Fumbling in the mirror, mixing up which way to turn the clippers, I eventually managed to clean up the rough spots. I held another mirror up so I could see the back, and it looked okay.
It was weird in the shower, shampooing my prickly-soft head, and even weirder when I got out and could feel every breath of air on my scalp. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went to put the clippers away, stopping when I saw myself in Mom’s mirror: it was me from my bare feet to about my shoulders, where my hair should have been hanging dark and wet, and then some other Cassie above that. I went through the tops in Mom’s closet, passing over all the dark solids and stripes and whites until I found a silky blouse, hand dyed in deep blue and burgundy rectangles with yellow sun-spots, swirls, chevrons, and squiggles drawn over it in gold fabric marker. I was afraid it was silk, which I don’t wear, but it was rayon. I whipped off my T-shirt and slipped on the blouse. It barely met the top of my jeans and was tight.
I stood looking at myself when I heard Mom on the stairs.
“Mom,” I called in my best casual-daughter voice. “Can I borrow your rayon top?”
“Which one?” she said, and stopped. I could see her in the mirror behind me and see myself trying to manage an innocent smile.
“I cut my hair. Do you like it?”
“Oh, Cassie!” she said. “Why would you? How could you just … ” She actually started sobbing, and holding me, and then pushing me away with her hands on my shoulders so she could look up at me. I still haven’t gotten used to being taller than her.
Dad’s alarmed voice called in, “Deb, are you all right?” And then he came in and saw.
“Dad burn!” he said. “Ye ain’t got no more hair no more!”
“Daddy, no! I thought something was wrong.” I looked in the mirror with feigned horror. “You’re right! It’s gone! Call 911! Is it like losing a finger? Can they reattach it?”
“Stop it, you two,” wailed Mom.
“There, there, Deborah.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s just hair. It’ll grow. And it doesn’t look so bad. She’s a good-lookin’ kid—I think I like it.” He reached out and felt my head, “Hmmm. Do you like it?” he asked me.
“I don’t know—I guess it’s all right. I wanted something different.”
“Well, it is different,” said Mom.
“Now, Deb, the child’s self-esteem—”
“Oh, all right, she’s as beautiful as ever. It’s just that—” She looked at me in the mirror again, where all three of us were clustered. “I’ve always loved her hair—it’s always been so … so Cassie. Remember, Gale? The first time we cut it? I felt like I was cutting her. But okay, honey, I know, you’re fourteen now. I just have to get used to it—used to my little girl doing things like this. But you might have said something instead of giving me a heart attack.”
“It was a spontaneous decision. Can I wear your blouse?”
“It’s a little small,” said Dad, eyeing my exposed middle.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Girls at school show a lot more than this and nobody—”
“You’re not girls at school.”
I tugged it down. “It’s okay, Dad. Look.”
“She’s fine,” said Mom. “It’s actually nice to see her dressing a little more feminine.”
I felt excellent walking into school today, even after yesterday—which I should have dealt with better and maybe wasn’t even that bad. Weird looks by the score. Maybe it’s cool to be visible.
St. Matt called me “Osama Bald-Laden,” and I thanked him for noticing. Quill ran up and started rubbing my head. DJ said, “Ponyboy, your hair, your tuff, tuff hair!” from The Outsiders. Liz Pine thought it was “radical.”
I sat with those guys at lunch, and it was okay though I wondered what my old lunch friends were thinking—I felt somehow disloyal to them and to my old self.
Even weirder is that I felt like going shopping for some new clothes after school. I still hate shopping, but I am suddenly bored with my old T-shirts. What’s wrong with me?
I tried to call Ally just now to tell her about my new haircut and everything that has been happening at school. Nobody home—I had to leave a message again.
Back to the summertime—
Ally left a big empty space at the cabin, the tipi, the whole Goat-horn valley, and, I have to say, inside both my brother and me. But she did give me a great parting gift by being my ally again and helping me convince Mom and Dad to let me spend the rest of the summer at the cabin.
Strange for your parents to be more worried about you being bored than you are yourself, but they wanted to know what I was going to do all day. Beyond reading, hiking, and writing a little, I wasn’t sure. Lie on the Carrock all day and watch clouds grow? Who cares. Boredom, not to mention horror, was living in the city: pavement, automobile exhaust, shopping, television, and a thousand other useless entertainments. But the mountains are filled with miracles: every thunderstorm, every sunset, every wildflower raising its head in the meadow, every patch of lichen on the Carrock, soaking up the sun and the rain and the air.
In the end Mom came around, deciding that she was going to “validate my need for solitude,” though she hoped I would think of some friends to invite up or to make plans with downtown. And she would be in and out, as would Dad, so I wouldn’t really be alone that much.
In the first week, Sean worked every day and came back tired, but it was nice having dinner together. I began the summer by immersing myself in Middle Earth—and Valinor—reading The Silmarillion for the first time and going through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings again. By the end of The Return of the King, I was walking around in a kind of daze, with the contours of Middle Earth mentally superimposed onto this earth.
