Love is a Four-Letter Word

by Vikki VanSickle

  “I guess,” I say.

  “How long have they been dating?” Michael asks.

  “They’re not dating,” I say sharply.

  “Oh. It seemed like they were.”

  “If you were on a date, would you sit with your kid and her badminton partner?” Michael looks hurt. I’m not sure if it’s because I insinuated that he wasn’t cool enough to warrant Doug’s attention or because I called him my badminton partner and not my date. I back-pedal a little. “It’s too early to really say if they’re dating or not,” I mutter.

  Michael nods, like he understands. “That must be weird, your mom dating,” he says. “I can barely stand it when my parents get all lovey-dovey, and they’ve been kissing in front of me my whole life.”

  I almost stop walking. “You think they kiss?”

  “Who?”

  “My mom and Doug!”

  Michael looks at me like I’ve been living under a rock. “Well, probably. They’re adults. Everybody kisses.”

  Now we’ve stopped walking. Is it my imagination, or is Michael standing a little closer? He clears his throat and his eyes get all shifty. One second they’re looking at me, the next they’re landing on my mouth, then over my shoulder. I feel cold and hot all at once. I rub my arms to make the feeling go away and start to walk — a little faster now. “Well, not in front of me they don’t.”

  Michael hurries to catch up. We walk the rest of the way home in silence. Finally we’re at the house. “Here we are!” I say brightly. I sound fake, even to myself. I just want to get in the door and away from any possible kissing. My heart is banging around in my chest so loudly it’s a miracle that Michael hasn’t heard it. It makes my hands shake as I fumble for my key.

  “Thanks for walking me,” I say.

  Michael shrugs. “No problem.” He smiles and takes a step toward me. “I had a nice time.”

  “Me, too.” After a second I add, “I should probably head in.”

  Michael nods, but makes no move to leave. “Okay.”

  “I’d invite you in, but my mom probably wouldn’t like it.”

  “That’s okay. … You’re a really good badminton player, Clarissa.” Before I can say anything he goes on, “And you’re really smart, too.”

  “I’m not, really. I can think of ten people in our class alone who are smarter.”

  “I can’t,” Michael says. He takes another step toward me. He is now standing in the circle of yellow light cast by the porch lamp.

  “You’re really good, too,” I say lamely, fumbling for the doorknob. “At school and badminton.” I glance wildly at Benji’s house, to see if maybe he’s sitting in the window, but it’s completely dark. Probably out with his theatre friends at karaoke or something. I feel abandoned. Michael closes the gap between us, one shuffley step at a time.

  “See you Monday!” I manage to turn the key and shove the door open with my shoulder in one smooth motion. I don’t even turn around to wave. Inside, I lean against the door until I’m sure that Michael has left. I close my eyes and take deep calming breaths through my nose until my heart stops hammering against my chest. For some reason, tears form at the corners of my eyes. I sniff them back, furiously. I don’t know why I’m so upset. The thought of kissing makes my head spin and my palms clammy. But the thought of Michael walking home all dejected makes me feel even worse.

  What’s wrong with me? If I had been Mattie or any other girl in the class I would probably be skipping off to call my best friend to tell her all about my magical first kiss with Michael. Instead, here I am, snivelling away in the dark, because I’m too chicken. It’s not that I don’t want to kiss him ever, I just don’t want to kiss him right now or in the immediate future. Somehow I doubt that will make Michael feel better. Mattie’s right, I am abnormal. Michael deserves someone else. Someone who, at the very least, would be happy to kiss him.

  Later, at Mattie’s, drinking hot chocolate made with real milk and mini-marshmallows, I tell her the whole story — except for the part about me crying in the dark.

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?” I ask, fully expecting her to yell at me about how I totally blew the perfect moment.

  “No,” she says. “You’re a romantic. You might not think you are, but I can tell. You want your first kiss to be the right person at the right time.”

  I consider this for a moment before asking, “What if it was the right person at the right time and I totally ruined it?”

