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Brandishing a plastic bowl in one latex-gloved hand and a brush in the other, Irene studies her handiwork – a long, amalgamated mass of wet hair. “I think I got it all. Forty minutes. Start your timer, Gianni.”
The sound of nails clicking against a phone screen is the only answer she gets. It’s audible for a brief moment before the speakers on the bathroom counter, hooked up to her iPod, start blasting another song.
As she goes to rinse the bowl and brush in the sink, she glances into the mirror, smiling at the three figures reflected in it.
It’s not often that she gets to see these two. Living in different countries makes it difficult. That makes it more special when they are in town, though.
So, there’s no way she’s going to sit and make small talk with a bunch of geezers at the family reunion still bustling outside.
She calls Ryosuke a cousin, though – quite frankly – the family tree’s a hot mess on his end. Her dad and great-grandpa always make a point of flying him out from Japan for these things.
He fixes his hair in the mirror, placing each curl just so and brushing the rest back with his fingers, his hips swaying to the music. “Forty minutes’ll dry his ends out like crazy. Do thirty, tops.”
“We’re going from black to blond, dude,” Irene says. “Trust me, it’ll take longer than you think. Unless you want him stuck with dishwater bleach hair.”
Gianni finally turns around from where he’s seated on the edge of the bathtub. “I’ll do thirty-five. Is that fair?”
Ryosuke cringes, but shrugs in defeat. “Whatever. Can’t believe you actually bleached it. Don’t do that again for a while. It’ll –”
“It’ll make you bald and shriveled up like that bitch from Lord of the Rings, yeah, we get it.” Irene sets the dying materials aside and tosses her gloves in the trash.
“What, you wanna send him back to Italy with a receding hairline?”
“I wanna send him back to Italy –” She snatches the empty dye box from the counter and reads the name. “Golden Breeze Blond.”
A few taps, and Gianni changes the timer on his phone. “I’d prefer the latter, I think.”
Gianni’s not actually a relative. He’s a family friend, more accurately – a former exchange student who stayed with her family for a summer. Still, he’s basically family at this point. Irene thanks the lord for MSN Messenger and sketchy free texting apps; otherwise, the two of them would’ve racked up millions in international fees over the years.
Besides, he even inherited a birthmark from his own family, just like Irene and Ryosuke. It doesn’t matter that they’re not visually similar – in their hearts, the star-shaped birthmarks on their shoulders and the black dots lining the shell of Gianni’s ear are connected.
Irene sets the box back on the counter and fixes her own hair. “Hey, I’ve been bleaching for years, and I’m not bald yet.”
“Yet.” Ryosuke glances at her reflection. “You ever think about wearing your hair different, Irene?”
“How so?”
“I dunno. You wear it down a lot.”
“Says the guy who’s had the same hairstyle since he was, like, five.”
Ryosuke huffs. “Hey, seeing Michael on the cover of Bad changed me, okay?”
“Whatever. What should I do different?”
“I could braid it,” Gianni says before poking at something on his phone screen. “How do I… unfreeze this? My screen is frozen.”
Ryosuke snatches it from his hand, and a click echoes through the room when he presses the power button. “Turn it off and back on again. Fixes everything.”
Sure enough, when he turns it on again, it’s unfrozen.
Gianni holds his hand out, trying to take it back. “Thank you. I don’t understand these new smartphones –”
“Who the hell’s this guy on your lock screen?”
Irene leans over and gasps when she sees the face, partially shrouded by the time. “Oh, Gianni, you didn’t tell me it was official! ”
She’s only seen him in grainy images Gianni’s sent before – mostly group pictures of his eclectic circle of friends back home – but she’s heard plenty about him through Gianni’s sappy late-night ramblings. He’s a thin, lanky boy around Gianni’s age, with haphazardly-cut strawberry blond bangs hanging in front of his face. In the lock screen photo, he’s cuddled up close to a smiling Gianni and looking pointedly away from the camera, his lips curled in a flustered pout.
