Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  “Where’re you going? You want I should come with you?” asks Buck, but she’s still in her robe.

  “I’m going to school early today. Because my hair is fucked.”

  Jesus is in the soles of my feet. Jesus is in the tires of my car. Jesus is in the wind at my back.

  From the look on Vi’s face, I think I probably said that last part out loud.

  Twenty-three

  I 592 hours down. 8 hours left to go.

  I have the timing of a trapeze artist. I hover in midair right now, but I can see the bar of the next trapeze swinging toward me. I have to grab hold and hang on with all I’ve got until I get dropped off somewhere new.

  With a half hour to go until school opens, I sit here in my car and struggle to keep my eyes open. A half hour to stay awake and then eight hours to get through and I’ll have completed the sixteen hundred hours required to be a licensed cosmetologist in the State of California. Then I only have to pass my State Board and I’ll have my license. That’s what I’m thinking. That’s all I’m thinking. I picture myself stylish, you know, a little eccentric—a nose ring, a hot pair of boots—greeting my next rich client with a double cheek kiss. The clients will think I’m so unusual and chic. My hands will be a subject for gossip, but what better place for gossip than a hair salon?

  Did you hear she crawled out of the car across a road full of broken glass?

  Tragic. Fascinating.

  The other hairstylists will be like a little family. Maybe Javi will even be there. We’ll drink margaritas together after the salon closes on Friday night. I’ll have a fabulous little apartment with a vintage yellow kitchen all lit with sunshine. Is there a baby in the picture? I don’t have an answer to that one.

  I feel like I’m on heroin, but I’m not. My eyes keep closing against my will and I have to open the car door to puke twice. At least the puking wakes me back up. Close my eyes and I see a wall of sickening orange—the daylight behind my eyelids.

  And bubbling beneath the sunlit kitchen is, What have I done? What have I done? Sometimes the damage of a moment’s mistake is immediately obvious but sometimes it takes much longer. Huffing gas is no good at all. Definitely not good for unborn children.

  Still fifteen minutes early, I get out of the car and walk through the deserted early morning streets toward the school. I wear my school uniform but carry the mint green 1950s cocktail dress that Javi and I bought at Jet Rag over my shoulder, the skirt of it blowing behind me like a banner. Through the arched picture windows, I see Miss Mary-Jo, Miss Hernandez, and a few of the students setting up inside. When I open the door, the overpowering smell of cheap shampoo and setting gel sends me running to the bathroom to barf yet again, nothing left in my stomach this time but bile.

  When I emerge, pale and shaking, Miss Mary-Jo bounds toward me, her mushroom hair bouncing with each step. She stretches her short arms wide and I brace myself for the hug. I bend down so she can reach me. She gives me a smacky wet kiss on the cheek.

  “You are too much the partying last night,” she says, wagging her finger at me playfully. “You look like a dragging cat.”

  She leans in and whispers, “If you were to go upstairs and lie down on the carpet behind the upstairs lockers, I surely would not be seeing you there, and I am the teacher of upstairs today.” She gives me a wink with one heavily mascaraed eye. There are angels everywhere.

  I do exactly as she suggests. I go upstairs behind the back lockers and fall to my knees on the thin stretch of crappy carpet. I wedge myself against the wall, my textbook under my head and my smock over me like a blanket, and fall into merciful blackness. Far away in the awake world, I hear the students start to arrive: giggling, shuffling, equipment tumbling out of lockers, the slam of metal on metal. I hear it behind my sleep and through it but it doesn’t wake me up. I’m as comfortable on this floor as I have ever been. I think maybe I’ll never get up again. And with that thought comes the tears.

  Vera and Lila hear me and peek their concerned faces around the side of the locker. I look up at them.

  “You are sick, honey?”

  “I’m okay. Thanks. I’ll be okay,” I say, unable to even try to be convincing. I wipe a stream of snot from my upper lip.

  “We go to get your friend for you.”

  And in what seems like an instant, Javier appears, his hair an incredible new shade of sea-foam green.

