2
Thrown with Great Force
8:32 A.M.
Imogen
Imogen Azar screeched to a halt.
Her back tire skidded in protest, but the rest of her scooter stayed upright. She had misjudged the distance to the curb by a good five feet. She’d had to pull up on the brakes hard in order to not accidentally crash through the window of the bookstore where she worked.
Typical. Just typical.
Imogen swung her leg over the moped. It wasn’t even a real bike. Just a dinky old Kawasaki that got the job done. Got her from point A to point B. Though, in the summer, it got her to point B with considerably more sweat on her body than she would have wanted. She left it there, on the sidewalk. Chicago PD could give her a ticket for all she cared. Imogen wasn’t going to spend another second outside in this heat.
She could feel the sweat already trickling down her armpits. Everything was wet and slick and disgusting here in the summer. The store was situated in Wicker Park, beyond the northwest edge of downtown Chicago, where the heat from the bigger skyscrapers just baked into the whole area and where they were too far inland from the lake to get much of a wind to clear any of the heat out. But Imogen wore a leather jacket, weather be damned. Because no matter how disgustingly hot she was feeling, road rash was on her list of hard nopes for the entire rest of her life. She’d gotten it once while she was learning to ride her scooter and that was one time too many.
Imogen didn’t bother taking off her helmet. She grabbed her bag out of the stash compartment in the scooter, then headed into work. She slammed the door behind her and saw that Little Miss Perfect, the self-appointed Coolest Girl in the World, and Brooding Art Boy were all already there. All three of them were staring at her.
All of this was still typical.
Cool Girl—whose real name Imogen had always thought ought to have been something like Skylar or Brooklyn or Indie, because Daniella was just such an ordinary name for such an extraordinary girl—spoke up first.
“Imogen. How wonderful to have you gracing us with your presence. Are you going to wear the helmet during work hours to prevent scaring away the customers with all of that sunshine that you bring to the job?” Cool Girl smirked, her north-suburb staccato especially prominent when she was giving someone else hell.
Little Miss Perfect gave Cool Girl a gentle, correcting tap on the arm. “Hi, Imogen,” said Little Miss Perfect in her most appeasing, brightest voice, because Little Miss Perfect was never not trying. “Hot outside, huh?”
It fascinated Imogen to look at the contrast between the two girls. Little Miss Perfect had dark hair, controlled curls. She was pretty and femme and everything about her was a little bit soft—big eyes, wide nose, full lips.
And then there was Cool Girl, with last night’s eyeliner and her hair bleached and frizzy. Cool Girl was not pretty in any sense of the word. She was electric—and occasionally bordering on stunning—but nothing so palatable or socially acceptable as pretty. She had a proud nose that jutted out from her face and eyebrows that punctuated her angular features. Like somebody crossed Maria Callas with Debbie Harry and gave her a worse attitude than the two of them combined.
And Brooding Art Boy, he just stared at Imogen. For a second, Imogen stared right back.
It was strange that Imogen felt so at home in a place where she had so little in common with her coworkers. But the facts were the facts, and Imogen had stopped questioning the truth of them a long, long time ago. Wild Nights was better than home, for reasons that would always remain a little mysterious to Imogen. There was love at home. Here, there was none.
She would rather be here.
Imogen committed herself to ignoring them all and kept on walking. One step after the other, the heels of her heavy boots digging and clomping against the old wood floor. The back of the store got darker and darker as she moved away from the storefront facade and into the spaces where the light from the windows didn’t reach that well.
Imogen didn’t stop until she got to the employee bathroom in the back. It was off the side of the break room, where they kept Wild Nights’ boxes of surplus inventory that didn’t fit in the storeroom, along with all the staff lockers and the two sad, worn cozy chairs that looked like they hadn’t even been new when The Golden Girls had gone off the air.
Imogen slammed the bathroom door shut.
Slamming felt good. Felt like a way to wake up. To make noise. To make something out of that awful nothing that was swallowing her whole, that was invading her chest. That nothing that made her numb everywhere.
Imogen finally took off her helmet. She slammed that on the dresser that Jo—Wild Nights’ manager—had put inside the bathroom, next to the sink. She dropped her bag onto the floor. It landed with a satisfying thud.
Imogen needed all these noises, all these sounds. Because aside from the everlasting nothing that was invading her body, there was also a string of thoughts running through her mind. Telling her to give up. Telling her to give in. Telling her nothing was worth it anyway. Imogen needed the noise to break the sound inside her head. She needed the noise to know there was feeling, honestly any sensation outside of herself.
For a moment, Imogen couldn’t look at herself in the bathroom mirror. All she could do was hang on to both sides of the sink, propping herself up with the support of the cool porcelain. And then Imogen looked up, into the mirror. She saw her face, looked into her own eyes, assessing the resolve she saw there. She nodded at herself.
She needed this. Needed a clean break. Needed something new, something different.
She needed to feel cleansed, and there was only one thing she thought would work. And there, in the bathroom of the break room at Wild Nights, was the only place where Imogen could even imagine it would work.
Imogen picked her backpack up off the aged tile floor and leaned it against the yellowing porcelain sink. She dug into the bag and found the hair clippers—the ones she’d taken out of her father’s drawer, the ones that he used to trim his beard—and she stood back up, grabbing a handful of her dark hair in one hand and holding the clippers with no guard on in the other. She turned them on, feeling the weight of them, the buzzing vibration in her hand. They were heavier than she thought they would be. And for the first time, she felt something in her hands that wasn’t cold or numb. She felt cool plastic and a humming motor. She felt her hands shaking into life. As though the clippers could resuscitate her, could give her back what she thought she’d already lost for good.
Then she took a deep breath and began to shave her head.
She took smaller, half-inch-size chunks at first. But then she grew in confidence with every stroke of the clippers, and she began to shave larger clumps of hair. Every clip of hair that came off was a weight. A memory. A wince and then a piece of relief. That relief grew stronger, grew bolder. It took hold of the nothing inside her chest and made a tiny, tiny spark.
Imogen had plugs all over her head now. She took the clippers and was so much more careful this time, so much more methodical. She let the shaver hum across her head, smoothing out the rough patches. Her fingers prickled against the freshly shorn hair. The clippers themselves were marvelous, efficient, almost magic in their work. The vibrations that Imogen had felt along her hands now reverberated across her scalp. Pinpricks of soothing feeling coming back at the very root of her hairs. Because that was all that was left now, the roots of her hair.