Meanicures

by Catherine Clark

  “You said that I was half the reason for this drastic change,” Mom said. “What’s the other reason?”

  I shrugged, not sure how much I wanted to explain. “I didn’t exactly have what we call a stellar day.”

  “No?” She looked genuinely concerned, but I wasn’t sure if it was about me, or the veggies that were about to burn. She quickly turned it off.

  I saw the video of me on TV in my brain again. “No.”

  “Want to talk about it?” she prompted.

  “Mmm …” I shook my head. “Definitely not.”

  “I’m worried. You’ve had long hair since … since …” She started to sniffle a little bit.

  “Since forever. I know.”

  “Since you were born,” she sniffled.

  “I don’t think I was born with long hair,” I said. “Unless you adopted me from a monkey house.” She still looked sad, so I added, “Mom, you know how it is when something just has to change. And you don’t know what it is, so you try … anything.”

  Mom looked at me as if she was finally getting it. “But, honey … why didn’t you just ask me to stop?”

  “I did ask,” I said.

  “Oh. Yes, I guess you did. But didn’t we have fun—I mean, can’t we still have fun?”

  “Honestly, it was fun, a lot of the time. And I’m glad to help out, and when you featured me on your website, that was really cool,” I admitted. “But lately—the thing is, Mom? I can’t afford to have bad hair days. Ever again.”

  “What? Why not? Did something happen?”

  “That’s kind of an understatement. Someone made fun of my hair this morning. Someone … kind of … cute. And boylike.” Not that I considered Hunter as any sort of potential boyfriend or anything, especially not after today, but he did still count as a boy. Sometimes what they—the boy species—thought counted.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I briefly considered telling her everything: the mean trick with Hunter, the altered news text, the clown face Cassidy had painted on me, the chocolate bras.

  “But maybe he was just trying to be funny. I mean, was it really that bad?” Mom reached out and touched my shorter hair.

  “When I went to get it cut today, the stylist said it looked like peas. Which is funny because Hunter Matthews said it looked like seaweed. Which isn’t as bad as Alexis calling it overcooked spinach.”

  “Ew. Well, what do they know? Green is the new black.” She laughed.

  I glared at her. “Not funny. My hair used to be strawberry blond, remember? Not veggie-green. That edamame concept you had? Not good.”

  “Sorry about that. But why didn’t you let me cut it?” she asked. “I’ve always cut your hair.”

  “I know, but the thing is, Mom? I needed it colored, too. I needed everything to be fixed as soon as possible. And … look. I need to be a little less … experimented on in the future.”

  “Oh.” She put her hand to her throat, which was covered with a pashmina. She nodded. “Okay. I get it, I think.”

  “Thanks.” I headed upstairs to my room.

  “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes!” she called up the stairs after me.

  I’d have to see it to believe it. I dumped my backpack onto my desk, and sat down to snuggle with Rudy for a minute, like I did whenever I got home from school. My cat loves to sleep in my bed when I’m gone—sometimes even under the covers.

  We live on this tiny peninsula jutting out into the ocean. My bedroom has a long, rectangular window that I love to look out of while I lie on my bed writing or talking on the phone. I watch lobster boats, seagulls, sailboats—sometimes even just the clouds. That afternoon the storm was providing lots to admire: crashing surf and water spraying into the wind. I loved it when the sea was dramatic.

  I jumped up and checked my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. The new haircut still looked good. Maybe I’d get sick of looking at it soon, but not yet. I wondered what everyone at school would think when I showed up the next day.

  Did I kind of look more like Gianni, my biological (and so far, only) dad now? Stylish, sort of?

  On my dresser I had a framed photo of me, Mom, and Gianni. I didn’t see him very often, and I didn’t know if it was his fault, my fault, or my mom’s fault. Sometimes I wondered why my mom wanted to do this parenting thing on her own. Sometimes I wish there was another parent around because my mom’s advice isn’t always that helpful.