  “Oh, good,” he says when he sees me there unshowered with my hair unbrushed, my face slick with snot and tears. I repeatedly clutch and release a corner of the smock, which lies in a wrinkled ball beside me. “Now I have something to do with these next eight hours.” He thrusts one hip forward and plants a decisive hand on it. “It’s going to take at least that long to get you looking pretty.”

  “I did a bad thing, Javi.”

  “Stand up, Frances Farmer,” he says, somehow managing to have disgust and love in his voice at the same time. He reaches his hand out to me and pulls me up. The head rush almost knocks me back down but I steady myself. “You can tell me all about it while we fix your hair.”

  That’s what I need. A new hairdo. Have I mentioned that a new hairdo can change the course of your whole day? It can change the course of your whole life if you let it. That’s why I came to beauty school in the first place. If I told you anything else, I was lying.

  The teachers are festive and lax today. Even Mrs. Montano has stayed holed up in her office and hasn’t attempted to quell the rising excitement. The graduating Armenian girls have cooked an incredible banquet and arranged it in a beautiful spread on tables they pushed together in the lunchroom. They chat while hanging streamers and those accordionstyle paper bells. The school looks ready for a bridal shower or a prom. Some of the students’ husbands and boyfriends start to arrive, towing little girls in organza dresses and patent leather shoes and little boys in tiny suits with their hair slicked down. The men carry lavish bouquets of flowers and set them on their wives’ stations, recently cleared of equipment for the last time.

  At the end of the day, after Javi has styled my hair to perfection, Javi, Vi, and I decide to change into our party clothes. Candy follows us back to the locker bays. She has been tailing me around all day trying to get the dirt.

  “Bebe, oh, my God. Did you get kicked out for sex? Come on. Tell me about it. Please. I’d tell you.”

  “No. Sadly. Not sex.”

  “Was it drugs? You can tell me. Do you have some? Can I buy some?”

  Javier styled Candy’s hair into the most incredible white girl afro-puffs I’ve ever seen, complete with red and orange and pink extensions. The height of it (and probably how tight he pulled it) does wonders for her double chin. She’s on my nerves less than usual today. I even feel kind of sad that I won’t see her again. The sad isn’t about her specifically, but about Serenity. Where will I go now?

  I change in the cramped bathroom, trying my best to clean the smell off me from last night before putting on my party dress. I spritz on a little vanilla oil and pull the dress up, the slight curve of my belly etching a wrinkle into the taffeta. I fasten the zipper, the stiff bodice encasing me like comforting armor. I look down and realize the thing I’ve forgotten. The thing I never forget—my fishnets. Emerging from under the bell of the dress, my legs look like the logs of ground turkey meat you see in the butcher’s display case. The thick keloid scars snake from my feet to the tops of my knees, the memory of the crash engraved into my every day. I don’t want to take off my pretty, pretty dress and put my polyester pants back on. Instead, I step my bare feet into my shoes, slip the straps around my heels, and don’t look down again. I look straight ahead to where I’m going and resolve that if people stare I’ll look them dead in the eye. I’ll look right through them.

  I join Javi and Violet where they are primping in front of their stations.

  “The dress, darling. It’s perfection. You’re Grace Kelly meets the B-52s. You do honor to the hair,” says Javi.

  My hair is magnific
ent. The candy-apple red, foot-high confection took him a full three hours.

  Javi is dapper in his shiny boots, black bell-bottomed pants, and a Pucci pattern blouse that perfectly matches his new hair. Violet wears a veil and a hat fashioned from an enormous black silk rose. She made her own outfit and it’s a floor-length, Victorian-inspired, deconstructed dress complete with corset and bell sleeves and chicly shredded edges. She’s much better with clothes than with hair.

  I take my place next to them, all of us fixing our makeup in the mirror. I dip into Javi’s iridescent white eye shadow, Violet does her lips burgundy blood red, and for Javi it’s about the lip gloss and just a touch of glitter on the eyelids.

  We declare each other flawless. Javi and I turn toward the mirror and don our tiaras, the crowning touch.

