“She shouldn’t be out,” Henzlick said. Then he scrambled out of the truck and hustled over to the woman. She shrank away from him, ducking behind the younger of the two men like a girl playing hide-and-seek.
“She’s scared, poor thing,” Petes said.
“With Henzlick coming at her like that, can you blame her?” Junior said.
Henzlick motioned to the men that they needed to take the woman home. Over and over he pointed toward the row of houses, his long arms making exaggerated arcs in the twilight. The men just stared blankly at Henzlick, who looked like someone doing a hopeless dance without a partner.
“Maybe we should help him,” Jhon said.
Petes shot Jhon a look. Junior gave him the wanking motion.
Jhon shrugged. “Fine.”
The woman reached into her burka, the fabric spreading like a crow’s wing over her hand, and as she did so, her companions slowly started backing away from her.
“Where the fuck are they going?” Petes asked.
“Do you guys think it’s really her?” I thought about what was under that cloth, her arms, probably beautiful, her heart, things so unique they couldn’t possibly belong to another woman, secreted away like treasures. The air around her seemed to glow as the sunlight hit the sand and Hoosier’s hood, reflecting back amber like her eyes. Something was about to happen. Winter. Winter would know.
Wallflower
(June)
Rhae Anne liked Wally Yoder well enough. He was personable and clean and smart. Good company. He was also a talented manicurist, a natural with the orange stick and nail buffer. Better even than Tina Gonzalez, and Tina Gonzalez had been very good. He could cut hair, too. And style it. Rhae Anne was jealous of how he handled the round brush and watched him sometimes out of the corner of her eye in an attempt to uncover his secret. Incompetence wasn’t the problem. The problem was the middle-aged lady clients. They didn’t like change, and Wally, who painted his nails and once in a while tried to get away with wearing a wig to work, was too much change all at once.
They didn’t even know what to call him. His workstation plaque said “Willa” but he’d been born Wally and they were used to referring to someone by the name stamped on their birth certificate. They quite simply did not know what to do with him, so what women like Viv Hochstetler and Shellie Pogue and Una Prokus and Velda McElroy did, for the most part, was avoid him. That meant more work for Rhae Anne and with prom season upon them—kill her now—she had more work than she could handle.
“Wal—I mean Willa, could you get that?”
The phone was ringing off the hook with calls from mothers who, convinced they’d be able to do their daughter’s hair for their special night, were in full-on procrastination panic mode, realizing too late that prom was far more high stakes than it had been when they were teenagers. Whereas the mothers had thought an elegant French twist or natural down-do would suffice, their millennial offspring demanded Los Angeles–style blowouts and ropy curls and intricate braids and glitter and flowers and birds shoved in, everything piled high and sprayed for dear life. Heaven forbid an errant strand fall while the girls grinded on their horny dates to gangster rap. Perish the thought that any part of them—hair, face, breast line—resemble their fine-enough, everyday selves. They wanted to be Cinderella for the night. Kim Kardashian. Or the slut who read the news on Channel 12.
Wally understood. Or so he said. “We’re basically told from the moment we’re born we should be pretty pretty princesses and prom’s like the first opportunity to really be one I mean outside of Halloween of course or a coming-out party but who has a coming-out party in Colliersville not me I’ll tell you that for sure!” He laughed at his own joke and answered the phone. “I’m sorry we’re booked you realize prom is tonight right?”
“Willa?” Rhae Anne said.
He raised an eyebrow and hung up. “Yes?”
“Can you be nicer to the disappointed customers?”
“Oh, sorry,” Wally said. “Sure thing, boss.”
Wally said the Hair Barn—a small, freestanding shop painted to look like an outbuilding but really more the size of an unhappy teenage girl’s bedroom—was his only safe space in town, the only place he could be himself, so Rhae Anne was lenient, letting him get away with more than she should. School was a nightmare, he said. He didn’t talk to anyone unless forced to and lived in daily fear for his life. He was sure one of these days a jock or that dick Benny Bradenton was going to take him out behind the woodshed—well, technically field house—and beat him until he saw not only stars but whole constellations, solar systems, “multiverses.” Home, Wally said, was worse.
“You know Helman.”
