Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Bree, however, has always absolutely despised the absolute God-send that is hair-dye and has since the day we met been hell-bent on imparting her hatred of it onto me. Ha. Fat chance.
Firstly, Bree has no idea what it’s like for medium brown headed girls like me. With her long, flowing, wavy, thick, strawberry blonde, chest length, princess tresses, she’s probably never had to step into a salon in her life. Therefore, she has no right to tell me to do anything about the color of my hair. Let someone with hair as naturally plain and insignificant as mine tell me to quit using hair dye, then maybe I’ll be convinced.
Secondly, I am absolutely addicted to the stuff. The day I decide to stop bleaching my hair blonde is the day Courtney Love shows up to something sober and not hung over. Bree and I have been over this at least fifty times, but persistent, little, fanatic of the natural look that she is, continues to bombard me with complaints.
Today is no different. Less than three minutes into the conversation, and she’s already prattling on about how, by being a peroxide blond, I’m succumbing to the evils of commercialism and capitalism, and that if I don’t stop soon, the entire world will eventually be taken over by Britney Spears look-a-likes and Lindsey Lohan act-a-likes. I choose not to pay attention.
Normally I would have, just to humor her, but at that very instant, Jasper “Jazzy” Striffy entered the cafeteria. As he all but floated past our table on his way to the one diagonally across from ours, I could not help but let a sigh of ecstasy escape my lips. Sometimes Jazzy is so perfect, I can’t decide whether I want to be with him or simply be him.
He is very gorgeous, very gay, very British, and utterly fabulous. Angling from shoulder length in the back to jaw length in the front, his pin-straight, jet-black hair with golden blonde bangs draping over his black, perfectly arched brows and stopping just above his long, dark, effeminate lashes alone is enough to force Yves St. Laurent himself into a fabulousity coma. It’s not just Jazzy’s hair though. It’s everything about him. The way the position and length of his flaxen bangs perfectly accentuates the contrast between them and his expertly stenciled in guy liner, dark brown eyes; the way he always decorates himself with Victorian era dress pants, dress shirts, vests, and overcoats, yet still manages to look fresh off the scene; the way his crooked, thin line of a mouth curls up in a droll smirk whenever he finds something amusing; the way every movement he makes is quick, deliberate, and decisive; the way he calls his bangs a fringe--Oh, I would absolutely kill to be that fabulous!
Usually, I could care less about Starbucks and glitter and people who spend hours on end in the mirror trying to decide between two completely identical shirts, but there’s something about Jazzy that makes me yearn for fabulousity. I know deep down it’s just his confident, self-assuredness that makes him different from all the glamour zombies around this school and that all I really have to do to be as great as Jazzy is stop being disgusted with myself, but that is way harder than it sound, and it feels a million times worse when you’re someone like me looking at someone like Jazzy.
“Breni!”
Now awoken from my Jazzy-induced daze, I turn to find an irritated Bree glaring at me. “Did you hear a single word I said?” she demands.
“Er, yeah. Something about hair dye leading to Britney Spears taking over the world, right?”
“No,” She breaths. “I was asking you if Jon was doing any better.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling like the rudest person alive. “Sorry. Um, no, I called him last night, and he’s still sick. His fever’s going down though.”
There is a brief pause in which I smile nervously and Bree sternly looks from me to Jazzy and back to me. Finally, she sighs.
“Breni,” she says, exasperated. “He’s so gay he‘s practically a drag queen, he’s a foreign exchanged student headed back to England at the end of the year, and you have a boyfriend, who is possibly on his deathbed as we speak. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Deathbed?” I repeat, giving her my best you’ve got to be kidding me look. “Bree, it’s just the flu. Chill.”
“Yeah, but still! Jon’s freaking in love with you. Do you have any idea how hurt he would be if he caught you drooling over some Adam Lambert wannabe?”
Resisting the urge to assert that Jazzy was not any type of wannabe--he was far too amazing to want to be anyone but himself--I rolled my eyes and excused myself to the bathroom. Bree is a hopeless romantic in the worst way. If you have a boyfriend and even so much as glance at another guy, in her mind, you are a whore.