  Twenty minutes later, Javier’s sister is blending margaritas by the shampoo bowls. Mrs. Montano has already broken into Paul’s cupcakes and she carries a double chocolate in one hand and a margarita, no salt, in the other.

  Me, I’m not drinking. Because yesterday was yesterday and today I am probably still pregnant, though I can’t be sure. Some days seem like the end of your life but then they aren’t and you still have to figure out how to wake up again.

  Buck shows up and she’s made an impressive effort to look like Nick Cave instead of Johnny Van Zant, which makes me think she really loves Violet. Violet glides around in that somber Victorian mourning getup but she can’t help it; she looks happy.

  Buck barely says hello before she starts talking San Francisco. She’s on fire with a plan for our future; she’s been at home plotting all day.

  “Here’s the evil plan,” says Buck as Violet reaches over with her pinkie to wipe a spot of frosting from her upper lip. “You stay on Javi and Paul’s couch for a couple of weeks. We wait for you to pass the State Board and then we hit the road. The three of us and baby makes four.”

  “I can’t go with you. I can’t just leave Jake. How can I?”

  “So what? You can’t. So neither can I. So come anyway. What the fuck? What else are you doing? You want to stay here and wait for your crazy-ass boyfriend so that the two of you can find a freeway underpass where you can hang out and sniff glue for a while? He doesn’t want a real life. You do. Or if you don’t you should.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this now. I want to dance.”

  Lila brought a boom box and her Hits of the Seventies cassette tape. The Armenian girls love it and Miss Hernandez loves it and a quake can even be detected in Mrs. Montano’s wide rear when “Celebration” comes on. The cultural walls and teacher-student hierarchies dissolve and we all start dancing with each other in the aisles. The students who are graduating are all flushed and dressed up. The students who are still working on their hours wear their uniforms and look jealous, but are having fun anyway. It’s a long time, 1600 hours. Let me tell you. It’s a long year of your life.

  “Dancing Queen” comes on and I find an open spot in the aisle where I sing and spin in my own world with my arms up in the air. Having the time of your life. I stop in midspin facing the back door. Through the milling, laughing crowd in the shampoo room I see a figure looming in the doorway, backlit with the yellow late afternoon sun. Eddies of dust catch the light from the open door as they swirl through the air.

  Jake. How did he get out? How did he get his clothes back? He wears paint-splattered army fatigue pants and a filthy thermal shirt with the cuffs cut off at the wrists so that the sleeves are frayed around his broad forearms. He has his usual combat boots on and a torn T-shirt tied around his head like a gangster or a pirate. The crowd instinctively parts, forming an aisle in front of him. His arms hang down at his sides and he looks straight ahead, which is to say straight at me. In his right hand is a dense, magnetic presence: the L shape of a gun. The same gun I shot off his cousin’s back porch in Joshua Tree. Violet approaches with a couple of sodas and she sees him at the same time I do. I hear her suck in a lungful of breath.

  “Call Susan,” I say.

  “Susan?”

  “Just call her.”

  I don’t know why my mind turns to Susan but I feel somehow that she’ll know what to do. I think that maybe I haven’t been fair to Susan. That maybe I haven’t been seeing people right.

  Vi fades backward into the front room. I glance around quickly. I don’t think anyone else has spotted the gun. They ignore the weirdo in the doorway and go on with their party. Javier’s sister keeps up the constant white noise of the blender.

  Jake hovers with a menacing, caged energy. I walk slowly toward him and I am floating, drifting. He scopes out the landscape, looking for enemies hidden in the bushes, under the shampoo sinks, in the chipped pink Formica cupboards, behind the door of the supply closet.

  As I approach, he lifts the gun low at his hip like a cowboy, pointing straight at the center of me. I keep moving forward.

  Jake grows more rigid with tension the closer I get. I walk until I can feel the gun pressing into the bodice of my dress right at my solar plexus.

  “Jake.”

  “I’m not Jake. That is my false name,” he says in a whisper through clenched teeth. “That’s only on one of my birth certificates. I have four. This is my right to be known by my real name. They steal it, the baby killers. The rapists. Who are you? Have they hollowed you out yet? This is what I have come to find out.”

