“I want to keep it all the same length but shorter,” Aspeth said.
Cross laughed‑a normal, masculine laugh, thank God. “How can it be shorter if it’s all the same length?”
“Therein lies the paradox,” Aspeth said. This was something people at Ault said a lot, a kind of catchphrase they’d been using since I’d arrived the year before. The first time I heard one of my own classmates, Tom Lawsey, use it, there was something embarrassing about the self‑consciousness of it, the fabricated newness, as if he’d gotten a nose job and then pretended otherwise. But the expression was so common that I pretty much stopped noticing, and once‑not at Ault but at home over the summer, when my mother asked me how I planned to finish making the chocolate chip cookie dough when it turned out we were out of eggs‑I even heard myself say it. (Of course, that really hadn’t been much of a paradox at all; I’d solved it by walking two houses down to borrow from the Orshmidts.) Another thing that had been popular to say for a while, among my classmates more than the rest of the school, was the word patina. It had gained popularity in my Ancient History class, where it went from being a term for the green film that formed on bronze or copper to meaning something vaguely dirty‑while wiggling their eyebrows or licking their lips guys would say (not to me, of course, but to other girls), “You have a nice patina.” But patina ultimately hadn’t had the staying power of, Therein lies the paradox.
I said to Cross, “Aspeth means she wants all the strands of hair to be the same length as each other but for all of them to be shorter.”
Cross looked at me blankly. He’d probably understood all along.
“Exactly,” Aspeth said. “See, Sug, Lee gets it.”
From the plastic bag I’d been carrying since I’d left my room almost half an hour before, I pulled out scissors and a hairbrush (not my own‑soon after cutting Tullis’s hair, I’d bought one for general use, which I never cleaned and no one ever asked if I cleaned). I stood behind Aspeth and brushed her still‑damp hair. Her shampoo smelled both nutty and floral, and I could see again why boys loved girls like her. “How many inches?” I said.
“I’m thinking four or five.”
“Are you sure?” Normally, I liked to cut as much as possible, I liked drasticness. But Aspeth had such outstanding hair that it seemed like I might be doing a disservice to the entire Ault community. “Let’s start with three inches and see how you like it.”
“But when it’s long, it tangles more. Maybe you should just shave my head.”
“You’d look good with a shaved head,” Cross said.
This was more the way I remembered him, how he could flirt by talking in an utterly ordinary way‑how, in fact, the flirtatiousness lay in the discrepancy between his calm, sincere tone and the improbable nature of what he was saying.
“Fine,” Aspeth said. “Take it all off. Make me bald.”
I lifted a lock and snipped, then scanned the room and saw, as I had expected, no trash can. I let the hair drop onto the bare floor.
Cross came around and stood next to me. “Holy shit!” he said. “Oh my God! You are going to be bald, Aspeth.” What I had cut was even less than three inches, but Cross felt like teasing her; he had no crush on me whatsoever.
“Shut up,” Aspeth said. Probably she liked him back. The official word, as transmitted to me by Dede the year before, was that Cross and Aspeth were “good friends,” and in fact, as freshmen, they’d both been going out with other people, but both of those relationships were over; Cross and Sophie Thruler had broken up back in October. If Cross and Aspeth liked each other, I thought, they really ought to just go out. It would be a stunningly unsurprising development.
“I don’t know about this,” Cross said. “You’re putting an awful lot of trust in Lee, and, Lee, what are your credentials?”
I was bent over, and I turned my head to look up at him. The expression on his face was lighthearted. For several seconds, I said nothing, and I felt him meet and absorb my own expression, his smile straightening, and I felt that an understanding passed between us‑I am not no one, I am not nothing, I do not exist as a backboard for you to bounce your jokes off of –but how can you ever be certain? Maybe he just thought I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Lee has cut a ton of people’s hair,” Aspeth said. “She was the one who cut Tullis’s.”
“No shit.” Cross had moved around so he was standing in front of Aspeth again.
