14. Of Cut Hair and Callbacks

"Mommy, I don' get it," Polly said matter-of-factly, "Your hair's so pretty! Why d'you wanna cut it?!"

"First off, it's annoying to take care of, and I don't want it any more," Carrie replied, "but there's a little kid somewhere with cancer or some kind of disease whose hair all fell out. I want to give them mine. The place that I'm giving it to, they make wigs out of it and give it to those kids."

"Ooooh..."

The pair were sitting in the waiting room of a new salon down in the centre of town near the mall, aptly named Serenity. The music playing over the speakers was calm and soft, but nothing like elevator music, and the walls were all creamy pastels and calming photography.

Carrie's father had done the insulation in the ceilings of this place, and the mother of the owner of Serenity was one of a group of women Carrie's mother adored and drank with. A lot. Thusly, there had been no competition in Carrie's mind. It was either Stacy or the 50-year-old woman who refused to bleach Carrie's hair for dyeing.

"Okay!" the young, blonde, beautiful Stacy said as she approached, "Come on over and we can do this."

Carrie smiled and nodded, leaving Polly to flip through the nature photography book on the waiting room table.

"So," Stacy said as Carrie sat down after the wonderful head-massaging hairwash, "What are we gonna do?"

"I dunno. Wing it."

And so Stacy stared for a while and Carrie watched in the mirror, and then 17 and a half inches of her hair were suddenly gone and laying in a limp tail on the nearest flat surface. And then out came the weird little razor-brushes and the textured scissors and Stacy went to work.

It was only about ten minutes into the act of slicing and dicing when an obnoxious chorus of a rock song blared from the waiting room. Carrie's cell phone.

"Moooommy, you're riiiinging!"

"I can hear it, honey. Just let them leave a message!"

"Okay!"

And that was the end of that.

It was an hour later, give or take, when Carrie was finally released from the Chair of Evil with a kind of chin-length punk cut. Stacy wanted to charge far too little for the laborious act, so Carrie pretended to relent after a minutes-long battle and simply gave Stacy whatever she wanted to. Quick goodbyes were said and Carrie scampered from the salon with Polly close behind. Out on the street, the little boy spoke up.

"Who do you think it was?"

"Who?" Carrie asked, utterly confused, and then, "Oh! Yeah, I should probably check."

The pair leaned against the wall as Carrie checked her cell phone history. She was expecting it to have been Evie having found some kind of bizarre plant life that Carrie simply must see right now, but it wasn't. It was a number she didn't recognize. Luckily, whomever it had been had left a message.

"...*click* Ah...hello, Miss Presley. This is Michael Prest. I was just calling to give you congratulations on...ah...wait, let me start over. Congratulations! You have been selected of the sixty applicants to play the part of Victim 1 in the upcoming film The Sundering! Uh...yeah, that works. Call me back as soon as you can, alright?"

Carrie's heart had stopped for a moment, and then begun fluttering in her chest. She dialed the number feverishly, praying to whatever deity existed that it wasn't too late.

It wasn't.