And then everyone would know.
Mom was waiting right inside the front door.
“How’d everything go today?” she asked. Anya heard the strain in Mom’s voice, heard how hard Mom was trying to make her words sound like an ordinary question, something an ordinary mom would ask her ordinary daughter on an ordinary day. Anya wanted to say, “Mom, you don’t have to pretend too.” On an ordinary day Mom would not be perched right on the edge of the living-room chair, waiting to pounce the minute Anya walked in the door.
“Fine,” Anya said.
Mom stopped pretending. “Did anybody say anything about your—”
“No,” Anya said before Mom had to say that word. Wig. “I don’t think anybody even noticed.”
“Well,” Mom said. “That’s good, isn’t it? So it doesn’t matter. We worried for nothing.”
Except Anya had wanted to play soccer at recess, but she’d been scared to, for fear of her wig slipping off. And she’d been thirsty after lunch, but she’d been afraid to tilt her head down over the water fountain. And during math she’d dropped her favorite pencil, and rather than bend down to pick it up, she’d watched it roll away. She could imagine the janitor sweeping it up right now.
“I guess,” Anya said. But there was tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, all the way up until the end of the school year, and if her real hair didn’t start growing back before that—well, Anya still thought she had plenty to worry about. “Hey, you won’t believe this. The Staph Infection asked me if I wanted to sit with her on the school bus.”
“Anya! You’re not supposed to call people names like that!”
Anya just grinned. Staph was a type of bacteria. Anya’s dad knew all about it because he worked in the lab at the hospital. He was the one who’d come up with that nickname for Stef Englewood, the bossiest girl in fourth grade. One night at dinner, when Anya had been telling her parents about Stef trying to make sure she and her friends got the best parts in the class play, Dad had said, “What’s that girl’s name again? Staph Infection? She sounds pretty lethal to me!”
Mom had said, in that same horrified voice, “Todd! Don’t encourage Anya to call people names!” But Anya had loved it. The secret nickname Dad made up seemed to vaccinate Anya once and for all against Stef and the mean things she did.
But that was before.
“So did you?” Mom asked now.
“What?”
“Sit with Stef on the bus.”
“No. Why would I?” Anya asked.
“To be friends . . .”
“Not with Stef Englewood!” Anya said. She wanted to shake her head for emphasis, but there was the wig to think about.
Secretly she wondered if maybe she would have sat with Stef this afternoon if she hadn’t had the wig. But Stef was the kind of person who’d notice.
Heck, she was the kind of person who would reach over and give the wig a tug, just to see if it moved.
“Mom, I have friends,” Anya said. “Just not any best, best friends.”
“Mmm,” Mom said.
Anya knew that if it hadn’t been for her hair and the wig, Mom would have said more, would have suggested inviting someone over or signing up for some activity. Mom was the kind of person who liked a lot of people around and something to do every minute.
Anya wasn’t like that.
She’d overheard her parents talking about it, plenty of times, when they thought she wasn’t listening.
“Maybe we need to force her to get involved with something, take a few chances,” Mom always said.
“But as long as she’s happy . . . ,” Dad always countered.
That was when Anya always stopped listening. Because she had been happy.
Before.
“I think I’m going to go to my room for a while,” she told her mother now.
“Don’t you want a snack first?” Mom asked.
Anya started to shake her head, then remembered that might not be such a great idea.
“No. I’m not hungry.”
“All right,” Mom said. But she was biting her lip. Her face was white and strained.
Anya went down the hall, stepped into her room, and shut the door behind her. She slumped with her back against the door, as if she was holding out the rest of the world.
