Dizzy has resumed talking. “I got your home phone number from the office. They should really keep those private. What if, like, a stalker got your number? By the way, Daphne, you are the only person on this planet who doesn’t have a cell phone. Do you know that? You live in way-back-world. Land-of-no-technology.”
I mutter under my breath. Not having a cell phone is a sore spot with me. Melissa thinks cell phones promote narcissism.
“How’s your head? That was so hysterical when you cracked it on that window in the diner.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, “I’m a riot.”
“Brooklyn is so pissed at you,” Dizzy says. “It’s all she can talk about. But listen, I’m sure you two can patch things up. She’s kind of hard on newcomers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t win her over. Once you get to know her, you’ll like her. She’s just a little bit…dramatic sometimes.”
“Let’s not talk about Brooklyn.”
“Sam is really flirtatious. Brooklyn thinks he has a thing for you.”
“I don’t even know the guy.”
“Oh, I know,” she says so quickly that I’m almost insulted. “So are we on?” she asks. “Are you ready to go?”
“To the mall?” I ask, just to make sure I’m following this strange conversation.
“Duh.”
“I’m still in bed,” I tell her. “Right where I was when I picked up the phone.” She seems surprised that I haven’t been showering and performing other hygiene rituals while we talked.
“Well, get off the phone then,” she says. “I’ll be at your house in fifteen minutes. Thirteen if I run the stop signs.” Then she adds, “Just kidding. I’m a very safe driver.”
Before I can confirm the plan, the phone is dead, and I realize I better get in the shower.
By the time I dry off, blow-dry my hair until it’s just damp, brush my teeth, put on a tiny bit of lip gloss, and throw on jeans and a hoodie, Dizzy is already in the kitchen. Everything is taking me a bit longer, because I start to feel a little woozy if I stand up too long. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, but I can still hear Dizzy talking to Melissa, who is responding in very serious and well-timed “Uh-huhs” that indicate she is either intensely interested or intensely appalled by Dizzy’s chatter. I run out of my room to the kitchen in case it’s the latter.
“There’s our girl,” Dizzy says when I appear. “Tell me you didn’t spend more than five minutes getting ready. Because, don’t get me wrong, you look fine, but that is not the look of someone who took more than five minutes. Seriously, though, with twenty, you’d be a knockout. We can cover that bald spot.” She reaches up and tries to touch my head, but I flinch. “And just a wee bit more makeup would do wonders.” I stare at her caked-on look. Her eyelashes are so heavy with mascara, she looks like she’s going to nod off at any moment.
Melissa smirks. She’s one of those people who takes about two minutes to get ready in the morning, and she still looks better than most people because of her milky-white complexion and her Mount Everest cheekbones. She says she doesn’t have time to worry about hair and makeup—that’s for people who don’t have anything else to do in a day. It’s an attitude that only someone who is naturally attractive can afford to have. If Melissa had a mustache or hair that naturally grew in the shape of a mullet, she’d be singing a different tune.
“But seriously, Daphne,” Dizzy continues, as if I haven’t been serious so far, even though I haven’t even spoken, “I was thinking that I could take you to get a haircut. We can do something about that…” She searches for the word “stuff.” She points at my hair. “I know this great place. Well, it’s not great. It’s in Quiet, so don’t expect miracles, you know? But it’s pretty good. The guy who cuts my hair, Lightning Rod—that’s his name, funny, huh?—can do wonders with anything. Any. Thing. Even me. Awesome, huh?” She glances at Melissa for confirmation of the awesomeness of Lightning Rod, then wrinkles her overly made-up nose at me and blows me a kiss.
I’m about ready to back out of this whole thing, which Melissa can tell, so she grabs her wallet and pulls out some cash that she hands to me. “Don’t bring her back until she has a haircut and some new clothes,” she says to Dizzy.
“I wasn’t planning to bring her back before then,” Dizzy says very seriously.
