Jamie Pittel
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Carrie pierces my nose. Afterward, I sit on the floor of her bedroom in a kind of daze. There’s something—blood?—trickling from the inside of my nose. The needle is still sticking into me, and the numbness from the ice we held against my nose earlier is starting to fade. It hurts. This dull, deep pain that centers on the needle and spreads to my whole head. My eye is watering uncontrollably, and I have to hold my hand against it so the tears don’t fall onto my nose.
“Here, Blondie.” Carrie is at my side, offering me a fresh ice cube wrapped in a paper towel.
There isn’t an easy place to hold the ice. Any contact will make my nose hurt worse. I settle on holding it against the bottom of my nostril, making it impossible to breathe through my nose. It doesn’t hurt less, but the cold feels good, makes me a little more alert.
“Are you OK?” she says.
I nod. “I think so.” Then I laugh.
“You’re laughing,” Carrie says. “Which means either you’re OK or you’re delirious. Either way, now would be a good time to put in the hoop.”
We bought a real body-piercing hoop, the kind that’s supposed to be safe and sterile and all that. I have no idea how I’m going to get the needle out of my nose and the hoop in without fainting, but I nod anyway. Now would probably be better than later.
I squeeze my eyes shut and clutch onto the bottom of my sweater with both hands, dropping my ice cube on the carpet. When she pulls the needle away, it hurts less for a second, then I feel her poking around with the hoop for the hole, twisting it into my skin, and this wave of something so unlike what I understand pain to be shoots through my head. Blood rushes under my skin faster than usual, like it’s trying to push my limbs to move. I’m not going to faint. Instead it’s like I have more strength. Like if Carrie were really trying to hurt me rather than improve my image, I could kill her with my bare hands.
“There,” she says, after twisting the hoop impossibly to get it hooked closed. “Try not to touch it except when you wash it—just with soap. Then turn it a little so it doesn’t heal stuck.”
I nod. Deep breath. I stand, pulling myself up by the leg of the desk chair, hand-over-hand like I’m climbing a mountain. I’m shocked when I get to the mirror on the back of Carrie’s door.
I look exactly the same.
In two and a half weeks I’ll be going to see my mother for winter break. It’s been almost six months since I moved to New York to live with my dad. I feel so different, it seems like she shouldn’t even recognize me when I go back to Berkeley, but the reality is, she might not even notice this when I first get off the plane. I mean, I just look like me. Me, straight blond hair that I cut short right after Halloween. Me in faded, slightly-too-small jeans and my father’s blue V-neck sweater. You notice these things—the clothes—before my nose. It’s still there, pretty small, round at the end, and on one side there’s a delicate silver hoop. The most normal thing in the world. It’s not even red or swollen like it should be. “Huh.” I cross my arms, turn my head to the side to see the hoop better.
“Do you like it?” Carrie asks.
I nod. “Yeah, I do. It’s just not all that dramatic, you know?”
My nose is throbbing, and my whole head is slightly sore. What I’m feeling is bored. Like I thought this would entertain me and now it doesn’t.
“If you want dramatic,” Carrie says, “we could do something else.”
I sigh. “I don’t think I could handle any more pain right now.”
She shakes her head. “Come here.” She motions for me to follow her and pushes open the door to her brother Ben’s room without knocking. My ears are hit by a blast of electric guitar and drums and some sort of screechy vocals. Carrie takes an orange sneaker to the head.
Ben’s sitting on his mattress in the corner of the room. “Knock, dumb-ass,” he yells over the music, waving his second sneaker menacingly in one hand. “I did not invite you into my lair.”
“Over here,” Carrie says to me, ignoring Ben. She points to a bookcase that’s cluttered with partly full jars of different colors. Hair dye. There’s a sludgy green, traffic-light yellow, peacock blue, inky black, the ruby red I saw on both Ben and Carrie when I first met them. Today Ben’s hair is teal. Carrie’s is her natural caramel color. It’s grown out long enough to show that she has curls, which are pushed out of the way with five or six barrettes, randomly placed on either side of her head.
