by JA Huss
Chapter Eight - Maddie
Outside I feel kinda lost. I mean, I know where I am. I just feel like I don’t know where I am. My heart is jumping a little. And I suddenly realize I can hear it.
Is that normal?
I’m not sure what’s going on but I stop at a street corner and lean against a lamppost, taking a moment to just be still. Think. I’m just—
“You OK?”
“What??” I snap my head and look around but no one’s there.
Well, there’s lots of people but none of them are looking or talking to me.
Am I hearing things?
I’m sure there’s like a dozen rational explanations for how I feel right now, it’s just the frontrunner is leaning towards… what?
God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just feel like I need to look around. Check my back and see if anyone is there.
Which is stupid. Leftover side effects of the whole drug-lord thing down in Mexico, that’s all. Maybe it was my devil talking to me?
But I check my shoulders and nope. That asshole has taken the day off.
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper, crossing the street. “You are insane, Maddie.” Not because I’m hearing things. Because I actually looked for the devil on my shoulder.
I keep walking, unsure of what to do with myself while Tyler...
Unsure about anything, really. How does that happen? One second you’re cool with everything in your life and the next second you’re not?
Is it because I’m not seeing what’s happening with Tyler?
The farther I get away from the salon, the more uneasy I become. My heart is definitely thumping now. I can feel the blood pumping through my body like a building sense of panic.
So I do what I do. The only thing I know how to do. The only thing I can do.
I pretend it’s not happening. I smile. I feel the wind on my face. I walk.
I. Keep. Going.
And that’s when I realize this is the same direction I was walking on Halloween. That Pete’s is just a few blocks away.
My feet suddenly have a destination and this, for whatever reason, makes all the difference. I inhale, exhale, and then the thumping is gone. The sense of uneasiness fades with each step I take towards Pete’s. And by the time I get to the burned-down rubble where I used to work, I am calm.
Which also makes no sense at all. Or else it absolutely does.
“Do you know what happened?”
I startle again, but this time when I glance over to my shoulder, I find a young woman dressed like a hooker, looking like she’s been awake for way too long. “Bad shit,” I sigh in reply.
She’s smoking a cigarette, which she flicks, and drags, and flicks again. Eyes taking in the scene. She says, “Yeah. I tried to get a job here.”
She’s obviously strung out and I wonder if there’s any chance Pete would have ever hired this woman. Probably not. “I just pulled an all-nighter.” I think she says it by way of explaining her strung out looking state. Because it comes out slightly defensive.
“Yeah?” I reply back.
“Yep,” she says, dragging her tired eyes up to mine to stare dead into them. Then she adds, “...I’m leaving today.”
“Yeah?” I ask. “Where ya going?”
“Home,” she says. Like everyone knows where home is.
“I needed the bus fare, so I worked all night. But before I made up my mind to leave, I was thinking about working here. I heard the guy was a good guy. The owner. What was his name?”
After a pause, I say, “Pete.”
“Yeah. Heard he was a good guy.”
“He was,” I say.
“I interviewed a few months ago but he turned me down. Said I should get clean.”
I nod. “And did you?”
She scowls at me. Because I think she feels like it was a judgement. Maybe it was. I don’t want it to be, but maybe it was. “I’m better than I was before,” she says.
I nod. I get it. I mean, she looks like shit now but bad is a bottomless pit, right? “I worked here,” I say.
When I glance over at her, she’s already looking at me. “I know,” she says. “Feel like I’ve seen you around.”
“Oh,” I say. Weird. The realization that people you don’t notice can notice you. “It was a...good place,” I say. Because it was. “He was a good guy.”
She nods. Sighs. Drags on her cigarette. Drops it to the ground and stomps it out with her hooker shoe. “I didn’t really know him. Couple times he saw me hanging around and gave me some breakfast. Before…” She waves her hand in the air, like ‘before’ encompasses a whole load of baggage. “But yeah, I came out of the hospital a few days ago and I swung by here. To tell him I was serious. That I was gonna get clean and come back in a few months to get that job and quit all this shit. But…”
She doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to.
But it was gone. Plan A was a non-starter.
“You look good,” she says.
“I do?”
She nods. “Yeah. I mean, Like I say, I’ve seen you around and yeah, you look better. I was standing over there,” she says, pointing to a street corner. “Just got dropped off from my last call ever.” Which makes her smile. Almost laugh. “And there you were. And I thought to myself, Damn. She looks good. And then I was thinking… like, you give me hope.”
“I do? How? Why, I mean.”
She shrugs, “I saw how you were a couple months back. You had this crazy look in your eyes all the time. Which, and I’m not judging, OK?” She makes a special point of letting me know that she’s not judging me. “But it came off as kinda desperate. And I used to think… I’m not the only one. But then it seemed like you got better. And it was bugging me.”
I don’t actually know what to say to her. I’m just… stunned that this woman I never met seems to have so much of her...time...invested in me.
“It bugged me that you were changing, I guess. Maybe I was jealous?” She smiles at me. An embarrassed smile. “I’m not giving up though. I’m one of those tough bitches, ya know?”
