Words That Start With B (2 page)

It’s my favourite time of day, just after dinner but before the street lamps turn on. Outside the air still smells like barbequed hamburgers and the sound of the crickets is getting louder; you can hear them underneath all the yelling from the kids playing street hockey. There is a nip in the air that I swear wasn’t there last week. Inside, Mom and I are staring at each other in the mirror of the Hair Emporium.

“Well,” she says, testing the weight of my hair in her hands, “what’ll it be this year? Blue highlights? Bangs? A fauxhawk?”

I roll my eyes. “Ha, ha. If I want to look like a weirdo, I know where to go.”

Mom laughs. “Well if you ever feel like indulging in a little teenage rebellion you can always get a job at Curl Up & Dye. That is one sure way to get under my skin.”

Curl Up & Dye is the newest salon in town. It falls under hipster salon in my mother’s three categories of salon. Barbershops don’t count because their clientele is mostly men. Hipster salons are full of stylists with tattoos and body piercings. They wear tight jeans or patterned tights and revealing tops, even the boys. You go to a hipster salon if you want to dye your hair purple or get a mohawk or want any kind of haircut that most people would find stupid.

Curl Up & Dye opened this summer and Mom has been grumbling about it ever since. The head stylist moved from Vancouver where she used to work on film sets, doing hair for movie stars.

“A gimmick,” Mom said. “She won’t last. Not when people realize how hard it is to grow out those mini bangs. Plus, if she was so hot in Vancouver, then what is she doing here?”

My mom’s best friend Denise tapped the side of her nose. “Drugs,” she said.

Denise thinks that drug dealing is the source of all mysterious wealth. “Clarissa,” she said, “you stay clear away from drugs. I don’t care how cute a boy is, never let him give you drugs; they will scramble your brains and wreck your skin. And that is more than my own mother ever told me.”

Mall salons are usually part of a chain. They offer the cheapest rates and use products you can buy from infomercials on
TV
. The stylists wear white and too much makeup. My mom worked in a mall salon once called Kwick Kuts. “I gave perms and trimmed bangs for eight hours a day with a half-hour lunch and no break. I felt like a little cog in a big wheel.”

To this day she hates giving perms because the smell of the chemicals reminds her of working at Kwick Kuts.

The last category is granola salons. In a granola salon, everyone talks in hushed voices and they play nature
CD
s on repeat all day long. If they offer you anything to drink, it’s water or green tea. The hair products are all natural, all organic and full of essential oils. Mom does not buy into any of it.

“If I want to feel close to nature, I’ll go camping,” she’ll say. “Oatmeal is for eating, not for scalp treatments.”

Mom calls them granola salons because they go after the
granola hippie: “Or worse, the type who think they’re hippies but spend hundreds of dollars at the mall to look like hippies.” Just the word hippie makes Mom roll her eyes.

The Hair Emporium doesn’t fit into any category. Mom caters to the small-town woman who wants a good haircut in a nice place, which is why the salon looks like a sunny kitchen, with fluffy white curtains, black-and-white checkerboard tiles on the floor, yellow walls and red reclining chairs. Every morning Mom burns a vanilla candle in the salon to make it smell homey. People are always saying that the Hair Emporium reminds them of the little salon in the movie
Steel Magnolias
. That makes my mom smile because it’s one of her all-time favourite movies. After
Pretty Woman,
of course.

Mom smiles at me in the mirror, playing around with my hair, trying to find the perfect shape. I try to avert my eyes but it’s hard when you’re sitting in front of a huge mirror and your mother is staring you down. I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror if I can help it. I know I’m not ugly, but I’m not beautiful either. I am the tallest girl and the third-tallest person in my whole class. My legs are really long, but not in a good way, more in a pants-never-fit way. I’m flat as flat can be, which is fine with me, and my hair can’t seem to decide if it would rather be straight or curly. Mostly I wear it in a ponytail to hide the fact that it is probably the worst hair you could possibly be stuck with.

“Don’t worry, Clarissa,” Mom says, reading my mind. “Right now your hair is all hopped up on hormones. It’ll settle down once you get through puberty.”

I hate it when she says words like puberty.

