“I guess wherever.” This was not the haircutting me but the normal-the shaky and uncertain-me. “We could just stay here.”
“It reeks here,” Cross said. “Let’s go to the basement.”
Mike Duane extracted another hug from Aspeth and then we both followed Cross out of the common room. In the basement, we entered a large room with a concrete floor, fluorescent lights, and narrow horizontal windows close to the ceiling; the room was empty except for a humming soda machine, two laundry machines, and two dryers.
“I just realized,” Cross said. “You probably need a chair, don’t you?” He turned and disappeared back up the stairs.
We also needed a towel to put around Aspeth’s shoulders, and newspaper to spread on the floor, but he was gone.
Aspeth yawned. “I’m so fucking tired. I was up until like three in the morning last night.”
“Wow,” I said. But Cross was requiring so much of my attention and anxiety that I no longer had any left for Aspeth. This piece of time was about his absence, before he returned with the chair.
“And the night before that I was up until two.”
I was wondering how far back we’d go in her sleep schedule when Cross reappeared. He was carrying a wooden desk chair with metal legs, holding it by the back so the legs stuck into the air and the seat rested on his shoulder. It seemed an especially boyish, cute way to carry a chair. He set it in front of the soda machine, and Aspeth sat down.
“You’ll get hair on you,” I said. “You might want to take off your sweater.”
She did as I said-so even with Aspeth, I had that peculiar authority-and passed it to Cross. “How pretty,” he said in a high, feminine voice, and he tied the arms of the sweater over his shoulders. The gesture horrified me.
“Red’s definitely your color,” Aspeth said.
“Thanks, doll,” he said in the same voice as before.
I felt an urgent wish for him to take off the sweater, and to stop talking that way. His behavior wasn’t funny, and the kind of funny it was trying to be was so ordinary, so lame even. Plus, I knew Cross wouldn’t act this way in front of only me, that his performance was for Aspeth’s benefit. Previously, I’d felt a secret hope that he was observing the haircut not because of her but because of me. It was less difficult than it probably should have been to believe that Cross felt exactly the way about me that I felt about him. I didn’t always believe this, but there were times-between classes, say, when we almost collided in the stairwell, and then we just stood there for a few seconds on the landing, face-to-face, not moving, before we continued in opposite directions. If things were normal, wouldn’t he have said something, like hi, and couldn’t it perhaps be a promising sign that instead he’d said nothing?
“I want to keep it all the same length but shorter,” Aspeth said.
Cross laughed-a normal, masculine laugh, thank God. “How can it be shorter if it’s all the same length?”
“Therein lies the paradox,” Aspeth said. This was something people at Ault said a lot, a kind of catchphrase they’d been using since I’d arrived the year before. The first time I heard one of my own classmates, Tom Lawsey, use it, there was something embarrassing about the self-consciousness of it, the fabricated newness, as if he’d gotten a nose job and then pretended otherwise. But the expression was so common that I pretty much stopped noticing, and once-not at Ault but at home over the summer, when my mother asked me how I planned to finish making the chocolate chip cookie dough when it turned out we were out of eggs-I even heard myself say it. (Of course, that really hadn’t been much of a paradox at all; I’d solved it by walking two houses down to borrow from the Orshmidts.) Another thing that had been popular to say for a while, among my classmates more than the rest of the school, was the word patina. It had gained popularity in my Ancient History class, where it went from being a term for the green film that formed on bronze or copper to meaning something vaguely dirty-while wiggling their eyebrows or licking their lips guys would say (not to me, of course, but to other girls), “You have a nice patina.” But patina ultimately hadn’t had the staying power of, Therein lies the paradox.
I said to Cross, “Aspeth means she wants all the strands of hair to be the same length as each other but for all of them to be shorter.”
Cross looked at me blankly. He’d probably understood all along.
“Exactly,” Aspeth said. “See, Sug, Lee gets it.”
From the plastic bag I’d been carrying since I’d left my room almost half an hour before, I pulled out scissors and a hairbrush (not my own-soon after cutting Tullis’s hair, I’d bought one for general use, which I never cleaned and no one ever asked if I cleaned). I stood behind Aspeth and brushed her still-damp hair. Her shampoo smelled both nutty and floral, and I could see again why boys loved girls like her. “How many inches?” I said.
“I’m thinking four or five.”
“Are you sure?” Normally, I liked to cut as much as possible, I liked drasticness. But Aspeth had such outstanding hair that it seemed like I might be doing a disservice to the entire Ault community. “Let’s start with three inches and see how you like it.”
“But when it’s long, it tangles more. Maybe you should just shave my head.”
“You’d look good with a shaved head,” Cross said.
This was more the way I remembered him, how he could flirt by talking in an utterly ordinary way-how, in fact, the flirtatiousness lay in the discrepancy between his calm, sincere tone and the improbable nature of what he was saying.
“Fine,” Aspeth said. “Take it all off. Make me bald.”
I lifted a lock and snipped, then scanned the room and saw, as I had expected, no trash can. I let the hair drop onto the bare floor.
Cross came around and stood next to me. “Holy shit!” he said. “Oh my God! You are going to be bald, Aspeth.” What I had cut was even less than three inches, but Cross felt like teasing her; he had no crush on me whatsoever.
“Shut up,” Aspeth said. Probably she liked him back. The official word, as transmitted to me by Dede the year before, was that Cross and Aspeth were “good friends,” and in fact, as freshmen, they’d both been going out with other people, but both of those relationships were over; Cross and Sophie Thruler had broken up back in October. If Cross and Aspeth liked each other, I thought, they really ought to just go out. It would be a stunningly unsurprising development.
“I don’t know about this,” Cross said. “You’re putting an awful lot of trust in Lee, and, Lee, what are your credentials?”
I was bent over, and I turned my head to look up at him. The expression on his face was lighthearted. For several seconds, I said nothing, and I felt him meet and absorb my own expression, his smile straightening, and I felt that an understanding passed between us-I am not no one, I am not nothing, I do not exist as a backboard for you to bounce your jokes off of–but how can you ever be certain? Maybe he just thought I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Lee has cut a ton of people’s hair,” Aspeth said. “She was the one who cut Tullis’s.”
“No shit.” Cross had moved around so he was standing in front of Aspeth again.
Aspeth lifted her head, probably subconsciously, to make eye contact with him. I could have pressed her head back down, but I didn’t. I was ceding to her; in fact, I felt a perverse desire to aid their union. I almost didn’t mind the way Aspeth was pretending she and I were aligned, us against Cross, girls against boy. “And Tullis’s haircut was awesome,” she was saying. “So there.”
“So there? Geez, Aspeth, you should really consider becoming a lawyer. Is nanny-nanny-boo-boo next?”
There was something repellant about watching Cross flirt; it felt overly personal, like seeing him pick food from his teeth.
“Stick your head in doo-doo,” Aspeth said, and they both laughed, and then she said, “Isn’t that how it goes? Nanny-nanny-boo-boo, stick your head in doo-doo.” This time, they said it in unison-things said in unison, like winks, made my skin crawl-and I had to fight the urge to bolt from the basement. They were losers! They were bigger dorks than I was! The trick, of course, would be to remember this at roll call when I saw them from far away, seeming coolly impenetrable.