Except for the earrings; I didn’t have any piercings. Mama had never allowed that, either, even though I was pretty much the only girl on campus without pierced ears. Everyone else had double-pierced lobes, nose rings (which were technically forbidden in the school dress code), belly rings and piercings in even more wild locations that were rumored, but very rarely witnessed.
But that was going to change for me soon, too.
Chapter 7
“Good, you’re early.”
Jacinda was waiting for me outside the salon the next morning, which was Halloween. It was unseasonably cold, and I had left the hotel in my light pink denim jacket, which was nowhere near adequate in the bitter wind. I was also extremely self-conscious that morning, because beneath my mall-bought pink jacket I was wearing the stale-smelling vintage outfit I had bought while shopping with Aaron the day before: jeans that were a size smaller than I usually bought and a t-shirt from the concert tour of a band called Dirtbike Jane, whose music I had never even heard before. I hadn’t bothered washing the articles of clothing, which I knew was gross, but I had no idea where there was a Laundromat near our hotel. I had done a sloppy job of painting my fingernails black, and was so self-conscious about the dramatic color that I kept my hands shoved in my coat pockets.
“I’m early,” I said, still hiding my hair beneath my Yankees cap. I had been insanely paranoid about missing that morning’s appointment, so much that I had asked the shady concierge at the hotel to provide me with a wake-up call.
Jacinda was decked out in an amazing velour quilted fuchsia winter jacket with white fake fur around the hood. She was sitting on the cement stairs of the salon, sipping coffee.
“No one’s here yet. I’m waiting for them to come an’ let me in with the keys,” she said.
I sat down next to her, wondering if this sudden blast of wintry weather was another obstacle God was throwing in our paths.
“So how long have you been working at this salon?” I asked, kind of surprised that anyone who looked to be around my age would have a real job at a real salon.
“I’m not really working here yet,” Jacinda clarified. “I got two more months to go before I’m certified and then maybe they’ll hire me. But first I gotta pass these classes. Until then, my real job is at Timmy’s.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?” I asked shyly.
“Eighteen,” Jacinda said defensively. “I dropped out of high school last year and enrolled at the Beauty Academy in Queens. Luckily I got into the styling program here. That’s important. You gotta make connections with the right stylists to find a job.”
“Why’d you drop out?” I asked, instantly regretting how horrified I sounded. I had never met anyone who had dropped out of high school before. Dropping out of high school within the circles at Treadwell Academy was akin to smoking crack or going to jail for murder. It simply was not done. Sure, I’d heard about the national drop-out rate on TV, but I never thought I’d actually be sitting on a stoop with a real person who had actually dropped out.
“Dang, girl, you ask a lot of questions,” Jacinda exclaimed, sounding humored and not annoyed. “If I tell you everything I got now, then what am I gonna put in my autobiography?”
I was stumped. Was this girl really writing an auto-biography?
“I’m just messin’ with you,” Jacinda said. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Gigi,” I said.
“Gigi, I like that,” Jacinda approved. “That would be a good rap star name. I dropped out because my high school was just violent and I wasn’t learning anything. I was sick of walking through metal detectors every morning and of drama breaking up our lessons every single day. And my mama needed my help watching my sister before she started first grade. I didn’t need my diploma to start beauty school and I already knew I just wanted to be a stylist, so I said, why waste another year of my life?”
Eighteen. Jacinda was only three years older than me and already seemed to have life completely figured out. She was the same age as most of the seniors at Treadwell, but she seemed decades older. Jacinda seemed mature enough to know how to rent an apartment and get utilities turned on and handle finances. I was desperate for her to like me and want to keep in touch with me after my hair cut.
As it turned out, because Jacinda was already a year and a half along in her studies, she was teaching the class at the salon that morning to five other junior stylists who had just started the program. The salon’s owner, a very short but handsome man with a European accent named Joao, seemed to adore Jacinda. Everyone adored Jacinda. How could you not? She was a busty glamour bomb who told everyone what to do, with the patience and kindness of an angel.
