by Ariel Kaplan
“Mischa!” Mom called. “I have my shoes on!”
I held the scissors parallel to my eyebrows. And I cut.
* * *
—
Nate found me in front of my locker fifteen minutes before first period, which was odd because he was never there that early.
“Hey,” he said, his back pressed against the locker next to mine and looking, not at me, but out at the crowd of people milling around. “So I have this theory that it’s the soy milk that’s giving me heartburn, and I’m thinking about switching back to dairy.” When I didn’t answer, he turned and looked at me. “Whoa. Did you get bangs?” He leaned in to inspect my hastily chopped-off hair. “Did you do that yourself?” he asked. “Didn’t we talk about cutting your own hair after the mom-bob incident of 2015?”
“Don’t bring that up.”
“It’s like nineties grunge in the front, party in the back. Is that what you were going for? ’Cause frankly, it’s kind of a mismatch.”
“Nate,” I said. “Please.”
He snapped his mouth shut, put his fingers under my chin, and turned my head slowly left and right. “It’s really not that bad,” he said. “You just need someone with a steady hand to even it out. It looks like you did it with a Weedwacker.”
“I was in kind of a hurry,” I admitted.
“You can go get it fixed after school. I’ll drive you, if you want.”
I met his eyes. He stared at me for a long minute, and I wondered if he could see the word FAILURE written on my retinas. Or maybe it was the fact that I was just trying really, really hard not to cry. Anyway, whatever he saw made him say, “Okay. Let’s go.” And he grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down the hall, in the opposite direction from where we both had first period.
“Where are we going?”
“Art room,” he said. “Mrs. Portland doesn’t teach first period. Should be empty.”
The art room was empty. “Up here,” he said, patting the counter next to the sink and then opening and shutting cabinet doors until he found a plastic box full of scissors. “Here we go.”
I hesitantly hoisted myself onto the counter, my feet dangling several inches over the floor.
“Nate,” I said. “I’m not sure I can fix it. I’m the one who messed it up in the first place.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I’m going to fix it.”
For a second, I really wanted to cry.
He approached with the scissors in one hand; then he flipped his backpack over his shoulder and pulled out a comb.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked.
“I’m very confident in my ability to cut in a straight line,” he said. “Hold still.”
He ran the comb through my bangs a few times to straighten them out and then set it down on the counter next to me. “Don’t move,” he said, his face about six inches from mine. “I’m going to try to even them out without making them any shorter.”
“Okay,” I said, because that sounded like a good plan. I had vivid, awful memories of my mother’s attempts to cut my bangs when I was about eight. They kept being uneven, so she kept cutting them a little shorter until they were an inch and a half long. It had taken six months before they looked normal again. Also, I really, really didn’t want anyone seeing my forehead today.
“Don’t move your head,” he said, holding my chin steady with his left hand. I felt the edge of the scissors skimming my eyebrow from left to right as he took impossibly small snips. I focused on his face to keep from flinching as the cold metal blade skated over my forehead. His lower lip was anchored between his teeth, and his eyebrows were drawn down in concentration. I tried to focus on the little scar under his left eye, but it was hard when I could feel him breathing against my face and he was close enough to kiss. Finally Nate said, “There. I think it’s better now.”
I turned around to look at myself in the mirror behind me. My hedge-trimmer bangs were straight. They weren’t even too short. It looked like something I’d done on purpose, with the aid of an actual hair-cutting professional. Best of all, the eyeliner was completely invisible.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much. You are the best friend in the universe. God.”
I turned around to look at him directly instead of in the mirror. “You’re like a genie. How did you even do that?”
He held his hand out in front of him, palm down, and said, “Steady as a rock.” Then he set both hands on my shoulders and stooped down to meet my eyes. “So do you want to tell me why it says ‘failure’ backward on your forehead?”
That night, I was looking forward to telling my mother that I had been rejected from every last school I’d applied to. I puttered around the kitchen, setting the table and trying to decide the best way of describing my situation, short of just letting her have a look at my forehead.
I wondered if this kind of occasion called for the use of salad forks. Somehow I didn’t think so.
I’d already had to tell her about the other schools. She’d heard about Admissions Day from some friends with high school kids, and she’d asked, so even though I’d really wanted to keep it to myself, I’d had to tell her.
Her face had sort of frozen up—like I’d known it would. She’d hugged me. And she’d told me Revere was lucky to be getting such a great student. But I’d known, even then, that she was disappointed. This, though…I didn’t know how she was going to handle it.
So Mom and I sat down to Chili Night. The idea of filling my stomach with beans sounded particularly awful, and I stirred them around in my bowl.
“Something bothering you?” Mom asked.
I’d been waiting until after dinner to tell her, because I figured she’d take the news better on a full stomach.
“Not really,” I said. “Um. How was work?”
“Oh,” she said. “Same as usual.”
“Fighting the good fight,” I piped in.
“Well, I try. For all the good it does.”
I set down my spoon, because this was a little more cynical than Mom usually got. “What do you mean?”
