Hancock Park (4 page)

I
f there was one thing I hated, it was not having control. But there I was, just sitting back and watching as my life was changing in front of me, and I had no control over what was happening. So I stopped eating. By Saturday, I hadn't really eaten in three days. I liked knowing that I was in charge of what I consumed; nobody else could have that power. That empty feeling proved I could take action, and I wanted the feeling to last and spread. Which is why I decided to accompany my mom to Frédéric Fekkai that morning.

My mom went to Frédéric Fekkai's Rodeo Drive salon every Saturday to get her hair blown out, and every month or so, she'd have her color touched up. Mom was a natural
blonde, but she was actually a pretty dark blonde, according to the pictures I'd seen. I'm probably not the best person to ask about my mom's natural hair color, because I've never actually seen it. My hair ended up a sort of middling brown, and I'd been happy enough with it for all my life so far. I didn't get my hair done at Frédéric Fekkai. But nobody turned and stared in horror when I walked by, either.

My mother always told me that I was pretty, but I figured I should take that kind of compliment with a grain of salt. Telling your daughter that she's pretty must be in some sort of rulebook—the Mothers' Code of Conduct. Plus, Mom had repeatedly said that I was just the right size for my height, and I
knew
that wasn't true. Size 8 was way above normal.

For L.A., anyway.

 

I sat in the passenger seat as my mom drove us to the salon. When we hit a stoplight, Mom turned to me.

“I'm glad you decided to come. This will be fun.” She'd been doing this false-cheer thing for a couple days, like, “Look, life is great! What divorce?”

“I hope so.” I was feeling guilty about blaming her for the divorce, but I wasn't going to admit that to her. Besides, I couldn't figure out who was actually to blame, my mom or my dad.

“Sweetheart, I know that you're mad at me, and you have every reason to be. I just hope you can understand that if I could have shielded you from this pain, I would
have. I love you more than anything in the world.”

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, too, but instead I looked down at my hands. The ride was silent after that, and soon we were pulling into the driveway of the hair salon.

The Frédéric Fekkai salon is on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Fekkai himself is in the Los Angeles salon only one day a month. Getting a haircut from him costs about six hundred dollars.

Which is three times what it costs to feed and educate a child in Africa for a year.

My mom gets her hair colored by Rian and cut by Marcos, and that Saturday, I would, too. I've always liked getting my hair done because no matter how I look when I walk in, I know that I'll look much better when I walk out. I don't really like
being
at this salon, though—all the beautiful women with shiny, layered hair and the clean-cut stylists wielding buzzing blow-dryers makes me feel entirely inadequate and disastrously unattractive. Also, I like to wait as long as I can between haircuts because that maximizes the effect of each one. There's nothing exciting about getting my hair trimmed an eighth of an inch, because I won't look any different. But if I cut off three inches, I could become an entirely different person in a matter of minutes.

Mom greeted the two young receptionists who sat at the circular front desk as though they were old friends, and we continued on to the changing room.

“Two robes, please. Cut and color,” Mom said to the older woman who stood behind a window, shelves of
towels and robes behind her. The woman took two thin, chocolate-brown robes down from a rack behind her and handed them to my mom.

“Here, put this on,” she said, handing me a robe. She took off her sweater and then her shirt and hung them on a wooden hanger.

“Do I need to take off my…” My voice cut short. I looked down at myself. I was wearing a turquoise tank top and jean shorts. The receptionists were wearing crisp, white button-downs and black pants, and the woman I'd seen perusing the makeup at the counters behind the receptionist desk was wearing head-to-toe Chanel. I hadn't known that I was supposed to dress up to go to the hair salon. Even my mom, although not in designer attire, looked totally polished.

She looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in days, and smiled. “You can just put the robe on over your clothes.”

We headed to the salon floor, where scissors clicked and the hum of blow-dryers overpowered everything else. And, of course, there were mirrors everywhere. Further back, we entered a smaller room; the hairstylists there wore cream-colored shirts instead of white ones. This, my mom explained, was the room where color was done. Mom gestured for me to sit down in one of the dark brown leather chairs, but I paused a moment, staring at myself in the mirror, standing behind the chair. Rian, a tall, thin woman with bobbed blonde hair, darted over to us, and I self-consciously
tugged the tie on my robe a little tighter. I hate robes like this because they generally make me feel short and stumpy.

