Studio 19

The phone rang at 2:34 a.m.

Lila jolted upright in the tangle of her too-thin sheets. The hum of the neon light outside her apartment window flickered in rhythm with her pulse. Sleep hadn’t been kind to her lately, and neither had the industry.

She fumbled for her phone, knocking over an empty ramen cup and a half-used bottle of dry shampoo in the process.

“It’s me,” came the voice—sleek, efficient, almost bored. Her agent, who lately only ever called with bad news. But this early- maybe she had something.

“Tess?” Lila croaked, sitting up straighter, spine tense with hope.

“Got you something. Photo shoot. Tomorrow morning. Big magazine. Urban decay aesthetic. Think grunge meets couture.”

Lila’s heart fluttered. “What’s the concept?”

Tess hesitated for a second too long. “They’re… different. You’ll look great. Just show up. 8 a.m. Sharp. Studio 19. Don’t be late, Lila. You can’t afford to be.”

Click.

Lila stared at the screen as the call ended, a pit blooming low in her stomach. She couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling that she’d just agreed to something—without knowing what the consequences would be.

The next morning, Lila briskly walked to the address that her agent had texted her earlier.

She walked in, not expecting the sight before her. The studio was stark—steel scaffolding, bare bulbs, shadows pooling in the corners like smoke. A makeup artist quickly handed Lila a bitter-tasting coffee and ushered her to a long mirror without offering any small talk. A man stood behind her, arms crossed, eyes sharp.

“This is Roman,” the assistant murmured before vanishing like the rest of them.

Roman looked like he’d walked straight out of Berlin in the early 2000s—piercings, boots, black denim that made no concessions for comfort. His gaze crawled over Lila like a surgeon evaluating a patient before an unneeded operation.

She met his eyes in the mirror. “Hi,” she said, voice faltering.

He didn’t answer before walking over to her and guiding her briskly into the chair. Pushing her down, he snapped a black cape tightly around her neck before reaching for a comb and separating her hair with mechanical precision.

Lila’s hair—long, thick, coffee-brown with soft waves—fell like a curtain past her ribs. It had taken years to grow. She wrapped her identity in it, used it like armor in castings, hid behind it when the comments got cruel.

She wasn’t told anything about cutting it.

“I—I didn’t think this shoot required—”

Snip.

The scissors snipped high, alarmingly close to her ear. A heavy lock fell to the floor before she could finish her sentence. Her breath caught in her throat.

“Don’t flinch,” Roman muttered. “You’ll make it uneven.”

“Wait! No, you don’t understand—my agent didn’t say—”

Snip.

Another section, closer to the scalp this time. Cold air kissed her newly bare neck.

“It’s just hair,” Roman said, irritation curling around every syllable. “It grows back. Eventually.”

She tried to get up. Roman pushed her shoulder down, firm and deliberate.

“We have a vision.”

The voice came from behind the lighting rig.

The director.

A woman in her fifties, dressed in architectural black, clutching a tablet and a clipboard. Her expression was like steel left out in the cold.

“You signed a release, darling. We needed something raw. You’re too safe, too pretty. We’re changing that. You’re being reimagined”

Lila’s chest constricted. She opened her mouth to protest again, but her voice snagged on the weight of her desperation, her dwindling rent money, her three-month backlog of unpaid bills. She stared into the mirror.

Roman pulled another section taut. The scissors gleamed.

The next snip had her hair level with her jaw, the last of her remaining length falling away with little resistance.

She gripped the armrests, knuckles pale. Her neck tingled in unfamiliar air, skin tight where hair once shielded her.

“Stop acting like I’m cutting off a limb,”Roman muttered as he straightened her head roughly. Carefully he combed some of her hair forward so it fell like a veil over her eyes. She couldn’t quite see what he was doing, but she could feel the scissors being slid in at a slant against her forehead, and tears threatened to overspill.

“You’re not listening,” she whispered, eyes glassy. “It matters. It matters to me.”

Roman didn’t slow down. Her small trembles just made him sharper, more clinical. Her pain made him efficient.

Physically, she was drained. Emotionally, it was a freefall. She imagined her younger self weeping in front of the mirror after trimming just a few split ends. That little girl felt very far away now.

When the last strand fell, the silence was as sharp as the scissors.

Roman stepped back.

