None of the Regular Rules (5 page)

“Let’s measure my hair tonight,” I said. I reached back and twisted my fingers through my ponytail, the same ponytail I’d worn for about six months straight. I pulled out my hair band and shook my hair around my shoulders and down my back. It was crimped from drying in the ponytail holder. “Get a good look now, ladies. If I’ve got ten inches when it’s pulled back, we’re cutting it off and sending it in.”

CHAPTER
FIVE

Ever since our conversation the night school started, I
hadn’t been able to
stop thinking about Johnny Rush. I didn’t
want
to be thinking about Johnny. I wasn’t sure
why
I was thinking about him. I only knew that I
was
thinking about him. A lot. Johnny was a curiosity. A fascination.

I guess it was because I wasn’t used to someone like Johnny talking to me. I don’t know. Maybe it was because, now that I’d been thinking of him so much more often, I’d realized how silly his name was:
Johnny Rush
. Was he a porn star? A professional skateboarder?

His parents must have had some expectation, at the fetal level, that he’d be popular to give him a name like Johnny Rush. Someone with that name couldn’t end up like that guy in the math league, the one who sometimes wore a storm trooper mask to lunch (I don’t know what that guy’s name is, but I am willing to bet it’s not Johnny Rush). My neighbor was blessed—or cursed, depending on how you look at it—from the get-go, and he obviously lived up to his name. He wasn’t a porn star, but he was popular. And strangely magnetic.

I was a little disappointed I hadn’t gotten to know Johnny before he left for college. He was sexy, fascinating, and seemed genuinely kind. Now, it was only a matter of days before he would drive off to Madison, with his stuff in the back of his parents’ SUV, and it was too late for regrets. I’d missed the chance.

These are the things I thought about as Ella and Grace worked to convert my third
-
floor bathroom into a hair salon later that night.
I also spent some time wondering if my hair would look anything like Johnny’s hair when it was cut—could I pull off a messy shag that told people I just didn’t care? If I didn’t look like Johnny, I had a feeling I would look like that guy who wore a
s
torm
t
rooper helmet to school. I
thought
the odds were fairly evenly split.

Johnny’s hair had grown out over the summer into sun-kissed blond waves that fell to just below his ears. I peeked into the mirror that hung over my desk and pulled my hair back from my face. I puckered my lips into a pout and gazed lovingly into my own eyes.

“Are you making kissy faces at yourself?” Grace asked, peeking into my room. “Saying adios to the old hair?”

“I’m practicing my new attitude,” I retorted.

I heard Ella sigh in the hall. “New hair does not make a new attitude.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “I like to think it will. Are you guys ready yet or what?”

“As a matter of fact, we are.” Grace stepped into my room and wrapped her soft hand around my arm. “Right this way, please.”

They led me up the stairs and into the cramped bonus bathroom at the very top of the stairs. It was a tiny little commode, with a minisink and a toilet stuffed so tightly into one corner that you had to sit on it sideways. But one whole wall was covered in a giant, gilt-edged mirror that made the room feel much larger than it was.

Ella and Grace had draped printed fabrics and brightly colored tissue paper all over the floor, and had set one of our kitchen chairs in the center of all the color. Ella gestured to
the chair, and I sat down. She put
a towel across my shoulders and fastened a piece of calico fabric around my neck like a cape. I recognized the fabric from one of Ella’s skirts.

As Ella played with my hair, fluffing it and brushing it and adjusting my head in the mirror, Grace taped the list to the upper left-hand corner of the mirror. It was a symbolic gesture, but seeing it there made the whole cutting
-
my
-
hair
-
off thing easier. That, and the pictures of the little kids with bald heads from the Locks of Love website. I’d been looking at pictures of those kids all day, trying to remind myself that I was lucky I had enough hair that I could help.

“Ponytails, please,” Ella commanded, holding her hand out toward Grace.

“Wait, how did you decide which of you is going to chop? Does either of you have any experience in the art of hair?”

Ella cocked her head. “Yeah,” she said. “I do. I tease my grandma’s hair when she’s between trips to the hairdresser.”

