A Little Change of Face by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page B

all other devils have ever done so that no one will ever suspect that you’re the devil, and not just any devil, but the real one, the tricky one, which is what you are, the realest and the trickiest.”
    â€œWhoa, you really need to stop watching the same supernatural shows that all of those preteen girls get hooked on, Scarlett.” She held up her hands defensively, looking like she was going to go for the garlic next. “Watching them like you do is really starting to turn you into some kind of flake.”
    She was my Default Best Friend. You’d think she’d have known I didn’t watch those shows.
    â€œOh.” I hands-on-hipsed her. “And, like, suggesting that an American woman compromise what looks she has is such a completely un flakey thing to do?”
    â€œRelatively speaking.”
    â€œWe can talk like this all day, going in circles, can’t we?”
    â€œPretty much.”
    â€œAny time you want to start explaining…”
    â€œAny time you want to start listening…”
    â€œWe’re doing it again.”
    â€œYeah, but you started it.”
    â€œDid not.”
    â€œDid too.”
    â€œDid not.”
    â€œDid too.”
    â€œOmigod! Sometimes, I don’t even know which one of us is talking anymore!”
    Pam gently—very gently, for her—removed my hands from over my ears. “That person—” she wince-smiled “—that person who just screamed? That person was you, Scarlett.”
    Is it possible to feel both mollified and mortified at the same time? “Thanks for clearing that up,” I said.
    â€œDon’t mention it.”

17
    I wasn’t sure if it was Pam’s idea or my idea, or if maybe it was simply me domino-reacting to Pam’s ideas but Pam and I had decided to switch places in life by switching faces.
    Well, sort of.
    â€œYou be nuts,” said T.B., seeing my haircut, glasses and new clothes for the first time, and hearing Pam’s Official Plan, as she’d finally spelled it out for me during her impromptu visit to my home.
    â€œShe be right,” added Delta.
    â€œYou both be annoying,” said Pam, sounding completely wrong somehow, and prompting me to say, “I wish we all be stop talking like this. It’s giving me a Fat Albert headache.”
    We were all seated on the floor around the coffee table at Delta’s, site for that month’s edition of our book club.
    For a few months, after Pam had initially introduced me to T.B. and Delta, they’d both taken to attending the once-a-month book-discussion group that I was moderator forat the library. Pam had been an attendee for some time and she pulled the other two in. This made it nice for me, since it kept the numbers up and made the program look like one that was worth the library maintaining, which was further nice for me since I preferred to spend a portion of my hours preparing for that rather than staring endlessly at Mr. Weinerman. But a few months into it, the glow had worn off. Oh, it wasn’t anything so mundane as them finding my discussions too mundane. I mean, really: how could such a thing be possible? No, rather, it had to do with the fact that the library forum wasn’t fulfilling the function that we all wanted in a book club together: a reason to meet other than specifically for food or drink, where we could spend five minutes pretending to be literary and then spend the rest of the time talking about our usual girl stuff, the group feeling self-satisfied in having engaged in a communally cultural activity. So we spun off from the library group (which I still moderated).
    That night, we’d discussed Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent —Delta’s choice since she was this month’s host—for five rip-roaring literary minutes, and now we were back to our favorite topics: us, men, life, and how to be satisfied with any and all combinations of those three.
    Delta