By then he’d have relaxed, chilled out, gathered his wits so he wouldn’t blurt out his discovery before he had any hard evidence … .
The door gave and opened before the key had finished its turns. A tallish young woman stood behind it
“Matt! Come in.”
“Krystyna! Krys. You’re here.”
“Yup. Live here, off and on. Didn’t Mira tell you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Don’t you look as yummy as a caramel sundae! What’s with the bleach, dude?”
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Blond in this instance. His cousin Krystyna’s hair was a kaleidoscope of platinum-on-blonde-on-black.
He put a dismissive hand to his hair, remembering it looked different. “Photo shoot for the radio station. I’m told it’ll wash out.” Close enough. “You, on the other hand … .”
“Madonna, Evita-in-Krakow style. You like the indigo highlights?”
“Colorful. I’m surprised to see you.”
“Have I got a Mae West line for you! Never mind. Not suitable for ex-priests. I guess my job is to entertain you until Mira gets home.”
“So … you live here. Off and on. I take it the punk boyfriend is around during the off?”
“Huh? Him? Oh, history. I was young and stupid then.”
“Three months ago?”
“Yeah. Want a beer?”
She was poised on the carpet verge next to the linoleum that marked off the alley kitchen.
“Yeah.” Matt realized he needed one.
Krys. She changed like a rainbow. Since he’d first met her when he’d connected to his Chicago relatives six months ago, she’d gone from breathless teenager to rebellious young adult, heavy on young to now … assertive single chick. Cousin. Assertive single cousin.
First cousin. Like it mattered to her.
She brought a Bohemian beer, the dark brown bottle sweating goose bumps of condensation. She didn’t offer him a glass.
“So.” Leaning against the eating bar that divided kitchen and living room. Five-foot-nine of fine Polish womanhood. Blue eyes both guarded and challenging. “How’ll we kill some time until Mira gets home? Cousin dearest.”
He suggested that they sit and talk. That was his profession, after all.
Or watch some TV. The remote was front and center on the small round fruitwood coffee table.
“I watched you on The Amanda Show today,” she told him, settling beside him on the couch. Settling way too much beside him.
“Really? It’s amazing how many people in Chicago miss my golden hour.”
She sighed. “You’re really good. I studied advertising in class. TV is a ‘cool’ medium. The cooler and more laid back you are, the hotter you come across.”
“Glad you’re learning something in college. Is Uncle Stash letting you major in art?”
“No.” She sat up from her couch-lounging position, took a long swig of beer. “He still treats me like a kid. A woman.”
“I thought you wanted to be treated like a woman.” Matt was surprised at himself for challenging this incendiary cousin with a crush on him.
She grinned. “Not that way. Like the kind of woman you write off and put down. Polish Catholic burqa anyone? Like a nobody with nothing about her that counts.”
“He’s old-fashioned. He can’t help it.”
“So I should suffer?”
“No.”
She set down the beer. Moved closer on the couch. She wore a soft black sweater that ebbed off her shoulders like ebony surf. Cashmere maybe, or just a really good acrylic.
Wow. He was really absorbing a lot from Temple. Including enough savvy to regard his high-spirited young cousin as sheer poison.
“I’m mad at you.” She sounded like an adolescent again, emotionally bipolar. Also like a Lolita.
“Why?” Might as well walk into it.
“It could have been you.” When he continued to look blank, she added. “Last Christmas.”
Matt sipped the beer, knowing he wouldn’t like where this was going.
She mirrored his gesture, eyed him sideways. “Instead it was that loser Zeke.”
“I met him. You brought him to the restaurant where my mother works. Apparently he wasn’t such a loser then.”
“If you remember him, you know I’m not lying.”
“He … like most guys his age he’s just self-involved, dead set on being too cool to care. Or too cool to appear to. He’ll civilize in a few years.”
“I wish you’d told me that before I lost my so-called innocence to him.”
“You—Krys, I don’t need to know this.”