“What does that mean, ‘tease
’
?”

“You know, fluff it for her. I believe the formal term is ‘ratting it.’ Get rid of the holes in her hairdo.”

“She has holes in her hair? From you?” I was starting to panic. Maybe I ought to have gone to a proper haircutter for this. But all my money was saved for gas, and I knew my parents weren’t going to shell out bonus cash to fulfill something that they would perceive to be a whim. I also didn’t want to tell them about this until it was done. I didn’t want them to know about Suzy’s list at all. They had a way of convincing me out of stuff, reminding me that it wasn’t a good idea. And it’s not like I was likely to trust the ladies at Great Clips any more than I would trust my best friends.

“So, ma’am,” Ella said, without missing a beat. Apparently she wasn’t going to provide further details about her hole-headed grandmother. “What are you thinking today?”

“Well, let’s measure it and then I guess we just snip and see what happens?” I was hoping for ten inches, the amount they needed for the wigs at Locks of Love. My hair had been growing without much weeding for a few years now, so I guessed it was probably close.

Grace pulled out a ruler. “Pony it up, Mistress Hair.”

Ella pulled my hair into two loose pigtails, near my neck. Grace brought the tape measure close and proclaimed, “Thirteen inches each, from binder to bottom!”

We all let out a whoop. Then, while I was distracted, Ella pulled a pair of scissors out of some unseen hiding spot and snipped one of the ponytails off. The hair that had been held back with the elastic swung free, some landing just below my ear, some falling far short. The ponytailed clump of hair landed in Ella’s hand. She wrapped her fingers around it and looked at me in the mirror, her mouth agape. The second ponytail remained completely intact on the other side of my head.

Just as I was about to reach up and touch the last of it, Grace leaned forward and produced another pair of scissors. She snipped the other ponytail and the rest of my hair was released. Each of my friends held a fat wad of my hair in
her
hand while I sat stunned and—slightly—hairless. I touched my hand to the back of my head and gasped when I felt the shortest section. It was less than an inch long where the
ponytail holders
had been.

Grace gathered the clump of hair that Ella was still holding close in her hand and stuffed both ponytails inside a padded envelope. I saw that it was already addressed to Locks of Love. At least they’d done the legwork. I just had to look funny for a few months.

“Well,” I said, finally. “Does someone want to attempt to make a style out of what’s left of it?”

“I do!” Ella shouted. She covered her mouth. “Sorry, that was a little loud. But I want to. I want to cut it. That felt so good.” She had a demented grin on her face. “Let me at it.”

I just closed my eyes and let her get to work. I could hear snipping and slicing and an occasional giggle as my friends pulled and tugged at my hair. Once, Grace gasped and Ella muttered, “Oops.” That was the only time I opened my eyes, but I closed them again when I saw that my head looked seriously lopsided.

Finally, Ella led me to the sink. “Just a quick rinse, and we’re good to go. I hope.”

Grace lathered me up with some sort of pear shampoo that her mother had probably brought home from a church retreat, and then Ella dried me off. I smelled a little too fruity for my taste, and my head felt empty and light. When I stood upright again, I came face to face with myself.

Choppy, dark, uneven layers framed my face and made my eyes look larger. The angles of my cheeks were more pronounced, as though the way I’d pulled my hair back for the last four years had held the skin of my face too tight against the bones. The hair on the back of my head was cropped close, and when I turned to the side, I could see the angles of my neck curving delicately up from the nape. I thought it almost looked like the silhouette of a body curving from my back up to my head. I ran my fingers through it and short hair dropped over my face in damp, sexy waves. I smiled the tiniest bit, testing the new me out.

There was something about my reflection that reminded me of Suzy, I realized. I looked a little bit l
ike her, in the lone picture of her
I had hanging in my room—the one I’d taken of her on her camera, just weeks before the accident. Her eyes were nearly closed, and the way the sun had been shining on her face when I’d snapped the picture made it look like her cheeks were made of ivory silk. But her chin was tipped up, and she was smiling. She didn’t smile a lot, but she smiled with me. I would never forget that.

