Pretty (27 page)

The surfer has a look on his face like he's perfectly balanced on his board and riding the highest and wildest wave. He's tan and shining and he's winning, he's flying. And I know—this is who he is. This is who he was really. I wish he could have seen himself this way. It's a gift of mine. I can see people how they are in their dreams. Like how Javi can give people the haircut they have in their dreams. And if you can do that, I guess it becomes like your job or obligation or something. Or even your purpose. It can become your purpose to see the people no one else sees and to see them truly pretty. I have my beauty school graduation today and for today my wrists will stay.

I say to the surfer, “Please go on ahead without me. I'll catch up. I'll catch up with you.”

I wake for real and open my eyes. I'm sitting in the driver's seat shaking with sobs, my face wet with tears. I must have been crying in my sleep. The windshield is whole and so am I.

And what I say to nothing, to the milky light of the approaching dawn is, “Please go on ahead. I'll catch up. I'll catch up with you.”

And I mean it. I'm ready for Aaron to go on ahead of me. I can't hold this guilt anymore. And I don't seem to be dying.

The car smells like a gas station. My mouth is cracked and dry. Drool coats the side of my face and the top of my dress hangs off me, barely covering my boobs. There's a toxic taste in my mouth so strong it creeps up the back of my throat and into my nose. The taste makes me gag, but I breathe through it and through the throbbing of my poor head. I put the car in drive and head it toward Serenity. Because this morning is as good as any to be born again. And you might call me an expert.

W
hen I walk in the door,
I immediately know that I'm fucked. The living room is washed in pale light and Susan Schmidt, looking hastily dressed and wearing no makeup for the first time I have ever seen, sits there with three of my sleepy housemates. They talk in low, concerned voices. My stomach lurches as I enter in last night's crumpled dress with my shoes in my hand. But this is how it goes. You do shit and sometimes you get away with it and sometimes you don't. Some people get away with everything. I don't get away with much.

All four of them look up at me, real grave. Althea looks down and Missy looks at Althea and Violet looks at me with helplessness in her eyes and I know that at least she has been defending me.

“Hello, Beth,” says Susan, all grim and self-important. “Would you please take a seat?”

I throw myself down into the ratty recliner and cross my legs. I fling my arms wide over the armrests. If this is it then this is it. I'm not dead and the full possibility of that fact alone moves through me like a speedball, nauseating and thrilling. I'll miss this place. This has been my home. But I'm not about to grovel to someone who knows me so little that she insists on calling me Beth.

“You know I like you, Beth, but you have committed some very serious infractions here. Do you have an explanation for why you stayed out all night, violating your curfew and making your friends sick with worry? I've already called the police and reported you as a missing person.”

“Not far off the mark, I guess. But I hope to find myself soon.”

Susan Schmidt rears up in her seat like an angry cobra. She has been dragged, at dawn, out of her cozy bed in her swanky home bought with her family money and now I, a soon-to-be homeless, half-crazy, knocked-up, gas-huffing skank, am being cryptic with her. It offends her sense of hierarchy.

“In light of the position you're in, it may be wise to drop the defensive cleverness and try to have an authentic conversation.”

This conversation, authentic or not, is totally pointless. I know well that there is no saving myself at Serenity and I am not about to hash this all out on the coffee table with Susan Schmidt. Plus, she's right. I pushed the boundaries a little too far and broke them. It appears as if it's time to leave.

I look at Violet. Fat, silent tears snake down her cheeks.

She wipes her red nose with her leopard print sleeve. It was Missy, I bet, who called Susan. She's frozen and looking down at the carpet with those haunted bug eyes of hers. For a full-blown paranoid schizo, she sure is a company man. I bet she thought she was doing the right thing, though. I can't really blame her.

“Well, kids,” I say. “It's been fun.”

“Why are you so defiant?” Susan asks.

“Bebes, please. Please,” says Violet. “We have to talk about this. You can't leave. Where are you going to go?”

I stand, pivot, and head upstairs to pack my stuff. There isn't much of it and it's fit in the Honda before.

“Wait, Beth,” Susan calls after me, scurrying to the foot of the stairs. “I think you owe it to yourself and to your housemates to process this situation with honesty and closure. We have to make a plan for you. We're concerned about your well-being. We don't want you just to run out onto the street.”

Susan's entreaties echo through the hallways but don't follow me upstairs. When I get to my room, everything looks neater than I left it, which is a sure sign they've gone through my shit.

I look around the room at Violet's goth goodies, at the dust along the top of the moldings, at the place where the window doesn't close exactly right, at the precious guitar leaning against the side of the dresser. I've lain in my bed here many hours just looking around, unable to get up and actually do anything. I know every crack in this ceiling.

My bravado drains into the floor and my stomach cramps. I wasn't expecting to leave so soon and with nowhere else to go.

I take my shirts out of the closet and fold them neatly into my duffel bag, thinking about a lunch I had with Jake. Two months ago, Jake and I were languishing in the same apathy: trying to not drink and to figure out a way that living in this world might suck a little less. Maybe wild success, maybe a good fuck, maybe saintly spiritual devotion, maybe a package of onion rings, maybe a trip to the Grand Canyon in a trailer or to Peru in a goat caravan or something. Sitting over black and white shakes at the 101 Cafe, we mused about it. The next junked car he had his eye on fixing up. His next doomed straight job. My soon-to-be career at a fancy Beverly Hills salon.

Afterward we went to Griffith Park and hiked up one of the trails to an overlook called Dante's Peak. We both thought that was really funny. When we turned back, there was this particularly steep stretch that he ran down with his feet barely touching the ground and his arms out to the sides and I swear he was almost flying. That's what this leaving is. It seems like a steep downhill, but maybe I'm just about ready to take off. That's the thought that keeps me packing.

