Vanessa pulled her hoodie sweater off and handed to Joan, which she quickly put on to conceal her shameful hair.
"Let's go to my house!" she exclaimed. "My parents are gone all week, so no one will have to see." She put her arm around Joan's shoulder as her countenance began to dissolve into a flood of tears.
Attempting to use her own body as a sheild to spare Joan the stares of others, she turned to Joan's brother. "Don't you feel any remorse over this?"
Todd nodded his head, scared, confused, and not knowing what to do. "Should I get Mom?" he asked.
"Take that thing with you and tell your mom what happened," Vanessa instructed, pointing at the ray gun. "Tell her that Joan will be with me, and don't use that thing again!"
Todd took off, and Vanessa escorted the wailing Joan away.
Vanessa led Joan into the bathroom and the two of them stared in shock.
"Where's the razor?" Joan asked, her voice shaking as the words formed.
Vanessa handed her razor to Joan, and also pulled out two bottles of shaving cream from her family's supply of the stuff. Joan immediatley got to work on her face. She'd never shaved a face before, but she knew how it was supposed to be done. It took a good long time before she got it as close as she could, and even that wasn't good enough.
"I can't keep this up," she moaned, staring at her reflection.
"We'll worry about your face later," Vanessa consoled, strangely unrepulsed by her friend's hairyness. "Take off your shirt."
Joan removed her shirt and immediately started on her chest while Vanessa produced another razor and went to work on her stomach. It was over an hour before Joan's body was relatively hairless, and Vanessa left when Joan insisted on shaving her pubic hair
When all was said and done, Joan didn't look too bad from a distance; but up close, it was very clear that she was getting hairy.
"Do you want to eat anything?" Vanessa asked, trying to keep the situation as normal as possible.
"No," Joan replied, the liveliness of her voice having disappeared and been replaced with a depressing monotone sound.
"Then, we'll just go to bed. You can either have the guest bedroom or sleep on the couch."
Not wanting to shed all over any of the beds in the house, Joan opted to sleep on the couch.