A Spiteful Inheritance

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Today was the day Anna had been waiting for as long as she could remember. Her mean, rich grandpa Eddy had finally kicked the bucket, and now it was time to receive her inheritance. Just a small fraction of his wealth would be enough that she’d never have to work again. Not that she ever had. The oldest of the sisters at 26, Anna had never worked a day in her life, aside from sponsored Instagram and TikTok posts.

She sat with her sisters Michelle and Daisy in the lobby of a lawyer’s office. It was a stuffy room on the 14th floor of a non-descript building downtown, and she twirled her blonde curls in her fingers to convey her impatience over the inconvenience of having to wait almost half an hour. Finally, a young paralegal ushered them down the hallway into an office in the back, and closed the door behind her. After a few minutes of waiting, a man walked in. He was a handsome man in his late forties with a neatly-sculpted beard, stylish glasses and salt-and-pepper hair. Anna pondered whether it would be inappropriate to hit on him, but decided to maybe save it for later.

“Hello, ladies” he introduced himself “I’m not sure if you remember me, but I’m Martin Grossman, your grandfather’s attorney.”

He shook their hands one-by-one before having a seat in his oversized leather chair.

“First of all, I’d just like to offer my condolences in this trying time. Your grandfather was a great man and this community will miss him dearly.”

“Oh, um, yeah, We’re all just heartbroken. I can’t believe he went so soon” Daisy replied, trying her best to force a tear.

She detected a smirk from the lawyer, as if he could tell how full of shit she was.

“Yes, well, I’m sure you are all very heartbroken, so I’ll try to take as little of your time as possible so you can get back to grieving.” he paused to let the girls force another few tears. “Shortly before he passed, Theodore recorded a video outlining the terms of your inheritance. He requested it be played to all three of you at the same time.”

“Terms?” Anna asked.

“Ah, yes, you’ll understand better when you view the recording. And again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Martin turned his computer screen around and hit the play button on a video.

Grandpa Eddy’s sickly visage appeared on the screen and began to speak.

“Anna, Michelle, Daisy, if you’re watching this, it means I’m dead. I’ve lived a life full of achievements and accomplishments that I take great pride in, but sadly, my time appears to be coming to an end soon, and there is one thing that brings me great shame: You. The three of you, I’ve watched grow from spoiled children to rotten, greedy adults. I’ve seen your posts on the Instagram and the TikTok where you tell all of your followers how much you hope I’ll hurry up and die so you can get your money. You thought I’d never see that because I’m an old geezer, but I made a fortune investing in social media so I’ve learned a thing or two. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t see a penny of my money, but I made a promise to your late mother that I wouldn’t leave you without a pot to piss in, and I intend to honor it. You can thank her that I’m giving you a chance, but maybe if she hadn’t married that immature manchild you call a father, you would have been raised better in the first place.”

The girls looks ranged from shocked to embarrassed. Martin was definitely smirking now. The video continued.

“So, I’ve decided to set up a trust fund for each of you that will disperse $50,000 per month, starting one year from now. However, each of you must adhere to the terms I set forth until then, or you get nothing. I’ll start with Michelle.”

All eyes in the room turned to Michelle.

“Michelle. I always dreaded going to restaurants with you because of the way you would inevitably abuse the waitstaff. You do know I put myself through Yale waiting tables, don’t you? Every time you yelled at some poor server, it truly hurt me. I always left them a thousand dollar tip for having to put up with you. That’s why I am setting forth the following terms for you to receive your inheritance: You must get a job as a waitress- full time- and keep the job for one year.”

Michelle shrugged. “Fine, whatever, how hard could it be to do some minimum wage job.”

The video continued “As for you, Daisy, you are the most vain, self-centered person I have ever met, and a bully too. You may not know this, but your senior year of high school, you bullied Emily Johnson so badly about her weight that she had to go to rehab for anorexia- which I paid for.”