Violet wakes Buck, and Buck helps me carry my bags down the stairs. The three of us walk out into a bright, cool spring morning. My graduation day. As I walk out the door of the sober living, a curtain closes behind me. I am moving, but I don't know in which direction. Susan hovers in the doorway as I hug my friends good-bye. The sincerely concerned look on her face surprises me. Have I been right about anything?

“Where're you going? You want I should come with you?” asks Buck, but she's still in her robe.

“I'm going to school early today. Because my hair is fucked.”

From the look on Vi's face, I think I probably said that last part out loud.

I
592 hours down. 8 hours left to go.

I have the timing of a trapeze artist. I hover in midair right now, but I can see the bar of the next trapeze swinging toward me. I have to grab hold and hang on with all I've got until I get dropped off somewhere new.

With a half hour to go until school opens, I sit here in my car and struggle to keep my eyes open. A half hour to stay awake and then eight hours to get through and I'll have completed the sixteen hundred hours required to be a licensed cosmetologist in the State of California. Then I only have to pass my State Board and I'll have my license. That's what I'm thinking. That's all I'm thinking. I picture myself stylish, you know, a little eccentric—a nose ring, a hot pair of boots—greeting my next rich client with a double cheek kiss. The clients will think I'm so unusual and chic. My hands will be a subject for gossip, but what better place for gossip than a hair salon?

Did you hear she crawled out of the car across a road full of broken glass?

Tragic. Fascinating.

The other hairstylists will be like a little family. Maybe Javi will even be there. We'll drink margaritas together after the salon closes on Friday night. I'll have a fabulous little apartment with a vintage yellow kitchen all lit with sunshine. Is there a baby in the picture? I don't have an answer to that one.

I feel like I'm on heroin, but I'm not. My eyes keep closing against my will and I have to open the car door to puke twice. At least the puking wakes me back up. Close my eyes and I see a wall of sickening orange—the daylight behind my eyelids.

And bubbling beneath the sunlit kitchen is, What have I done? What have I done? Sometimes the damage of a moment's mistake is immediately obvious but sometimes it takes much longer. Huffing gas is no good at all. Definitely not good for unborn children.

Still fifteen minutes early, I get out of the car and walk through the deserted early morning streets toward the school. I wear my school uniform but carry the mint green 1950s cocktail dress that Javi and I bought at Jet Rag over my shoulder, the skirt of it blowing behind me like a banner. Through the arched picture windows, I see Miss Mary-Jo, Miss Hernandez, and a few of the students setting up inside. When I open the door, the overpowering smell of cheap shampoo and setting gel sends me running to the bathroom to barf yet again, nothing left in my stomach this time but bile.

When I emerge, pale and shaking, Miss Mary-Jo bounds toward me, her mushroom hair bouncing with each step. She stretches her short arms wide and I brace myself for the hug. I bend down so she can reach me. She gives me a smacky wet kiss on the cheek.

“You are too much the partying last night,” she says, wagging her finger at me playfully. “You look like a dragging cat.”

She leans in and whispers, “If you were to go upstairs and lie down on the carpet behind the upstairs lockers, I surely would not be seeing you there, and I am the teacher of upstairs today.” She gives me a wink with one heavily mascaraed eye. There are angels everywhere.

I do exactly as she suggests. I go upstairs behind the back lockers and fall to my knees on the thin stretch of crappy carpet. I wedge myself against the wall, my textbook under my head and my smock over me like a blanket, and fall into merciful blackness. Far away in the awake world, I hear the students start to arrive: giggling, shuffling, equipment tumbling out of lockers, the slam of metal on metal. I hear it behind my sleep and through it but it doesn't wake me up. I'm as comfortable on this floor as I have ever been. I think maybe I'll never get up again. And with that thought comes the tears.

Vera and Lila hear me and peek their concerned faces around the side of the locker. I look up at them.

“You are sick, honey?”

“I'm okay. Thanks. I'll be okay,” I say, unable to even try to be convincing. I wipe a stream of snot from my upper lip.

“We go to get your friend for you.”

And in what seems like an instant, Javier appears, his hair an incredible new shade of sea-foam green.

“Oh, good,” he says when he sees me there unshowered with my hair unbrushed, my face slick with snot and tears. I repeatedly clutch and release a corner of the smock, which lies in a wrinkled ball beside me. “Now I have something to do with these next eight hours.” He thrusts one hip forward and plants a decisive hand on it. “It's going to take at least that long to get you looking pretty.”

“I did a bad thing, Javi.”

“Stand up, Frances Farmer,” he says, somehow managing to have disgust and love in his voice at the same time. He reaches his hand out to me and pulls me up. The head rush almost knocks me back down but I steady myself. “You can tell me all about it while we fix your hair.”

That's what I need. A new hairdo. Have I mentioned that a new hairdo can change the course of your whole day? It can change the course of your whole life if you let it. That's why I came to beauty school in the first place. If I told you anything else, I was lying.

The teachers are festive and lax today.
Even Mrs. Montano has stayed holed up in her office and hasn't attempted to quell the rising excitement. The graduating Armenian girls have cooked an incredible banquet and arranged it in a beautiful spread on tables they pushed together in the lunchroom. They chat while hanging streamers and those accordionstyle paper bells. The school looks ready for a bridal shower or a prom. Some of the students' husbands and boyfriends start to arrive, towing little girls in organza dresses and patent leather shoes and little boys in tiny suits with their hair slicked down. The men carry lavish bouquets of flowers and set them on their wives' stations, recently cleared of equipment for the last time.