Melissa must be losing it, because normally she praises me for being the kind of girl who is not obsessed with being a girl. When I was five, I asked Melissa if I could have a Barbie doll, and she gave me this huge lecture on the dangers of encouraging girls to play with dolls. It causes little girls to romanticize motherhood while preparing them for caretaker roles, she argued. So she bought me a plastic hockey stick instead, which I broke the first time I took it outside and tried to hit a Super Ball. I ended up cracking the hockey stick against the side of the house.
I take the money anyway.
***
The mall sign says The Mall, as if it is the only mall in existence in the entire world. “Pretty cool, huh?” Dizzy looks from me to the mall. “It’s all new. Before this, we had to drive to Tulsa or Oklahoma City to shop. Then we got our own mall.” She beams at it.
“Yeah, pretty cool,” I say, thinking about how many of The Mall could fit into the Mall of America, where I used to shop back home.
Dizzy parks near the salon where Lightning Rod is waiting for us. He turns out to be this middle-aged guy with the beginning of a beer gut whose real name is Rodney. “Lightning Rod” is a nickname he earned for how fast he can cut hair—which I don’t necessarily think is a positive attribute for someone wielding scissors near my head.
While he cuts my hair, he keeps making this joke where he says, “Oops, oops, oh, crap, I’m so sorry.” And then he and Dizzy laugh. I can’t see what he’s doing, since Dizzy insists that they surprise me with a haircut she picked out of a magazine. Still, I can see long chunks of hair raining down around me. Instead of making me feel sad, it makes me feel powerful, like each hunk of hair is one less thing I have to carry around. Lightning Rod has to work much slower than he’d like, he tells me. He has to carefully cut and comb around my stitches, which are still sore and tender. I grit my teeth every time he gives my hair even the slightest tug.
I’m also a little nervous, because even though Dizzy is what I imagine guys think of when they think of sexy, her hair is kind of a disaster. She’s playing with it now, pulling it out of a braid and putting it up into two curly pigtails that look cute but are not exactly my style. I grew out of pigtails at birth.
When Lightning Rod is done with what he calls his masterpiece, I finally get to have a look. When I turn around, all three of us examine it in utter silence. “Well, say something!” I finally plead.
Lightning Rod places his hand over his mouth. “Oh! Oh, oh!” he says. “I’m going to tear up. I’m going to, right now.” He shakes his hands in front of his face.
“Me too,” Dizzy chimes in. “I can’t believe it!”
“It’s unbelievable,” Lightning Rod agrees.
At this point, I’m contemplating a wig. I mean, it looks fine to me, but if this is the kind of reaction I’m going to get, I might as well forget about showing it to anyone else. “That bad?” I ask, thinking that my taste must be seriously off. The longer I look at it. the more I think it’s kind of cute.
“Bad?” Dizzy yells. “It’s awesome!”
“You look like Louise Brooks,” Lightning Rod says.
“Who?” I ask, wondering if I even want to know.
“She was a silent movie star, a pinup girl. She was…something else.” Lightning Rod blows a kiss into the distance. “Hot. Sexy. Out of this world. That kind of girl.”
Dizzy pulls out her BlackBerry and quickly finds an image. I stare at the black and white photo of Louise’s sleek, shiny crown of hair. I do kind of her look like her, I guess. My hair is longer than hers, falling just below my chin, but I can see that we have the same dark eyes, pale skin, and bow-shaped lips.
I smile at the mirror
and then at Lightning Rod. “You think I can pull this off?”
“Honey, if you were ten years older, or I were ten years younger, you would be my dream girl. I love it!”
Dizzy squeals and hugs me for about the hundredth time today.
The only word I can think to describe it is cool. That’s how I feel. I don’t even feel bad about the hunks of my long hair lying dead on the tiled floor.
“This is exactly what you needed,” Dizzy tells me. “Now you are finally you!”
After the haircut, we buy two pairs of jeans, some makeup, and a pair of dangerously high heels with silver studs for me. I blow through Melissa’s money quickly, and I have to reach into my purse for the few dollars I’ve saved from Christmas and birthday money that my grandmother sends to me. Lightning Rod doesn’t come cheap. And buying stuff at the mall, I realize, is seductive and addictive. I’m enjoying the idea of being a different version of me, someone who has clothes from the mall, rather than just the hippie-esque things that Melissa gives to me—undoubtedly, someone’s thrift store castoffs.