Hair coiled on the floor in dark, serpentine shapes. Lila stared at her reflection, hollowed out and furious.

The cut was blunt—an asymmetrical bob. On the left, it stopped cold at her earlobe. On the right, it swept long to her chin. Short, slanted bangs fell jagged across her forehead like broken glass.

The director clapped once. “Perfect. This is pain. This is truth. Let’s get her to wardrobe.”

Lila didn’t move.

“You alright?” Roman asked, not kindly.

She didn’t answer.

She couldn’t.

Her hands reached up slowly, fingers grazing the short hair at the side of her head. The absence there echoed through her body like a scream in a cathedral.

Assistants led Lila down a sterile hallway, her uneven bob still clinging to her damp neck. A wardrobe assistant—barely older than a college student—greeted her with a chipper tone that grated against the metallic taste in her mouth.

“You’re gonna look insane. This is such a moment for you.”

Lila nodded mutely as the girl ushered her behind a folding screen and presented the outfit: a deconstructed asymmetrical blazer, one shoulder exposed and the other buried under folds of cracked leather. Torn fishnets. Steel-toed boots dusted in ash. A heavy chain necklace that felt more like a restraint than an accessory.

She slipped into the clothes like she was crawling into someone else’s skin.

At the makeup station, the artist was all business: charcoal smudged around her eyes, a bruised plum tone dabbed beneath her cheekbones. Her lips were coated in a color so dark it was almost black, then blurred at the edges to look like she’d been kissed violently—or crying.

They didn’t bother asking how she felt.

By the time they shoved her onto the cold concrete set, she could barely feel the ground beneath her boots. Her new haircut tickled the edge of her jawline like a knife testing the skin.

The flashes began.

“Turn your chin left—no, more. More.”

“Arch your back—like it hurts.”

“Don’t smile, Lila. This isn’t a shampoo commercial.”

The director barked from behind the monitor, never looking her directly in the eyes. Assistants adjusted light stands and fog machines like silent ghosts. The music playing overhead was distorted and heavy—bass that made her ribs ache.

Lila twisted herself into sharp, disjointed poses: crouching like prey, glancing back over her shoulder, staring dead into the lens with eyes that had gone dry from the fans blasting her face.

Inside, she was crumbling.

Halfway through, as Lila leaned was a having her makeup touched up, the director frowned. She stepped back from the monitor and motioned to Roman. The two retreated behind a set wall, their whispers sharp and clipped.

“It’s not working,” the director muttered. “That bob’s wrong. It’s too fashion-y now, not edgy enough. She looks like a girl playing dress up, not someone who lives this lifestyle.”

Roman rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who wanted asymmetrical. I told you—should’ve gone full shearing.”

“Then fix it. Clean it up. I want to see her skull. And take those ridiculous bangs—make them short.

Roman groaned but nodded. “Fine. Get her in the chair.”

They didn’t ask her.

The makeup artist barely finished blotting her lips before someone grabbed her arm and steered her back to the stylist station. Roman waited, arms crossed, already draping a black cape over the seat.

“Again?” Lila asked, her voice cracking.

“Sit,” Roman said. “Don’t start crying again. You’re making this harder than it has to be.”

She sat, frozen. The cape snapped around her neck like a noose.

Roman spun her to face the mirror. Her own reflection startled her—eyes rimmed in black, hair jagged, makeup already smudged from sweat. She barely looked human anymore.

“New direction,” Roman grumbled, brushing her hair roughly. He offered no other information before pulling out a pair of clippers.

Lila gripped the chair’s arms, knuckles bone-white.

“Please don’t shave—”

They clicked on. Loud. Merciless.

The moment the machine touched her nape, she jerked. Roman held her still with a firm hand pressed against the back of her skull.

“You’re going to mess it up,” he hissed.

He ran the clippers up high—the hum buzzed through her teeth, the vibration reverberating into her skull. The cool metal scraped skin, exposing the vulnerable back of her neck to the air like she’d been peeled.

She felt it all.

The hum. The heat. The sharp flick of falling strands brushing against her back as they slid down the cape and pooled around her heels.

He switched to shears for the bob. Lila watched in distress as he brought the scissors up and slid them into the hair next to her cheekbone.

Snip.