“My hair?” I say, still feeling kind of woozy. She’s right. Even short, my hair is boring. I mean, Gus has a four-inch-tall Mohawk—he’s probably embarrassed to be seen with me.
“He-ee-ey,” Ben says, standing up now and moving in front of his bookcase to turn the music down. “Blondie.” He looks at me like he just noticed I’m standing here. “You pierced your nose.”
I nod. He isn’t asking, just noticing out loud. It took him about three minutes. Too long.
“It looks cool,” he says.
Carrie works her way behind him to dig through the jars of dye. “Swamp Green?” she calls to me.
“Not.” I cross my arms against my chest and lean into the door frame.
“Wouldn’t have thought you could pull it off,” Ben says, looking at me sideways. “You’re starting to look like a halfway-normal person.”
“Normal, thank you. That’s just what I was going for.” I push Ben aside and look over Carrie’s shoulder at the dyes. “What else is there?”
“Blueberry?” She holds the almost-full jar up against my hair.
“Oh yes,” I say. “I think Blueberry is just the thing. Blueberry is absolutely the epitome of normal.”
Carrie grins. “You sure?”
“Yep.” My nose is hurting less already at the prospect of blue hair. “I really, really want Blueberry.”
“Your parents are so going to freak.”
I shrug. “Not my dad.”
“You’re seeing your mom at Christmas?”
I nod. “No avoiding it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I turn the blue jar around in my hand, hold it in the light to see the color sparkle through the glass. “Yeah. Let’s.”
Watching the blue stream of water rush down the kitchen drain, getting more and more transparent, feeling the blood fill up my head and my nose ache like it’s going to fall off, I’m pretty sure people will notice a difference. When the water’s finally clear, I flip my hair back and drip onto my shoulders and the linoleum.
Carrie hands me a towel and I rub down my head, smiling because I feel clean and energized. I raise my eyebrows. “So is it really blue?”
Ben laughs. “Change your mind already?”
I shake my head and try to look at my reflection in the glass door of the microwave. Too dark to see. I go check the bathroom mirror.
This is noticeable. I peer into the mirror, turn my head to one side and then the other. The person I’m looking at is like me, but not me. She’s like my long-lost twin sister who’s much more worldly than I am. She probably plays pool and lives in a loft with her sheepdog and listens to blues music in smoky clubs and eats sushi. Her friends are poets and sculptors and bass players—the kind of people my mother has never even met.
Carrie reaches for a pot of hair goo on the sink next to me and scoops some into her palm. “You can’t have hair that color falling into your face, you know.” She sweeps her hands through my hair, smoothing it back so it’s slick and sticky. My head looks like a blue bowling ball.
“We should go out,” Ben says. We’re all squeezed into the bathroom now, crowded around the sink.
“And celebrate,” says Carrie.
“Absolutely,” says me.
I call Gus, and we meet at Riverside Park and crowd onto one of those kiddie merry-go-rounds that you spin around until everyone’s dizzy and nauseated. Right now it’s not moving except to creak and tilt whenever someone shifts positions.
“I propose a toast.” Gus holds up the bottle of Southern Comfort we’ve been sharing. “To Lisa’s blueness.” He takes a sip from the bottle and hands it to me. “May she shock the pants off her mother.”
Everyone laughs. I choke on the sweet liquor and pass the bottle to Ben, trying not to cough because it stretches my face and makes my nose hurt.
“She’s going to die,” I say. “She used to dress me in outfits.”
Gus laughs. “Outfits! Good thing you got away.”
He’s kidding, but I really was running away from the outfits. Last summer, my mom and I were both bridesmaids in my aunt’s wedding—matching lavender dresses, baby’s breath in our hair, the whole deal—and I was this miniature version of her, which I realized I had always, always been. I had no idea what I would look like if I dressed myself. I moved away because I needed to find out.
Carrie hands me a carton of ice cream with a plastic spoon sticking out of it. “What did your parents do?” I wave the spoon at the three of them. “About, you know, the punk stuff?”
“Mom expects it,” Carrie says.
Ben nods. “Nothing she can do.”
