.
“Look, it’s better already.”
She directs me through shaping things up—she has totalk me into trimming any more length off, but I do, around the front and the sides. Her voice is gentler than I’ve ever heard it. “A little rounder on the left, over your ear.”
When I’m not checking my work, I’m studying her face for the first time. I’ve always been too scared to spend this long in front of the mirror, but I’m stuck here, so I look.
Aside from all the blood drenching her hair and face and nightgown, she looks pretty, well, normal. Probably a year or two older than me, with full cheeks and a heart-shaped mouth and a strangely modern shape to her dark eyebrows. Her hair is long and dark, plastered to her cheekbones and neck in whorls, and her skin looks like it would be a lovely shade of tawny brown if the life hadn’t been sucked out of it. Her eyes are a deep, emergency-room red and ringed with dark circles, but it kind of works on her.
When we’re done, I have a choppy halo of hair, but it looks less like I got caught in a Weedwacker and more like it happened on purpose. I dust bits of hair off my shoulders and turn my face left and right, examining how it looks from different angles.
I look like me.
My mouth tugs into a smile. Through bloody teeth, Mary smiles, too.
The next morning at breakfast, my mom spills a whole pot of coffee when she sees me, but she doesn’t tell me she hates it. She just asks if everything’s okay, and I say yes, which is alie but also not. At practice, Emily tells me she likes my new hair, and I’m pretty sure she’s not being sarcastic.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sinks in the locker room and panic starts to bubble up. I still look like me, but looking like me in front of everyone is kind of scary. Maybe it wasn’t so scary last night because I was seeing myself next to a bloody apparition.
When I get home, I go straight to my bathroom, shut the door, and turn on the water so nobody can hear me. As soon as I’m in the same room as her again, it’s the opposite of how I felt when I first saw her. Everything inside me settles.
She raises her dark eyebrows at me, and I realize I need to fill the silence.
I ask her the first thing I can think of: “Why do you sound like that when you talk?”
“Like what?” she asks.
“Like me. Like you know what texting is. Like, normal.”
“What else am I supposed to sound like?”
“Aren’t you a ghost from like three hundred years ago or something?”
“Oh, I only died, like, two months ago.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Mary says. “Don’t really know how I ended up haunting mirrors. One minute I was walking under some construction scaffolding, and the next I was in your mirror.”
