How We Roll

by Natasha Friend

  QUINN WAS HAPPY TO SEE HER MOM’S car pulling into the pickup line because it meant that she was just seconds away from taking off her shoes. Quinn’s feet were dying. Her scalp was itching like mad, too. She would give it a good, long scratch if Ivy, Carmen, and Lissa weren’t clumped around her in front of the school, firing questions. What did she think of her first day? Was she glad she’d moved here? Did she think any of the boys were cute?

  It was exhausting. Not that Quinn was complaining about the attention. She wasn’t. It was just that all this smiling and head bobbing was new to her. Not to mention being on high alert in case her skirt rose up or Guinevere decided to melt off her head in the heat of the day.

  “Hi, honey,” Quinn’s mom said when Quinn finally got in the car.

  “Hi.” Quinn yanked off both sandals and sighed. Relief.

  “How was it?”

  “Good,” Quinn said. Because she couldn’t risk scratching her scalp yet, she examined her feet. One, two, three … five blisters.

  “Good.” Mo squeezed Quinn’s arm as they pulled away from the curb. She looked tired. More tired than she had that morning, which was saying something. It probably meant she’d been fielding calls from Julius’s school all day. But Quinn didn’t ask. Having Mo to herself was a rare thing.

  “Looks like you made some friends.”

  Quinn glanced in the side-view mirror at Ivy, Carmen, and Lissa shrinking into the distance, attending to their tiny phones.

  “Yeah,” she said, sounding surer than she felt. After the suckfest that was eighth grade, Quinn was not as trusting as she used to be. She could count on three fingers the number of people she actually trusted now: 1) her mom, 2) her dad, 3) her grandma Gigi in Arizona. And Quinn had never told any of them about Paige and Tara drifting away, or about the names she’d been called, or about that One Stupid Night.

  That One Stupid Night had taken place the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, in Paige’s basement. Paige, Tara, and Quinn had been planning the party together for weeks. They’d decorated Paige’s basement (white Chinese lanterns, heart-shaped balloons, confetti on the tables). They’d baked (red velvet cupcakes, heart-shaped cookies). They’d made a Valentine’s playlist. They’d even worn matching outfits: hot-pink tights that they had bought at Target and oversized white T-shirts that they had graffitied with fabric markers. Candy heart messages like Be Mine and Text Me and Crazy 4 U. At Paige and Tara’s request, Quinn hadn’t worn the Colorado Rockies cap that night. She’d found a red-and-white-striped beanie with earflaps in the bargain bin at Anthropologie. It made her feel like a fighter pilot.

  Paige’s parents had been cool about the party. They’d greeted each guest at the door, but after that, they’d promised to stay upstairs and let the kids have fun.

  For a while, fun had been the girls sitting on couches and the boys cramming mini cupcakes into one another’s mouths. Then fun had been the girls dancing and the boys sucking helium out of the balloons and squeaking to one another like chipmunks. Finally, fun was Seven Minutes in Heaven.

  Until that night, Quinn had never heard of Seven Minutes in Heaven, let alone played it. The idea had come from Sammy Albee, who was the youngest of six and seemed to know everything there was to know about boy-girl parties.

  Quinn remembered Sammy Albee grinning as she held up a stack of paper strips in her fist. “Everyone write your name on one of these. Boys’ names in the silver bucket. Girls’ names in the white bucket.”

  Quinn had done as Sammy asked, just as everyone had done as Sammy asked. Sammy had that kind of personality. And even though there were very few eighth-grade boys Quinn would have considered making out with for seven minutes in Paige’s basement bathroom, she’d figured that whoever she got matched with, a girl’s first kiss was a rite of passage. Quinn was almost fourteen. And this was, after all, a Valentine’s party.

  She’d stood there, drinking Hi-C, as names were called and couples filed in and out of the bathroom. Adrienne and Tyler. Kelly and Ben. Paige and Henry. There was giggling and hooting and blushing and a few dramatic gagging noises. And then, all of a sudden, the coolest thing happened.

  “Quinn,” Sammy said, reading a slip of paper from the silver bucket. “And”—Sammy stuck her hand into the white bucket—“Ethan.”