“So nice to meet you,” Rian said, running her hands through my hair. “You've got a gorgeous base color. Are you thinking of going lighter? Doing highlights?”

“Um, thanks,” I said. Base color? Was that a compliment? Or was that like saying this is a good starting place—a good canvas. Was I just a good blank page?

“Yeah, highlights, I guess. I want something different. Something new.” I looked at my mom.

“Do whatever you want,” Mom said. “I just want you to be happy.”

I looked back up at the mirror. Rian was staring back at me, and I looked deep into her eyes. Clichés flew at me. Brunettes do it better. Blondes have more fun. And redheads? Well, I wouldn't work as a redhead anyway.

Brunettes do it better. Yeah, maybe that's true. But maybe doing everything better isn't such a good thing. Blondes have more fun. It's possible; who knows? I knew that I certainly didn't have that much fun. I sighed and swiveled my chair around to face Rian, who was chatting animatedly with my mom about a recent episode of
Kathy's Eye
.

“I want to go lighter,” I said. “Much lighter.”

And two hours later, I loosened the ties of my robe and walked out into the Beverly Hills sunlight, a brand-new blonde.

T
he conventional wisdom about a school like Whitbread is that it must be
so great
to go to an all-girls' school that has a uniform, because it means we can just roll out of bed in the morning, put on a skirt, and head to school without having to worry about what we look like.

Yeah—not exactly. Two types of girls attend Whitbread: There are the girls who do just roll out of bed in the morning and head off to school, and then there are the “flair” girls—girls who accessorize their uniforms as much as they can possibly get away with.

For me, getting dressed for school is a process, not a roll-out-of-bed kind of thing. But not because I'm a flair girl, more because I'm…particular. For example, if I'm
wearing the white collared shirt, I refuse to wear the white sweater. If I'm wearing the navy blue collared shirt, I can't wear the navy sweater. My socks have to rise to no more than one inch above my sneakers, and my skirt can't have wrinkles.

I always set out my clothes the night before the first day of school, and my backpack is always prepacked. But this year, I decided to wait until the day-of to pick my outfit. I think it was my attempt to be just a little bit more like everyone else.

But as I dug through my closet Tuesday morning trying to find a navy blue shirt that would work with my white sweater, waiting until the last minute didn't seem like such a bright idea.

Finally settling on a button-up cardigan, I zipped my backpack, put my phone on vibrate and tucked it into the pocket of my skirt (which was hanging on my hips instead of my waist—another perk of not eating), and headed down the stairs. Today was the first day that I was allowed to drive to school. Only juniors and seniors are allowed to drive to school because the parking lot isn't big enough. Of course, the upcoming renovation would leave us with a couple floors of underground parking, so future sophomores wouldn't be forced to wait like I was. I didn't live far away from school. So I didn't
really
need to drive. But it was the principle that mattered. That and my thirty-pound backpack. Mostly, I wanted to start off this year differently—with a bang. And not the kind of bang that
came from huffing and puffing under the weight of my backpack, walking into school with my face red and my skirt riding up.

I didn't need to be at school until eight, but I was ready to leave at seven-thirty. Grabbing my car keys off of the front hall table, to the silent house I shouted, “Good-bye.” Stratfield had one more week of summer break, so Jack was still asleep. I had no idea where my parents were.

I drove down Third Street, passing the Wilshire Country Club golf course and that mansion with the naked statues in the front yard. After a few blocks, the big white building that is Whitbread came into view. To enter the parking lot, I had to drive past the ivy-covered front entrance and turn left in the middle of the block. The car waiting in front of me for the parking lot was an Audi, and the car that turned in behind me was a Prius. Priuses and Audis were among the most popular cars at school, although there were quite a few Mercedes and BMWs as well. The Audi was struggling to pull into a tight spot, and the security guard was gesturing wildly, trying to help the girl. I pulled around her and parked in an empty spot in the back of the lot, just behind a light blue convertible. Leaving my keys in the car, I stepped out into the pleasantly warm air. If you parked in the lot, you had to leave your keys, just in case one of the security guards had to move your car to let out another car. It's all a part of the Whitbread Honor Code.