The class collectively gasped in horror and eyes shot open wide when Jacinda took my cap off my head and exposed my hair disaster. She introduced me to her students.
“This is Gigi, everyone. As you can see, Gigi has recently suffered a traumatic color experience and has decided today to go a little shorter with her style. We’re going to take real good care of her,” Jacinda announced.
And I believed her. I had butterflies in my stomach when she sat me down in a swiveling leather chair in front of a mirror. One of the students in the class brought me a piping hot mug of coffee from the back of the salon, and she could have had no idea how thankful I was for that freebie.
“The first thing we gotta do when cutting a fierce bob is find the natural jaw line,” Jacinda instructed her students, who were hanging on her every word. She gently cradled my head in her hands, which smelled like vanilla hand lotion, and cocked my head to the left side a little bit.
“When you’re cutting hair on someone young like this with a sharp jaw line, you want to cut right at the line and let the contours of the shape drive the angle of the hair. On someone older or heavier with less definition in their face, you want to go about half an inch longer than the jaw so that the edge of the hair creates a fake line. This is important, because if you cut too short on someone like that you’re going to make them look fatter and they’re gonna come after you.”
The class giggled.
I felt like a princess having my hair done at the salon. I had been in salons before, from Scottsdale to Switzerland, but never by myself. And my hair had never been shorter in my whole life than the top of my shoulders, other than once when Mama had suggested I try layers when I went off to Treadwell for the first time, and I cried in our car on the way home because I looked so bad. First, one of the students washed my hair with a fancy shampoo that smelled like coconut, and then as part of the service, I received a mind-numbing head massage. I would have gone home happily at that point even if that was all I was scheduled to receive that morning.
Jacinda snipped my wet hair off quickly and expertly, fussing over the ends and stressing the importance of making sure that every single strand was cut evenly. I cringed as I felt the weight of my hair fall from my head and heard it hit the floor. I was afraid to even look in the mirror as Jacinda cut.
When she was done cutting with the scissors, Jacinda went back over the edges of my hair with a razor to make sure that everything was perfect. Her class nodded observantly when the cut was done, and then she whipped out a hair dryer and round brush, and blew my hair with intense heat until it was wave-free and smooth.
“And there you have it, the classic bob,” Jacinda announced to her class, who broke into applause. She spun me around in my chair so that I could face the mirror.
I was breathless. I had never imagined what I’d look like with short hair, but I looked completely unlike myself. I looked older, possibly even convincingly eighteen, and far less babyish. My face looked slimmer and my eyes looked larger. Somehow, Jacinda had managed to accomplish the impossible: I looked pretty.
Of course, my hair was still a toxic shade of mustard.
There was a thirty-minute break in between classes, during which many of the students fled for the streets of Soho to find the biggest coffees that mone
y could buy at Starbucks. The salon was not yet open to regular customers as it was still pretty early on a weekday morning. Other stylists, however, were slowly trickling in and setting up their kits at their chairs; some of them even wore Halloween costumes.
Jacinda led me to the back of the studio, where there was a small kitchenette.
“Refill?” she asked, taking my coffee mug out of my hand.
Before I could reply, she was pouring more coffee into my mug and adding milk from the compact fridge beneath the counter.
“So, what are you thinking about color?” Jacinda asked. I opened my mouth to reply before I noticed that Joao had joined us in the kitchen, and that she was asking him for input, not me.
I felt his hands in my hair as if I was a doll, picking at the silky bright yellow locks that Jacinda had just styled.
“Winter blond,” Joao mused. “Very pale. A Scandinavian blond. I’m thinking, Liv Ullman.”