  Quinn and Ethan.

  Actually, this was the worst possible thing that could have happened, but Quinn hadn’t known it then. All she’d known was that Ethan Hess was the cutest boy in eighth grade, and if she had been able to pick anyone to play Seven Minutes in Heaven with, it would have been him.

  It might have been Quinn’s imagination, but when she and Ethan walked into the bathroom, the hooting and hollering was louder for them than it had been for any other couple. Quinn hadn’t been thinking about her hair then. She knew she was bald. She knew Ethan knew she was bald. Her baldness had just seemed, in that moment, irrelevant. She felt cute in her fighter pilot beanie. And anyway, the lights were off.

  “Hey,” Ethan said in the dark.

  “Hey,” Quinn said back.

  Ethan was taller than most of the eighth-grade boys. He looked older, too. He had real muscles under his T-shirt. Quinn had noticed on their way into the bathroom how his sleeves were tight and she could see the line of his deltoids right through the fabric. Standing in there with the door shut, she could smell his boy scent. Soap and grass and an undercurrent of sweat that wasn’t exactly gross. Ethan Hess smelled like a basketball player, and Quinn knew he was good because the boys’ team and the girls’ team shared a court, and she had watched him scrimmage.

  “So,” Ethan said, taking a step closer. He was chewing cinnamon gum, which happened to be Quinn’s favorite flavor.

  “So,” she said.

  They’d both laughed a little, because it was weird to be standing in the dark in Paige’s bathroom while everyone waited outside. Even though it was pitch-black, Quinn could picture the seashell wallpaper and the little starfish soaps that she’d washed her hands with a million times.

  “Think you’ll go all the way?” Ethan said.

  “What?”

  “Your team. You’re in the quarterfinals, right?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” She had thought they would be kissing by then, but there they were, talking about basketball. “We’ll make it to the semis at least.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Us too. Summit will be tough, but we can beat them.”

  Quinn registered every word Ethan was saying: Summit’s shooting guard was tall, but he was a one-armed bandit. If they pushed him to the left, he had nothing. Against Casey Middle, they’d have to play the zone. But all she could really think about was the smell of his cinnamon gum and how, if she leaned in just a little, their lips would touch.

  “Two minutes!” someone yelled from outside.

  Had five minutes passed already? That’s what Quinn was wondering when Ethan reached out and grabbed her boob right through her shirt.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  She had been surprised more than anything else. Why would he do that? Had it been an accident? She remembered what she did next: she removed his hand from her boob and told him to keep his paws to himself. But then he did something even weirder: he grabbed her hand and put it between his legs, where the zipper of his jeans had already been unzipped.

  Quinn remembered leaping back the same way she had in the haunted house on Halloween, when she’d stuck her hand in a bowl of eyeballs and intestines. Even though she knew they were really just peeled grapes and cold spaghetti, the feel of them had made her jump.

  “Come on,” Ethan pleaded. “We’ve only got two minutes.”

  “I don’t care if we’ve got two years,” Quinn said.

  “Finish up, lovebirds!” a voice called from outside.

  “No one has to know,” Ethan said.

  “No one is going to know,” Quinn said, “because nothing is happening.” She reached through the dark for the doorknob, but she wasn’t fast enough. She felt
the hat come off her head. “What are you doing? Give me that!” Her hands scrambled through the air, but she felt nothing.

  That was when the door flew open. The lights came on. Ethan walked out of the bathroom with Quinn’s hat dangling from his finger, smirking. “Gives new meaning to the word head.”

  Those were the words that would change everything. Gives new meaning to the word head. Quinn hadn’t understood them at the time. She’d had no clue. All she knew when she walked out of Paige’s bathroom was that Ethan Hess had her hat, and everyone was laughing, and she needed it back. She got it no problem. Ethan was so busy being high-fived and fist-bumped and back-slapped, he didn’t care about the hat anymore. She grabbed it straight out of his hand and jammed it back on her head.

  “What a jerk,” she said to Paige and Tara when she managed to get them alone in a corner. “You won’t believe what happened in there.”

  “We heard,” Paige said. “Ethan’s telling everyone.”

  “What?” Quinn said.

