The Honey Bus - Meredith May Page 0,78

over the Monterey Peninsula. Suddenly I was moving between five different classrooms a day, each with a different mix of people from Carmel and Pebble Beach and Big Sur. This made me gloriously anonymous. Nobody had to know I was the girl who couldn’t listen to the Beatles without crying, or the one whose family was too weird to get her a proper Halloween costume. I blended into the mosaic of everybody, perfectly happy to be one little tile on the wall.

Granny chose my electives, enrolling me in typing and German, and to my great delight, home economics, where I learned to cook and use a sewing machine. The class was entirely female, but I didn’t consider it wife-training; I saw it as planning for the adulthood Grandpa promised was coming, when I’d finally cook my own meals without burning them, and never again would I have to wear other people’s cast-off clothes.

When a new after-school computer class started, Granny bought a thin floppy disk about the size of a potholder so I could learn to program a machine called an IBM. When the director of the school yearbook asked for volunteers to work on weekends helping him cut and paste all the student portraits onto production pages, I threw my hand up. Whatever my new school offered, I wanted it. I was surprised and delighted that there was so much going on outside our house, and I wanted to try all of it.

Middle school felt like a do-over to my life that had started on the wrong foot, and for the first few weeks I studied people, looking for potential new friends. There was one girl in my English class who held my attention and squeezed. Sophia had the kind of beauty that hushed a room; she was lithe and graceful and looked a bit like Brooke Shields in her Calvin Klein jeans. She carried herself with the cool indifference of a European exchange student who has seen more of the globe than her teachers.

She picked up German faster than anyone in class, and when she sat next to me in English, her long, dark hair swished when she flipped it out of her face. She smirked a lot, and I desperately wanted to know what she was thinking, what kind of music she listened to and where she went after school. She told me that she was allowed to drink red wine with dinner, and that her mother sometimes took the passenger seat and let her drive their stick-shift LeCar to school. I didn’t doubt it. Sophia was so beguiling that high school boys were already dedicating love songs to her on KSPB, the radio station at the private school in Pebble Beach. During written tests, whenever she leaned toward me to whisper that she didn’t know an answer, I turned my paper so she could copy mine. I didn’t care if I got caught.

One day I got up the nerve to ask her what shampoo she used to make her hair smell so good.

“Something from my mom’s salon,” she said.

The word salon lit up like the Hollywood sign in my mind. I was still going to the village barber and getting a lollipop after he chopped my hair into the same helmet cut. I muttered something about how great it must be to get expensive shampoo for free, then immediately regretted sounding so unsophisticated.

“I can get you some,” she offered. “Come with me to my mom’s salon after school. She won’t mind.”

Imaginary game show glitter shimmered down all around me.

“You sure?” I said, doing my best to appear undecided.

The rest of the day was a blur, and after the last school bell, I met Sophia behind the gym. She led me on a shortcut through an open field that emptied fifteen minutes later at The Barnyard, a boutique shopping center designed to look like a cluster of barns surrounding a big windmill. It was a touristy place where visitors bought cashmere sweaters or oil paintings of the Central Coast, but its flagship store was geared more to the locals: a massive bookstore with an organic café in back. Sophia led me along The Barnyard’s brick garden paths, up a flight of stairs and down a balcony. I heard the whine of hair dryers and knew we were close. Sophia pushed open the door, and an Adam Ant dance song came thumping out, all trumpets and drums.

“Honey, is that you?” called a voice from behind a screened partition.