The Replaced

The idea that she and I might be walking around with the same hair color, natural or not, even this many years later . . . well, thanks but no thanks.

I turned to Natty, who was contemplating the other two options way too seriously, but at least she was putting some thought into it. I put my fate in her hands. “Go ahead, you pick first,” I told her.

She bit her lip and shot me a questioning look. I shrugged because as far as I was concerned, it was hair. My natural color would grow back eventually.

But when her fingers clamped around one of the boxes, I was impressed by her bold choice. She’d chosen the one with the cover model who had sleek, cropped, intensely black hair.

I never would’ve called that one.

That left me with the darker of the two browns.

Willow had already gone into the gas station’s restroom with her package, so Natty and I followed, taking the new hairbrush Jett had bought us, along with the unopened pack of oil rags we’d be using as towels. Let the transformation begin!

Willow’s blue eyes sparkled mischievously as she gave us a nod from where she was standing in front of the mirror, already hard at work on her own hair. Apparently she didn’t need anyone’s help.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection from behind her and was mildly surprised that I hadn’t changed since the last time I’d looked. I still had freckles and eyes I thought were too big for my face—but not alien big, just regular-girl big.

I didn’t want to be some half-breed alien anomaly. I just wanted to be regular old me again.

Averting my gaze, I fumbled with the instructions for the hair color. My eyes stung, making it hard to concentrate, but Natty just took the sheet of paper from my hand.

“Here, let me.” She uncapped one bottle of astringent-smelling solution. Dumping it into the larger one, she shook them together like she’d done this a thousand times before. “I used to help my mom,” she explained when she caught me eyeballing her. She pointed to the single toilet in the restroom, and I sat down on the closed lid.

“You never told me about your mom,” I told Natty as she tipped my head back and began running the applicator tip through my hair in sections, squeezing the cold solution into my roots and rubbing it in with the fingertips of the cheap plastic gloves that had come with the kit. “You never really talked about your family.” The pungent hair-color smell began to overpower the grungy bathroom smell.

Natty just shrugged. “You never asked.”

She wasn’t wrong. In all the time we’d spent together, I’d mostly just felt sorry for myself. It’d been all about me. Me talking about Tyler. Me talking about my dad and his drooly, mutty dog, Nancy. I’d probably even mentioned my mom. But I’d never bothered to ask Natty about her life before she’d come back as one of the Returned. “What was she like, your mom?”

Natty’s fingers slowed as she massaged my scalp, her voice drifting. “Pretty,” she said wistfully. “Funny too. The kind of person everyone noticed. When I was little, I would watch while she got ready to go out on dates. I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub while she put hot rollers in her hair and put her makeup on. And every time, she’d spray me with her perfume, while she told me all about whichever new guy was taking her out to whatever new place they were going.”

“So your parents weren’t married?”

She continued to work the dye through my hair. “My dad wasn’t around much. He . . .” She sighed. “He couldn’t keep out of trouble . . . got thrown in jail a lot. Sometimes, when he was out, he’d promise to visit or send presents, that kind of thing. But it never happened. My family wasn’t like one of those TV families.” She didn’t say it like she was sad or anything—instead she smiled a faraway smile. “I always wanted my dad to be like Pa Ingalls.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Who was that?”

Willow did a double take and let out a whoop that passed for a laugh. It was maybe the first time I’d ever heard her laugh and I definitely didn’t hate it. “Are you for real?” She shook her head like she was shocked, or mock-ashamed, by my lack of knowledge. “He was the dad on a little show called Little House on the Prairie. Ever heard of it?”

Okay, yes, I’d heard of it, but I’d never actually seen it. “You know that was before my time, don’t you?”

Natty went back to work, shrugging. “I guess that makes sense. But it was my favorite. I didn’t understand it back then, but I guess my dad wasn’t interested in having a family,” she lamented. “Mostly, he just called when he was broke or in a fix. Him and my mom would fight over money, and then we wouldn’t hear from him again until he needed something else.”

I tried to imagine what that would be like, not having a real dad, the kind who was there every day, helping with homework and cheering the loudest at your games, or even being pissed at you when you snuck off campus with your best friend—all the things a dad should do.

Natty had gotten screwed in that department.

“Sorry,” I told her lamely, because what more was there to say?

She just went on massaging the last of the solution into my hair. “We’ve all got a story, don’t we?” She said it like it was a fact, and I guess it was. The Returned were interesting, to say the least.

It made me wonder about Willow—her family, her past before all this. “What about you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Willow said, showing me her teeth in a flash of white as she smeared the chocolate-brown goo through her already brownish hair. Not much of a disguise, if you asked me. “I watched Little House on the Prairie all the time.”