We end the shopping marathon by picking out Dizzy’s swimsuit, a daring two-piece in chocolate brown with gold rings on both the top and bottom. She looks incredible in it. Dizzy is one of those people whose good looks sneak up on you. One minute, she looks like a little girl playing dress-up—someone who packed on her mother’s makeup—but if you look at her for a few minutes, you realize she’s actually sort of amazing, with curves in all the right places. Even with those pigtails, she can pull off a bikini in a way that I could only imagine. I try not to act too surprised when Dizzy twirls around.
“When does pool season begin?” I ask.
“Oh, not until May, probably. Josh is having a pool party for his birthday then, and if you don’t get a suit early, all the good ones are gone. Come on,” Dizzy says after she pays for the little brown swimsuit with a credit card. “Let’s get food.”
We get pizza slices—glossy-looking pieces that have obviously been under a heat lamp for hours—and look for a place to sit in the tiny and crowded mall food court, a depressing circle of chairs and tables beside a foul-smelling waterfall. It’s almost three o’clock, but there’s no sign of the lunch rush dying down. The few chairs are loaded with Quiet High people, and many of them rush over to Dizzy to greet her or chat with her, so it takes us a long time to finally sit down at a table in the corner, right beside the window that overlooks the vast parking lot of The Mall. Is the lot ever full? I wonder. Where would that many people come from?
Dizzy talks a lot—and it’s all frustratingly fast and incredibly loud. I have to be quick if I want to jump in and get something out before Dizzy interrupts. She’s not trying to dominate the conversation or anything—she’s just the type of person who has so much to say that she can’t manage to keep her mouth shut for very long. After much chatting about pool parties, she switches topics with no warning. “So do you have a boyfriend at your old school? Are you a virgin?” she asks, without the slightest hesitation. My jaw drops.
“No, no boyfriend,” I say, ignoring the virgin question. “I went out with a few guys here and there. Nothing special. Just dinners, a couple of movies, that kind of thing.”
Dizzy laughs until she chokes on her rubber pepperoni. “That’s so old school! Dinner dates!” She turns to the people sitting next to us—two women with small children. “A dinner date!” she tells them. “Can you believe it?” They move their children closer to their table.
What I don’t tell Dizzy is this: I’ve never met a guy that I could see myself being with for more than a few hours. Nobody has ever caught my attention in that way.
“I’m a make-out slut,” Dizzy tells me in a softer voice. “I have a running tally.” She pulls a notebook out of her giant pink purse and slaps it on the table. Names neatly written in different colors of ink litter the page.
“Wow!” I say loudly. One of the little kids starts to cry.
Dizzy slams her hand down on our table, sending plastic silverware bouncing off our plates. “Thirty-three just this year!” she yells with glee, and the kid cries harder. The mother shoots us an irritated look.
“What about Josh? You were with him at the diner.”
“Eh,” she says. “We’re on-again, off-again. We’re not like some of the couples at Quiet High. Old married people.” She makes barfing noises. “What do you think of Sam?” she asks suddenly.
I shrug. “I don’t know. Seems okay, I guess.”
“Almost every girl at QH has a thing for Sam Cameron, but he’s pretty particular about who he hooks up with. Brooklyn is pretty lucky,” she says. “I know girls who would kill to be in her pointy pageant shoes.”
I refrain from saying that Sam can’t be too picky if he’s with Brooklyn. “You act like Sam is a celebrity.”
“He sort of is. He’s Sam Cameron. Every school has a guy like him. He’s our very own Brad Pitt.”
“Sam’s not really my type,” I say, surprising myself. I am not really aware that I have a type until the words come out of my mouth.
“What?” Dizzy says, holding her ear, pretending that she’s heard me wrong. “Did you just say that Sam Cameron is not your type? What, for goodness sake, then, is your type?”
