Rufus + Syd

by Julia Watts

  Rufus: Sure, we could fake that you’re my girlfriend. Either that or you could be good at algebra. Do you think maybe we could go for a drive this Sunday? Take me away from this hellhole, Syd!

  Syd: Wow, me being your girlfriend or me being good at algebra…. I can’t decide which tests the limits of credibility more.

  Rufus: You’re funny, you know that? But what about Sunday? Where do you drive to anyway?

  Syd: I don’t go as far away as I want to… not enough money for gas. But I drive out into the country where there’s nobody to give me crap or tell me what to do. Why don’t we try to do it next Sunday instead? That’ll give me a week to earn gas money… and you a week to fabricate a girlfriend.

  Rufus: Okay. Next Sunday. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be so aggressive. Just shows you how desperate I am to escape. Maybe I can chip in for gas with the little I get for an allowance.

  Syd: Rufus, you’re about as aggressive as a bunny rabbit. And I mean that as a compliment.

  Rufus: Hey, speaking of aggressive—do you by any chance know Jimmie-Sue Rumbley? She’s somebody at school that I actually like. She’s so tough. She looks like she could kick some serious ass. Plus, I just really like her style.

  Syd: Uh, yeah, I actually ended up hanging out with her and her friends the other night. It was a disaster, but it wasn’t Jimmie-Sue’s fault. She was… uh… busy with her boyfriend.

  Rufus: Ha! Good for her. I wish I had a boyfriend to be busy with. That’s so cool that you were actually hanging out with her. I didn’t mean to suggest that we’re friends, though. She’s way too cool for me.

  Syd: Well, if you do get a boyfriend, here’s hoping he’s hotter and smarter than Jimmie-Sue’s. The girl could do better. But maybe not in Vermillion… it’s a small pond, and it’s pretty slim pickin’s where the fish are concerned.

  Rufus: It’s probably not even safe for me to have a boyfriend here. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I was harassed on my way over here. Nothing horrible. Just slapped around a little. It’s been a lot worse. But I’m sick of it.

  Syd: Oh my God! Really? Who was it?

  Rufus: Justin Palmer, Cody Johnston, and a couple of other guys—the usual suspects. I hate this town.

  Syd: Those guys are such dicks. I’d kick their asses if they didn’t outweigh me by a hundred pounds. You want me to walk you home when we’re done here? I’m not a very imposing bodyguard, but I’ll do my best.

  Rufus: Thanks, Syd, but I don’t want both of us getting beat up. I do have to go, though; I just saw the time. This has been really fun. Let’s do it again soon.

  Syd: Yes, let’s.

  Rufus: See ya.

  Syd

  I’M SITTING in biology, awaiting another boring lecture from Mr. Combover. We’ve left fish and have moved on to dry land. A bio class might not be so bad if it was taught by somebody who wasn’t a walking sleep aid. Mr. Combover sucks all the life out of life science.

  When Danny walks through the door, my stomach clenches. I spent all Monday morning dreading seeing him, but he didn’t show up. Not on Tuesday either. And so I let myself think I was safe—that I’d never have to see him again, that he’d moved away or joined the Witness Protection Program or something. No such luck.

  He walks past my desk with that fixed straight-ahead stare people get when they’re deliberately trying not to see you. He sits down at the back of the row, and I can feel him shooting death rays at the back of my head.

  Mr. Combover starts droning, and I look down at a page in the textbook. A diagram shows a cute, fuzzy, just-hatched chick, then a skinny awkward adolescent chick, then a full grown chicken. The next-to-last picture is of the chicken looking all decrepit and geriatric, and the final one shows it flat on the ground, dead as a doornail. The different pictures in the diagram are labeled birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death.

  Well, that’s certainly a cheery outlook. I guess I’m in the growth stage, what with being a skinny, awkward adolescent chick. Now all I have to look forward to are maturity, decline, and death.

  The country kid sitting behind me taps my shoulder. I turn around. When I do, he passes me a note and jerks his head back to indicate it’s not from him. It’s a small piece of paper folded into a tiny square, and I unfold it in my lap under the desktop. The torn sheet contains one word, written in all caps: DYKE.

