Cycler

by Lauren McLaughlin

  My eyes fall on a cluster of beauty implements bunched into a small white coffee cup on the counter. Tweezers, makeup brushes, a nail file, a tiny pair of nail scissors.

  Nail scissors.

  I rush to them and flick them open and shut. Staring into the mirror, I watch as my sad face comes alive with a new sense of purpose. A guy could do a lot of damage with nail scissors.

  A lot of damage.

  June 1

  Jill

  “Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!”

  Metal on metal. The clatter and cachink of the new lock. Then the bedroom door flies open and Dad rushes in.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he says.

  Mom rushes in still wet from the shower and wrapping a towel around herself. “What’s going—” She freezes when she sees me, her hair fizzing with shampoo. “What happened to your—” She comes at me slowly, wet arms outstretched as if she were preparing to capture a dangerous moth. “Are you hurt?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  I can’t take my eyes off the mirror.

  “Jill, honey?” she says.

  “I haven’t done Plan B yet, Mom. I still remember—Oh mal!”

  Him! Jack. The nail scissors!

  I cover my face with my hands. Peering between two fingers, I look at the mirror again. It’s still there. That hideous, mal thing is staring back at me with my own eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Mom says.

  “It’s not okay!” I say.

  Dad chews violently on his thumbnail. “What should we do?” he says. “Helen, what do we do?”

  Mom turns on him like a viper. “Shut up.” Then she faces me with a forced calm. “It’s okay. Let me just have a closer look.” She kneels on the edge of the bed, pulling her towel up with her. She inspects my neck and arms, then pulls the covers down over my naked torso. In the doorway, Dad turns and starts pacing just outside in the hallway. Mom looks up and down my legs. “Are you hurt anywhere, sweetie?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

  She steps off the bed, holding her towel closed, and has another look at me, trying—and totally failing—to appear unfazed. “Everything looks okay,” she says.

  “Everything does not look okay, Mom.” I face the mirror again. “Look at me!”

  “Shhh,” she says. “Jill. Listen to me. Jill.”

  I pull my eyes away from the ghoulish creature staring at me in the mirror.

  “Jill,” she says. “I want you to do Plan B. Okay?”

  “But—”

  Mom puts her hands on my shoulders. “You can do it, honey. Look in the mirror.”

  I look in the mirror again. Staring back is indeed my face. My girl face, my girl eyes, my girl nose and mouth. But something’s missing.

  Most of my hair.

  Cruel shingles of it poke from the right side of my head. On the left, I am almost completely bald except for a cluster of scabby wounds where Jack cut it so close he nicked my scalp.

  Panic rises like bile, but I keep staring at my reflection. I do not look at my parents in the edges of my peripheral vision. I focus on my eyes. That’s what matters. Not this scabby head.

  When I’ve taken in the image, I lie down and close my eyes.

  “I am all girl,” I say.

  The black dot pops into view in the center of my forehead. I love that dot. Sometimes I think it’s the only reliable thing in my life. I repeat the mantra as the black dot expands; then I project Jack’s four days onto the blackness.

  His face, his hands, the nail scissors.

  “I am all girl.”

  The crisp image of his hair falling into the damp sink.

  “I am all girl.”

  The beads of sweat on his determined face, the stink of his armpits as he paces the room.

  “I am all girl.”

  His hunger, his hard-on, his longing for Ramie.

  “I am all girl.”

  His rage, his envy, his lust.

  “I am all girl.”

  All of it projected like a scary movie until I fade it all the way to black.

  I let the blackness calm me for a moment; then I project my own face onto it. It’s frightened, butchered, but most importantly, all girl.

  When I’ve absorbed it in all of its pure femininity, I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling. He’s gone. All of him. Even his dreams.

  We don’t bother with French toast this morning. Instead, Mom cuts off the hair on the right side of my head to even it out. Then she digs out the Yellow Pages and flips it open to the wig page.

  Meanwhile, Dad comes up from the basement holding a disgusting trucker cap that reads “#1 Dad.” “I found this,” he says. “Until you get the right wig.”

