Yesterday

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “Hey you,” he says as though we know each other much better than we actually do. “How’s it going?”

  “Hey,” I say guardedly.

  “I was just wondering if you needed a ride home?” he asks, straightening. “I know you’re new here and all so …”

  I narrow my eyes and point to my locker so he’ll stand aside and let me open it.

  “Sorry.” He laughs and shifts his weight to the locker next to mine.

  My hair falls forward so that I can only make out thin strips of him through my curtain of dirty-blond strands. I enter my locker combo and slide the lock open. “The thing is, I don’t live that far,” I say, more to my locker than to him.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he tells me, all perfect teeth and quarterback shoulders. “I’m sure you could still use a ride. It’s real windy out there today.” His name comes to me as he’s trying to sell me on a ride home: Terry. The guys he was hanging out with at the party were calling him something else, a jock nickname I’ve forgotten, but Nicolette introduced him as Terry.

  “The cold doesn’t get to me,” I say, because Terry isn’t my type in the first place and in the second, I really don’t want to repeat what happened with Seth.

  “So you’re saying you’d rather walk home in the cold than take a ride from me?” Terry recaps like the concept of a girl not being interested in him is a completely foreign one.

  “I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.” I turn to stare Terry straight in the eye. Distracting myself with a guy from school isn’t a workable concept and if it was, I would’ve chosen Seth. Meanwhile, the boy I won’t let myself actively think about is still blinking his green eyes inside my head.

  “How do you know it’s the wrong idea if you haven’t given me a chance?” Terry quips, a smarmy grin taking over his face.

  My eyebrows slant together in aggravation. “I guess you just have to trust me on that.”

  Terry flinches and focuses on the floor. “Wow,” he mutters. “You’re pretty hostile. I think I’m starting to get why Seth dumped you.”

  A startled laugh chokes up from my diaphragm. “Is that what he told you?” I smother the impulse to set Terry straight. Who cares what someone I met once and have never had a conversation with thinks?

  I need to keep my head on straight. I need to keep my problems to myself and not let them bleed into my mother’s and sister’s lives. I need to cement myself in strength and logic, lock my brain into the here and now and forget about dreams and visions. Someone like Terry, I don’t need.

  Having made that decision so resolutely, it’s doubly annoying to face a similar situation the very next day with a guy I get paired up with in English class for a short assignment on Greek myths. Kyle’s not a jock or any other obvious thing and I like the sound of his laugh as we joke together about King Minos, Prince Theseus and Princess Ariadne but then he spoils it by telling me how cute I am when I smile. “Well, you’re cute all the time,” he says. “But especially when you smile.” Then he pauses, slouches down in his chair and adds, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this but I was glad when I heard you weren’t with Seth anymore.”

  “I was never with Seth,” I correct. Not that it’s anybody’s business.

  The guy nods slowly. “Better still.”

  I bite down on my pen cap and scan the story of Theseus and the Minotaur as Kyle, in his long-winded and self-deprecating way, proceeds to ask me out. There’s a part in Theseus and the Minotaur where Princess Ariadne writes to Prince Theseus. Her letter begins, “I am a beautiful princess as you probably noticed the minute you saw me.” A couple of minutes ago Kyle and I were kidding around about how conceited Princess Ariadne was to note her own beauty but from my first day at school so many people seemed to have judged me by my appearance.

  I’ve gone from being unnerved by it to slightly flattered (on occasion) to feeling straitjacketed by it and when the final bell rings on Friday afternoon I dash for Christine’s locker with a special request. If people can’t get past how I look without a shove, I’ll give them the push they need. Maybe Princess Ariadne was cool with guys fawning over her for the wrong reason but I’m tired of it.

  Christine’s head is down and she’s yanking on tall boots with a zillion chunky straps down the front. Her black top hangs on her like a piece of drapery, cinched at the waist and then falling in pleats halfway down her thighs. She doesn’t notice me until I’m right next to her. “Oh, hey, Freya,” she says, glancing up at me. Her shock of heavy black eyeliner highlights the stunning light blue, nearly violet, of her irises in a way that makes my breath catch when I stare at them straight on.