I have this idea of what I look like in my head, and every time I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I’m always a little surprised at the person staring back. In my head,
my nose is smaller, my cheeks are thinner and my eyes are more green than brown. It doesn’t help that my mother is officially a knockout, with a heart-shaped face, dimples, big blue eyes and thick, honey-blond hair. She has an award to prove it. When she was seventeen Mom won the beauty pageant at the fair and came second in the regionals, not that she ever talks about it. Her official title was Dairy Queen, which had nothing to do with the restaurant, sadly, but was because the pageant was sponsored by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario.

Denise is the one who fills me in on all those stories. To hear her tell it, you would think it was Denise who won and not my mother. “Oh, Clarissa, she was a sight for sore eyes. Poor Janice Beal thought she could step dance her way to the podium, but no amount of dance training could get rid of that pug nose. Am I right, Annie?”

Mom demurs and won’t say anything more about it. If she’s disappointed that her daughter isn’t beauty pageant material, she never mentions it. Just as well. I have no desire to prance around in a bathing suit or spend all that time smiling like an idiot. Still. One dimple might be nice.

“Do you want me to straighten it? Maybe add a few highlights?”

I don’t like the way she’s looking at my hair right now, like it’s hopeless. Just because she
can
do stuff to it doesn’t mean I want her to. It is my hair after all. If I want to shave it off or twist it into dreads it’s none of her business. I brush her hands away from my head.

“I don’t want to do anything with it,” I say.

“Fine,” Mom sighs. “A wash and a trim it is. Now close your eyes and I’ll give you your scalp treatment.”

Before they go to the sink for a shampoo, my mother
gives her customers a five-minute head-and-shoulder massage that she calls a scalp treatment. It’s her specialty. Some people swear up and down that mom does the best dye job in town, but really, it’s the massages that keep them coming back. People are always asking her if she took a course in massage therapy, but Mom says, “Nope, I was born with the magic touch.”

She isn’t kidding. First she starts with your shoulders, kneading them till they go all soft like Silly Putty. Then she works up your neck and her fingers slide behind your ears and into your hair as she massages the troubles right out of your head. When Mom is working her magic, people’s jaws go all slack and hang-dog, and if they’re really enjoying it, they drool a little. When she’s done they open their eyes and blink like they’re just waking up from the best sleep ever. Sometimes they can’t talk until the cool rinse revives them a little. She’s that good.

When I was younger Mom used to perfect her magic touch on my head. I’d crawl onto her lap, lean back against her and just sit there sucking my thumb, somewhere between asleep and awake, and let her massage away. That was before I was too old for such things. Now if I want a head massage I have to get my hair cut, just like everyone else.

Try as I might, I just can’t seem to fall asleep. I’ve laid out my clothes, packed and repacked my backpack. I even made my lunch. I can’t remember a time I was more excited to go back to school. Then again, the first day of school used to mean the death of summer. This year the first day of school means the first day of the rest of my life. In interviews, famous actors and actresses are always talking about the people who changed their lives. I can’t explain it, but I just know that Miss Ross is that person for me.

I met Miss Ross in grade three. There was a robin’s nest in one of the trees along the border of the playground, and a group of boys was trying to knock it down by throwing rocks at it.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, back off! Leave them alone!”

A few of the kids scattered, but the older ones just laughed at me and kept on pitching stones, and anything else they could find, at the nest. You could just barely hear the baby birds, peeping away.

“How would you like it if I threw rocks at you?”

When no one answered, I grabbed a handful of gravel and started pitching stones in their direction. I wasn’t aiming at their heads, not on purpose, but I’m not a great shot,
so even though I meant to hit their backs, I missed a few times and hit them square in the neck. That didn’t go over very well, but at least it got their attention.

“Hey! Who do you think you are?”

Suddenly the nest was forgotten and I was the new target. I held my arm across my face to protect my eyes as stones came whizzing by my head, too close for comfort. They had much better aim than I did. I turned on my heel and ran smack into Miss Ross, Benji hovering beside her.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

“That’s quite enough, gentlemen.”

The boys skidded to a halt. She wasn’t very tall, but Miss Ross had a way of making herself seem taller. She had what my mother would call a tall personality.

“I’ve taken the liberty of alerting the principal that you will be waiting for her outside her office.”

They didn’t look so tough anymore. Getting caught was bad enough, but getting caught by Miss Ross was the ultimate. One of them stuck his lip out and pointed at me.