Aspeth lifted her head, probably subconsciously, to make eye contact with him. I could have pressed her head back down, but I didn’t. I was ceding to her; in fact, I felt a perverse desire to aid their union. I almost didn’t mind the way Aspeth was pretending she and I were aligned, us against Cross, girls against boy. “And Tullis’s haircut was awesome,” she was saying. “So there.”
“So there? Geez, Aspeth, you should really consider becoming a lawyer. Is nanny‑nanny‑boo‑boo next?”
There was something repellant about watching Cross flirt; it felt overly personal, like seeing him pick food from his teeth.
“Stick your head in doo‑doo,” Aspeth said, and they both laughed, and then she said, “Isn’t that how it goes? Nanny‑nanny‑boo‑boo, stick your head in doo‑doo.” This time, they said it in unison‑things said in unison, like winks, made my skin crawl‑and I had to fight the urge to bolt from the basement. They were losers! They were bigger dorks than I was! The trick, of course, would be to remember this at roll call when I saw them from far away, seeming coolly impenetrable.
“Aspeth,” I said. They were still laughing, and I tried to come up with a different topic. “Do you think Ms. Moray will wear those boots tomorrow?”
“You have Ms. Marinade, too?” Cross said.
“Lee and Ms. Moray hate each other,” Aspeth said. “They’ve had major battles.”
Was this true?
“Were you part of the pimp thing?” Cross asked.
“No, but they’ve clashed other times,” Aspeth said.
“Lee, I didn’t know you were so”‑Cross paused, and we made eye contact, and I thought that depending on what he said next, this might be a flash of the other Cross, the one I’d thought I liked‑“angry,” he said. It hadn’t been a flash.
“I’m not.” I probably sounded angry in this moment, but I didn’t care.
“Marinade was never a first‑draft pick, though, right?” Cross said.
“Shut up,” Aspeth said.
“I thought everyone knew.”
“Will you seriously shut up?” Then Aspeth seemed to reconsider something‑apparently, me‑because she said, “Okay, Lee, you can’t tell this to anyone, but Ms. Moray was a last‑minute addition to the faculty. I guess they’d hired this other woman to be the English intern, and she was super‑smart, she went to Yale, she was black and everything so they were psyched for that, and then at the last minute, in August, her fiancé, who lives in London, got testicular cancer and she went to be with him. They were totally scrambling to find a replacement, and here’s Ms. Moray, who, big coincidence, wants to teach but has no job lined up for the fall. So they hire her and, like, two days later she drives out from South Dakota.”
None of us spoke‑I had even stopped cutting Aspeth’s hair‑and then Cross said, “Cancer o’ the balls. Ouch.”
“How do you know?” I asked Aspeth.
“Renny told me.” Renny Osgood was the woodworking teacher, a guy in his early thirties who’d graduated from Ault and then, alone among Ault faculty, not gone on to get a college degree. His handsomeness was commented on with regularity in the student paper, and he was rumored to have had an affair with a senior girl a few years back, though no one ever knew the girl’s name; in any case, he did have “friendships” with certain current students, and Aspeth was one of them. “She’s out of her league here,” Aspeth said. “Not only as a teacher, but with coaching, too‑you can tell she’s a decent athlete, but she has no experience with field hockey. She doesn’t even know the names for plays.”
Of course Ms. Moray had no experience with field hockey‑barely anyone played it in the Midwest. I had a sudden vision of her, back in September, finding out she’d been hired at Ault and packing up all her belongings in a hurry and heading East. I pictured her driving alone, changing radio stations when they turned staticky, staying at night in a motel where she could stand in the door of her room and see an endless field of soybeans interrupted only by a pro‑life billboard or a water tower. From Iowa (not South Dakota) she’d probably taken I‑80 to Cleveland, then picked up 90‑that was the route my father and I had gone when he drove me to Ault to start my freshman year.
“She got lucky,” Aspeth said. “She’s a shitty teacher, but Ault was in a bind.”