  “I was wondering if I could ask you a favor,” I say. “Do you think you could help me dye my hair?”

  “Are you serious?” Christine’s fingers tug at her own black locks as she stands up next to me. “Why do you want to do that?”

  “Because”—I ball up a fistful of blond hair in my right hand—“this doesn’t feel like who I am.”

  Christine tilts her head to one side and says, “So how do you want to look?”

  “More like you,” I admit. “I want to change my image.” I want the people who only talk to me because of how I look to leave me alone. I want my outsides to match the prickly, shady, mysterious way I feel on the inside.

  Christine’s lips curve into a small smile. “That sounds radical. Are you sure?”

  As sure as I’ve been about anything lately. I don’t have any control over what’s going on inside me but buying a tube of hair dye and some new clothes is definitely within my power.

  “Positive,” I tell her. “The sooner the better. When do you think you could do it?”

  “Um … tonight,” Christine says, smiling harder. “If that’s good with you.”

  Tonight is excellent.

  FIVE

  As soon as my mom’s home from work I ask her if she can drop me off at the mall after dinner to meet a friend from school. In Auckland I had a restricted driver’s license that allowed me to drive around by myself during the day, which usually only happened on weekends when I had access to one of my parents’ cars. We moved back here before I was old enough to get a full driver’s license in New Zealand and now I’ll have to start over from the beginning—qualify for a learner’s permit and take driver’s ed.

  My mom looks as tired as I felt after my bad dream the other night but she chauffeurs me to the mall later anyway. Christine and I hit the store where she usually buys her hair dye and the girl at the cash register gives me a discount because she knows Christine. Afterwards we pick out the palest pressed powder we can find in the department store makeup counter along with a brand of eyeliner Christine recommends and I tell her what Terry said about Seth dumping me. “I guess that’s him trying to preserve his reputation or something,” I add.

  Christine bares her teeth like she’s about to growl. “You shouldn’t let him get away with that shit.”

  I shrug. “I don’t care what he says. It’s not worth worrying about.”

  “I knew he was an asshole,” Christine says, almost to herself.

  “You told me you didn’t know him well enough to have an opinion about him,” I remind her.

  Christine smiles slyly. “I lied. Not about knowing him but about having an opinion. What can I say? I have finely tuned asshole radar.”

  We catch a bus back to Christine’s house with the stuff I bought (the clothes shopping will have to wait for another day) and hole up in the upstairs bathroom where she puts on rubber gloves and parts my hair four ways so she can get at my roots. She starts squeezing the dye onto the back of my head and by the time she’s gotten to the front the chemical smell’s making my eyes water. Christine says it stinks but that it’s never really bothered her eyes. She advises me to tough it out for the next thirty minutes and then we’ll be able to wash the dye out and meet a whole new me. In the meantime she sits on the toilet lid and I balance myself on the side of the bathtub.

  Because
I’m already technically crying and I’m sort of in the middle of becoming someone else and Christine’s the only person for thousands of miles that I’ve spoken to about guys even a little, I impulsively ask her if she’s ever had a déjà vu about a person she’s never met.

  “I get déjà vu all the time,” Christine says, “but not usually about people, more about things I’m doing.”

  That sounds normal and I stretch my legs out in front of me as I think about the guy on Walmer Road and what he could be doing with his Friday night. He didn’t recognize me before and he’ll be even less likely to recognize me when Christine and I are done here.

  The problem with knowing where he lives is that I can go back anytime I want to. I’m trying not to do that but I’m fighting with myself on so many fronts lately that I’m afraid I might give in. I’m almost equally afraid I won’t, that I’ll stop trying to figure out what really matters and why and end up just like everyone else.

  “Did you have a déjà vu about someone you’ve never met?” Christine asks pointedly.

