Turn 15 of 16

Lead all thirteen Karens to a salon. The women inside the 14th Karen. Her outfit is a long sleeve red v neck, black capris, open toed sandals, sunglasses cover her eyes and the name tag on her left breast. Her hair is the real Karen cut that you and the others are about to get, a asymmetrical, heavily layered bob with a short, spiky back and chunkily highlighted, side-swept fringe.

Karen breaks the standoff the only way a Karen can: with an agenda. 'There is a violation,' she announces, 'two blocks east. A salon. Unlicensed hedges in the window display.' Thirteen lists lower, satisfied, and the column reforms, fourteen sandals no — thirteen, marching east out of Birchwood Lane in single file, a parade of identical bobs moving through the Sunday streets like weather.

The salon is called Shear Genius, and inside it a stylist of twenty-eight is cutting a client's hair when fourteen sunglasses darken the doorway. Karen steps forward, list extended. 'Those window hedges are not an approved variety. And that styling chair faces the WRONG WAY for a residential business.' The stylist spins the chair around, scissors still in hand, and makes eye contact with fourteen copies of the same woman. 'Are you — you've GOT to be kidding me. Get out of my salon. GET. OUT.'

She yells it, and the yell is the key, the fatal brassy key. Mid-sentence the change takes her — frame thickening into the sturdy build of a fifty-year-old woman, skin paling, hair lightening and lifting into the blunt jaw-length bob, the fourteenth copy. Her black apron re-knits itself into a long-sleeve red v-neck; her jeans run down into black capris; her sneakers flatten into open-toed sandals. Sunglasses rise onto her face, and on the left breast of the red v-neck, letters surface: KAREN — HOA.

'—and ANOTHER thing,' she says in the shared voice, 'my window hedges are a VIOLATION and I will be filing against MYSELF.' Then she looks at the row of identical haircuts around her and her lip curls with professional offense. 'And THIS cut is WRONG. All of you. Sit down. All fourteen of you, sit DOWN.'

They sit. Fourteen chairs, fourteen capes, and under the capes the true work begins: the asymmetrical, heavily layered bob, short and spiky at the back, chunky highlights swept into a side-swept fringe — the real Karen cut, the original, the one Karen has worn since before any of them had names. Scissors fly in fourteen hands. Cape after cape comes off, and one by one the blunt copies are corrected into the genuine article, spiky backs swept clean, fringes falling right. Karen watches in the great mirror as fourteen identical reflections turn to face her — and for the first time she sees it plainly: not one of them is the original. They are all copies of something, and the something is sitting in chair one.