Tattoo You

She trusted him completely.

That was the problem.

The captain of the school football team rarely looked this embarrassed. What made it stranger was the fact that the person standing in front of him was a girl most people barely noticed — maybe pretty, but only if you really paid attention.

“Alice, I need your help. You saw what happened, right? I’m not some idiot who just runs forward with a ball whenever people yell at him to run. I’m the best at math in our class. Okay, I don’t like reading, and I don’t get poetry, but why humiliate me like that?”

“Brad, the problem isn’t that the poem was bad. The problem is that it was bad in the laziest possible way. Yeah, Mr. Keating went too far, but I think it’s hard on him seeing everyone use AI for assignments now. That poem too…” She shrugged. “Honestly, I think most people had theirs written by a chatbot. But how did you even manage to pick one that ridiculous?”

For the past few months, school had started feeling like it spoke through neural networks. Some people used them for essays, some flirted through dating apps, some generated fake profile pictures for burner accounts. It felt as if everyone had quietly accepted that something artificial now stood between them and reality.

“I don’t get it,” Brad said helplessly. “ChatGPT told me the poem was good, and then all those comments… It spent, like, half an hour analyzing it. Line by line. Basically proving either I’m an idiot for writing something that bad, or even worse — too stupid to understand why it’s bad. And I can’t! I seriously can’t…” He hesitated. “Alice, will you help me? Just a little? And I… you really don’t want anything this time?”

Brad talked to her differently than everyone else did. Like her intelligence was something valuable instead of something annoying.

“I’ll help, Brad. But I really have to go.”

“Thanks.”

Alice sometimes talked to AI more than to actual people herself. At least neural networks never made her feel strange. She had noticed that people often walked away from conversations with her looking offended, even though she rarely felt she had said anything cruel. She had long gotten used to the fact that almost every disagreement in class ended the same way: people either got angry at her or simply stopped talking.

Usually, it went something like this:

“You always talk like you swallowed Wikipedia.”

“And you sound like a spelling book threw up.”

Alice walked down the hallway fully aware they had been talking too long. Madison would be here soon.

Madison stood surrounded by girls from the cheer squad, telling some story with exaggerated gestures. They were laughing hysterically; even the two guys standing nearby looked entertained. The moment she noticed a teacher passing, her whole tone changed.

“Mr. Hall, we’re totally preparing for the charity game!”

The teacher sighed.

“As long as you don’t burn the gym down, I trust you.”

“No promises,” Madison laughed.

Everyone laughed with her.

Only when she noticed Alice did something in her expression shift.

“Hey, you. I already warned you. Stay away from Brad. He’s mine.”

“Hi, Madison. Great to see you too. Slavery got abolished a while ago, but I guess you were too busy cheering to notice.”

“Oh my God, is Brad getting tutoring from the autism department again?”

“You know Brad’s struggling with literature again,” Alice said calmly. “And as you should’ve figured out by now, he’s not my type.”

Madison’s smile twitched.

“This isn’t about Brad.”

She stepped closer.

“You look at people like you already know you’re better than them. It’s annoying.”

Alice almost said that she barely talked to anyone not because she thought she was superior, but because talking to people felt difficult in ways she could never properly explain. But she knew how pathetic it would sound out loud.

“So who is your type? Him?”

Madison nodded toward Alice’s shirt.

“Ash is just my favorite artist. And there’s a concert tonight.”

“Sounds like a Jewish name.”

“Guess you were doing the salute before you picked up pom-poms.”

Brad awkwardly laughed as he walked over.

“Madison’s joking. Don’t start again.”

Madison smiled, pleased with herself, like she had just won a small round. For a second, it seemed to her that Brad barely even noticed her — that he was only looking at Alice. The smile on her face faltered almost imperceptibly.

They went their separate ways. That evening, there was a concert.

Ash genuinely meant a lot to Alice as an artist. The depth of his lyrics, the way he handled language — he felt like a continuation of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, updated for a different era: face tattoos, rap, modern rhythms. Of course, she liked him as a man too, but that felt normal for a teenage fan. Alice wasn’t under any serious illusions about it.

She had long gotten used to the fact that music, books, and thoughts were easier to share with the internet than with people nearby.

The next morning Brad came over. They went through examples of AI-generated poetry and ways to tell decent writing from lazy garbage. Alice explained things; Brad nodded. She still hadn’t recovered from the concert and found herself speaking with unusual enthusiasm.

Fifteen minutes after Brad left, a message appeared on her phone.

Madison:
You’re done.

Alice barely reacted. Madison had always been vicious — the kind of person capable of orchestrating absurdly elaborate revenge schemes — but somehow, they had always missed Alice. And sometimes, Madison could even seem kind.

One of the cheerleaders twisted her ankle awkwardly on the stairs.

“Shit, hold still.”

Madison crouched beside her immediately, helping her up.

“If coach makes you practice jumps with that ankle again, I swear I’ll kill him.”

The girl laughed nervously.

“You literally always want to kill somebody.”

“Because people are stupid.”

Madison slung the girl’s arm over her shoulder and helped her down the hall. Alice noticed people looked at Madison with something dangerously close to admiration.