  A pause to a question like that is as good as an affirmative response and after a couple of seconds I drag my teeth across my bottom lip and say, “A guy I passed in the street.” I can’t tell her about following him home from the hotdog stand outside the museum—that would sound psycho, even to someone who’s trying to be my friend. “It was such a strong feeling that I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “About him,” Christine qualifies, not looking fazed so far.

  “About him, yeah, but also about the situation in general—how someone who I’ve never met could feel that familiar to me.” My ears are beginning to warm and I pinch my left earlobe, causing Christine to reach down for a wad of toilet paper.

  She hands it to me so I can wipe the dye from my left hand. Then she says, “Maybe you did meet him before, a really long time ago and your subconscious remembers it even if you don’t.”

  “Maybe.” I get up to run my hand under the water and then sit myself back down on the tub again. “It just seems weird.”

  “What’s weird about it?” Christine’s black-rimmed eyes study me.

  “Well, if I did meet him a long, long time ago, how come I can’t stop thinking about him? You’d think he’d have to have been someone important, in which case I should remember and so should he.”

  Christine stares contemplatively at the matching purple hand towels hanging beside me, next to the bath. “Past life,” she offers.

  Her tone gives no clue whether she’s kidding or not and I say, “Do you believe in that?”

  “Not really. But what do I know?” She tucks her hands into her lap and leans forward. “Maybe you should’ve tried to say something to him. Where did you see him?”

  “On the way home from school earlier this week,” I lie. “But he doesn’t go to school with us—I mean he looked like he could be a high school student but not at Sir John A. Macdonald. I would’ve noticed.”

  “Maybe not. You’ve only been going there two weeks. There must be a lot of students you haven’t seen yet.”

  I raise my eyebrows as if to say she could be right but my mouth is downcast, like I’m not convinced.

  “If you see him again you have to say something,” Christine coaches.

  She has no idea that she’s making it harder for me to resist temptation. I blink back another chemical-induced tear as I picture the boy’s arresting eyes and perfect mouth. I’m driven restless by the thought that I don’t know what he’s doing at this very second, that I don’t know the tiniest thing about him except where he lives and that he likes hotdogs. It doesn’t seem right not to know.

  I have to change that.

  Soon Christine’s washing the excess dye from my hair and spraying on a leave-in conditioner. The dark hair framing my face makes my blue eyes stand out more. I was afraid my blond eyebrows would look stupid with black hair (Christine was afraid to blind me so left my eyebrows alone) but even that contrast looks sort of cool and once I’m finished with Christine’s hairdryer I stare into the mirror, feeling infinitely more like the external me matches the shadowy person inside.

  When I thank Christine she says that if I get some of my hair chopped off, tease it like crazy and then we do my makeup right I’ll be pure Siouxsie Sioux. Having been impressed with the Siouxsie and the Banshees’s video for “Dear Prudence” I saw the other night, the suggestion makes me smile.

  “I like it long, though, so I’m not going to cut it,” I tell her, running my hand down a newly darkened strand. I brush it forward, flopping it over my eyes so I can hide behind it. “But we can work on the makeup a little bit and pick out some new clothes.”

  “Oh, definitely new clothes,” Christine says emphatically. “Otherwise there’s not much point in changing your hair—you’d still look part preppy.”

  Christine’s dad drives me home when we’re done experimenting with makeup (which mostly translates into pale skin and kind of scary eyes) and I hesitate before stepping inside my house, afraid my mom won’t be happy about the new look. But the first person who lays eyes on me is Olivia, who wrinkles her nose as I step into the kitchen. “You smell like chemicals,” she complains from her spot at the refrigerator.

  “I know.” I move in close to her to peek into the fridge. My appetite’s been under control during the last couple of days—this feels more like a run-of-the-mill snack craving.

  “And you look like an evil twin of yourself,” Olivia adds, reaching past me for the carton of orange juice.