Suddenly, I was really, really happy I’d cut it. I beamed at my friends, then took a Sharpie and crossed
n
umber
t
hree off our list.

There was only one thing missing. As long as we’d gone this far, what was stopping me from really stretching? “What do you think about a pink streak?” I asked, meeting my friends’ eyes in the mirror. “If I’m supposed to jump off a cliff, I think I need a dash of new color.”

CHAPTER
SIX

By the time we’d finished
cutting and streaking my hair
with some leftover Mani
c Panic I found in Shane’s room
, it was close to eight. Cars lined the street in front of my house, and as I peeked out the window I saw the lawn mower careening toward the road, en route to pick up more passengers at their cars and ferry them from the road to the rocky beach. Johnny stood astride the mower, and someone was rolling around in the wagon that was still hitched up to the back. It was possible it was two someones, but it was hard to see details in the fading light.

“Are they having sex in the back of that wagon?” Grace asked, resting her chin on my shoulder from behind.

“Open the window,” Ella commanded. “Do something to make him notice you! We need to go to that party!”

I pushed open my window just as the mower cut out. In the momentary silence, the screech of my old wooden window filled the night with a howl.

Johnny looked up and I instinctively tried to hide. “Yo!” Johnny called out in a stage whisper. “Get yourselves down here, ladies. Sophie, some people have been talking about stealing our pumpkins. Defend your turf! Save the stowaways!”

“Is he drunk?” Grace whispered. “What is he talking about?” I hadn’t told my friends about the brief conversation I’d had with Johnny down by the beach earlier in the week. It had seemed so inconsequential, and I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Even though, in my head, it was kind of becoming a big deal.

“Tell him we’re coming,” Ella murmured from across the room. As I moved away from the window to turn out the light, I found Ella on the floor with both of her legs up in the air. She was pulling a pair of lacy leggings up under her stretchy skirt, and I think she’d somehow managed to put on both lip liner and lipstick in the time I’d been watching Johnny out the window. “Let’s conquer
n
umber
f
our!”

I clicked off the light so they couldn’t see me blush.

***

It was disappointingly easy to sneak out of my house. Too easy to count it as
real
sneaking out (
n
umber
e
ight on Suzy’s list), since my parents’ snores were fairly obvious from just about anywhere in the house. I’d long ago memorized the route through the house with the fewest number of creaky boards.

There was a reason for this, and it wasn’t anything exciting. Mom wasn’t keen on me eating sweets (
her
weight issues…not mine), so I’d come up with a regular act of rebellion when I was still in elementary school that had carried on until we moved into this house. Every night when Mom went into her bathroom to do her face routine I would sneak downstairs and pluck three of my dad’s hidden Oreos or Milanos or sometimes, if we were light on the real stuff, one of those oddly
airy soy
-
ice
-
cream sandwiches that my mom thought were a real treat. Then I’d stuff it all in my mouth at once and chew as I
sneaked
back upstairs.

My mom’s dessert embargo was a perfect way to
create
food issues, if you ask me. But no one asked me, so I’d continued my sneak eating for years, and learned how to get around in our house without making a whole lot of noise.

So that night, when it came time to get out of the house to join Johnny’s party down on the beach, I led Ella and Grace through the dark channels of my house, pointing to a loose board here or a creaky step there. We made it out and spilled onto the lawn a few minutes after Johnny had beckoned to us from the window. As we stepped onto the grass, I realized I was still wearing the same outfit I’d worn to school. It worried me that this worried me. I didn’t understand why Johnny’s opinion of me mattered as much as it did.

I could hear the low hum of the lawn mower, back in business, down at the far end of the lawn. Suddenly, the sound cut out, and the buzz of the party crested over the hill from the beach. It sounded like a decent number of people were still around, since it was obviously not a small, intimate get-together. I patted my hair nervously and noticed that Ella and Grace were both fidgeting on either side of me.

“Smell my breath,” Ella demanded, coming up close to huff in my face. “Okay?”

“Cheeto-y.”

