Hair Care Tips Inspired By The Teen Horror Novels Of Christopher Pike, From Memory

by Alexandra Molotkow

Waves that spiral into infinity
Go to the library in the future, where you’ll find yourself humming a song by a retro group called “Heavy Balloon.” At the library you’ll encounter a strange woman who seems vaguely threatening but points you to another part of the library, where you’ll meet the man you’ll fall in love with this week — and for all eternity. Long story short: even though you’re 18, you’re scheduled to take off in a space ship traveling faster than the speed of light around the universe, and by the time you get back he’ll be long dead. But it gets worse because a lot of stuff will go wrong and a lot of humans will die and you will live until the end of time through to the beginning of time and onward, all the while holding out for the one you love. Turns out you were the vaguely threatening woman at the library! And you were right to be scared, because you seriously considered killing yourself! But several weeks into a deep moisturizing treatment, your hair was softer and more controlled than you’d thought possible.

Color that survives a long burial
You’re either an Ancient Egyptian deity or a deity from another planet modeled on Ancient Egypt — it’s not totally clear. You may or may not be a tyrant, but you sure like to bang your main assistant, and he either loves that about you or hates you very much. Anyway, someone buries you alive, possibly your assistant, and since you’re immortal this is a terrible conundrum. You lie in a coffin for a few millennia and then astral project yourself into the body of an 18-year-old girl in the future or on Planet Earth. Your assistant comes after you, either to save you or to carry you back to your punishment, but you don’t know he’s your assistant, because as far as you’re concerned, you are a sexually active 18-year-old girl. You and your assistant have sex. He is very hot with striking white hair and you are a bad bitch with eye-splitting auburn highlights because of that once-a-week color guard conditioner you’ve been working in from your roots to the ends.

Cold-blooded shine
It’s the last day of high school, and you know what that means: you’re 18 years old, so it’s fine for Christopher Pike to describe you naked. Your school has organized a scavenger hunt for the graduating class. You hope to make a move on your crush, possibly named Becky, also 18 and capable of nudity. Over the course of this scavenger hunt, several of your friends die; also, strange lizards pop up everywhere and fizz out caustic purple blood when punctured. It turns out these lizards are aliens and so are some of the people you knew from school, including your favorite teacher and Becky, who might still let you see her naked. One thing you love about Becky is her straight, gleaming, chestnut hair. She gets it that way with a $217 straightener and by never washing it more than twice a week.

Stop alienating the literal world with your dandruff!
It’s just like the old saying: one day you wake up and the whole world is dead. Or is it? Wandering your abandoned city, you run into a handful of 18-year-olds from school, but no one can tell you where the rest have gone or why you keep finding yourself in strange rooms like the one in the video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty — rooms in which you sometimes have sex. Eventually you find a sheaf of short stories written by the angry weirdo in your English class whose name you only vaguely remember, depicting gruesome deaths. It takes a while, but eventually you realize these stories are about you and your friends, who have started dying in gruesome ways, like being impaled by a pitchfork. (She has given you pseudonyms, like “Photo Radar,” based on your initials.) Do you die? I can’t remember. But your dandruff is under control because you’ve been rubbing a little argan oil into your scalp after every cleansing.