But she hadn’t been a shitty teacher when she’d been hired. She’d never taught before. And who was Aspeth to decide she was shitty now? She was still inexperienced. Rarely did I wish I were not party to a piece of gossip, but it struck me that I really hadn’t needed to know that Ms. Moray had been Ault’s second choice.
“Okay,” I said to Aspeth. “You’re all finished.”
Aspeth stood and ran her fingers back through her hair, one hand on each side of her head. I was slightly disappointed to realize how tidy I’d been‑though the floor beneath the chair was littered with hair, virtually none of it had been scattered on Aspeth’s shirt. She turned to Cross. “How do I look?”
“Ugly,” he said.
Aspeth stuck out her tongue at him, yet even then she was not remotely ugly. She looked at her watch. “Fuck,” she said. “Dinner is only open for fifteen minutes.”
She walked toward the stairwell, and Cross followed her. I couldn’t tell if I was also supposed to follow. Plus, there was the matter of cleaning up.
“Hey, Aspeth,” I called.
She said “What?” without turning around.
“There’s a lot of hair still on the floor.”
She glanced over one shoulder. “There’s not that much.”
There was so much you could have made a wig from it. “Do you guys at least want to put the chair back?” I said.
“Oh, yeah.” Cross walked back and hoisted the chair onto his shoulder again, and this time, the motion seemed charmless.
“Thanks a zillion, Lee,” Aspeth said, and they both disappeared.
I looked from the hair on the floor to the stairs. It may have been Aspeth’s hair, but it was still pretty gross just to leave it there. In the end, I went back up to the common room, borrowed a broom and dustpan, swept it up, dumped it in the trash‑as I did so, I had a fantasy of transporting it across campus and dumping it instead in Aspeth’s bed, but this probably was a disciplinary offense and even if it wasn’t, it was highly Audrey Flahertyish‑and then returned the broom to the dorm closet. The common room had emptied out, and there were a few french fries stuck forlornly to the table in front of the couches. I considered eating them‑after all, I had missed dinner‑but that would be pretty Audrey Flahertyish, too. Martha had been right, I thought as I walked back to my dorm. And this was it, the last time: I was retiring from cutting hair.
The assignment for Song of Myself was to write about something that mattered to us, to take a stand, and in the days before the assignment was due, I couldn’t think of anything. “The death penalty,” Martha suggested on the way to formal dinner.
“Would I be for or against it?”
“Lee!”
“I’m assuming against.”
“You’d be against it because it discriminates against minorities and poor people. The overwhelming majority of people who get the death penalty are uneducated black men. Plus, a lot of people sent to death row have turned out to be innocent.” Martha knew this sort of thing both because her father was a lawyer and because she was a generally more serious and better‑informed person than I was. The information floating around in my own brain concerned, for instance, of the name of a famous actor’s pet Shih Tzu (Petunia), or why a model had recently been shipped to rehab (for anorexia, with additional rumors that she’d been snorting coke).
“The death penalty’s a good topic,” I said. “But maybe not for me.”
“You could do welfare or abortion.”
“Dede will do abortion.”
“Okay, fine, toenail polish‑pro or con?”
“Perfect,” I said. “You’re a genius.” We were quiet as we passed the chapel. I was so much less lonely, things were so much better for me, now that I was rooming with Martha. “Hey,” I said. “What if I do something on prayer in school? I could compare public and private schools and say something like it’s fine at a place like this because everyone who’s here made a choice to come. But it’s not really fair in public school because what if you’re Jewish or Buddhist?”
“That sounds okay,” Martha said. “It’s not great because it’s not something you’re passionate about, but it sounds good enough.”
When we turned in the papers, to my relief, Ms. Moray didn’t make anyone read aloud. They were to have been a minimum of 800 words, and counting my name, the date, the words “Sophomore English, Ms. Moray,” and the title, mine had been 802. I imagined that she hadn’t had us read them in class because they were too long, but when she handed them back the next week, it turned out she did want us to read. “I like for you guys to know what’s on each other’s minds,” she said. “Norie, why don’t you start?”