“Shit, I thought she was studying abroad. But… I never did that again.” Daisy assured her sisters.

“And then you did it again! During your almost one year in college, you bullied one of your sorority sisters into an eating disorder!” The voice of their departed grandfather cried out incredulously. “Since you love calling everyone else fat, I’m going to give you a taste of your own medicine. The terms are such: You will step on a scale today. A year from now, you will weigh in again. If you have not gained at least 100 pounds, you will not receive a penny.”

Daisy started to cry. “Fuck! That’s way worse than Michelle’s! I can’t do that. I’ve worked my ass off for this body.”

“Better work your ass off at getting a job then!” Michelle teased. Anna was too nervous to join in teasing her sister, because she didn’t know what would come next as the video continued.

“And Anna, dear Anna. Let’s look at some of the things you’ve referred to me as on social media…” The man on the video put on reading glasses and began to read off a paper “Baldy, the old bald dinosaur, Dr. Evil, the smooth-skulled shithead, and Lord Voldemort- by the way, yes, I do know who that is. You really seem to be fixated on the fact that I am a bald man. I started losing my hair in my late twenties, and keeping it shaved has been part of my daily routine for the last fifty years. I actually find it quite satisfying, and perhaps you will too. For the next year, you are to shave your head as smooth as mine, every day. No wearing wigs, and you are to post a… ahh… selfie at least once per day to Instagram.”

Anna’s sisters laughed at her as she grabbed her blonde locks in horror. There had to be some way out of this, she though. No way this could be legal.

Grandpa Eddy laughed and continued “And one last thing. None of you can’t tell anyone why you’re doing this! If you tell one soul, you get nothing!”

The video ended and Martin handed them all some papers.

“Now, let’s go over the details.” He explained. “You’ll be signing a non-disclosure agreement as to the contents of the video you just watched, and the terms of your inheritance. Your grandfather’s estate will be employing private investigators to ensure that you are complying with the terms and have not violated the NDA. Failure to comply with said terms will result in the contents of your trust fund being dispersed to a number of charitable organizations, as will refusal to sign this contract today. By agreeing to these terms, you will waive all rights to pursue legal action against Mr. Sanders’ estate. Should you comply, we will schedule a meeting one year from today’s date to begin the payments from your trust funds. Are there any questions?”

Anna looked around. Michelle shrugged and signed immediately. Daisy looked like she wanted to scream but seemed to have realized how much she needed the money, so she signed. Anna was the last holdout. She treasured her locks and worried she’d look like a freak without them, but $50,000 a month was a lot more than she could ever earn herself, hair or no hair. Reluctantly, she signed.

 

Later that day

 

Anna parked her car outside her favorite hair salon. She spent the next half hour trying to decide how to explain what she needed to do. Every time she started to open the car door to get out, she froze. There was no way that Anna could bear the humiliation of having all her hair shaved off in a busy salon while strangers gawked. She was going to have to do this herself. Anna started the car and drove to the nearest Target, where she bought a set of electric clippers, avoiding eye contact with anyone else in the store and paying at self checkout.

When she got home, Anna took a long shower and washed, dried and curled her hair one last time. She stared at herself in the mirror, holding the clippers and trying to talk herself out of it. She wondered if maybe could keep relying on the money she made as an influencer and forget about the trust fund. But that wasn’t realistic, she wasn’t popular enough to earn a real living off social media, and if she said one wrong thing, she could get cancelled and never see another dime. There was always the plan to marry a rich guy, but she’d already been trying to do that, and all of her relationships had been disasters. That was a fact which likely wouldn’t change, since she lacked the self awareness to realize that her toxic personality traits were the reason they were all disasters. Was she really going to let that old monster win?