  Tara’s lip curled up the way it did when she was grossed out. “Please tell me you didn’t actually give him head.”

  “I don’t know even what that means,” Quinn said.

  “Sure you do.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Oral,” Paige said, leaning in and lowering her voice. “You know … down there. Not your hand, but your mouth.”

  “What?” Quinn remembered laughing at the thought. “That’s disgusting. I would never do something like that.”

  “Ethan said you did.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “Well,” Paige said finally, “good.”

  “Because that would be revolting,” Tara said.

  “I know,” Quinn said.

  “And really, really bad for your reputation,” Paige said.

  “Seriously,” Tara said. “We’re almost in high school, Quinn. You need to think about these things.”

  Quinn didn’t like the way her friends were talking to her, like she was a little kid and they were her parents. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was Sammy Albee walking over, grinning like a wolf. “Ethan’s fly was down. Everyone saw.”

  “So?” Quinn said.

  “So. Everyone knows what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything. We never even kissed.”

  The basement, Quinn suddenly realized, was silent. Someone had turned off the music. Everyone was looking at her.

  She remembered exactly what happened next. She turned and looked straight at Ethan, who was standing over by the snack table, eating a heart-shaped cookie. A heart-shaped cookie that Quinn herself had baked.

  “Tell them,” she said. Her voice was loud and clear, but her chest was tight. “Tell them nothing happened in the bathroom.” She wondered how Ethan could be eating a cookie right now. If she had tried to put anything in her mouth, she would have barfed.

  “Ha,” Ethan said, spraying crumbs through the air when he spoke. “Good one, Gandhi.”

  “My name,” she said, still loud, but now her voice was shaking, “is Quinn. And nothing happened in that bathroom.”

  But it hadn’t mattered that she was telling the truth. It hadn’t mattered that Paige and Tara believed her. Because no one else at the party did. Neither did any of the eighth-grade girls on Quinn’s basketball team, who hadn’t even been at Paige’s house, but who, before practice on Monday, confronted Quinn in the locker room to let her know that they’d heard about her “slutty behavior” on Saturday night and that it “didn’t reflect well on the team.”

  Nothing was the same after that. Nothing.

  Paige and Tara hadn’t stopped being her friends, exactly. They were too nice for that. The changes were subtle. Like Quinn would text them and they would take a little longer to text back. Or they would start “running late” for school so they had to get rides, and Quinn would walk to school on her own. Then there were the comments. You’re bringing this on yourself, Quinn. If you don’t want people to call you names, why don’t you make an effort? Wear a pretty scarf. Stop coming to school all sweaty.

  Once or twice, Mo mentioned something. “I haven’t seen Paige or Tara in a while. Is everything okay?”

  “Sure,” Quinn would say. “Everything’s fine.”

  Because here was the thing: unless you had a brother like Julius, you wouldn’t understand. If Quinn were to come home from school and say, “Hey, Mom and Dad, can I talk to you?” they would say, “Of course. Just let us get Julius settled.” That was another thing that sounded simple but wasn’t. Julius needed his snack arranged on a tray. He required three different foods, all of which had to meet the day-of-the-week criteria, and none of which could touch. The seams of his socks had to be straight at all times. He needed three blankets when he was watching TV, and they could not be wrinkled. Not only was the process of settling Quinn’s brother torturously slow, but if anyone deviated from the plan, the meltdown that followed could be epic. Julius didn’t care who saw. He didn’t care who got hurt. When he lost it, he lost it completely. Lamps flew. Bystanders got kicked, punched, scratched. One time, he melted down in the grocery store, and afterward, the cereal aisle looked like a war zone. Quinn felt so bad that her mom and dad had to deal with Julius that the last thing she wanted was to unload on them.

  “Preternaturally self-sufficient.” Those were the words Quinn’s mom had used to describe her once, on the phone with Grandma Gigi. Quinn remembered because she’d had to look up the word preternatural. Grandma Gigi was a retired social worker and a great listener, but she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s last year, so it wasn’t like Quinn was going to call her up and say, Hey, Geege, let me tell you about all the bad stuff that’s been happening to me.

  “Q,” her mom said.

