End of the Innocence (14 page)

Sammy actually covered her mouth when she saw it.

“Try this on,” he said, handing it over to her reverently. She took it like it was made of spun crystal instead of cloth and thread. He pointed to the girl’s dressing room, and she took off like an Olympic sprinter. As soon as the door closed, he turned back to me. “And you were looking for something in a flour sack?”

I bit the inside of my cheek to prevent me from saying something I would regret. “Can you help me or not?”

He rolled his eyes as he walked toward the men’s clothing. “Well, I am not a miracle worker, but I can find you clothes.”

“Why are you so shitty toward me?” I asked as he looked through the racks.

He looked over at me and saw the look on my face and realized I wasn’t joking. “Well… because I am willing to bet no one has ever talked to you like this.”

“That is a good thing.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s not. You never had a big brother, and you need one. I mean, look at you,” he said, gesturing at me. “You’re smarter than anyone in this town, you have a brain that can think circles around the best minds I’ve ever met, and you waste it stumbling over your own feet and hiding in your boyfriend’s shadow.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he ignored me. “You have the opportunity to really change things around here, and instead you’re going to waste time trying to be normal.” He grabbed a shirt off the rack. “Trust me on this, Kyle, normal is highly overrated.” He handed me a pair of pants and a jacket. “You spend your life trying to be average, and you might just end up succeeding.” He pointed toward the changing room. “And then you’ll be just like everyone else. Won’t that be nice?”

I took the clothes and beat a retreat to the changing room.

I began to put them on angrily as I finished the argument safely in my head. There was nothing wrong with being normal. Normal was… well, normal, and it was what people looked for. That was why abnormal was a bad thing, and what did he know about me? I didn’t hide behind anything, much less Brad. Just because he’d lived in places other than Foster didn’t mean he knew anything.

I stomped out of the dressing room and looked in the mirror.

“Fuck, he did it
again!
” I muttered as I stared at myself in the clothes.

I had no idea how he did it, but once again the clothes had somehow transformed me from being mild-mannered Kyle Stilleno into, well, a real teenage boy. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I looked good. I would never get myself there in regards to my self-esteem, but I had to admit I looked better than I had.

“You know, if you were serious about your convictions, you’d throw those clothes off and refuse to take them from me.” Robbie was leaning against the door to the dressing rooms with a shit-eating grin on his face.

I tried not to look him in the eyes; I hear they have no power if you refuse to look them in the eyes.

“So do I look okay?” I asked, keeping my eyes fixed on the clothes in the mirror.

“Close,” he said with a critical eye. “How much do you trust me?”

I made the mistake of looking him in the eyes.

The next thing I knew, I was perched on a stool in the back of the shop with a towel over my shoulders. Sammy watched on in her dress, looking like something out of a nightmare Walt Disney might have had when he was alive. “You are crazy,” she said to me. “And that is coming from someone who has a primary color in her hair.”

Robbie stood behind me with scissors in his hand and a leer of what I was sure was pure evil on his lips. “Quiet, you,” he ordered, accenting his words with the snipping of blades. “And you? Head down,” he added as he pushed my chin to my chest. “This takes concentration.”

“Why do I feel I am going to regret this?” I asked, trying not to sound as scared as I felt.

“You’ll regret me cutting that pretty face if you keep squirming,” he threatened before he sprayed my hair with water. “I used to make a pretty good living cutting hair before I was sentenced to twenty-to-life in this one-horse town.”

“Did they pay you to cut hair or pay you not to?” I asked, trying to glance over my shoulder.

He pushed my head down again. “One more word out of you, and I will have you with pigtails. No joke.”

I did not think he was joking.

For the next fifteen minutes, I tried not to wince every time he snipped off another piece of hair. Robbie had assured me the only thing I needed was a trim to make the look complete, and, like an idiot, I believed him. Over the years I had learned to love my shaggy hair because, one, it was easy to maintain, two, it didn’t require a lot of money for haircuts, and three, it hid my eyes. It was my very own veil of privacy, and I was giving it up for a stupid party.

