The Missing Limousine

Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Sanjena Sathian about her writing process.

Watching The Bachelor was supposed to make life easier. I started getting into it a year or so after I began working at my brother’s salon. I had a regular stable of clients, but none was particularly in love with me. The problem was not my skill—I am talented at hair removal and competent at mani-pedis. The problem was our Yelp reviews, which said things like “Good eyebrow threading but that one girl makes you keep your eyes open for a whole minute before she starts and the way she stares makes you think she’s trying to suck your soul out.” Which I thought was dramatic.

When he saw that particular review, my brother came into the back storeroom where I was taking my break and waved his phone around like a distress signal to get my attention. I was reading a blog about people who believe they’re already dead, and how psychologists find it very difficult to treat those settling into the placid state of afterlife. They are basically unconcerned with going to work, and surprised you can see them at all.

“Earth to Avanti!” My brother read the review aloud. “Can’t you just learn to make small talk like a normal person?”

I was willing to learn.

He conferred with his girlfriend, who suggested I watch The Bachelor. She said it was like the NFL for women. Like if the whole world shared the same high-school friends to gossip about. She said there were blogs and podcasts and tabloids and Instagram feeds and brackets and betting pools. She said that everyone watched it, that even some men indulged, discreetly and lovingly. It would let me into the world, this show.

This happened in the spring. Outside, the Bradford pear was stinking up the parking lot and dropping petals that looked like used Kleenex. As summer set in, I binged, taking careful notes inside my studio apartment, with its thin walls and rattling window AC unit, while the humid days thickened outside.

By late June, my eyes were starting to hurt and my hand was starting to cramp and my social-media feeds were crowded with images of all that normalcy, and yet I still was not much better loved by clients. Until Camrynn Hare—an old high-school classmate—walked in. Some years ago, a white girl would not have come to our salon, but eyebrow threading was now mainstream.

When she leaned back, I began staring into her cement-colored eyes but stopped myself. I asked if she watched the show and she made an intense mmhmm noise. I remembered how she’d passed around a tube of snake-venom-infused lip gloss by the lockers, her whole clique pursing their slick, plump mouths.

“What do you think of that Earl guy?” I asked. Earl was the villainous country singer with the snake tattoo coiling up his right arm.

“Oh my God,” she said. “He was in SAE at SMU with my maid of honor’s fiancé, and—” and then we started to talk. I lost track of my limbs as we discussed Earl’s true motivations, his upcoming gigs in Nashville, and whether or not he’d secretly had a girlfriend the whole time.

As she opened her eyes to blink at her newly pruned brows in the mirror, she cocked her head. The hair that had once been bleach blond was now