Life, Love, & Lemons

by Vernon, Magan

  “That’s what both bathrooms means.” He sighed like I had just said that stupidest thing ever.

  “Jason, I could clean the guy’s bathroom; it’s no big deal,” Kai said.

  “Malakai, if I wanted you to clean the bathrooms I would have asked you, but I didn’t; I asked Bentley.” He turned to me and grabbed the mop and bucket. “Have at it, Bentley.”

  It took me the rest of my shift to be able to get all the hair and grime from the guy’s bathroom. By the time my shift was over I wanted to do nothing but go home and just take a long, hot shower. I got back to my apartment and was greeted by the sound of Dad’s hacking cough.

  “Hey, Dad.” I put my car keys on the hook and headed toward the living room.

  His only response was to cough even louder. I finally approached the couch to see him laying there and looking worse than ever. He hadn’t moved from the spot where I left him and was wrapped in his comforter like a giant burrito. His teeth were chattering, but I could see sweat dripping off of his forehead. This was so not cool.

  “Dad, are you okay?” I questioned and knelt beside him. I looked around for Mom but of course, she was nowhere in sight.

  “Yeah, just a little cold is all.” He coughed some more.

  “Dad, this is getting ridiculous, come on.” I stood up and reached my hand out to him. “You need to get to a doctor.”

  “Bent…” He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “I don’t have health insurance, where would I go?”

  I let out a deep breath, “I guess we’ll go to one of those Take Care Clinics at the pharmacy or something. It’s better than nothing, and I don’t want you keeling over on me.”

  “Fine.” He slowly got up from the couch. He looked even more fragile than ever in his oversized hoodie and sweatpants. The last six months had really taken a toll on him. He had gone from the big engineer providing for his family to this feeble old man who spent his day on the couch. As he crept from the apartment and into my car, I felt like crying. If he still had a job, he wouldn’t be this sick, and I wouldn’t have had to work all day and not notice how sick he had gotten. It was all becoming too much to handle.

  “You know this really is a nice car,” Dad said, sniffling as we pulled out of the apartment parking lot.

  “Yeah, I like it. It gets me where I need to be.” I glanced over at him from the corner of my eye.

  “Your mom thinks that we should sell your car. You know an extra expense of having three cars, but I told her we’re not that hard up for money and you need a car for work and school. Besides I can’t let you go off to college without a reliable vehicle.” He cleared his throat.

  “Mom wants me to sell my car?” My mouth literally gaped open. I was the only one who was working and actually needed a car to get back and forth. She wasn’t doing anything but going out with her friends and driving the SUV that took up three times the amount of gas as my car.

  “Yeah, but don’t worry, Bent.” He patted my knee before covering his mouth again to clear his throat. “We’ll be just fine. I know that you need a car, and you’ve just been working so hard that I just can’t punish you like that. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  Dad’s words continued to mull in my head as we pulled into the pharmacy parking lot. They said Dad would be back there for about thirty minutes, so I slowly perused every aisle of the small pharmacy, which wasn’t much to look at. We never really went to the pharmacy or even a Wal-Mart pre-Dad’s lay off. Mom figured everything that we needed we could pick up at the grocery store and that Wal-Mart and other places like that, were ‘dirty.’ I was almost half glad that we had this complete lifestyle change. I now knew what a snob Mom was and how I never wanted to be like her.

  I started walking down the shampoo aisle when I spotted the big display of different hair dyes. Then I remembered what Brynne had said about my roots. Okay, so getting my hair dyed hadn’t been as big of a priority with not really having the money to do so. The eighty-five dollars that it would normally take to get my hair colored every eight weeks could have been better spent elsewhere. I looked up at the large security camera mirror. Wow, I really was starting to get that two-tone look. My brown roots were stretched out about an inch from my scalp, and the rest of my blonde hair was a striking contrast to it. I scanned the boxes for a color that looked like it would be close enough to my own. I picked up a box with an overly smiling blonde on the cover.

