So Yesterday (9 page)

Chapter 13

"THIS
IS GOING TO STING,” JEN SAID.

It did. Of course it did.

Bleach is acid, the great destroyer. You see, each of
your hairs is protected by an outer layer called a cuticle, which holds in the
pigment that gives the hair its color. The purpose of bleach is to destroy
these cuticles so that all the pigment falls out. It's quick and dirty. Like
smashing a bunch of fish tanks to release the fish, it leaves a mess. That's
why if you go on to add coloring, a little bit swims down the drain every time
you take a shower. Your fish tanks are broken.

I had known all this, but only in theory, because I'd
always dyed my hair blacker, not lighter. (I was just adding more fish, not
getting rid of the old ones.) So when Jen started daubing toothpaste-consistency
acid into my hair, I wasn't prepared.

"That stings!"

"That's what I said."

"Yeah, but
...
ow."

It felt like many thousands of mosquitoes were
visiting my scalp. Like a bald man who'd fallen asleep at the beach. Like my
hair was on fire.

"How's that?"

"A lot like
...
having acid on my head."

"Sorry, but I maxed out
the solution strength. We're going for major transformation here. It won't hurt
as much next time, you know."

"Next
time?"

"Yeah. Your scalp loses a lot of feeling after
the first bleach job."

"Great," I said. "I was looking to get
rid of some of those extra scalp nerves."

"No pain, no gain."

"I'm feeling the gain."

She covered my head with a
piece of aluminum foil—saying helpfully, "This makes it hotter, to
strengthen the chemical reaction"—then flipped another chair out and sat
down across from me.

We were in Jen's kitchen,
which was small but clearly the workplace of a committed cook. Pots and pans
hung from the ceiling, clanking lightly in the breeze from an exhaust fan
working to remove the smell of hair acid. Two thousand dollars' worth of
recently purchased non-Hunter party-wear hung among the pans, still covered in
plastic to make sure my next credit card bill wouldn't kill me.

Jen lived here with her older
sister, who was trying to break into being a dessert chef. Many of the
blackened iron pans suggested the shapes of macaroons and ladyfingers, and
there was a series of sifts for refining flour down to invisible dust.

The kitchen was retro or maybe
just old. The chair on which I quietly writhed was vintage chrome and vinyl,
matching the table's green-and-gold-speckled Formica. The refrigerator was also
1960s era, with a stainless-steel door handle shaped like a giant trigger.

As the acid slowly flayed my scalp, I found myself desperate
for ' distraction.

"Has your sister had this
place long?"

"It was my parents' when they first moved in
together. We lived here until I was twelve, but they kept it after the Day of
Darkness."

"The Day of Darkness?"

"When we moved out to Jersey."

I tried to imagine a whole family living here, and my
melting-scalp discomfort was tinged with claustrophobia. Off the kitchen were
two other smallish rooms with air-shaft windows. That was the whole place.

"Four people in this place? New Jersey must have
looked pretty good."

Jen made a gagging noise. "Oh, sure. Great for my
parents. But everyone out there thought I was a
freak,
with my kiddie-punk purple
streaks and homemade clothes."

I thought about my own big move. "Well, at least
you weren't too far away from home to visit."

She sighed. "Might as well have been. By the time
I was fourteen, my Manhattan friends had all dumped me. Like I'd turned into a
Jersey girl or something."

"Ouch."

I remembered my peek into Jen's room when we'd
arrived. It was classic Innovator: furniture collected off the street, a shelf
overrun with notebooks, a dozen half-completed projects in paper and cloth.
Three walls were covered, one by magazine clippings, one by a collage of found
photographs she'd picked up off the street, and the last by a bulletin board
painted to resemble a basketball court, on which magnetic
Xs
and Os held up pictures of players male
and female. The loft bed made a cave for a small desk, where a laptop flickered
in invisible communion with a wireless hub hanging on the wall. All the frantic
clutter of a cool girl trying to make up for the Lost Years.

"When did you move back?"

"Last year, as soon as they let me. But it's hard
to get your cool back after you lose it, you know? It's like when you're walking
down the street, perfectly dressed, grooving to some excellent sound track in
your head, and you trip on a crack in the sidewalk? A second ago you were so
cool, and suddenly . . . everyone's just looking at you. You're back in
Jersey." She shook her head. "Is that hurting?"

"How could you tell?"

"Something about the grinding teeth."

"When does it stop?"

She weighed invisible objects in her hands.
"Depends. We can stop it anytime. But for every second of pain now, you'll
be blonder and less Hunter-like when you come face-to-face with the bad guys
tonight."

"So, it's pain now or pain later."

"Pretty much." She pulled the fridge's giant
trigger and reached in for a carton of milk. From the jangling metal overhead,
she acquired a mixing bowl and poured some in. "This is ready for when
you can't stand it anymore."

"Milk?"

"It neutralizes the bleach. It's like your head
has an ulcer."

"That feels accurate." I steeled myself,
eyes on the undulating white surface of the milk settling in the bowl. Blonder
was better, safer. But the route to blond was long and hot.

"Distract me more," I pleaded.

"You grew up in the city?"

"No. Moved here from
Minnesota when I was thirteen."

"Huh, the opposite of me.
What was that like?"

