Entry: Oopsie.

         Candice, my "facialist" at our local hole-in-the-wall day spa, nervously teased me bi-weekly about "peeling" away the pencil lines between my eyebrows. I'm a sun-ripened raspberry girl, and "chemical peel" brought up thoughts of skinning raw chickens and rubbing them with formaldehyde before hacking off their limbs and feeding them to my husband, Jay.
         "You're just paranoid. I'd fix you up real quick. And when you see yourself in the mirror, you won't even recognize yourself!" she laughed as she signed me up for my regular facial.
         Today I got a little tired of her teasing and decided to just go along with it. College girls on commission gotta make their money and maybe if I gave in this once she'd shut up about it.
         She beamed and clapped her hands. "You're gonna look great! I'm, like, too excited. Meet you in the blue room!"
         I creaked into the closet sized dressing room and emerged in a white towel.
         "What happened to all the robes and toga dohickies you guys usually have?" I sinched the insufficiant covering tighter over my chest and tried to pull the bottom edge lower to hide the cellulite on my thighs.
         "Sorry about that. We were gushing over with people yesterday, so all our stuff's at the cleaners'."
         "Oh." I pursed my lips. "Out of curiosity, how many of these facial things have you done?"
         She ignored the question. "Just lie back. Yea, like normal. There ya go. OK. We'll start out the same and work into the peel in a few minutes."
         Whenever she puts those steamy towels on my face I go out like a light, so I didn't notice anything different until she was almost done.
         "Just another minute," she was chattering, "and let me sponge it off and then you can look at the new you!"
         She mopped my tingling face. And then she paused for a really long time. I was still in the land of little brown fuzzies and I didn't come back to reality until she distractedly breathed, "Oopsie," like she hadn't meant to say it out loud.
         My eyes popped open. "What do you mean, oopsie?"
         She bit her lower lip and stared at my face. Then she stared at the white sponging towel in her hand and started picking through it with her manecured finger nails.
         "Candice, what exactly are you doing?" Apprehension swelled in my stomach.
         "Um, hold on just a sec, I've gotta go find something." She scurried out of the room.
         I snatched the hand mirror laying next to my head. My pencil lines were gone. So were my eyebrows. And my eye lashes. And my bangs. I grabbed the sponging towel and found all the remnents of my face in it's despicable little folds.
         "Candice! Get your butt back in here and put these back on!" I screamed as I rushed into the waiting room. I reached just in time to see her sprinting to her pink Neon. It didn't occur to me to wonder why until she started pealing out of the parking lot.
         Unfortunatly it was a weekday and because the spa works on "appointments only," Candice was the only one on-staff that afternoon. So I ran outside, in the towel that just covered my tush, and leaped into my car. Of course, my keys were still in my purse in the dressing room. I flew out of the car, dashed inside to get my purse, huffed over the asphalt and jumped behind the wheel to chase her down. The little punk-mucket must've been going over 90 'cause I wasn't catching up and my car only shakes that violently when I top 85.
         The police officer behind me must've had a newer model.
         I pulled into the median and locked my eyes on the emblem in the middle of my stearing wheel.
         I didn't see him, but the startled exclamation assured me that yes, a strange man really was staring at my half-naked fluorescence. "Just give me the ticket," I growled, jamming my hand out the driver's side window. "I don't care what's on it. Write it up, hand it over and quit looking at me."
         Now I'm home with my husband's green cotten robe, over three other layers of clothing, an eyebrow pencil in one hand and my son's stocking cap pulled over my raw forehead. And there's nothing I can do about my eyelashes.
         Jay might grumble about the ticket, especially when he sees what it's for. But if he makes one comment about my face, his chicken casserole's gonna taste alot like formaldehyde.