I take a bite of ice cream and it swims down into my alcohol-warmed belly and chills me.
“Mine think it’s a fucking miracle,” Gus says. “They think I’m like one of the artists at their snooty-ass gallery. They don’t know shit.”
Will my mother yell? Will she disown me? Hold me down and pour peroxide over my head? I can’t imagine her anything but confused. She would never expect this of me. Before the bridesmaid incident, I just wore her outfits, all cheerful-like. When I was little, I kind of loved it—going shopping together, getting the same haircuts and showing them off to my dad when we got home. Now she won’t know who I am. Which of course she already doesn’t. When she sees me, she’ll know she doesn’t know.
I lean closer into Gus’s side and reach my arm out to take the bottle back from Carrie, who’s drinking now, tilting it back into her mouth, her head resting on one of the bars of the merry-go-round.
“Blondie,” she says when she sits up and sees me beckoning for a drink, “you’re turning into a little bottle hog.”
“I’m cold,” I say. “And I’m not blond.”
Gus laughs and points at Carrie. “She’s got you there.”
Carrie rolls her eyes and slaps Gus’s hand out of her face. “You will always be blond,” she says, looking me right in the eye. “You can’t change something like that.”
I pretend to ignore her, but those words stay with me all night. They flit around in my head, my liquid brain, working slower and stranger with the alcohol. Always blond. I twist my good-luck braid—the only blond part left of my hair—around my pinky until it cuts off my circulation, the tip of my finger purple and swollen. I pull a strand of blue down into my face, roll it between my thumb and index finger until the brittleness from the gel flakes away and it’s dry and soft and peacock colored. The blue doesn’t rub off on my fingers. You can’t change something like that.
I wake up at five thirty. Everything hurts. My nose most of all, but also my head, my stomach. The Southern Comfort is still with me.
My father smelled it on me when I came home, looked back and forth from my nose to my hair. Waved a hand in front of his nose. “You smell like a distillery, Lisa.” He sniffed. “And cigarettes?”
“I don’t smoke,” I said. “Just my friends were smoking around me.”
“I’m supposed to celebrate that?” he said, gesturing to the rest of me. When I didn’t have an answer, he sighed. “We’ll talk about it in the morning, Lise. But you’re going to have to tell your mother. About all of it.”
He’s still asleep. My mother will be asleep for hours and hours in California. I drink three cups of water in a row, the glass cool against my lower lip, clicking loud on my teeth. I bring a fourth cup into the bathroom with me and stand in front of the mirror again. Pale, pale skin—impossible to remember June in Berkeley when I was so brown and so blond—hair now the color of blueberry Kool-Aid, sticking up in tufts in the back of my head. Silver metal runs right through the flesh of my nostril, just punched in there like the rings on my binder. The mirror draws me to it, like a hand pulling me back every time I turn away. I close my eyes and sip my water, open them and look again. I still look like this. This is what I look like. All the time.
As soon as it’s late enough in California, I call my mother.
“Hello, darling,” she says. “I miss you.”
“Yeah,” I say. I stop for a minute, breathe, listen to her breathing three thousand miles away. “I miss you, too.” I do, and I listen for a minute while she talks all businesslike and chatty about her Thanksgiving leftovers, realizing this is the last time she’ll ever be this nice to me. This is the last moment she’ll think I belong to her. She can’t see me yet.
“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
“Oh. What is it, darling?”
“Well, a few things, actually. Remember how I got my hair cut short a while ago? I told you that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was still wanting, you know, a change. To look different from before.”
“Yes?” Her voice is getting impatient.
“So I colored it.” She’s rubbing off on me. I would never have used the word “colored” about my hair if I was talking to anyone else.
“Oh?”
“Blue.”
“What?” She’s screeching.
“Blue. I dyed my hair blue. Also I pierced my nose.”
“You pierced . . .” She’s so confused she can’t form whole sentences. “You what?”
“My nose. There’s a hoop in it. Not in the middle, like cattle. I think that’s disgusting. Mine’s just on one side. It looks really good, Mom. I like how it looks.”
