Only Twenty-Five Read online

  Only Twenty-Five

  Jennifer McCoy Blaske

  Published by Jennifer McCoy Blaske, 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  ONLY TWENTY-FIVE

  First edition. April 18, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Jennifer McCoy Blaske.

  Written by Jennifer McCoy Blaske.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  ONE

  Meg

  “Are there any questions about tomorrow’s quiz?” I asked my seventh grade music class.

  Chris Caldwell waved his hand back and forth before belting out, “Are we gonna have to do that stuff where you play the notes and we write the numbers?!” Chris always spoke loudly.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “There’s a section on melodic dictation, but it’s exactly like the sections we practice at the beginning of every class. If you’ve been doing well with those you should have no problem with that part of the quiz.” I looked around the room. “Any other questions?”

  Half the kids stared at me. The other half started packing their stuff.

  “Okay then.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. “The afternoon announcements should start any minute. Do I have a volunteer to clean the whiteboard?”

  The usual six hands shot into the air.

  “Emily, you can do it today. Thanks.”

  I walked to my desk in the front corner of the room as the kids fidgeted in their seats, waiting for the announcements. I wanted to double-check that I’d made enough copies of the quiz for tomorrow. I quickly counted them and put them in a Manila folder. Then I scribbled ”review the choral pieces to order for the fall concert” on a yellow sticky and stuck it on my calendar.

  “I like your ponytail holder Miss Caldwell,” said Emily as she erased the side of the whiteboard near my desk. “It matches your earrings.”

  I put my hand to the burgundy scrunchie in my hair and gently tugged at some of the loose strands. “Oh, uh . . . thank you.”

  “You’ve been wearing ponytails a lot lately,” she said, doodling a little picture of a butterfly on the top corner of the board. “They look cute, but you should wear your hair down sometimes too. You have nice curls.”

  I poked at a few more hairs before forcing my hand down. “Thanks Emily.” I eyed her face, wondering if she meant it or if she was she hinting at something. You could never be too sure with middle-schoolers. . . . After running her tone of voice and facial expression through my bullcrap detector I decided she appeared genuine. “I guess you’re right. I have been wearing ponytails a lot lately. I haven’t really thought about it.” I was lying, of course. I knew exactly why I was wearing ponytails and I was getting tired of them myself. I hoped I’d soon be able to go back to wearing my hair any way I wanted.

  Fortunately, any further discussion of my latest hair style was avoided by the commencement of the afternoon announcements. The choral room came alive as the twelve-year-olds who’d been made to sit still and be mostly quiet for the last several hours banged their chairs into stacks against the wall. Those who listened to the announcements were informed that the chess club was meeting in room 205 and bus number five was running late. The bell sounded and everyone made the usual mad dash for the doorway.

  “Have a good afternoon!” I called after them. “See you tomorrow.”

  I looked at the yellow sticky note on my desk calendar. It was my first year teaching general music and chorus at Madison Middle. So far, I liked it a lot. After graduating from Orchard City College I did my student teaching at the middle school level and really enjoyed it. Then I worked as a general music teacher at three different elementary schools. Traveling between jobs got old after a while. At times I felt like an itinerant. I was getting tired of the piles of teaching materials all over my car . . . and feeling homeless. And I missed working with older kids. I was somewhat reluctant to leave Orchard City and the comfy life I’d been living in my college town for six years. But I sent applications to school systems all over the state last April and May. I finally got this job in Madison. It was hard leaving Orchard City, but I knew I was doing the right thing.

  Everything was relatively ready for tomorrow—thanks to the work I did during lunch. I dug a lipstick out of the zipper compartment in my purse. I stepped over to the music locker in the corner. I looked in the mirror on the inside of the door and applied a fresh coat of lipstick. I tried fluffing the limp curls of my ponytail but there wasn’t much I could do by that point. No worries, I reminded myself. It’s getting taken care of.

  I tossed my lipstick in my purse, zipped it up, and threw the strap over my shoulder as I stepped toward the door. Thankfully, I remembered to turn around at the last minute and grab my keys off little hook on the wall before I headed out to my car.

  TWO

  Meg

  When I told my best friend Katie that I was worried because I’d been seeing a lot more hair in my brush than usual she told me I should go to the doctor. She said it could be a sign of something like an iron deficiency or a thyroid problem.

  Katie was always very practical like that. She was my college roommate during my senior year. We hadn’t lived in the same town since she graduated four years ago, but I still considered her to be my best friend.

  At first, I put the doctor off. I told myself that maybe it was just my imagination, or something temporary. But about three weeks ago, when I was taking a shower, I noticed that the water in the tub was going down more slowly than usual. When I fished around in the drain I pulled out an alarmingly large clump of hair. That evening, after I got home from work, I examined my hair closely in the mirror. My curls were definitely more scraggly-looking than they used to be. I knew then that I could no longer ignore this.