“Actually,” I interjected. “I would be open to something a little more like…”
I was on the brink of asking for something that Grace would never have the courage to request. However, the words would not leave my mouth. I wanted hair that was edgy. Cool. Hair that would turn heads on the Treadwell campus. The hope was so far-fetched for me that I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. All I could do was wave my fingers in the direction of Jacinda’s own Technicolor pompadour.
“Really?” Jacinda asked, genuinely surprised. “You want crazy punk rock hair?”
I insisted that indeed I did.
So, after Jacinda took the horrible brassy gold out of my hair and blew it out as a silvery white blond for the benefit of her class, she let me select a pot of Manic Panic out of a metal cabinet in the back of the salon. My hand reached straight for a bright shade of violet.
“Ultra Violet!” Jacinda exclaimed at my choice. “Girl, you ain’t messin’ around. I think that’s way too much for you, though. You’re a novice. We should ease into this.”
She selected a much more tame shade of lavender, and adding the bright color to my ends was a lot less stressful than the bleaching had been. By this point in the day, it was noon, and the salon was filling quickly with shoppers from Soho smelling of expensive perfumes and carrying shopping bags. Dance music filled the salon, and my purple ends quickly became the main attraction.
“Ah, to be young again,” a blond woman with a face that looked like it had endured heavy plastic surgery murmured as she was led past me to her stylist’s chair.
As Jacinda worked, I watched in awe. When she was done, I was truly no longer Grace Mathison. I was definitely Gigi Martin, with my white-blond hair, pale purple ends, and black fingernails.
“I love it,” I whispered, barely able to believe that the girl in the mirror was me.
Jacinda clapped her hands.
“You’re not done,” Jacinda said. “I mean, if you really want to look like a downtown girl, then the bob is not the style for you. But if you like it, we don’t have to go any further.”
I was curious to see what more Jacinda intended to do. I gave her permission to do whatever she wanted, and then tensed up when she took the electric razor out of her styling bag. I squeezed my eyes shut, assuring myself that she wouldn’t shave off all of my hair since she just wasted purple dye on it. I heard the buzzing of the razor above my right ear, and twenty seconds later she told me to open my eyes.
She had shaved the right side of my head about three inches above my ear, but not so closely that the scalp was bald. My hand immediately moved toward the chopped hair and I loved how the half-inch of soft white stubble felt against my palm, like bunny rabbit fur. The girl in the mirror looked like a serious bad ass. Like a girl who hung out with skateboarder guys and graffiti artists. It was a weird sensation, looking at my own reflection and being jealous of it. It was impossible to believe that this girl was actually me.
Joao insisted that Jacinda take my picture for her portfolio. I was hesitant about this, because since I was in hiding, probably the dumbest thing I could do was allow my picture to be put on a salon website. But I felt confident that I looked so different just four hours after arriving at this place that I told myself not to worry. No one would ever mistake this purple-tipped blond smirking in the digital photo that was taken of me for Grace Mathison, daughter of Chuck, host of “The Christian Power Hour.”
I was kind of dying to send my picture to Juliette. She would have completely freaked to see me looking so differently. But as far as I knew, she didn’t want anything to do with me. And my mobile phone with the awesome built-in camera and hundreds of funky photo filters no longer had a SIM card anymore.
Jacinda handed me fifty dollars from the register near the front door and earnestly thanked me for being such a good sport all morning. She was putting her jacket on at the same time as I was preparing to leave, and told me it was time for her lunch break before her first real client of the day was scheduled to arrive at two p.m. After I walked through the doors of the salon, Jacinda would have no reason to ever get in touch with me again unless I acted fast.
“Do you want to get lunch?” I asked. “My treat?”
“Oh, come on, Gigi,” Jacinda laughed. “Don’t let that fifty bucks burn a hole in your pocket. There are a million things you could do with that money better than buyin’ me lunch.”
I didn’t have to think for even a second to know that there wasn’t anything I’d rather spend my earnings on than trying to cultivate a friendship with perhaps the coolest girl I had ever met.