“I see,” she says. There’s a scary calm to her voice. Either she’s still in shock, or she’s already decided to disown me and isn’t even upset.
I take a big breath. “So Dad wanted me to tell you, also, that last night, after I did all that, I went out, you know, with my friends.”
“Yes?” Her yesses just pull me along, like she’s actually tugging at the phone cord, bringing me closer and closer to her so she can make some sense of what I’m telling her.
“And we were out pretty late, I guess. And I was drinking. I came home kind of drunk, and Dad was really mad at me. He wanted me to tell you.”
There’s this chilly silence, until finally she says, “Lisa, let me talk to your father.” Her enunciation is astounding.
“He’s out. He went to get groceries. Do you want me to have him call you when he gets back?”
“No,” she says, all clippy. “No, that’s all right. Just tell him . . . tell him I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
“OK, Mom.” I wait to see if she’s going to say anything else, but she’s just breathing again, so far away. “Mom, how mad at me are you? Because I thought you’d be really mad, but you’re not saying anything. Are you so mad you’re not speaking to me?”
“No, sweetie,” she says, her voice all fake-nice again. “I’m not mad. Concerned. We’ll talk about this more tomorrow, OK?” It’s like she’s telling this to herself as much as me. She’ll call back tomorrow when she’s decided how to deal with me. After she’s yelled at my dad, she’ll yell at me. I can wait.
“She probably had to consult her hairdresser about how to put you back the way you were,” Carrie says at school on Monday. “And tonight she’ll call you back and explain how you can pretend this ugliness never happened.”
I glare at her. “ ‘Ugliness’? You think I look ugly?”
She shakes her head and pulls her French book out of her locker. “No, I think you look great. You know what I mean. Like, from her point of view, the whole situation is ugly.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” But maybe I do look ugly. I was so worried about looking different, I forgot about pretty. What does Gus think?
I meet him at Gray’s Papaya after school. We lean against the wall outside, drinking smoothies. My hands sweat inside mittens, even wrapped around the cold waxed-paper cup.
“Gus?” I tap the thick sole of one of his Doc Martens with the toe of mine.
“Hmm.” He raises his head to look at me, lips still wrapped around his straw.
“So I look really different now. I mean, I must look like a totally different person from when we started going out?”
Gus raises his eyebrows and nods slightly. “Uh-huh. You look different.”
“Is that weird?”
He puts his cup down on the sidewalk and stands in front of me, lifts my chin up with his hand and looks straight at me. His rings are cold against my skin. With the other hand he brushes my cheek along the right side of my nose, near my nose ring. “Does it still hurt?”
“Some. A little less.” I wrinkle my eyebrows. “You’re not answering me, Gus. Do you hate how I look now?”
He shakes his head, his face still inches from mine. “No. I think it’s good.”
“You think it is good, like on some big philosophical level, or you think it looks good?”
He kisses me on the lips, his hands still cupping my face. “Both.”
That’s the right answer. So why am I disappointed? Maybe I want to challenge Gus, too. To see if he’s still attracted to me if I don’t look as good. Because maybe he liked me because I was blond and normal looking and, I guess, pretty in this kind of conventional way. Unlike the other people he hangs out with.
“You’re frowning.” He drops his hands.
I press my lips together. “Gus, why do you like me?”
He picks up his smoothie and takes a long sip. “You’re not bored,” he says. He drinks more and looks at me sideways without raising his head all the way.
“What?”
“I like you, among other reasons, because you’re not bored.”
I narrow my eyes and walk to the corner to throw out my empty cup.
He follows and throws his away, even though it’s half full. “Everyone I know is bored, Lise. Except you. Look at Ben and Carrie. School bores them. Adults bore them. Hell, we bore them.” He kicks the garbage can and steps back to our spot against the wall. “My parents think they can get unbored by discovering new talent. They find some supposedly fascinating new artist and show him off to the world and then, when they’re still bored, they go look for another one.
“But you are totally unbored. You’re, like, engaged with the world. All the time. You didn’t do this”—he wraps a strand of my hair around his index finger—“because you were bored with being blond, right? You did it because you were interested in being blue.”