  “No,” Mattie says thoughtfully. “Right person, wrong time. I totally believe that you and Michael are destined to be together. You’re just not ready. And that doesn’t make you a baby,” she adds quickly. “It makes you smart.”

  I feel warm and fuzzy, and not just from the hot chocolate. “Michael said I was smart,” I remember.

  Mattie rolls her eyes. “That’s because you are.”

  “So are you. You’re incredibly wise and you make the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had.”

  Mattie giggles. “You know, it’s probably a good thing you didn’t kiss tonight.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because you must have had terrible pizza breath.” I throw a marshmallow at her head but at the last second she bobs up and catches it in her mouth. We both burst out laughing.

  “Nice reflexes,” I say. “Too bad you couldn’t use them in badminton.”

  Mattie gasps and for a split second I worry that maybe it was too soon for that kind of comment, but she grins, grabs a handful of marshmallows, and starts launching a counterattack. “Take it back!” she laughs.

  “Never!” I cry, and we continue throwing marshmallows at each other until Cheryl comes into the kitchen and tells us to keep it down.

  Trim

  I make it through breakfast and most of the morning without having to revisit the double date debacle with my mom, until she knocks on my bedroom door and says, “Are you still in your pyjamas?” Followed immediately by, “It’s time for a cut.”

  I run my hands as best as I can through the tangled mess that sticks out from my head in all directions. “I like it this length.”

  “A trim, then.”

  To the untrained ear my mother’s voice seems light, but I can hear the iron in it. It’s no use. I’m caught. “Okay,” I agree, and follow her downstairs to the Hair Emporium.

  Normally, Mom would flip on the radio and hum along (off key) as she sets up her arsenal, but today she gets right down to business. I climb into the chair. The leather squeaks under my thighs. It’s the only sound in the otherwise creepily silent salon. Mom runs her fingers through the length of my hair — a little forcefully, if you ask me — barking instructions. “Tilt your head. Now to the left. Look straight ahead. Hmmm …”

  I so desperately want to make conversation about something, anything, but the only thing I can think about is the double date, which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid, and so I don’t say a word, even as Mom spritzes my face instead of my hair and digs the comb into my scalp. There is nothing worse than a silent salon. Mom says it’s a sign of mistrust between the stylist and her client.

  I clear my throat about a million times, but the only thing I manage to get out is, “Not too much off.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mom says breezily, “you’re in good hands.” She fans the apron around me and snaps it tightly around my neck. The thing about getting your hair cut is there’s nowhere to go. You’re trapped in the chair at the mercy of a woman with scissors. And sometimes a razor. “So. How is Mattie?”

  “Fine. We had hot chocolate.”

  “When was this?” Mom asks.

  “Last night.”

  “What time last night? Because I seem to recall seeing you at Pizza Hut around seven-thirty.”

  Well what do you say to that? “I guess it was closer to eight-thirty.”

  “So this is after you went to Pizza Hut …” Mom presses.

  “Yes.”

  “… with Michael …”

  “Yes.”


  “… who is your badminton partner.”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting.” Mom cuts furiously. I am worried about the amount of hair that is piling up on the floor at my feet. “Aren’t you going to ask me how my night was?” she asks.

  “How was your night?” I say obediently.

  Mom smiles, but it’s a little too maniacal to put me at ease. “Wonderful. I had a lovely time with Doug, who is just as sweet as pie. We had dinner and saw a movie. Thank you for asking.”

  I squirm in my seat. It’s hot under this apron. “So, you’re dating? For real?”

  Mom stops cutting and looks at me in the mirror. “Yes. We’re dating. For real. Are you dating?”

  “No!”

  Mom narrows her eyes. “Are you sure? Because it certainly looked like you were on a date.”

  “It wasn’t a date. We had to use up those gift certificates, otherwise they’d go to waste. You can’t not use gift certificates …” I trail off, painfully aware of how lame I sound.

  “Will there be more dates?” Mom asks.