  “Goldie Locks, medium golden blonde, eh?” I muttered as I looked at the back of the box. There was a picture of some dark hair on the before part and then a blonde shade that was pretty close to the color of the rest of my hair on the after part. I figured that it should turn out all right and maybe I could save almost eighty dollars by using the box color.

  I walked back over to the Take Care counter to pick up Dad and purchase the hair dye. Dad was waiting in a chair, almost completely slumped over.

  “What did the doctor say?” I asked as we headed over to the pharmacy counter.

  “Pneumonia. It looks like I’ll be taking some antibiotics and resting for the next week. He said it was good I came in now or it would have been a lot worse,” he said between coughs

  I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t go earlier. This really could have all been avoided.

  “Your name please.” A very young looking woman in tortoise shell glasses and a low bun peered out from behind a glass window.

  “Marcus Evans,” Dad answered.

  The woman typed some stuff into the computer and pulled out a white bag from underneath the counter. “It looks like it’s going to be two hundred and thirty dollars for the visit and another thirty dollars for your prescription.”

  I think Dad’s jaw dropped to the ground. Usually we didn’t pay anything but a ten dollar co-pay when we went to the doctor. But that was pre-lay off and now I figured that it was going to be even harder to get Dad to ever go to the doctor again.

  Chapter 18

  Cheeseball Head

  I got up extra early the next morning to color my hair before school started. It was my first day starting my two new AP classes, and I really didn’t want to meet a whole bunch of new people with the two-tone look.

  The color burned my scalp as I sat at the kitchen table finishing up the last part of Animal Farm and waited the twenty minutes before I was able to wash it out. Miss Winter was going really slowly with the book since she had everyone take turns reading it in class, but I figured that the sooner I got it done, the sooner I could work on other things. My other classes weren’t really hard at all, and I wasn’t sure how much more homework I would have with AP history and chemistry.

  My twenty minutes was up, even though it seemed like it took forever, and I was in the shower faster than I knew I could move. Mom usually spent most of the morning taking over the bathroom but every time I asked her why, she said that she had to be ‘networking ready.’ I wanted to know what kind of supposed networking she really was doing all day. I assumed it was just sitting around with her friends and hoping that one of them would get drunk enough to buy her lunch or a few more drinks.

  After three shampoos and one condition, I hopped out of the shower and quickly ran to the mirror to check out my new hair.

  ORANGE. My hair was freaking orange. This couldn’t be right. I dried it feverishly with the towel. Nope, still orange and now messy. Okay, maybe it wouldn’t look as orange after I blow-dried it. I put on my bathrobe and started blow-drying my hair until it was so hot it burned against my shoulders. That did nothing. It just made the orangeness of it stand out even brighter. How could this happen? The box made it seem like my hair would be golden blonde and not orange.

  “Bentley, dear, I need to get ready.” Mom banged on the bathroom door. How could I show her my face? Or better yet, how could I show her my hair?

  “Bentley!” she screamed and knocked harder.

  I threw the door open and just stared at her with my cheese ball-colored head. Her eyes grew wide. “Oh dear…” She muttered
. “What on earth did you do to your head?”

  Then her eyes narrowed. “This isn’t some punk trend you picked up from that new boyfriend, is it? Because I will not have my daughter walking around with orange hair and tattoos or whatever it is that boy is in to!”

  I stormed past her and then quickly turned my body back toward her. “No, Mom, this isn’t something I did for Kai. Who by the way you haven’t even met or tried to get to know,” I practically spat out that last part as I put my hands on my hips.

  “Well, dear, you know I have been busy with looking for a job and taking care of things since your father isn’t working.” She straightened up as she walked into the bathroom, trying to ignore me.

  “Whatever.” I was too tired and too worried about my hair to really care about whatever lies Mom had to spew.

  I ran into my bedroom and in record time was dressed and did my makeup. I knew I had to get to Gabby’s before school started. I hoped that she would be able to help me with my hair.

