---

"Owie!"

"Oh, sorry, hon! But that one there was just bugging me to death!" She pressed on the spot above and between his eyes to take the sting away.

"You have like maybe twenty-eleven hairs up there that you really need gone!" She pulled at his eyebrow with her thumb and smiled, her normal mouth under her magnified eyes.

Mike realized he'd been asleep, or near enough to sleep that it made no difference, until a tiny spark of pain where he wasn't expecting it had jolted him back. His face felt stiff, almost.

"On my nose?" He didn't ~think~ he had a unibrow....

"It was just a stray hair in the middle there, hon, but you have a few that are all over the place! And since you don't wax or pluck - and you ~never~ should! - in a few years you'll be bushy or have to be plucking them anyway...." She thumbed his other brow and used the cool of the tweezers to point. He assumed.

"Won't I look weird with red up there?"

"Of course not! I wouldn't do that to you! It'll just be the ones that are out grazing in the field instead of keeping with the herd, not a bunch together. And you have great tolerance for it...." She grinned at the explanation. And he knew what she was talking about, when he thought about it.

"Well, okay... I guess."

"Kewl!" She grinned even more at her fake kewl-ness and dabbed at his brow with a cold, damp cotton ball as he closed his eyes against the stinging fumes.

-

It hurt. She was slow and used a lot of ice, but it still hurt.

She alternated with the odd ones on his cheeks after a while....

-

"Six-thir... two and a half hours!?"

The clock on the wall was always behind Denise and he never knew the time until she sat back and up at the end of the session. Some of them had been fifteen minutes that felt like an hour, and some half-hours that felt like a minute. But none had been even an hour! Not nearly! Denise grinned from the sink.

"Yeah, I'm amazed, too! You're just the second client I've had that fell asleep while I worked on her face and the other one was drugged up on valium or something! But once you started zoning, I figured 'what the hey, lets go to town!' and kept going. You're my last client today and we're gonna do them all eventually anyway. And your brows look great!"

She came back with a cold, wet towel and pressed at them before wrapping it around his whole face.

"I got a ton done and ~completely~ cleaned off your chin and lip and cheeks, all just one or two at a time so you wouldn't wake, and all down your neck where they're so random, and back under your jaw is almost done and I blended up both sides...." He heard her washing up and arranging her equipment away as she talked.

"There's always going to be new growth from hairs that were hibernating... but I got so much!"

Mike tried to feel what she'd done. Under the towel, his whole lower face was warm. His eyebrows stung a bit. Sunburn sting. Done?

Denise came back with another towel and switched them. Mike kept his eyes closed against the light. Cold again. Denise kept them in a cooler, specially for comfort.

"Ten minutes of cooling right away brings down the swelling the same way a whole night would, if you don't."

Mike blinked while he tried to figure out what she'd said. Then he mmm-ed that he understood. Denise didn't always make sense, grammar-wise, but then, neither did he. She lifted the cloth and ran an ice cube over his brows, like she sometimes did.

"Am I gonna be too swollen from so much?" Talking under a wet towel felt weird. The ice felt heavenly. He kept his eyes shut.

"Maybe a little more than usual, but I really was all over and didn't do any concentrated work at one time, so I think you'll be about normal by tomorrow. Do you have early classes again?"

The ice disappeared and she came back with a third cold towel and switched them so fast he had to wait to answer. She knew he had a late class on Thursdays and an early one on Fridays. The towels seemed cooler each time. Or he was.

"Yeah...." He was suddenly tired. Really tired.

"Don't fall asleep again!" Denise wasn't worried, it sounded like, but she made it like she was. When he opened his eyes and turned his head, even not seeing her through the towel, he knew she was sitting at her desk, writing up the invoice and his receipt, all normal, talking at her work.

"It's a lot of work, getting two hours of electrolysis, so you need to go have a big supper and then get to bed. And put on this cream just before bed and leave it on." She waved a tiny toothpaste-like tube at him and put it down again. He didn't see her, but she always did.

"And put cool towels on again for a half hour at least before bed, too. Before the cream."

She put the receipt into his folder and slid it back into the top filing cabinet drawer, shut it with a small rumble-clunk and stood up with a smile.

"You're about 95% done, hon! I couldn't even find any to do at the end! So no session next week and I bet we only need fifteen minutes the next! It shouldn't even show then!"

She lifted the towel off and ran her hand over her work - and his face - with a professional's pride. And a huge grin. She squeezed a dollop of the moisturizer she used onto her fingers and started to spread it. It was cool, too.

"It's at the point where most of the time it'll be invisible, normal fine hairs here and there, and you won't even look rough when you grow it for me." She thumb-smoothed his brows with the cream, too, and then reached back and squeezed another tiny dab and thumbed it in, here and there. She sat back and grinned.

"You look really pretty, hon. And less like your caterpillars are shedding, too."

