“Awesome.” He smiled, and I thought that if I’d known that smile was coming, I’d have told him yes before he’d finished his first question.
“Do you want to do it here?” I gestured around the common room, which contained a fireplace, a television, two pilly orange couches, five or six pilly blue chairs, a few bookshelves built into the wall, and, next to the kitchenette, a round table with several wooden chairs.
“Here’s fine,” Tullis said. “Do you have scissors?”
“Yeah. They’re not, like, special haircutting scissors, though.”
“That’s cool. And we should probably get a towel. You want me to go get a towel? I’m just in Walley’s.” So that was why he’d stumbled into this common room-because ours was the girls’ dorm closest to his own. It occurred to me that maybe cutting hair was one of the things, like baking chocolate chip cookies or holding a baby, that all boys thought all girls knew how to do. If he did think that, it was sweet-I didn’t want to be the one to reveal that he was wrong.
“I can get a towel upstairs,” I said. I had only my own towels, which I washed in the machines in the basement, but Martha, like most students, got the laundry service. Every Tuesday morning before chapel, you left your used towels, along with your other dirty laundry, in a yellow drawstring bag with your last name printed on it, on the steps of your dorm. When you got out of chapel, there was a new bag waiting with fresh towels and last week’s clothes, now clean. This magical transformation occurred for the fee of three thousand dollars a year. When my father had seen the price in one of the many mailings Ault had sent me the summer before I enrolled, he said that for half that much per student, using only a washboard and a bar of soap, he’d abandon my mother and brothers and move to Massachusetts with me to do the laundry of every kid at Ault.
I turned off the soup on the stove and hurried upstairs. From our room, I took a towel still in its plastic casing (Martha wouldn’t mind my borrowing, and she didn’t go through all her towels in a week anyway), and I pulled the scissors from my desk drawer and my brush from the top of my dresser. Also, while I was up there, I put on a bra. I considered changing my shirt, but I thought Tullis might notice and think I was trying to impress him; he might think I was dumb enough to imagine all it would take was a different outfit. Heading back to the common room, I took the stairs two at a time.
“Why don’t you sit here?” I pulled one of the wooden kitchenette chairs in front of the TV so he could watch a show while I cut. He sat down, and, from behind, I set the towel over his shoulders, walked around so we were facing each other, and pulled two corners until they overlapped with no space between the towel and his neck. “Take your ponytail out,” I said, and he did. I scrutinized him. Our faces were perhaps two feet apart, mine a little higher than his, and normally it made me squirm to be this close to a boy-I imagined that my pores appeared enormous, my skin blotchy-but this situation wasn’t about me; standing before Tullis, I felt dispassionate, practically professional. “Do you want to keep the same shape but you want it to be shorter, or do you want it to be more of a typical guy’s haircut where it’s close to your head all the way around?”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t think you want it super-short.” Because, I thought but did not say, I wouldn’t know how to do that. “But it can be kind of shaped to your head.” I walked around behind him again and began to brush his hair. It was pale brown with lighter streaks, not as soft as a girl’s but still nice. I reached my arm over his right shoulder and tapped my fingertips just under his chin. “Keep your head straight.” Immediately, he lifted his head and pulled back his shoulders. I held the scissors up and snipped a lock of hair. There was a certain physical pleasure in the act, hair against metal, the sound and feel of the slice. I realized that I didn’t know what to do with what I’d cut. “Hold on a sec,” I said, and I took some newspapers out of the trash can and spread them by the chair. I let the lock drop soundlessly and reached for another.
“You don’t think my hair needs to be wet, do you?” he said.
This hadn’t occurred to me-why hadn’t it occurred to me? But it seemed that if I told him to wet his hair at this point, I’d undermine my credibility. “No, you’re fine,” I said. “I can do it this way.”
After a moment, he said, “I always wondered why they make you get it wet at the barber. Like, what does that do?”
Behind him, I tried to keep the smile out of my voice. “It’s just a preference people have,” I said. “Some people think it makes it easier. But, actually,” I added, growing bolder, “it can be confusing because your hair looks longer when it’s wet, so you might cut more than you mean to.” The statement was, in fact, true, but I had no idea where I’d gotten it-a magazine probably.
We didn’t speak for several minutes. At first, I was cutting no more than half an inch at a time, going across the back so it was even, then cutting half an inch more. But he wanted it all off, he’d said, and it was awfully long, and my current method wasn’t particularly efficient. In a single snip, I took four inches, and as I did, I felt the glee of the irreversible. I sensed that Tullis was absorbed in the television program, which was about the search for the lost island of Atlantis. A few more minutes passed. He had a fraction of the hair he’d awakened with in the morning. It occurred to me that given how drastic it was, other students would remark on his haircut, and that he might mention that I had done it. Lee Fiora? they would say. How did that happen? Or maybe just, Who’s she? It was possible that news of the event might even reach Cross Sugarman.
“Why didn’t you wait until Monday and go into town for this?” I asked.
“You know how you get an idea in your head and you’re like, ‘Why wait?’ It was time. That’s how I felt.”
I hesitated, then said, “Why aren’t you at the dance?”
“The dance?”
“The one in the student center.”
He laughed. “I know where the dances are. That’s not really my thing, you know?”
“Yeah.” After a pause, I added, “Me neither.”
“I went the first few years here, but it’s pretty much the same week after week.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Never having attended a single dance, I wasn’t in a position to know, but it seemed I might as well agree. “Okay,” I said. “It’s pretty short.”
He reached back and made a loop with his thumb and index finger, as if to catch his ponytail, but all his fingers circled was air. “Holy shit.”
“Is that okay?”
“No, yeah, it’s great.” He rubbed his fingertips a few times against the place where his hairline and his neck met. “It’s totally what I wanted. It’s just different.”
“I still need to clean it up. Put your shoulders back again.”
He did as I’d instructed, and I resumed trimming. The part I was least sure of was the hair that grew from the crown of his head-how long was I supposed to leave it? I walked in front of him again, my body between him and the TV, and I pushed back the hair that fell on either side of his temples. “Do you want bangs? You do, right?”
“Do I?”
“I think it would look kind of weird if you didn’t have them.”
“Sure, then. That’s cool.”
“Close your eyes.”
He did, and for several seconds, I looked at his face. There were freckles across his nose and cheeks that you couldn’t see from farther away, and, on the right side of his chin, a mostly healed zit that he’d popped, from the looks of it, three or four days ago. Also on his chin, there was a little golden stubble around the tip, and there was some above his mouth, too. I felt a tenderness, almost a protectiveness, toward him that surprised me. It was strange to remember that I’d thought I had a crush on him, though I also knew that such a crush, a false crush if crushes were not all by definition false, could rise again with enough distance. But here, with the two of us positioned so close together, he reminded me of myself; he was far too much like me for me to love.