Then I read Desert Solitaire again—what a contrast! Where Tolkien made his own mythology, Abbey told stories of people and the earth just as he saw them. In one, a vulture is a carrion bird, full of dark symbolism. In the other, it’s “the noble turkey vulture,” in whose gut any creature might find an honorable resting place.
I remember one night later in the summer: Sean and I sat alone on the sunset rocks, shielded behind our sunglasses. The day was clear except for a few wispy clouds hanging between us and the Collegiate Peaks. Sean had just gotten a letter from Ally confirming that she would come for two weeks at the end of July and beginning of August, then the two of them would have another couple of weeks to take the long way back to school.
“Do you still miss her like you did?” I said, almost calling him “Nickie.” It seemed like we were about to have a conversation out of “The Last Good Country.”
“Every day,” Sean said. “But you get used to it.”
“Do you love her a lot, Nickie?” Okay, I thought, I might as well go with it.
“So do you, Littless.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I thought you hated her at first.”
“Was I awful?”
“You weren’t bad.”
“Now that she’s gone, I’m used to it too. But sometimes I expect to see her—like I’m down at the ponds and I think she’ll be there.”
“You make it sound like she’s dead.”
“No. But she’s not here.”
“I know what you mean.”
He stared out toward the horizon for a while. “Have you ever heard that saying, ‘Wherever you go, there you are’?”
“Sounds like something Dad would say.”
“He does,” Sean said, like himself now and not Nick Adams. “I think of it like this—any place has two components—what’s there, and what you bring with you.”
“Like in Lorien when Aragorn says that the only evil in that place is the evil that people bring?”
“I don’t remember, but yeah. You like it here because, in a certain way, there’s no e
vil here—just like Lórien. You can’t stand the messes that people make, and we keep it pretty clean up here. Out there,” he gestured off in the distance, north toward Denver, “there’s all kinds of shit going on.”
The sun began to slip behind the mountains and a breeze moved up the valley.
“But what I really meant was how this place holds her, holds our memories of her. I think you were reading all that Tolkien to escape, so you wouldn’t miss her. And now we’re sort of used to it, so we don’t mind missing her, we even like missing her, because it’s the closest thing to being with her.”
“Which is going to happen in about three weeks.”
“Wow,” he said, and I didn’t know if he meant Ally coming or the sky, which had taken the colors of roses and peaches, like watercolors washed over the thin clouds.
“Wow,” I said, meaning both.
18 September
Images of summertime:
I’m sitting on the beaver dam, still, watching trout flash out of the shadows to take caddisflies from the surface. Mosquitoes bite me, and horseflies, which I slap and flick into the pond to feed the trout. The sun burns me, and the wind squints-up my eyes. Stubble grows on my legs and prickles under my arms until it softens and lengthens. I shower in sun-heated water from the roof of the cabin and brush out my hair as I dry in the sun on the Carrock. When rains come, I wait with everything else, listening to the drumming on the roof or the tipi and feeling the water soaking into the land.
When I think of my summertime in the mountains, I feel strange now, grooming myself for the eyes of others. The mountains don’t care, the land doesn’t care. The raven seems to watch you, but what are its thoughts as it flaps above the trees and calls to another on a distant rock?
I miss my hair. I want to wrap myself up in it, but there is only my head, exposed and bare. What will I wear today? Suddenly I have to make decisions. I look at my legs, brown and gangly and adorned with dark hairs. I have a pair of hiking shorts that are borderline long enough to pass dress code. And I think I’ll hack the arms off a T-shirt, and maybe cut a few inches off at the bottom.
On my way into the school I heard a chorus of “omigods” and shrieks of laughter from a group of BFF girls who were staring at my legs. Whatnever. St. Matt didn’t let me down—he checked me out at our lockers and said, “Missed your legs when you got rid of your hair, Osama.” I was followed by stage whispers and rude looks all morning.
At the Tolkien lunch group, the seventh grade girls giggled at me, but DJ said I looked “tuffer every day.”
Mr. Griffin read the part where Gandalf tells Frodo that it was not “a pity” that Bilbo didn’t stab Gollum when he had a chance—“it was pity that stayed his hand.” He put a lot of emphasis on the bit where Gandalf says that while many who live deserve death, many who die deserve life. “Can you give it to them? Therefore be not quick to deal out death in judgment, for even the wise cannot see all ends.”
“And Gollum is so cute!” said Tarah.
“Cute?” I said. “Where is he described as being cute?”
“In the movie, you know?”
“Oh. Haven’t seen it.”
Nobody could believe this was possible, except Griffin. He said that the first time he saw it he couldn’t enjoy it because all he could think about was how different it was from the book.
I read the scene where Sam looks into the Mirror of Galadriel and sees all the Shire being polluted and the trees being cut down.
DJ read about Gimli the dwarf asking Lady Galadriel for a lock of her hair.