Back when Anya was younger, Mom had turned her room into a pink paradise, with a flowery border stenciled on the walls, a frilly eyelet comforter on the canopy bed, dolls in pink dresses on a shelf above the dresser. Even when she was four, Anya had known the room was more Mom than Anya. Over the years Anya had gradually added a pile of soccer balls and jump ropes in the corner, art supplies spilling across the desk. The pink-dress dolls were long gone, replaced by books about the stars. On her last birthday Anya had begged for, and finally gotten, a new canopy and comforter for her bed—they were the deep blue of the night sky and had tiny pinpricks of silver scattered across them like tiny suns and moons and stars. Looking up into her new canopy every night, Anya could imagine that the roof was gone and she was staring straight up into the heavens. Her room finally felt like it belonged to her.
Except now there was a wig stand smack in the middle of the dresser.
Anya went over to the window and tugged on the shade, making sure it was pulled as low as possible. Then she walked to the dresser.
The wig stand was smooth, rounded plastic, head shaped but blank faced. Anya was glad it didn’t have any eyes, a nose, or a mouth drawn on it, like all the stands back at the wig store. She could still feel the way all those eyes had stared at her when Mom said, ever so gently, “You’ll have to take your hat off so they can see if the wig fits.” Anya knew the eyes were only plastic, only fakes, but it didn’t feel that way.
Now Anya reached out and touched the smooth top of her own wig stand. Even without eyes, even without a face, the wig stand seemed to taunt her. “Give me my hair back,” the wig stand seemed to be saying. “That’s my hair you’re wearing. You don’t have enough hair of your own.”
Tears blurred Anya’s vision. Forgetting all the instructions for carefully removing her wig, she grabbed the top of it and yanked hard. The toupee tape made a ripping sound letting go. It hurt.
Toupee tape. Anya hated that name. Old men wore toupees. She was a little girl. She shouldn’t have to wear anything that had the word toupee in it.
Anya tossed the wig, crooked, onto the wig stand. Forget carefully reshaping it. Forget taking good care of it so it’d last a long time.
Then, because she was terrified she might catch a glimpse of herself without the wig, she threw herself across the bed, buried her face in her pillows.
She remembered what Daddy had said: “Hey, it’s only hair.” He’d been trying to comfort Mom. He wouldn’t say anything like that to Anya.
She remembered what the doctor had told her parents: “At least she doesn’t have cancer.”
Hey, it’s only hair, Anya told herself. At least I don’t have cancer.
But they were only words. They did nothing to loosen the knot of misery in her stomach, nothing to stop the sobs choking out of her throat, nothing to make the hair grow back on her head.
Four
The news threatened to come bursting out of Keely’s mouth the minute Mom picked her up from after-school care. But she could tell Mom was too busy barking orders to listen: “Hurry up! We’ve got to pick up Jacob. The day care called just as I was walking out the door—he’s been coughing a lot and they’re kind of worried. If he has to stay home sick tomorrow, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
What if Anya’s cancer had started with coughing? Keely didn’t think it worked that way, but still. Jacob was her little brother, just five years old, cute and funny when he wasn’t being a pest. Keely almost felt like letting a sentimental tear or two slip out of her eye.
Mom was still talking.
“And Brian’s basketball practice ended five minutes ago, and Kevin thinks I’m going to let him have the car tonight to
go to play practice. . . .”
Brian and Kevin were Keely’s older brothers. They weren’t ever cute and funny.
Mom jerked up the door handle of their SUV. She was already reaching for the cell phone before she’d fully slid into her seat.
“Mom, wait,” Keely said as soon as she’d scrambled into the back and dumped her book bag on the floor. “I have to tell you something.”
“If it’s not someone dying, it’s going to have to wait,” Mom said, still moving fast.
“But it is!” Keely said. “I mean, it might be.”
Mom turned around and looked at Keely.
“Anya Seaver has cancer.”
“Who?” Mom asked. But her voice was soft now, sympathetic.
“Anya Seaver. She’s in my class at school. She’s been in my class every year since kindergarten. And now she has cancer.”
Mom wasn’t turning the key in the ignition. She wasn’t reaching for the cell phone anymore. She let out a soft “Ohhh,” then was silent and still for a full minute, which was kind of a record for Mom. “What type of cancer does she have? What’s the prognosis—oh, I guess that’s not something they’d discuss with kids. Oh, her poor parents. I’ll have to give them a call and see if there’s anything we can do. Is their number in the school directory, do you think?”