You wear the uniform, you adhere to the Code.

I
t was early still, but the campus had already begun to fill up with students. I walked up the steps, past senior girls who were writing in lipstick on the faces of underclassmen their class year. I set down my backpack along a wall near the library. At Whitbread, we're allowed to put down our belongings anywhere on campus and come back to pick them up later. Nobody ever steals anything. As I started down the north hallway, I passed two girls with large sunglasses, messy hair, and skirts rolled over so short that most of their boxer shorts were showing. One of them lowered her sunglasses and gave me a once-over. Alissa Hargrove. The head of the Trinity.

Amanda and I had anointed them the Horny Trinity in
the ninth grade after we heard about some sex toy party Alissa had hosted. That we weren't invited to, of course.

Alissa readjusted the large designer bag she had hoisted over her shoulder. The bag must have weighed at least as much as she did. I had this theory that Alissa Hargrove didn't actually eat (like, for real—not for few-day stints, which was all I could manage), and I had yet to see anything that would disprove it. Also, for the past year or so, there had been a rumor going around that she did coke. Which, I guess, would help with the staying-skinny thing. Her long, gray cashmere sweater vest hung loosely over her nonexistent hips. She, naturally, was one of the “flair” girls. Gray wasn't actually in uniform, but somehow she managed to get away with wearing it. I smiled pleasantly and said, “Hey.”

Alissa paused for a moment, then nodded. “Hey.” We'd been going to school together for twelve years—since kindergarten at our progressive private elementary school—but she looked at me as if she'd have to think
really
hard to come up with my name. I thought about Barneys and her dad's hand on my back and blushed a little.

Courtney Gross, the girl with Alissa, gave me a shy smile. I had never had a full conversation with her, but she seemed nice enough. Instead of a collared shirt, she was wearing a white tank top with a rhinestone frog on the chest. My mom had featured that brand on her show—the company custom-designed these shirts, which cost a
fortune. I was just about to ask the generic first-day-of-school question—“How was your summer?”—but I was stopped by an overexcited Kimberly Turner. “Guys,” she squealed to Alissa and Courtney, “the new Junior Living Room is fab! They installed a refrigerator and TV in there for us.” The three of them were essentially the most popular girls in my grade, and I felt awkward, standing there on the edge of their conversation. I was about to make an excuse to keep on walking when Kim turned to me. “Omigod, Becky, how was your summer?”

Kim is tall and gesticulates a lot when she speaks. She always reminds me of her mother; the energy never fades. We used to be friendly because her mom always brought her to the Hollywood Women's Political Committee meetings at my house. Her mom was a dedicated member of the group, but Kim stopped coming to HWPC meetings once she became cool and had better friends to hang out with. Kim and I had also gone to elementary school together, but even with being thrown together because of our moms, we hadn't ever been
friends
.

“My summer was really good,” I replied.
It would be really nice,
I thought,
if her mom hadn't told her about my parents getting divorced.
Because if she had, not only would the whole grade know about it, but also my “I had a great summer” disguise would be ruined. “How was yours?”

“Ah-mazing. Did you lose weight? You look awesome. I lost weight. I lost two pounds. P.S.—I love the blonde. It's fab on you. So, I should get to Advisory,” Kim said, all
in one breath. “Do you want a Red Bull? I have, like, a six-pack in here, and I brought a carton for the Junior Living Room. You know, first day of school pick-me-up, whatever.” She shrugged her shoulders and nodded her head rapidly. I wondered how many Red Bulls she'd already had. I thought about mentioning that the “bull” in Red Bull is because of the taurine that's in it, which was originally found in bull bile, but I thought better of it. Facts like that weren't exactly friend-winning.

“Sure.” I choked back a momentary repulsion and the fear that if Amanda could see me, she wouldn't approve, and I grabbed a can from her bag. “Thanks. I should get going, but good to see you,” I said, and I awkwardly continued down the hall, thinking about how that was the longest conversation Kim and I had had in years.