  ***

  “Bee, what are you doing here? And what happened to your hair?” Gabby was still in her pajamas with a towel wrapped around her head when she answered the door.

  Gabby, her mom, and her sister lived in an older Cape Cod style house not too far from school. I had only been to her house a handful of times and never inside. It was only to pick her up with Jake and Brett on occasion.

  “That’s what I’m here for.” I stepped into her living room and dropped my book bag next to an over-stuffed blue couch. “Do you think you can help me? I mean isn’t your mom a hairdresser or something?”

  Gabby nodded as she pulled the towel off of her head and leaned against a wooden rocking chair that sat next to an old television on a small stand. “Yeah she is, but, Bee, it’s going to take hours to get the color out of that, and school starts in an hour.”

  I slumped down onto the hard wood floor. I wanted to cry as I put my head in my hands. “What am I going to do?”

  It was bad enough that Brynne made fun of my bad roots what would she say when I showed up with bright orange hair? Would Kai think I was terribly ugly and not want to be seen with me? And what was up with Mom? It was all getting to be way too much.

  “Hey, now.” Gabby knelt down next to me and put an arm around my shoulder. “I can have Mom take care of your hair after school, but for now, I’m sure I can come up with something to cover it…”

  I looked up at her warm smile and for the first time all morning I actually smiled back.

  ***

  I was almost late to my first day of first hour AP history, but I figured that covering up my hair and eating a breakfast that was cooked by Gabby’s mom instead of Dad would be a heck of a lot better.

  Somehow Gabby managed to hide most of my hair by wrapping it in a green head scarf. She figured if I paired it with her green peasant top then people would think I was going for some sort of a hippie look.

  I practically ran into my first class and wasn’t all too happy to see Roxy and Teegan sitting together in the back of the room.

  “Oh man, check out Princess Peach’s new little bohemian look,” Roxy quipped. Her arms looked huge and all too muscular as they bulged out of her red tank top.

  “Maybe it’s some kind of kinky role-play thing that she and Kai do. Brynne always said that he was into that stuff,” Teegan laughed.

  I sat down just as Roxy yelled loud enough for everyone to hear. “What are you talking about Teegan? You know that Kai’s about as straight-laced as they come and I’m sure that even little Miss Catholic School Girl couldn’t crack that open.”

  I wanted to bury my face and my hair under my desk and never come up. I was pretty grateful when the short and chubby Ms. Stein walked in.

  “Class, settle down, the holiday is over, and it’s back to learning.” Her heels clicked on the linoleum. It was obvious that she was another new teacher because her black bob was meticulously styled, and she was dressed like this was some kind of a professional job in a button-up shirt and dress pants.

  I walked over to her desk and handed her my class transfer slip.

  “Ah, Miss…” Her brown eyes scanned my slip. “Evans.” She smiled, but it was more of a tight-lipped smirk. “I don’t know what they let you do in your last class, but I’m sorry I don’t allow bandanas in my class.”

  “But, it’s just a head scarf. It kind of goes with my outfit,” I pleaded. I couldn’t take the head scarf off, not here, and especially not in front of Teegan and Roxy.

  Ms. Stein’s eyes got wide. “Miss Evans, I do not make an exception for anyone,” she snipped, so now we had the attention of the whole class. “Take that scarf off now.”

  I looked down and slowly removed the scarf from my head as my bright orange hair fell down to my shoulders. The whole class started laughing wildly and no one laughed harder than Roxy and Teegan.

  The day kept getting worse as people would come up with a new nickname each time they passed me. I was really hoping that when I saw Kai at lunch he wouldn’t try any sarcastic comments.

  “Whoa, what happened here?” I looked up to see Kai waiting for me by my locker after gym class.

  “I kind of had a fight with some hair dye…” I muttered and did my locker combination.

  “Well, I mean it’s going to take some getting used to.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “But I think I’ll like your hair matching my car.”

  “Gabby’s mom is going to fix it after school. Sorry to burst your bubble.” I smiled as we headed outside with our lunches.