“Are you shocked?”
“I don’t hand out moral judgments anymore. Gave that up for Lent, along with my Roman collar.”
“You’re shocked, I can tell.”
“Not shocked. Just not comfortable discussing this with you.”
“You discuss things like that all the time on TV and the radio, in front of thousands of people.”
“I don’t know them.”
“I’m just being honest.”
“You need to be honest with yourself. You don’t have to share the news with other people.”
“You’re not other people. You could have been the one.”
He shook his head. “Never would have happened. Face it; we’re first cousins. Even civil law, not just ecclesiastical law, frowns on that. I know family dynamics. First cousins are often first crushes but I’ve been too messed up myself to do unto others the same. It’s not that you’re not bright and attractive, trust me.”
“Are you still—?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“You are!” It was an accusation. “Why?”
When he didn’t answer, she shook his arm. “Are you saving yourself for someone?”
Matt thought for a long moment. She had nailed it. The question was, should he be?
“Because if you are, maybe a little preliminary practice, a dry run, would be just the thing. Cousin.”
Chapter 32
The Wig Is Up
“The show must go on” is an ancient theatrical maxim probably going back to the Greeks and the first ever chorus line on some hill in Thessaly.
It was all too evident that reality television shows still abided by the same philosophy.
Except that Temple and Mariah had been on Candid Camera much more frequently than the other candidates, so Big Brother and Sister had been watching Xoe Chloe’s every far-rambling move.
Mariah returned to their room from her morning lifestyle counseling session feeling both nervous and rebellious.
Temple had slept in, in her wig, which was now looking matted as well as lank and dispirited. In fact, it looked like the road kill of some thankfully unrecognizable species.
She awoke grudgingly from dreams of Rafi Nadir and Matt Devine escorting her and Mariah to the father-daughter dance, except that Temple got Nadir for a father!
“What a nightmare,” she muttered as Mariah shook her awake. Although, the alternate possibility of Matt as her “father” escort was even worse. And far more Freudian.
Mariah was whispering in her ear. “They say I’m missing my beauty sleep and getting into trouble. I got a big lecture about bearing down on my diet and exercise program and staying away from you.”
“Good idea.” Temple struggled up and pulled the bedside clock closer to read it in B.C. time. Before Contacts were installed for the day.
“Yikes! My lifestyle session is in eighteen minutes. Gang way!”
In fifteen minutes, Xoe Chloe was fully assembled, bedhead and all.
“The great thing about punk,” Mariah noted from her watching post on the bed, “is that you can be considered put together no matter how ragged you look.”
“Thanks, kid.” Temple dashed into the hall where she ran into the Golden Girls, advancing in a pack and sniggering at her approach. This was not a promising sendoff to her lifestyle consultation.
&n
bsp; “Are you going to get it,” Silver predicted.
Temple’s faux-green morning eyes blinked in the glare generated by so much pink, shiny spandex in a group. Even if they were all as stick-thin as flamingos.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You haven’t buckled down to the program,” Honey said. “I hear the coaching team will be reading you the riot act.”
“Shape up or flunk,” Ashlee added.
This was not good. If Temple was totally out of the running, she’d be of less use to Mariah, and her mother.
“Outa my way, Blondies.” Temple ploughed through the permanent wave of sugar and spice and everything not nice.
Under the current regime, the house’s den had the feeling of a headmaster’s office. Temple paused at the closed double doors, then opened one and strolled in.
The whole Teen Queen team sat around the big oval wooden table. Only one chair was free, at one end of the oval.
Temple slid onto the huge leather chair, feeling like Little Orphan Annie called onto the carpet in Daddy Warbucks’s office.
Four judges and the five consultants glanced up, away, and shuffled folders. Not promising. Their spandex-shiny hot pink folder covers looked ludicrous lying on the dignified walnut conference table. Arthur Dickson might have been a tad eccentric, but he would be spinning in his presumed grave to see this crew taking over.