“And he’s too reserved,” said Quill, “but Gimli—I mean DJ—wanted me to ask you for a lock of your midnight tresses, Cassie.”
“Shut up, man,” said DJ, hiding his head.
“He wants one of her dresses?” asked Tarah.
“Tresses,” said Quill. “Locks, mane, protein filaments—hair.”
“Most regrettably, Master Gimli,” I said, “My dirt-brown locks—they weren’t midnight at all—have been most ignobly deposited in the trash.”
“Bummer, man, he’s, like, heartbroken.”
When I got home, the phone was ringing. It was Ally.
“Less than two weeks, sister,” she said.
“I know, I can’t wait. It’s the best birthday present ever.”
I took the cordless out back to the patio.
“How are you?”
“Great—I mean, up and down, you know. I’m living for this trip. What about you?”
“We could really use a break, too. Sean is studying his ass off—I’m pretty busy myself. Too many classes, not enough art. You’re going to love this place at the beach.”
There was a pause. I had so much to tell her, I didn’t know where to start.
“What’s up,” she said. “Did you just want to chat? Your message sounded sort of urgent.”
“Well … for one thing, I cut off all my hair.”
“All of it? How short?”
“Short. Not shaved, but clippered.”
“Wow. I bet it’s awesome. Do you like it?”
“I don’t know—it’s different, I wanted a change.”
“That’s cool. What else? School?”
“What do you think?”
“That bad?”
“I don’t know. Yes. The work is easy enough, my grades are okay, but … everybody hates me.” I thought about DJ. “Well, not everybody.”
“Oooo. Cassie’s in love.”
“Am not.”
“Who is he?”
“His name’s DJ.” I told her about the Tolkien and writing clubs and how DJ wanted a lock of my tuff hair.
“How romantic. He sounds sweet. And he must have it bad for you.”
“You think so?”
“How many eighth grade boys would ask for a lock of your hair? Are you going to give it to him?”
“No.”
“Do you like him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You should give it to him. It’s cute.”
“Well, I think I can get it out of the trash.”
“He’ll love it. But what about everybody else—the ones that hate you?”
I told her about choir, and how they thought I was the Antichrist because of the incident in reading. And how they think that I’m a freak because I have more hair on my legs than my head.
“We’ll have to find you one of those T-shirts that says, ‘You call me a freak—as if that’s a bad thing.’”
“Perfect.” We laughed.
Then she said, “Listen. I had this idea for you.”
“For me?”
“Yeah, I was going to wait until you came out here, but maybe sooner is better than later.”
“So, tell me!”
“Well, you remember in the beginning of summer when we were talking about how awful middle school is, and I said that high school should be at least marginally better?”
“Trouble is,” I said, “how am I going to make it ’til I get there?”
“That’s the idea. You don’t wait. You go to high school now.”
“You can’t—” I said. “How could I do that?”
“Well, you said you were old enough to be a grade ahead, right? Your birthday is just before the deadline. So skip the rest of eighth grade.”
“Will they let me do that? They won’t let me do that.”
“They might. What have you got to lose? Look at yourself—you don’t belong in middle school.”
We came up with ideas—talking to the GT lady at school, convincing Mom and Dad, going to the principal instead of the assistant, maybe even going straight to the high school.
“I bet your dad could convince the schools,” Ally said. “Think h
ow many hopeless cases he’s won in court. So your job is convincing your parents.”
“That should be easy. Won’t they love to think of their brilliant daughter skipping a grade?”
“I don’t know—sometimes they don’t like you to move so fast.”
“But it’s too perfect. Now that you’ve come up with this, I feel like it’s the only way I’ll survive.”
Even as I said that, it sounded like the overstatement of the year, but still, I was filled with euphoria. To be free of that horrible place forever! To be in a big school, with older kids, where nobody will know me or notice me or think I’m weird. Maybe even where people have half a brain and don’t always have to be part of the herd.
And yet, I have doubts. I might be starting to make friends, including DJ. I can still see them, though, right? And what if high school is no better? This little voice keeps fretting me, saying it will never happen, and if it does it won’t do any good.
My head is swirling with ideas and fantasies as well as misgivings, and on top of it all, I feel so weird with my new haircut and wearing different clothes and thinking about DJ, too. How do I feel about him? It’s not like some kind of warm and tingly feeling—it’s more that I can’t stop thinking about him.
19 September
Writing group was cool, and just for fun, I tied up a lock of hair for DJ. Turns out it wasn’t in the trash because Mom had collected it. She is saving it in a little box and gave me some. I tied a ribbon around it, and put it in an envelope.
To Gimli, Glóin’s son:
A lock of tuff, tuff hair.
I didn’t know how to close it, so I left it at that.
Without even reading the envelope, DJ gave me a smile that said he knew what it was. He slid it into his backpack even as Quill was grabbing for it.
“Stay back, Quillen,” he said. “Thanks, Cassie.”
“Sure, man.” Man? Had I just called him man?
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