Chapter Three

That afternoon, I met up with Lisa in a stark, stuffy room where twenty-five fledgling hairstylists sweated over doll heads attached to rickety tables, each one trying to distinguish him or herself from the others. You could almost smell the ambition pumping off them in hot waves.

Lisa and the two other supervisors kept a sharp eye on the contestants as they cut, curled, coaxed, and coiffed their mannequin’s hair into competition perfection. The blank-eyed stares of the doll heads should have long since lost their creepiness for me, and yet they hadn’t. There was something inherently unnatural about severed heads being shoved onto rotating posts, then attached to tabletops just so stylists could play with their hair. It didn’t help that the mannequins came with names like Annie, Rachel, or Derek, as though they were real people who had bequeathed their heads to the science of hairstyling.

Representing each sex and every nationality, loose doll heads lay topsy-turvy in bins along one wall, waiting to be chosen and transformed. Curly, straight, dark, light, long, short, anything and everything a stylist could want or want to make over.

They gave me the willies.

A student along the sidewall caught my attention. He painstakingly smoothed each strand of his doll’s hair into the shape of a tulip. But what drew me to him was the color technique he’d used to create a deep red at the base that gradually lightened to pale pink “petal” tips. I stepped closer to get a better look. The shading was near perfect, no blotches or steps, just a slow transition from dark to light.

I pulled a business card from my bag and laid it on the table where he was working, taking a chance he’d be interested in a job in California. Startled, he glanced up, then nodded at my encouraging smile. I hoped he’d call. Naturally talented hair colorists weren’t thick on the ground.

Moving on, I watched another student tease a large section of her doll’s hair. After packing the hair thick with her comb, she then flipped the section toward her and smoothed one side with a plastic bristled brush. She gently turned the hair under, forming it into a Liberty Roll made popular in wartime 1940s, and then secured it with bobby pins. Although nice, there was nothing special about the style—until I caught a glimpse of the drawing sitting on the table in front of her. The finished product would have American flags and…were those sparklers?

I suddenly had the urge to make note of the fire sprinklers and emergency exits. Hairspray and fire didn’t mix. Continuing down the row, I studied each student’s creation. Two of them had very similar designs. I was speculating on who had copied whom when a voice whispered in my ear.

“Holy catfight, that’s going to get ugly.” Juan Carlos seemed to have recovered from his run-in with Richard and was back to his usual sarcastically observant self.

“How’d you get in here?”

“Please. I’m more connected than a mob boss’s barber’s bookie. I should be asking how you got in here, but I won’t because I’m just so happy I found you. Guess who I ran into?”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

He knew I hated this game. “Just tell me.”

“Don’t be such a Crankerella Crankenstein. You take the fun out of everything. Fine,” he huffed. “I’ll tell you. But I want it on record that I tried to surprise you.” He paused, then with great dramatic flair announced, “Bobby Brickhouse!”

I groaned. Bobby Brickhouse was not a time in my life I wanted to revisit. Neither was the memory of finding him with his hand up my assistant’s shirt.

Juan Carlos looked genuinely disappointed. “I thought you liked him liked him. What’s the deal? How could you not like him? He’s built, stacked—”

“Yes, I know. Like a brick house. Ha-ha. That joke’s not too old.” At his glare I explained, “I did like him. But Bobby Brickhouse is a two-timing, empty-headed jerk.” Why couldn’t I ever find a guy who just wanted me? Not me and my assistant.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. How did I not know you and Bobby Brickhouse hooked up? First Viv and now you with a secret. What is this world coming to? Doesn’t anybody tell anybody anything anymore?”

The sting of Vivian’s dishonesty hit me anew and my cheeks went hot with shame for not having told Juan Carlos about Bobby Brickhouse. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I was just so embarrassed that I—”

“What is he doing here?”

I turned to see who had nabbed Juan Carlos’s attention. Richard Stain’s dark head was bent toward Lisa’s and they appeared to be in deep discussion.

Juan Carlos shifted as if the ground beneath him had suddenly turned into molten lava. “I gotta go.” He glanced around, looking for another way out, but the only exit was directly behind Richard. “I gotta go,” he repeated, the panic in his voice rising.

I reached for his hand, not knowing what else to do. “Do you want me to distract him so you can leave?” I offered.

He seemed to take some comfort from our contact. Visibly summoning his strength, Juan Carlos gripped my hand in both of his and took a deep breath. “No. I’m fine.” Then he shook himself loose and straightened his sweater. “I’m fine. It’s fine. Whatever. I don’t care. He can be here. I can be here. It’s fine.” He turned his back on Richard and directed his attention to one of the students instead. “That’s gorgeous! Look at that.”

