Darling

by K. Ancrum

  Charles, Fyodor, Minsu, Waatese, Curly, Nibs, and Peter were all crowded in the center of the dressing room, having a dramatic conversation while the drag queens watched in irritation.

  As the three girls joined the boys, the drag queen in the gingham dress hissed, “Oh great, more children. This isn’t a day care center!”

  Peter, who looked a little worse for wear, with ashes on his cheeks and his bright eyes shining with manic energy, was saying, “You’ll have to stay here until they leave.”

  Ominotago, not nearly as starstruck as Wendy, pushed through the boys until she was standing directly in front of Peter and staring him down fiercely. “Tell me what’s going on. Now,” she demanded.

  Peter narrowed his eyes to slits and didn’t answer her. Instead, his eyes trailed over Tinkerbelle and landed on Wendy. “Nice to know you made it, Darling. I see you’ve met my other ex, Ominotago.”

  Unlike Tinkerbelle, Ominotago didn’t even flinch. Her hands were already curled into fists, and her body was angled to keep Tinkerbelle and Wendy behind her protectively. Charles, Waatese, and Minsu, who were standing behind Peter, looked at him in open disgust.

  “Detective Hook is here,” Curly answered Ominotago, breaking the tension. “He’s asking for permission to search the restaurant, but management isn’t letting him ruin their dinner service without a warrant.”

  “Sounds like a problem, but you’re not staying in here,” the queen in the gingham dress snapped. “You’re lucky Bella even opened the door for you.”

  Peter said nothing, but turned around and snatched a box of makeup wipes off the vanity. He began briskly rubbing the ash off his face, arms, and hands.

  “Those were mine, but you’re welcome to them,” the queen who was holding her lashes said sarcastically as Peter nearly emptied the entire box.

  When Peter was finished, he grabbed a comb from the vanity and began fixing his hair. “Detective Hook can’t get in for a search, but if he buys something, he can get in as a customer and he will walk around. So. Everyone who wasn’t detained by police can come into the restaurant and sit at my table.” He painstakingly put himself to rights. “Everyone else, find somewhere else to hide. I’m friends with the head chef, so you guys can probably slip into the kitchen.”

  Peter did something bafflingly swift with his hand without reaching into his jacket at all, and suddenly he was holding a business card. He gave it to Fyodor, who took it gingerly from Peter like it was a cursed object.

  “The chef’s name is Joe,” Peter said. “Give him this, and he’ll let you go into the pantry.”

  “How do you know this man?” Fyodor asked suspiciously.

  Peter grinned at the opportunity to show off. “I know everyone who is worth knowing in this city.” Wendy noticed, for the very first time, how sharp his eyeteeth were. Peter turned his back on Fyodor, clearly finished speaking to him. Fyodor joined Charles, Minsu, and Waatese in looking at Peter’s back in disgust, but he, Waatese, Charles, and Minsu left the dressing room.

  Now it was just the queens, Peter, Nibs, Curly, Ominotago, Tinkerbelle, and Wendy. Ominotago watched, arms crossed, as Peter picked up a compact, daubed a fingertip in some concealer—also belonging to the queen holding her eyelashes—and patted it beneath his eyes until he looked as fresh as when Wendy had met him.

  “Tinkerbelle,” Peter said, “you can come with me, Nibs, and Curly if you want. Om—”

  Ominotago interrupted him. “You don’t give me orders anymore.”

  “Fine,” Peter snapped, finally addressing her directly. “Do what you want. Just keep Darling safe and hidden. So fucking stubborn.” He tossed the compact back on the vanity as all the drag queens watched in scandalized silence.

  Peter pointed at the door. Curly reached over and patted Wendy on the shoulder one last time and then followed Nibs out into the restaurant. Tinkerbelle squeezed Ominotago’s hand and glanced up at Peter with a blank look that Wendy finally understood was fear, before following his instructions, as well.

  Peter pulled another card out of thin air and handed it to the queen whose makeup he’d taken. “Thank you for letting me use your things, sweetheart. I’m sorry for not asking beforehand,” he said in the gentle voice Wendy hadn’t heard since he was hugging her after her kidnapping. “If you bring this to Elim Wig and Beauty and hand it to the cashier, he’ll let you take one thing from the store for free. Any price, any grade of hair, all for you.”