Which makes me smile. Kinda big. “I do know.”
“I just keep climbing. I never look down, either. That’s pointless. I just keep my head up and climb. It’s all you can do. Give up or keep climbing. And I’m just not a quitter. I wish I was, it’d be easier. But I’m not. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I just nod, dumbly. I’m speechless.
“So… it’s hard. But I got my bus fare.” She looks down at her small purse and pats it. “Worked all night to get it and now I’m leaving.”
I want to say all kinds of things. Stupid motivational things that mean nothing unless you’re saying them to yourself. Things like, Hang in there. It gets better.
But I don’t. And she turns to leave.
I don’t want her to leave, I realize. So I say, “Hey?”
She stops walking and looks over her shoulder at me. “Yeah?”
“You need anything? Money? A ride? I can call you a car or get you a taxi.”
She shakes her head. “Thanks, but no. I’m good. I’m really good.”
And then she turns and walks away. Disappears from view as if she was never really there. Like a figment of my imagination. She just fades into the crowd.
It’s only then that I realize there’s loads of people around. People who like… faded into the background while we were talking. That life goes on, no matter what. The world never stops turning. The sun keeps rising, the night always comes, and then the light takes its place.
Every twenty-four hours there’s a new opportunity for a fresh start.
That girl. We are the same person, she and I.
I hope she makes it.
I wish I could help her.
I will help her.
Maybe not her, specifically. But people like her.
People like us. People who fuck up and keep going.
People who never give up.
Chapter Nine - Tyler
Each snip of the scissors cutting off strands of my hair is like letting go of something I’ve been holding onto too tightly. Not memories. Those will, I imagine, stay with me forever. Or at least until I get old and senile. Which is a weird thing to ponder, considering that I never thought I’d live past twenty-five. Every day since then has been unexpected.
But it’s the feelings that seem like they’re drifting to the ground with each new cut.
Snip.
Mom dying. What that felt like. Falling to the floor.
Snip.
The explosion. The one that killed Nadir. Floating to the ground.
Snip.
Getting the word that Scotty was gone. The shock. The loss. The retreat from everyone and everything. Being carried to the earth with the former extensions of me.
Snip.
Rodney’s not talking now. He was at first. Very chatty. Like, I suppose people expect from their barber (or stylist, I guess). First thing he asked was, “So did you guys have a good Christmas?”
That’s one of those things people say, right? Like, “Did you have a happy birthday?” Or, if you went to a party or something, “Did you have a nice time?” Or, like if you’re married or whatever, “How’s John?” And shit like that.
And nobody ever expects or plans for the answers to be, “No, my birthday was shitty.” Or, “The party sucked. I got food poisoning.” Or, “John left me. He ran off with the pool boy.”
It’s not really people’s fault, I guess. We’re all just taught to be polite and to make conversation and shit. It’s an easy way to sound like you care. Because we’re all supposed to care about each other. Which isn’t the same thing as caring for each other, of course. Almost nobody wants to do that.
I’m only thinking about all this shit now because of all the other shit I’m also thinking about now. About how I can, like, make a difference. Or help people. Or whatever the hell I’m planning on doing. Because I don’t really give a shit about being “nice.” Anybody can be “nice.” I think what I want to be is... kind. Which is a different thing altogether.
Which is why, even though my impulse was to answer Rodney’s question with, “No. Not really. Went down to Mexico. Got into a gun fight with a drug jefe and watched some dudes get killed,” I chose to consider him, and the fact that he’s just trying to get through his day like everybody else, and said, “Not bad. You?”
Which was great, because then he went off on a long soliloquy about his boyfriend Thomas (the one I kept referring to in my head as Bow Tie at Thanksgiving) and how Christmas is hard for Thomas because of the rough time he had growing up, and yadda, yadda, yadda. And what was weird was that I found myself really paying attention. Not going, “Uh-huh, oh, really? Wow!” and all that shit, but genuinely hearing what he was saying. Like, my mind didn’t wander off to random lines of dialogue from Jaws or what-the-fuck-ever. I stayed completely invested in the shit he was telling me and was just... there.
When he realized how long he had been going on he said, “Jesus. I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear all my bullshit.”
“No, no,” I told him. “It’s fine. Go on.”
And then he did. And when he finally got to the end and had kind of talked himself out he said, “Thanks for listening.”
And I said, “No problem.” Because it really wasn’t. Which was... different. For me.
But now he’s all business. He’s turned the chair so that my back is facing the mirror. I think he’s doing it partially so that he has the space to really maneuver around and assess and decide his next move from all angles, and partially because I think he’s kind of excited for me to get “the big reveal.”
It’s funny to watch him. He looks the way artists do when they’re standing back from their canvases trying to determine what else a painting needs. He narrows his eyes. He steps forward. Then he steps back and shakes his head. I’m just sitting here watching the whole thing, trying to not fall asleep. Which is not because I’m tired. It’s actually just one of those things that happens when you have bundled energy and no place to put it.
And then, just as Rodney starts nodding his head like he’s happy with what he’s done, on cue, Maddie walks back in.