I smile, because it would be great if that were true. But is it?
“Come on.” He tugs at my jacket and steps away from the wall.
“Where?”
“The gallery.”
I look at him like a question mark.
“Yeah. I’m thinking maybe you won’t hate it.”
From the street it looks like nothing—a glass door interrupting a white stucco wall. Inside it’s all spare white space, white walls spotted with shapes of color.
A mechanical ding-dong sounds overhead as we walk through the door, and a tall man with thinning black hair and thick black glasses appears from behind one of the freestanding extrawhite walls.
“That couldn’t possibly be my son? Is the apartment on fire? Do you need money?” He winks at me while Gus glares.
I press my lips together to keep from smiling and lean into Gus’s side.
He sighs. “Dad, this is Lisa.” He’s mumbling, like a whole different person.
“Ah.” His father steps forward and takes my right hand in both of his. “I’ve heard nothing at all about you. What a pleasure.”
He and Gus stare each other down for a minute, and I wait, trying to figure out how real the tension is. Maybe sarcastic is just what they do.
“You must be an artist,” his dad says.
“That’s not why you’re here, then? Hmph.” He crosses his arms against his chest and looks at me.
Gus squeezes my hand but doesn’t say a word.
“I think you are an artist.” He gestures at my head. “That’s your canvas right there.”
I don’t understand for a minute. But then I do. My hair, he means. My nose. That’s what people see now when they see me.
He waves his hand for me to follow him to one of the display walls. “Take a look around, Lisa-who-I’ve-never-heard-of.”
Gus gives his father a violent look.
“Maybe something will inspire you.”
I step back, away from both of them. “I’ll just look, then?”
They shrug identical bony shoulders.
I walk up one side of the room, turn a corner, walk along another wall. The air around me feels thin, white like the walls. I stare at each piece, but nothing happens. I feel Gus and his father watching me, waiting for a reaction. This is a test. I have to prove to Gus that I’m interested in this stuff, not bored by it, but also I have to be on his side in the fight he’s having with his dad. And for his father, I have to fall in love with the right piece so he can proclaim me an artist.
Gus leans against a bare patch of wall with his arms crossed, staring at me. His dad is pacing, leaving a few feet between us so he can pretend he’s not following me around.
To escape both of them, I turn into this small room off the main gallery, and now I want to look at the art. Tables are scattered around the room—all different sizes and heights—and ledges stick out of the walls. On each surface is a wooden box, painted white or green or pale pink or gold. They have writing on them, black letters, done, I think, with stamps or stencils. One huge round box has stories on it, random paragraphs from fairy tales. “The Ugly Duckling” covers the inside—not all of it, but the part where the ugly duckling first sees the other swans and he wants to be with them, even though he doesn’t know why. Other boxes have poems or dreams or just one word, repeated again and again, letters snaking around the edges of the wood.
Now I want to write words on boxes. On walls, T-shirts, furniture. My fingers itch to write words. I step from one box to the next, reading every word, touching the corners to feel the texture of the paint, opening lids to find more words inside. Then a hand is on my shoulder, and I startle and gasp out loud.
“Sorry,” Gus says.
“I like these,” I whisper.
He nods.
“Maybe you’re a poet,” says his father, who is standing in the doorway to this little room full of boxes. “A word sculptor.”
“ ‘A word sculptor,’ ” I echo. “So my hair isn’t why I’m an artist?”
“Could be it’s just fashion,” says Gus.
“You don’t think fashion is art?” argues his father.
“You know,” I say, “I should really get home. I mean, I told my dad I’d be home for dinner, and he doesn’t know I’m here, and I shouldn’t be late today, you know, after Saturday.”
“Yeah,” says Gus. “Let’s get out of here.”
I wave as Gus leads me toward the front door. “It was nice to meet you.”
And we’re back out on the street. It’s dark now, and cold enough to see my breath under the streetlights.
“Did you see that big box,” I say as we walk. “The one with the fairy tales?”
“Uh-huh.”
We walk into the subway station, and it’s too crowded to talk. Everyone is coming home from work, and Gus and I can barely stay together going down the stairs and through the turnstile, much less talk, until we get to our platform.