  Mom and I look at each other.

  “No good?” he says.

  “Richard,” Mom says. “Why don’t you go upstairs and grab Jill’s pink hoodie sweatshirt, which is usually hanging from a hook on the inside of her closet.”

  “But Mom,” I say. “I never wear the hood up. I’ll look like a girl gangster.”

  “It’s temporary,” she says. “Richard?”

  Dad faces me with that “poor little dear” look, then rushes upstairs.

  Mom runs her finger down the list of wig stores, then rips the whole page out.

  “Where are we going?” I say.

  “Burlington,” she says.

  “Not the Burlington mall,” I say. “We could deeply run into someone there.”

  “It’s not at the mall,” she says. “And it’s Friday morning. We’re not going to run into anyone.”

  Dad comes back and hands me my pink hoodie. The soft fuzzy underside pulls at the scabs on my head. I check out my reflection in the microwave door. “I should put on some makeup.”

  Mom scrutinizes me, then nods. I run upstairs, grab my makeup bag and decide to put it on in the car.

  Dad doesn’t come with us. I can’t remember the last time he left the house. I think he’s becoming agoraphobic, but now is not the time to ponder such freakitudes. Mom and I drive down Main Street in the opposite direction of the high school. Never taking her steely gaze from the road, Mom digs around in her purse for a stick of gum. She always chews gum when she’s nervous.

  I flip the visor down and look at my hideous head in the mirror. “I look like a mental patient,” I say. “How can I face Tommy looking like this?”

  Mom chomps her gum. “You’re not going to look like this, honey. You’re getting a wig, and everything will be fine.”

  Fine. Sure, everything will be fine. Everything’s always fine. I think Mom believes that if she keeps insisting on this delusion, one day it will come true.

  I am not so deluded.

  I examine one of the scabs on the left side of my head. “Mom,” I say. “Do you think Jack intentionally cut into the skin, or do you think he was just trying to cut the hair too close?”

  “Let’s not overanalyze what Jack does,” she says. “The important thing is containment.”

  I flip the visor back up. “Yeah, Mom, but we don’t have containment. He may be locked up in my room, but what’s to prevent him from doing something else? Something worse?”

  Mom chomps her gum like it’s the last piece on earth.

  “Tranquilizers,” she says.

  “What?”

  She narrows her eyes at the road.

  “Mom, are you serious?”

  Chew, chomp. Chew, chomp.

  “Wouldn’t that be kind of dangerous?” I say.

  Mom glances at me for a second, then returns her eyes to the road. “I’ll look into it, honey.”

  By “look into it,” she means she’ll test them on herself first, like she did with that estrogen stuff.

  “No, Mom,” I say. “No way.”

  Chew, chomp. Chew, chomp.

  Besides—and I don’t say this part out loud—something about it seems wrong. Tranquilizing Jack is tantamount to murdering him. He doesn’t deserve that, does he?

  Does he?

 
; “Mom,” I say. “Promise me you’re not going to start experimenting with tranquilizers.”

  Mom puts her hand on my knee. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll slip them into Dad’s jasmine tea first.”

  “Mom!”

  “I’m kidding.”

  Up ahead is a sign for Route 114. With maximum efficiency, she signals and merges right, her jaw making mincemeat of that poor stick of gum.

  The lady in the first wig store is about one hundred years old and deeply in love with the 1950s. Almost every wig is brunette and styled in a bouffant, including the one she’s wearing. Mom and I try out a couple and realize there is no way I can pull off a single one of them unless I want to look like Annette Funicello.

  The next store is in a strip mall in Saugus and features mostly bright pink, blue and neon green costume wigs. At the end of one narrow aisle is a single long, straight, brown wig that looks vaguely normal. Mom tugs me toward it, then lifts it from its mannequin head and puts it on me. Hands on my shoulders, she guides me to a dirty heart-shaped mirror hanging crookedly from a metal post. I can barely get far enough away from it to see. Way-too-loud techno music blares at us.

