by Ann Angel
Payton sat on the stool and stared at his monkey body in the glass. At his own burning face, and behind that at Eddie’s smile, distant and amused. “Payton, the monkey,” Eddie said from the summit of his sixteen years. “Payton, the Ape Boy!” At first, encouraged by his brother’s anguish, he upped the ante. “Come one, come all,” he hollered. “He’s got a face like your backside and a backside that lights up at Christmas.” Glancing for a minute at the photographer for approval, he hurried on. “Yessir, yessir! Payton, the Freak of Nature. Don’t get too close, folks. He might just bite off your arm.” That was when Payton started to cry.
And once he started, he couldn’t stop. It was as if his grief were a thing apart; as if the harsh, doglike yelps were coming from someone else. Even though Eddie specialized in the fine art of bringing his younger brother to tears, the sudden, eruptive force of Payton’s misery seemed to bother him. “Aw, Pay,” he kept saying, shifting from one sneakered foot to the other. “Come on, Pay. I didn’t mean nothing.”
Still sobbing, but on the wind-down, Payton watched a strangely penitent Eddie shuffle over to the photographer. “This is kid stuff,” Eddie told the photographer, helping Payton to duck his head, lifting off the yoke of the board. “Me and my brother, we’ll just take a picture like we are.” Then, as if his kindness embarrassed him, he added, “It’s for our mother. She’d like it better plain.”
So they’d posed together, and Payton, tears drying on his face, had felt the weight of his brother’s arm around him. As if they were two friends, two careless boys together out of choice, not bound by the strange and oppressive ties of brotherhood.
When they took the photograph home, their mother wanted to glue it in the scrapbook, but Payton begged to keep it instead. That night before he fell asleep, he pulled the candy box from under his bed. He held the new picture for a while, staring at it in the moonlight coming through the blinds, memorizing the sweet curve of his brother’s arm around his own small shoulders. Finally, he removed the velvet top of the box and put the photo inside with his other treasures—the mysterious, crenulated nest of a paper wasp; the featureless, pancaked quarter some boys had left on a railroad track; the pale, frosted wing of a luna moth; and a whole family of Guatemalan worry people with bendable wire bodies and tiny, smiling faces, each no bigger than the head of a match.
Jamie Pittel
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Carrie pierces my nose. Afterward, I sit on the floor of her bedroom in a kind of daze. There’s something—blood?—trickling from the inside of my nose. The needle is still sticking into me, and the numbness from the ice we held against my nose earlier is starting to fade. It hurts. This dull, deep pain that centers on the needle and spreads to my whole head. My eye is watering uncontrollably, and I have to hold my hand against it so the tears don’t fall onto my nose.
“Here, Blondie.” Carrie is at my side, offering me a fresh ice cube wrapped in a paper towel.
There isn’t an easy place to hold the ice. Any contact will make my nose hurt worse. I settle on holding it against the bottom of my nostril, making it impossible to breathe through my nose. It doesn’t hurt less, but the cold feels good, makes me a little more alert.
“Are you OK?” she says.
I nod. “I think so.” Then I laugh.
“You’re laughing,” Carrie says. “Which means either you’re OK or you’re delirious. Either way, now would be a good time to put in the hoop.”
We bought a real body-piercing hoop, the kind that’s supposed to be safe and sterile and all that. I have no idea how I’m going to get the needle out of my nose and the hoop in without fainting, but I nod anyway. Now would probably be better than later.
I squeeze my eyes shut and clutch onto the bottom of my sweater with both hands, dropping my ice cube on the carpet. When she pulls the needle away, it hurts less for a second, then I feel her poking around with the hoop for the hole, twisting it into my skin, and this wave of something so unlike what I understand pain to be shoots through my head. Blood rushes under my skin faster than usual, like it’s trying to push my limbs to move. I’m not going to faint. Instead it’s like I have more strength. Like if Carrie were really trying to hurt me rather than improve my image, I could kill her with my bare hands.