  “Huh?” Quinn was staring out the window as they passed by the Gulls Head High School athletic fields.

  “I asked if you were itchy today.”

  “A little,” Quinn said. Now that she was out of eyesight, she could finally lift Guinevere and scratch. And scratch. And scratch some more.

  “Did you try the witch hazel?”

  This was one of the tips they had received from the perky blond wig technician at Belle’s Wig Botik in Denver: If you’re going to wear a wig all day, put a few drops of witch hazel on a damp cloth and wipe it over your scalp once every two to three hours.

  Right. Like Quinn would ever ask for a bathroom pass in the middle of geometry. Pardon me while I zip to the girls’ room and witch-hazel my head.

  “I’ll try it when we get home,” Quinn said.

  Mo glanced at her watch. “I need to pick Julius up at four. We have a meeting with his therapy team at four fifteen.”

  “Can you just drop me at the house?” Quinn said, because the last place she wanted to go was her brother’s therapy team meeting.

  “It takes twenty minutes to get to the Cove. I don’t want to be late.”

  “Please?”

  Mo glanced at her watch again, then at Quinn.

  “I’ve got homework,” Quinn said.

  “Already?”

  “Yes.” It was easier than saying how much she did not want to go to Julius’s school or how badly she needed to take off this wig. She knew Mo meant well, but Quinn really didn’t need any more itchy-scalp advice from someone with hair. “I need the computer,” she added, in case her mom was about to tell her that she could do her homework in the car.

  It worked.

  The minute Mo dropped her off at the house, Quinn unlocked the front door, ripped Guinevere off, and flung her into the living room. She gave her scalp a good, long scratch. Then she remembered that this one stupid wig had cost her parents two thousand bucks. God, what a racket—but Quinn felt bad, so she put Guinevere upstairs, back on the Styrofoam head where she belonged, so she wouldn’t lose her shape.

  Now Quinn was bald and barefoot in front of the iMac in her dad’s makeshift office, free to log in to her chat room. Quinn’s usernam
e was FuzzyWuzzy. As in “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?” There was a certain amount of sick humor on alopeciasucks.com.

  She began to type.

  Day one with a wig. Reason: new school. Outcome: mixed. Pros: 1) “hair” was a big hit, even got complimented, 2) not being called Gandhi. Cons: 1) worried all day that wig tape wouldn’t hold, 2) so freaking hot and itchy, like fire ants eating my scalp. Does this mean I will go qball tomorrow? Highly doubtful. Just need to dunk my head in witch hazel tonight, I guess (???). Verdict: fraudulence can be fun.

  It didn’t take long for the responses to roll in.

  TheNewNormal: Way to go, Fuzz! Didn’t u feel so much better in public? I will never go back to qballing.

  T’sallGood: U r not a fraud, Fuzzy. U r just trying to feel good about yourself. No harm in that.

  BaldFacedTruth: Have u tried Oregon grape root? It’s a plant extract. There’s this spritz u can use before u put on your wig. “Oregon Conditioning Spray.” Highly recommend.

  WigginOut: Or u can wear a wig liner …

  HairlessWonder: Best wig tape for sensitive skin is Walker brand 3M. They sell scalp protector too.

  TheEyebrowsHaveIt: Are u AAU? If so I recommend Cardani Human Hair Eyebrow Wigs #15. No itch, and u can sleep with them on!

  AAU stood for alopecia areata universalis. This was the rarest type of alopecia areata, resulting in 100 percent full-body hair loss, which meant eyebrows, eyelashes, pits, pubes, leg hair, everything. Not to be confused with AAP (alopecia areata patchy), where the hair on your head fell out in random spots, or AAT (alopecia areata totalis), which was what Quinn had. Even though she’d started out patchy, she had since lost every hair on her scalp but nowhere else. All things considered, Quinn was lucky. She couldn’t imagine wearing eyebrow wigs.

  Thanks, guys, she wrote. I’ll let u know how it goes.

  CHAPTER

  4

  QUINN’S MOM CAME BACK FROM HER MEETING at the Cove with homework. Not for Julius, who was parked in front of the TV with his three blankets, but for Quinn and her dad, who were parked at the kitchen table with their ice cream.