Then I wondered how much I cared. Part of me wanted someone to cut the thread I was hanging on to. Or maybe I just wanted to cut it myself.
“Whatever,” Heather said. And then, “There’s no way I’m eating this garbage. What is this? I can’t even tell.”
PJ put down her fork.
“I think Susan should be prom queen,” I said, even though it wasn’t even Christmas yet. People were already discussing prom like it was the main event of our lives. It was four months away, and everywhere you turned in the hallway, there was another girl describing who she secured as a date, or what her dress looked like. I figured that Susan would go with Brad, and that his tux would match her dress.
“Please,” said Heather.
“What?” I said. “Don’t you think she would make a good prom queen?”
Scottie shrugged.
“She’s hot,” he said to me, “but not as hot as you.”
Heather rolled her eyes.
“Girl, I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’re going to be prom queen, even if you transfer schools. Even if you move to Australia.”
* * *
—
Provincetown was empty. Commercial Street was lined with Christmas lights and wreaths, but it had rainbow flags flying everywhere too. Icicles dangling from the roofs. The rainbow made me uncomfortable. Was this where I belonged?
There were sex shops everywhere, above convenience stores, even. Vibrators. Strap-ons.
I wished Heather were there so we could make fun of everything and I could pretend sex was just a joke.
Every time I closed my eyes, Susan’s hand was inside me, her hair brushing my chest, her breath on my face. The more distant that night became, the more I felt its realness. I woke in the middle of the night with crazy thoughts of going to Susan’s house, crawling into bed with her like we used to, and kissing her.
I saw a hair salon down the street, next to an ice cream parlor, which was boarded up for the season. The salon was called Rock Paper Scissors.
I went inside and looked from chair to chair, but there were no other customers in the place.
A guy in high heels and makeup asked me if I needed help.
“Yes, actually,” I said. “Can you just . . . Can you make me look gay?”
He smirked. I got the feeling that he’d been asked to do this before.
I felt like I was so far from Hopuonk. This guy would get murdered there. He had fake eyelashes and a wig.
“Sit down, honey,” he said, gesturing to a swivel chair. “What do you mean, you want to look gay?”
“Just . . . make me ugly.” Explaining it was too difficult.
He looked at my reflection in the mirror, and his expression reminded me of the one on Corvis’s face on homecoming night in the secret bathroom.
“You don’t really want to do this, do you?” he said. “Are you sure you’re not just having a Riot Grrrl moment? I promise you’ll regret it.”
“Do it,” I said. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch. Also, his hands felt good on my scalp, and I went into a sort of trance.
The result was this: a half-buzzed head, the other half chin-length and wavy. It took about thirty minutes.
“This is what it’s supposed to look like?” I asked when it was done. My face looked different. Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I felt like my skull was too visible, my nose too big, and my eyebrows too thick. I looked like I should be Kristen Duffy’s friend.
The guy sighed and shook his head, placing a dainty hand on his narrow hip.
“You’re more than just beautiful,” he said to my reflection. “You’re Brooke Shields beautiful. You’re Cindy Crawford beautiful. Why’d you have to mess up that great thing you had going on?”
I stared at him in the mirror, at his makeup job. You could tell he was a cute guy, but his face was all covered with crap. I’d never seen a cross-dresser before, but why did he think girls had to wear fishnets?
“Well, why do you?” I asked. “Real girls don’t wear fishnets, except on Halloween.”
“I’m not a girl,” he said, “and I’m not trying to look like one.”
“Well, why are you wearing those clothes, then?”
“Because this is what I wear,” he said. It seemed like he was enjoying this conversation a lot more than I was.
There still weren’t any other customers, and I wondered what this man did all winter, what kinds of things he ate, where he hung out, whether or not he went fishing, or if he was an aspiring artist.
“How much for the haircut?” I asked.
“On the house,” he said. And then, as I was putting on my coat, he said, “There’s more than just one way.”
“One way to what?” I asked.
He spun around, flinging a hand in the air, like I wasn’t worth answering.
“One way to what?” I said again, but he didn’t answer.
The buzzed side of my head was cold.
The Present
Sandra was still pretty beat-up about Susan’s dad. We spent every Christmas alone, but this year, I felt a distance between us.
She was so upset about my haircut when I got home from Provincetown that she’d been ignoring me more than usual. I was hoping she’d yell at me, but she didn’t. She was horrified and she told me it was ugly, but all she did afterward was force hats on me.
On Christmas morning, though, she didn’t mention it. We ate powdered donuts from Bayside Donuts while we opened our presents, which was one of our traditions. We wore our pajamas and started drinking champagne at ten o’clock in the morning. By eleven, we were both pretty sloshed.
The tree was decorated mostly with ornaments I’d made as a little kid—Popsicle sticks covered in glitter, pinecone people, garlands of painted macaroni, and plastic cartoon characters hanging from strings, which came with McDonald’s Happy Meals. We didn’t have elegant glass bulbs like the trees at Heather’s and Susan’s houses.
I gave Sandra some makeup from Macy’s, the expensive kind. Clinique. I only splurged on this once a year, and, as always, she pressured me to wear it, which was the second part of the present. I was trying to compensate for something—my gayness, my haircut—I don’t know. I realized that every year, when I spent part of my savings on expensive makeup, I’d always felt this way—like I was trying to compensate for who I was.
We didn’t mention Susan’s dad.