Because of Anya

  “Todd, you can’t be so hard on yourself,” Mom said. “None of this is your fault.”

  “I know,” Dad said. “And it’s not your fault, and it’s certainly not Anya’s fault. It’s just something that happened. And it may end, and it may not, and we’ve just got to go on with our lives regardless.”

  “Daddy . . . ,” Anya said, and couldn’t go on. Her face twisted. Why did her body keep betraying her? First her hair fell out, now she couldn’t keep from crying. Rather than sit there sobbing in front of Mom and Dad, she whirled around and raced to her room.

  Anya buried her face in her pillow. Then she yanked another pillow over the rest of her head. She didn’t care how badly she mashed her wig. Yes, she did—she stopped crying long enough to jerk the wig from her head and fling it to the floor.

  Someone knocked at her door.

  “Anya?” Mom called. “Can I come in?”

  “I just want to be alone right now,” Anya called back. She sniffed. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask to be excused.”

  Anya expected Mom to come in anyway and sit on the side of the bed and stroke Anya’s hair—no, pat her back, maybe—and tell Anya she shouldn’t cry, everything was going to be all right. But Mom didn’t. Anya heard the footsteps that meant Mom was walking away.

  That made Anya cry even harder.

  Anya didn’t know how long she cried, but she soaked both pillows with tears and used up half a box of Kleenex wiping her eyes and nose. When she couldn’t cry anymore, she sat up dizzily. The room was dark. For all she knew, it could be the middle of the night. No—Mom and Dad were still up. Anya could see a thin line of light under the door and hear the hum of voices that meant they were sitting in the living room talking.

  Anya was thirsty. It seemed like she’d used up every last drop of liquid in her whole body making tears. Shakily she slipped out of bed. The crying had made her lightheaded and weak-kneed; she felt like some invalid who’d been confined to her bed for months.

  But she’d felt like an invalid even before she started crying. It was like she wasn’t even herself anymore, Anya Seaver. She was someone else, some disabled person who couldn’t even grow hair.

  You’re thirsty, Anya reminded herself, before she started crying again. Go get a drink.

  Anya bent over and placed the wig back on her head. Then she pushed open her door and stepped into the dim hall. She turned toward the bathroom. She could hear Mom and Dad better now, but she didn’t feel like talking to them yet. She was glad of the wall that shielded her from them.

  Then she heard what they were saying.

  “No, I can’t cope with this!” Mom was sobbing. “This is my little girl! I keep looking ahead—what’s it going to be like for her when it’s summer and all the other kids want to go to the swimming pool but she can’t? What’s it going to be like when she gets to middle school and they have sleepovers where they do each other’s makeup and hair? What’s it going to be like when she gets to high school and nobody wants to date her because she’s bald?”

  Anya couldn’t hear Dad’s answer. She couldn’t make herself keep walking toward the bathroom, either.

  “And you wonder why I don’t think we should keep trying for another baby?” Mom cried. “Maybe put another child through this agony?”

  Anya froze, as still as if she’d been turned to stone. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. Not that, she thought. Alopecia’s not going to take that away too.

  Anya remembered a perfect day last September when she and Mom and Dad had taken a picnic to the state park. All three of them had thrown a Frisbee back and forth; Dad got the soccer ball out, and they played a crazy game where Anya got to be goalie for both teams. It ended when all three collapsed in a heap together, laughing.

  “Anya, you really need a brother or a sister to help you defend those goals,” Dad had said.

  And Anya had looked from Dad to Mom, and she’d seen that it wasn’t a joke. And then both Mom and Dad had explained that they were thinking about having another baby, and they weren’t sure how Anya would take the news, because she’d be so much older than her brother or sister, but—

  “Are you kidding?” Anya had interrupted. “I’m thrilled! I’m delighted! I’m”—she came up with one of Mrs. Hobson’s vocabulary words—“ecstatic!”

  She was so overjoyed she’d done cartwheels, right there in the grass, six or seven in a row.