She nodded. “Okay. That’s better than plaque.”

I looked at her. “What does plaque smell like, exactly?”

“Crap.”

“Right. Well, you don’t smell like plaque then.”

We reached the edge of the lawn and stood overlooking the party from above. There were at least thirty people gathered, some of whom I recognized from last year’s student council, some from the Homecoming Court, and others from their general notoriety in the halls of our high school. I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to who was who and who was doing whom, but I was pretty sure this was the cream of last year’s popular crop. I noticed a few people from our own class, but couldn’t see everyone who was hidden in the background, f
a
rther away from the fire.

“Oh, God,” Grace muttered beside me. She looked pale in the light of the moon. “I don’t do parties.”

“Come on,” Ella said, and tugged at her arm. “The people down there are not movie stars.” My two friends slipped and slid down the hill together. It was too late to turn back now. “Anyway,” I heard Ella say as she slid down the hill. “You can just consider this a ‘gathering.’
 
”

We tucked into the corners of the crowd, weaving between couples and barely getting any notice. A few people glanced our way, but it was surprisingly easy to squeeze in, to give ourselves time to acclimate. I realized no one was really looking at me, and that’s when I started to wonder what exactly I’d expected. Maybe that someone would rush over with beer and throw it on me, or that there would be chanting. Don’t parties like this come with chanting and hollering, identifying new arrivals? I don’t know, maybe that’s just what I always imagined. I thought I’d be more obvious—that I’d stick out as someone who didn’t belong.

Instead, I could see that some people were making out around a fire, others were stripping down to go skinny
-
dipping in the lake, and someone—who
was
that?—was playing a guitar. He was sitting alone, staring at the kissers, which made it seem like he was serenading the people who were hooking up. That in itself would be a little weird. But I’d never seen the guy before, which made his presence even creepier.

I shook my head and looked around. Suddenly a hand landed on my shoulder and then Johnny Rush was in front of us. His sun-bleached
blond hair hung loose in front of his eyes, and he had a dopey grin on his face that made me wonder if maybe he was a little dim. It wasn’t a charitable thought, I know, but I had to distract myself from staring at his eyes, which were a color that looked like it was made up of tiny aquamarine crystals.
He’s dating Mackenzie Gardner
, I reminded myself.
And leaving for college. And a perfect stranger.

“Neighbor! You came. I thought maybe you were too snobby to join us. Welcome to our shared beach.” He laughed.

“Of course we came,” I said, more confidently than I felt. He thought I was snobby? “I couldn’t miss the last lawn
-
mower kegger ever, could I?”

“Who says this is the last ever? It’s just the last for a while.” He looked at me. “You have new hair.”

“I cut it.” I reached one hand up and touched it, self-consciously.

“It looks a little like mine now,” he said, and pressed his cheek against mine so Ella and Grace could admire the comparison. He smelled good, like lake water
and grass
, and my skin buzzed where his face touched mine. I could feel the muscles in his cheek move as he smiled hugely at Ella and Grace. “Do we look like twins?”

“Not really,” Ella deadpanned. I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was thinking:
t
hat Johnny was either drunk or dumb. We both had a tendency to jump to conclusions. Some might call it a flaw, I called it preparedness. “Yours is blond, Sophie’s is brown. With a streak of pink.”

“Ooh, a pink streak,” Johnny said, wiggling his fingers. “Fawwwncy.” He laughed again. “Well, whatever you’ve done with it, it looks fantastic.” He nodded resolutely, as though by him saying it, it was a fact.

For some reason, the compliment made the inside of my body melt.

“Do you know everyone here?” Johnny asked, stepping away from me. “Surely you know the beautiful Miss Mackenzie.” He pulled his girlfriend over and she slipped into his arms as though they’d been custom
-
fitted to her body. I felt horrible pangs of jealousy and wondered how I could possibly feel possessive about Johnny Rush when I’d spoken to him for a total of, maybe, twelve minutes in my entire life
.
I suddenly wanted to lean over and bite Mackenzie Gardner. I realized I really hated Mackenzie Gardner. Who knew?