“Normally,” Beth Marble announced, “at this point in the competition we’re starting to see real improvement in the candidates.”
“I am too.” Temple nodded sagely. “I met a bunch in the hall coming here. Their high-pitched giggle quotient is way lower and I think they’re all developing larger calf muscles. Must be from the spike-heel footraces.”
“You always have a sassy answer.” Beth shook her head, putting her halo of curls in motion. “That hides nothing but your own anxiety.”
“Hide my anxiety? Not my idea. Anxiety is the watchword of our modern age. I’m visibly neurotic and proud of it.”
“I don’t think so.” Ken Adair, the Hair Guy, rose and walked toward Temple. “Everybody wants to be confident and secure, and you too are going to get that way if we have to browbeat you into it.”
Temple rolled her eyes, trying to think up a suitably Xoe Chloe comeback. “Anybody recording this? Sounds like lab-rat abuse to me.”
Adair reached her chair, spun it to face him, and scalped her.
“Yeow-ouch!” She gazed up at a foot of limp coal-black monofiber filaments dangling from the hairdresser’s viselike grasp.
“You are a fake, Xoe Chloe.” Beth Marble came to stand behind him.
“A freaking fraud,” Dexter Manship added to the chorus, while still balancing on his tailbone in his matching leather chair.
“A spirited but self-deluded girl,” her own Aunt Kit threw in, trying to put a positive spin on this shocking revelation.
“A … a has-been,” Savannah added after a long and visible search for words that hadn’t been used yet. Apparently, she could only come up with phrases that applied to herself.
“So I wear a wig.” Temple/Xoe sat up boarding school straight. “So does Cher. And Dolly. And a lot of performers. You going to tell me that’s not true?”
“Why a black wig?” her aunt asked, playing the defense attorney role.
“Sim-ple. I’ve got red hair.”
“So?”
“So who wants that? It’s unlucky. And mine’s curly too. Who wants to be Shirley Temple in a world where the Good Ship Lollipop is dropping anchor a day away from Guantanamo Bay?”
“No politics!” Beth commanded. “We are an issue-neutral show.”
“Yeah, right. So anyway, curly red hair’s a drag. It belongs in a comic strip. Like I’d want to be mistaken for that loser comedian, Carrot Top? Black is the new red.”
“My dear child,” Beth said, “wigs are not allowed. We’re going for natural beauty here.”
Temple snorted. “Tell that to the Golden Girls. When they sit in the bleachers, it’s at their hairdresser’s. Right, Mr. Adair?”
“Nothing wrong with subtle colorations, Miss Xoe. Subtle,” he repeated in a voice like a drill bit.
“Subtle sucks,” Temple said airily. “It’s the refuge of uncertain minds.”
“Well, we’re certain about one thing.” Manship had risen and was staring her down. “That rats’ nest of fake hair has got to go. What’s under there can’t be any more pathetic. Color and restyle, Adair. Right now.”
Temple would have opened her mouth to protest, except Adair had her by the shoulders. He was dredging her out of the chair and marching her down the hall before she could say “Garnier Fructose.” In one minute flat, she was shoved into a room where the reek of hairspray was sickly sweet enough to choke a skunk.
This was a part of undercover work Molina had never prepared her for: beauty boot camp.
For the next ninety minutes, Temple was buckled into a rotating chair where she was washed, styled, spun, dried, spindled, and mutilated.
She felt like a duck in the weeds whose shelter is ripped away one reed at a time. Huddled under a pink plastic cape, she watched tiny feathered remnants of her past haircut fall like residue from a tarring and feathering. Too many people inside the Teen Queen Castle knew Temple Barr, redhead and PR whirlwind. Her cover was being stripped away and blown dry even as she sat strapped to the chair.
“I don’t know why you hate your red hair,” Adair said. “So many girls do. Guess they feel like Raggedy Ann dolls. A shame. Red rocks for me, but change what irritates you. Take a look, pussycat.”
He handed her a mirror.