When she sees me, she puts her hand to her mouth reflexively. Rodney snaps his head to see her standing there. “Wait, wait, wait, I’m not sure I’m finished!” He steps toward me again, places the scissors near my temple, but once again decides better of it and steps back, saying, “OK, no. I am.”
He crosses his arms and rolls his neck around like he just got finished doing a heart transplant or something. And now Maddie walks over to stand beside him, her hand still over her mouth. I can feel my eyes widening in the way that precedes the question, “What? What the fuck is it?” But I don’t actually ask the question, because I know what the fuck it is. Or I can imagine.
Rodney lets out a long sigh through his nostrils and then says, “So?”
Maddie shakes her head a bit, lowering her hand slowly from her face. Then the head shake turns into a nod. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.” Then she says it a third time. “Yeah.”
“Gotta be real,” I say. “Freaking me out a little bit, gang.”
Skinny Jeans now turns the corner from the back, carrying a tray with hair shit on it—razors, scissors, product, all that stuff. And when he sees me, the tray crashes to the ground, he puts both hands over his heart, and says, “Oh, my heavenly fuck.”
Both Maddie and Rodney jump at the sound of the crashing tray and then they grab each other around the biceps, clutching tightly, as they turn back to me.
“More freaked out now, FYI,” I mention. “Guys, what the fuck? Look like you’re walking through the jungle and just ran up on a lion.”
Maddie approaches me tentatively, both hands pressed together, as if in prayer, her fingertips resting against her lips. She looks down at the unreal amount of hair on the floor. It’s like somebody just sheared a small animal or something. I’ve still got on the apron thing that Rodney clipped around my neck, so my body is totally hidden and just my head is poking out. Maddie puts both her hands on the arms of the chair so that I’m now pinned down under the tarp that covers me. She stares at me. Finally, I say, “Hey.”
Her eyes crinkle up and she says, “Hey.”
She lifts her hand up and strokes my cheek. It feels weird. Her hand is actually touching my face. The skin that covers my bones. I think about my talk with Brandon in the park last week: His notion that a person is not made of the things they say, or the things they think, or even the things they do.
And he’s right, of course.
What makes a person a person is something unidentifiable. It sure as hell isn’t the skin we wear. I know that as well as anybody. The way a thing looks is like the least of what makes it it. Like the old Buddhist riddle goes, ‘If you strip a rose of its petals and thorns and bud and all the rest of it, is it still a rose?’
Who knows?
But still. The skin we’re in. That’s what people see.
And what they see is how they recognize what’s in front of them. And so, for the first time in a dozen years, I suppose Maddie recognizes somebody she used to see all the time, sitting in front of her once again. I wonder how that must feel. For the briefest of flashes, I have this jolt of anxiety that all the angry feelings she had, and all the resentment, will come pouring back over her. Because THIS is the guy she hated in her head. THIS is the guy who broke her heart and her spirit without even knowing he was doing it. THIS is the guy. So I need to know what she’s feeling.
I ask her in the best way I know how.
“Do I look like Lady Gaga?”
She smiles and says, “Almost as good.” And then she gives me a kiss.
Wow. Holy shit. The feeling of her lips on mine with nothing in between us? No dense shrubbery that she has to hack through to get to me waiting on the other side? It feels unreal. This is the first time a woman’s lips have touched mine without impediment
in... well. Probably my whole life, actually. Because the beard was only the physical manifestation of the barricades I had up.
And I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s going to feel like when my naked, hungry mouth gets to place itself on the rest of her body.
Rodney approaches cautiously and asks, “Wanna see yourself?”
“Guys, Jesus. I just got a fuckin’ haircut. It’s not like you performed plastic surgery.”
“Oh, didn’t I?” Rodney asks, arching his right eyebrow and then his left. (Fuckin’ showoff.)
Maddie steps to the side. Rodney places his hands on the arms of the chair where hers were and spins it around. I look at them standing behind me in the mirror. They seem excited. Like when someone is unwrapping a present you gave them and you’re simultaneously eager and nervous to see what they’re going to think of it.
And then my eyes track away from them and settle on the image looking directly back at me in the mirror. A reflection of somebody that I wasn’t even sure was there anymore.
A reflection.
Huh.
That word can mean a lot of things.
Reflection.
And on a deep inhale, I silently acknowledge it all.
Hey, dude. Long time.
Chapter Ten - Maddie & Tyler
MADDIE
“What?” Tyler asks. He’s looking over at me in the passenger seat. There’s a little bit of traffic, so he’s keeping one eye on the road, but the other one keeps drifting back to me. And I know I’m staring. But I can’t stop. It’s one thing to have known that it’s Tyler I’m with. It’s another thing to see him. The guy I knew before.
For the most part, anyway.
“Nothing. You just...” But I run out of words and instead lean across the front seat of the Tesla, grab his face, and kiss him on the mouth. He kisses me hard back and then there’s some honking as the car swerves and Tyler jerks the wheel. I sit back in my seat but leave my hand on his leg. Right next to the erection he now has going. “Does that ever not happen?” I ask.