  That was when she could still do cartwheels without worrying about her wig falling off.

  For weeks after that picnic Anya had imagined a new baby in the family. She had imagined the baby clapping her little hands, cooing and gurgling with joy when Anya got home from school. She had even imagined taking the baby for walks in a stroller, to give Mom a rest, and having all the neighbors stop and admire the baby and tell Anya, “Well, aren’t you a good big sister.”

  Those daydreams hadn’t exactly fallen out of her head along with her hair. She’d just pushed them to the back of her mind, to wait in suspended animation until her hair grew back.

  And now Mom was saying she didn’t want a baby anymore, because of the alopecia.

  Because of Anya.

  Anya turned and fled back to her room to cry some more.

  Twelve

  Keely had stood up to Stef.

  Keely lay in bed that night, practically hugging herself with joy and wonderment and—yes—relief. She’d stood up to Stef and nothing had happened.

  Keely never stood up to anybody. She’d never stood up to her brothers when they teased her. She’d never stood up to Mom when Mom was rushing around tossing off orders like a drill sergeant. And most of all, Keely had never stood up to Stef or Tory or Nicole.

  But that afternoon Keely had.

  Keely propped herself up on one elbow and stared out the window at the full moon while she relived the end of second recess in her mind.

  Talking to Anya had been . . . hard. Anya just had such a miserable look in her eyes. Keely had never seen someone so sad. She ached for Anya. And the longer Keely talked to her, the more certain Keely was that she wouldn’t do what Stef wanted her to do: tug on Anya’s wig and see if it moved.

  “Well, I’ve got to go,” Keely had finished up. “It’s been nice talking to you. See you later.” Keely’s hands didn’t move up toward Anya’s wig; she didn’t even lean in close to try to see what was under the wig. Then she walked back to where Stef and Tory and Nicole were waiting. She felt like a hero returning from war—a hero like Martin Luther King or Gandhi, because she’d refused to fight, refused to do anything cruel.

  “You could have just given her hair a little pull,” Stef said when Keely reported the entire conversation and admitted what she hadn’t done.

  “No, I couldn’t,” Keely said. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see the look on her face. Stef, I think she really is dying. I’m not going to do something mean like that to someone who’s dying.”

  And it was Stef who dropped her eyes, Stef who couldn’t meet Keely’s gaze, Stef who was ashamed.

  “Then one of you do it,” Stef said to Tory and Nicole.

  Slowly, very slowly, Tory and Nicole shook their heads, declining.

  They were more scared of Anya than they were of Stef. They didn’t even want to go near someone who might be dying. They weren’t as brave as Keely.

  Stef’s face turned red then, and her eyes got hard. This was a look that Keely had always been terrified of before. Before, that look would always send Keely scrambling to do whatever Stef wanted—telling Kruti her earrings were ugly, telling the third graders they weren’t allowed to sit at Stef’s table during lunch, telling Mom that Keely absolutely, positively had to have a Limited Too shirt like everyone else. All those things that made Keely’s stomach churn and her skin crawl. She didn’t like Limited Too shirts. She hated being mean. She just hated even worse to have Stef mad at her.

  But at second recess Stef’s angry look didn’t transform Keely into an obedient slave, as usual. At se
cond recess Keely narrowed her own eyes, glared right back at Stef.

  “And Stef, so help me, if you pull Anya’s hair yourself, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  Thirteen

  The third day that Anya had to wear her wig to school was gym day.

  The gym teacher, Mrs. Vance, had announced back in December that as soon as they came back from Christmas break, they’d be starting gymnastics.

  Gymnastics. Somersaults. Cartwheels. Handstands. Backbends. Flips.

  Anya didn’t even like leaning over, for fear of losing her wig. With gymnastics, Mrs. Vance might as well have been plotting to humiliate Anya.

  The ladies back at Josephine’s Wig Shop had given her a few tips for dealing with phys ed.