  Gianni had been a good friend of my mom’s at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where she went to college, living outside of Maine for about ten years. Mom and Gianni both ended up leaving FIT and going into the “hair couture” field instead. Gianni thought it might be a good match for my mom, but he wouldn’t be a good match for my mom because he had a boyfriend.

  Oops.

  She was crushed, or so she says, but they worked it out to become best pals. When she wanted kids but didn’t want to get married (she’s the kind of person who really gets a kick out of doing unusual things, which annoys my grandparents to no end), she decided he was the perfect guy to have them with.

  Sometimes I don’t know why she tells me this stuff, because it’s really personal. You know?

  She named me Madison after Madison Avenue, which I guess is a big destination, fashion-wise. My little brother, Parker? He was also created in a test tube (sorry—TMI), but he wasn’t named after a New York street. He was named after our Grandpa McCarrigan, which made my grandparents a lot more accepting of Mom’s whole single-parent test-tube-babies plan.

  I think when my mom moved back to Maine and started her own business as the shampoo hippie, before she morphed into this corporate, wealthy CEO type who still dressed like a hippie, she was, basically, a flake. Her flakiness still comes through in her creative product ideas, but now she actually gets paid a lot for being flaky. (But not having flakes, à la dandruff. That could be a career killer.)

  Sometimes I think that Olivia must be Mom’s daughter, not me. They can both be so clueless. They should have passports from la-la land.

  Anyway, Gianni’s more like a distant cousin than anything. He sends lots of stuff to me from his work at fashion shows both abroad and in New York, where he’s a hair stylist for a couple of runway supermodels. Sometimes I have some of the coolest clothes at school—especially T-shirts with unique colors, cuts, or logos.

  Not that anyone there recognizes this, or cares. They’re too busy all wearing the same stuff from Abercrombie, L.L.Bean, or Aèropostale.

  The cool thing about being best friends with Cassidy years ago was that she had only her mom, too, so the two of us were in day care together because our moms worked full-time, and nothing seemed off at the time about them being single moms. (Cassidy’s dad had moved about an hour away and she saw him every other weekend.) My mom would always say that “lots of people have different family situations and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Now Cassidy’s mom was remarried so she had a stepfather, and my mom had her on-again, off-again thing with David. He wasn’t part of our family, and he wasn’t not part of it, if that makes any sense.

  Cassidy and I used to be good friends. We attended the same preschool, where we both liked to wear dresses and spin a lot—according to Mom, anyway. I’ve blocked it out. Then, as we got older, we took dance classes together.

  I had an empty fish tank on my big desk, under my loft bed. I used to have fish, but when we moved into this house a few years ago, I started to feel really guilty. Here I was, living right on the water … on the ocean … and then having these captive fish. I wanted to free them but I knew they wouldn’t survive in the cold Atlantic water, but still, it seemed wrong that they had to look at it.

  So when they went to the great fish tank in the sky, I gave them a proper burial at sea and didn’t replace them. Instead, I cleaned out the tank and turned it into a display case for my old dolls and their fashionable outfits. So it’s my doll tank now. They look sort of bizarre, but
it’s like a department store window that I keep designing.

  Looking at my dolls, I thought about how once last year Cassidy and I had taken my Malibu Barbie and turned her into Bar Harbor Barbie for a school project—we’d made orange rubber boots for her, and built a lobster trap from toothpicks. (They tend not to make dolls and toys about Maine because we’re not as glamorous as California—but if you want a red stuffed lobster, there are a hundred to choose from.)

  But sometime last year things changed with Cassidy. It had started out with small things I didn’t really notice at the time. Like one time she uninvited me to a sleepover at her house, telling me at the last second that it was called off. Then I found out at school that it hadn’t been—she’d just decided to invite Alexis instead.

  Or the time we had plans to go to the movies, and she didn’t show up. I finally called her, and she said, “Oh, something came up.”