  Abba has changed to the Bee Gees’ infectious falsetto.

  “They haven’t got to me yet, Jake.”

  “I’m not Jake,” he says, eyes straining, fat beads of sweat forming on his unshaven upper lip and across his forehead. “I am the Christ. I am Jesus of Nazareth. And if you are not yet a zombie I’m here to save you. You have been waiting so long to be saved. I have heard you in my sleep. There is no more time. They are here, the zombies, I can smell them rotting. Zombies with only one eye and with twelve names and as each man is a house so each man will fall. But here I am for you. Cover your face now. Do you smell it? Horrible, horrible. The smell.”

  Jake flares his nostrils and sniffs at the air like there is a fire. Then he drops the gun to his side, grabs me by the arm, and pulls me toward the supply closet. He quickly opens the door, glances behind him, shoves me in front of him, and closes the door behind us.

  “We can wait here until nightfall. It is a myth about zombies and night. Zombies do not need the death of the sunlight. Only the death of the sunlight of the soul. The zombies of this age are day dwellers. That way they can see better who has lost faith. I can protect us here. If I don’t sleep, I can protect us.”

  He locks the door and faces it, sitting down with his back against the unopened boxes of hair product that are stacked against the wall. He holds his gun between his legs, pointed at the door.

  The supply closet is barely big enough for two. The perimeter of the floor is lined with boxes and the walls are shelved to the ceiling with rows of hair color and developer and perm solution and facial products and gloves and applicator bottles and industrial-sized refills of shampoo and conditioner. It smells like perfume and latex and bleach. My own hair reeks of the whole bottle of hair spray that Javier used to cement it into its sculptural beauty.

  I stand there for a minute, stiff in my dress like an overgrown doll in the corner of a dark closet, the light and sounds of the party bleeding in around the edges of the door.

  He listens theatrically, like a dog with his head cocked.

  “Can I turn the light on?” I ask.

  He seems startled by the question, as if he forgot I was there. “Yes,” he says, not looking at me, keeping his watchful gaze on the door with its off-white paint chipping and yellowing with age. I turn on the light and the bare bulb above throws harsh shadows.

  I slip my shoes off and sit down cross-legged next to him on the cool, speckled linoleum, my dress puffing out around me like a muffin top.

  “Do we really need the gun? What about love thy enemy?”

  “I love them. I love them
so much. I just can’t stand the smell of them. Every age has a Christ. I’m the Christ for this age and therefore I carry a gun. I am here to protect you.”

  “From who?”

  “From Caesar. He is a bloodthirsty madman. He believes he is God. He is not even an emptied-out god. History will try him and reveal this. We must be careful of our prophets, He said. We must be careful of our prophets but we must have faith in our angels.”

  Jake gestures in the air with his gun for emphasis. He smells like chemicals and b.o. How could I have been so wrong about everything?

  “They shot me up with mind control drugs and they tried to convince me I was someone I was not. But halfway through, I remembered my true identity. I remembered that I am Jesus and that is my birthright. They tried to tell me there are no zombies but at the same time their flesh was rotting off their faces in front of me. I told them I could save them but they didn’t want to be saved. They will destroy me rather than be saved, but I will not let them. I had to escape from there to do God’s work. I know your wish. I’ve always known your wish. I could grant it.”

  The wish thing makes it sound like a bit of Santa Claus got mixed in with his Jesus. Truthfully, I do. Of course I have a wish. But even Jesus was no genie.

  Jake probably hasn’t slept in days. Beyond the party noises and the music, I start to hear another kind of bustle outside the door—hushed and official voices. The music stops abruptly.

  “You believe you are a slave and that you are being punished,” he says, putting the gun down on the floor beside him and placing a hardened palm on either side of my face. His hands smell like dirt and metal. “You wish to be saved. But you already are. You already are saved.”

  I can’t save Jake because he’s already saved, too. But saved doesn’t equal healed and his healing isn’t mine to give. And there it all is, clear as an L.A. sky after a winter rain scrubs the smog away. Jake has got to finish this zombie battle without me. I’m going to San Francisco with Buck and Vi.