She seemed to have forgotten to return my paper, and I raised my hand, but she didn’t call on me, so I put it down. I wasn’t going to interrupt; it would be better to wait until it was my turn. Chris’s paper was about the importance of sports in school; Aspeth’s was about how travel expands your horizons; Dede’s was about how she’d become pro‑choice. (Since the day Dede had passed me the ratings sheet, I purposely hadn’t sat next to her, but I had watched to see if she and Aspeth had done it again, and they had; they’d done it daily. I was too far away to read what they wrote, but on the day Ms. Moray wore a kilt, complete with an oversized safety pin, I knew they’d trash her‑a kilt was another idea of boarding school that only an outsider would have.) Jenny’s essay was about how her best friend in second grade had died of leukemia, which didn’t exactly seem like a strong belief she had, but it was so sad that I thought she deserved an A anyway.
I was beside Jenny, and when she had finished reading, Ms. Moray said, “Jeff, you can go ahead.”
“Ms. Moray?” I said.
“You’re not going,” she said. “And you know exactly why.” Her face was flushed. I could feel the other students watching me, and I turned to Jeff, as if to give him my blessings to go ahead, as if I had any idea what was happening. The only thing I could imagine was that this was somehow related to my refusal to read back in the second week of school.
When the bell rang, Ms. Moray said, “We’ll pick up here tomorrow. Darden and Martin, remember to bring your papers back to class. Lee, stay here, and the rest of you are dismissed.”
After everyone had gone, she took something‑my paper‑from under her grade book and shoved it down the table toward me. It slid about halfway and stopped, still out of my reach. I glanced at Ms. Moray before leaning in to take it, and something in her expression made me freeze.
“I could flunk you for the term if I wanted to,” she said. “Your lack of respect for me as a teacher and your lack of respect for this classroom‑I’m dumbfounded, Lee. I don’t know if this is something we can work through.”
I waited to see if there was more, and when it seemed almost definite that there wasn’t, I said very quickly, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
She raised her eyebrows disbelievingly, but I held her gaze. The longer I held it, I imagined, the more likely that I might persuade her of my ignorance. She was the one to look away, and when she did, I reached for the paper. The title I had chosen, which now had a red F circled above it, was “Prayer Is Not A Good Idea In Public Schools.” Next to the title I’d put an asterisk, and beside t
he asterisk on the bottom of the first page I’d written, “This is not an issue I truly care about, but I believe it fulfills the assignment.” This remark was surrounded by a jungle of red writing, which I scanned, though not all the words were legible: Then why did you bother to write it?! Do you not understand… your glibness and utter lack of regard for… because this assignment, the entire purpose of which…
I looked up. “I didn’t mean that I don’t care like I don’t care at all, I just meant I don’t care about it.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I was just telling the truth.”
“Then why didn’t you pick another topic?”
“I couldn’t think of one.”
“There’s nothing you feel strongly about? Here you are, you’re going to this incredible school, being given every advantage, and you can’t think of anything that matters to you. What do you plan to do with yourself?” She waited, and I realized it was a question I was supposed to answer.
“You mean for a job? Maybe‑” It had occurred to me that I might like to be a teacher, but surely this would seem suspect. “Maybe a lawyer,” I said.
She made a scoffing noise. “Lawyers stand for something. They believe in something. At least the good ones do.” She refolded her arms. “I don’t know what to do with you, Lee. I don’t understand you. You’re a cipher. Do you get anything at all out of coming to this class?”
“Of course.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure what you’re asking specifically.”
“I’m asking if you get anything out of coming to this class. It’s a pretty simple question.”
Neither of us spoke, and as the silence stretched, I felt further and further from the last thing she’d said. Perhaps I could change the subject entirely, reply to a different topic‑I could say, And that’s why parrots make really good pets. Or, It’s because I’ve always wanted to visit New Mexico. When I thought about it, it seemed a little ridiculous, a little arbitrary, that this was the conversation we were having; fighting with Ms. Moray felt inorganic.
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