Hairstyles of the Damned (34 page)

The Tooth Fairy came right up to me, smiled, and took my hand. Then she dug into her magic satchel and pulled out a funny-looking quarter and put it into my palm. I looked at it and it wasn’t a quarter at all, but some funny kind of foreign coin.

She smiled, blinking at me, and said, “That one is from Greece.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I give out coins to children all over the world,” she said.

“That must get confusing,” I said.

She nodded and said, “It does.”

“Well, thanks,” I said.

“This will be the last gift I give you,” she said.

“What?”

“This will be the last time I come visit you because you’re not a child anymore.”

I laughed and wondered who the hell she really was under the mask.

I put the Greek coin in my pocket and smiled nervously. I kind of walked away, toward the orange and black pyramid of cupcakes, and looked at her and she waved at me, nodding, and I suddenly felt very strange for some reason, like it really was the end of my childhood or something. I sat there for a moment staring at everyone at the party and all of a sudden it hit me, really. It was like the last Halloween party I’d ever go to in high school, and Halloween, well, I guess that was always like my favorite holiday as a kid because, you know, you got to dress up and be someone else, and I looked around and here were all these kids—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old—all in different costumes and everything, and like I said, something right there ended for me.

It was like I saw all these kids, but like how they looked every other day, the different kinds of kids, you know, like
the stoners
like Bill or Mike Madden, who I had seen just the other day and who was now mostly high all the time, or at least every time I saw him, always sitting in his stone-washed jean jacket in the backseat of an El Camino he was trying to rebuild, getting stoned in the parking lot after school, and I’d wonder where he’d be in a year; or
the punk kids
and
goths
like Kim or Laura or Gretchen, dyeing their hair or wearing their spiked bracelets or Clash T-shirts, still very concerned with keeping up their weirdo punk appearance; or
the jocks, the sport-o’s, the athletes
in their varsity jackets, backwards baseball hats, and professional sports team jerseys; or
the nerds, the geeks, the pussies,
kids like Rod, wherever he was at that moment, in their
Star Trek
T-shirts, dressed in dorky, plain clothes their overprotective mothers had picked out for them; or
the gangster wanna-bes
in baggy pants, gold chains, and oversized shirts; or
the rich prude girls
in very tight Esprit sweaters, who stuck their noses up so high and drove around in their brand-new convertibles; or
the sluts
in low-cut bodysuits and skirts so short you could see how hard they were trying to be noticed by somebody, anybody; or
the oldest teenagers in the world
, those kids who weren’t kids anymore but wouldn’t ever let go of high school, dudes like Tony Degan, who would never really age, in his ironic “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, constantly looking wise and amused but now looking a lot less cool; or
the ghosts
—the ones who had, for whatever reason, disappeared and stopped hanging out with us before they could finish growing up, like Bobby B. in his military fatigues because he had joined the Army after being expelled a few months back. All these kids, all these people were trying to pretend they were the people they wanted to be by how they dressed, just to fit in, just to be accepted and to belong to something, and, well, I got it all suddenly.

It would always be a put-on, high school or not, for the whole rest of the world, for the rest of our lives. You couldn’t ever guess who someone was by the way they looked because, good or bad, the way they looked was always just a costume or an act. It was Halloween every day, for most people anyway, just to feel like they weren’t alone, to belong, just to keep being happy maybe. Maybe everyone else might go on thinking that people were just what you saw—
the clothes, the haircuts, the cars
—but not me, even though it seemed the whole world kind of worked that way: a put-on, only interested in the appearance of things like your class, your race, whether you were a girl or a boy, all the stuff you couldn’t really change anyway. It seemed really hard to grow out of that; maybe all you could do was try your best, try not to judge people from the way they appeared to be, I guess. I decided I might try to do that, try not to make decisions about everyone by what I saw because of how small and wrong that was, but it seemed that was just the way my brain worked, that all I could do was keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. I thought maybe that’s what growing up might do for me maybe, which was kind of scary.

I guess I started feeling kind of strange, and then I saw Gretchen in the corner of the basement still arguing with Tony Degan who, like I said, wasn’t wearing a costume but had on a black eye patch; I maybe felt like I didn’t want to be myself suddenly, I didn’t want to be a senior and at the end of it all anymore, I just wanted to keep being a kid and keep being stupid, because not being a kid was weird. That’s all I had ever been, really, and now someone was asking me to be someone else suddenly, and I pounded a PBR quick, then another, the cold foam charging down my throat, then smashed the can against my forehead, and a sophomore, Lenny, someone’s little brother, saw me do it and clapped his hands and said, “Bad-ass!” and I nodded toward him and walked past Gretchen, who looked like she was crying, her black zombie eye makeup running down her soft cheeks, still shouting at Tony. I walked right past her and up to the Kissing Booth girl, Laura, and dug into my back pocket, opened my wallet, and said, “How much do I get for twenty bucks?” and she laughed and took my hand and I ended up making out with her fiercely in her own kitchen upstairs.

After ten minutes of serious groping, during one point I was biting her wrist, Laura blinked at me and said, “Brian Oswald. Wow,” and I didn’t have an answer to that, but I said, real cool, “Do you want to show me your room?” and she nodded and we were just about to head upstairs when I saw Gretchen, whose face looked like black spiderwebs, lines and crisscrosses of mascara. I let go of Laura’s hand and watched Gretchen walk out back and sit on the small cement porch.

It was over between her and Tony, finally, and it had been coming for some time, months maybe, and I could tell because she had not gone back downstairs to kick that other girl’s ass, which was like kind of amazing to me, considering, like, she had finally just given up on him, and also she was really, really crying, shaking her head, and now she was sitting on Laura’s back porch, her knees pulled to her chest, smoking, and really, really crying, and, well, right there I decided I would go out and sit beside her and tell her I was sorry—for her, for everything—and then be ready for whatever might happen after that.