She put more cheese on top of her chili. “You know, Misch, we’re not playing on a level field. Sometimes it’s just depressing, that’s all. You have no idea how lucky you are.”
“Right,” I said. “I mean, of course I do.”
“Educated parent, middle-class upbringing. Best education you could get. I know it’s rough, being on the lower side of the economic scale at school. But you’re still starting about ten steps ahead of most people.”
I had a sudden urge to fill my mouth with beans.
“I just mean, you’ve had a lot of great opportunities. Even if you end up at Revere next year, you’ll have a real leg up.”
“Mmph,” I said, because my mouth was full.
“So try not to worry too much about it,” she assured me.
“Grumph-umppph,” I said, nodding vigorously.
“You didn’t get your official letter from them yet, did you?”
I put my spoon back in my bowl and carried it into the kitchen. “Not…no. I didn’t get the acceptance yet,” I said. I stuck the bowl in the sink and said, “Is that my phone?”
“I don’t hear it.”
“Oh, yeah! There it is! That must be Nate!”
“Can’t you call him back?”
“I can’t. He’s having an. Um. A crisis.”
“Nate’s having a crisis.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s bad. Bad crisis. Poor Nate.”
“Mischa…”
“I have to go!” I called over my shoulder, scooping up my purse and my keys. “Nate needs me!”
“Nate needs a kick in the butt!”
“Good thing I’m wearing my shoes, then!” I said, and shut the door behind me.
&nb
sp; * * *
—
I got to Nate’s house half an hour later. His sister opened the door for me; she was thirteen and athletic and grumpy. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. Rachel Miller neither liked nor disliked me; I existed outside the scope of her world, which consisted of school, other thirteen-year-olds, and softball. She played on some travel team that had practice or games almost every day, which seemed to have eaten Nate’s parents’ lives, but, on the bright side, it meant that Nate kind of got to do his own thing a lot, since he’d assured everyone that middle school softball was not a good use of his time. “Is Nate here?”
“He reads comic books now,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Mom says he’s regressing.”
“Uh, I’m sure he’s not regressing.” She moved aside so I could come in. She was in her softball uniform, which probably meant she was on her way to practice, because she wasn’t sweaty yet.
“I like your hair,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Nate was sitting in the living room reading while Robbie the robot vacuum zoomed around the room doing its nightly seven o’clock pass. On the coffee table was a fake skull; I patted it on the head as I sat down. “Hey, Maury,” I said, addressing the molded plastic cranium. “Looking good.” Memento Maury was a leftover Halloween decoration from years past; Nate found some kind of perverse pleasure in buying him new accessories whenever he thought of it. Currently he was wearing a beret and false eyelashes. I wondered if they were his mother’s, or if he’d bought them specially. “Where are your parents?”
“Work. Then they’re meeting Rachel at her game.”
“Rachel has a game?”
“Yeah, she’s there now.”
“No, she’s here. She just answered the door.”
“Oh,” he said. “Crap.”
“Were you supposed to take her?”
He turned away from me and shouted, “RACHEL, WAS I SUPPOSED TO TAKE YOU TO SOFTBALL?”
“NO, FATIMA’S PICKING ME UP,” she called back, and then a little more quietly, but not much, she added, “loser.”
“I just love her,” Nate said.
I sat down next to him on the modern, cream-colored couch that was just a tiny bit too firm to really be comfortable. Nate’s whole house was like that—everything was very, very perfect in an interior-design kind of way. Sometimes I thought his mother had just opened a mid-century furniture catalog and ordered one of everything.
On the coffee table were volumes three and four of Inuyasha.
“You’re still reading that?” I asked. “Are there more boobs?”
“In fact, there are!” he said. “But everyone just has the regular number. I feel kind of cheated.”
I picked it up and flipped to a random page. “Wow,” I said, pointing to a really hot girl with long hair and a sword. “How many does she have?”
He glared at me. “That’s Lord Sesshomaru. He doesn’t have any.”
“Oh,” I said, looking closer. “Yeah, you’re right. He’s super hot.”
“You thought he was a girl!”
“Well, now I see he’s not, and I think he’s hot!”
“He’s Inuyasha’s evil brother,” he said. “And he’s super hot.”
“Is everyone in this book super hot?”
“Pretty much. It’s giving me some kind of an existential crisis, though.”
“What? Why?”
He turned the page to show me another character. “Okay, here’s the thing. See, Kagome is really the reincarnation of Kikyo. She’s a priestess, right?”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah, but even though she’s her reincarnation, they aren’t the same person. At all.”
“Well, no, because Kikyo’s dead.”
“She actually comes back to life, but that’s not what I mean. It’s like, I always thought reincarnation meant the same person coming back to life over and over, but they’re two totally different people.”
“Oh. That’s kind of what I thought it meant, too. The coming-back-to-life thing.”
“I know! But it turns out that’s Hindu reincarnation, and Buddhist reincarnation is different.” He handed me another book from the bottom of the stack called Zen Buddhism: A Primer.
