Meanicures (5 page)

“Okay, so what would
you
do?” the other stylist asked Poinsettia. “I want him to leave me alone. He broke my heart, now it’s time for him to move on. I’m in a better place, or I’m trying to be, and I don’t want him around me!”

“Well, here’s what I would do,” said Poinsettia as she applied the last touches of color to my hair with the brush. “I would write him a letter. And then I would burn it, and his name, in a glass jar. After that, you’ll be free of him. You can move on with your life.”

“And, um, why’s that, exactly?” I asked, peeking out
from underneath my multiple hair clips. “I mean, why would that work?”

“Simple,” she said. “You have to externally formalize everything you’re informally internalizing. Know what I’m saying?”

I blinked a few times. Was it the fumes from the probably-not-organic hair color going to my head, or could something like this actually help us solve
our
problem? What if we could get rid of the mean girls that way? “That’s kind of … out there. You really think that would work?” I asked.

“I’ll try it,” the other stylist said. “Can’t hurt, right?”

I sat back, thinking furiously. I mean, my mom could go New Agey and hippie on me sometimes, but she’d never suggest anything like this. She’d just tell me to be nicer. I couldn’t
be
any nicer, and the mean girls were still horrible to me. So maybe Poinsettia was onto something after all.

“Sometimes you have to take chances. You know?” Poinsettia asked.

I nodded as she set the timer for my hair color. “Oh, I know.”

My mother
nearly fainted when I walked through the door at dinnertime. “Madison?” She grabbed the kitchen island to steady herself. “What did you do?”

I was the one who should have been shocked. She was cooking dinner on a Monday night. My mom, the queen of ordering in, who never met a takeout menu she didn’t like.

That’s not totally fair, I guess. She used to cook a lot, but ever since her company got successful and took off, she hardly ever has the time on weekdays. Mom started out as a crunchy granola hippie, then went corporate. She’s still vegetarian—technically a pescetarian, which means she eats fish, too—but most of the time we either go out for dinner or order takeout.

Some people think Mom and I look alike, because we both have strawberry-blond hair and green eyes. We’re about the same height, and apparently have the same eyebrows, which is a weird attribute to share, if you ask me. You’d think DNA would have more important things to do than go around determining eyebrow shapes.

At the moment, we didn’t look that much alike anymore. She still had her long, straight hair, and I now had a short bob that stopped just below my chin line. I was still wearing my T-shirt, jeans, and corduroy jacket, and Mom had on one of her flowing hemp outfits. (Even when she wore a business suit, she had on an unbleached cotton camisole underneath.)

“Kind of obvious what I did, huh? So, what do you think?” I asked.

“Uh, I guess the important thing is what do
you
think?” she asked.

“I like it.” I gazed at my reflection in our stainless steel toaster. “It’s different.”

“Different. Yes.” She reached out to touch the back of my head, where my hair now stopped. “Are we feeling all right?”

“I am. I don’t know about you,” I said, backing away. She had this glazed, confused expression that made me think dinner wasn’t going to turn out well. The brown rice would be burned, veggies scorched, and tofu done to the point of crumbling into sawdust.

“Oh, wow. Did you color it, too? You colored it!” she suddenly cried.

“Mom, I had to,” I said. “It was green this morning, thanks to your baby shampoo experiments last night.”

“What kind of color did you get? Where?” A look of horror crossed her face. “It wasn’t
chemical
, was it?”

She was acting like I’d suddenly started doing drugs.

Then suddenly her eyes brightened. “No, you know what, this is great, this is fantastic. I’ve been trying to develop this line of stuff just for shorter hair, called Original
Short
Clean, and it’s all about special extralight shampoos for—”

“No, Mom. I’ve had enough.” The words were out before I even had time to think about them. I realized this was something I’d wanted to say to my mother for a long time now.

“Enough?” she asked.

“Of me having to be your girl guinea pig for all your hair products. That’s half the reason I wanted to cut my hair,” I said.

“It is?” She looked genuinely stunned, and I guess I couldn’t blame her. I’d never really been honest with her about this before.

“Yes, Mom. I mean, what’s wrong with using Parker for a change? Or David, or—”

“Their hair is not receptive to formulas designed mainly for longer hair—and, well, David hardly
has
any hair, for one thing.”

“Aha! You tried out your stuff on him too many times, didn’t you?
That’s
why he’s bald,” I teased her. My mom’s boyfriend shaved his head, which often looked like a shiny bowling ball. To me, it was kind of ironic that the organic hair care product queen of Maine was dating someone with absolutely
no
hair.

“You said that I was half the reason for this drastic change,” Mom said. “What’s the other reason?”

I shrugged, not sure how much I wanted to explain. “I didn’t exactly have what we call a stellar day.”

“No?” She looked genuinely concerned, but I wasn’t sure if it was about me, or the veggies that were about to burn. She quickly turned it off.

I saw the video of me on TV in my brain again. “No.”

“Want to talk about it?” she prompted.

“Mmm …” I shook my head. “Definitely not.”

“I’m worried. You’ve had long hair since … since …” She started to sniffle a little bit.

“Since forever. I know.”

“Since you were born,” she sniffled.

“I don’t think I was born with long hair,” I said. “Unless you adopted me from a monkey house.” She still looked sad, so I added, “Mom, you know how it is when something just has to change. And you don’t know what it is, so you try … anything.”

Mom looked at me as if she was finally getting it. “But, honey … why didn’t you just ask me to stop?”

“I did ask,” I said.

“Oh. Yes, I guess you did. But didn’t we have fun—I mean, can’t we still have fun?”

“Honestly, it was fun, a lot of the time. And I’m glad to help out, and when you featured me on your website, that was really cool,” I admitted. “But lately—the thing is, Mom? I can’t afford to have bad hair days. Ever again.”