“There,” she says, after twisting the hoop impossibly to get it hooked closed. “Try not to touch it except when you wash it—just with soap. Then turn it a little so it doesn’t heal stuck.”
I nod. Deep breath. I stand, pulling myself up by the leg of the desk chair, hand-over-hand like I’m climbing a mountain. I’m shocked when I get to the mirror on the back of Carrie’s door.
I look exactly the same.
In two and a half weeks I’ll be going to see my mother for winter break. It’s been almost six months since I moved to New York to live with my dad. I feel so different, it seems like she shouldn’t even recognize me when I go back to Berkeley, but the reality is, she might not even notice this when I first get off the plane. I mean, I just look like me. Me, straight blond hair that I cut short right after Halloween. Me in faded, slightly-too-small jeans and my father’s blue V-neck sweater. You notice these things—the clothes—before my nose. It’s still there, pretty small, round at the end, and on one side there’s a delicate silver hoop. The most normal thing in the world. It’s not even red or swollen like it should be. “Huh.” I cross my arms, turn my head to the side to see the hoop better.
“Do you like it?” Carrie asks.
I nod. “Yeah, I do. It’s just not all that dramatic, you know?”
My nose is throbbing, and my whole head is slightly sore. What I’m feeling is bored. Like I thought this would entertain me and now it doesn’t.
“If you want dramatic,” Carrie says, “we could do something else.”
I sigh. “I don’t think I could handle any more pain right now.”
She shakes her head. “Come here.” She motions for me to follow her and pushes open the door to her brother Ben’s room without knocking. My ears are hit by a blast of electric guitar and drums and some sort of screechy vocals. Carrie takes an orange sneaker to the head.
Ben’s sitting on his mattress in the corner of the room. “Knock, dumb-ass,” he yells over the music, waving his second sneaker menacingly in one hand. “I did not invite you into my lair.”
“Over here,” Carrie says to me, ignoring Ben. She points to a bookcase that’s cluttered with partly full jars of different colors. Hair dye. There’s a sludgy green, traffic-light yellow, peacock blue, inky black, the ruby red I saw on both Ben and Carrie when I first met them. Today Ben’s hair is teal. Carrie’s is her natural caramel color. It’s grown out long enough to show that she has curls, which are pushed out of the way with five or six barrettes, randomly placed on either side of her head.
“My hair?” I say, still feeling kind of woozy. She’s right. Even short, my hair is boring. I mean, Gus has a four-inch-tall Mohawk—he’s probably embarrassed to be seen with me.
“He-ee-ey,” Ben says, standing up now and moving in front of his bookcase to turn the music down. “Blondie.” He looks at me like he just noticed I’m standing here. “You pierced your nose.”
I nod. He isn’t asking, just noticing out loud. It took him about three minutes. Too long.
“It looks cool,” he says.
Carrie works her way behind him to dig through the jars of dye. “Swamp Green?” she calls to me.
“Not.” I cross my arms against my chest and lean into the door frame.
“Wouldn’t have thought you could pull it off,” Ben says, looking at me sideways. “You’re starting to look like a halfway-normal person.”
“Normal, thank you. That’s just what I was going for.” I push Ben aside and look over Carrie’s shoulder at the dyes. “What else is there?”
“Blueberry?” She holds the almost-full jar up against my hair.
“Oh yes,” I say. “I think Blueberry is just the thing. Blueberry is absolutely the epitome
of normal.”
Carrie grins. “You sure?”
“Yep.” My nose is hurting less already at the prospect of blue hair. “I really, really want Blueberry.”
“Your parents are so going to freak.”
I shrug. “Not my dad.”
“You’re seeing your mom at Christmas?”
I nod. “No avoiding it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I turn the blue jar around in my hand, hold it in the light to see the color sparkle through the glass. “Yeah. Let’s.”
Watching the blue stream of water rush down the kitchen drain, getting more and more transparent, feeling the blood fill up my head and my nose ache like it’s going to fall off, I’m pretty sure people will notice a difference. When the water’s finally clear, I flip my hair back and drip onto my shoulders and the linoleum.