  It was agonizing at first. I used to lie awake at night and wonder: why did she want to be friends with them, instead of me? Why couldn’t we all be friends, like we used to be?

  There was this weird, almost geological shift happening, like Cassidy and I were two glaciers moving in opposite directions.

  “What happened? You used to be such good friends,” my mom walked around saying, for what seemed like weeks on end.

  “Mom, things change. People change,” I’d try to explain.

  “Not that much.”

  “Yes, they do. You don’t understand!”

  “Just call her,” my mom would say over and over. “It’s a misunderstanding, that’s all. You don’t stop being friends overnight.”

  The first couple of times I took Mom’s advice and called Cassidy, the only person at her house who wanted to talk to me was her mom. She’d go on about how much she missed me, and ask why I hadn’t been to their house lately, but I didn’t want to say, “Because your daughter is being kind of a jerk to me lately.”

  At the same time, my mom was stuck a decade back, wondering why Cassidy and I didn’t wear the same dresses or take ballet anymore.

  Meanwhile, the same thing was happening with Team Tay-Kay, when Kayley decided she wouldn’t do any extra training sessions with Taylor anymore because it “ruined her concentration.” And Olivia and Alexis stopped co-owning the bunny they’d shared for two years because Alexis suddenly decided keeping bunnies as pets was way too juvenile for her.

  Maybe those things wouldn’t have been terrible on their own. People grow apart and all that. But Kayley, Cassidy, and Alexis couldn’t seem to let well enough alone. They had to openly drop us. Repeatedly. In public. They quit riding bikes to school with us, turned the other way when we passed them in the halls, and, worst of all, blocked the chairs around their lunch table when we tried to sit with them the second day of seventh grade. By the time we quit arguing with them about it, we were left with no place to sit, and carried our lunches to a couple of folding chairs in the corner, by the racks where everyone left their dirty dishes and used trays.

  It was beyond embarrassing.

  So, maybe Poinsettia was right.

  Time for big changes.

  Changes were good.

  I heard a noise like something snorting—a small whale, maybe. I turned from the mirror, and there was Parker, standing in the doorway. “What are you doing in here?” I asked. “You’re supposed to knock fir—”

  “Whoa,” he said, stepping back. “I didn’t know the storm was that bad.”

  “What do you mean? The surf?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at the whitecaps in the ocean.

  “No. I mean, it blew your hair away,” he said, laughing.

  “Get out. Out!” I ran over and slammed the door behind him.

  Little brothers should not be seen or heard.

  Maybe I should work on a plan to get him out of my life, too, I thought. As soon as possible.

  Chapter 6

  “Where did you get that adorable cut?” Olivia cried when I walked into the Whale after supper and pulled my umbrella out of the twisting wind. I’d called my friends and asked them to meet me at Olivia’s parents’ restaurant as soon as they were done eating.

  “A new place, on Main Street. Combing Attractions,” I said.

  “It’s really cute!” Olivia ran over to take my raincoat and hang it on the rack just inside the door. “I love it, Madison.” She was already a lot better at talking with her braces.

  Olivia was wearing sparkling silver long-bead earrings. She made all her own jewelry with bead kits, and was always giving us new homemade bracelets and necklaces for presents. I hoped her dangling metal earrings didn’t get caught in her new metal braces. I didn’t know why I thought that, but I did.

  “Never heard of it,” said Taylor. She wore a green Payneston High hoodie, jeans, and blue plaid rain boots that squeaked as she swiveled on the stool. “The color is awesome! So did your mom fix that for you?”

  “I got it fixed myself, actually. At the salon,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were going to get your hair cut?” asked Taylor. “We totally would have gone with you.”

  “Yeah, you ran out on me. I didn’t know where you went,” said Olivia.