  Just like Wendy had, the queen melted, and then she took the card from Peter.

  “He’s good for it, too,” the queen wearing the feathered tights said as she ringed her eyes in iridescent green-and-blue shadow. She had spent the entire interaction focused on her costume, while the other drag queens had been watching the children hash out the details of avoiding the detective.

  Peter wove in between the other queens to reach the corner where the queen in feathered tights was sitting. He pressed a quick kiss to the side of her face, over the feathers she had glued down. “Good luck tonight, Bella. I’ll be watching you,” he said sweetly.

  Peter spared one more irritated glance at Ominotago before following Nibs, Curly, and Tinkerbelle out into the restaurant.

  The instant he was out of the room, one of the waitresses who had stripped down entirely to street clothes crammed a baseball cap over his short hair and declared, “I do not like him at all.”

  “I don’t, either, girl,” the drag queen in gingham scoffed. “He gives me the creeps.”

  “He’s not all bad,” the queen named Bella said. “He tips crazy well, and if you’re nice to him, he brings you gifts.”

  “I don’t need gifts from that man,” the waitress replied, raising an eyebrow and cocking his hip. “I buy my own shit. See you bitches tomorrow.” He slung his backpack over his shoulder, rolled up one leg of his pants, and clipped it so it wouldn’t get in the way of his bike chain. “Your makeup is fucked up,” he said to Wendy on his way out the door. “Dorothy will give you a hand.”

  Wendy looked over to the vanity.

  The drag queen in gingham—Dorothy—waved a hand, so Wendy went to go sit next to her.

  Ominotago pulled out a chair and settled into it, looking at her watch. “I’m giving this about twenty minutes before I check on the other guys. I’m not leaving them in some stranger’s kitchen.”

  “Were you crying, darling?” Dorothy asked, with a generous amount of sarcasm.

  Wendy started for a moment before realizing “darling” was just being used as an endearment; this person didn’t know Peter’s nickname for her or that it was her last name.

  “I’ve had a hard night,” Wendy said quietly. “You don’t have to help me with this or anything. I don’t want to get in the way of you getting ready.”

  Dorothy threw her head back and laughed, showing a gold tooth in the back of her mouth. “Oh, I like this one. She’s polite.”

  Up close Wendy could see the cracks in the plaster. Dorothy was older than Wendy had thought, and her makeup was significantly complex. Her face was pulled back with what looked like tape or pins of some kind and tucked into her wig cap. Her chin had to have been waxed to be this smooth this late at night. She had obvious highlighter dusted onto her cheekbones, but a much more subtle, expensive looking highlighter smoothed over the bridge of her nose, onto the sides of her jaw, and over her clavicle. Her lipstick was three different shades from the same color family layered from dark to light, creating the illusion of much fuller lips. It was like seeing a pointillism painting from a distance and knowing it was made up of dots, then leaning in close and realizing the dots were actually Rubik’s Cubes, painstakingly arranged to form a much larger picture. Wendy was impressed.

  “I like this one better,” said the drag queen by the door, who had finally put her other lash on, while waving a hand at Ominotago. “Her makeup actually looks good.”

  Ominotago was busy doing something on her phone and didn’t acknowledge the compliment. Wendy had only known Ominot
ago for approximately thirty minutes, but she already felt safer with her than she had with Tinkerbelle. Ominotago was much more serious, and she hadn’t backed down to Peter at all, hadn’t given him a single inch. Whatever fight she and Peter had before Wendy arrived had already been won, and it was extremely clear that Peter was the loser. Wendy wasn’t stupid enough to ask about the whole Peter/Tinkerbelle/Ominotago dating time line, but she was curious about it. Who was first? Tinkerbelle? Ominotago? How did he even manage to get Ominotago to like him? That alone seemed like a monstrous feat. Had he treated Ominotago as aggressively as he seemed to treat Tinkerbelle? Ominotago wasn’t scared of Peter, that was obvious, but she did seem to dislike him a lot. And where did Curly fit into this? Did he fight Peter over giving Ominotago a nickname before or after Peter and Ominotago dated? What happened when Ominotago and Tinkerbelle started dating? They hadn’t stated it out loud but they were clearly very much together. She couldn’t imagine that reveal going over very well. She hadn’t known Peter for particularly long, but there was no way that a boy who had spoken to Nibs the way he did in the kitchen without waiting for an explanation wouldn’t have gone ballistic to hear that both of his ex-girlfriends had started seeing each other.