Carrie hands me a towel and I rub down my head, smiling because I feel clean and energized. I raise my eyebrows. “So is it really blue?”
Ben laughs. “Change your mind already?”
I shake my head and try to look at my reflection in the glass door of the microwave. Too dark to see. I go check the bathroom mirror.
This is noticeable. I peer into the mirror, turn my head to one side and then the other. The person I’m looking at is like me, but not me. She’s like my long-lost twin sister who’s much more worldly than I am. She probably plays pool and lives in a loft with her sheepdog and listens to blues music in smoky clubs and eats sushi. Her friends are poets and sculptors and bass players—the kind of people my mother has never even met.
Carrie reaches for a pot of hair goo on the sink next to me and scoops some into her palm. “You can’t have hair that color falling into your face, you know.” She sweeps her hands through my hair, smoothing it back so it’s slick and sticky. My head looks like a blue bowling ball.
“We should go out,” Ben says. We’re all squeezed into the bathroom now, crowded around the sink.
“And celebrate,” says Carrie.
“Absolutely,” says me.
I call Gus, and we meet at Riverside Park and crowd onto one of those kiddie merry-go-rounds that you spin around until everyone’s dizzy and nauseated. Right now it’s not moving except to creak and tilt whenever someone shifts positions.
“I propose a toast.” Gus holds up the bottle of Southern Comfort we’ve been sharing. “To Lisa’s blueness.” He takes a sip from the bottle and hands it to me. “May she shock the pants off her mother.”
Everyone laughs. I choke on the sweet liquor and pass the bottle to Ben, trying not to cough because it stretches my face and makes my nose hurt.
“She’s going to die,” I say. “She used to dress me in outfits.”
Gus laughs. “Outfits! Good thing you got away.”
He’s kidding, but I really was running away from the outfits. Last summer, my mom and I were both bridesmaids in my aunt’s wedding—matching lavender dresses, baby’s breath in our hair, the whole deal—and I was this miniature version of her, which I realized I had always, always been. I had no idea what I would look like if I dressed myself. I moved away because I needed to find out.
Carrie hands me a carton of ice cream with a plastic spoon sticking out of it. “What did your parents do?” I wave the spoon at the three of them. “About, you know, the punk stuff?”
“Mom expects it,” Carrie says.
Ben nods. “Nothing she can do.”
I take a bite of ice cream and it swims down into my alcohol-warmed belly and chills me.
“Mine think it’s a fucking miracle,” Gus says. “They think I’m like one of the artists at their snooty-ass gallery. They don’t know shit.”
Will my mother yell? Will she disown me? Hold me down and pour peroxide over my head? I can’t imagine her anything but confused. She would never expect this of me. Before the bridesmaid incident, I just wore her outfits, all cheerful-like. When I was little, I kind of loved it—going shopping together, getting the same haircuts and showing them off to my dad when we got home. Now she won’t know who I am. Which of course she already doesn’t. When she sees me, she’ll know she doesn’t know.
I lean closer into Gus’s side and reach my arm out to take the bottle back from Carrie, who’s drinking now, tilting it back into her mouth, her head resting on one of the bars of the merry-go-round.
“Blondie,” she says when she sits up and sees me beckoning for a drink, “you’re turning into a little bottle hog.”
“I’m cold,” I say. “And I’m not blond.”
Gus laughs and points at Carrie. “She’s got you there.”
Carrie rolls her eyes and slaps Gus’s hand out of her face. “You will always be blond,” she says, looking me right in the eye. “You can’t change something like that.”
I pretend to ignore her, but those words stay with me all night. They flit around in my head, my liquid brain, working slower and stranger with the alcohol. Always blond. I twist my good-luck braid—the only blond part left of my hair—around my pinky until it cuts off my circulation, the tip of my finger purple and swollen. I pull a strand of blue down into my face, roll it between my thumb and index finger until the brittleness from the gel flakes away and it’s dry and soft and peacock colored. The blue doesn’t rub off on my fingers. You can’t change something like that.
