Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [69]
Cassie nodded solemnly, pulled something from the shelf beside her, and handed it to me: the book of color swatches I’d been looking at when I first came in. “What about the color? Dark streaks would go well. Some red would be easy to work in.”
I flicked through, let her point out what she meant, but I knew those colors had nothing to do with the Piper Vaughan I was becoming. For good reasons and bad I’d attracted the attention of a whole lot of people recently, and the truth is, it didn’t even bother me anymore. I was someone different now, someone new. I was stronger than black, bolder than red. I was . . .
My finger stopped as if it had its own agenda. But when my brain eventually caught up, I knew it spoke for all of me.
Cassie locked eyes with me. “Are you sure?”
I nodded confidently, and the confidence was genuine.
“What are you thinking—stripes? highlights? bangs?”
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything,” I repeated, swallowing as I said it.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “But first I have to ask: Are your parents going to track me down and kill me for doing this?”
I nodded. “It’s entirely likely.”
Cassie laughed. “Good. I eat conservative middle-class suburban couples for breakfast. No offense.”
“No offense taken. Actually, it sounds like you’ve already met them.”
Cassie laughed again, and so did I, and then I realized that my heart was still beating fast, but in a different way—not apprehensively, but excitedly. I was taking charge, and it felt amazing.
“You’re excited, huh?” she asked, watching me.
“Yes. Is that silly?”
“Not at all. It’s why people come. They say it’s about looking smart, or beautiful, or professional, but it’s not. Gray-haired ladies try to recapture their former brunette. Brunettes want to go blond. Other women go for colors that don’t arise in nature. Each group thinks it’s completely different than the others, but I don’t see it that way. I’ve watched them looking at themselves in the mirror, and they’re not interested in conforming or rebelling, they just want to walk out of here feeling like themselves again.”
I didn’t need to say anything more for Cassie to know she had me pegged; my expression spoke volumes. She patted my shoulder gently and gave me the book of swatches to hold, then turned my chair around so I couldn’t see the mirror. While she mixed the dye and began applying it to my hair with a brush, I bade farewell to the old Piper Vaughan, mouthing the words printed on the swatch over and over, like a mantra: Atomic Pink.
Twenty minutes later Cassie left me with a head-full of plastic cap, and said she’d be back soon. She didn’t exactly give me a ballpark figure for soon, but I figured I shouldn’t be expecting to make it back to school for last period.
I could have read trashy magazines while I sat there, but I didn’t. Instead I turned the chair so I could watch Tash and Kallie. (Cassie had relegated them to the very back of the salon, where they were less likely to unsettle any paying customers.) Tash frowned with concentration as she applied dye in bold streaks to Kallie’s auburn hair, but the pair of them kept giggling so hard that Kallie had trouble staying still.
The dye was a brownish color, but the odor drifting along the salon was peroxide, so I knew Kallie was about to be the recipient of blond streaks. I tried to imagine how she’d look—probably like a black animé character. Color-wise, she wasn’t being as adventurous as me, but by having Tash do the job, she was taking a leap of faith beyond anything I could imagine. I worried what would happen if her hair turned out terribly. Would everyone at school laugh, or would they simply wonder what had gotten into Kallie Sims?
Or was that precisely the point? Because no matter how it turned out, this was a way for Kallie to turn her back on all that she was perceived to be: an enigmatic beauty—untouchable, beautiful, flawless. Maybe she could untether herself from that world completely. No more rifling through the designer clothes in last season’s bargain bucket.