“I need to get in there and rinse out my eyebrows,” Aaron said after his patience ran out. He banged on the locked bathroom door twice.
I threw the door open to the bathroom to let him in, hoping that he would assure me that it didn’t look as bad as I thought. My brother had enough sense from being raised by our mother to know when to be appropriately sensitive with girls’ feelings.
“Holy…” his voice trailed off the moment he saw me.
“Aaron!” I shrieked, forgetting temporarily that he was no longer Aaron.
“Your hair looks… irradiated,” he said, in awe of the shade.
“Oh my God,” I said, taking the name of the Lord in vain. “Don’t look at it!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him in that moment that his eyebrow dying experiment was also a colossal failure. Somehow the dye had gotten from the actual hairs of his eyebrows onto the skin beneath, and he looked like he had rubbed coal in smudgy stripes over his eyes.
“We have to do something,” he said, sounding scared.
My first inclination was to just cut my shoulder-length hair off completely. Fortunately, neither my brother nor I had the smarts to bring a scissors with us on our journey.
Our options were very limited. We could go to a salon and seek assistance but neither of us had any idea how much salvation at the hands of a professional stylist would cost. It could potentially bankrupt us, so we quickly ruled out that option while I sat on the edge of my twin bed, miserable. We could buy another box of hair dye, which would cost us another twelve dollars. After some discussion we decided that if we were going to go that route, dying my hair darker would probably be a safer bet than trying to go blond again even if the end result left me looking like a Goth disaster.
Or, we could buy a hat to cover my head, and see if a few days and a few more shampoos would fade the brightness of the toxic yellow.
We settled on the last option, primarily because I was terrified of putting any more chemicals on my head that afternoon that would burn my scalp. We were both quickly going stir-crazy in our tiny hotel room and were itching to go back outside for fresh air. Aaron scrubbed at his eyebrows with a hand towel and a bar of soap until he looked more like he really had dark hair and less like he had been mining coal that day. Two blocks away from our hotel in Times Square, I purchased a New York Yankees baseball hat. I glared at the man who sold it to me, who stared in surprise at my hair.
With shame, I admitted to myself that back at the hotel I had been pretty excited about my transformation into a blonde. Of course, that had been before the cataclysmic outcome, but now that I had opened myself to the possibility of looking like a different person, I was eager for the change to be complete. It was very vain of me, I knew. I had been taught that my appearance was a gift from God and that intentionally altering it was like telling God he hadn’t done a good enough job. But Mama used anti-aging cream at night to prevent wrinkles, and colored her hair to wash out the handful of gray strands that plagued her. Daddy had his eyelids lifted when they began sagging and interfering with his vision. How was that any different in theory from getting a tattoo or plastic surgery, or me dying my hair a new color?
Still, I couldn’t help but think as we rode downtown that this was God’s way of delivering a nasty message to me. The emptiness that had surrounded me back at the hostel uptown had followed me to our hotel in Times Square. Had God really stopped caring about me? Was he suggesting that I just throw in the towel on this new life and face the music along with my parents? If that was truly what he wanted for me, I simply could not understand why.
Aaron and I walked the streets aimlessly together that afternoon trying to familiarize ourselves with the city and formulate a plan. He was half-heartedly looking for a job, and by looking I mean, literally looking in windows of restaurants and trying to decide if he could imagine himself working in them. We had gathered from all of the ads in the free newspaper, The Village Voice, that there would be a huge Halloween parade downtown on Wednesday night that was pretty much the city’s biggest event of the year. The Village Voice was a neighborhood newspaper that had really cool personal ads on its back cover.
“I’m kind of curious to check this out,” I said, pointing to a picture in the newspaper from the previous year’s parade.
We had stopped at a falafel joint near NYU for a late lunch and were stuffing our faces hungrily with cheap falafel sandwiches, sitting on tall bar stools near the counter along the greasy front window. I felt awkward wearing a baseball cap indoors but did not dare take my Yankees cap off my head.
“I’m not that interested in Halloween,” Aaron murmured. “Just a bunch of drunk people acting like idiots.”
I studied the picture more closely. Of course I knew what a drag queen was; I hadn’t been raised in the woods by wolves. But, I’d never met one in person before. The picture in the newspaper was of an enormous woman (upon closer inspection, not a woman, but a man dressed as a woman) wearing an elaborate Las Vegas showgirl-style outfit complete with a feather headdress and glittery false eyelashes.
Just then, two girls not much older than me walked past the falafel shop; one was a girl dressed as a devil in a red body suit with a tail attached, and she was laughing and linking arms with another girl dressed as an angel with a homemade halo constructed from tinsel. A week before, I would have rolled my eyes at their casual reference to devil worship. But I was seeing everything through different eyes in New York. It didn’t seem like they were doing anything to dishonor God. It seemed like they were just cool college kids on their way to a Halloween party to have fun.
“I want to go,” I said firmly. “We live here now and I want to fit in.”
Something was happening in my head. I was getting very excited about changing my appearance and my life. I wanted to look like someone other than Grace Mathison and I wanted to try things that Grace Mathison would be afraid to try. If God was going to turn his back on Grace Mathison, then I was going to turn my back on her, too.