I’m thinking of an answer when I see January’s pink-streaked hair in the distance. She’s carrying a handful of shopping bags, and she’s talking animatedly to the person walking with her. I squint into the distance. It’s Jesse. He’s looking through the glass of the pizza case. January keeps talking, putting the shopping bags on her wrist and using her hands to punctuate. Jesse suddenly moves his head slightly in our direction. I feel silly saying that The Mall suddenly gets quiet, but I swear that it does. His eyes lock on mine—he smiles, a genuine smile that covers his whole face. I force myself not to look behind me. I give him a half-smile back, just in case there’s a crowd of people behind me who are waving at him. Jesse touches his own hair and then points to me. He gives me a casual nod. I give him slight head turn, a modest Who me?
Dizzy, oblivious to the fact that I’ve been ignoring her, is hard at work sawing at her pizza, running her plastic fork against the tough skin of cheese. “Wow,” she says. “That settles it. You’re crazy.” Then she proceeds to explain the history of every relationship of every person at QH, pausing only to make sure I’m following the complicated soap opera plot. Apparently, everyone dates everyone else. “Within reason,” Dizzy says. “One of us is not going to date someone like him.” She points her fork at a table behind me, where a cowboy-hatted, Wrangler-wearing boy eats, holding a fork like a shovel. He smiles at Dizzy, unaware that she is holding him up as Exhibit A: Cowboy Eats Chick-fil-A Coleslaw.
“I see,” I say, turning back around to face her.
“Hey, Dizzy.” January and Jesse appear at our table.
“Oh, hi, January,” Dizzy says in a fake sweet voice. “Jesse,” she says, nodding at him, giving him a million-dollar smile. She turns back to me and raises her eyebrows. Obviously, she’s trying to speak to me in some kind of secret code, but I have no idea what she’s saying. I just nod.
“I hardly recognized you, you look so good,” January says to me.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Awesome, isn’t it?” Dizzy says proudly, as if she did it herself. “The bald spot is practically invisible.” My hand goes immediately to my scalp, and then I wince when I touch the stitches.
“You look incredible,” Jesse says boldly. We all turn to look at him. We exchange smiles that seem laced with undertones. You didn’t call me last night, he says with his eyes.
I didn’t know I was supposed to, I say back with mine. My cheeks feel warmer. I reach my hand out and touch my new, smooth hair—it feels like the satin edge of a blanket. It’s weird not having it draped down my back, feeling hot and sticky.
“It’s different,” I say.
“It suits you,” Jesse says.
“What’s going on? What are you two up to today?” January as
ks.
“Bathing suits,” Dizzy says, reaching for her bags. “Check this out.” She extracts the brown top and waves it in front of her face. “Cool, isn’t it?” she says to January in a pleasant tone laced with pity. She’s being nice to January because she feels sorry for her.
“God, I’m fat,” January says, looking down at her scrawny legs, her skinny arms dangling at her side.
“You are not,” Dizzy says. Then she sighs heavily and pushes her plate away from her. “I shouldn’t be eating this. I’m going to look like a cow in that suit.” She glumly tosses the top back in the bag. Dizzy is hardly fat. Nevertheless, she and January continue to go back and forth about who is fatter, each claiming to be a bigger blimp than the other.
I heard these kinds of conversations before at Academy. I understand that it’s a ritual, something that is supposed to make girls feel better, but it never does, because the conversation always repeats, stuck in a loop forever. I feel lucky that I have never been part of this. I’ve just never felt bad about my body. I’ve never felt too fat or particularly skinny. Melissa did something—at some point in my life—that made me feel okay about who I am. Too bad she couldn’t bottle that and sell it. We’d be rich.
Jesse looks at me while Dizzy and January make pig snorting noises at each other. “So what are you two doing today?” I ask.
“Shopping,” he says, pointing at a J.Crew bag he has in his hand. “One of my least favorite things to do.” I immediately like that about him. I can’t stand guys who like to shop. I put them in the same category with guys who use flatirons on their hair and who press their jeans.
Dizzy now has her bags open and is showing January all of her purchases. She’s even showing mine.
“What’d you get?” I ask Jesse, pointing at his bag.
“Something really exciting.” He pulls out a tie. “It’s for work.”
“Oh, yeah? What do you do?”
“Mostly show up and prove to my dad that I’m reliable and trustworthy, and that I’m developing a sound work ethic.”
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