  I shrug. “Maybe. No. I don’t know. It’s not like you and Doug.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean I’m not going to spend all my time talking to him or about him or bonding with his stupid dog.”

  Mom puts both hands on the chair and turns it so we’re face to face. “What is wrong with you? So you get to go gallivanting with a boy I barely know and I can’t spend a few hours with Doug, who has been nothing but kind to you? Don’t I get to be happy, too?” she asks.

  “So I make you unhappy?”

  “Clarissa, don’t do this. You’re twisting my words. Of course I’m happy with you. Maybe right now I’m not ecstatic with your behaviour, but I’ve never been anything but thrilled about you. But I am an adult, and I get to go on dates and have fun and fall in love if I want to.”

  “Fall in love?” I repeat.

  “Yes, fall in love. Haven’t I earned that?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Good. Then we agree.” For a second I think that’s it and she’ll go back to being the stylist and I’ll go back to being the client and in ten minutes I can run as far away from this salon as possible. But she continues. “Honestly, the way you’ve been behaving you’d think you were the most hard done by kid in the world. Have I ever, to your recollection, brought a man home for dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Or gone out on a real, bona-fide date?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. You know, there are some single women out there who never let their kids get in the way of their love lives. I could have had a whole string of men, but I didn’t. That’s not me. This is my life, you and this salon, and that’s fine with me. But then someone like Doug comes along and you think, maybe there could be something more, you know?”

  I don’t know. This isn’t really the kind of conversation I want to have with my mother. I don’t like to hear how the salon and I are suddenly not enough for her. A wild wave of rage like I haven’t felt in ages washes over me and I have to grip the sides of the chair to stay calm. I’m not mad at her, not really; I’m mad at the universe or God or whatever supposedly greater power it was that poisoned my mom’s body with cancer and wrecked everything. Before the cancer, we never fought like this. Before the cancer, the salon and I were enough for her, there was no Doug. So what if the surgery is done and the chemo is over and her hair is growing back; here we are, a year later, and cancer is still ruining our lives.

  “Like you and Michael. What’s going on there?” my mom continues. “I didn’t even know you played badminton. How do you think it feels to learn about your daughter winning a badminton championship in front of someone else? I’ll tell you how I felt: I felt like a bad mother.”

  “You’re not a bad mother.”

  “But I felt like one.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Mom stops cutting and sighs, looking at me in the mirror. “What happened to us?” she asks. “We used to tell each other things.”

  I shrug. I don’t know what happened. Somewhere along the line, some things became too hard to say out loud. It’s easier to not say anything at all.

  Mom tucks a damp strand of hair behind my ear. “I want us to be able to tell each other things again,” she says. “Don’t you?”

  I shrug. I start to say I guess, but the look on my mother’s face is so heartbreaking that I change my mind and say as firmly as I can, “Yes, I do.”

  She smiles and loosens the waves of my hair with her fingers. “There. I feel better. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  The Benj

  “What’s that noise?” Mom asks, glancing at one of the windows in the salon. Loud, obnoxious laughter filters through the screen and disrupts the peace and quiet of the Hair Emporium. Ambiance is everything to my mom. She frowns slightly and turns the volume on the radio up a notch.

  Dolly, one of her oldest and most loyal clients, sniffs in distaste. “Teenagers,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  I clear my throat. I may not be loud and obnoxious, but I am still technically a teenager and I take offense to that eye roll.

  “Sorry, Clarissa,” Dolly apologizes. “I can’t imagine you making such a fuss.”

  “That’s because I wouldn’t,” I say.

  “That’s my girl, thirteen going on sixty-five,” Mom says. She smiles and I smile back. Ever since my impromptu haircut we’ve been very polite with each other.

  Dolly wags her finger at my mom. “Nothing wrong with sixty-five,” she scolds.

  “Oh, Dolly, you don’t look a day over fifty,” Mom says, and the two of them laugh. She looks back at the window. “I may be wrong, but it sounds like it’s coming from Benji’s place.”