  My father was happy that I qualified for free lunches at school, but I just couldn’t make myself do it. I didn’t want to be another charity case, so I pretended like I was on a perpetual diet. Kai and I would usually go and sit outside with his friends during lunch, and I would sip on bottled water while everyone else ate. Dad packed my lunch a few times, but like I said before, he wasn’t the greatest cook, and I was never too sure what he would put in my lunch bag.

  “So why did your mom make you quit your friend’s band?” I asked, trying to change the subject off of my hair as we sat down at a picnic table. I was also kind of curious as to why Roxy had called him straight-laced while we were in class. The guy with the lip piercing didn’t seem to be straight-laced.

  “Well, Mom’s kind of religious, note the Bible name,” he said and took a bite of an apple out of his lunch bag. “And well she really didn’t like the fact that I was singing about masturbation and whatever else a lot of the songs Brody had written about were saying.”

  “But like, she let you get a lip ring and you go to all their shows, so isn’t it pretty similar?” I questioned before taking a sip of water.

  “Well, yes and no.” He set his lunch down. “I mean there are certain things that Mom definitely doesn’t like that I do, but listening to music isn’t making me a bad person. She was really worried at first when we moved here, and I started listening to punk music and got the lip ring, but she knows I’m a good kid.”

  He took another bite of his apple and swallowed before he started talking again. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t do drugs. She knows I’ve got a good head on my shoulders, so she’s stopped getting on my case so much about it.”

  “Wait a second. So you really don’t do any of that?” I blinked hard as I looked at him. It really didn’t make any sense. I knew that his friends pretty much reeked of pot whenever I saw them, and I’m pretty sure that back at St. Christopher’s there was never a weekend that I didn’t have some kind of a drink in my hand.

  “I never really wanted to. Ever since I moved here from Wisconsin, I was always kind of too busy doing other things and that just never really appealed to me. I’d rather kind of be conscious as to what’s going on than have an altered image of it.” He smiled and stood up, tossing the rest of his lunch in the trash can. I followed suit, standing next to him.

  “I’d really like to remember every moment that I’m hanging out with you instead of some drun
ken flashback,” he said and put his arm around me and led me into the building before the lunch bell rang.

  “You’re cute.” I stood on my very tippy toes and kissed his cheek.

  “You’re not bad either, cheese ball, but uh I think you’re kind of lost.”

  “Why do you say that?” I cocked an eyebrow as we headed down the science hall. My other AP class was chemistry, and it was my first day of having it fifth hour, right after lunch.

  “Don’t you have class on the other side of the building at this time?” He started walking into Miss Timmon’s lab.

  “No, I have AP chemistry now.”

  “With Miss Timmons?”

  “Yeah.” I sat down at a table in front.

  “It looks like this may be my lucky day.” He leaned in on the lab table.

  “And why is that?”

  He searched through his book bag and pulled out a giant green chemistry book. “Because we’re in the same chemistry class.”

  He was right, my day did just get a whole lot better. I may have had orange hair but having class with my boyfriend kind of made it not matter as much.

  Chapter 19

  Let’s Pray On This

  “Wow.”

  “Wow what?” I said, trying not to look up from my chemistry book.

  It was Wednesday night and I was back over at Kai’s working on chemistry homework on the futon. His sisters were asleep in the bedroom and his mom was working her second job. Well, at least I was doing homework.

  He leaned over and ran his fingers through my hair. Gabby’s mom was able to get the color out of it, but now it was a walnut-brown color that I don’t think I had since I was kid. She was also able to cut off some of the split ends, so I was trying to get used to the new shorter brown hairdo.

  “I really can’t concentrate on homework when I have this hot, brunette girlfriend sitting next to me.” He leaned over, his fingers delicately tracing my collarbone

  “Kai, we have a worksheet due tomorrow,” I pleaded and tried as hard as I could to concentrate on the periodic table, but all I could think about was the goose bumps that his fingers left on my skin.