“But she started it!” he whined.

Miss Ross held her hand up for silence.

“I will deal with Clarissa.”

I looked up at her, mouth hanging open. She knew my name?

The boys walked off, grumbling to themselves. One of them shot me a dirty look. I raised my chin in the air and pretended not to see it. What did I have to be sorry for? I wasn’t the baby-bird killer.

“Come with me, please.”

But as I followed Miss Ross through the playground and toward her classroom, I got that sick feeling in my stomach. I may not have been aiming at the birds, but I did throw
rocks at another person. Some people probably think that’s worse. Maybe Miss Ross was one of those people. I didn’t know much about her then. The older kids didn’t pay a lot of attention to us younger students, so most of what we knew about her came from bits and pieces of conversations we had gathered in the hallways or on the playground. On the first day of school the kids who didn’t get into her class spent lunch hour crying about it. She was like the Wizard of Oz and I was about to enter her Emerald City.

“Please come in, Clarissa.”

Walking into Miss Ross’s classroom was like walking into a rainbow. I didn’t know where to look first. One whole side of the classroom was lined with red bookshelves, bursting with books. Easter-egg coloured kites were strung along the ceiling, which was painted light blue with white cloud patterns. Behind her desk Miss Ross had a real painting, the size of a bulletin board, of a tree that had birds in the branches instead of leaves. The birds were all different colours, too many to count.

Miss Ross smiled at the painting, running her fingers over the canvas. The paint was so thick it stuck out in shiny ridges. I wanted to touch it, too.

“I have always loved birds,” Miss Ross said. She unwound her scarf from her neck and reached beneath her blouse to pull out a chain. On the end was a silver bird, wings outstretched, mid-flight. It matched a pair of earrings dangling from her ears, delicate silver feathers that glinted in the sunlight and looked almost real. She held out the necklace for me to look at it. I leaned forward but kept my arms at my sides. My hands were still grubby from the gravel; I didn’t want to get dirt all over it.

“I made this a long time ago, at summer camp.” Miss Ross smiled at the memory. “I hammered it myself,” she explained, running her fingers over the dents.

“They look like scales,” I said.

Miss Ross laughed, but in a friendly way. “They do!” she agreed. “People are always giving me things with birds on them, cards, mugs, you name it. I even have a book of bird poems. You know, the Haida people have totems to represent their clans. I’ve adopted the bird as my own personal totem.”

“What kind of bird?” I asked.

“It changes,” she said. “But right now, I’m fascinated by magpies. Magpies are collectors. They find bits of wool and thread, sometimes even lost jewellery, to decorate their nests. Each one is truly unique and beautiful.”

I could see why Miss Ross liked magpies so much. Her classroom was like a magpie nest, full of beautiful things.

“What kind of bird am I?” I asked.

“You, Clarissa, have the soul of an eagle. A brave warrior and loyal friend.”

I liked the sound of that.

“But even eagles must know when to cross the line,” Miss Ross said gently.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked. Before she could answer, I rushed on, “Because I was just trying to save the birds! There were babies in the nest, and those boys were trying to knock it down. They would have died.”

“Your friend Benji told me you were trying to protect them. That’s very honourable. But there are other things you can do to stop something like this from happening again. Can you think of something else you could have done?”

“Told a teacher?” I guessed.

“Exactly. Let me deal with those boys. Throwing rocks at another person is just as bad as throwing them at birds.”

“No, it’s not!” I cried. “A bird can’t throw rocks back!”

“You have a noble spirit, Clarissa. I admire that. But someone could have been seriously hurt. If you throw rocks at another person, you are just as bad as the person who throws rocks at the birds. The intent is still the same; to hurt another living thing. Do you see?”

When she put it like that it made sense. I felt ashamed.

“Do I have to go to the principal’s office, too?” I asked.

Miss Ross smiled. Even her teeth were beautiful.

“I’m sure Principal Donner has her hands full. I’ll tell you what, just this once I will make an exception. But I want you to promise me you won’t throw rocks at another living thing again. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” I said solemnly. She offered me her hand and we shook, like adults. The bracelets on her wrist clinked. I would have promised her anything.

“Well, Clarissa, it was nice to meet you.”

And then she said the magic words.

“I look forward to having you in my class.”