“You need anything else?” she asked, looking into the convenience store basket.

“Umm, maybe a couple shirts?”

“You do realize there are like five in the car that you haven’t worn yet, right?” I’d hoped she hadn’t noticed. What could I say?

“Oh, yeah. I guess I’m good then.” I turned up an aisle to head toward the checkout, but she grabbed my shoulder.

“Hold up, Marg – we’re not done yet. Come on,” she said as she led me towards a corner of the store, a mischevious smile on her lips.

“Umm, what are we getting?”

“You remember our deal, right? So you have to do it.” I nodded, swallowing hard as my stomach churned. I was nervous, but also excited. It felt like no matter what she had me do, it wouldn’t be on me – like it was all her doing. She pulled me into an aisle of beauty supplies. “We are going to dye our hair,” she said, beaming.

“Dye… our hair?”

“Yup.”

“But… why?”

“It’s fun!” she said, not looking at me. I remembered the newscast then – everyone was looking for the pretty blonde girl with green eyes, but if her hair was brown… “Come on, pick a color,” she told me, inspecting two different boxes herself. Now that I’d thought about it, I could almost hear the desperation in her voice. Or… fear. She was afraid of being caught and going back. But why?

I tried to get out of my head and turned toward the array of boxes in front of me. I’d never even contemplated dying my hair – that was part of me, and changing it… well, I guess it reminded me of plastic surgery. It was like I was saying that my dark brown hair wasn’t good enough. It had never been anything but a long and frizzy mess, but I actually almost liked the color. I didn’t really want to change it.

I told her I’d do it, though, so I had to. Right? And besides, dye would grow out…someday. “Here, you’d be pretty as a blonde,” she said holding a box beside my face.

“No, I think…” I thought I wanted to keep my hair the way it was. “I think I’ll go with this,” I said as I picked up a box. Mitta just looked at me.

“Seriously? Isn’t your hair already black?”

“No! It’s dark brown.” She leaned forward to inspect my hair, sighed, then took the box from me and tossed it in the basket, along with her own.

“Baby steps,” she said, almost to herself. “Baby steps.”

“What color did you pick?” I asked as we headed toward the checkout lanes.

“Something more than two shades away from my actual hair, I’ll tell you that,” she said with a smile as she started unloading our basket onto the conveyor belt.

“Don’t we need more stuff to actually do it? Like… I don’t know, bleach or something?”

“Why do you think I got these?” she asked, holding up a pair of fat paintbrushes. “And neither of us is going lighter, so we don’t need bleach.”

“You’ve done this before, then?” She seemed to know what she was doing – that at least gave me a little hope that I wouldn’t end up with green hair or something because I did it wrong.

“Nope. Always wanted to, though.” So maybe I would end up with green hair. Great. She thanked the cashier as we picked up our bags and headed back out to the parking lot. “Do you remember where the last truck stop was that we passed?”

“Umm, I think so. Why?”

“Well, we’ll need a shower to rinse it out. I mean, I could probably do it in a sink, but you have a lot of hair.” It hadn’t even occurred to me until then how we were going to shower as we drove around – I didn’t know that truck stops had them. I guess this whole thing still didn’t feel… permanent. It seemed like we could turn around any day and just go back home, like nothing had ever happened.

I caught sight of the toothbrush I’d bought in the bag as I set it down in the trunk; it wasn’t temporary. For as far as I could see, Mitta and this old car were the only things I had. This was my life – showering at truck stops and eating dry cereal out of plastic bowls. Sleeping in a makeshift bed in the trunk of my car. Heading to Mexico.

Was this better than what I’d left behind?