Gianni snatches his phone out of Ryosuke’s hand, cheeks red. “I – well, it was fairly recent. There hasn’t been an opportunity for me to bring it up.”
“Wait, is that – are you dating Ricotta? Your weird nerd friend?”
“Ryosuke.” Irene lightly punches his shoulder.
“Hey, I don’t mean it in, like, a mean way. He’s objectively a nerdy guy. You’re just defending him ‘cause your boyfriend’s a weird nerd, too.”
“Anakiss is not a weird nerd.” She pauses. “...Okay, he’s a weird nerd. But I like him.”
Gianni takes another look at his phone screen, and a tiny grin pulls at the edges of his mouth. “I like my weird nerd, too.”
Ryosuke gags. “Gross. At least tell me your first date was better than Irene’s.”
“It was. We had coffee, and he took me to an indoor flower garden, with plants from all over the world, and…”
“I dunno,” Irene interjects, “Anakiss bringing me to his house to look at his Lego sets kinda gives that a run for its money. He had a whole Batcave built and everything.”
She chuckles at the memory, but stops when Gianni stays silent. “You alright there?”
“This is going to sound strange,” he says, wringing his hands in his lap, “but… do you ever get deja vu?”
Suddenly, something tightens in her chest. “How so?”
“I… I had a wonderful time on that date, believe me. But something about that setting was like… a reminder. Of what, I don’t know. Something kept telling me I’d been surrounded by those flowers before. Like I was connected to them. I know this sounds melodramatic, but I saw lilies, I believe, wrapped around a pillar, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
And then… Ricotta. There’s an image in my mind – him against a backdrop of violets – that’s stuck with me. What disturbed me most was,” Gianni hesitates, “there was a greenhouse for tropical plants. They had a rafflesia: the largest flower in the world. It smells like a corpse. I held his hand, and turned to him, and I couldn’t help but think we’d been together like that before. Together with the stench of death in the air.”
Irene doesn’t respond. Can’t, really.
Ryosuke laughs, but it’s shaky. Uncertain. “Jesus. You sure you want to date this guy?”
And Gianni returns it, smoother, his usual poise lacing his voice once again. “I’m certain. It’s quite romantic, if you think about it, isn’t it?”
Irene turns back to the counter. Her eyes catch a speck of gold staining the laminate, and she grabs a tissue to wipe it away.
Anything to keep her hands busy. To keep her veins distracted from the chill coursing through them.
“My apologies. That was a weird tangent,” Gianni says, avoiding her eye in the mirror. “It really was a lovely date –”
“I know what you mean.” The words tumble from Irene’s mouth before she can think.
“You do?”
She nods, closer to a tremble. “I feel it with Anakiss a lot. Since the first time we met. It was subtler back then, more like a nagging thought, I guess. But when I first met Emporio… that’s when it got really bad.”
She wouldn’t trade that fateful night, nearly a year ago now, for the world. What began as a rather unlucky series of events, starting with Anakiss’s car running low on gas in the middle of nowhere, brought her enduring friendships. Friendships that, should their paths have diverged even slightly, never would have come to be.
And she’d rather not picture what could’ve happened to Emporio, the poor kid, had she and Anakiss not stopped at that gas station. It’s a relief to know he’s safe with them, even if the question of what happened to his parents, who abandoned him there in the first place, wears at the back of her mind.
And yet. “I felt like I already knew him, somehow. I never even cared for kids that much, but I felt like I had to protect him. And then Eldis came along, and Dominic, and… I don’t know. After talking to them for maybe an hour, it was like I’d had the same conversations with them before.
I get dreams, sometimes, about all of them. And, like, I think that’s normal. Except they’re always so vivid when they’re there. Like I’m watching a movie I’ve already seen.”
She takes a breath to speak again, to recall another scene: Emporio, awoken by nightmares in the early hours of the morning. Sitting on the sofa she and Anakiss had repurposed into his bed. Clutching her, before she could even get a word out, and muttering a name into her pajama shirt.