Aaron looked dubious. “Gigi, we don’t have money to waste on Halloween costumes.”
He was right. We didn’t; we didn’t have money to waste on anything. I looked around the funky falafel shop at all of the other kids around our age eating there. Aaron and I stuck out like absolute nerds in our suburban prep school attire. This was Greenwich Village, where acid-washed denim jeans, Converse Chuck Taylors, and killer high-heeled black leather boots were the uniform. I was pretty sure I was the only girl in a two-mile radius wearing a beige cable-knit sweater and matching corduroys. I shuddered on my stool, remembering that even the underpants I was wearing were monogrammed with my initials: GAM. No one in this neighborhood wanted to look respectable or classy. It was far more important to look cool or bohemian, or like you acknowledged that wearing anything clean or ironed was a joke.
“Aaron, we don’t look like we belong here,” I said quietly. “We look like tourists.”
I had never before in my life felt pressure to conform and it was very strange to suddenly feel such a strong urge to look less normal. When I convinced Aaron that he might have an easier time finding a job waiting tables if he looked more like a downtown hipster than an Alpine ski instructor, he agreed that we could check out a few vintage clothing stores and just look.
As soon as we walked into the first vintage store on Broadway, two sales girls swooped down upon Aaron as if they were birds of prey and he was fresh meat.
“Can we help you?” an impossibly tall black girl in sky high heels wearing black leggings under a red vinyl mini skirt asked him.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” the other associate, a petite white girl with brown hair and blond streaks, asked him.
“Eh, we’re just looking,” my brother said, so quickly intimidated by the sexy girls. It’s easy to assume that good-looking boys always know exactly how to carry themselves around girls. Not the case! My brother was living proof that sometimes cute boys have absolutely no clue
how cute they are, and how they could probably have just about anything they wanted in life, if they dared to ask.
“He needs help,” I called out from a row of t-shirts nearby. “He needs an intervention.”
The two salesgirls looked him up and down and clucked their tongues disapprovingly at his navy blue V-neck cashmere sweater, stonewashed jeans and penny loafers.
“Boy, you look like someone just held you hostage in Hunter Lodge for the last few years,” the black sales girl told him.
I smiled to myself as I examined a rack of faded concert t-shirts. Hunter Lodge is a retail chain owned by the father of Emma Jeffries, one of the juniors at Treadwell Academy. The store is probably best known for its risqué catalogs, and right before my freshman year it had featured none other than Emma modeling on its cover. My father had led a media campaign protesting the release of that particular issue, because on it, Emma, who was only fifteen at the time, posed with two completely naked men exposing their bare butts. The end result was that the store had to put the catalog in silver paper sleeves, which only made Emma even more famous.
I was not exactly a fan of Emma, because during my first week at school, in retaliation, she had somehow managed to spray paint an enormous stencil of Jesus on the door of my room at Rutherford Hall. Juliette had thought it was hilarious at the time and had painted daisies and silly birds around the crucifixion. I had not been similarly amused. What I had taken particular offense to was that Emma had gone out of her way to buy a copy of my parents’ magazine, The Spirit Monthly, and had taped the monthly letter penned by my mother, to me, to our door for everyone on our floor to read.
Sure, the magazine was published and anyone could buy a copy and read the Note from Mama letter in any issue. But really, at my boarding school, who would? It didn’t do much for my reputation to have fifteen girls on my floor laughing at my mother’s notions about my growing up too fast and encountering all kinds of evils and demons on my first venture away from home. Particularly when those evils and demons my mother was referring to were their treasured rap jams and push-up bras from Victoria’s Secret.
The Hunter Lodge look is totally preppy; tight blue jeans, shrunken sweaters, leather oxfords. The stores pump their signature men’s fragrance through the ventilation system so that the customer’s entire shopping experience reeks of coriander and pine. I would not have been surprised at the time if every article of clothing Aaron was wearing that day had been bought at Hunter Lodge, including his socks and boxers. And of course, he would have bought them with his own money at the mall near his school, because our parents considered Hunter Lodge to be owned and operated by child pornographers and would pretty much both have had strokes if they knew Aaron shopped there. It was music to my ears that fashionista girls in New York City thought Hunter Lodge was decidedly uncool.
An hour and forty dollars later, Aaron and I each carried a bag containing new outfits. Aaron also had the black salesgirl’s phone number, although he insisted after we were out on the street that he would never call her; girls had recently gotten him into too much trouble.
Still not having given up on my idea of going to the Halloween parade the next night, I led my brother into a cosmetics supply store called Timmy’s to look at their display of holiday items. Their costumes were way out of our price range. I didn’t dare ask Aaron to spend any of our precious money on costly items – like tight nurse outfits and witch hats – that would be completely useless to us by Thursday morning. I wanted very much to dip my toes into Halloween somehow, without jumping into the deep end.
Aaron wandered down one of the more boring aisles to find toothpaste, and I lingered in front of a display of ninety-nine cent nail polishes. Maybe black nail polish would be my costume. As silly as it may sound, I had never before in my life worn a nail polish color darker than pink. My mother considered colors like reds and purples to be too adult for a young girl, and when she explained to me that colors like that tended to suggest seduction, she made me too embarrassed to even seek out dark colors on my own at school. I definitely did not have any plans to seduce anybody. Blues, greens and wild shades like brown and gray were out of the question.
