Tuesday, February 23, 2010

going to be okay, but I didn’t hear him. As if robotic, I pushed past him and got in the car. The second my mom peeled out of the driveway, I began to wail, fresh tears bursting forth, as if my arm had been cut off. For nine months, I had sacrificed so much for that boy. He wasn’t my first kiss and he wasn’t my first time, but he was my first everything else. I had given him my heart, my innocence, my trust, even my lungs, in a way, as I was deathly allergic to dogs and cats, and Jon owned both in abundance. All my efforts, all my sacrifices, had been for nothing. I don’t know how long I cried after that, but it was dark out by the time I stopped.
I felt a little bit like I had in my dream when I watched myself shatter into a million pieces—detached, as if all this was happening to some friendly but distant acquaintance. The girl I had been for the past nine months, the strong, happy, peaceful, loving sprite I had let Jon transform me into, was the broken, glass doll on the floor. I could not be her anymore without getting trampled on. Maybe she was dead, maybe she was simply comatose, but either way, for the moment she was gone.
Clearly, however, I could not let this go unattended. A vital part of me had died. I needed to replace that part as soon as possible. I needed to be reborn. With this thought in mind, I went inside to leave my mom a note, then headed out, armed with nothing but a rosary, a cell phone, and what little money I had in my purse. Not daring to think of anything else but the road in front of me, I hiked down to the nearest convenience store, purchased the brightest, boldest, most rebellious color of hair dye I could find, then walked back to my house.
At some point, when Jon and I had still been together, I had told him I would die if we ever broke up. Since we had broken up and I was not willing to die, I figured I might as well dye instead.
Not even my mother, who opposed my hair-dying habits almost as strongly as Liz, dared to stop me. She did not understand my logic, but she knew I was hurting, and she figured hair-dye was better than crying. Hell, not only did she not stop me, she helped me do it.
That evening, in the bathroom, as my mother squeezed the toxic-smelling, neon liquid onto tendrils of my hair enveloped in crumpled bits of plastic wrap and talked to me about life and love and music, I was strangely reminded of birth. It was just me and my mother and the rain beating against the windows, and she was designing me, molding me, coaxing me out into the world, playing both the role of the mother in labor and the doctor.
While I waited the prescribed half hour it took for my hair to absorb the color, I thought about Liz, my mother, Jon, my new hair, and potentially my new self.
Liz liked my hair but didn’t like the length and how I colored it. My mother liked my hair and my imaginative ways of styling it, but also didn’t approve of my dying it. Jon always loved the yellowish blond color I dyed it, but constantly whined that I should grow it out and stop straightening it.
Nothing I did with it was ever good enough for anybody. In most situations, the same applied to me. Liz always complained that I should be more image-conscious. Jon had constantly nagged me to be more free-spirited. My mother periodically told me to stop being so damn negative. Everybody was always on my back and in my hair.
As I stripped out of my bathrobe, slid the plastic wrap out of my hair, stepped in the shower, and turned the water on, I imagined them all being washed away down the drain with the dye.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Liz practically had a heart attack when she saw me Monday morning. She spent a total of five minutes staring at my head and sputtering, which on any other day I would have used to retreat, but I was bound to be criticized sooner or later. It might as well be sooner.
“What did you do to your head?” she finally demanded in horror. “It’s pink! It’s hot freaking pink!”
No, it was not pink. It was yellowish blond with chunky magenta highlights, but I didn’t bother to correct her. Liz was on a roll. There was no stopping her now.
“Seriously, like… Oh my gawd, Breni! I can’t even find the words, this is just… How could you?! It looks like you let your little sister color on your hair with spray paint.”
After about ten hours of this, she concluded with a huffy, disgusted threat to disown me if I ever tried anything like this again. As if on cue, she then proceeded to ask if Jon had seen my new hair yet and if he had, what did he think of it?
With a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan, I said, “No, he hasn’t seen it yet, and quite frankly I don’t really give a flying fart in space what he thinks.”
That was a lie. I did care what he thought, but I knew I shouldn’t. He surrendered the right to have any control over my life when he broke me apart.
At my callous response to the mention of the former love of my life, Liz’s jaw dropped yet again. Before she could recover and begin berating me all over again, though, I told her we broke up.
“Oh…” She said quietly, the astonishment on her face turning to sympathy.
Gathering me into a hug, she told me she was so sorry and that this was horrible and that if I wanted to cry, then cry.
“It’s okay,” she told me in a pitying tone that would’ve embarrassed me had I the energy to be embarrassed. “Just get it all out. A horrible, horrible thing just happened, and you have the right to be upset. No one would blame you if you bawled like a baby for days.”
Liz spent the rest of the morning contradicting everything my mother had told me last night. My mom thought I could do better, but Bree obviously disagreed. It wasn’t so much that she thought Jon was the greatest guy in existence as much as it was she thought he was the greatest guy I was capable of attracting. Every other guy I had ever been attracted to was out of my league, according to Liz.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Not until the very last period of the day did I give in to the despair spawning at the back of my head. I had been fighting so hard throughout the day to keep myself distracted, but this approach back-fired. It was like trying to plug up a geyser with a giant cork. The pressure continued to build and build until I couldn’t take it anymore.
Hastily asking the teachers permission to head to the levorotary, I grabbed the hall pass, not even bothering to fill it out or get it signed, and sprinted to ladies room. The second I was in, the tears burst forth. To get more privacy and to hide from my own reflection—there’s nothing more depressing than watching yourself cry—I locked myself in one of the stalls.
Everything felt so hopeless. Not only had I lost my boyfriend, I had lost my best friend, and nothing ever hurt me more than the loss of a companion.
I was caught up in meditating about all this and feeling sorry for myself when a strange, British, masculine voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Is it the boyfriend?”
I knew this query was directed at me because it was far too quiet for there to be anyone else inside the bathroom besides the voices owner and me.
“Um, what?” I asked, somewhat dazed by the loss of body fluid from all the crying.
“The reason you’re crying—is it the boyfriend?”
“Well, ex-boyfriend now,” I murmured, and began to push the door open to see who the voice belonged to. Even though I had suspected it was him, I still couldn’t help but be stunned at the sight of Jazzy poised in front of the wide, full-length mirror, reapplying his coal-black eye-liner. From across the cafeteria, Jazzy looked like a model, but up-close, he was so beautiful, so alluring, so striking, he reminded me of a succubus. I couldn’t just stand there staring at him all day though, so I blurted out the first thing that popped into my head.
“Er, this is the girls’ room.”
Without missing a beat, he capped his eye pencil, gave me a slow smile that almost rendered me comatose, and drawled out, “Yes, sweetie, I know, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the portrait of heterosexuality and I haven’t gotten any in months so I don’t really trust myself in a lu full of young, indisposed American blokes who may or may not care to experiment with their sexuality.”
Despite his somewhat androgynous facial features, his voice was completely, deliciously masculine. It was a voice I could have spent my entire lifetime listening to.
I was just beginning to zone out and fantasize about that voice, those lips, and that body when Jazzy interrupted my thoughts again with an abrupt, affirming “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, I’ll accept you. You can be my new project.”



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