  The next morning I called a dermatologist and put my hair in a ponytail. And I’ve been wearing it that way every day since. . . .

  ***

  “Is your book good?” asked Dr. Harris.

  “Oh . . . yes, it is.” I’d been so engrossed in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that I hadn’t even heard him enter the room. I was a little embarrassed. “It’s an Agatha Christie book.” I held it up to show him before slipping my bookmark—with a cat precariously hanging on a tree branch and the words “Hang in There” printed on it—between the pages. I closed the book and nervously clutched it in my lap.

  “Mmm hmm,” Dr. Harris said.

  I realized he wasn’t actually the least bit interested in my reading selection. He was just trying to get my attention.

  “Well Meg, your biopsy results are back.”

  Even though he’d assured me last week that they weren’t actually checking for cancer I winced slightly at hearing the word “biopsy” again. Apparently, the scalp biopsy was just something to go along with my blood work to give them an indication of the cause of my hair loss.

  “It looks like you’ve got a classic case of androgenetic alopecia which is very common and completely harmless.” Dr. Harris flipped a blank form over on his clipboard and started sketching something on the back in pencil. “I’m not the best artist in the world.” He chuckled. “
But I’ll do my best to illustrate what’s going on.” He drew a lumpy circle. “Everybody sheds hair every day. Normally, the hair is replaced by a hair equal in size.” He drew a smaller lumpy circle next to the first one. “With androgenetic alopecia, the hair is replaced with a miniaturized version of itself. Over time, the hair follicles shrink so much that they quit growing altogether.”

  “So what causes it? Does it have something to do with my thyroid?”

  “No. We checked your thyroid and the numbers were fine.” He wheeled over to the wall and peered at a chart. “As the name implies, androgenetic alopecia is hereditary. The non-medical term is female-pattern baldness.”

  Female-pattern baldness? I gaped at him for what felt like a long time. I must’ve heard wrong. Maybe they got my labs mixed up with someone else’s—someone who was, like, sixty. That was possible, right? I’ve gotten my students’ names confused before. Surely the labs must run hundreds of tests a week, maybe even thousands. They’re bound to screw something up every now and then.

  “What did you say?” I finally managed to ask.

  “You have female-pattern baldness.”

  Why was he so calm? Why wasn’t he frowning at my chart? Or telling me that we’ll have to run the labs again, that there must be some mistake?

  “It’s the same genetic condition as male-pattern baldness, although it doesn’t usually manifest as quickly, or become quite as pronounced, as it does in men. You probably won’t ever get a shiny spot the size of a silver dollar on the top of your head.” He grinned.

  Was he trying to be funny? “I’m only twenty-five!” I was completely unamused. “How can I be going bald?”

  Dr. Harris nodded. “Twenty-five is a little young. But it can happen any time after puberty. Sometimes it even happens in teens, although that’s pretty rare.”

  “So . . . what do we do?” I was afraid I knew the answer already. “There are ways to treat it . . . right?”

  Dr. Harris took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. Not a good sign. If there was a simple treatment he would’ve immediately said so and happily started scribbling a prescription or referral or something.

  “Minoxidil, the brand name is Rogaine, is . . . sometimes effective,” he said cautiously. “If it’s used regularly, at high dosages, sometimes it can slow down the progression of the hair loss.”

  Sometimes it can slow down the progression of the hair loss. His words echoed through my head. Sometimes? Not even often, but sometimes? How often is sometimes? And not fix it or cure it, but slow down the progression?

  “Will it help me grow back any of the hair I’ve already lost?”

  He hesitated for a minute. “No. At best, it might slow down the rate of future hair loss.”

  That didn’t sound like treatment to me.

  “And,” Dr. Harris went on, “it’s important to understand that hereditary hair loss will continue to progress once treatment stops.”

  I sighed. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means that if you start applying the minoxidil and then stopped it would be like you never took it at all. . . . And you’d lose any hair it prevented you from losing while you were taking it.”

  Dr. Harris—who I couldn’t help but notice had a pretty decent head of hair himself—didn’t seem the least bit concerned. I stared at him as he calmly told me I was going bald and there was sort of a treatment . . . but not really . . . just something to stall things. And oh, it might not even do that much. Plus, I could use minoxidil for the next ten years, but if I quit it’d be like I never took it at all! This was the best the medical community had to offer? Seriously?

  “So . . . I’d have to use it for the rest of my life?” I didn’t care that I was starting to sound like a snotty teenager. I was mad.

  “Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’d have to continue using it indefinitely to prevent additional hair loss.”

