I didn’t need to take her word for it. I’d already seen what kind of mom Billie was. “I know.”
“And Tonette spoils those girls. She don’t even know what they’re really like, she’s so blind.”
I shrugged again. It didn’t matter what Tonette saw or didn’t see in those girls. It only mattered what she saw and didn’t see in me.
“Listen, I don’t got a ton of money, but how about we go into town and get haircuts or something?” Terry asked.
“Haircuts?”
She shrugged, a sheepish smile crossing her face. “I got boys. Haircuts is the best I can do with a girl.”
It occurred to me that nobody was going to say one way or another whether I needed or didn’t need a haircut. Or a visit to the dentist. Or to study or to learn to drive or to eat regularly or do any of the things I was used to being reminded to do. It was all up to me now, a thought that was both empowering and frightening as hell.
“Okay,” I said, my hands searching the back of my hair involuntarily. “I could use a haircut.”
Terry left the boys with Grandmother Billie and we scooted into the car Grandfather Harold had picked me up from the motel in. It was the first time I’d left the house since I’d arrived there. I sat in the front seat, holding Marin’s purse in my lap, more out of habit than because I needed it for anything, and marveled at how close the main strip of town was. Out on my porch, I’d felt so very far away from the rest of the world. Five or ten minutes on foot would have had me at the first gas station, another five would have gotten me to the teeny movie theater. Another five would have gotten me to pretty much anywhere else I wanted to be. How odd to feel so isolated when civilization was literally all around you.
Terry pulled up to a strip mall and swung into a parking space outside a shop called Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor.
Inside, I was immediately swept away by the smell. Taken to so many different places in my past that I almost felt pulled apart. Times I’d been with Mom, nervously waiting for a color to set or for a new cut to be revealed. Times we’d taken Marin so she could get her tiny nails painted. Times I’d gone with Dani and her mom for pedicures or waited for Jane to get highlights done.
The last time I’d been in a beauty salon had been the weekend before the tornado, getting my hair fixed for prom.
Dani and Jane and I had decided to go as each other’s dates, even though Dani had been asked by three different guys and Jane had sort of started seeing a boy she’d met at an orchestra competition in April, and I probably could have talked Kolby into going with me.
But we’d made the decision that senior prom was for dates and romantic dinners and swanky nights out; junior prom was for fun. This was our “fun” year.
We’d gone all out. Big, floor-length poufy formals filled with tulle that ate us up when we sat down. Expensive mani-pedis and updos, sparkly shoes that we kicked off the second we hit the dance floor and ignored for the rest of the night, dinner at Froggy’s, where we played video games while we waited for our food.
It had been so much fun.
And I had completely forgotten about it until I smelled the astringent odors of permanents and hair dyes and nail polish and remover and glue. My old life was that far away. Gone. As if the tornado’s damage would never be complete. It had destroyed my present, laid waste to my future, and was now busy eating up my history, too, as I forgot what life was like before.
“May I help you?” a pink-haired woman said, peering up at us over a massive marble countertop.
“We’d like to get our hair done,” Terry said. “Whoever’s available is fine.”
The woman ran her sparkly black-tipped fingernail down a schedule book, then called over her shoulder, “Jonas? You got time for two walk-ins?”
“Yep,” a voice called, and she motioned for Terry to head back to wherever the voice had come from.
“Come on,” Terry said, grabbing the sleeve of my shirt between her two fingers. “You can help me decide what to do. I haven’t had my hair done in a shop in prolly ten years. Always just have Billie cut it.”
We made our way back to the salon chair, where a man wearing all black and practically dripping in pomade assessed us over a pair of round-rimmed spectacles.
“Ladies,” he said. “Who’s first?”
I pointed at Terry, and she sat down in the chair, bashfully taking in her image in the mirror. Her hair was long and limp, hanging halfway down her back in split-ended clumps. Jonas ran his fingers through it appraisingly.
“What are we doing?” he asked, and Terry looked over at me, questioningly, almost panicky.
I shrugged. “What do you want? Short?”
She giggled. “I don’t know. I never did this before.” She turned back to the mirror and studied her reflection, twisting her head to one side, then the other. “Yeah. Okay. Short will work.” She glanced at me again. “Something fun, right? A change. A new me.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, the feeling so foreign I almost yanked it away, but caught myself. “We both need reinvention, don’t we?”
I nodded. Why not? She was totally right. It hadn’t been my choice to reinvent myself. It had been thrust upon me and it sucked. But here I was in my crappy circumstances. This was my life now. Why not make a whole new Jersey? Start over. Who was going to notice, anyway? “Let’s get color, too,” I said, squeezing back.
She bit her lip and then nodded. “Why not? Let’s splurge a little.”
Three hours later, we walked out of Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor, our hair cut in sharp punk strips around our faces. Terry’s was dyed a solid hot pink. Mine was brilliant purple. We giggled as we got into the car.
“You like it?” Terry asked, pulling down the visor so she could look in the mirror. She played with the ends of her hair.
“It’s definitely different,” I said. “Mom would hate it.” I pressed my lips together. Up until this point, I’d only mentioned my mom when explaining to someone that she was gone, had kept her alive only inside myself. Did it make her more gone if I started talking about her in casual conversation? Did it make her more gone if I did things like dye my hair a color she would have hated?
All of a sudden I felt ashamed. Mom was barely gone. The dirt was probably still fresh on her grave. How dare I make a decision like this without her? How could I be so selfish? I had an urge to run back inside and have Jonas do it all back the way it was. Cut it blunt across the bottom, dye it brown.
“Your grandmother is definitely going to hate it,” Terry said. “Which makes me like it all the more.” She grinned at me wickedly, then reached over and felt my hair with her fingers. “You look dark and mysterious,” she said.
Just what I needed—to look as dark as I felt on the inside.
Terry was right—Grandmother Billie hated our color choices. She called us tramps and ranted and raved that next thing we’d be getting tattoos and having our faces pierced, and she asked Terry if she thought hanging around with me was going to make her young and beautiful, because it wasn’t.
The yelling created the kind of scene the family loved to flock to, and before I knew it, Lexi and Meg were standing in the living room doorway, taking it all in with matching smirks on their faces, staring at my hair as if it were so stupid and childish it made them want to laugh.
But the second Tonette came home from work, they started howling about how they wanted colored hair too.
“It’s not fair!” Lexi cried, actually squeezing out a few dumb tears. “Terry never got us hairdos. Why should she get one? Just because she’s new.”
“You said she wouldn’t get any special treatment,” Meg added. “This looks pretty special to me.”