  “No, not Benjamin, he’s such a sweet boy,” Dolly protests. “Speaking of boys, I hear you found yourself a man, Annie.”

  “A girl can’t keep a secret in this town,” Mom says, grinning slyly.

  “I’ll go check on that noise,” I offer, before she can delve into all the details. But neither Mom nor Dolly look over from their conversation. I hop up from my perch at the hair dryer where I’ve been flipping through an old magazine looking for alcohol ads for my advertising project. It’s not due for two weeks, but without Benji to entertain me I’ve been disturbingly productive where schoolwork is concerned.

  Upstairs, I pause in the living room and peer out the curtains in the bay window. Sure enough, Benji and his theatre friends are draped all over his front porch, chatting. One of them, a girl with a long, thick braid reaching almost to her waist, sits cross-legged on the grass, occasionally stretching an arm over her head. She is clearly a dancer. A blonde girl with dark glasses keeps taking her hair down and then rearranging it in various ponytails, almost like she has a tic. Either that or the boy she’s talking to makes her nervous. He looks like he spends a lot of time at the gym, but he has unfortunate hair that looks like it would be curly if he would just let it grow a little bit. Instead, it sticks out all over his head in a dense fuzzy mess, like a Brillo pad. All three of them look like they’re in high school; I don’t recognize any of them from Ferndale.

  Benji sits next to Charity, she of the siren-red locks and professional resumé. The other three keep trying to engage Benji and Charity in conversation. I can hear them from my secret post by the window. Each one is louder than the next.

  “I don’t like the new choreographer either,” the dancer says, pulling her feet in to touch her thighs. She is incredibly flexible. “She’s trying too hard. I mean, it’s community theatre, half the cast has never been to a dance class before. It took the Munchkins a half-hour to get the box step down pat, how does she expect them to master a real jazz combination?”

  Glasses snorts and does an impression of someone, a Munchkin I guess, flailing her arms and falling all over the porch steps. The group bursts into laughter. They grab their stomachs or slap the porch and wipe tears from
their eyes. I’ve never seen a group of people laugh so hard in my life. It doesn’t seem real, it’s like they’re acting all the time. I’m exhausted just watching them. Benji wraps his arms around his legs and giggles madly into his knees.

  I feel weird listening to them, like I’m spying. I know I should go over and say hello but I can’t shake the feeling that maybe Benji doesn’t want me there. If he did, wouldn’t he have invited me over when he got home from rehearsal? No. I’m being ridiculous. I can’t sit here hiding behind the curtain all day. Benji is my best friend, why shouldn’t I go over and say hello?

  I slip out the back door. Benji looks over as the screen door slams behind me. His face lights up and the knots in my stomach melt away. “Clarissa!” he exclaims. He sounds genuinely happy to see me.

  “Hey,” I say, disguising my nerves with a casual tone and praying that no one saw me hiding behind the curtains in the bay window.

  The theatre kids smile at me and practically fall all over each other to shake my hand and introduce themselves. Glasses turns out to be Mika, the dancer is Katie, and the boy goes by Beckett.

  “Beckett?” I repeat.

  The boy shrugs. “Yeah, I know, it’s weird. My mom named me after this playwright no one’s ever heard of.”

  “Excuse me,” Mika interrupts, “but Samuel Beckett is a revolutionary playwright. It’s not like he’s someone obscure, like Wycherly or Albee.”

  Charity and Katie laugh. Beckett rolls his eyes.

  “Can you imagine if your mom named you Albee?” Katie says.

  “Okay, so no one but hardcore drama students like you dorks has ever heard of him,” Beckett says.

  “Beckett’s mom teaches drama at the high school,” Charity says. “She also directs all the major Gaslight Community Players shows.”

  I guess this explains the Beckett thing.

  “Not all of them,” Beckett protests.

  “All of the good ones,” Mika says. “We are seriously lucky to have her.” I wonder who Mika is more in love with, Beckett or his director mother.