I wake up at five thirty. Everything hurts. My nose most of all, but also my head, my stomach. The Southern Comfort is still with me.
My father smelled it on me when I came home, looked back and forth from my nose to my hair. Waved a hand in front of his nose. “You smell like a distillery, Lisa.” He sniffed. “And cigarettes?”
“I don’t smoke,” I said. “Just my friends were smoking around me.”
“I’m supposed to celebrate that?” he said, gesturing to the rest of me. When I didn’t have an answer, he sighed. “We’ll talk about it in the morning, Lise. But you’re going to have to tell your mother. About all of it.”
He’s still asleep. My mother will be asleep for hours and hours in California. I drink three cups of water in a row, the glass cool against my lower lip, clicking loud on my teeth. I bring a fourth cup into the bathroom with me and stand in front of the mirror again. Pale, pale skin—impossible to remember June in Berkeley when I was so brown and so blond—hair now the color of blueberry Kool-Aid, sticking up in tufts in the back of my head. Silver metal runs right through the flesh of my nostril, just punched in there like the rings on my binder. The mirror draws me to it, like a hand pulling me back every time I turn away. I close my eyes and sip my water, open them and look again. I still look like this. This is what I look like. All the time.
As soon as it’s late enough in California, I call my mother.
“Hello, darling,” she says. “I miss you.”
“Yeah,” I say. I stop for a minute, breathe, listen to her breathing three thousand miles away. “I miss you, too.” I do, and I listen for a minute while she talks all businesslike and chatty about her Thanksgiving leftovers, realizing this is the last time she’ll ever be this nice to me. This is the last moment she’ll think I belong to her. She can’t see me yet.
“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
“Oh. What is it, darling?”
“Well, a few things, actually. Remember how I got my hair cut short a while ago? I told you that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was still wanting, you know, a change. To look different from before.”
“Yes?” Her voice is getting impatient.
“So I colored it.” She’s rubbing off on me. I would never have used the word “colored” about my hair if I was talking to anyone else.
“Oh?”
“Blue.”
“What?” She’s screeching.
“Blue. I dyed my hair blue. Also I pierced my nose.”
“You pierced . . .” She’s so confused she can’t form whole sentences. “You what?”
“My nose. There’s a hoop in it.
Not in the middle, like cattle. I think that’s disgusting. Mine’s just on one side. It looks really good, Mom. I like how it looks.”
“I see,” she says. There’s a scary calm to her voice. Either she’s still in shock, or she’s already decided to disown me and isn’t even upset.
I take a big breath. “So Dad wanted me to tell you, also, that last night, after I did all that, I went out, you know, with my friends.”
“Yes?” Her yesses just pull me along, like she’s actually tugging at the phone cord, bringing me closer and closer to her so she can make some sense of what I’m telling her.
“And we were out pretty late, I guess. And I was drinking. I came home kind of drunk, and Dad was really mad at me. He wanted me to tell you.”
There’s this chilly silence, until finally she says, “Lisa, let me talk to your father.” Her enunciation is astounding.
“He’s out. He went to get groceries. Do you want me to have him call you when he gets back?”
“No,” she says, all clippy. “No, that’s all right. Just tell him . . . tell him I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
“OK, Mom.” I wait to see if she’s going to say anything else, but she’s just breathing again, so far away. “Mom, how mad at me are you? Because I thought you’d be really mad, but you’re not saying anything. Are you so mad you’re not speaking to me?”
“No, sweetie,” she says, her voice all fake-nice again. “I’m not mad. Concerned. We’ll talk about this more tomorrow, OK?” It’s like she’s telling this to herself as much as me. She’ll call back tomorrow when she’s decided how to deal with me. After she’s yelled at my dad, she’ll yell at me. I can wait.
“She probably had to consult her hairdresser about how to put you back the way you were,” Carrie says at school on Monday. “And tonight she’ll call you back and explain how you can pretend this ugliness never happened.”
I glare at her. “ ‘Ugliness’? You think I look ugly?”