PART 2
I grabbed my car keys and called the police from the driveway.
“My sister has my seven-year-old daughter. She’s running a fake cancer fundraiser using my child, and she’s planning to shave her head on a livestream to get more donations. I already filed a fraud report this week. I need an officer to meet me at her apartment.”
The dispatcher found my report number. “Officers are on their way, ma’am.”
I got there in fourteen minutes. I ran up the stairs and pounded on the door.
“Valerie! Open the door!”
I heard the buzz of clippers through the door. Then Tilly’s voice.
“Mommy?”
The door opened. Valerie was holding the clippers. Her phone was on a tripod in the living room, pointed at a kitchen chair.
There was a pile of long red curls on the floor.
I couldn’t breathe.
Then I looked at Tilly.
She’d only cut one side. A short patch above her left ear. The rest of her curls were still there.
“Aunt Val said it would help a sick girl,” Tilly said, confused. “But then I asked which girl, and she didn’t know. So I said I wanted to wait for you.”
My seven-year-old had stopped it herself.
I picked her up and held her against me.
Valerie rolled her eyes. “Oh my God. It’s hair, Jocelyn. It grows back.”
Two police officers came up the stairs behind me.
One of them looked at the tripod. The pile of curls. The GoFundMe page open on Valerie’s laptop.
“Ma’am,” he said to Valerie, “we need to talk about a fraud report.”
The investigation took six weeks.
Valerie had raised $67,400. She’d spent almost $40,000 of it. A new car lease. A trip to Cabo. Professional lighting for her videos.
The photo of the bald girl in the hospital bed belonged to a real family in Ohio. Their daughter had died of leukemia two years earlier. Valerie had stolen the picture from their memorial page.
When I found that family and told them, the mother cried on the phone for a long time.
GoFundMe refunded every donor. Valerie was charged with theft by deception and fraud. She pleaded guilty and was ordered to repay every dollar she’d spent. Her page was shut down. The shampoo company dropped her.
My mother called me after the sentencing.
“You’ve destroyed your sister,” she said.
“No, Mom,” I said. “She used my daughter’s face and a dead child’s photo to steal from strangers. And you knew.”
I haven’t spoken to her since.
The next week, Tilly asked me to fix her hair.
So I brought her into my salon after closing. I cut her curls to her chin, so the short patch blended in. She loved it.
Then she asked me something that made me put down my scissors.
“Mommy, can we give my curls to a real sick kid?”
So we did.
We donated twelve inches of red curls to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer.
A month later, we got a photo in the mail.
A little girl in Phoenix, bald from chemo, smiling in a long red curly wig.
Tilly taped it to her bedroom mirror.
“See?” she said. “Now it really helps.”
THE END.