  My face heats up. My palms sweat. Acid rises in my throat, but I swallow it back. He’d like it if I jumped up and ran out of the room in tears. It’s what he wants. Well, I didn’t give him what he wanted on Friday night, and I won’t give it to him now. I sit still. My hands are balled into fists under my desk, but I don’t move and I don’t cry.

  What I am is mad. I’m not mad because I think being called a dyke is an insult. If I had a problem with gay people, I wouldn’t hang out with Rufus. What makes me mad is that Danny has slapped a label on me just because I hurt his ego. I guess he figures any girl who doesn’t swoon over his large-mouthed-bass kissing technique must be a lesbian.

  When the bell finally rings, I resist the urge to jump and run. Instead I pack up my belongings slowly and make it a point not to look at Danny when he passes my desk. I don’t get up until he’s gone. But then, when I’m on my way to my locker, Travis, Jimmie-Sue’s hookup from Friday night, sees me, makes an obscene waggling gesture with his tongue, then laughs.

  I don’t speed up my stride, but I do head for the restroom instead of my locker. There, it’s safe to cry. I find a stall, lock the door, and bury my face in my hands to muffle the sobs. In my head, all my sobs sound like “why why why”—why did my stupid mother make me move to this stupid town with these stupid people?

  When I come out of the stall and check myself in the mirror, my face looks like a rained-on newspaper, crumpled and streaked with inky black from my eyeliner and mascara. I wet a paper towel and try to repair some of the damage, but really all I do is smear it up worse.

  The door swings open, and it’s Jimmie-Sue Rumbley. Apparently today is some kind of special reunion for everybody present at my Night of Awkwardness.

  “Christ, what happened to you? You look like death holding a cracker,” Jimmie-Sue says. She leans close to the mirror, rolls some red gloss over her lips, then checks her teeth for smears.

  “Nothing,” I say, even though it’s an obvious lie. Sane people don’t look like this when nothing’s happened to them.

  “Bullshit.” She pulls down her artfully ripped black baby tee so more of her cleavage shows—cleavage I envy. “Here’s the only poem I ever wrote,” she says. “If you cry, it’s because of some guy. Hey, it’s not on account of Danny, is it? He was pretty pissed when you ran off the other night.”

  “It’s not Danny,” I say.

  “Good,” she says, “’cause he’s not worth wasting your tears on. None of them are.”

  “Then how come you—” I picture her wallowing on the blanket with Travis and try to find a polite way to finish my sentence.

  She cuts me off with a grin. “How come I’m always chasing guys? The same reason my dog chases cars, I reckon. Something to do. Take it easy, Syd. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

  Jimmie-Sue lives in a run-down trailer out past the Hair Affair. The scrawny Heinz 57 mutt in her yard tries to chase my car whenever I drive past. But his chain always jerks him right back to where he started.

  I wash my face with the weird-smelling pink soap from the dispenser and dry with paper towels. I don’t look at myself in the mirror because I know I won’t like what I see.

  Somehow I survive the rest of the day. I get out of the school building as fast as I can and start walking toward the Hair Affair. When I pass Mr. D’s, Rufus comes running out the door, calling my name. Seeing him smile at me with such kindness makes me feel like crying all over again.

  “Hey,” he says. He’s wearing his usual white T-shirt and Levi’s. “I’ve never seen you without your eyeliner.”

  I want to tell him the truth—that I messed it
up crying and had to wash it off. But then I’d have to tell him why I’d been crying in the first place. If I say I cried because Danny called me a dyke, Rufus might take it the wrong way. It wasn’t the word Danny used; it was the intent behind it. But what if I can’t explain that to Rufus? I can’t lose him, especially not so soon after I found him. “My eyes were bothering me. Seasonal allergies.”

  “Oh, okay.” He doesn’t sound like he believes me. “Are you coming in for a cup of joe? That’s what Barbara Stanwyck called it in a movie I watched the other night. It’s Stanwyck Month on Turner Classic Movies.”

  “I’d better not today. I promised Mom I’d help out in the Hair Affair this afternoon.” This is the literal truth. But really it wouldn’t matter if I stopped for a cup of coffee first. It’s just that I feel so bad from what happened, and I know if I end up sitting across from Rufus in Mr. D’s, I’ll have to make a choice to tell him everything or to tell him nothing. Each option seems equally painful.

