After I found out about the Blonde Fury, I thought I’d better colour my hair again. I bought the dye at the same drugstore where I’d bought the pregnancy test, only this time its shelves were half vacant. There was an inventory girl with dark blueberry hair who stood in front of the selection with a clipboard. She had loaded all of the Blondissima and Super Blonde into a shopping cart, presumably to be trucked away into some back warehouse, out of customer eyesight. I reached out a finger and ran it along the remaining choices, as if touching the boxes would help me. When you get to know me, you’ll find out I have to touch everything to convince myself it’s real. I touch everything except people. Your father, an exception.
Brown Sugar, Toffee, Pecan, Cedar, Acorn, Walnut. In the cardboard panel on the boxes that showed the results, and on the dingy hair loops attached to the shelves below, they all looked the same shade.
“I went for the darkest,” the employee said. “Don’t take chances.”
—From Emily Schultz’s satirical novel The Blondes, a wild and smart look at cultural theory, gender roles, and societal expectations, against the backdrop of a curious and dangerous new rabies-like disease that only turns women with blonde hair into cold-blooded killers.
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