Wildlife Read Free

okay, she wasn’t exactly in love with the whole billboard plan.
    When I came home with my hair dyed—and it looked great, by the way—she nearly had a conniption.
    Beeb joked her out of it by talking in headlines:
    “New Study Reveals Hair Dye Does Not Chemically Neutralize Political Awareness.”
    “Feminist Survives Professional Eyebrow Wax.”
    “Makeup—It Washes Off!”
    “These things were serious crimes back in the day,” Beeb said to me by way of explanation. As though I haven’t heard every feminist rant under the sun and am not a proud feminist ranter myself, when warranted, and when I can be bothered.
    “And PS, Mother, I am the only person in my grade who doesn’t have dyed hair,” I said.
    “Not anymore, you’re not,” she said, eyebrows up.
    There was a big preproduction meeting at the photographer’s studio where Beeb “consulted” the art director, who “consulted” the makeup artist, who had a colorist on “standby.” To hear them, you would think my hair was of global significance. But whatever they did, it sure did not look like any other hair I’d ever seen.
    They talked about “layering” the color, and “textural”color, and “variegated” color. And the amazing thing was that even though it had about ten different colors in it—all individually painted and put in foils—it still looked like my hair, but as though it was walking along with its own set of glamour spotlights.
    Getting it done was outlandishly boring. It took a whole day to do hair and the makeup “tests.” But I would have put up with it ten times over to see Charlotte turning green when I got home.
    “You don’t even look like yourself,” was the best she could come up with as she huffed off to sulk in her room.
    After pretending like it was no big deal, I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom. I actually could not stop staring at myself in the mirror. I looked awesome. It was mesmerizing. And Charlotte was right for once in her scurvy little life: I looked nothing at all like myself. It was me with a work of art stuck right onto my face.
    I kept blinking at my reflection. One minute I could see myself, the next, just the beautiful mask. Which looked five years older than me. If I were in a scary movie, this would be the perfect moment to first experience psychosis. Maybe the mask would talk to me. As my now-crazy older self. From the future. I shuddered. I was freaking myself out. I stuffed my hair into a ponytail and turned on the taps.
    The shoot was right before the end of third term, and the billboard was up on the last day of the holidays before weleft the city for our fourth term, boarding at Mount Fairweather, which is Crowthorne Grammar’s outdoor education campus.
    “Deadline tighter than a fish’s arsehole,” as Beeb said.
    She swears like a mad thing. She says it comes from spending too much time with crews.
    As soon as the billboard went up, it was all over Facebook. Holly was posting it before the paste was dry. In one keystroke I went from being a year-ten “nobody” to a year-ten “unknown quantity.”
    Once it hit Facebook, Holly applied some pressure, and I got the event invite to Laura Jenkins’s party, which was on that very night. Holly had told me about the party a couple of weeks ago. She understands that I prefer to know when I’m being socially outcast. I pressed Attend (what the hell—I didn’t have anything else on) and shut my laptop as Mom walked in to check that I was packed, which I more or less was.
    “Sibbie, what is this?” She was looking at my supersize, multi-gadget, bloodred Swiss Army knife. “You’re taking a weapon?” She frowned, no doubt running a mental checklist of some of the miscreants in my grade.
    “It’s optional. But, yeah, I’m going totally gangsta.”
    She laughed.
    “I feel like I’m sending you back to the Stone Age.”
    “You might as well be.” I gave my cell phone a hammy kiss. “Farewell, my heart, my