I saw more and more hair fall to the floor around me, and I felt my stomach start to convulse. “I do like my hair, you know.”

“Then shut up,” he said, standing in front of me and studying my bangs. He made three more cuts and then took a step back. “Okay, look left.” I turned my head. “And right.” I looked the other way. “Now stick your right hand out.” I looked at him, confused, and held my hand out. “Okay, put it down.” I put it down. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Put your hand out again.” I slowly stuck it out. “Now shake it all about.”

I flipped him off, and he burst out laughing.

I ripped the towel off and headed toward a mirror. “It’s still wet!” he called after me. “It’s going to look a lot better when it’s styled!”

I envisioned my hair looking like I was in the late stages of radiation poisoning, the ones where there are just patches of hair sticking out of a balding headscape.

One look in the mirror and the breath I’d been holding left me in one shocked “Oh!” I honestly did not recognize the guy staring back at me.

“You hate it?” Robbie asked from behind me.

“I don’t,” I said, half-stunned. “I really don’t.”

The bad part was, I really didn’t. He’d cut my sides short and left my bangs kind of long. The result made my whole face look different, longer. I looked older but in a good way.

“See?” Robbie stated. “There was a handsome kid under all of that hair and insecurity after all.”

Between the haircut and the new clothes, I looked 1,000 percent better, more like I imagined everyone else my age looked. “I can’t believe that’s me,” I said, not even sure if I’d said anything aloud.

“Believe it, kiddo,” he whispered.

I looked over to Sammy, and she gave me a thumbs up. “But, then, I never had a problem with your hair before,” she added.

“All right, missy, a good haircut does a body good,” he said, shooing at her. “Now go pack that dress up, or I might charge you for it.”

She gave him a double take before she took off toward the dressing room.

When we were alone, he began putting the new clothes in a bag. “Now remember—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, cutting him off as I slipped on my shirt. “Make sure not to wear them to Nancy’s.”

He froze, his hand halfway in the bag.

“No,” he said sternly. He dropped the bag and walked over to me, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. “No, I wasn’t going to say that at all. I want you to wear them to Nancy’s. I want you to wear them everywhere. And if some asshole throws a Coke on them, come back, and I will give you another set and another and another. And you will wear those in there too, and if he keeps throwing Cokes at you, then I’ll buy you a raincoat. But you are not going to stop going to Nancy’s or anywhere else you want to go, and you are not going to stop dressing nice. That’s not the point.”

I was shocked, and I knew my face was pale. “Then what is the point?” I asked, dazed by the strength of his conviction.

“The point is that They don’t win. Sooner or later, someone is going to tell him to knock it off with the Cokes, and after that, he is going to get kicked out. And after that he is going to get banned, and then sooner or later someone will make it illegal for him to do that. And that, young man, is how change happens. One immaculately dressed boy at a time.”

I felt my eyes stinging, and I realized no matter how sarcastic or rude Robbie got, he was always on my side. “Why are you so nice to me?” I asked him wiping at my tears.

He ruffled my hair and went back to putting my clothes in a bag. “You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?” I shook my head. “I’m your fairy godmother, bitch. Get used to it.”

B
RAD

T
HE
rest of the week was insane.

Winter Break on the horizon created its own excitement, but for us seniors, the fact that this Winter Break was our last one at Foster High made everything seem a little out of whack. The Party was also a “last,” our last one as high school students. Between the two, our whack-out got worse by the day.

So far Kyle’s plan to secretly invite people who never had a chance to go to one of these events seemed to be doing well. At least The Event hadn’t become public knowledge yet.

And that fact continued to bug me.

Nothing moved faster through Foster High than gossip. Yet the fact that several dozen people knew what we were planning and none of them talked seemed impossible. It wasn’t until I brought it up to Kyle that I understood why. He had been distracting as hell with his new haircut. I thought I had liked his shaggy hair, but this new look was just pushing all of my buttons, and I almost forgot to ask my question.