A few days later, while walking through the hallway, Alice spotted Madison talking to a skinny, messy-looking guy she had only ever seen around the computer club and academic competitions. He was showing her something quickly on his phone. Madison was listening with an unusual seriousness. As Alice passed, she caught part of a sentence.

“No, if you train the model right, she won’t even notice.”

Madison laughed quietly.

“Oh my God. This is gonna be so funny.”

Then she noticed Alice and dragged a finger across her throat.

Message received.

Alice kept walking. Outside, on the front steps, she reached into her bag for her phone.

It wasn’t there.

She went back through the halls, scanning the floor, checking one classroom, then another. She searched for over an hour. The school barely ever had thefts. She must have lost it.

But where?

Eventually, exhausted and frustrated, Alice headed toward her car. She was about to pull out of the parking lot when she spotted Brad running toward her. Watching Brad run was, in its own strange way, mesmerizing.

“We found your phone!”

“Thanks, Brad. I already searched everywhere — it was completely gone. How’s literature going?”

“Mr. Keating’s happy.” He smiled awkwardly. “He said my poem was really mediocre, but at least it sounded like something I actually wrote.”

He paused.

“Which… isn’t exactly true. But I tried. Didn’t feel like correcting him.”

“See you.”

Alice drove home.

That evening, something impossible happened.

She stared at her phone and rubbed her eyes.

Ash had liked one of her poems.

Her first reaction wasn’t excitement.

It was suspicion.

She had spent far too much time online to believe something like that immediately. She checked. Verified account. The same one she had been following for years.

Then another like appeared.

This time under her photo.

Her heart started pounding so hard she could barely sit still. She wandered around the empty house for hours — her parents were away for months — unable to calm down. Eventually, she climbed into the bath and let herself imagine Ash.

The next day felt unreal. School, conversations, people around her — all of it seemed temporary somehow, vaguely artificial. Reality only really began whenever her phone lit up. Everything else felt like waiting between messages.

She even smiled at Madison, who answered with her usual venomous smirk.

That evening, Ash messaged her. A standard message, really — that he liked her poems, that it was nice having fans like her.

Alice replied instantly. She told him his lyrics meant a lot to her. That she had always dreamed of meeting him. That she honestly couldn’t believe this was happening.

He answered that maybe they would meet someday.

Then wished her luck.

Alice was shaking. Her hands trembled so hard she didn’t know what to do with herself. Eventually, she wandered into her father’s bar, grabbed a bottle of whiskey, and poured herself a full glass.

The drink smelled like peat, burned her throat, and tasted awful. For a second, she thought she might choke.

But her hands stopped shaking.

Later, she found herself back in the bathtub.

At some point, Alice caught herself thinking not in sentences anymore, but in messages she might send him.

The next evening, Ash texted again. The notification sound alone stole her breath. Her heart lurched so violently it felt as though her body had learned to recognize him before her mind had.

Now they were talking like friends. He clearly seemed interested in her.

She was hopelessly in love.

They texted during the day too now, drifting into the rhythm of something that looked suspiciously like flirting. He didn’t always reply immediately — understandable, considering he was famous — but he never disappeared for long.

Sometimes Alice deliberately stayed out of the chat for a few minutes, trying not to seem too eager.

Then checked again almost immediately.

Just in case he had written.

Sometimes she caught herself borrowing his tone, his favorite phrases, even tiny habits of speech.

Then he called.

Dressing rooms. Tour buses. Bad reception.

The picture was blurry, the sound inconsistent, but it was definitely him. He said he dreamed about meeting her. Said it would happen as soon as the tour ended.

Alice felt different afterward. Lighter. Like something had unfolded behind her ribs.

Sometimes she caught her reflection in dark windows and tried to imagine how he saw her. Before this, she had almost never thought about her appearance.

Now she thought about it constantly.

The empty house suddenly felt too small.

She wanted to leave it behind and step into the world where Ash was waiting for her somewhere.

A few days later, he called again.

“I have an idea,” he said.

For the new album, they were putting together promotional material — photoshoots, visual campaigns, eventually a music video. And he had decided that girl should be her.

Alice stopped breathing for a second.

There was just one problem.

The girl would have to match his aesthetic.

Which meant—

“She’d have to shave her head.”

“If that’s too much, I get it,” he added after a pause. “We’ll just have to find someone else.”

Alice had never even considered short hair, never mind being bald. She loved Ash’s look, sure, but imagining it on herself felt impossible. And yet, right now she felt like she would grow horns and a tail for him if he asked. Shaving her head barely even registered.

“When?” she asked quietly.

“The sooner the better. We’ll need a few selfies in the new look so the producers can approve everything. But I’m sure there won’t be a problem.”

Five minutes after the call ended, Alice was standing in front of the bathroom mirror holding the electric trimmer her father usually used on his beard.

For several seconds, she simply stood there, listening to the soft mechanical hum. Turning it off now would still be easy. For some reason, looking into the mirror, she suddenly felt that the girl with long hair already seemed distant somehow. Separate. Less real.

Her hands were shaking, but this time she skipped the whiskey.

Alice switched the trimmer on and started exactly where there would be no turning back — straight down the center of her head, from forehead to crown.

Hair scattered into the sink.

For a moment, fear hit her.

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There was no turning back now.