The Brittanys Read online

  “Brad!” Mom yells. “Don’t scare your sister like that.”

  I notice in my periphery that a few people at the surrounding tables have craned their necks to hear our dinner conversation, and I’m mortified.

  “Apologize to her,” Dad says, pointing his fork at Brad and then at me.

  “Look,” Brad concedes, “none of this will happen in your lifetime, so don’t worry about it. Maybe your children or grandchildren will have to endure the demise of society and the world as we know it, but most likely not you.”

  Our hibachi chef rounds the corner of our table right then and introduces himself. He confirms everyone’s orders, including the surf and turf for my dad and brother, and the chicken teriyaki to be shared between my mom and me. I nod my head yes when the chef speaks to us and decide there are bigger things to worry about than one little chicken for dinner. Anyway, it’s one of my favorite meals, and maybe I’m not ready to give it up just yet.

  The food is served with a flourish, but we eat most of the rest of the meal in silence. Brad just sits there, peeling the lobster shell away from the body. He doesn’t look up from his plate.

  I’ve already decided I’m not going to tell Jensen about what happened, the raised voices and the way everybody turned and stared. I figure some things are just private, things other people, not even Jensen, would understand.

  Jensen is off the hook the next day, as expected. Her mom and dad are going to a wine mixer in Naples, but she still credits her early escape from being grounded to her wit. We decide to bike to CVS to buy temporary hair dye in a box, the kind we’ve seen on commercials and in magazines, the products that women scrub onto their heads in the shower and later shake out in voluminous waves for the camera. That will be us soon.

  Whenever we ride to CVS, we always stop at Subway for a kids’ meal, even though we are fourteen. We like the circular buns and our choice of cookie. We both always get white chocolate macadamia nut. That day, when we pull up at Subway, we see Joey Fratinelli and Mitch Parker inside. Joey is in our grade; he’s a punk kid. He kind of looks like Steve-O from Jackass and is in all remedial classes, a step below Jensen’s regular classes. He doesn’t live in my neighborhood, though. He lives out in Coral Springs, and Jensen and I are both confused as to why he’s hanging out with Mitch Parker, who lives one neighborhood over from me.

  “He’s probably selling him weed,” Jensen offers as an explanation.

  “So they just met up at Subway to do a drug deal?”

  “Druggies gotta eat!”

  We laugh our asses off before gathering ourselves and heading inside.

  “Don’t talk to them,” Jensen whispers. “You always want to talk to guys.”

  “I don’t even think Joey Fratinelli knows who I am.”

  “Then please don’t talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s embarrassing. I just want to get our sandwiches and go.”

  As the door dings its traditional ding, we realize we’re still in our uniforms. Our school has a pretty strict dress code: you can only “dress down” and wear your own clothes on select days, like on your birthday or for various school events, and even then only if you donate a dollar to charity. I’m wearing a regulation red polo with a khaki skirt, and Jensen is in a navy polo with a khaki skirt as well. Joey’s in a black T-shirt and his school khaki pants, and Mitch is in his striped navy-and-white polo. When you get to sophomore year, you’re allowed to wear the striped shirts. Another year until we can wear the blue-and-white-striped polo with a khaki skirt, straighten our hair, and adorn ourselves in the same Tiffany choker with a heart charm and the Birkenstock slides that every sophomore wears. We can’t wait.

  The boys are ordering their sandwiches. Jensen and I peruse the cookie selection from afar, and I can already see they’re fresh out of white macadamia. This day can’t get any worse.

  “You girls go to our school,” Mitch says suddenly, pointing his foot-long plastic-wrapped sandwich at us. I stay quiet, since Jensen told me not to speak. She nods. I place my hand on a promotional sticker of a teriyaki-chicken sandwich. I attempt to peel the edges with my pointer finger and eye Joey looking at me.

  “Are you in middle school?” Mitch asks. It’s the worst question, because we are not in middle school, but we must look like we are, even though we’re freshmen. We’re small and are always at the bottom of height and weight for our age at our yearly checkups. Our doctor points to the chart. He points below the pink arch for girls where we should be but are not. Maybe next year.

