“Your sister has trichotillomania,” said my mother over the hum of the fridge. “Do what you can for her.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Is she crazy?”
“No,” said my mother. “And don’t you dare say the word ‘crazy’ in front of her.”
I looked over to where my sister was sitting, watching the news and sucking on a lollie pop.
“How’s it going?” I called to her.
“I have trichotillomania,” she informed me, her eyes fixed on the television.
“I still don’t understand what that means,” I said to my mother. “Is it a disease?”
“It’s a syndrome.”
“Is it contagious?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Is it fatal?”
“How can it be; hair’s already dead.”
I took a breath.
“What?”
“Your sister can’t stop pulling out her hair.”
“It’s a compulsion,” called my sister, who had apparently been listening to the entire conversation.
I peered at the back of my sister’s head. Her hair appeared to be perfectly fine, or at least it was the same as usual. Long, thick, glossy. Our rooms were adjacent to one another, and each morning I awoke to the scream of her blow dryer. My sister cherished her hair.
“What, is she… collecting it?” I asked my mother. She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Of course not. That’s perverse.”
I looked back at my sister. Beyond her head, well-coifed newscasters were reporting a story about a local man who had gone on a rampage, scalping people and chewing up their brains.
“It’s not like your sister is some kind of maniac,” said my mother. “One in every hundred people has TTM.”
“One in every seven people secretly believes that their life is a television show,” I said.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I made it up.”
There was a pause.
“Is there a cure for this… trichotillomania?” I asked.
“Baldness,” boomed my father, entering the room. I winced; the week strains of sunlight through the window reflected off of his shiny pate into my eyes.
“Stop it,” said my mother. “Not exactly. We’re not giving her medication, of course. But there are some habit reform techniques that we’ll be trying.”
“Oh. Okay.” Another pause. To ease the tension, I gnawed on the crater of raw flesh that I had carved out of the cuticles on my thumbnail. My parents watched, aghast.
“That’s onychophagia,” muttered my mother to my father. “Or perhaps even dermatillomania. Either way, we should call the doctor.”
They left the room.
“You’ll be fine,” said my sister. I walked up to where she was sitting and looked at her face. She had no eyelashes. She peered at me with big blue eyes like a fish’s, windows without drapes, fingers without nails. To me, she looked pretty.
“Does it hurt when you do that?” I said.
“Lean in,” she said. I closed my eyes and brought my face closer to hers. I felt a tug, then a sting. I had suffered far worse pains, but I was still surprised by the amount of violence that was transmitted through that tiny follicle, millimeters long.
“It hurts,” I said. She smiled.
“But now you get to make a wish.”
***
Phoebe Nir
Phoebe Nir is a high school student living in New York City. She is the recipient of the Stephen Sondheim Young Playwrights award and has been published in a handful of online literary journals. She once saw Stephen Colbert in a bookstore, and she nearly had a heart attack.