The scissors echoed loudly in her ear, making her flinch. The short tuft drifted down, landing softly on the cape in front of her. He continued the cut, carving a line around her skull and cutting the last of her long hair away. He left it blunt and clean, slicing into the layers with aggressive precision. It now barely grazed her cheekbones, revealing every contour of her face—no more hiding.

Then came the bangs.

“Head forward.”

“No—wait, I—”

Snip.

Because the bangs had originally been cut at a slant, he raised the scissors high on her forehead to achieve the straight line. He cut them dry then trimmed again, razor-sharp. They stopped in the high on her forehead- baby bangs- the kind only a few could pull off. On Lila, they looked unhinged. Jarring. The kind of fringe you’d see on a Victorian doll in a horror film.

Every time she flinched, Roman grew rougher.

Each cut was another boundary crossed, another reminder that this wasn’t her image anymore.

It belonged to them.

Lila looked at herself in the mirror.

Her scalp peeked through the stubble. Her bangs were sharp and awkwardly high.

Her face was exposed, too exposed.

Her tears had started again, trailing silently down her cheeks, carving clean paths through the makeup.

Roman didn’t comment. He walked away, already tossing the clippers onto his table with a clatter.

Lila sat perfectly still, a defeated mannequin in Roman’s chair.

Her hair was gone — her neck exposed like a throat waiting for a blade. Her reflection stared back, eyes wide and red-rimmed, no longer crying, just drained, like she’d used the last of herself to resist what couldn’t be stopped.

Roman was gone without a word, wiping stray strands off his gloves.

But then the director appeared again — in her sharp, clean lines of black fabric and the scent of expensive perfume that smelled like cold marble and wilted lilies. Her heels echoed like a clock ticking down.

She stood behind Lila in the mirror. Studied her.

Then, without asking, she reached forward.

Her fingers dug into Lila’s hair.

She lifted a section at the crown, letting it fall slowly. Ran her nails lightly across the shaved nape. Tugged lightly on the short baby bangs.

Lila flinched, but didn’t move.

“It’s close,” the director murmured, more to herself than anyone else. “But not quite there. The color’s wrong. That warm brown—it’s too soft. Too girlish.”

She turned to Roman without looking away from Lila’s reflection.

“Dye it black.”

Roman groaned. “Seriously? You couldn’t have said that before I cut it?”

“Would’ve been a waste if the cut didn’t work. But it does. She’s almost art. Just needs to be… adjusted a little more.”

Lila felt a pang of nausea.

Roman was already mixing the color. He didn’t bother asking if Lila wanted it. No one asked. They just did.

She sat silently, her posture crumpled, as he wrapped a towel around her neck again. The dye bowl clicked against the counter, the brush tapping lightly as he stirred it.

He slathered the cold, wet dye onto her scalp with quick, practiced strokes, pushing the bristles roughly against the roots. It was cold — painfully cold — and it dripped, seeping into her ears, her temples, the edge of her skin like ink bleeding across paper.

He worked fast.

The ammonia burned her nostrils. Her eyes watered again, not from emotion this time, but the sting of chemicals.

Black.

She watched it spread in the mirror like rot, like infection. Her soft brown hair darkened into something sharp and inky, something that no longer reflected light — only absorbed it.

Her features changed before her eyes.

The soft girl was gone.

Once the dye had set, Roman rinsed it roughly in the back basin, cold water trickling down the back of her collar and soaking into the inside of her costume. He scrubbed until her scalp ached. After she was led back to the chair, and Roman roughly dried off her hair with a towel.

When the chair was turned around, the mirror offered a stranger.

Her new black bob clung to her jawline like a helmet. The shaved nape stood out stark and pale. The baby bangs looked even harsher in black — like slashes cut across her forehead. It was graphic. Unnerving. Beautiful, in a tragic kind of way.

Roman didn’t comment.

The director leaned in. Smiled.

“Now she’s perfect.”

They didn’t let her dry off completely before dragging her back under the hot lights. The stylist pressed a black mesh veil against her shoulders to add to the “funeral aesthetic,” while someone else reapplied the plum-colored bruises under her eyes, darker this time.

The camera was waiting.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Lila posed like she wasn’t inside her own body.

She crouched on shattered glass. She leaned against a rusted wall with her head tilted like a corpse in a crime scene. Her hair — jet-black and gleaming like oil — clung to her cheekbones, slick and dark as if she’d been drowned.

“Give me numb.”

“Give me ruin.”

“Give me the death of innocence.”

