By Saturday morning, the countdown clock said six days, eleven hours and forty minutes. The viewer count said fifty-three thousand.
Fifty-three thousand people were watching a digital clock. Next to it sat a stock photo of scissors and a bad crop of my face from the whiteboard video. Every few minutes the account behind it, CountdownToTheCut, posted the same two words in red.
BE THERE.
I am Dagny Gundersen, thirty-seven, a hydraulic engineer with fifty-one inches of hair and one very public bet. I had told the internet, in writing, on television, that the decision was mine and the schedule was "when it's ready." The internet had read that and scheduled it anyway.
I did not open the stream again. I did open my spreadsheet.
LONG_GAME has a column called NOTES. Most of the cells say "nominal." I had always thought of that as the joke of the spreadsheet. Twenty years of nominal.
But on Saturday, I read the whole column for the first time in years, and it was not all nominal.
2007: first January. Uneven. Still mad.
2010: graduated. Wore it in the braid under the cap. Cap fell off anyway.
2013: started at Garnet Falls. Winifred asked if it was a safety issue. Wrote the memo.
2016: Dad.
2019: Osman's chili. Whole floor evacuated. Hair smelled of cumin for a week.
2024: filed the hard hat notch. Best work.
I sat at my kitchen table and read twenty years of my life in one column. It was not a record of hair. It was a record of Januaries. The hair had just been the tape measure.
That was the part the countdown did not understand. It thought it was waiting for a haircut. It was waiting for the end of a spreadsheet.
I didn't know yet whether I wanted the spreadsheet to end. I only knew I did not want fifty-three thousand strangers to end it for me.
My mother called at noon.
She is sixty-nine and lives forty minutes away. She still uses the kitchen scissors with the bottle opener in the handle, which I know because she mentions them every time I visit.
"I saw the clock," she said. "On my phone. The one with the scissors."
"Don't watch it, Mom."
"I'm not watching it. I'm glaring at it. There's a difference."
She paused. "Those aren't even good scissors. Those are craft scissors. Nobody cuts hair with craft scissors."
"You cut hair with kitchen scissors."
"Once," said my mother. "In 2006. And I have apologized every Thanksgiving since."
It was true. Her apology had become as much of a tradition as the turkey. Somewhere between the stuffing and the pie, she would look at my braid and say, "I'm sorry about the ends." I had always assumed she was joking.
"You know why I always apologize?" she said. "Because I said I'd fix it next time. And you never gave me a next time. You just grew it, out of spite, for twenty years."
"It wasn't spite."
"Dagny. You made a spreadsheet."
I did not have a good answer to that.
"I'm proud of you," she said. "The money's wonderful. But whatever you decide, decide it like you.
"Not like some clock. You never did anything because a clock said so. You were three weeks late being born."
"I was on schedule. The doctors miscalculated."
"That," said my mother, "is the most you thing anyone has ever said."
"Three hundred and ninety-eight days," said Winifred on Monday.
She did not say "Item one." She looked around the table at the four of us. Then she closed her notebook, which I had never seen her do at the start of a meeting.
"I've seen the clock," she said. "We all have. I want to know what we're doing about it."
"I reported it," Rocco said. "Nineteen times. Respectfully, I filled in the little box that says 'other' with a full paragraph."
Rocco had now gone sixteen days without shaving. His head was covered in a dark gray fuzz, like a tennis ball that had seen things. He kept touching it, then looking annoyed that he had touched it.
"The platform said it doesn't violate their policies," Lucia said. "Because it's 'about a public figure.'"
"I'm not a public figure," I said. "I'm a public utility employee."
"Caption," said Lucia quietly. "Public utility employee becomes public utility."
Then she looked at me, and her eyes were red.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I posted it. All of this is because I posted it."
"You asked me first," I said. "I said yes. And you've been hiding the worst comments at three in the morning for two weeks. I saw the moderation log."
Lucia went pink. "You weren't supposed to see that."
"I read logs," I said. "It's a condition."
Osman cleared his throat.
"Let me pull up the map," he said.
Nobody was in the mood for a map. He pulled it up anyway. But it was not the world map, and it was not Pump Station 6.
It was Garnet County. There were small orange dots spread across it, two hundred and twelve of them.
"I called Ramona on Friday," Osman said. "These are the people on Hairloom's waiting list, in this county alone. Rough locations only, no names."
He looked at me. "Thanks to the fund, every one of them gets a wig this year. Most of them before Christmas."
Nobody said anything for a while. Two hundred and twelve orange dots is a lot of dots. It's more than a clock.
"They don't care about Friday," Osman said. "None of them asked about Friday. I wanted you to see the people who actually matter here."
At 1:41 on Wednesday morning, my phone went off with the alarm tone I had set for one place only.
PUMP STATION 6. PUMP 2 FAULT. WET WELL HIGH.
It had rained all evening. The river was up. Pump 3 had been coughing for a week. And now Pump 2, the reliable one, the one we never worried about, had stopped.
If the wet well filled, eleven thousand homes on the map would find out in the least pleasant way possible.
I called Rocco. He answered on the first ring, which meant he had also been awake, probably touching his head.
"I'm already in the truck," he said.
The river path was dark and loud with rain. I pinned the anchorage in the truck, then tucked the braid into my vest at the door. Nothing loose near a pump, even at two in the morning. Especially at two in the morning.
Inside, Pump 3 was coughing hard. Pump 2 sat silent. Its intake screen was clogged with a solid mat of leaves, branches and, for reasons nobody will ever explain, a garden hose.
We locked it out and tagged it. Rocco held the flashlight while I raked. It took forty minutes, and it was not glamorous, and nobody filmed it.
At 2:58 a.m., we reset Pump 2. It started on the first try, with a long, healthy hum. The wet well level began to fall.
We sat on the tailgate of the truck afterward, soaked, watching the river.
"Twenty years," Rocco said. "Twenty years this station's been asking. And every year, the council says next fiscal year, and every year it limps along until a night like this."
"It's not a decision," I said slowly. "That's the problem. They just don't decide, over and over. And it looks the same as a decision from the outside."
Rocco scratched his fuzz. "Is that what you're doing? Not deciding?"
I thought about my spreadsheet. Twenty-one rows. Every January, at nine in the morning, I took out the steel tape and measured. Every January, I looked at the number and chose to keep going.
"No," I said. "I decided every year. That's the difference. I just never had to decide out loud."
The rain was easing. Across the river, the lights of the subdivision we protect were all still on.
"Fifty-three thousand people are going to watch a clock on Friday," I said. "They want to watch my head."
"Respectfully," said Rocco, "the internet is weird."
"It is. But they'll watch whatever I'm doing."
I turned to look at the station, the brick, the rust, the door you open with your shoulder. "The budget hearing's on Thursday. The day before."
Rocco looked at me. Then he looked at the station.
"Oh, no," he said. "You've got an engineering face on."
I took out my phone and called Winifred. It was 3:20 in the morning. She answered on the second ring, fully alert, like a woman who has been waiting twenty years for this call.
"Winifred," I said. "How many people usually watch the council's budget hearing online?"
"Eleven," said Winifred. "Twelve, if the clerk's mother is feeling well."
"I'd like to get that number up."
Up next: This Fiscal Year
Continue to Part 5 →