After all that bargaining and indecisiveness, she finally acted on impulse. Closing her eyes, she made a quick, seamless motion of her right arm, flicked the clippers on and pushed them through her thick, blonde hair, right at the center. When Anna opened her eyes, there was a bald strip through the center of her scalp. The die had been cast. Her hands were shaking and her heart was racing at 150 beats per minute. She made some desperate attempts to hide the bald strip in the middle, but it was clearly futile. Accepting the fact that there was no going back brought a wave of calm over her, and as her hands steadied, she made another pass with the clippers, and another.

She laughed at the reflection in the mirror, seeing that she had shaved her hair into a crude, blonde skullet. The hair on the right side of her head went next. Then she switched hands and clumsily clipped off the remaining half left-handed, leaving uneven stubble. She removed the guard from the clippers and ran them over her entire head until the bristle was short enough to shave off with a razor.

Anna took a deep breath and proceeded with the next step. She squirted some shaving cream into her hand and spread it evenly across her scalp. Using the same razors she would use for her legs and armpits, she scraped away at the foam. This hair was thicker and tougher, and she nicked herself a couple times. When all the foam was gone, she felt her scalp. It was disappointingly rough, and so she spread another layer of foam and repeated the process, this time applying more pressure.

The face that stared back at her was one she did not recognize. To Anna’s surprise, though, she didn’t hate it. She had a nicely shaped head without all that hair covering it up. For as long as she remembered, Anna had occasionally thought to herself “could I pull off bald?” She now knew that the answer to that question: Yes.

Now how the hell was she going to explain this to all her followers?

 

Six Months Later

 

Anna had stayed faithful to the terms of her contract. While the initial reveal of her smooth scalp had gotten mixed responses, she had been steadily picking up more followers ever since. She had explained that she decided to go a year without hair in order to “liberate” herself from the pressure society put on women to have long, high-maintenance hairstyles. It was a convenient excuse that would explain when she started growing it back out. A few of her female followers had actually joined in and shaved their own heads without even getting a financial reward for it. Anna was now producing sponsored content for companies that made razors and shaving gel, and her make-up tutorials had a new twist that grew her viewership exponentially.

Michelle, on the other hand, had not had such success with her task. Three weeks in to her job at the Cheesecake Factory, a group of eight churchgoers had spent two hours treating her with rudeness and derision. When she saw that they had only left her with a $20 bill as a tip, it already made her upset. Then she unfolded that bill, and found out that it was actually a sheet of bible verses disguised as a $20 bill, which made her furious. When she ran out to the parking lot to give them a piece of her mind, it got her fired. Michelle would not be receiving any inheritance. Thus, she found herself at Anna’s apartment, once again asking for financial support.

“Look, Anna, I just need two grand so I can put a deposit on an apartment, I’ll pay you back as soon as I get the money from selling my Hermes bag!” Michelle pleaded.

“Why can’t you just get it from Todd? He has thousand dollar bills stuck to the bottom of his shoes.” Anna responded dismissively.

“So… Todd found out I’ve been sleeping with Jaden, so that’s a no-go. He’s cut me off entirely.” Michelle responded with shame.

“Uhh… okay, then get the money from Jaden, didn’t you say he works at Goldman Sachs?” Anna replied, growing more impatient with her sister.

“Yeah… about that… turns out he works at a car dealership that’s part-owned by Goldman… and he works in the pre-owned department.” Michelle sighed and hung her head.

“Well, here’s the thing. Even with my new sponsorship deals, I’m still pretty much living paycheck-to-paycheck. Plus you already owe me three thousand bucks from the last couple times you said you’d pay me back, so this well has run dry for you.”

“Please, just one more time and I’ll be set for a while” Michelle bargained.

“Well… I may be able to hook you up with a way to make a lot more than you need.” Anna responded with a smile. Michelle gave her a nervous look.

“An opportunity? What does that mean?”

“So…” Anna paused to dramatically stroke her smooth scalp, knowing Michelle wasn’t going to like what she was going to say next “I got approached with a sponsorship offer from this chain of places that do laser hair removal. You know, underarms, legs, bikini, that kind of stuff. Thing is, that’s not what they want me to do. They want me to do laser hair removal on my head, and make this big promotion out of it. They offered $100,000. I told them I’d consider it, but I want to grow my hair back out when my trust fund kicks in, and besides, I’d lose my razor and shaving cream sponsorships if I didn’t have to shave anymore.”