  “Okay, well, I’ll see you later, then.”

  I can hear the disappointment in his voice, so I say, “We’re still on for our Sunday drive, right? Our pretend date?”

  He smiles. “Of course. I’ll bring you pretend flowers and pretend chocolates.”

  “Hey, I’d rather have a pretend date with you than a real date with any guy in our school.” It feels like the first whole truth I’ve told all day.

  “WHAT’S UP, Buttercup?” Mom says when I push open the screen door at the Hair Affair.

  “Not much.”

  “There’s my hair sweeper,” Darlene says. “Grab a broom, hon. You could stuff a dozen pillows with what’s on the floor here.”

  She’s just about right. I scoot the broom around underneath the chairs. Baby-fine blond hair mixes with brown and salt-and-pepper and solid gray hair like a different version of the chicken diagram in my biology book: growth, maturity, decline…. When the door swings open, I have the ridiculous hope that it might be Josephine, even though she’s not been back to the Hair Affair since her shoulder got better. Instead it’s a heavy woman, probably in her early thirties, with her hair snatched back in a careless ponytail. There’s a little blonde girl with her who can’t be any older than five. “Haley’s ready for her princess do,” the woman says in a singsong.

  “All right, Haley,” my mom says, turning around the styling chair. “Why don’t you come sit on your throne here, and we’ll get you all princessed up?”

  Haley climbs into the chair, and the woman hands Mom a clear plastic bag of blond hair. Mom takes it out of the bag and looks at it. “All right,” she says. “But a weave takes time. Haley’s going to have to be a very patient princess.”

  “She’ll be good,” the woman says, giving Haley’s shoulder a squeeze. “She knows if you’re gonna win, you’ve got to work for it.”

  “I’m gonna win the Tiny Miss Sweetheart Pageant,” Haley says, swinging her pink-sandaled feet. “I’m gonna win a crown and a trophy and a million dollars.”

  “A million dollars—is that right?” Mom says, giving Haley’s mother a look.

  “I wish,” the woman says, looking up from texting. “We’ll be lucky to win back half of what we put into it. But it’s not about the money.”

  Mom doesn’t bother to ask what it is about.

  After about ten minutes of steady hair-pulling, Haley isn’t such a patient princess anymore. “Ow!” she keeps hollering. “That hurts!” I can tell from the way my mom’s mouth has drawn itself into a straight little line that she’s not having any fun either.

  “Princesses don’t whine,” Haley’s mother says.

  I’m sanitizing combs and brushes now, and I have to bite my lip to keep from saying that princesses probably do whine when it feels like somebody’s pulling out their hair by the roots.

  Darlene is smoking a cigarette and watching as Haley whimpers and tries not to squirm. “I’ve got an idea, Haley,” she says. “I’ve got me a bag of M&Ms over here. How about every time mean old Sandee there pulls your hair you suck on an M&M to get your mind off it?”

  “We try to keep her away from candy. Gotta keep her weight down,” Haley’s mom says, though she doesn’t look like she steers clear of the M&Ms herself.

  “Mommy,” Haley says, her voice as sweet as Karo syrup, “do you want me to win the Tiny Miss Sweetheart Pageant?”

  “You know I do, baby.”

  “Then… give… me… the M&Ms!” she shouts.

  It’s a royal decree, and her mother obeys.

  The second the now pouffy-haired princess and her mother have left the shop, Mom lights a cigarette. “The only thing I hate worse than doing pageant princesses is dead bodies,” she says. The different beauty shops take turns fixing the hair of the corpses at the local funeral homes.

  “Well, at least dead bodies don’t talk back to you,” Darlene says. “That’s one thing they’ve got over the pageant mommas.”

  Since Mom and I rode home together, she goes into the kitchen with me to help with supper. “How about the old blue box tonight?” she asks, pulling a Kraft Dinner out of the cabinet.

  “Fine by me,” I say, since it basically means all I have to do is boil water.

  I fill a pot and set it on the stove, then go to the freezer to see what our veggie options are. “Broccoli or brussels sprouts?”

  Mom makes a yuck face. “How about neither? We got corn?”