  “Your wig will stay on and be secure under normal circumstances,” the tallest woman—Josephine?—had said. “But a lot of our girls have found that it’s a good idea to wear a headband when you have gym.”

  “Oh,” Anya had said weakly.

  Nobody wore headbands at school. Headbands hadn’t been in style since second grade, when Stef Englewood and her friends all decided to grow out their bangs at the same time, and they needed some way to keep all the in-between-length hair out of their eyes. Anya had kept her bangs. She didn’t even own one of those stupid little plastic headbands.

  But the headband Josephine was talking about wasn’t little and plastic. It was elastic and wide—at least two inches across—and it circled Anya’s entire head.

  “There!” Mom said as she finished helping Anya put her wig on the morning of gym day. She snapped the headband in place. “What do you think?”

  Mom was being extra cheerful this morning. Unless you looked really closely at the puffiness around her eyes, you’d never know she’d been sobbing her heart out on Daddy’s shoulder the night before.

  Anya tried not to look really closely. She didn’t look in the mirror Mom was holding out either.

  “Feels tight,” Anya said. She gave her head an experimental shake. The wig didn’t budge. “I don’t think it’ll fall off.”

  “The headband’s kind of cute, too,” Mom said. “I predict everyone will be asking where you got it.”

  Then what will I say? Anya wondered. “Josephine’s Wig Shop”? “Shave your head and go down there right now”?

  But Mom’s perkiness tricked her into looking in the mirror. Anya was almost surprised to see her own familiar face staring back at her: the familiar brown eyes, the thin nose, the lips that were pretending to smile for Mom. Anya felt like she didn’t have a right to that face anymore; she felt like such a different person that nobody else should be able to recognize her either.

  Above her face the wig was stiff, but cut and tinted to look just like her original hair. In fact, the only thing that looked weird was the headband.

  But it looked really, really weird. It looked like something an old lady would wear—and not a normal old lady either. It’d have to be some old lady who still wore the same clothes she’d worn back in the 1960s: gaudy calf-length pants in unnatural colors like neon lime and electric orange, wild shirts with huge flowers or geometric designs. And, to top it all off, some thick, bright red headband like Anya’s.

  “Anya?” Mom said. “Is something wrong?”

  I can’t go to school looking like this, Anya thought. Everyone’s going to laugh.

  “No,” Anya said. “I’m fine.”

  Fourteen

  Nobody laughed. Some people stared—Anya even felt Mrs. Hobson’s eyes lingering on her too long during spelling. Stef Englewood and her little gang kept whispering together, and turning around and looking, then whispering some more.

  Anya spent as much time as possible during recess hiding out in the bathroom so no one would try to talk to her.

  Then it was time for gym.

  Anya walked down the hall on shaking legs. This was worse than going to the dentist, worse than going to the doctor to get a shot, worse than that time back in third grade when she’d had to stand up in front of the whole class and give a five-minute speech. It seemed just plain wrong to keep going forward when she knew that what waited for her in the gym might be her worst nightmare.

  “Hello, fourth grade,” Mrs. Vance boomed as soon as Anya’s class stepped into the room. “Ready for some fun?”

  Mrs. Vance was the kind of gym teacher who must have hated school when she was a kid herself. She acted like everyone ought to be really grateful to her because phys ed had to be the only enjoyable part of the school day.

  “I know you all spent your whole Christmas break wishing and wishing for school to start again so we could get going on the gymnastics unit,” Mrs. Vance said. “Well, the moment you’ve been longing for is finally here!”

  She started dividing them up into groups. Anya was hoping for the balance beam, but Mrs. Vance sent Yolanda, Leah, Sammy, and Ryan in that direction. Anya waited, her heart sinking further with every assignment Mrs. Vance doled out.

  When just six kids were left, Mrs. Vance announced, “Okay, the rest of you can go practice front and back rolls and cartwheels on those mats over there. We’ll rotate you onto the other equipment as soon as possible.”