  Especially because of how besotted Tinkerbelle clearly was with Ominotago. Wendy remembered how Tinkerbelle had beat her hands against the police car window in hysterics, and the relief with which she’d clutched Ominotago when the other girl was finally free. It was almost embarrassing how romantic it was to watch. If there hadn’t been explosions and sirens accompanied by the sounds of Charles’s sobs, Wendy would have felt extremely awkward. Almost like she’d stumbled into the climax of a movie set where the main characters were finally making out, accompanied by the soaring strings of the score.

  “Hey, kid, look, do you want me to do this shit or not?” Dorothy was saying.

  Wendy snapped out of her thoughts to see Dorothy holding a makeup wipe in her hand and looking impatient.

  “Ground control to Major Tom,” Dorothy said. “Either give me an answer or get out of the chair.”

  “Yes,” Wendy said quickly.

  Dorothy sighed in irritation and began roughly wiping the makeup off Wendy’s face. “Okay, here we go.”

  “How do you get it to look like that?” The drag queen who had complimented Ominotago’s makeup asked.

  Ominotago finally looked up from her phone for a second. “I do it with my fingers. I just picked a bunch of colors that went together and kept at it until it looked okay.” She returned to texting. She clearly didn’t care.

  The queen leaned back in her chair. “You are much more talented than you give yourself credit for, girl. That shit looks like a J. M. W. Turner painting. Dorothy, you see this baby doing yellow under her eyes and fading that to blue and pink, purple in the shadows?” The queen sucked her teeth and nodded. “Opulence.”

  Dorothy looked over Wendy’s shoulder at Ominotago, who seemed irritated at the attention. “You can’t teach that,” Dorothy said.

  Dorothy finished polishing all of Tinkerbelle’s work clean off Wendy’s face. “You want the same thing or something different?”

  “Tink—uh, my friend did my makeup like this because she wanted me to look different. Not like myself,” Wendy answered.

  “Like a disguise?” Dorothy asked, raising a slim eyebrow. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into?”

  Bella snorted, and Wendy turned to her, but Dorothy wrenched her chin forward.

  “You sound too timid to be one of Peter’s girls,” Bella said softly. “He likes them spicy. You’re too white bread and tap water.”

  “Too berries and cream,” Dorothy echoed.

  “Too Ann Sather’s,” the drag queen by the door said. “What are you doing with that wild-ass boy?”

  “She’s new,” Ominotago remarked, not looking up from her phone.

  “Oh, honey, you need to go home,” Bella said in a deeply apologetic tone.

  “I know,” Wendy said firmly. “I’m working on it.”

  “Oh, never mind. There’s that attitude!” Dorothy screeched, laughing again. “I should have known you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have it.”

  Wendy wanted to frown, embarrassed that everyone knew Peter had a type and she apparently fit it. But Dorothy’s fingers were too tight, and her grip was too strong for Wendy to feel comfortable offending her.

  “The best disguise is subtle,” Dorothy continued, squinting at Wendy’s face. “If you try to look different, everyone knows you’re trying, and they’ll seek out similarities to what they’re looking for anyway. You’ve got to change the little things.”

  Dorothy handed Wendy a hand mirror and started working. She darkened Wendy’s eyebrows with mascara and eyeliner, then contoured her nose to look pointier at the tip and flatter at the bridge. She buffed blush on Wendy’s hand to match to her skin tone, then purposely chose a brighter color and applied it lower on her cheeks than Wendy would have thought would look nice. Dorothy leaned back so Bella could get a look. Bella pursed her lips and nodded, so Dorothy continued.