  “They’re in my grade,” Joey finally says. I thought he’d gone mute. I know he’s embarrassed that we’re in his same grade and that he has to introduce us to Mitch, even though we already know who he is without really knowing him. That’s the crazy thing about our school: you pretty much know everyone since it’s so small. When my brother graduates at the end of the year, there will be twenty-seven kids at his graduation ceremony. The school is growing more and more each year, but not much, since it’s a prep school. There are about three hundred kids in the whole upper school, 106 in ninth grade, and five of them are Brittanys.

  “What are you doing for Halloween?” Mitch asks, handing the cashier money for his and Joey’s subs.

  “We’re dyeing our hair,” I blurt out, nervous. I realize too late that Mitch meant what are our plans for the actual holiday, and not who or what we are going to be. “That’s why we’re here now. We’re going to get hair dye. I’m going to be Ariel, the Little Mermaid.”

  “That’s hot,” Mitch says. “Are you going to have a coconut bra or whatever?”

  “Shells?” I suggest.

  “Yeah, shells. Damn, that’s hot. Are you gonna do that?”

  “I’m making the costume myself, so probably,” I say, even though I hadn’t planned on it.

  “What are you gonna be?” Mitch asks Jensen. Last year, Jensen and I stayed in and watched The Others even though we had both already seen it—together, in the theater, actually. We bought a tub of popcorn from Blockbuster and some candy-corn pumpkins and drank Cokes. We wore black Soffe shorts with orange T-shirts to appear festive to no one.

  “I don’t know yet,” Jensen says.

  “She’s doing a blue streak, though. And I’m doing red.”

  “Joey, these girls are pretty cool; why don’t you hang out with them?” There’s a pause while Joey and Mitch look us up and down. It feels like Joey is trying to figure out the answer to that very question while Jensen and I wonder, Yeah, why don’t you hang out with us? We’re girls and we want what girls want, have what girls have, do what girls do. Joey begins to smile, and it gives me hope, a light at the end of this teenage tunnel.

  “They don’t smoke weed,” Joey says, and elbows Mitch. They laugh.

  When he says it, I feel like dying. I can feel how badly Jensen wants to kill me for having started all this. It’s true that we don’t smoke. We’ve never even tried it. We haven’t had the opportunity. I’m not really as against it as Jensen is. Our ex-friend Christina Kirkland started smoking weed in seventh grade and Jensen refused to speak to her, so I don’t speak to her anymore, either. Sometimes she smiles at me in the hallway. I know she still hangs out with Kenzie and Gottlieb because they all live west of the Turnpike, but it’s not the same. We were never super close anyway. I slept at Christina’s house once, after a bar mitzvah, and in elementary school we bonded over our love of SpongeBob SquarePants, but that was about it. Jensen played club volleyball with Christina over the summer and their dogs got along, but otherwise we could do without her.

  But, no, we’ve never tried the stuff, and it separates us from the “cool kids.” The thing is, we had been “cool” once. When Jensen took me under her wing in fourth grade, we ruled the school. Everyone was afraid of her, so, therefore, everyone respected me as well. We were equals. Jensen was blonde, I was brunett
e. Jensen’s favorite color was blue, mine was purple. Jensen was Christian, I was Jewish. Jensen liked sports and video games, I liked boys and makeup. We evened each other out. Neither of us went anywhere or did anything without the other. We were a team, a duo, an unstoppable force of girlhood. But something we had decided on long ago was that drugs were “bad.”

  Weed is questionable, though. Is it really that bad? “It’s a plant,” Jensen argues sometimes, late at night, when we can’t sleep. “It comes from the ground, like a tomato or a carrot.” Jensen’s brother, Matty, does it all the time, but we’ve never partaken. We’re scared of being out of control, I guess, of becoming bad kids, because we’re so “good.” Dyeing our hair will be the first thing we do to explicitly go against our parents. It’s been fun to plan it, talk about it at school all week, and research shades that will go best with our eyes. But in all actuality it feels bad not to have our parents’ approval. Jensen doesn’t care as much as I do, mostly because we’re doing it at my house, so, naturally, my parents will find out first.