Rhae Anne did. She hadn’t hired Wally because she felt sorry for him. Not exactly. She’d hired him for his persistence—he’d spent much of the winter haunting the Hair Barn, résumé and nail kit in hand, begging for a chance to show her what he could do—and his skill. But in the back of her mind was a nagging concern for the kid, a sneaking suspicion that to be born the son of Helman Yoder, trans or not, was a rough portion. A bad hand. So pity was part of it.
“Hello Hair Barn otherwise known as Prom Day Head-Quarters. Get it? Head-quarters? Anyway, what can I do you for?”
“Willa!” Rhae Anne said. “Tone it down, okay?”
Wally blushed. “Okay, okay. It’s just the excitement’s contagious, you know?”
Rhae Anne certainly did not know. She was finding it hard to breathe. Prom season always affected her this way. So much hairspray, so much pressure, so many moms, too many memories. She thought, against her will, of her own prom, of Larry leaving her alone on the dance floor to go get drunk behind the school with a bunch of football players and their dates. Rhae Anne would never forget how it felt to stand under a disco ball in a butt-bowed gown, “We’ve Got Tonite” blaring from the speakers some audiovisual nerds had dragged in for the occasion, all the pretty girls around her drooping like lilies and forced to submit to being cherished, to being held tight against polyester coats, all whispered to and wanted. Rhae Anne’s feeling at that moment was not one of smallness or insignificance. Instead, it was as if she were a giantess towering over the dance floor, her bloated figure (her period would come that night) conspicuous and sympathy inducing. All she could think at that moment was, I deserve this. I must deserve this or it wouldn’t be happening.
Marissa Marino was in Rhae Anne’s chair. Her mother had thought ahead and scheduled an appointment for a blowout and style back in March. “She doesn’t even have a date yet,” Tessa Marino explained, trying to sound embarrassed, “but I figure, better to be safe than sorry.” Everyone knew that Marissa would get a date for the prom, just as everyone knew now that she hadn’t been to school for an entire week.
“Because trauma because shame,” Wally had whispered behind his hand as Marissa walked into the Barn, head down, a thinner, self-conscious shadow of her mother. “And her all Miss Perfect Attendance. Not anymore.”
The day of Daisy’s disappearance, Marissa was supposed to pick the little girl up at the bus stop and babysit her until Hector got home. She told Randy Richardville and the slew of reporters who’d interviewed her—before her mother and father got a lawyer who put a stop to any and all such impolite questioning—that she simply forgot. It had been an odd day she said, her class schedule turned on its head by a spur-of-the-moment pep rally. And then there was the stress of SAT prep and college applications. A small but vocal pocket of the Colliersville population blamed Marissa for Daisy going missing. “Colleges don’t want to hear from you until, like fall,” Wally often pointed out. “Even if you’re Marissa ‘My Teeth Light Up from the Inside’ Marino. So that college SAT crap is just that. Crap. And the pep rally? What. Ever.”
Shame and trauma and a disappeared Daisy Gonzalez weren’t stopping Marissa from going to a high school dance, and she was wearing exactly what she should to her pre-prom hair appointment—a button-up shirt that wouldn’t ruin her do late
r when it came time to don the dress. Also skinny jeans and Ugg boots. She looked beautiful but pale. Her mother did all the talking.
“So what we were thinking is a milkmaid sweep kind of French braid that goes from here”—Tessa drew a manicured finger from Marissa’s right temple to her left—“to here. And then soft curls down her back. Also, a gardenia just resting, you know, resting, in the braid, but not really in the braid. More on it. Like it just drifted down from a tree and stayed.”
Wally sniggered from across the shop. Marissa blushed but remained silent.
“Where’s the gardenia?” Rhae Anne asked.
“In a cooler in my car. Gardenias must be kept at a certain temperature. They’ll wilt otherwise.” Tessa was a beauty in her own right—tall but not very, curvy but only in the right places, a Sophia Loren sort of face. All of it, from what Rhae Anne could discern, natural, but aided, of course, by money. Tessa was aging in the way women did when they had easy access to fresh fruit, expensive moisturizers, and personal trainers. She’d probably never cleaned a bathroom in her life. Look at those hands.