  She wiped the heavy mascara off Wendy’s lashes and replaced it with a set of natural brown false lashes glued farther out from Wendy’s lid than the corner of her eye actually went. Then Dorothy filled the excess space with brown liner with a bit of pink in the corners, like Wendy had seen on ballerinas up close. She contoured underneath Wendy’s chin with brown shadow and dusted only the tops of her cheekbones with a pink-based highlighter. When Wendy looked into the hand mirror Dorothy gave her, she found that she looked almost like a doll, or like someone from a silent film. Dorothy was rough and kept wrenching Wendy’s head around, but she was incredibly talented. Wendy doubted she’d ever look this good again.

  “Do you want to keep the hair, or do you want something different?” Dorothy asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “The hair looks good,” Ominotago interjected unexpectedly. “Suits her.”

  Dorothy laughed. “Oh, sweetheart, you don’t have to say that. She won’t take your girl. This one is as straight as—”

  That was enough. “You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here,” Wendy said crossly.

  Dorothy paused and leaned back. “Honey, I don’t have to do anything.” She lowered her eyelids in warning. “The only reason your little behind is in this chair and not out there in the middle of that cop-infested restaurant is because I will it to be so. Do you hear me?”

  Bella clicked her tongue.

  “And the only reason I will it to be so,” Dorothy continued, crossing her legs, “is because it’s not my way to leave children out where the wolves can get them. Do you understand?”

  Wendy glared and gritted her teeth but answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now, you are out of your depth and out of your territory, and you are receiving a service far more expensive than you could ever afford. So when I ask you whether you want something done with your hair, you say yes, ma’am, or no, ma’am. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Wendy said. Her cheeks were burning, but thankfully Bella was looking politely away.

  “So,” Dorothy snapped, “are we gonna brush out this nest into something worth wearing, or are you too stubborn to take kind unless it’s wrapped up like a Christmas present?”

  Wendy took a deep breath and tried her best not to sound sassy. “May you please do my hair as well, Ms. Dorothy?” she asked evenly. Eleanor would have been proud.

  Dorothy clapped once very loudly and smiled wide. “Of course, I will!” she said. “But you have to close your eyes.”

  Wendy sat still in the chair, eyes clenched, for the next twenty minutes. At first she sat in muted rage from the talking-to she’d just received, then later to keep the tears of pain inside from Dorothy’s rough brushing and the jabbing of pins. She promised herself that she wasn’t going to do anything elaborate with her hair and makeup for at least a year. She didn’t care if Eleanor’s hot friend Montana would th
ink she looked gross. Two makeovers in one night was two makeovers too many. She swore Dorothy had wiped her makeup off with pure rubbing alcohol, and Tinkerbelle’s backcombing had probably given her a lifetime’s worth of split ends. She also kept hearing the other queens making commentary, but Ominotago hadn’t said a word since Wendy had closed her eyes. She was almost afraid the other girl had left—but she hadn’t heard the dressing room door open and close. Wendy heard a crinkling noise and felt hard presses from Dorothy’s fingers, then she received a spray of something that smelled floral in a fresh and expensive way, and then Dorothy patted her shoulder hard.

  “You can open your eyes,” Dorothy said.

  Wendy swiveled in her chair to face the mirror.

  Dorothy had brushed the crunchy ringlets Tinkerbelle had given her into soft, cinematic, fluffy waves that framed Wendy’s face prettily. She had gathered the top half of the back into two loose braids by Wendy’s ears and pinned it so that the hair fell back over her shoulders, curling playfully at the ends. Even though Dorothy was white, it was immediately clear that she had worked with Black hair before, and the difference in skill between her work and Tinkerbelle’s was dramatic. Then, ever the master of detail, Dorothy had tucked sprays of baby’s breath and dried leaves in a crown, through the braids and over the top of Wendy’s head, a touch so delicate and tasteful that it was immediately clear to Wendy that Dorothy had spent her life learning this: the art of beauty. Wendy gasped softly and finally saw a genuine smile bloom on Dorothy’s face like a morning glory. Wendy reached up to touch her hair in disbelief, but Dorothy smacked the back of her hand softly.

  “Oh, Dorothy.” The queen by the door swooned. “She looks like a wedding in the spring.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” Dorothy said gently. “Like Aida Overton Walker. Look her up when you get home, dear.”

  Ominotago looked impressed, as well. She put her phone down and rested her chin in her hands to watch Wendy watch herself.