The style the student had created was amazing. We inched closer for a better look.

“Wow.”

“Do you think she’d show me how she did that?” Juan Carlos asked.

“Probably, if you asked her.”

“I’m going to grab a doll head just in case.” Juan Carlos scooted around the tables, bound for the doll head bins on the other side of the room.

“Ten minutes!” Lisa announced, galvanizing the students into a panicked frenzy of hairspray clouds and last-minute checks on the competition.

“Oh. My. God! You are such a cheater!” shouted a young man—one of the two students who had really similar designs.

“What?” At the accusation, the other student, a redheaded girl, stared back and forth between the two hairstyles, obviously surprised by what she was being accused of. Then her indignation kicked in. “I didn’t cheat! You’re the cheater. I’m telling.” She jumped up with her hand in the air. “Judge!”

“I’m telling,” the boy mimicked. “Go ahead. Confess your cheating ass off. Tell them how you stole my idea then ruined it.” He flicked a finger at a curl on the redhead’s doll, causing it to fall. “See. Crap. A total knockoff.”

The redhead clenched her fists at her sides and screamed, “You ruined it!” Then she launched herself at the boy, knocking her doll head off its stand and onto the floor.

The poor loose head rolled across the floor, tripping up Lisa and one of the judges who was coming to the girl’s aid. Realizing what she’d done, the redhead made a grab for the boy’s doll head. Grappling with her, the boy juggled the head in the air like a football receiver trying to clutch a just-in-reach pass. The girl slammed her body into his, causing him to knock into the table and lose his battle to save the head. It flew out of his hands and collided with the tulip-shaped doll head.

After that it was every man for himself. Those who had stations near the brawl ripped their doll heads off the stands, trying to protect them. As the fight rippled out, involving more and more students, craniums became the projectile weapons of choice.

I ducked, narrowly missing a blow to my own noggin and crawled under a nearby table. A second later I was joined by Richard Stain, his large body nearly crowding me out and into the clash.

“This is like being in the court of Henry the Eighth. Because of all the severed heads, I mean,” he explained with a shy grin.

I cracked a smile and nodded. “I got it.”

“Holy Anne Boleyn.” Juan Carlos wedged himself in behind me. “I feel like I should be singing the chorus for that Henry the Eighth song.” He nudged me to scoot over for him, pushing me into Richard. “Give a guy some room.”

I could hear Lisa and the other judges trying to calm everybody down.

“There is no more room. I’m not the only one under here,” I complained.

Juan Carlos caught sight of Richard and glowered. “Figures. Quit hogging all the cover, Gigantor.”

“That’s it!” Richard reared up, taking the table and our hiding place with him. As he stood, the table flew off his back and crashed to the floor behind him, narrowly missing a student. He pointed a meaty finger at Juan Carlos. “You’re going to stop insulting me. Right now!”

The sudden violence seemed to have a startling effect on the students. They stopped pelting each other with doll heads and turned as one to watch the new fight.

Juan Carlos slowly unwound from the floor and puffed up to his full five-foot-ten-inch height. He pointed a finger back at Richard, right up in his face. “I’m sick of you telling me what to do!” He jabbed his finger to punctuate his point. The doll head he had clutched in his fist swung back and forth by the hair, hitting Richard in the chest.

Everyone froze, and the room went eerily quiet.

Something wasn’t right.

A scream, sharp and staccato, slashed the air. The sound created panic. Chaos rose up all around as if the three of us, Richard, Juan Carlos, and I, were in the center of a tornado. People whirled and twirled, generating a cyclone of pandemonium and noise.

So much noise.

That piercing, penetrating scream never stopped. I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to shut it out.

Juan Carlos reached for me, but I shrank away from him. His gesture brought with it the realization that it was me who was crying out.

Richard made a move to come to my aid, then froze. Horror etched his face, curling back his features, the skin pulled tight as his attention fixed on the head dangling from Juan Carlos’s fist.

Juan Carlos followed our gazes, his eyes moving slowly from his fist clutching the long, snowflake-white hair, to the dulled ice-blue stare, over the fragile, ashen beauty, finally resting on the jagged edge where the head should have met the body.

Juan Carlos opened his mouth to scream, but unlike me, no sound came out. He began to shake, quaking so hard the head bobbed back and forth. The head’s movements seemed to snap something inside of him. In his panic, he flung the head away from him, scattering the remaining people in a flurry of yelps and shrieks.

As the head came to rest, the crowd stopped and stood there, gaping. Then as a group, they inched closer, sealing away from me the sight of Dhane’s face lying broken and wrong on the dirty, industrial-grade carpeting.