She gave it. All of it. And somewhere in the middle of the shoot, she stopped trying to remember what her hair used to feel like.

The shoot paused for lighting adjustments.

Lila stood off to the side, wrapped in a damp towel, shivering under the fluorescent overheads. Her hair was still wet from the last setup, and the dye had stained the skin around her hairline — faint blue-black shadows like bruises.

She didn’t sit.

Didn’t speak.

Her fingers curled tightly around the edge of the towel like she might fall through the floor if she let go.

Across the room, the director watched her — arms crossed, tapping her foot against the concrete floor. A flicker of agitation crossed her face.

Then: an idea.

“Roman,” she called sharply, motioning him over.

He approached, clearly exhausted, already wiping down his clippers.”What now?”

“New direction.” Her voice was flat, but something gleamed behind her eyes. “The character’s evolved. She’s needs something edgier- something that will really stand out.”

She glanced back at Lila, who stood like a ghost under the lights.

“Give her a Mohawk. Full. Shave the sides completely clean — I want scalp. Use the razor. Style the top into spikes. Make her unapproachable.”

Roman blinked, then sighed and nodded. He turned and motioned to the assistants off to the side, and Lila was led back to the hairdresser’s chair.

She didn’t ask what was happening. Not this time.

But when she saw the straight razor on Roman’s tray, her knees nearly buckled. She sat without being told, shaking slightly, towel still clutched around her.

Roman clipped the black cape around her neck and looked at her in the mirror.

He looked at her with a critical eye, running his hands through what was left of her hair.

“Better you don’t know what’s coming,” he stated calmly, carefully sectioning out a thick line of hair down her skull.

“Please—”

But he already had the clippers in hand.

“Hold still.”

The moment the blades touched her temple, she gasped — not because it hurt, but because of the sheer finality of it.

He dragged the clippers all the way up, from temple to crown, with a slow, unbroken stroke. Hair rained down past her shoulders in short black ribbons.

“No, no, please—”

Another pass. The side of her head now naked, pale under the studio lights.

Her scalp felt raw, exposed. The buzz of the clippers vibrated deep into her skull. Tears streamed freely down her cheeks, unchecked. She didn’t sob — she was beyond sound. Just trembling and silent, as the left side of her identity was erased.

Then the right side.

Short black locks fell around her like wings being plucked.

The clippers revealed bone, angles, skin she’d never shown anyone.

Roman worked quickly, mechanically — not out of cruelty this time, but because he couldn’t afford to care.

Then came the razor.

He squirted foam along both sides of her scalp and began scraping it clean.

The blade scraped with a shick, shick, shick sound, dragging across sensitive skin.

Cold air flooded in as the last stubble was scraped away.

Lila flinched with every pass, but said nothing. Her fists balled beneath the cape.

Roman took a damp towel and wiped the foam away. Her scalp now gleamed under the lights— utterly bare. Smooth. Clean. Stripped.

Only the narrow strip of hair remained — a thick runway from her forehead to the back of her skull.

He dried it and trimmed what was left, making sure it was all the same uniform length.

Then he pulled out the gel, thick and cold. Roman combed it through the remaining strip of hair with his fingers, rough but precise.

He took a fine-toothed comb and began sculpting.

Vertical spikes.

Six in total, each about two inches tall. Razor-sharp. Rigid. Monstrous.

They caught the light like steel.

A final insult to the softness she once protected.

Roman stepped back.

The woman in the mirror was not Lila.

She was a creature. A creation. An icon of destruction. Her cheekbones jutted like knives. Her baby bangs sat awkwardly beneath the row of blackened spikes, making her look like a surreal art piece — half war-punk, half shattered doll.

“Alright,” the director said, suddenly animated. “We’re almost there.”

Almost.

Lila’s knees wobbled as they pulled her out of the chair.

An assistant wrapped her in a silk robe. Someone tried to hand her water; she couldn’t lift her arm. A faint buzzing filled her ears. Her scalp tingled with leftover gel and the sting of the razor. Her face itched with dried tears and sweat.

Then the voice:

“Get her back in makeup. We need to fix the brows.”

The words barely registered at first.

Then Lila blinked, dazed. “The what?”

The makeup chair was still warm from earlier, the bright ring light above it unrelenting. She sat without resistance now, shoulders hunched, eyes downcast.