“Oh FUCK no!” Michelle responded emphatically. Anna chuckled a bit. It was more of an insult than a serious offer. No woman in their right mind would ever actually agree to that, but she wanted to rub it in to her sister that she was now poor. She continued.

“Yeah I knew you wouldn’t like it, but hear me out. First of all, 100 was their initial offer. I’m sure if they started with that, they can go higher. Also… on a similar note… If I hadn’t needed to shave my hair off on such short notice, I could have made a lot of money. I constantly get DMs from guys who ask me if I have any friends who want to shave their heads, and some of them offer pretty substantial sums for a private show. At the very least, you could do that, see how you like it and then decide if you want to do the laser thing.”

Normally, Michelle would have told Anna to go fuck herself, but compared to the first offer, it seemed almost reasonable. Anna was actually serious this time, she legitimately could get Michelle more than enough money to pay her back and move into a new apartment that way.

“So this is like a fetish thing?” She inquired.

“Look, I’m gonna be completely honest with you: Yes. Absolutely. I definitely have a lot of fetish guys following my insta” Anna conceded “But they’re not nearly as creepy as the fetish guys following Daisy’s weight gain. I mean, there’s a filter you can use to see how you’d look bald, maybe give that a look, see how much you hate it, and let me know. If you do want to, I’ll give you the money you need for your deposit.”

“I don’t know.” Michelle nervously fidgeted with her dark brown hair “I guess, maybe, we can see how much I get offered and go from there.”

 

Two Weeks Later

 

The offers had been too much for Michelle to pass up. As soon as Anna hinted that her sister might be thinking about shaving her head too, the DMs started rolling in. With a bit of stretching the truth, Anna managed to drive a bidding war all the way to $15,000 to view the private stream. The high bid, from a Japanese man, came with some strings attached as to how she would do the deed, but Michelle was okay with it as long as there wasn’t any nudity. She had learned the hard way that any time you send a man nudes, they’ll be on the internet forever. Another 33 people who hadn’t been willing to fork over 15 large had paid $100 for a copy of the video afterwards. Anna didn’t tell her sister about that, and considered the $3,300 a finder’s fee.

Anna let Michelle film at her apartment using her video and lighting equipment, and Daisy came along for moral support. She had clearly been sticking to her terms, with her gut hanging out the bottom of a t-shirt that no longer fit, and her yoga pants stretched beyond their intended limits.

“Let’s do this!” Michelle shouted enthusiastically.

Though she had been reluctant to even consider the idea a couple weeks ago, Michelle had gotten more and more excited about the prospect of shaving her head. She couldn’t stop looking at herself through a bald filter on Snapchat, and she liked the look more and more every day. Plus, when she calculated how much she was actually spending on on hair products, it was a number much higher than she ever would have guessed. She put on the outfit that Toshiro had sent her, a skimpy schoolgirl outfit. Per the instructions, she braided her hair in two pigtails.

After fumbling with the lighting and camera lenses and confirming that their benefactor could see the stream, Anna signaled to Michelle that she was ready to start filming. “And… Action!”

Michelle smiled at the camera and winked. “Arigato, Toshiro-san!”

She danced seductively and picked up a pair of scissors off the floor. First, she put the scissors around one of her pigtails, but then she wagged her finger and lowered them around her tight shirt. After a couple snips, the tattered fabric fell to the floor, leaving behind a black bra that perfectly framed her ample breasts. Again she placed the scissors around her pigtail, but wagged her finger and stopped. Next she snipped off her skirt, leaving just a tiny black thong underneath. She danced around and twirled for the camera, wiggling her barely-covered butt in the direction of her rapidly-expanding sister as if to taunt her with her tight body.

