VOLUME III: 42 – Hair Straightener

I got back to my apartment just in time to realize that the black dress, my precious thirty-dollar surrender flag to the realm of acceptable family appearances, is still needed ironing.

Fun fact: I do not own an iron. Or an ironing board. Or whatever grown, capable, credit-score-having humans use to de-wrinkle the fabric manifestation of their generational compliance.

For a moment, I just stood there in the dim light of my living room-slash-every-room, the dress limp and accusing where it draped over the back of my only chair. My phone buzzed somewhere under a pile of laundry, but I ignored it. I was too busy picturing Akane’s face if she knew her only sister was about to attend Grandpa’s birthday dinner looking like a dollar store vampire widow.

So I did what any well-adjusted adult would do in my place: I flopped the dress across my unmade bed, spritzed it with water from my tiny green spray bottle (originally purchased for my succulents, now all dead and reincarnated as fertilizer in my trash can), and started pressing out the worst of the wrinkles with my hair straightener.

Every time the plates hissed against polyester, I half expected the dress to ignite and solve my problem for me.

If Akane could see me now, she’d file for sister emancipation, claim irreparable reputational damage, and probably deduct me from her taxes under ‘charitable loss.’

Ten sweaty, curse-laden minutes later, the dress was... slightly less tragic. It still looked like it wanted to fight me in a dark alley, but at least it didn’t look like it had been dug out of the bottom of a gym bag.

I wriggled into it, hopping awkwardly to zip the back. The fabric tugged across my shoulders in a way that made me painfully aware I had maybe not factored in post-divorce snack habits when I bought it last year. I tugged at the hem, brushed off invisible lint, and approached the mirror for phase two of the inevitable meltdown: hair.

My hair stared back at me like a disappointed parent.

I attempted a low bun. It drooped sideways like a sad pancake. I tried to twist it up with a claw clip — my old faithful — but the clip cracked under the strain and spat plastic teeth onto the bathroom floor.

“Betrayal,” I whispered at it, then laughed, because what else was there to do?

Eventually, I settled for pulling the whole mess into a ponytail, raking my fingers through until it at least looked intentional and not like a cry for help.

Good enough. It had to be.

I checked my phone again.
Nothing from Akane. No frantic voice message ordering me to wear something better. No surprise cancellation from the ancestors on high. Not even a polite natural disaster to obliterate the restaurant and spare me the performance.

Cowards. Every last one of them.

I glanced at the clock. Too late to back out. Too early to get hit by a convenient meteor.

I grabbed my purse, pitiful thing I’d owned since two years ago, the seams fraying and the strap threatening to mutiny and stuffed it with my phone, bus card, a travel-size deodorant (just in case) and a packet of emergency gum that expired last Christmas.

Double-checked my bus card.
Double-double-checked my face in the bathroom mirror.

Walmart dress. Two-dollar lipstick, smudged once, wiped off, and reapplied with trembling dignity. Eye bags lovingly cultivated by 3 AM streaming sessions and an intimate relationship with anxiety.

Perfect.

I slipped on my cheapest black flats, the ones that made my toes question my life choices and locked up my apartment. The door stuck like it always did; I had to yank it three times before it shut with a defeated click.

The stairwell greeted me with its usual scent of stale air and suspicious mildew. My heels clacked against the cracked concrete like a judge’s gavel, echoing down the empty corridor as if to announce: Behold! The human embodiment of half-hearted adulthood descends!

Outside, the late afternoon sun beamed down with aggressive optimism, bouncing off parked cars and my forehead alike. Birds chirped. A dog barked somewhere down the block. A toddler shrieked at his mother about gummy worms in a pitch that rattled my skull.

Honestly, I wanted to join him. Gummy worms sounded way better than pretending I was the responsible, well-mannered youngest granddaughter at a dinner table of politely disappointed relatives.

At the bus stop, I caught my reflection in the grimy shelter glass: I looked like a ghost cosplaying someone’s respectable daughter. Pale where makeup should have been, hair that wouldn’t pass inspection under Akane’s unforgiving eyes, posture that screamed ‘last place in life’s three-legged race.’

“Look at you,” I murmured to my reflection, ignoring the side-eye from the college kid standing six feet away, earbuds in but listening anyway. “Going to Grandpa’s birthday in a fresh dress and minimum emotional stability. Growth, baby.”

A faint grin tugged at my lips, though it didn’t reach my eyes.

The bus squealed and hissed to a stop in front of me, its doors groaning open like the gates to a bureaucratic afterlife. I climbed aboard, dodging the glare from the driver as if I personally had summoned rush hour and found a seat by the window.

Around me, the bus smelled faintly of stale air conditioning and someone’s spicy takeout. A trio of college kids argued about a group project. An old lady in a purple sun hat snored gently into her shopping bag. Across the aisle, a man with three grocery bags and a suspiciously large jar of pickles made direct eye contact every time I looked away.

I hugged my tote like a shield and glued my eyes to the window. The city slid by in fractured pieces: cracked sidewalks, a corner store advertising three lottery tickets for five dollars, an old man selling tiny baskets of strawberries on a folding chair that looked older than him.

I tried not to think about the dream I’d had last night, the one with my mother’s voice echoing in a language my brain hadn’t used since I was a kid. I tried not to think about Akane, immaculate in her pressed blazer, greeting me at the door with that pinched smile she used when she was embarrassed on my behalf. I tried not to think about how, tonight, I would sit straight and nod politely while Grandpa talked about the good old days, and everyone would watch to see if I could behave like a proper adult long enough for him to blow out his candles.

It’s just one dinner. One night of pretending.

Then I could come back home, peel off the performance along with the dress, and scream like the feral little gremlin I truly was.

Easy.

The bus lurched over a pothole. My forehead thumped lightly against the glass, but I didn’t move away. I just let the city smear itself into watercolor shapes on the other side, as if somewhere in the blur there was a version of me who was already on her way back home. Makeup smudged, hair undone, and just free.

The bus rumbled on.

I pressed my forehead to the window and let the city blur.