-

Mike had only glanced at the mirror in Denise's washroom. His face looked like it was badly sunburned. Half his face. It had always felt worse than it looked, before, like a scraping, rough shave for the first few hours. But tonight it ~looked~ even more raw than it felt, so he only glanced at it. It was puffy, too. Denise saw her work, not real faces....

-

He worried about people seeing him at the bus stop. He knew it looked weird: red eyes, red face, swelling. Like hives. And acne. He tried to ignore everyone. Everything. The cooler night air felt good. On his face, at least.

He was glad it was at least dark out. He wished there were shadows he could hide in. He wished his sweater was heavier.

He hoped that boy wouldn't see him.

His chest tightened even more. More than hugging his books could help.

-

On the bus, in the warmth, Mike could feel his face swelling. Almost like it was getting stiff. He knew it was mostly an illusion, but it felt real. Denise had said aspirins helped a tiny bit, so he took two from the little flat tin his mom had given him. A travel tin, she'd said, and that it was older than he was and she'd bought it when she was in school, too. He kept it in a little zippered pocket in his bag, safe.

He sat and read with his head down and his face hidden by his hair. He'd finger-combed it forward and knew he looked like a grunge stoner, but at least people couldn't see.

Almost done. Months and months before they thought....

(People wouldn't see it anymore. Wouldn't think he was weird...)

He couldn't help smiling. (Almost done....)

Suddenly, at that thought, he realized that he couldn't really imagine what he'd look like when it was all over.

-

At the dorm, his history reading completed on the slow-service bus, he half-filled his ice cream pail with ice from the floor fridge in the hallway, then topped it up with cold water and settled down to an hour of cooling before an early-early bed time. Even if he was two hours later getting back.

Assuming nothing noisy happened on the floor outside. It should be okay on a weeknight....

Before settling in to see what was on TV, he examined himself closely in his hand mirror for the first time.

He ~was~ really swollen, almost like hives. More than ever before. And there was a lot of red. Everywhere.

Spots even low down on his neck. Spots all the way to the top of his cheeks and from his ears there was a continuous red right under his jaw, all around.... Everywhere where he had beard hair. Had had.

The red was where he ~used~ to have a beard...

And it was ~smooth~. Like, the hairs that were still there weren't even what he saw. Not until he looked for them. And they were soft. Like peach fuzz hairs.

He had to keep looking, examining it. His whole lip, and under, and down his neck....

It ~was~ like a sunburn. But it was ~done~! His hated, painful beard was really gone! Gone! His eyes looked funny with the same burn around his brows, his much neater brows....

Like a clown in a color negative, wherever his skin stretched, it went really pale.

He had to laugh then, and laid back to cool his red, smooth clown skin.

-

He fell asleep without using the cream. Without taking the last cold, wet towel off, either.

It was still cold and wet in the morning, by his ear.

-

He was even more sensitive to touch, but when he checked again after his shower it was a bit better again, and from experience he knew even more of the red'd be gone by after breakfast, though the little rough spots would look even worse for a day or so.

Like standing up was all that was needed for a fast bit of healing. Blood ran downhill, he guessed...

His eyebrows looked... odd. He just wasn't used to them, maybe, he thought....

For the first time since he'd started having to, Mike didn't have to hate shaving. He patted his sensitive face dry and looked in the mirror, and smiled. No shaving. Maybe... never again.

He grinned on purpose and admired the weird patterns of red and pale that still happened. That would go away soon and he'd never have ~them~ again, either.

He'd never be the same again. No beard. No caterpillars. He looked weird now, but after: he'd be perfect!

He felt like he was starting a new life or something!

-

He smiled his odd, red smile all the way to breakfast. Even getting up at seven for stupid eight A.M. classes was okay on a morning like this! Even the cafeteria's idea of what pancakes should taste like was fine!

Even Trevor Harris passing him in the hall and calling him a freak was fine! Trevor called all Arts majors freaks!

Engineers... and who signed up for ~five~ early morning labs?? All he did was study!

-

Logic 102, Critical Reasoning. 8:00 to 10 A.M., Wednesdays and Fridays.

The only philosophy Mike knew before university wasn't even part of Father Bertolli's course. I think, therefore I am. Apparently that was existentialism, part of Intro to Philosophy, 101, over in the Arts theatres.

But wasn't enrolling in an eight in the morning class on Fridays the ~opposite~ of logical, critical reasoning?

As he walked across the quad to class, Mike hummed a song that he vaguely remembered didn't really go the way he was humming it. The morning was chill but he smiled the whole way and hugged his bag tighter for warmth. The text for Logic 102 was small enough to fit inside.

Over to the right he could see the bus terminal. The path to the Arts building was there, too.

Around the Becker building were the stairs and door where he'd seen that boy...

Where that boy had smiled at him.

Mike's smile made the tuneless tune he was humming a little sillier. He didn't care.

-

End of Part Tres, wherein the Chrysalis Forms