“The box?” he says.
“Right,” I continue, almost shouting. “It had part of ‘The Ugly Duckling’ on it. You know that story?”
“Yeah, sure. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that.”
“Right. But when I was looking at it, I was thinking that’s not what it’s really about. I mean, it’s not about beauty.”
“No?”
“Nope. Not at all. It’s really about the difference between who you really are and who you’re supposed to be, like, according to your family.”
“Yeah . . .”
“So this guy, he was born to a family of ducks, right? And he was supposed to be beautiful or cute or whatever, in a duckish way. Everyone expects him to be. But he’s not, so they’re disappointed in him.”
“Until he finds out he’s a swan.”
“Right. But he still can’t hang out with his family. He has to get away from the other ducks and be beautiful among swans. It’s just like us, like everyone.”
Our train comes and we step on, squeeze together against a pole, and I keep talking, loud, right into Gus’s ear.
“My mom wants me to be pretty and well dressed in this really conservative, pale-pink way. She expects me to be, because she is. Like the ducks. She thinks I’m wrong because I’m not a duck. Your dad thinks how you look is cool, but he thinks it’s because you’re an artist. A duck. But you’ve got a swan Mohawk, not a duck Mohawk.”
Gus grins at me, huge dimples in both cheeks. He’s about to start laughing.
He nods, undoes his smile.
“All of us, you and me and all our friends, are swans. We’re beautiful or special or whatever when we’re together, but not in the way our families want us to be. They can’t see it, because they think we’re supposed to be like them. That’s what the story’s about.”
We crawl off the train and up three flights of stairs to the street.
“So by your theory,” Gus says, “our parents think we’re ugly ducklings; our friends know we’re beautiful swans.”
“Exactly.”
We turn onto my block and I walk more slowly, scraping my shoes along the sidewalk.
There’s a woman standing on my front stoop, right under the halo of the porch light. I drag my feet slower, but she still gets closer. Her back is straight, a brown scarf matches her shoes, suitcase at her feet.
Swan. My mother is beautiful. A swan. Which makes me not. Either.
She sees me, furrows her carefully groomed eyebrows, tilts her head forward a bit farther to be sure it really is her daughter coming toward her.
I’m colder now inside my body than out. It’s cold in my stomach; cold blood pumps from my heart. I squeeze Gus’s hand tight, stop walking. Stand still.
“What?” Gus strokes the back of my hand with his thumb, doesn’t try to loosen my grip.
Breathless, I open my mouth and close it again. I look at the sidewalk: grainy gray cement, not smooth.
“My mother,” I whisper to the sidewalk, loosening my fingers but not letting go. “Over there.”
Gus draws in his breath. “Oh.”
I step forward. Lift my right foot, place it down, left foot up, down. Again. Eyes on my shoelaces, on the cracked, bumpy sidewalk. I stop when the stairs up to my front door are at my toes. Gus’s left foot stops against my right. Our four Doc Martens make parallel lines, black, black, silver, silver. I raise my head.
She holds a hand against her cheek, leather glove against her pink skin, blond hair falling gracefully across the leather. Eyes blue like mine, peeking over her smooth brown fingers. They pierce into me, question, greet, scold, soothe.
“Mom.”
Gus lets go of my hand.
Then my mom walks down the steps and reaches her arm out to hug me. I let her, and I feel Gus step away from me, giving her room. Briefly, I put my arms around her. A small squeeze to counter the big one she’s giving me.
Then, gently, I push her away.
“Lisa, honey, look at you.” Her voice soft, sad. “You don’t look like you anymore.”
“I do,” I say. “I look just like me.” All the fear drains out of me at the sound of my own voice. It’s like the rush of strength I felt when Carrie put in my nose ring. I am sure now. Sure that this is the important part. Not shocking my mother or being beautiful—duck beautiful or swan beautiful. I reach behind me for Gus’s hand. I can’t see him, but I know he’ll be there. And he is, fingers twisting around mine, no gloves in the way, just skin.
“This is what I look like, Mom.”