The makeup artist — a quiet, angular woman with long fingers and a smudge of eyeliner under one eye — examined her face like it was a draft in progress.

“They’re too soft,” the director said, standing just behind them. Her voice was sharp, decisive, as always. “The eyebrows. They don’t match the haircut. It’s still giving us too much… girl.”

She tilted Lila’s chin up with a single finger.

“She needs to be void. Alien. No nostalgia, no softness. The brows go.”

The makeup artist hesitated only briefly. “You want me to bleach them?”

The director narrowed her eyes. “No. I want them gone. Shave them. We’ll draw in something angular. Thin. Sharp enough to cut.”

Lila opened her mouth — then closed it again.

She couldn’t find the words.

The makeup artist gave a small sigh and reached into her kit, pulling out a tiny razor — delicate, almost surgical.

She touched Lila’s temple lightly. “Close your eyes.”

The first stroke was gentle, but Lila felt it like a guillotine.

A soft scraping, the whisper of the blade removing tiny hairs, one by one.

The makeup artist pressed her other hand to Lila’s forehead to keep her still.

Stroke by stroke, she cleared away Lila’s brows — first the right, then the left.

The sound of the blade was barely there, but to Lila it was deafening.

Not pain — just loss.

The absence of something that had always belonged.

The woman wiped her face with a soft cloth, then turned back to her kit.

“Now hold still,” she said, more gently than anyone had spoken to her all day.

She dipped a tiny angled brush into a dark pomade and began sketching thin, harsh strokes above Lila’s bare brow bones.

The new eyebrows were angular. Short. Unnatural.

They slanted upward at sharp diagonals, tapering into fine points that made Lila’s eyes look sharper, colder. They gave her a vaguely inhuman, almost otherworldly expression — something out of cyberpunk or dystopia.

The softness of her old face was gone.

This face could have been a mask.

When the artist was finished, she spun the chair so Lila could face the mirror.

She didn’t recognize herself.

No eyebrows.

Shaved sides.

Spiked Mohawk.

Black eyeshadow like smoke damage.

A face designed by committee.

She stared, hollowed out, unsure if she was about to cry again or if that part of her had burned out entirely.

The director appeared behind her once more, arms folded, appraising.

“Now we’re ready.”

She leaned in and whispered:

“You’ve never looked better.”

Lila didn’t answer.

She just stared at the reflection and thought: I’ve never looked less like me.

______________

Once the shoot ended, the studio emptied fast.

Lila sat alone in the makeup chair, her spine curled forward, as crew members packed away light stands and wheeled out fans. Stray bits of her hair — long black strands and broken spikes — still clung to the floor beneath her feet. No one offered to clean them up. No one said goodbye.

The director had already left.

Roman vanished after the last touch-up.

The makeup artist gave her one last glance, then turned out the light.

Click.

Darkness.

Lila stood up slowly.

The silk robe she’d been given was damp around the collar. The boots she came in with were still by the door, caked with stage dust and mascara tears. She pulled them on in silence.

There was no car waiting for her outside.

She hadn’t asked for one.

The city was colder than she remembered. October wind scraped against her shaved scalp, finding the freshly bare skin behind her ears, the raw patch at the nape of her neck.

Every time she passed a lit window, she flinched at her reflection.

The spikes.

The shaved sides.

The ghost of her eyebrows.

The new angles of her face, painted on like graffiti.

She felt like something unholy walking through the world — a prototype, half-human, made for shock rather than life.

Strangers stared.

A few men catcalled — not with desire, but fascination, confusion, maybe even fear.

Someone muttered, “Jesus Christ,” under their breath as she passed.

Lila kept her arms wrapped tight across her chest. She tried to tuck her chin into the robe collar, but there was no hair left to hide behind. The wind cut across her scalp like glass.

She passed her own reflection in a darkened shop window and stopped.

The woman there didn’t move like her.

Didn’t blink like her.

Didn’t carry her pain — she wore it.

A walking monument to artistic vision. To someone else’s idea of beauty. To something no longer allowed to be soft.

Lila pressed her palm against the glass. It fogged slightly under her breath.

For a moment, she wished she could step through and grab that other version of herself — the one from before — the one with the long, warm hair and untouched brows. The one who flinched at split ends and smiled nervously in casting rooms.

That girl was gone.

She wasn’t just changed.

She’d been erased.