Black finger nails for me would be a definite act of rebellion. Gigi Martin would totally wear black nail polish, I assured myself, examining the bottle. I wasn’t sure yet who Gigi Martin was, but I was pretty sure she was nothing like Grace Mathison. Gigi Martin would not only wear black nail polish but she’d not even think it was a big deal.
“Girl, what have you done to your hair?”
A female voice behind me startled me so unexpectedly that I almost dropped the bottle of nail polish I was holding. I spun around to find a Timmy’s employee, probably not much older than me, glaring at me with her hands on her hips.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I wanted to be a pale blond but something bad happened.”
“Yeah, it did,” the girl agreed adamantly. Her name tag said JACINDA and her hair was cropped short but was Mohawk-ish on top, with the ends of it dyed bright red. Without asking for permission, she took the NY Yankees cap off my head and examined my hair. I let her; I was highly intimidated by her because her thick navy blue liquid eyeliner was fierce, and she had the guts to wear a black and red checked button-down shirt knotted at her midriff to reveal a jiggling belly. This girl was a thousand times cooler than any girl at Treadwell Preparatory Academy. “Don’t you know you can’t go from red to blond with one process?”
“No,” I said sheepishly. “My brother just bought a box of blond hair dye and I thought that was all I’d need.”
Jacinda sighed impatiently and motioned for me to follow her over to the next aisle. Even though Aaron and I had agreed that we wouldn’t spend any more money on hair products that day, it seemed like this girl knew exactly what I needed to rectify my hair situation. It couldn’t hurt to follow her and take notes for the future.
“If you’re a natural redhead you gotta buy this powdered bleach and this activator,” Jacinda informed me, first pointing to a purple paper packet and then to a jug of white goo. “Mix them in a plastic bowl, not metal, with a plastic or wooden utensil. Then you put it on your hair but you have to be real careful to not get it on your scalp, ¼cause it’ll burn like a mother, and it lifts all the color out. Then you can dye your hair blond and the right shade will take. If you just go straight from red to blond with dye, you’re gonna get a gold mess every time,” Jacinda said, as if she couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. “And then you gotta wash your hair with special shampoo for bottle blonds, or else that gold will creep right back in.”
As if she genuinely cared that I get it right next time.
“OK, I’ll try to remember that,” I said as she studied me. She was going to stand there until I took her recommended products and walked over to the cash register, I could tell.
She crossed her arms over her ample bosom and pursed her lips at me. “Are you for real? Are you gonna walk around like that for another day?”
I was stupefied. Sales people in stores near campus would never be so direct with customers in drug stores.
“I don’t have any money,” I blurted. “My brother has to pay for my stuff and we can’t spend much more today.”
I braced myself for a dirty look or an even more aggressive sales pitch, but instead Jacinda waggled her finger at me to follow again, and led me to the cosmetics counter. She gave me a Timmy’s business card and scrawled her phone number on the back using a purple ballpoint pen.
“You got a job?” she asked me.
“Uh, no,” I said, tucking the business card into my wallet. I noticed that my Treadwell ID was still in my wallet, and made a mental note that Aaron and I should really destroy our old identification.
“Good. I need models for my class at the DaSilva Salon tomorrow. You’ll get a cut and we’ll fix that…”
She waved her finger in the general direction of my hair.
“…That on your head and you’ll get
fifty bucks. Be at 110 West Broadway at eight o’clock in the morning.”
My jaw dropped. She was going to fix my hair for free, and pay me?
“What kind of a class is it?” I asked.
“Well, technically it’s two classes,” Jacinda informed me. “First there’s my cut class, and I’m supposed to find someone who wants a bob, so I’ll cut your hair into a bob but if you hate it, we can change it. Then I have Advanced Color Techniques, so usually I have to do a double process, but… I don’t know if your hair will be able to handle more damage.”
Aaron joined us, carrying a small tube of toothpaste and two brushes.
“Are you the brother who made a mess of this girl’s hair?” Jacinda accused him.
“Guilty,” Aaron said, surprised at being confronted by a total stranger.
“Son, you should stay out of the hair design game,” Jacinda scolded him with a finger raised to emphasize her point.
We paid for our toothpaste (we had both gone two days without brushing and our breath was pretty foul) and we walked to Prince St. to catch the uptown N train back to our hotel. I was elated. I had scored fifty bucks in pocket money and all I had to do was get up early in the morning and come downtown, plus I was going to have my hair done in a fancy New York City salon. Maybe God was trying to teach me a lesson, but I was making good things happen on my own without any help from him, whatsoever.
Of course I couldn’t see it then, but I had just been introduced to one of the best friends I would ever have in my entire life. Miracles are funny in that we often don’t realize when they’re happening to us.
On our walk to the subway, I paid special attention to the kids my age walking around in pleather jackets and funky-colored tights with wild scarves wrapped around their necks topped by dangly earrings. I would be joining their ranks in the morning as a disaffected hipster.
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