Flo agreed with her. “I’ll have golden hair, too. It’s bound to make me look better. Don’t you think so, Judy?”
The wind blew harder. Judy could scarcely make herself heard above the weird whistling noise it was making.
“You won’t be Flo,” she shouted. “You’ll look so different without your pretty, brown hair.”
“Who will I be?” Flo asked, glancing at Clarissa just as the wind caught her scarf and sent it flapping. “Will people call me a changeling?”
“Now you’re laughing at me,” Clarissa charged. “Well, you can joke if you want to, but I still have a feeling I’m not real. You must have felt there was something different about me when you called me a phantom friend.”
“We were talking about the empty chair,” Judy began.
“People say things sometimes without knowing why they say them, and they turn out to be true,” Clarissa insisted. “Mother didn’t mean it when she called me a changeling, either, but she made me feel like one. You know—as if the real me is hidden somewhere under this dull, drab hair.”
“Did your mother call it dull and drab?” asked Flo. “Is that why you’ve hypnotized the rest of us into buying this golden hair wash?”
“Me? Hypnotized you? I thought it was the other way around.” Clarissa seemed genuinely distressed. She turned to look at Flo, and at that moment the thirteenth bottle of golden hair wash fell and broke, spilling all over the snow.
“Look what you made me do!” With a sound that was more of a sob than a laugh, Clarissa added, “Now I can never be a golden girl. I can never find the really, truly me!”