“Hi, Sophie,” Mackenzie said sweetly. Okay, maybe she wasn’t that bad. She knew my name, and we’d never spoken two words to each other in my three years at East Central. I guess I’d always assumed Mackenzie was one of those uppity snobs who refused to look down at the classes below them.

There were a few cliques of girls at our school that acted like they lived in their own special, gilded high school world. It was a world with only twenty or thirty people who lived at court, and the rest of us were just faceless nobodies who stood around waiting to serve them. They were envied and adored, but I was never exactly sure why or how they found their way up to the top of the turret.

“Hi, Mackenzie!” I chirped. “How are you?” Oh my gosh, I was chirping. Why did my voice suddenly sound so chipper? Surely someone was going to notice that I was acting like a total dork. “How was your summer?”

“It was fantastic,” she said, and snuggled in closer against Johnny’s chest. I could smell her sweet perfume, and I hated that it was blending in with Johnny’s clean lake smell. He was going to smell like girl, another girl, and I didn’t want him to. “I take off for school tomorrow,” she said with a pout. “Madison.”

“Oh, you’re going to Madison, too?” I asked, and my heart stopped beating for a second. I could picture it now—Mackenzie and Johnny, snuggled up in some extra
long dorm bed, surrounded by classic literature and cups of latte. They’d read each other passages from Shakespeare, then laugh a
t something together, then they woul
d kiss and snuggle and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

Oh. My. God.
What is wrong with me?

Mackenzie grinned and nodded. “I’m pretty excited about it.”

“I’m sure,” I said, trying to shake the image of the two of them and the Shakespeare and the coffee cups from my mind.

“Do you guys want a beer or anything?” Mackenzie offered. “Hey, Pete, pour a couple of beers, okay?” She looked back at us and said, “Or if you want a Coke, we’ve got that, too.”

I looked at Grace and Ella. It’s not like any of us really had anything
against
beer (well, Grace did—but that didn’t count, since Grace was against pretty much
everything
). “Yeah, I’ll take a beer,” I said. Why not?
It wasn’t
like we had to drive anywhere. Maybe beer would soak up some of the tiny little beads of jealousy that were skittering around inside my stomach. They were making me nauseous. “Grace probably wants a Coke.”

Grace smiled at me gratefully.

A few seconds later, Peter Martinson walked over with three cups from the keg. I’m sure Ella nearly collapsed next to me, but she held her chin high and pretended she was as confident as ever.

“Hey, guys,” Peter said, grinning. “Who ordered the beer? Hey, neat hair, Erickson.”

“Thanks,” I said, reaching up to feel my short style again. I kept forgetting
my hair
was all gone.

Ella smiled at Peter, but said nothing. She wordlessly took a cup from his hand and stared at the rocky ground. “What’s up, Ambrose?” His eyes brushed over Ella, then stopped on Grace. “Grace Cutler,” Peter said slowly, holding a beer out toward her. She shook her head, so he shrugged and drank it himself. “What are
you
doing at one of Johnny’s parties? I didn’t know you knew how to have a good time at non-school-sanctioned events. This isn’t the Homecoming Dance, you know. No chaperones.” He downed the beer and wagged his finger in front of her face.

As a kid, Peter had been decent—we’d played together a lot until fourth or fifth grade. But then sometime in middle school he’d turned into a prick. Even still, Ella couldn’t get him out of her head. She couldn’t see through the pretty exterior to the rotten core.

“Peter, it’s so funny
you’re
here,
too
,” I said, taking a sip from my cup. The beer was warm and smelled pungent, like chem lab gone wrong. I tried to channel my new hair as I spat out, “I was
just
thinking about you. I was going to give my little cousin all my old Barbie dolls, but then I realized
you
still have a few of them. Do you think I could get them back, or do you still like to play with them?” It was such a stupid thing to tease someone about—what was I, a ten
-
year
-
old boy?—but he really did still have my Barbies and I knew Peter would hate me bringing it up. He was the kind of guy that valued his masculinity and image above all else. Which
was
why the pink polo had been so perplexing.