"My mother said not to let anyone cut it all off..." I began, but she had already walked away.

Then Bowie appeared before me, charismatic and handsome and a little artificial-looking. As we shook hands, I felt the clatter of multiple rings, his fingers loaded with stacks of silver and gold bands adorned with turquoise and diamonds.

An assistant draped me in a shiny black robe and washed my hair with expensive-smelling potions. I was rinsed, combed out, and led back to the cutting station, where I was greeted with the vaguely unnerving sight of Bowie standing there with a straight razor. For the next half hour I let him position my head at every imaginable angle, while he exerted tension on strategic locks and sheared off inches at a time with the razor. He was quiet as he worked, frowning in concentration. By the time he finished, my head had been pushed back and forth so many times, I felt like a Pez dispenser. And long swirls of hair were heaped on the floor.

The hair was quickly swept away, and then Bowie did the blow-dry in an exercise of dazzling showmanship. He lifted pieces of hair over the long tip of the blow-dryer and twirled them around a round brush as if he were collectine strands of cotton candy. He

showed me how to apply a few spritzes of hair spray at the roots, and then he pushed my chair around to face the mirror.

I couldn't believe it. Instead of a frizzy skein of black hair. I had long bangs and shoulder-length layers, shining and bouncing with every movement of my head. "Oh," was all I could say.

Bowie wore the smile of a Cheshire cat. "Beautiful." he said, scrubbing his fingers over the back of my head, flicking the layers upward. "It's a transformation, isn't it? I'll have Shirlene show you how to do your makeup. I usually charge for that, but it's my present to you."

Before I could find the words to thank him, Shirlene appeared and guided me to a tall chrome stool beside the glass-fronted makeup counter. "You've got good skin, lucky girl," she pronounced after taking one look at my face. "I'll teach you the five-minute face."

When I asked her how to make my lips look smaller, she reacted with shocked concern. "Oh, honey, you don't want your lips to look smaller. Ethnic is in now. Like Kimora."

"Who's Kimora?"

A dog-eared fashion magazine was tossed into my lap. The cover featured a gorgeous honey-skinned young woman, long limbs arranged in an artless jumble. Her eyes were dark and tip-tilted, and her lips were even fuller than mine. "The new Chanel model," Shirlene said. "Fourteen years old—can you believe that? They say she's going to be the face of the nineties."

This was a new concept, that an ethnic-looking girl with jet-black hair and a real nose and big lips could be chosen as a model for a design house I had always associated with skinny white women. I studied the photo while Shirlene lined my lips with a rosy-brown pencil. She applied a matte pink lipstick, dusted my cheeks with powdered blush, and applied two coats of mascara to my lashes.

A hand mirror was pressed into my palm, and I inspected the final results. I had to admit, I was startled by the difference the new hair and makeup had made. It wasn't the kind of beauty I had wished for—I would never be the classic American blue-eyed blonde. But this was my own look, a glimpse of what I might someday become, and for the first time in my life I felt a stirring of pride in my own appearance.

Lucy and her mother appeared beside me. They studied me with an intensity that made me duck my head in embarrassment.

"Oh...my...God," Lucy exclaimed. "No. don't hide your face, let me see. You're so..." She shook her head as if the right word eluded her. "You're going to be the most beautiful girl in school."

"Don't go overboard." I said mildly, but I could feel a flush rising to my hairline. This was a vision of myself I had never dared to imagine, but I felt awkward rather than excited. I touched Lucy's wrist, and looked into her glowing eyes. "Thank you," I whispered.

"Enjoy it," she said fondly, while her mother chattered to Shirlene. "Don't look so nervous. It's still you, dummy. It's just you."

CHAPTER 5

The surprising thing about a makeover is not how you feel afterward but how differently other people treat you. I was accustomed to walking through the school hallways without being noticed. It threw me off balance when I walked through those same hallways and boys stared at me, remembered my name, fell into step beside me. They stood at my locker while I fiddled with the combination lock, and took the chair beside mine in open-seating classes or during lunch. The banter that came so easily to my lips when I was with my girlfriends seemed to dry up when I was in the company of those eager boys. My shyness should have discouraged them from asking me out, but it didn't.

I accepted a date with the least threatening of them all, a freckled boy named Gill Mincey, a fellow sophomore who wasn't much taller than me. We were in earth science together. When we were assigned as partners to write a paper on phytoextraction—the use of plants to remove metal contamination from soils—Gill invited me over to his house to

study. The Minceys' house was a cool old tin-roof Victorian, freshly painted and refurbished, with all kinds of interesting-shaped rooms.

As we sat surrounded by piles of books on gardening, chemistry, and bioengineering. Gill leaned over and kissed me, his lips warm and light. Drawing back, he waited to see if I would object. "An experiment," he said as if to explain, and when I laughed, he kissed me again. Lured by the undemanding kisses. I pushed aside the science books and put my arms around his narrow shoulders.