Michelle then placed the scissors around her right pigtail again, but this time, she snipped. The sharp blades barely made a dent in the thick mass of hair, and it took about ten snips to separate the first pigtail from her head. She held her trophy up high and dropped it on the ground. After dancing around some more, Michelle bent over to pick up a pair of clippers and a hand mirror. Making sure the camera could get a good angle of what she was doing, she ran the clippers along the right side of her head with a #2 guard, until all the hair was only a fraction of an inch long. Next, she removed the guard and reduced the remaining hair to barely-visible stubble, careful to leave the left side of her head untouched. Finally, she placed the clippers above her right eye and swiftly erased her eyebrow.

She danced around gracefully while rubbing her head and then laid down on the floor next to a tray. It had a bowl of water, a can of shaving cream, and a package of razors. Of course, they were the brands that Anna sponsored. She slowly massaged the shaving cream into her scalp until half her head was covered while looking at the camera, then passed over it with the razor. Unlike Anna’s first attempt, this was a heavy-duty razor designed for use on the head, and it left behind nothing but smooth, flawless skin as Michelle glided it effortlessly over her scalp. When she was done, she spread a little more shaving cream over her eyebrow and with one swipe, removed all traces of stubble.

After that, she did a photo shoot with her half-bald head. Toshiro instructed her how to pose. She took fifteen photos in different poses, feigning every emotion from surprise to anger to glee as she rubbed her denuded scalp. Finally, she wrote Toshiro’s name on her head with a marker in crude Japanese characters which weren’t even close to correct.

This was actually all Toshiro wanted, and he logged off shortly after, but Anna didn’t tell Michelle, because they needed to finish the video for all the other people who had paid to see it. Michelle repeated the same process on the other side of her head, first snipping the ponytail, then clipping the hair down to a #2, then once again with no guard, and finally spreading another layer of foam to completely remove her remaining hair and eyebrow.

“And that’s a wrap!” Anna shouted. Michelle hugged her and daisy before picking the hand mirror back up and staring at herself.

“You know, I have to say, I kinda love this!” Michelle beamed.

“Told you that you would!” Anna reassured her.

Michelle put her clothes back on and helped Anna and Daisy clean up. At least, she tried to, but she was so distracted by her bare scalp that she was not of much use.

 

A Few Days Later

 

Anna and Michelle met at Daisy’s apartment for dinner. One of Daisy’s YouTube followers had a 20 piece bucket of fried chicken delivered to her, and she needed help making it look like she ate the whole thing. Michelle was the last to arrive, her bald head covered by a hoodie. As she sat down next to her sisters, she lowered the hood.

Anna stared at Michelle’s scalp and looked concerned “Hey, Michelle, your skin on your head looks kind of irritated, did you shave it again? I can give you some of my supplies if you want to keep it smooth for a while. Don’t use that cheap stuff.”

“Yeah… about that…” Michelle responded. “Remember that laser hair removal company you were talking about? The one that was offering you 100k to laser off all your hair?”

“No!!!” Anna replied with shock

“So… when I debuted the new look, they reached out to me pretty much instantly and I negotiated a deal. You weren’t wrong about them being willing to go up on the price. We did the first session a few hours ago!”

“Wait, WHAT?” Anna replied with shock. She wasn’t even being serious when she offered that to Michelle.

“Yeah, they didn’t think I’d go through with it, that’s why they haven’t promoted it yet, but I’m no quitter. Hurt like a bitch but I just had to keep my mind on the money. They paid the first installment up front, and I’ll get the rest when I complete the next couple sessions. Plus they’re giving me a set of wigs from Scheinhart Wig Company that look just like my old hair, those are really high-end.”

For the first time in months, Anna felt jealous of her sister. Not only would she now be the poor one until the trust fund kicked in, but this would surely mean that Michelle would steal a lot of the attention she had been getting online. Maybe she should have taken that offer from the hair removal clinic more seriously.

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