Rhae Anne glanced in her workstation mirror, wiped away a white fleck of something, and stared for a brief moment at her face, unfortunately freckled, slightly scarred. An ugly beautician. How ironic.
“I have lemon juice in my purse,” Tessa said, hovering. “For the gardenia. You’ll want to rub some on your fingertips to keep the petals from browning.”
“Mom,” Marissa said.
“What?”
“We’re good,” Rhae Anne said to Tessa. “We can take it from here.”
Tessa squeezed Marissa’s shoulder and found a seat in the waiting area under a strand of star-shaped hanging lights. Rhae Anne watched Tessa cross her legs, study her perfectly shaved calves. What was it like, to look at yourself and like what you saw? To revel in what mirrors gave back to you? It was something Rhae Anne and her best friend, Shannon Washburn, often talked about—what beauty meant in this world and the lack of it, too. Shannon, born to arguably the most beautiful woman in town, was always cursing her own unremarkable looks. “This is why we fuck beneath us,” Shannon said just a few weeks ago on a visit to Rhae Anne’s. Shannon was drunk and bemoaning her latest knock-down-drag-out with Josh Seaver, which, as far as Rhae Anne could piece together between Shannon’s sobbing bouts, had started over the fact that Josh lost his job and then moved on to Shannon’s aversion to fellatio and Josh’s habit of leaving joints burning in the bathroom. Practically inconsolable, Shannon kept pulling at her crazy-long hair and saying, “We think because we’re ugly we deserve the worst of the worst.”
Rhae Anne didn’t really like the sound of that. Larry was not at all on the same asshole level as Josh, who, Rhae Anne knew for a fact, was cheating on Shannon with high-school-bully/prom-queen-turned-sad-stripper Brianna Pogue. Sure, Larry wasn’t perfect—he’d gotten her a set of miniflashlights for Valentine’s Day and a Crock-Pot for Christmas and hadn’t kissed her in weeks—but he was good-looking and hardworking and also the only man who’d ever paid her any attention. After sixteen years, their love was comfortable, as broken-in and welcoming as the couch at the end of the day. “Fucking beneath us?” Rhae Anne said to Shannon. “Nah, I prefer to be on top.” Shannon laughed a little at that. It was the same service Rhae Anne provided her clients. The moment they finished their particular sob story, she swooped in with a silly joke or anecdote, careful to make herself the butt of it all. It was necessary, part of the job. It was also exhausting.
The phone rang again.
“Yellow, Hair Barn,” Wally said. “How can I help ya help ya help ya?”
While Wally informed yet another prom mom that she was out of luck, Una Prokus walked in. Without an appointment as usual, Rhae Anne thought, and wearing saddle shoes like a ten-year-old. At least Una never sprang for anything beyond a bang trim and maybe, just maybe, she would trust Wally to do it.
Wally told Una he’d be with her in a minute. “Meantime cool your jets,” he said. “Jets or Sharks take your pick.”
Una sat down next to Tessa, grabbing a Highlights from the magazine rack and crossing her thick ankles. Tessa shot her a smooth smile, but Una didn’t return it. Instead, she raised the magazine so that it was level with her bangs. The cover showed a little girl hosing down a golden retriever in a driveway. Blue water everywhere.
“When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying—”
“Willa!”
“Yeah, boss.”
“Can I have a word?”
Wally nodded. They met behind a curtain in the back of the shop where the two of them sometimes had tea or coffee or snuck sandwiches between clients. Rhae Anne sat at the yellow Formica table and folded her hands in front of her.
“You need to be less rude to the customers,” Rhae Anne said. “I mean, I’m glad you feel able to be yourself here, but—”
“It’s just how do these women think we can squeeze their daughters in for a Farrah and a half-foil tonight of all nights?” Wally again launched into song and his voice was clear and high. “Tonight, tonight, the world is wild and bright, going mad, shooting stars into space!”
“See?” Rhae Anne said. “That’s what I’m talking about. I just need you to take it down a notch.”
Wally bit his lip and looked at his shoes. Chuck Taylors. Red, with sparkly toes. Rhae Anne hoped he wouldn’t cry.