“We-e-ell”—Keely twisted uncomfortably in her seat—“I don’t think you should call. I think they’re trying to keep it secret.”
“Then how do you know?” Mom asked.
“Stef said—”
“Oh, Stef,” Mom said dismissively. She turned the key and began angling out of the parking space.
“No, really,” Keely said. She hated it that Mom didn’t like Stef. “Stef noticed that Anya was wearing a wig today, and Stef figured out that she must have lost her hair because she’s going through chemotherapy, so she must be really, really sick. Only, she must not want people to know.”
“Come on, Keely. Are you going to let Stef fool you again?” Mom asked. She was weaving in and out of traffic now. She sped up going through a yellow light on the corner of Hard Road.
“Mom! I saw the wig too!”
Mom was stopped at a red light now. She turned around.
“Keely, think. Just because this little girl’s wearing a wig, that doesn’t mean she has cancer. There could be plenty of other reasons someone might wear a wig.”
“Like what?” Keely asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom said. “I don’t have time to think about it right now. But I do know that if the girl with the wig—Anya, is it?—isn’t talking about it, it’s really none of your business. Or Stef’s.”
The red light turned. Mom hit the gas and sped into the parking lot of Jacob’s day care center.
“Just stay in the car,” Mom instructed Keely. “I’ll be quick. Get some of your homework done while you wait.”
Keely watched Mom rush to the door and punch in the code on the security box with lightning speed. Keely could tell: Mom had already forgotten about Anya, already decided there was nothing to worry about, nothing to be done.
Keely wasn’t going to forget.
Five
It had started in the fall.
In a way, Anya could see how that might be funny. Leaves let go of tree branches and fell in the fall. Falling stars streaked across the sky in October. Why shouldn’t her hair let go of her scalp and fall too?
Mom had noticed it first, one day in November when she was French-braiding Anya’s hair before school. Mom had three separate strands of half-braided hair clutched in her left hand, while her right hand gathered the next clump to weave into the braid. Then Mom had suddenly cried out.
“Anya, what is this? You don’t have any hair back here!”
“Huh?” Anya said. She’d been reading while Mom braided. She was a million miles away, in Camelot, where Arthur was pulling a sword from a stone.
“Feel back here,” Mom said, guiding Anya’s fingers to the lower right side of her scalp. “You’ve got a bald spot the size of a quarter.”
The skin was smooth and no hairier than Anya’s arm. It didn’t even feel like skin that was supposed to have hair growing on it.
“You didn’t get bubble gum stuck in your hair and cut it out, did you?” Mom asked.
Anya didn’t bother answering such a silly question. She and Mom both knew she wasn’t the type of kid to chew bubble gum, let alone get it caught in her hair. And if she’d cut gum out of her hair with scissors, there’d be prickly, shorn hair there now, not blank, smooth skin.
“How long has this been here?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know it was there,” Anya said.
“Well, I’ll have to braid your hair differently so that it doesn’t show,” Mom said. “Maybe I’ll call the doctor, too. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
By the time Mom had spoken to the doctor, and he’d referred Anya to a specialist, and she’d finally gotten an appointment to be seen, Anya had two more quarter-size patches of empty skin on her scalp. And any time she brushed her hair, more came out on the bristles.
Anya didn’t brush her hair much anymore.
Mom didn’t braid it anymore either, because the best style for covering all the bare patches was letting it just hang straight down. Then Anya got a bare spot right on the top of her head.
She had to start parting her hair over on the side and holding it in place over the bare spot with a big silver barrette.
“The doctor will tell us what to do,” Mom said as she carefully fixed Anya’s hair the Monday before Thanksgiving. “I’m sure we’ll have this cleared up in no time.”
Anya didn’t tell Mom she’d found a fourth spot, just behind her right ear, only that morning. The doctor’s appointment was that afternoon. Anya was glad they were finally going to do something, and she wouldn’t have to have Mom fussing over her hair ever again.