  Anya was one of the six kids.

  So was Stef Englewood.

  Anya stood as far back in the group as possible while Tyler showed off a dramatically flawed cartwheel.

  “Don’t you know you’re supposed to keep your legs straight?” Stef said. She did a cartwheel of her own, smooth and polished. “I’ve been taking gymnastics since I was three. This is so easy.”

  Anya didn’t pay attention to how straight Stef kept her legs. Anya was too busy watching the way Stef’s hair floated around her head—bouncing, then flattening with Stef’s leap, flowing toward the ground when she was upside down, settling lightly on her shoulders when she was done.

  “All right, Anya, let’s see yours,” Mrs. Vance said, coming up behind their group.

  “M-me?” Anya said.

  “Unless you’ve changed your name,” Mrs. Vance said. “See anyone else around here named Anya?”

  Anya stepped up to the mat. Why hadn’t she gotten Mom to write a note to get her out of gym?

  She knew why. If Mom had written a note, she would have had to explain why Anya couldn’t do cartwheels or headstands. She would have had to tell Mrs. Vance or Mrs. Hobson or the principal or someone that Anya had lost her hair and was wearing a wig.

  Anya raised her hands over her head. She started running, but not too fast. She sprang up but didn’t launch her body forward with nearly enough force. She’d barely placed her right hand on the ground before her feet came crashing down. It was the worst cartwheel she’d ever done.

  But—she checked quickly—her wig had stayed in place.

  “I did better cartwheels than that when I was two,” Stef snorted.

  “Try it again,” Mrs. Vance said, looking at Anya a little strangely. Anya was usually great at phys ed.

  This time Anya ran a little faster, leaped a little higher. She actually felt the air whizzing past her face. Somehow she managed to abandon herself to the joy of the cartwheel. She’d show Stef. She could do great cartwheels, even with a wig on.

  Anya rose up at the end, triumphant. She stood still, panting.

  “Very good,” Mrs. Vance said, and moved on to the next group.

  Anya’s wig had stayed on. It wasn’t even crooked.

  After that Anya did a roundoff. She stood on her hands and her head. She walked across the balance beam. She felt so free. Her wig didn’t move an inch. Maybe she’d just wear a headband every day. She didn’t care how weird she looked.

  Then, right at the end of phys ed, when her group had rotated back to the mats, she got brave enough to try somersaults.

  “How many can you do in a row?” Tyler asked. “Five,” Anya said. “Five between here and the end of the mat.”

  She bent down and rolled forward, tucking her knees against her chest. She concentrated on pushing off with
her legs, keeping her body in one tight ball. She didn’t think about the wig at all.

  Roll—roll—roll—roll . . . She was getting dizzy, but she hadn’t reached the end of the mat yet. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the other kids in her group stepping forward to see if she could squeeze in the final somersault. Then in the middle of the fifth somersault, as she put the top of her head against the mat, something pulled at her scalp.

  Automatically Anya’s legs kept pushing, her hands kept shoving off against the mat. Her mind didn’t have time to stop the momentum of her body. But her somersault went crooked. She scrambled to her feet. She looked up at the other kids in her group.

  All five of them were staring at her, bug-eyed.

  “You lost your hair!” Tyler gasped.

  It seemed like the whole gym went dead silent after that. The gym was never silent. It was the kind of place where kids screamed at the top of their lungs, and so did Mrs. Vance. But now Anya could practically hear herself blinking. She could feel every single person freeze, staring at her.

  Desperately Anya reached up for her wig, wanting to believe that Tyler just meant one hair, or one little strand, was caught on the mat. But Anya’s hand went all the way up to the top of her right ear without encountering a single synthetic hair. She didn’t let herself reach any higher. She whirled around and saw the wig and the worthless red headband still lying on the mat.

  “It’s . . .” Anya choked. She felt all those eyes staring at her. She snatched up the wig from the mat and took off running.