All Good Children - Catherine Austen [15]
“My sister does hair,” Xavier says.
“Oh, I wish she’d do me,” Dallas says. I smile. Mom rolls her eyes. Ally and Xavier don’t get it, but that’s just as well.
I go to the cheapest hair salon in the quadrant: Kim’s Trims. It’s the size of my bedroom, with a wall of mirrored tiles to plump it up. It reeks of hairspray and Kim’s musky perfume. She’s a middle-aged beautician who lives in a carpark by the highway outside of town. She and three other stylists take shifts at the salon. She probably bathes in the sink where she washes my hair.
Mom says carparks used to be places where people parked their cars before they took a bus to work in the morning. They’d return on the bus at the end of the day and get back in their cars and drive home. The cars would still have gasoline, and the tires would be on, and even the music systems would be in place, just as the owners had left them. That’s the kind of safety full employment used to bring.
Now, of course, carparks are places where people live in cars that don’t work. They’re the hallmark of modern efficiency. When you have a host of vehicles no one can afford to drive and a horde of people who can’t afford a home, a carpark makes royal sense. Especially if you live alone, like Kim. Then there’s lots of room.
Kim talks so much it takes an hour and a half to trim my hair, and it’s only two inches long to start with. Mostly she holds up her scissors and stares in the mirror, waiting for me to answer whatever her last question was.
“Huh?” I say.
“When I was your age, the student council met with the governing board every week to keep the dialogue going,” she says. This explains why I zoned out. “But my nephew tells me his student council just chooses the color of the yearbook. It doesn’t influence school policy.”
I shrug. “I’m not on the student council.”
“You should join it.”
I laugh. “They wouldn’t let me. I missed the past two weeks of school.”
“If you let other people make the decisions, you can’t complain about what they decide,” she says. “That’s what I tell my son. He’s always got his head in an engine. He doesn’t take any interest in what’s going on in the world. Then he raises his head and wonders how things got so bad.”
I should tell Xavier that the field of hairdressing is wide open to him. It’s a legal way to trap people in a chair and force them to listen to you for hours.
“Like the new education program they started this fall,” Kim says. “There’s not one student council that had any input into that decision.”
I wish I’d let Dallas cut my hair.
“My mom cuts my hair,” Dallas whispers into his RIG. “That’s how the rich stay rich.” He would never give anyone else that information. It’s like confessing that your parents grow their own meat or knit their own mittens. You might as well sign up at the psychiatric recall center.
He runs a hand through his silky bangs. “Who did you vote for on Freakshow?”
“Zipperhead. You?”
“Juice and Tiger.”
I don’t comment. Tiger is a teenager tattooed with stripes to complement his pointy ears and golden eyes that are probably plastic. Juice is almost twenty-five and so defective that he leaks from all orifices. There’s no way he’ll win—either he’ll be exposed as a fake or he’ll die of blood loss.
“Who do you think would win in a fight?” Dallas asks. “A tiger or two cougars?”
“There aren’t any tigers left.”
“I think there’s a few in zoos.”
“Then a tiger would win for sure.”
“I think so too.”
Austin shoves his face into the screen. He has a cracked lip, swollen purple ears and white goo on his chin. “Ice cream! Ice cream!” he shouts like an idiot child. “Dad bought me ice cream after my fight. None for you units. Hah!”
Dallas ignores him. “If you could only have one dessert for the rest of your life,” he asks me, “what would it be: chocolate cake or ice cream?”
“Xavier told me that chocolate cake doesn’t contain chocolate.”
“So? Ice cream doesn’t contain cream. They still taste good.”
“Maybe chocolate cake.”
“Me too,” Dallas says.
Austin whacks him on the cheek. “Ice