“What? Why not? Did something happen?”

“That’s kind of an understatement. Someone made fun of my hair this morning. Someone … kind of … cute. And boylike.” Not that I considered Hunter as any sort of potential boyfriend or anything, especially not after today, but he did still count as a boy. Sometimes what they—the boy species—thought counted.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I briefly considered telling her everything: the mean trick with Hunter, the altered news text, the clown face Cassidy had painted on me, the chocolate bras.

“But maybe he was just trying to be funny. I mean, was it really that bad?” Mom reached out and touched my shorter hair.

“When I went to get it cut today, the stylist said it looked like peas. Which is funny because Hunter Matthews said it looked like seaweed. Which isn’t as bad as Alexis calling it overcooked spinach.”

“Ew. Well, what do they know? Green is the new black.” She laughed.

I glared at her. “Not funny. My hair used to be strawberry blond, remember? Not veggie-green. That edamame concept you had? Not good.”

“Sorry about that. But why didn’t you let me cut it?” she asked. “I’ve always cut your hair.”

“I know, but the thing is, Mom? I needed it colored, too. I needed everything to be fixed as soon as possible. And … look. I need to be a little less … experimented on in the future.”

“Oh.” She put her hand to her throat, which was
covered with a pashmina. She nodded. “Okay. I get it, I think.”

“Thanks.” I headed upstairs to my room.

“Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes!” she called up the stairs after me.

I’d have to see it to believe it. I dumped my backpack onto my desk, and sat down to snuggle with Rudy for a minute, like I did whenever I got home from school. My cat loves to sleep in my bed when I’m gone—sometimes even under the covers.

We live on this tiny peninsula jutting out into the ocean. My bedroom has a long, rectangular window that I love to look out of while I lie on my bed writing or talking on the phone. I watch lobster boats, seagulls, sailboats—sometimes even just the clouds. That afternoon the storm was providing lots to admire: crashing surf and water spraying into the wind. I loved it when the sea was dramatic.

I jumped up and checked my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. The new haircut still looked good. Maybe I’d get sick of looking at it soon, but not yet. I wondered what everyone at school would think when I showed up the next day.

Did I kind of look more like Gianni, my biological (and so far, only) dad now? Stylish, sort of?

On my dresser I had a framed photo of me, Mom, and Gianni. I didn’t see him very often, and I didn’t know if it was his fault, my fault, or my mom’s fault. Sometimes I wondered why my mom wanted to do this parenting
thing on her own. Sometimes I wish there was another parent around because my mom’s advice isn’t always that helpful.

Gianni had been a good friend of my mom’s at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where she went to college, living outside of Maine for about ten years. Mom and Gianni both ended up leaving FIT and going into the “hair couture” field instead. Gianni thought it might be a good match for my mom, but
he
wouldn’t be a good match for my mom because he had a boyfriend.

Oops.

She was crushed, or so she says, but they worked it out to become best pals. When she wanted kids but didn’t want to get married (she’s the kind of person who really gets a kick out of doing unusual things, which annoys my grandparents to no end), she decided he was the perfect guy to have them with.

Sometimes I don’t know why she tells me this stuff, because it’s really
personal
. You know?

She named me Madison after Madison Avenue, which I guess is a big destination, fashion-wise. My little brother, Parker? He was also created in a test tube (sorry—TMI), but he wasn’t named after a New York street. He was named after our Grandpa McCarrigan, which made my grandparents a lot more accepting of Mom’s whole single-parent test-tube-babies plan.

I think when my mom moved back to Maine and
started her own business as the shampoo hippie, before she morphed into this corporate, wealthy CEO type who still dressed like a hippie, she was, basically, a flake. Her flakiness still comes through in her creative product ideas, but now she actually gets paid a lot for being flaky. (But not having flakes, à la dandruff. That could be a career killer.)

Sometimes I think that Olivia must be Mom’s daughter, not me. They can both be so clueless. They should have passports from la-la land.

Anyway, Gianni’s more like a distant cousin than anything. He sends lots of stuff to me from his work at fashion shows both abroad and in New York, where he’s a hair stylist for a couple of runway supermodels. Sometimes I have some of the coolest clothes at school—especially T-shirts with unique colors, cuts, or logos.

Not that anyone there recognizes this, or cares. They’re too busy all wearing the same stuff from Abercrombie, L.L.Bean, or Aèropostale.

The cool thing about being best friends with Cassidy years ago was that she had only her mom, too, so the two of us were in day care together because our moms worked full-time, and nothing seemed off at the time about them being single moms. (Cassidy’s dad had moved about an hour away and she saw him every other weekend.) My mom would always say that “lots of people have different family situations and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Now Cassidy’s mom was remarried so she had a stepfather, and my mom had her on-again, off-again thing with David. He wasn’t part of our family, and he wasn’t
not
part of it, if that makes any sense.

Cassidy and I used to be good friends. We attended the same preschool, where we both liked to wear dresses and spin a lot—according to Mom, anyway. I’ve blocked it out. Then, as we got older, we took dance classes together.

I had an empty fish tank on my big desk, under my loft bed. I used to have fish, but when we moved into this house a few years ago, I started to feel really guilty. Here I was, living right on the water … on the ocean … and then having these captive fish. I wanted to free them but I knew they wouldn’t survive in the cold Atlantic water, but still, it seemed wrong that they had to
look
at it.

So when they went to the great fish tank in the sky, I gave them a proper burial at sea and didn’t replace them. Instead, I cleaned out the tank and turned it into a display case for my old dolls and their fashionable outfits. So it’s my doll tank now. They look sort of bizarre, but it’s like a department store window that I keep designing.