The Woman with the Shaved Head flipped through the pages of the magazine. "Arent these women fascinating?" "How so?" the Listener asked quietly. "They're all so... interchangable. All these women, from all these different backgrounds... and yet they wind up all the same." The Listener shrugged. She'd wanted to be a model from day one. All the glamourous clothes, all the fawning admirers, all the travel to exotic places just for the sheer, hedonistic pleasure of taking a photo with her in the middle of it. She knew it would be hard work to get to that level, but she was prepared for hard work. Her mother taught her that well. Within two years, she was on the cover of virtually every major fashion magazine in North America. Her perfect skin, the result of hours of finding just the right balance of moisterizers and colour enhancers, was suitable for every shoot, and her eyes, pale orbs whose exact colour remained a mystery, took every form of makeup with elan and style. Her cheekbones were just the right height; her hair was the perfect shade of dark blonde. Her breasts were neither too big nor too small. She was indeed perfect. To maintain that essential perfection was a full time job in and of itself. Her meals were carefully monitored, as was her gym regimen. She knew to the calorie exactly how much had gone in and how much had come out so that perfect balance was sustained. Her social life was equally screened: she would allow no emotional distress nor physical relationship. To keep her skin perfect, she neither laughed nor cried; rather, she remained in a blissful equilibrium of uninvaded calm. Of course she had friends, mostly in the industry. Initially, they welcomed her, cajoling her to join them at the latest restaurant opening, where they would dine on meals that she now found repulsive; her own, by contrast, was just enough to keep the engine within at optimal performance. They found her emotional distance bewildering, then tiring, and the invitations stopped. She did not miss them. The contracts continued to roll in, and before long, the little girl from the small town in the midwest now owned a house in Maine and a condo in Los Angeles. Bored with one, she would fly to the other. In the airport one afternoon, she saw a mother and child, a young girl. And something inside, long dormant, awakened. Uncertain what it was, she found herself piling her bed with random objects so she could pretend she didnt sleep alone. Driving home from a shoot, she would impetuously move a ring from her right hand to her left so she could imagine the thrill of having someone waiting for her at the end of the day. Then one morning, she looked in the mirror and realized she hadnt seen herself without makeup in two years. Scrubbing it off, she found the face of a woman who was neither pretty nor plain, but simply ordinary. "What was she telling you, I wonder?" the Woman with the Shaved Head asked. "I'm not sure. Perhaps she found her simple ordinariness cathartic." "I wonder..." "What?" The Woman with the Shaved Head looked at the magazine once more, then tossed it aside. "I wonder if she looked into the mirror and found even her real face a lie."