“No one you used to know listens to these people,” he explained over lunch. “Even if they shouted what they knew in the middle of the quad, all they’d get is milk thrown at them. Gossip only works if the people hearing care about who is talking.”

I suddenly understood why he wanted these people to show up to The Party.

By Friday the school was a mess. What little control the teachers had over us during the year vanished on days like these. Any work that needed to be done had been finished days before, giving way to period upon period of movies or free time where the teachers sat behind their desks and watched the clock as closely as we did. I wasn’t even sure why we came to school except for the fact that if we had been given Friday off, we would have been completely useless on Thursday instead.

I sat in the back of the classroom with Jennifer while the rest of the class pretended to play hangman or slept.

“I am actually excited about tonight,” she said, leaning in toward me. “I can’t remember the last time I felt that way about one of Kelly’s parties.”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” I commented, watching the pack of jocks who used to be my friends play paper football on their desks. “Last year I would have been over there, not giving a shit about anything.”

“And now you have Kyle,” she said softly. I looked over at her and smiled. “He’s good for you.” She went back to making endless circles in her notebook. “He makes you a different person.”

“I don’t feel all that different, though.”

She looked up to see if I was joking. “Oh, you are. Trust me, the difference is like night and day.” She traced a few more circles. “But then, if you asked me last year if I was planning on smuggling a couple dozen nerds into The Party, I would have told you to fuck off. So he seems to have that effect on people.”

I put my hand on hers. “If it means anything, I like you a lot more like this than I ever did before.”

She put her hand over mine. “You know, it does.” She squeezed my hand and smiled. “I don’t know why, but it does.”

We sat through the rest of the class in comfortable silence.

I was telling the truth. I didn’t feel all that different. I felt like I was the person I always wanted to be inside. The only real difference was I stopped editing who I was to fit in with people. I cared more about Kyle than I did about being liked, and that had made all the difference in the world. I walked out of the English building and saw Kyle coming toward me, and my face lit up. I strode to him, picked him up by the waist, and gave him a huge kiss right there in the middle of everyone. He looked at me, shocked. “What was that for?”

“For being you. For being you,” I whispered to him. “And if I haven’t said it enough, I love you.”

This time he kissed me back.

He kept his arms around me and pulled a little away to beam a smile at me. “I’m not sure where all that came from, but we should do it some more.”

“Get a room,” Jennifer snarked, walking by us. I playfully kicked at her as she dodged out of the way, laughing. “So, we meeting up beforehand or just meeting at Aimes’s?”

Good question. With parties like this, no one wanted to be the first one who showed up. Only lame people stood around doing nothing in the first uncomfortable minutes of a party. At the same time, no one ever wanted to be the last to arrive, because odds are everyone there would probably be talking about you. All of us showing up together would mean the party started when we showed up, since there were more of us than the jocks and their girlfriends. It also was a show of strength, proving to the people we invited that they weren’t on their own.

“We could meet up at your place,” I said to Jennifer. “You could catch a ride with us to Kelly’s house.”

“Um, yeah.” She hesitated. “But what if you guys wanna go and be… oh, you know, by yourselves? How am I getting home?”

I started laughing while Kyle looked at me, confused. “We’ll get you home,” I said through my chuckles.

“I don’t understand,” Kyle asked. “Where would we go during a party?”

I leaned in and whispered in Kyle’s ear. “She means what if we go upstairs and have wild monkey sex in an empty room.”

It embarrassed me to admit how much I loved watching him blush.

“Trust me,” I told her while I wrapped my arm around Kyle and tugged him close. “You have a ride home.”

She looked at Kyle and then back to me. “Okay, if you promise.”

“We promise!” Kyle blurted out.

I really resisted the urge to just break down laughing and instead nodded at her. “What he said.”

“Be over by seven,” she said, walking away.

I nodded as I tried not to cry from holding back my laughter.

“Shut up,” Kyle said to me, seeing my face. “I mean it! Shut up.”