AGGIE NORTH

People hated that she wore a hoodie, but it was none of their damn business. She wasn’t a prejudiced person, but why was a hoodie any different from wearing a headscarf, and in this snowflake town everyone loved Muslims, right?

She wore it because she was bald. Not temporary chemo-bald. Forever-bald. Her hair started falling out in big clumps when she was twenty, shocking enough that her supervisor at work sent her to the college health service to check it out. The nurse practitioner called it alopecia. She explained that no one knew why it happened to some people, and there was no cure. Aggie’s co-workers on the housekeeping staff were used to it, and no one there hassled her about wearing a hoodie.

Other people weren’t so kind. The worst time was at Stop & Shop, right after that Black kid in Florida was shot, and the woman at the bakery counter called Security and two rent-a-cops brought her to their office for questioning. One of them held Aggie’s hands behind her back, and the other pulled down her hood. He gasped and the other one let her hands go.

She had pulled her hoodie back in place. “You satisfied?” she snarled. “I’m bald. And I’m white. So, go to hell.”

Aggie watched the progress of the detectives around the Court, thinking how much she didn’t want to talk to any cops about anything. But like so many things in life, she didn’t have any choice. When the doorbell rang she tried to rearrange her face into a less surly expression.

Really, it wasn’t that bad. The detectives were polite and didn’t ask about her hoodie. Since she didn’t know anything about the missing woman or her husband, there wasn’t much to talk about. Although that bothered her too, that she had lived here for so long and hardly knew their neighbors.

That was one of the reasons she and Arnie were saving their money to buy a farm. They needed to get out of this town and move somewhere people would be more like them—not bald, but regular—and there’d be fewer neighbors, in any case. So, they both worked hard at the college taking extra shifts when they could. They made birdhouses to sell at craft fairs. Arnie built them down in the basement and she painted them real pretty, with flowers and hearts. And she babysat, when she could find jobs.

Babysitting was how she had met Morgan and Marc in Number One. Their doctor mother was a class-A bitch, but Morgan was a sweet girl, even though her name was odd. Aggie asked her about it once, and she said she was named for a character in some old movie that her parents watched the night they got pregnant. How weird is that? In any case, bitch-mother never asked Aggie back to babysit after that first time. But Aggie heard that the people moving into Number Five next door had a baby, and she was hoping for some regular babysitting hours.

In the meantime, she stayed mostly in the house when she wasn’t working. Arnie did the grocery shopping since that bad time at the store. She probably wouldn’t join the search party for the old woman. She would like to help, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. The sideways looks and the silent judgements. Not worth it, no way.