I flipped through the first few pages; it was riddled with Nate’s handwriting, and he’d underlined a bunch of passages. Probably this is what he’d been working on instead of his Heart of Darkness paper, which was almost certainly not done yet. “So what did you figure out?”
He took the book back from me. “I’m only on page twenty, but I can tell you with a great degree of certainty that I have no understanding of Buddhism. Or any other Eastern religions, basically. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“There’s probably a class at Emory.”
“There’s probably a department at Emory. I just mean, I feel like I spent eleven and a half years in school, and maybe I should know what reincarnation is.” He leaned back on the couch. “Or which way Japanese books go.” He picked up a plastic tray from the coffee table, which held some kind of frozen chicken dinner. He took a bite and offered me some, which I declined.
“Chili Night,” I said. “I’m kind of disappointed about the not-coming-back-to-life thing, though, because right now I think that might be my only shot.”
“Don’t say that.”
I absentmindedly picked a carrot off the edge of the tray and ate it. It was mushy and tasted like it only dimly remembered having once been an actual vegetable.
“How did your mom take it?” he asked.
“I didn’t actually tell her.”
“What?” he asked, revealing a mouth full of half-chewed chicken. Then: “Pick up your feet.”
I folded my legs under me on the couch as Robbie zipped past, like a motorized Frisbee on a mission. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the vacuum. “I couldn’t. She was giving me the ‘you are so privileged’ speech, and I just couldn’t tell her all my privileged prospects were circling the drain.” I ate another carrot. “Actually, that’s not right. They’re not circling the drain. They have gone down the drain. My prospects have moved into the sewer.”
“The sewer leads to the ocean, eventually,” he offered helpfully.
“You’re right,” I said. “The sewer’s too nice. I need an uglier metaphor.” I slapped the couch. “A septic tank. My future resides in a septic tank. How am I supposed to tell my mother my future is in a septic tank? There’s no way to sugarcoat ‘septic tank.’ The poop goes in, and it doesn’t come back out again. That’s what a septic tank is, Nate.”
“You need to stop saying ‘septic tank.’ ”
“Septic. Tank.”
He rolled his eyes and stuck his tray down on the coffee table. “You can’t just not tell her, though. I mean, you are telling her at some point, right?”
“Of course I’ll tell her. Eventually.”
“Like, before she tries to move you into a dorm at Revere?”
“Yes,” I said, heaving a sigh. “Before that.”
“You know,” he said. “I read some article about a girl in Canada who lied to her parents and told them she’d graduated from high school and was going to some fancy college, and then she got up every morning and went someplace else. I think she kept it up for a couple of years.”
I laughed. The idea was not entirely unappealing. “What tipped them off?”
“Uh, actually, she put a hit on them so they wouldn’t find out.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” he said quickly. “You might not want to let it get that far.”
“I’m not going to murder my mother because I didn’t get into college!”
“So wait,” he said. “Does anyone kn
ow about this but me?”
“Um. No. Just you.”
He scooted away from me on the couch.
“Oh, relax; I’m not going to kill you, either.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what that Canadian girl said, too.”
“Oh, shut up. By the way, if my mom asks, you’re having a crisis.”
“Me? Why am I having a crisis?”
“It was the only way I was getting out of the house.”
“Throw me under the bus, why don’t you.”
“Consider yourself thrown.” I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. “Seriously, Nate. What am I going to do?”
He patted my back. “You’ll figure something out. You can always go to community college and transfer in a year. It’s not the disaster you’re making it out to be.”
“Right,” I said. “Imagine telling my mother she’s been wearing the same pair of shoes for four years, but it’s not a disaster that I’m going to community college next year.”
“It’ll be cheaper, at least,” he said. “She might appreciate that.”
“I guess.”
“Really, though,” he said. “I think you should see Ms. Pendleton tomorrow. Maybe she’ll have a suggestion. Maybe there’re some other schools with late deadlines you can apply to. Or someplace with rolling admissions.”
“I guess,” I said. “You’re probably right.”
“Of course I’m right.” He put his arm around me, and I leaned into him. “Stop thinking about septic tanks.”
“I’ll try,” I said, stifling a yawn. Robbie had finished his chores and plugged himself back into his docking station to charge, so it was suddenly very quiet. “Can we watch a movie?”
“Sure,” he said, digging the remote out from between the couch cushions. “It’s even your turn to pick. See?” He squeezed my shoulders. “Everything’s getting better already.”
I smiled weakly, mostly because I didn’t want Nate to feel like he wasn’t helping. But the truth was, my future had truly, legitimately been flushed.
I woke up in a sweat because I’d had the shower dream again. It was not my favorite, and I had it so often on test nights that I’d actually started expecting it, except I didn’t usually have it on normal nights. It goes like this: I’m in the shower, only somehow the drain stops working, and the whole thing starts filling up with water, faster and faster, until I’m treading water up by the ceiling, and then the water goes up over my head and I realize I’m drowning. The thing is, I don’t have to drown; I could just open the shower door, but my entire calculus class is standing in my bathroom watching, and some of them are, like, taking notes? So if I open it, I will wash out of the shower and wind up naked on my bathroom floor in front of everyone.