  “Yeah, but it’s just a starch really, and then our whole meal would be yellow.” The textbook for health class says that the more colors on the plate, the healthier the meal.

  “And a yellow meal is going to kill us?”

  “I guess not.” I grab the bag of corn and stick it in the microwave.

  Mom lights a cigarette. “I never would’ve done that to you, you know.”

  “Done what?” I tear open the blue box.

  “Stuck you in pageants and paraded you around like the world’s tiniest pole dancer. I mean, I couldn’t have done it anyway because I wouldn’t have had the money for the dresses and crap. But even if I could’ve afforded it, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I know,” I say. “And it’s probably a good thing too, because I would’ve sucked at it.”

  Mom grins. “You would’ve been one pissed-off princess, that’s for sure. When I was doing that little girl’s hair today, I was thinking that when you was her age, the main thing you liked to do was play in the dirt. Some nights I’d just take you out in the yard and spray you off with the hose to keep you from turning the bathtub into a mud puddle.”

  Moments like this remind me that when it comes to mothers, I could’ve done a lot worse. I think about telling her about the scene with Danny Friday night, about the note he passed me in biology. But Mom is who she is, and she’s never going to understand why, if the boy who wanted to kiss me wasn’t totally gross, I wouldn’t kiss him back. So what I end up saying is, “I finally made a friend at school.”

  “Oh really?” she asks. “Girlfriend or boyfriend?”

  “Boy-space-friend, not one-word boyfriend.” I stir the noodles.

  “Well, you never know… that space could end up closing in awful fast,” Mom says, smiling.

  “It won’t. He doesn’t like girls that way.”

  “Oh,” Mom says. She looks disappointed for a second, then brightens. “Gay boys can be awful fun. I knew a couple of ’em in beauty school, and they were hilarious. One of them couldn’t stop talking about Dolly Parton for two seconds. Does your friend like Dolly?”

  “I haven’t asked him.”

  “Well, you’ll have to. I bet he loves her.” Mom seems to be enjoying her sudden status as an expert on all things gay. “What’s his name?”

  “Rufus.” I pick up the pot and drain the noodles in the sink.

  Mom winces. “Bless his heart. That sounds like a name you’d give a hound dog.”

  “I think it’s a family name.” I set the pot back on the stove and dump in the Day-Glo orange powder.

&
nbsp; “That’s always the excuse, isn’t it?” Mom gets plates out of the cabinet. “You name your kid Jehoshaphat or something and then say it’s a family name like that makes up for it being godawful.”

  We sit at the kitchen table eating our yellow dinner off yellow plates. The Monochrome Meal.

  “You know,” Mom says, “I really like having you work in the shop. You’re good at it.”

  “It’s hard to be bad at sweeping up hair,” I say.

  “Not just that part. Like when you shampoo customers you’re good at that. And you’re good at talking to them. Half the business is knowing how to talk to people.”

  “Thanks.” Compliments always make me feel shy, even coming from my mother.

  Mom scoots her macaroni around on her plate. “You know, I was thinking… what if after you graduate you was to take classes at that beauty school over in Dothan? After you got your license, maybe you and me could open up our own shop. None of this nickel-and-diming working for other people anymore. It could be something fancy like the places they have in bigger towns—where you can get your hair done but you can get a mani-pedi and a facial too. We could call it something cute like Sandee and Sydney’s Salon.” The smile that’s been on her face gets even wider. “What do you think, Buttercup?”

  I think I’ve lost my appetite. It’s not like I have to stretch my imagination to know what the life Mom’s proposing would be like because it would be almost exactly like the life I have now. Except it would be worse because I’d be an adult, still in Vermillion, living with and working with my mother. I’m tempted to say, “If it was a choice between being a beautician in Vermillion and dying a slow, painful death, I’d still have to think about it.”

  But Mom’s eyes are shining and she’s still smiling, and I know that what she’s just told me isn’t just an idea she’s been kicking around but a genuine, honest-to-God dream. So I say the only thing I can: “Wow, I don’t know. I guess I need some time to think about it.”

  “Okay,” Mom says, her smile fading a little. “That’s what I figured you’d say. You’re a thinker. Me, I like to jump in with both feet.”