  “I don’t know.” I walked over to the counter and slid onto a stool next to Taylor. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it.” I waved hello to Olivia’s mom, who was at the host stand, while her dad was probably somewhere back in the kitchen. They made the best fish chowder for miles around—not to mention their fried clams—but they served seafood lots of different ways, too.

  “Do you remember when Kayley dyed her hair purple, so then I dyed my hair because we were Team Tay-Kay, only mine didn’t come out right and I had that magenta streak straight down the middle like I was a really weird skunk?” Taylor said. “My dad went absolutely ballistic, ‘You have a meet coming up and nobody goes into a meet looking like that, what were you thinking?’ and we had to go to the drugstore and stay up like half the night dying it back to brown, except it was more like black?”

  “How could I forget that?” said Olivia. “I think we went through about eight towels that day. So, if your mom wasn’t there when you got your hair colored, what did she say when she saw it?”

  “She’s trying to deal with it.” On my way out that night, she’d actually admitted that it was not a horrible thing.

  “So. What’s your idea?” Olivia asked. We all scooted in close to the counter.

  I looked over my shoulder at the restaurant to make sure nobody we knew happened to be in hearing range. I caught Cameron Hansen’s eye—he was there with his family—and waved awkwardly. Hi, remember me? The idiot from this morning’s update with the red face and the green hair? Yeah, it’s the new and improved me, now.

  I hope.

  “Well, I was thinking we need to kind of clean the slate, you know, with Cassidy and everyone,” I said.

  “Clean the slate? How?” asked Taylor, squinting at me.

  “When Cassidy and I were friends, we said we’d always, always have our hair long,” I explained. “We had to have the same headbands, the same braids, everything. I just don’t want anything in common with her anymore. I want to cut all our connections.”

  “So, you’re done!” Olivia gave me a high five. “Hair cut, mission accomplished.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it’s only a start.”

  “Um … what do you mean?” asked Olivia. “Are you planning to cut it even shorter?”

  I laughed. “No—I just meant it’s the start of something.”

  “You’re losing me,” she said. “Have a fry.”

  “What are you thinking?” Taylor asked me. “You sound like you have a plan.”

  I shook my head and felt the strange sensation of my short hair moving on my neck. “Here’s the thing. While I was having my hair cut, this other stylist kept talking about breaking up with this guy, and my stylist said she should write him a letter
and then burn it. She said it would help her get him out of her life. He’d leave her alone after that,” I explained.

  “Burn his name? And a letter?” Olivia shook her head. “Sounds crazy. Who is this person, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. She was coloring my hair at the time. I might have missed some of the details,” I admitted with a smile. “But just think about it for a sec,” I urged. “We want the mean girls out of our lives, right? We want them to stop harassing us. So why not give the same thing a try?”

  “Sure,” said Olivia, spraying me a little. “Something like that, maybe. But … that?”

  “I just wish I could completely ignore them,” I said. “I hate that it matters to me what they think or do, when they obviously don’t care about us.”

  “I know, it’s not logical,” Taylor added. “I keep trying not to care if Kayley does better than me this year or whether she goes to state or whatever.” She sighed. “But I do. So then I tell my mom, and she’s like, well, you just have to be teammates, you don’t have to be friends, that’s part of growing up, blah blah blah.” She paused. “So what were you saying, Madison?”

  I drained the last of my soda and pushed the glass away. “I want us to have a good-bye party for them.”

  “A party with them?” Olivia asked. “Are you nuts?”

  “She didn’t say with them,” Taylor pointed out. “She said for them. As in, good-bye. To get them out of our lives. Right?” She looked at me, and I nodded.

  “Well … how?” asked Olivia.

  “That’s the part I don’t know yet,” I said. “I was hoping we could use your computer and look up some ideas. I mean, I know we can have the party at my house. We have a fireplace and we can definitely burn their names. But what else?”

  “Let’s see.” Olivia had her computer on the counter, where she often sat to do her homework while her parents worked. She looked over at the two of us. “What are we talking here? A witch thing? Witch dot com?”