  Sometimes it feels like she isn’t as worried as I am about things. I’ve always had this deeply rooted fear that if I did something bad I’d be shunned, or my parents would hate me, disown me, send me to jail. It manifests as sharp pains in my stomach, killer headaches that take three Advil to remedy, or sad naps that can last anywhere from twenty minutes to a few hours. But Jensen sort of likes living on the edge, the very edge I stay far away from. She lies to her parents all the time. She takes money from their wallets, even though they would give it to her if she asked. She uses cheat codes for her video games and gets extra lives, extra coins, extra chances to win. No matter what I do, I still feel a general desire to be “good,” to be liked, to be loved. I want to fit in, be accepted. I want to play the part. And maybe it’s because Jensen’s parents both work full-time and can’t see her as much as she would like, or maybe because her older brother is a “hoodlum,” or maybe because her grandparents essentially raised her and their old-fashioned Greek Orthodox ways didn’t translate, but Jensen just wants to rebel, to live a life that stretches some invisible cloth of the world. The more she stretches, the greater the reward for her. She can decide her own fate.

  The boys laugh and exit Subway. A guy in an apron asks us what we want, and we proceed to order our kids’ meals. I get turkey. Jensen gets tuna. Both on round rolls. Both with extra pickles. The cashier tells us there’s a fresh batch of white chocolate macadamia cookies being made if we want to wait a few minutes. Things are looking up.

  “Would you ever smoke?” I ask Jensen while we wait for our cookies.

  “Not with Joey Fratinelli.”

  “Why not? He’s cute.”

  “He’s not cute! His eyes are too big for his head. He smells like hamster food. And he’s emo. Why do you like him?”

  “I think he volunteers at a PetSmart. But I don’t like him. I just think he’s cute.”

  “You think everyone’s cute.”

  “No. I don’t think Mr. Zuppurdo is hot, and you do.”

  “Alan Zuppurdo is a man. He’s like a silver fox. He drives a sensible van. That is hot.”

  “I’d smoke weed with Joey.”

  “I feel like if I’m going to smoke, I’d want it to be with someone I’m really close with, just in case I trip out or something. I’d want to do it with you, I guess.”

  “Where would we even get weed?”

  “And we wouldn’t know how to, like, roll it up or whatever.”

  “Well, that’s why Joey’s good. ’Cause he can do it with us—like, show us how to smoke.”

  “Joey thinks we’re losers. Thanks for butting in, by the way. We probably could have gotten invited to a sophomore Halloween party if you didn’t ruin that for us.”

  “Mitch said we were hot. And you weren’t saying anything!”

  “Sometimes it’s best not to say anything in the presence of guys.”

  We eat our sandwiches and head to CVS, a couple stores over. I save my cookie, but Jensen eats hers right away, fresh out of the Subway oven.

  “It’s so good,” she says. “How do you not want yours now?”

  Inside CVS, we make our way to the hair-care aisle. We’re not entirely sure what we’re looking for, but asking for help is out of the question. I just need red and she needs blue. I find a box that shows a girl with super-shiny red hair, almost the color of our uniform’s polo shirt. Not so much a ketchup red, but a bit deeper, like the wine Jensen’s mom drinks. Jensen comes over to me with her box.

  “I think I might just do a lighter blond.”

  Her hair is already whitish blond. It was definitely lighter when I met her, but it’s pretty damn light now.

  “You’re chickening out! That’s, like, getting clear!”

  She laughs so hard she drops her box, then picks it up and shows it to me.

  “No, it’ll lighten it. See how some of my hair is, like, orangish? This will make it all one color. There’ll be a noticeable difference.”

  “Whatever. I’m still going red. I can’t believe I’m the bold one here.”

  We pick up some Nerds Ropes and pay for our boxes. We’re so happy that you don’t need to be eighteen to do this stuff. Anyone with a bicycle can pick up hair dye and change their look. We’ve got that small freedom, and we’re riding with it, until we both, inevitably, get into trouble.