“J-Jolyne. Jolyne. I’m sorry.”
But the memory tastes bitter on her tongue, constricts the air in her lungs, so she leaves it be.
Ryosuke laughs again, even weaker this time. More of a gasp. “Sounds like I’m not the only one, then. I always thought it was just something about Morioh. There’s gotta be a word for it. Nostalgia, sorta?”
With that, the room falls silent, aside from the iPod playing some pop ballad and the distant echo of the gathering outside.
Irene almost jumps out of her skin when Gianni’s timer goes off, sending a marimba melody careening into her eardrums.
“Okay,” Ryosuke says, “time to get that gunk outta your hair.”
They maneuver a stool over for Gianni to sit on, then have him lean backwards over the edge of the bathtub – “I feel like I’m getting baptized,” Irene hears him mumble. From there, washing the excess dye out of his hair is easy enough. She’s done it herself, though on a lesser scale, countless times.
She’s almost done drying it, cupping handfuls of his curls into the diffuser, when he speaks up again. “Like I said earlier, I could braid your hair, if you’d like.”
She shrugs. “Sure. Why not?”
“Ooh, Gianni, let me braid yours, too,” Ryosuke says. “I think that’d look good. Especially with the new color.”
“I thought you were against him going blond,” Irene responds.
“Too late to stop it now. I can live with it. Just keep that dye away from me.” He runs a protective hand over his own curls.
Irene decides against teasing him further. She turns off the hair dryer and sets it aside. “What do you think, Gianni?”
He studies his reflection in the mirror, stroking his fingers gently through the now-golden locks, and smiles. “I like it.”
“Awesome. Braid time, then?”
The three of them line up along the counter – Irene’s back to Gianni, Gianni’s to Ryosuke – and get to work.
“Ryosuke,” Irene calls back to him, “You should do something different, too.”
His nose scrunches up. “I dunno. It’s not like I can make it any better than it already is.”
She glances at the iPod’s screen as it transitions into another song. An idea pops into her head at the sight of the tiny album icon. “You should do it like Prince. You could pull it off.”
Based on his facial expression, she may as well have suggested sacrilege. But he finishes Gianni’s braid and takes a quick glance into the mirror. “I’ll… try it. For five seconds. And then I’m going back, you hear me?”
He flips his head over and combs his curls forward with his fingers.
With a final, subtle tug, Gianni ties back Irene’s own braid. “I’m done.”
“Thanks, man.” Irene turns to look into the mirror, to study Gianni’s handiwork –
She freezes.
Her heart skips a beat, then pounds, sending a dizzying wave to her brain.
She can’t explain it, because it can’t be possible. But that is not her reflection.
Those are someone else’s eyes.
She wrenches her gaze from herself (herself?) in the mirror, instead turning to Gianni and Ryosuke.
They’re both deathly still.
Gianni’s brow furrows, staring at the golden braid hanging over his shoulder, the exposed dots on his ear.
Ryosuke’s hair is piled on top of his head in a messy pompadour. Somehow, she’s sure that the disarray isn’t what’s caused the color to drain from his face.
After a few seconds, each feeling more like an eternity, they blink, seemingly coming back to their senses.
“Deja vu,” Irene mutters, her throat dry.
Ryosuke shakes his head and pushes his hair back into place. “Weird. Th-that’s why I don’t mess with it. Don’t mess with perfection, right?”
Gianni simply hums, refusing to look back in the mirror. He takes his phone from his pocket and glances at the time. “I think your dad said dinner would be ready by five thirty, Irene. We should head back out.”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
When Irene and Gianni both free their hair from their braids, none of them say a word.
Irene shuts off the iPod, and after the others leave the room, she dares to take another glance into the mirror.
Irene, she tells herself, staring into her own eyes. That’s Irene. I’m Irene.
And as she turns off the light and shuts the door behind her, she ignores the echo of another name lingering in her mind.