The funny part is, my boyfriend of almost nine months, Jon, is the exact opposite of Jazzy in every conceivable way. Where Jazzy is lithe, Jon is plump. Where Jazzy is smooth and soft-spoken, Jon is rough and loud. Where Jazzy is sharp and sarcastic, Jon is slow and sincere. Where Jazzy’s hair is long, colorful, straight, and so fabulous it should be a crime, Jon’s is short, dark brown, flippy, and styled with as much skill and effort as an alcoholic mother would use to pack her kids’ lunches. The same can be said about my love for the two boys. I love them both, but in completely different ways. This is what Bree fails to understand.
Jon is my soul mate, my best friend, and my fire. He’s the guy I plan on spending the rest of forever with. We like each other, we love each other, and we lust after each other. You know. Typical boyfriend-girlfriend love affair.
Jazzy, however, is more of a celebrity crush. I don’t just admire him, I worship him. He’s not just a guy to me, he’s a god. He’s my idol, and therefore I could never really have a substantial relationship with him even if he was heterosexual. I mean, to me, dating is all about reaching out and making a connection with someone, and how am I supposed to reach him much less connect with him if I have him on a pedestal towering an infinite number of feet over me?
~!~
I could not have been feeling worse come Thursday night.
Not only was I hunched over the toilet, regurgitating everything I had consumed over the past twenty-four hours or so into it’s blessedly cool porcelain surface, but I was doing this the night before Jon’s promised return to school. I had not seen him since last weekend, and since I was obviously not going to be well enough to go to school the next day, I wouldn’t get to see him until Monday.
After puking my guts out for what felt like an hour, I collapsed unto the cold, tile bathroom floor and tried to wonder what felt worse: my throbbing head, my aching stomach, my burning throat, or my affection-starved heart from all the boyfriend-separation anxiety.
Whatever hurt the worst, I was definitely much too in pain to move so I eventually drifted off to sleep on the bathroom floor and began to sink into a sea of feverish dreams.
The dream started off as a sort of out-of-body experience, as if everything was being seen through someone else’s eyes.
I watched myself walk down the hallway outside the school cafeteria towards Jon, who was standing in a corner, facing the wall. My lips opened with his name on the tip of my tongue, but before I could say anything, he turned towards me with his mouth in a flat line and his usually vibrant, bright blue eyes a shade black as death, holding a china doll that looked exactly like me.
“I’m sorry, Breni,” he murmured in a cold tone he’d never spoken to me with before. “I’m sorry.”
He then slowly lifted the doll up with one hand, all the while looking at me, and dropped it. The doll fell in slow motion, but immediately shattered upon hitting the floor. I watched myself crack apart like broken glass and shatter, falling to the floor in pieces as if I myself were nothing but a walking, life-size doll. Jon simply ambled away, completely unfazed.
The dream then changed so that I was experiencing everything from my point of view again and was in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV, crying. Suddenly, Jazzy was there, climbing into bed beside me. He moved so close to me, we were practically on top of each other.
“Are you leaking again, Brenda?” he whispered. No one outside my family had called me Brenda since I was five. “Don’t worry. I’ll fix you up.”
This said, he brought his mouth, tongue slightly protruding, to my cheek and began to half-lick, half-kiss away the tears right off my face. As if this wasn’t weird enough, with each tear he consumed, his skin tone grew bluer and bluer and mine, redder and redder, until we looked like nothing but an attempt to breed a human blueberry with a human strawberry in order to create some type of new species of purple berry.
Things got a lot racier after that, and someone must’ve moved me from the bathroom floor to my room sometime during the night, because when I awoke about nine hours later, I was in bed, tongue-kissing my pillow.
Unfortunately, that was the most action I got that weekend, as I spent the rest of it puking up large fractions of my body weight into the toilet, drowning myself in orange juice and tea, blowing my nose about a hundred times a day, torturing myself with unspeakably romantic old movies, and missing Jon terribly. I was also worried, because Jon sounded so distant on the phone when I talked to him last. He said nothing was wrong, but I knew him better than that.
“Damn it,” I told myself. “I’m going to be better by Monday if it kills me!”
Sure enough, come Monday morning, I was feeling a hundred percent better. Rejoicing, I threw on some extra makeup (which was actually just eyeliner and blush, as I usually didn’t bother with the stuff), had breakfast, hurriedly dressed, and headed out the door.

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