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the hell were you when I got
to the bottom? I had to drag my bleeding ass to the hospital all by myself.”
    “I panicked. I was calling for
help.”
    “Help? Let me guess. You were
already busy on the phone telling Motley that I screwed up the job.”
    “I alerted him to the situation,
yes.”
    “Oh geez, Rabbit, you are such a
brownnoser.”
    “Well, clearly you haven’t died
from the altercation, so where are you now, Alice?”
    “I’m outside Vincent de Paul
Hospital. I just got patched up by some dude who was probably a bogus doctor.”
    “You always think the worst of
everyone. Where is de Paul? On Rochereau?”
    I squinted to see the words written
on the sign at the cross street.  “I think so.”
    “Come to my apartment so we can
regroup. Don’t walk here. Those trigger-happy guys from the Eiffel Tower might
be looking for you. Hop on the metro at the Denfert-Rochereau stop, it should
be right in front of you if you’re on Rochereau. I will give my doorman a heads
up that you’re coming.”
    I was already ducking inside the
stairwell leading down to the metro station as he suggested it. My eyes scanned
the concrete walls for any trace of the man who had shot me an hour earlier.
The big yellow adverts for microwavable au poulet lining the tracks,
meshed with the plastic blue bucket seats lining the walls, overwhelmed my eyes
and dizzied my senses. The white pills hadn’t really worn off like I told the
doctor. The incoming train rumbled with a thunderclap and I braced for the gust
that was about to surge the tunnel on the heel of the train’s brakes. It blew
my skirt up and ironed my tattered shirt to my chest. I glimpsed a blurry study
of myself in the reflective doors of the train car. Trestles of my hair grew
down from my scalp like knots, inorganic shades of tangerine and sienna. I was
missing one of my dangly earrings. My slashed t-shirt revealed the thinness of
my shoulder and laid bare a frontier of sallow, bony skin, leading the eye to
my clavicle, which protruded hauntingly from my skin-and-bones frame. I was a
fool to have thought that doctor was looking at me like I was beautiful.
    The reflection of my own eyes
caught my attention. Haunted was the way to describe them. The eyes were green
and an artificial rim of melted black eyeliner gave them an appearance that was
animalistic, or extraterrestrial, or perhaps just that of a twenty-one-year-old
girl who had seen too much.
    The train doors parted, splitting
my reflection in two.        
    “You realize I am going to have to
cut my hair over this, right?” my lips spouted into the phone. I stepped
onboard, one hand patting inside my bag in search of my metro pass. “I’m too
damn recognizable with this red mop. I really freaking liked my hair too. Do
you have any idea how pissed this makes me?”
    A homeless guy sleeping inside the
train car gave me a censuring look as though my yelling was funking up the feng
shui around his cardboard pillow. From his spit-glossed lips he muttered
something in French I couldn’t understand. I had lived in the city for three
years, and I could still barely order a croissant in the native tongue. I had
been busy with other things.
    “We’ll take care of it when you get
here,” Rabbit assured me. He let off a big sigh to passive-aggressively signal
to me that he thought I was overreacting, as usual.
    “Give your doorman a heads-up
because I am not waiting on the curb for you. You know the protocol. Have a box
of hair dye and a sharp pair of scissors waiting for me when I get there.”
    *   
*    *
    I launched my bag down on the
marble countertop that formed a border around Rabbit’s shiny bathroom sink, and
noted with satisfaction that he did, in fact, have both items I requested
waiting for me. We had certainly done this ritual enough times.
    I glided the golden scissors into
my hair and began snipping. I went for a short and sleek look, letting the
pointed ends fall as daggers at my