I chewed my lip. It wasn't an
experience I talked about much, but I had to talk about something.
"Eye-opening."

"What do you mean?"

A finger of acid was making its way down the back of
my neck. I rubbed it.

"Come on, Hunter, you can
make it. Become one with the bleach."

"I
am
becoming one with the
bleach!"

She laughed. "Just talk
to me, then."

"Okay, here's the thing: Back in Fort Snelling, I
was pretty popular. Good at sports, lots of friends, teachers liked me. I
thought I was cool. But my first day in New York, I turned out to be the least
cool kid in school. I dressed from a mall, listened to total MOR, and didn't
have the first clue that people in other places did anything else."

"Ouch."

"No, this is ouch. That
was more like
...
being suddenly
erased."

"That doesn't sound like
much fun."

"Not really." My voice cracked a bit,
related to the acid on my head. "But once I realized I wasn't going to
have any friends, the pressure was off, you know?"

She sighed. "I do know."

"So it got kind of interesting. Back in Minnesota
we had maybe four basic cliques: ropers, jocks, freaks, and socials. But
suddenly I was in this school with eighty-seven different tribes. I realized
that there was this massive communication system all around me, a billion coded
messages being sent every day with clothes, hair, music, slang. I started
watching, trying to break the code."

I blinked and took a breath. My head was melting.

"Go on."

I tried to shrug, which reorganized the pain in new
and interesting ways. "After a year of watching, I went on to high school,
where I got to reinvent myself."

She was silent for a moment. I hadn't meant to get
into quite so much detail and wondered if the acid was seeping into my
brain,
making
it
porous.

"Wow." She took one of my hands.
"Sounds horrible."

"Yeah, it sucked."

"But that's how you got into cool hunting, isn't
it?"

I nodded, which sent a second little trail of acid
down my back. My scalp was sweating now, trickles slow and incendiary, like
flowing lava, as seen on a certain cable channel associated with wildlife,
experimental aircraft, and volcanoes. I forced my mind away from the image.

"I started taking pictures on the street, trying
to figure out what was cool and what wasn't and why. I got a little obsessive,
which happens sometimes, and started writing commentary. Then that turned into
a blog. And about three years ago Mandy saw my site and sent me an e-mail: 'The
client needs you.'"

"Huh. Happy ending."

I tried to agree, but at that moment the only happy
ending would have been my head in a bucket of milk. A bathtub of milk. A
swimming pool of ice cream.

"I guess that's why your bangs are so long,"
Jen said.

"What?"

"I've been wondering about your hair. It seemed
kind of weird that you were this cool hunter, but you had those bangs hiding
your face." She reached across and flicked away a trickle of lava from my
forehead just before it dribbled into my left eye. "But now I get it. When
you moved here from Minnesota, you lost all your confidence. You had to hide
for a while. So it makes sense: You're still hiding some of yourself."

I cleared my throat. "You think my bangs lack
confidence?"

"I think maybe you're still scared that you might
lose your cool again."

I felt my face flush. The kitchen felt hot and small
and crowded. I couldn't tell how much was annoyance, how much was embarrassment,
and how much was the acid on my head. I wanted to reach up and tear my scalp
off, to scratch the giant mosquito bite that was my brain. The bleach was
definitely leaking through.

Jen smiled and leaned forward until her face was
inches away. She pursed her lips, and I thought for a crazy second that she was
going to kiss me. My anger dissolved into surprise.

But instead she blew lightly, a delicate wind that
cooled my damp face, sending a shudder through me.

"Don't worry," she said softly. "I'm
going to fix all that. Those bangs are doomed."

I couldn't stay that close, so I laughed and turned
away.

She waited until I turned back. "I know how it
feels, Hunter. I lost my cool too."

"Not really, though. They just didn't get
you."

"No, really. No matter what I did over there, I
couldn't crack the code. All those girls in my eighth-grade class probably
still think I'm some loser who writes poetry."

"Oh! Body blow," I said, trying to smile.
But the memory of my first year in the city wasn't done with me yet. It was
always there, a cold lump of clay in my stomach. I remembered the lump growing
heavier every step of the way to school. Recalling that awful loneliness had
invited it into me again, as if it belonged inside me.

I took a breath and willed myself into the present,
where I was cool. Well, burning up actually and hunted by implacable foes and
without my cell phone. But
cool,
right?

"I always thought aluminum foil on your head was
supposed to prevent mind reading," I said.

Jen grinned, but only for a moment. "It's not
mind reading. Like you said, it's all about reading codes. I just read a
different set than you."

"You mean you use your powers for good?"

"Instead of helping giant shoe corporations?
Maybe." She stood and dropped a washcloth into the mixing bowl of milk and
lifted it, dripping, into the air before my wide eyes. She carried it behind
me. "See what you think of my powers after
this."

I felt the aluminum foil whisked away, and a cool and
sovereign mass descended upon my head, transforming the burning acid into
something benign, finally ending my agony.

"Oh
...,"
I groaned.

There were still a few trickles of acid coursing down
my neck and flickers of annoyance from being read like a book. It was much
better when I was the one reading the codes. Everybody hates old pictures of
themselves.

But when I looked in the bathroom mirror, I liked the
result.

No pain, no gain.