We walked down West Broadway to Spring St. and stopped inside a sandwich shop, where I paid for two sandwiches and two lemonades. There was no seating inside the very crowded shop, so we sat down on the bench outside and ate, watching people in Halloween costumes walk by.
Jacinda lived with her mom and two younger sisters in the Bronx. One sister was in junior high and the other was only eight years old. She worked at Timmy’s at night to pay for her tuition at beauty school. She had an on-again, off-again boyfriend named Orlando, who that day was not technically her boyfriend. I committed details of her life to memory in the same way I would have tried to prepare for a test at school.
“You’re new in town,” Jacinda stated.
“How’d you know?” I asked, disappointed that my vintage store clothes hadn’t been much of a convincing costume.
“‘Cause you’re still excited to be here. Anyone who’s been here a while is over it,” she told me. “What are you, like a student or something?”
I finished my sandwich and balled up the brown paper bag in which it had come. “Yeah,” I said. “Art school. My brother waits tables.”
“Where are you guys from?” Jacinda asked.
“Los Angeles,” I lied.
I felt bad lying, truly, I did. Dishonesty was something I had never even dared to try around my parents. There had never been any point in lying about my life at Treadwell, either, because anything my fellow students wanted to prove or disprove about me they could find online on the Wikipedia entries about my parents. It was exciting and liberating to lie through my teeth; I could be anything in New York I said I was. But it didn’t feel good to be lying to Jacinda.
“Wow, now Los Angeles, that’s tight,” Jacinda said, impressed. “If I grew up in a place where it was warm all the time with a beach, I’d never leave. That’s what I want, right there. A big old house in Los Angeles and a convertible car.”
We talked for an hour, until our teeth were chattering and Jacinda barely had time to run back to the salon to meet her client. I had spent twenty-one of my fifty dollars, but it had been totally worth the lecture that Aaron was going to deliver to me about financial responsibility because Jacinda typed the mobile phone number that Aaron and I shared into her Blackberry and mentioned something about a party on Friday night.
I had made a friend in New York.
That night my brother and I stood in a huge crowd on Sixth Avenue clapping and yelling as the Halloween
parade danced past us. I couldn’t help but notice that boys were looking at me. Maybe it was lavender-tipped hair, or maybe it was just the confidence I was exuding now that I was no longer Grace but was instead a daredevil named Gigi.
“Excuse me,” a boy with an eyebrow ring called after me as Aaron and I entered a deli. “Hey. Purple. I need to talk to you.”
I ignored the boy as if he didn’t exist, but inside my skull, my brains were melting. Boys never talked to me. Ever. I couldn’t help but wonder what those guys I had met in Colombia, Tim and Chris, would think of my new look. They would probably think that I looked like an idiot; handsome boys who went to Ivy League colleges wanted girlfriends who looked like Alyssa Ackerman and Emma Jeffries, not pint-sized pale girls like me, no matter what color my hair was dyed. Halloween night was the first night of my life that I didn’t care. Lots of boys were looking at me and trying to get my attention. Cool boys. Boys with skateboards and dreadlocks and giant headphones over their ears.
My brother had already expressed his contempt for my new look back at the hotel.
“You look like a cartoon character,” he had grumbled that afternoon when I had returned from the salon.
It was absolutely freezing outside that night. Halloween revelers had resorted to bundling up at the expense of their costumes; Frankensteins were wearing ski caps, slutty kitty cats and devils and nurses were covering their cleavage but not their legs with heavy down-filled winter coats. We were shivering our behinds off in our light fall jackets, woefully unprepared without having brought heavier coats, scarves or hats with us on our adventure. But the parade was worth the inconvenience of the cold. I was thrilled at the disco music, the scantily-clad drag queens on rollerblades, the participants who went all-out and teetered down Sixth Avenue in monster costumes on stilts. It was unlike any show I had ever seen before.
This was what our parents had been shielding us from our whole lives?
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