Temple glanced sideways at her reflection through squinty eyes. How would she face Molina when she admitted to having lost her cover to a pair of barber’s shears, leaving the policewoman’s daughter alone in a house crawling with secret tunnels, cameras, and sick stalkers?
Temple, shrinking in the chair, straightened.
So had her hair. Straightened somehow.
It had been bleached into a medley of warm and cool blonde shades! And straightened and razor-cut into shoulder-brushing length. She looked like … nobody she knew. A stranger. The Power of Blonde: hide behind your hair color.
Her cover was not blown! It was … better than ever. Hallelujah!
Of course, imagining what the grow-out would be like was a nightmare, but for the moment …
“Pretty foxy.” Her Aunt Kit was standing there, beaming down on her niece. “This girl has a chance at the prize if her attitude improves.”
Thanks be to savvy aunts! What an actress! Still, Kit might be onto something. Temple was still studying herself in the mirror. Dang if the blonde hair didn’t make her green contact lenses even more dominant. An eye of another color was a slim sliver of a disguise but it had worked for Max. Temple guessed that her new pale honey hair would even make her real eye color, a wishy-washy blue-gray in her own opinion, resemble the dangerous, deep steel blue of a Fontana Brother’s Beretta.
“Pink is not her color,” Kit told Adair, “too sweety-sweet with her pale complexion. If she were on one of my book covers, she’d be wearing Nile green or peach velvet.”
Vanetta, the show’s wardrobe witch had appeared as well. “We’ll go with the icy Easter tones … peach, aqua, and pale lilac for her. This will be one of the more dynamic makeovers. From jet black to liquid blonde.”
Vanetta, a brunette and therefore one who might be expected to have issues with blonde, instead grinned from ear to ear. “I love it. I have to put everybody else but that Molina girl in pasty pastels. This honey-warm blonde at least gives me a mid-tone palette to play with.”
Temple was startled to realize that she and Mariah were the only not-blondes in the finals. And also the reason why: in states with a large Hispanic labor force, Anglo women, even natural-born brunettes, didn’t want to be mistaken for “the hired help.”
On the other hand, not being blonde made the two of them stand out in a crowd. For
a wild, wonderful moment, Temple pictured Mariah winning her category, in her glory, going—oh, all right, no dog in a manger, Temple—going to her school father-daughter dance with Matt Devine, a “dad” to die for.
Oops. Another prominent brunet haunted the premises: Rafi Nadir, Mariah’s real father. Temple didn’t see him playing a role in any fairy tale ending except one of the darkest tales by the Brothers Grimm, maybe Iron John.
Meanwhile, the moment was all about her, Xoe Chloe, debunked brunette and closet redhead now transformed into a mainstream blonde bombshell. If only Max could see her now. Not Matt. He didn’t have Max’s theatrical instincts and would probably just be shocked.
“Okay, pumpkin.” Adair the Hair Guy was suddenly her best friend. “What d’ya think?”
Xoe Chloe had only one thing to say to the mirror. “It rocks, dude!” She slapped palms all around and stood up. Her sigh blew snips of hair into a small whirlwind around her.
Still in the game, Temple thought. Who knew a new hairdresser was the best disguise? Probably the eighty million women who patronized them regularly, which had not included her. Until now.
By that afternoon, the ravishing, newly conventional Xoe Chloe had instantly blossomed into the lead in the makeover sweepstakes.
Matte-black Xoe Chloe’d had so far to come that the transformation was breathtaking. Blondes of all description—tall, taller; thin, thinner—darted stiletto glances her way as Temple put in her forty minutes on the elliptical machine and her twenty-minute jog around the Hearst Castle-size pool, slathered in the sun screen recommended for her pale complexion, sweating into her extravagant dye job, which seemed up to the abuse.
It occurred to her that, having proven herself the most dramatic makeover so far, she might also be the freshest candidate for harassment.
Every cloud had its silver lining.
Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit Page 19