  Dr. Harris’s lack of any detectable reaction to my nastiness just upset me more. I wanted to jump out of the paper-covered patient’s chair, yank the paper off, and tear it to shreds. I wanted to scream that Dr. Harris needed a better bedside manner when informing a young, single woman that she was going bald. I wanted to take my purse and fling it as hard as I could across the room. I wanted to run into the hall, slam the door behind me as hard as I could, keep running, and never stop. I didn’t do any of those things. I just sat there feeling overwhelming and suddenly exhausted.

  “So, if I start taking Rogaine, the best I can hope for is that it will stay like this . . . and not get any worse?” I asked quietly, pointing at my head.

  “Yes.”

  “And even that may not happen?”

  “Correct. Rogaine doesn’t produce visible results for everyone . . . even at the highest doses.”

  I felt like I was in a trance.

  “I think you should give it a try,” Dr. Harris said quickly. “It’s completely safe, it won’t make it any worse, and you don’t need a prescription. It’s sold over the counter.”

  I nodded. I guess it was a nod. It felt sort of like my upper body was sort of bobbing in a floaty kind of way.

  Dr. Harris glanced at the clock on the wall. “Do you have any other questions?”

  Yeah, just a few, I thought. Why is this happening to me? How can I look at myself in the mirror every morning knowing I look awful and that it’s just going to get worse? How much longer can I hide this by wearing a ponytail? And when that doesn’t work anymore, what then?

  “No,” I murmured. “No questions.”

  “Okay then,” he said, sounding eager to get rid of me and move on to a patient with real problems. He scribbled something on my chart and handed it to me. “You’re good to go.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, taking the chart.

  THREE

  Josh

  “We’ll take a medium thin-crust pizza,” Wendy told the waitress in her usual perky voice, “one side with sausage and the other side with pineapple.” She gave me a mock glare.

  Wendy knew I thought pineapple was disgusting on pizza. I smiled faintly back at her.

  “Got it!” the waitress said before she walked away.

  Wendy unrolled her red napkin on the table and daintily set it in her lap. “So, how was school today Josh?”

  “It was good.” I taught gifted English at Madison Middle School and loved my job, but I hated the way Wendy always asked me how school was. It made it feel like she was my mother or something. “The eighth-graders are learning about Edgar Allen Poe so I played the clip from The Simpsons where they do a version of The Raven. I made it a game for the kids to figure out who the narrator was. They thought it was pretty fun.”

  “So, who was it?”

  “Darth Vader. Well, you know . . . James Earl Jones.”

  Wendy nodded politely, obviously unimpressed. “You play a lot of TV shows for your classes, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess I do.” I grinned. “Oh, that reminds me, there’s a Simpsons episode where they talk about The Tell-Tale Heart. Maybe I’ll let them watch that too.”

  “Do you ever have any complaints?”

  “Complaints? About what?”

  “I don’t know.” Wendy raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “It just seems strange that you let them watch TV all the time in a gifted English class. Have any parents ever complained about that . . . all the TV?”

  “We don’t watch TV all the time. We watch clips that are relevant to what we’re studying. Different media can help the kids better relate to the material and make connections. If The Simpsons can help me get them to love Poe, I’ll take it. I don’t see anything wrong with that . . . at all.”

  “Okay, okay. There’s no need to get defensive. So . . . what else is going on with you?”

  “Well, I just read this really interesting story.” I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t know if this would be her thing, but she asked. . . . I leaned on the table and folded my hands. “I mean I read it a few years ago but I just
reread it and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Oh yeah?” Her face brightened. “What story?”

  “It’s called A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “JD Salinger.”

  Wendy’s smile faded. “JD Salinger? Isn’t he the guy who wrote The Catcher in the Rye?”

  “Yeah.” I was impressed that she knew that. Salinger has always been one of my favorite authors.

  “We had to read that in high school.” Wendy frowned. “I didn’t like it at all.”

  I probably should’ve left it there. But I was really eager to talk to someone about the story. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish is better. It’s in a book called Nine Stories which is a collection of . . . well, nine short stories.”

  Wendy smiled ever so slightly and nodded. “I gathered. And what’s it about?”

  “It’s about a guy named Seymour Glass. He was away during World War II and he’s having a lot of trouble fitting back into society now that he’s home. Or really, he probably never fully fit into society but it’s becoming more and more obvious to him . . . and more difficult.”

  “Okay,” Wendy said as she played with the napkin in her lap.

  I could tell she wasn’t particularly interested. But I went on. “The thing that’s so cool about it is that a big part of the story is him talking to this little girl on the beach named Sybil. You can see that’s the only time Seymour feels like he can connect with someone . . . when he’s talking to this little girl. She gets him. He can be fun and playful and silly with her.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wendy’s eyes glazed over as she looked toward the kitchen hoping to see a pizza heading our way. “So what happens?”

  “Well, after he says goodbye to Sybil he goes back to his hotel room. His wife is asleep there and he shoots himself in the head with a pistol.”

  Wendy winced. “So what does his wife do when she wakes up?”