“I know you’re going through a tough time,” she said. “Still…”
It wasn’t just the transitioning thing, which, as far as Rhae Anne could tell, was pretty surface level so far—he’d plucked his eyebrows into thin boomerang shapes, stuffed his bra, tried to move around the world more like a woman—but there was also the dairy shutdown to consider, and his mother’s struggle with pills, which had landed her in the psych ward for a week and a half. Rhae Anne heard from Velda McElroy who heard it from Olive May Redburn that Helman and Birdy were talking divorce and that would mean even more upheaval and probably a move. It was a lot for a teen boy working on being a teen girl to handle and Rhae Anne understood that. She didn’t want to have to fire him.
“All I’m saying is when you answer the phone, sound sympathetic, okay? And when you’re helping out our more aged clients, just keep in mind that they’re a little behind the times.”
“In other words,” Wally said, tugging at his shirt, “hide my light under a bushel basket?”
“I’m afraid so. Speaking of our aged clients, can you take Una? I’m going to be tied up with Marissa for a while.”
“If you think she’ll let me.”
“Be as ‘normal’ as you can.” Rhae Anne used air quotes for “normal” and rolled her eyes so Wally would know she was on his side. “I have faith in you.”
Wally smiled at her and wiped the lipstick from his mouth. It left a purple smudge on his hand and upper lip, where it matched the burgeoning mustache he’d forgotten to shave. “Better?”
“Better.” Rhae Anne gave him a shove. From behind the curtain, she watched him approach Una, who dropped her magazine and started to shake her head. Undeterred, Wally took her hand and led her to the station next to Rhae Anne’s, saying as he did so just how much he liked her shoes.
“And pardon my bursting out randomly into song, Ms. Prokus.” Wally shook out a black cape and wrapped it around Una’s shoulders. Una didn’t answer, just looked at her lap. “Colliersville High’s doing West Side Story for the spring musical and I’ve got ‘I Feel Pretty’ on the brain.”
Rhae Anne went back to her chair. “Let me guess,” she said to Marissa. “You’re Maria.”
“I can’t sing,” she said.
“Neither could Natalie Wood, but that didn’t stop her.” Rhae Anne brushed out Marissa’s long hair. It was straight and shiny, not a split end in sight. “You have beautiful hair.”
“Thank you.”
“So, who’s the lucky guy?”
“My date? His name’s Benny.”
Wally was spraying Una’s bangs with a water bottle. He stopped. “Benny Bradenton?”
“Yes,” Marissa said.
“Benny ‘My Dad Owns Three Gas Stations So I’ve Never Had to Pump My Own’ Bradenton? That one?”
“I guess.”
“Interesting.” Wally narrowed his eyes. “Int-errrr-esting.”
“Ignore him,” Rhae Anne said. Then she gave Wally a look. Pol-ite, she mouthed.
“What’s interesting?” Marissa asked.
Wally mouthed back, Don’t worry, boss. “Well,” Wally said aloud, “on the very day that little Daisy Gonzalez went missing I just sort of overheard Benny talking to Renee Seaver—” Wally handed Una a mirror so she could see the back of her head. “I think we should take a few inches off, get rid of the unhealthy stuff, don’t you agree?”
“Sure.” Una was still looking at her lap.
“Anywho,” Wally continued, “I overheard Benny talking to Renee Seaver—Marissa, you know Renee.”
Rhae Anne sectioned Marissa’s hair for the braid. “Willa, what’s all this about?”
“As I was saying, on the very day little Daisy Gonzalez went missing I happened to hear Benny telling Renee that they should do something exciting, put Colliersville on the map so to speak, and Renee was like ‘Break into my dad’s place of work?’ and Benny was like ‘No something much more devious not to mention illegal’ and Renee was like ‘Kidnap a kid and hold her for ransom?’ and Benny was like ‘Eff yeah,’ so I don’t know call me crazy but I kind of started wondering if, well…”
Marissa stared straight ahead. Her left eye twitched slightly. “You started wondering what exactly?”
“If Benny Your Boy Toy might have bitten off more than he could chew. Gotten in over his head. Hitched his wagon to a fallen star.” He turned back to Una. “So, would you like face-frame bangs or something more jaunty?”
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