She sighed and, still wearing her backpack, sat down at her desk. In a regretful voice, she asked, “Am I?”
“Yes.”
“I just feel funny about it,” she said. “I mean, why do you cut people’s hair?”
“Why do I cut people’s hair? I don’t know. Why are you asking me?”
We weren’t having a fight. Really, it was difficult to imagine fighting with Martha because she was the most un-angry person I knew. Even in this moment, she seemed, if anything, sad. Still, I felt an unfamiliar tension between us.
“I’m asking because-oh, I don’t know.”
“Say it,” I said. “Whatever you were going to say, just say it.”
She paused. “I think you cut people’s hair, especially boys, as this way of having contact with them without having to really get close.”
“You mean physical contact or just social contact?”
“Well.” She considered the question. “I guess both.”
“So I’m a pervert?”
“No! Oh, no, Lee, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s totally normal to want to be close to people.” Martha’s goal was to be a classics professor, but there were times when I could more easily picture her as a therapist, or possibly an elementary school principal. “But it’s like you’re doing people a favor, and what do you get from it? No one ever helps you clean up. It’s not an equal trade. And I just think you deserve better.”
I looked down at my thighs against the mattress.
“You can be friends with, like, Nick Chafee,” Martha said. “If you want to, that is. Personally, I don’t think Nick is any great shakes. But it’s not like the best you can do is to cut his hair.”
I believed that Martha believed this. Whether Nick Chafee believed it was a different story.
“Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this,” Martha said.
“No, I appreciate you saying something.” I swallowed. “I do.”
Martha stood again. “I just feel like it’s better for me to get a haircut in town. You don’t have to do anything for me.”
“But I would be happy to cut your hair,” I said.
“I know.” She was next to the door, gripping her bike key in one hand. “Thank you.”
“Martha,” I said as she stepped into the hallway.
She turned around.
“Does everyone think that about me? That I cut hair so that-” I wanted to say, so that I can talk to boys even though I’m a loser, but Martha hated it when I insulted myself.
“Of course not.” She grinned. “People are too busy thinking about themselves.” (No one was ever better at reassuring me than Martha-before tests, she reassured me that I could pass, and before formal dinner, she reassured me that my clothes looked okay, and before I went home for Christmas or the summer, she reassured me that my plane wouldn’t crash. She reassured me that no one had noticed when I’d tripped walking out of chapel, that I would be happy in college, that it didn’t matter if I’d spilled root beer on her futon cover, and that I didn’t have bad breath; if I doubted her, she would lean her face in and say, “Okay, breathe on me. Go ahead, I don’t care.” Sometimes still I think, What did I ever give back to you?) “I’ll be gone a couple hours,” Martha said. “Don’t go to dinner without me, okay?”
I nodded. “I would have been able to tell you’d gotten a haircut. Even if you’d snuck out, I’d know when you got back.”
“Yeah, well.” She grinned. “Remind me never to go into espionage.”
As I watched her leave, my mind shot ahead to a time in the future when we would not share a room, when our daily lives would not overlap. The idea made me feel as if I were being held underwater. Then I thought, You’re being ridiculous; you have almost three more years together, and I could breathe again. But I knew, I always knew-and as unhappy as I often was, the knowledge never made me feel better; instead it seemed the worst part of all-that our lives at Ault were only temporary.
Ms. Moray was at the board, showing us how to divide a line in a poem into stressed and unstressed syllables, when I felt Dede nudge my thigh. I turned, but she was looking straight ahead.
A few seconds later, I felt more of a pinch. I looked down and saw that she was trying to pass me a piece of paper. At the top, in handwriting I recognized as Aspeth’s, it said, RATE-O-RAMA for 11/8. Beneath this was a grid, with Dress, then Shoes, then Makeup along one side; along another, it said Aspeth, then Dede, then Lee.
In the boxes adjacent to her name, Aspeth had written, for Dress, “3.4.” For Shoes, she had written, “6.0.” And for Makeup, she had written, “0.8,” and she had added, the words cramped into the box, “Can someone please tell this woman the heyday of aqua eyeliner is LONG past?!?” Dede, meanwhile, had given Dress a 2.8, Shoes a 6.2, and Makeup a 1. Under Aspeth’s comment, she’d written, “Agree!” which was the most apt and succinct summary of their relationship I could imagine.
Ms. Moray returned to the table, and I let the piece of paper sit untouched on my lap, like a napkin. But the truth was, I felt cornered by it. Yes, there were things I didn’t like about Ms. Moray, but they had little to do with her clothes. And besides, didn’t Aspeth and Dede understand that written words trapped you? A piece of paper could slip from a notebook, flutter out a window, be lifted from the trash and uncrumpled, whereas an incriminating remark made in conversation was weightless and invisible, deniable in a later moment.
Yet how could I not participate? They had extended an invitation, and if I refused, surely another one would never be offered. At the same time that Jeff Oltiss began reading aloud the Emily Dickinson poem that started “The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met/ Embarked upon a twig today,” I set my pen against the piece of paper and, over the three empty boxes that awaited my ratings, wrote, “All overshadowed by the pin-a real dazzler!” Before I could think more about it, I passed the paper back to Dede.
After class, I dawdled as I always did. In the stairwell, Aspeth glanced back-she and Dede were about twelve feet ahead of me-and our eyes met. “Such a good call on the pin, Lee,” she said. She’d stopped walking, so Dede had stopped, too, and I caught up to them. “It’s like, whose grandma did she steal that from?” Aspeth continued. “From now on, accessories get a category, too.”
“Definitely,” Dede said.
“So, Lee,” Aspeth said, “I have something to ask you.”
Dread reared up in me. Maybe she’d say, Have you ever kissed a boy? Or: What kind of cars do your parents drive?
“Can you cut my hair?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.” So great was my relief at the mildness of the question that it was only after I’d agreed to it that I remembered my conversation with Martha. Not that it had been conclusive, but it had given me pause.
“Since there’s no formal dinner tonight, let’s do it at six,” Aspeth said. “Then there’ll still be time to get to dinner before it closes.”
On nights when there wasn’t formal dinner, Martha and I went to the dining hall at six, the minute the doors opened, and usually I’d been ravenous since quarter after five. There was a group of people we sat with, the other sophomores who showed up early. They were mostly kind of dorky guys, and I was beginning to sometimes actively participate in the conversation instead of simply waiting until someone said something that required a response. But still-this was Aspeth.
“Six is fine,” I said.
I knocked on her door three minutes after six, having arrived at five of, waited until six exactly, decided six exactly was probably worse than being a little early, and waited a few more minutes. From outside the door, I could hear pounding music, and I had to knock repeatedly before Aspeth answered. She was wearing a T-shirt, a red cardigan sweater with tiny, pearly star-shaped buttons, underwear, and no pants. Her long blond hair was wet, with grooves running along her scalp where she’d combed it back. She made a face at me, a kind of joking-apologetic face, then darted to the corner to turn down the stereo, leaving me an unobstructed view of her golden haunches: thin, smooth thighs, and the twin scoops of her ass encased in-fleetingly, this surprised me, and then it made complete sense, how the choice was both classic and sexy-white cotton underpants. The music on the stereo was the Rolling Stones, and it occurred to me that Aspeth was the kind of girl about whom rock songs were written. How could Dede bear to be around her? Even though it was just the two of us, I felt like her chaperone.