  “Thanks,” I say, sarcasm pooling on my tongue. “That’s exactly the look I was going for.” With no interesting leftovers to munch on, I close the fridge and seek out my mother. She’s up in her bedroom with the door ajar so it doesn’t occur to me to knock but as I swing through the doorway I see that she’s sitting on the double bed, her feet curled up beside her and a family photo in her lap. I recognize the photograph from across the room. It was one that was taken of all of us in an Auckland portrait studio just before Christmas. There’s a snowy backdrop and the four of us are wearing Santa hats with fake fur cuffs and a fluffy white ball dangling from the end of them.

  We were happy then, I guess. I wish I could feel that way when I remember it instead of being broken the way I am. When I look at old photos of myself, it’s like I never really existed.

  I take a step back, sure I’m interrupting my mother’s memories. The floor creaks underfoot, giving me away.

  “Freya!” my mother exclaims, her jaw tightening as she takes in my image. “What have you done to your hair?”

  I clasp my hands behind my back and frown. “A girl from school helped me dye it. I wanted a change.”

  My mother has set down the family photo and she straightens her legs, throwing them over the side of the bed. “It’s pretty drastic. Why didn’t you say anything when I was dropping you off?”

  I shrug. “It’s not that big a deal and it’s my hair.”

  My mother grimaces as she casts an eye back at the family photo. “But your real color is so lovely.”

  My real color is something I’m not. If my mother and I have had a conversation like this before, I don’t remember it, yet the resentment rising up inside me is so familiar that it feels like second nature. I knew she wouldn’t approve.

  “Ordinary,” I counter, my brain beginning to simmer at the thought of what my mother will say next, how she’ll make me feel like I’ve done something stupid or selfish. “And what’s wrong with wanting a change? Everything else has changed lately. What’s the matter with me taking charge of something that I can control?”

  My mother raises her eyes to meet mine again. “What’s done is done. It’s just so”—she squints as she examines my hair—“so dark. And your makeup … Did you think I would’ve tried to stop you? Is that why you didn’t say anything?”

  “I don’t know.” She seems more surprised than angry and I push aside my instinct to fight with her. Why did I suspect her reaction would be wo
rse? “I guess I didn’t want to have to stop and talk about it.”

  I begin to explain to my mom, as best I can without giving some of my darker feelings away, how things here are different from New Zealand. I tell her I don’t want to look like the preppy/jock kids who listen to bad music, can’t think for themselves and tend to treat the less-popular kids like they’re invisible or worse. The bottom line is that I’m hoping she’ll give me money for new clothes to complete my transformation.

  My mother listens with her head cocked. “If it’ll make you feel better, you can buy some new things,” she says eventually. “I guess I should consider myself lucky if your teenage rebellion amounts to some hair dye and dark clothing, huh?” She ventures a smile.

  The smile I return is wider and warmer. “Very true,” I say, plucking the family photo from the bed and staring down into my own eyes. They’re sort of like my dad’s but the rest of my face is more like my mom’s. My parents are what you would call attractive people—tall, thin and youthful for their age. Olivia seems to have a general predisposition towards good looks in common with them but not much else and as that occurs to me, a wave of heat washes over my body from head to toe, just like the one that overwhelmed me at the dinosaur exhibit in the museum. My head swirls with dizziness and I clutch my elbows and exhale slowly, fighting for control over my body.

  “I find it hard to look at photographs of him too,” my mother says as she peers sympathetically up at me. “Difficult but comforting at the same time.”

  I hand her back the photo, feeling, for the zillionth time, like a phony.

  I do miss him. I’d give anything to have him back. But I can’t shake the feeling that my dad’s absence isn’t the only thing that’s the matter, that it’s not even the worst thing. It’s as if I’m … infected by some quicksand type of suspicion.

  I don’t know who I am anymore.

  This moment. Here and now in my mother’s bedroom. That’s real. Christine dyeing my hair earlier. My sister downstairs … my sister …