  “I think it’s the wrong color,” I say.

  Mom exhales through her nose, then approaches the goth store clerk slumping by the cash register.

  “Can that one be dyed?”

  The goth clerk mouths “What?” through black lips.

  Mom raises her voice and asks again.

  The girl shakes her head.

  I take it off and place it back on the mannequin. Crooked. On purpose. I swear the whole place smells like marijuana.

  Mom waits for me by the door, holds it open, then says “thank you” to the girl in a tone that completely reverses its meaning.

  In the strip mall parking lot, I sit in the passenger seat, staring at Route 1. Every car whizzing by makes me sink deeper into my hoodie. With the torn-off sheet from the Yellow Pages in her lap, Mom starts calling every wig store on the North Shore with detailed questions.

  While she does this, I put my feet up on the dashboard and try to figure out what exactly Jack was hoping to accomplish with this “haircut.” I mean, obviously, he was acting out because we locked him in the bedroom. But did he honestly think we’d react by setting him free? Is this some kind of deluded brinkmanship? I thought he was on board with our arrangement. He’s never complained about it before. All of a sudden, he’s stalking my best friend and cutting off my hair. What’s that about?

  Maybe I shouldn’t have “deleted” him so quickly after I woke up. Maybe I should have allowed my memory to wander into Jacktime a little. Know your enemy, and all that. When did Jack become my enemy?

  “Thirty-two Franklin Street?” Mom says into the phone. “Off of Boylston?” Shoving the cell phone between her ear and shoulder, she snaps her fingers and points to the glove compartment.

  I dig out the atlas.

  “All right,” she says into the phone. “And you’re sure you have a natural-looking medium-brown to auburn wig? Straight?” She nods. “Okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” She hangs up and looks at me. “This is not going to be cheap.” She folds the torn-off Yellow Pages sheet and slips it into her purse. “And we have to go to Boston.” She says “Boston” the way someone else would say “hell.”

  “Really?” I say.

  She nods, then reverses the Saab out of its spot. “Whatever it takes,” she says. “We can sell it on eBay when your hair grows back.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  We wait forever at the exit until there’s a gap between two cars just wide enough to rocket between. I pull my pink hoodie down low, over my eyebrows, nearly over my eyes.

  Technically, the strip mall we’ve just departed is only fifteen minutes from Theatrical Features, a.k.a. “the wig store,” in Boston. But this is Boston, after all, so it takes us a full two hours to find the place. Mom hates—I mean hates—driving in Boston, and I don’t blame her. Whoever designed these streets was clearly on crack. It’s amazing that there are enough smart people here to fill up Harvard and MIT. Oh, and don’t bother asking anyone for directions. Giving strangers confusing, vague or intentionally wrong directions is Boston’s number one hobby. After circling Government Center four times in search of Franklin Street, Mom pulls into the nearest parking garage and we decide to walk the rest of the way.

  As soon as we emerge from the cool, dark garage into the sunlit, jam-packed sidewalks of Government Center, I want to curl up and die. I know no one can tell I’m butchered and scabby under my pink hoodie, but I feel like such a dork. Mom asks a cop to direct us to Franklin Street. It’s three left turns, followed by a right turn, a circle, a square and a squiggle. Eventually, we find the entrance to Theatrical Features in the side of an old brick warehouse. Mom takes my hand and we wait in the dark entrance, where shelves overflow with gloves, hats and a gazillion other accessories. Hearing the entrance bell, a thirtyish gay guy steps out from behind a counter displaying about six hundred types of black leather gloves.

  “Hi,” he says. “These aren’t for sale or rent,” he explains. “It’s my personal collection.”

  Mom smiles her manic robot smile as if it will protect her from this guy’s flamboyant homosexuality. She’s not a homophobe or anything. It’s just that whenever she meets anyone who is in any way outside of the norm, she makes such a huge effort of not noticing or judging that it becomes obvious that she’s noticing and judging. Me, on the other hand? I’m dating a bisexual guy, so I’m not even fazed by this.

