In Her Skin(21)

I wait for the hairdresser to sweep away, murmuring about tinfoil, before I ask her the question I’ve been wondering.

“Will I go to school with Temple?” I ask. There are considerations to make, a hide to be grown. If they send me to your all-girls school, there’s going to be a whole other level of questions and challenges. Also, math might not be my strong suit, but three years of no school do not equal seven years of no school, so I’m going to have to downscale my knowledge, do a little research on third-grade curriculum versus high school. I need to know what I don’t know.

Mrs. Lovecraft repeats the question back to me. Then: “Oh no, that would never work! We’ve hired a tutor to homeschool you.”

I exhale hard under my black cape. Jerel returns with an assistant pushing a cart carrying a bowl of paste and tinfoil strips. I give the bowl a strange look, and he strokes my hair.

“We’re going to brighten you up a touch,” he coos. “Give you that sun-kissed look.”

I’ve done everything to escape being sun-kissed. Florida was my purgatory and gray Boston is my salvation. Now they want me to look like I spend time in the sun, and that one photo I saw of Vivienne Weir is the reason. My hand floats to touch the foil strips that Jerel has painted sections of my hair to. I look like I’m trying to block aliens from reading my thoughts. Once, Wolf and I caught lice, and even though I haven’t itched for months, I wonder if Jerel can tell. Lice look less like bugs and more like white glue, and they will live through the apocalypse. We slopped mayonnaise on each other’s heads and wrapped them in Saran Wrap, and combed each other out like monkeys. The mayo took weeks to get rid of, and it occurs to me, gazing into depths of mirrors, that my looks are not nearly as fine as Vivi’s. When I think I can’t take it anymore, Jerel releases me from my tinfoil cage. Again, I am washed, and this is becoming my favorite part, and is this salon where Temple goes to get polished and rich-looking? Jerel raises his scissors and starts lopping hair off, big lengths of it, and it sails to the floor. No one asks me what style I want but I am silent, because this isn’t about me, though I am in the chair. In fact, I am turned away from the mirror, facing Mrs. Lovecraft, who looks excited.

When Jerel spins my chair back around, I squeak.

The girl in the mirror is not just sun-kissed. She is waxed and buffed and downright sparkly. My hair is lighter. My hair is glossy. The baby bangs are blended and the ends turn under and it is shorter in a way that Wolf would hate, but I know this shorter is chic. I feel the back of my neck and it is cool and I do not recognize myself.

Mrs. Lovecraft leaps from her pod and clasps her hands. “So smart, Jerel! It’s perfection!” She moves behind my chair and Jerel steps aside. In the mirror, her eyes shimmer with tears. “Vivienne Weir, you grew up to be a beautiful young lady.”

After I unsnap the robe and Mrs. Lovecraft hands over her credit card, it is time to shop. You will not tolerate me wearing your old clothes forever, and Mrs. Lovecraft wisely bought me only underwear, pajamas, and one fancy coat, given the uncertainty of the situation. The jeans I’m wearing bite my waist and drag on the ground, and Mrs. Lovecraft seems to think an overcorrection is in order. We head for J.Crew to buy cropped pants and striped sweaters. Unlike at the salon, here she asks my opinion on what I like, and though I don’t like anything here in this store of little-kid colors, I do like new things, and I like covering my body, and I like adding up the price tags in my head, which is dizzying. And I’m starting to understand why people equate stuff with love, because having your own nice clean things means you blend in without trying, and blending in is relaxing. By the time we’ve hit H&M “for some trendy things,” we are laughing like mother and daughter, like ladies who lunch, and we do lunch, at Stephanie’s on Newbury, where the hostess knows Clarissa Lovecraft and the servers fall over themselves to satisfy her, and by association, me. She gets me to try tuna sashimi, which is served in a cocktail glass with Day-Glo orange sprinkles. When I make a face, she swears I liked it as a child, and I can do this, I can eat this red slime so much like an internal organ, along with its tangerine sprinkles, and I do, and it is surprisingly good.

Mrs. Lovecraft orders a second cocktail, muttering “Uber,” like I care if she drives drunk, me whose real mother lived high. She wishes out loud that we didn’t have to carry so many bags. I like the bags, I tell her: there is something cool and old-fashioned about two ladies swinging overflowing shopping bags and smiling. She loves this and toasts my iced tea. There’s only one thing that would make this better, she says. Would I mind changing into one of my new outfits? I skip to the ladies’ room, ripping tags off a lime-green button-down sweater with an attached collar and cotton pants sprayed with teeny dots. I fold the clothes I was wearing and place them in the bag, then check myself in the mirror.

I expect to look dorky. I don’t expect to look young.

Momma called me an old soul. Maybe the first half of my life, in Immokalee and the other blur-towns, was my time to be old. This is my time to be young.

I toss my hair around my face and practically skip back to the table, where a waitress is serving Mrs. Lovecraft her third vodka cocktail.

“Look at you! Camera ready, I’d say,” she says, her words a little slurry.

I pull my seat in primly. “We’re taking pictures?”

“You never know when the press are around, darling,” she says.