And for that reason—not to mention the fact that, really, I’d had no choice in the matter. I hadn’t so much acted that day as reacted—I was glad I’d done what I had.
“Now that,” Dauntra said with approval, nodding at my hair, “is what I’m talking about.”
“You like it?” I threw my backpack into my employee locker. Later, before I leave, Stan will go through it, to make sure I haven’t ripped off any DVDs. My backpack, I mean. Even though I was the store’s token goody-goody, everyone’s bag gets searched before they leave. Even mine. It’s the Potomac Video way.
Although certain of its employees are trying to change that.
“I love the black,” Dauntra said. “It makes your face look thinner.”
“I don’t know if thin-faced was the look I was going for,” I said. “But thanks.”
“You know what I mean.” Dauntra, whose hair is two-toned, Midnight Ebony and Pink Flamingo, fiddled with her eyebrow ring. “What did your parents say? Did they lose it?”
“Not really,” I said, ducking back behind the counter. “They barely noticed, actually.”
Dauntra made a disgusted noise.
“God, what are you going to have to do to get their attention, anyway?” she wanted to know. “Have a baby at the prom?”
“Um,” I said, choking a little on the diet Dr Pepper I’d bought at the convenience mart next door before my shift. Because, you know, considering recent events, my having a baby at the prom isn’t totally out of the realm of the possible. “Yeah. Ha. That would probably do it, all right. But, you know, there’s something to be said for maintaining a low profile. Right now they’re all over Lucy, on account of her SAT scores.”
Dauntra’s look of disgust deepened. “When are people going to get that that stupid test doesn’t mean anything? I mean, what does it measure? How well you paid attention in class the past decade of your life? Please. Like that can tell a college admissions office anything about how well you’re going to do for the next four years while you’re at their school.”
Dauntra, whose parents kicked her out of the house one night after she turned sixteen and got an eyebrow ring (and a twenty-year-old boyfriend), is currently studying graphic design at a community college. She’d dumped the boyfriend, but kept the eyebrow ring, and opted out of the whole SAT trap by refusing to take them, or to enroll in a school that required them. Dauntra has a lot of opinions like that. I actually think that she and Lucy’s boyfriend, Jack, have a lot in common that way.
“So what’d the ’rents do?” Dauntra wanted to know. “About your sister?”
“Oh,” I said. “They’re making her get a tutor. And cut back on the cheerleading to make time for it. The tutoring, I mean.”
“Typical,” Dauntra said. “I mean, them playing into the whole sick fallacy that those scores mean anything. Although if it means your sister spends less time in a miniskirt, undermining the feminist cause, I guess it’s a good thing.”
“Totally,” I said.
I thought about asking Dauntra what she thought I should do about David and the whole Thanksgiving thing. I mean, she is more experienced than I am—probably more than Lucy, too. I figured the advice from a woman of the world like Dauntra might be really valuable, not to mention insightful.
Only I couldn’t really figure out how to bring it up, you know? Like, was I just supposed to go, “Hey, Dauntra. My boyfriend asked me to spend Thanksgiving with him at Camp David, and you know what that means. Should I say yes or no?”
Somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So instead, I asked her, conversationally, “So, how’s the battle of the backpack going?”
Dauntra glanced darkly in Stan’s direction. “Stalemate,” she said. “He said if I didn’t like it, I could go work at McDonald’s.”
Dauntra’s convinced that the video store’s policy of having a manager go through employee backpacks before allowing them to leave after their shift is unconstitutional—even though I’d asked my mom about it, and she’d said, technically, it wasn’t. Dauntra refused to believe this, but it’s cool she even cares. Some people I know—well, okay, Kris Parks, to be exact—only pretend to care about issues because doing so looks good on their college applications.
“I was thinking about pouring Aunt Jemima all over the inside of my JanSport,” Dauntra went on, “so when Stan reaches inside it tonight, he gets a big handful of syrup. But I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good backpack.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see how that might hurt more than help. Besides, it isn’t Stan’s fault, necessarily. He’s just doing his job.”
Dauntra narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what all the Nazis said in their own defense after World War Two.”
I didn’t think searching someone’s backpack for stolen DVDs was quite the same as killing seven million people, but I didn’t figure Dauntra would appreciate me mentioning that out loud.
“Anyway,” she said, changing the subject, “how was that new art class? The life drawing one?”
“Oh,” I said. “Kind of, um, startling.” I still didn’t feel comfortable bringing up the David thing, so I just said, “Did you know life drawing meant nudes?”
Dauntra didn’t even look up from the manga she’d cracked open over the register’s keyboard.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Oh,” I said, slightly let down. “Well, I didn’t. So I got to see my first—you know.”
That got her attention.
“The nude model was a GUY?” She looked up from the comic book—well, it was really a comic novel, or graphic novel. I should start trying to get the terminology correct, since someday I hope to write and illustrate mangas of my own. “I thought nude models were always women.”
“Not always, I guess,” I said.
“You know, some guy dropped his pants in front of me on the Metro the other day,” Dauntra said incredulously, “for free. I had to call the cops. And, like, this Susan Boone lady, she pays some guy money to do it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Dauntra shook her head in disbelief. “Did you feel violated? Because whenever a guy shows me his goods when I’m not interested in seeing them, I feel violated.”
“It wasn’t really like that,” I said. “I mean, you know. It was art.”
“Art.” Dauntra nodded. “Sure. I can’t believe a guy gets paid to show off his goods, and people call it art.”
“Well, not the showing-off-his-goods part,” I said. “But the drawings we make of it.”
Dauntra sighed. “Maybe I should take up being a nude model. I mean, you get paid just to sit there.”
“Naked,” I pointed out.
“So what?” Dauntra shrugged. “The human form is a thing of beauty.”
“Excuse me.” A tall guy in a beret—no, really, a French beret, although he didn’t happen to look French—approached the counter. “I believe you’re holding a film for me. The name is Wade, W-A-D—”
“Yeah, it’s right here,” I said quickly. Because the guy in the beret is a regular, and even though I’d only been working at Potomac Video for two months, I knew that if you didn’t head off Mr. Wade at the pass, he’d go on for as long as he could about his film collection, which is extensive, and mostly in black and white.
“Ah, yes,” he said, when I showed him the DVD we’d been holding for him. “The Four Hundred Blows. You know it, of course?”
“Of course,” I said, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. “That will be fourteen seventy-nine.”
“One of Truffaut’s finest,” Mr. Wade said. “I have it on video, of course, but it’s really the kind of film you can’t own enough copies of—”