  “What can I do for you?” he says.

  “I called about the wigs?” Mom says. “Natural hair, medium-brown to auburn?”

  “Ah.” He claps his hands and looks around as if in search of a nearby display of wigs. “I’m Charles, by the way.”

  Mom nods.

  He puts his very small hand very gently on Mom’s shoulder. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.” He gestures like a game show host to two ancient wingback chairs tucked under and somehow into a display of giant candy canes. Then he rushes off down a corridor jammed on either side with ball gowns, riding crops, cowboy boots, baseball hats and every type of petticoat you could ever need. If you needed that kind of thing. The whole place is one sneeze away from a costume avalanche.

  Mom sighs, then sits down. “I think we’ll find what we need here.”

  A few minutes later, Charles returns through a different corridor, his left hand draped with what looks like a wet muskrat.

  “Here we go,” he says. He stands in front of us and presents the thing on his fist, bangs front. “Now, you’re going to be putting this on yourself, I take it?” He cocks his head and purses his lips as he looks at me. He probably thinks I’m a cancer patient. “Listen.” He runs his slender fingers through the thick brown bangs. “Bangs,” he says. “Bangs are essential unless you’re very adept at placement.” He examines my face from side to side. “You’ve got a cute nose, so you can wear bangs. Let’s give it a try.”

  I pull the hoodie off my scabby head.

  Trying valiantly to hide his curiosity, he removes a thin mesh skullcap from the black nylon utility belt he’s put on. “Why don’t you put this on first?”

  I try to stretch it from front to back, but it keeps snapping back. Mom holds one end of it and we spread it out above my head.

  “That’s it,” he says. “You need to be able to do this on your own. Now, watch the ears.”

  I guide it down to just above my eyebrows and pull it into place.

  “Excellent.” He adjusts it back a bit on my forehead, then fits the wig on top of it.

  The color is pretty close to my natural color, if less mousy. It’s a shortish bob with heavy bangs.

  Mom has a look and nods approvingly. “Not bad,” she says.

  “It’s not too frumpy, is it?” I say. “I don’t want to look like a soccer mom.”

  “Soccer mom?” Charles removes a long, thin metal comb from his utility belt. “Ple
ase. Did you see Chicago? It’s practically Velma.” Very carefully, he combs out some tangles.

  I look at myself in the mirror and have to admit there’s a sort of vintage chic to it.

  “You like it, honey?” Mom says.

  There’s a softness in her voice. She’s relieved. We’ve won this round. We’ve beaten Jack, my brand-new enemy.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Then I look at Charles, who’s eyeballing the wig in search of microtangles to vanquish with his surgical comb.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” he says with a wink. “Wigs are what we do.”

  The whole way home, I stare at myself in the mirror, pushing my seat as far back as possible to take in the full shape of my head.

  “It makes me want to do jazz hands, Mom.”

  Mom sneaks a quick look at me, then merges onto Route 114.

  “It’s classic,” she says. “It’s a style that never goes out of style.”

  I turn to the side to examine my profile. “It doesn’t make my nose look big, does it? You know, the bangs?”

  “You don’t have a big nose, sweetie. I’m a little concerned about your mouth, though.”

  I face the mirror full on. It’s true. I have a big mouth. That’s why I wear my hair layered. Thing is, I’ve never minded my big mouth. I think there’s something kind of cool about it.

  I purse my lips, then smile wide. I’ve never looked so not me. “I like it,” I tell her.

  “When we get home,” Mom says, “I want to put it through some tests. Make sure it’s secure.”

  I still can’t peel my eyes from the mirror. “Does it look like real hair?”

  “It is real hair.”

  “But does it look like real hair?”

  She turns onto Trask Road and pulls over for a second. Then she faces me with a scientist’s eye. “It does,” she says.

  We head down Trask Road toward our house and who do we spot sitting on the cement flower bed at the top of the steps, drinking something from a cruddy jam jar with Dad?