But the doctor didn’t smile and give her medicine and tell her she’d soon be cured. He frowned.
“We’ll have to do some tests,” he said. “But it looks like alopecia areata.”
“Alo-what?” Mom said.
Anya thought that whatever alopecia areata was couldn’t be too bad, because it was such a pretty name. Alopecia areata shouldn’t be a disease or a condition or whatever it was. It should be one of the ladies in King Arthur’s court. It should be the name of a foreign beauty queen.
“The best way I can explain it is that she has become allergic to her own hair,” the doctor said. “It’s an auto-immune disease, though when I say that, people get scared. She’s perfectly healthy otherwise. Does anyone else in your family have alopecia areata? There is a genetic component.”
“No,” Mom said. “No one. I’ve never heard of it before.”
Anya waited. Any minute the doctor was going to say, “And here’s what you do to get your hair back. . . .”
“So, what’s the treatment?” Anya’s mother asked.
The doctor sighed. “Well, you have some choices. . . .”
Anya let her mind wander while the grown-ups talked about minoxidil and cortisone cream, and which medicines were or were not safe for kids. Anya got bored. There wasn’t even anything to look at in the examining room except the doctor’s big framed diploma on the wall. Anya read it over three times, even though it was full of words like henceforth and heretofore. Then she couldn’t concentrate on henceforths and heretofores because Mom was getting upset.
“You mean there’s a possibility she’ll never get her hair back?” Mom was saying. Her voice sounded the way it did when she and Dad were arguing and Mom was about to cry. “And she might lose the rest of her hair too?”
“I didn’t say it was likely,” the doctor said. “But I wanted to prepare you for all the possibilities. Alopecia areata is a very capricious disease. It’s impossible to predict what will happen. Some people forego treatment and regain their hair anyway, and never have a repeat episode. Others go through a cycle of lo
sing and gaining for a period of years. Others go completely bald and even lose their eyebrows. Then there’s alopecia universalis, where people lose every bit of hair on their entire body. But that’s very rare.”
The doctor had a soothing voice. It flowed like honey, slow and sweet. But Mom seemed immune to his charm.
“How can we make sure that doesn’t happen to Anya?” Mom was asking, horrified.
“You can’t,” the doctor said.
Six
Anya still had her eyebrows. She still had her eyelashes and the tiny, light hair on her arms. But by Christmas she didn’t have enough hair on her head to look normal.
“It’s a good thing you got out so early in December this year,” Mom said. “Nobody noticed at school, did they? Here, let me put some more of this cream on those spots—your hair is bound to grow back by January.”
Anya’s grandparents lived too far away to visit for Christmas every year, and this was one of the years that nobody in Anya’s family was traveling. So all Christmas break Anya sat inside, hiding out, waiting for her hair to grow back.
Christmas morning Anya’s dad didn’t get his camera out like usual and take pictures of Anya-beside-the-tree, Anya-with-her-stack-of-presents, Anya-with-the-bows-pulled-off-her-presents-and-stuck-in-her-hair. Anya heard her parents conferring in the kitchen.
“Shouldn’t I . . . ,” her dad said. Anya couldn’t make out his next few words. Then his voice rose in a question, “. . . like normal?”
“Good Lord, no,” Mom said.
Anya looked at the tower of wrapped boxes beside the tree. She’d gotten more presents than ever.
She didn’t want any of them.
At Christmas dinner she shifted mashed potatoes around her plate with her fork. She stabbed chunks of turkey but didn’t bother bringing the forkful up to her mouth. And Mom and Dad, who were usually big promoters of the Clean Plate Club, didn’t say a word.
She took to wearing an old baseball cap that had belonged to her dad when he was a boy. It said CINCINNATI REDS across the top. The bill stuck out so far Anya could pull it clear down to her nose, and no one could see her eyes. That was good. Anya could cry under that baseball cap and nobody would know.