girls from band, the boys who hoped they were gay rather than permanent misfits; before them, Twyla—Aubrey called them all “bitch.” Especially the boys.
Aubrey squinted in irritation. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I asked, though I knew immediately what she meant: Don’t try to talk like me. Be like me.
I had wanted to tell her that I couldn’t try to be like her because I no longer knew who she was. Later that day, though, after graduation, when Tyler had yelled out, “Go, Aubrey!” so loudly that everyone in the megachurch where the ceremony was held had laughed, I’d come home and examined my forehead. Beneath the harsh overhead light in the bathroom, I saw it, the Benjamin Franklin resemblance. Where my hairline had once been thick and dark as Wolfman’s, spindly, sparse hairs now barely held the line above a dome of a forehead that did indeed suddenly appear huge and shiny as any Founding Father’s. I’d recently had to start wearing reading glasses, and the wire-framed numbers I’d grabbed at the grocery store after the cool leopard-print pair I’d started with had broken didn’t help.
So I experimented a little. I brushed down a few strands of hair, then snipped them into the barest of feathery wisps. It was such an improvement that I snipped more. Then some more. Improvements continued right up to the moment when Aubrey barged in, blinked twice, and said, “Oh, my God. Miss Tarketti.”
“What?” I play-screeched. “Miss Tarketti?!” Miss Tarketti was her second-grade teacher who wore her hair in a tight pageboy with a Mamie Eisenhower sausage roll of bangs. I squashed my new bangs down and added, “I think they’re cute. I was going for a Betty Page look.”
Aubrey squinted. “Who?”
“The fifties pinup girl. She’s very in now.”
“With who?”
“Hipsters?” I supplied.
“Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, Mom, not too many ‘hipsters’ here in Parkhaven. Unless you’re counting yourself. You probably just spaced out again and cut too much off.”
Aubrey took the scissors out of my hand as if I were a mental patient. I began growing my bangs out that very moment.
“Oh, hey,” I ask Aubrey now, casual, as if the thought had just that second popped into my head. “Have you gotten in touch with …” I pause and snap my fingers as if I can’t quite recall the name of the girl assigned to be her roommate. “Sierra! Have you written Sierra back yet?”
Aubrey shakes her head, as annoyed as if bees were swarming around it. “I told you, I will.”
The Jerry Springer audience in my head screams at me to Whup her sorry ass! Lower the boom! Quit pussyfootin’ around!
“When? Aubrey, you’re leaving tomorrow. All this girl has ever wanted to know is what your colors are so she can get a rug that coordinates. Did you even tell her that you most definitely do want to go in on a minifridge and a microwave?”
Inexplicably, Aubrey reacts to my innocuous questions as if I’d gone after her with a blunt object. She splays out her fingers to silence me and shrieks, “I will! I told you I will! Do you ever believe or even listen to one single thing I ever say to you?”
I know she’d rather engage me in a big, screaming argument about whether or not, in her entire eighteen years of life, I, her oppressive, paranoid mother, have ever, for one second, believed anything she’s said to me than actually answer my questions, so I don’t oblige her and instead invoke Zen Mama and answer in my Hal the robot voice, “Aubrey, I’m not being unreasonable here. We don’t even—”
“Amethyst and turquoise.”
“What?”
“Or sage and heather.”
“Sage and heather what?”
“Her colors, I’m sure those are what this roommate’s colors are going to be. I mean, her name is Sierra. And her last name is hyphenated. How much more über–crunchy granola can anyone get? She’s probably got a nose ring and major tats and creepy white-girl dreads.”
“You’re reading an awful lot into a name. Sierra did take the initiative to get in touch with you. That’s friendly, isn’t it? She’s reaching out.”
“Stalkers reach out too.”
“Aubrey, she’s your roommate. You could be living with her for the next four years.”
She starts to speak and her right nostril twitches. This is Aubrey’s “tell.” It unnerves me because Martin had the same giveaway twitch. If we were playing poker, I’d know that he was considering bluffing. With Audrey it means that she is hiding something. She was always a horrible liar, and I can