  * * *

  —

  We decide to do it at the same time. This way, we won’t have to wait patiently for one result, then the other: the big reveal can come all at once. We run upstairs to my room and wrap ourselves in the shittiest towels I have. In our hair-coloring boxes, we are equipped with gloves, plastic dye bottles, powdery mix, and instructions. We’re supposed to mix the dye in the bottles and squirt it strategically onto our hair in sections, let it sit for thirty minutes, then rinse out, and ta-da.

  For the most part, my mom seldom comes upstairs. Instead, she yells from the first floor that dinner is almost ready, tells me to do my homework, asks if Jensen is staying the night. Now she yells up that a bad storm is coming and we should use the electricity while we can, and that Jensen’s mom called and they are stuck in Naples for the night, so Jensen will need to stay over. This is okay with us. We hurry with the hair dye.

  Jensen’s super-blond mask looks like nothing on her head. She didn’t do sections, like the box said, but simply scrubbed the dye all over and twirled her hair into a bun to let it sit. I let her do my dye job, and she sections my hair into a middle part, with two portions in the front and two in the back. After a while of dividing the liquid diplomatically, she eventually squeezes the bottle haphazardly onto my head and rubs the dye all over, trying to get it even.

  “What happens if we leave it on too long?” I ask.

  “You’ll just be really red.”

  “And you’ll be clear.”

  “I think it’s better to leave it on longer than not long enough.”

  “Yeah, I don’t want it to do nothing.”

  While we’re waiting for the dye to set, we notice a stain on the bathroom rug, the one with a pattern of yellow roses around its border that I begged for and that was very expensive. I wanted it so badly and then I got to have it, and now there’s bright red hair dye on one of its corners. We try wiping it off, scrubbing it, soaking it in hot water, but the stain remains strong. There is no way to tell my mom about this. There wasn’t even a plan for telling her about dyeing our hair, aside from just coming downstairs sporting a new look.

  It nears the thirty-minute mark, and we press on. We lay a towel over the stain and proceed to wash our hair dye out in the sink. Jensen goes first so my red can sink in a bit more. With a shower cap covering my hair, I can’t quite tell yet if the dye is doing anything. Jensen’s looks the same after she washes it, but she promises that once she blows it dry it’ll be shiny and w
hite.

  She washes out my hair in silence, which is concerning to me.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Ariel. You’re definitely Ariel.”

  I look in the mirror, and with my hair sopping wet, I can see how red it is. It’s Little Mermaid red, all right. My mom is going to kill me.

  We both dry our hair, Jensen first and then me. It becomes obvious that Jensen’s dye in fact did not do anything at all and that my dye did everything. I look completely different. Especially in the fluorescent bathroom light, you can see the fractals of red bombarding my light brown hair. It worked too well. I should have left it on for less time. I like it, though. I think the red looks sexy, like Jessica Rabbit, cartoonish but cool. I think the guys in my grade will like it. I can’t wait to show up at school next week and look different.

  My mom yells from downstairs that she’s ordering a pizza and that we should come down and tell her what we want. It’s now or never. Jensen follows me down for support.

  “Does mine look different at all?” she asks.

  “No.”

  My mom’s in the kitchen, leaning on the island next to the telephone. She’s reading the menu for Nino’s Pizza, and when she looks up at us she does a double take.

  “What did you do?” she yells at us, but mostly at me—probably all at me.

  “It’s temporary!” I try to calm her down.

  My mom asks Jensen to go back upstairs and in the same breath asks her if cheese is okay. Jensen nods and runs. I know she wants pepperoni, but she’s taking one for the team.

  “I thought I told you I didn’t want you to do this,” my mom begins. She stands with her hands on her hips. I note her hair, the blond she has a colorist highlight in every six to eight weeks, and remind myself how unfair this all is. Why can’t I get my hair colored, too? Most girls in my grade have highlights or dye their hair, get it chemically straightened, even shave the back of their necks so you can see a field of fuzz when it’s up in a ponytail or a bun during PE. It goes against our school’s dress code, yes. We’re not supposed to have crazy colors or styles, piercings, or tattoos that might distract from our studies. But it’s only hair. It’ll fade or grow out eventually. I know my mom probably just wants me to stay the way I am, to always be her little girl, but I want to look different. I want a change.