That can’t be real. Is it?
I end up questioning all of his photographs this way. They’re narratives, definitely. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They’re all unsettling and private, but the strangest and most compelling thing about them is some of them—a lot of them—I can’t tell if they’re staged.
The angles he uses remind me of eavesdropping.
There is a series of a couple fighting in a kitchen. It’s told backwards, from the end of the fight—she is walking away—to the beginning—they’re smiling and laughing together. Culler calls that one Best Friends. A woman hitting her child in a store, first alone, and then by the last photo there’s an audience and some of them look like they’re enjoying watching it.
Culler calls that set Perfect Day.
Various photographs of people seen in ways no one wants to be seen. And there’s a passiveness about them too—I should be inspired to act, but like the person behind the camera, all I can do is watch. I don’t know how it makes me feel. One of the last sets is of a faceless couple totally fucking, which makes me feel weird. I think I like it. But that angle—I don’t know if they know they’re being photographed. The series is called Apologies.
I want to ask him what that even means.
I click away from the screen and lean back in my chair.
Something about Culler’s kiss has made me so restless.
I keep replaying it in my mind—just the kiss—and then I take it one further. I imagine us having sex on the pavement and it’s amazing. I think of it close. The way I see it in my head, it’s all skin and touching and expert hands. And then my brain pans out and we’re surrounded by all the photographs my father took. And that is when I stop replaying it in my mind.
For a couple of minutes.
I’m not restless enough to call Milo, who I also think of and imagine having sex with Missy because I’m a freak, but restless enough that when Beth starts pressing the haircut thing again, I say, “Fine. Let’s go. Right now.”
We’re in the kitchen. Mom is upstairs in bed, where she’s been for the last five days. That’s not normal. This is a bad week because for all of the planning my dad apparently put into jumping off a building, he forgot their wedding anniversary would be the first post-death event. It’s still not for another couple of weeks, but Mom looked at the calendar and saw it penciled in and it was all over from there.
I overheard her crying about it with Beth the night I got back from the studio. First she wanted to know if he remembered their anniversary and killed himself anyway. Then she wanted to know if he was so full of the idea of dying, he just totally forgot. Then she realized neither was the better option and it all ended with her crawling into bed.
I stood outside the door to her bedroom, wanting to go in and say something, but all I could think about was how much I hated my dad for doing this to us and then I felt so sick and then Beth came out and said, “Where did you put everything from the studio?” I told her he’d gotten rid of it, all of it, and she relaxed and actually said, “Oh, good. That makes it easier.”
And then I crawled into bed.
Which is also when I started thinking about having sex with Culler.
I want to have sex with someone.
What is wrong with me.
Beth and I maintain stony silence in the car. Well, I do. She hums to herself—no radio, because it distracts her—and babbles about what kind of cut I should get.
“You have well-defined cheekbones and sharp features,” she says. “I’ll leave it up to Cory, but if you’re going to keep it long, the least you could do is ask him to thin it out, so it doesn’t bushel around your head.”
Bushel around my head? I hate everything that comes out of this woman’s mouth. I study Beth. Her blond hair—which is already going gray, but dyed to hide it—is cropped tight to her head and she has such an ugly mouth. She has these tiny lips that she somehow turns into red colored squares with lipstick.
“I want to look like Marilyn Monroe,” I tell her.
She laughs. “You’re no Marilyn Monroe.”
The hair salon is just off the mall and it’s called CUTZ, which makes me embarrassed for it, but it’s a nice little place, I guess. It’s all yellow and checkered floors, which clashes horribly with the country music they pipe in through the speakers.
Beth is really weird with me when we’re out in public. She tries to pretend we like each other or at the very least, she likes me and she doesn’t know what the fuck my problem is. She knows Cory, the stylist—an older man with frosted tips, which makes me feel embarrassed for him—and insists he be the one who cuts my hair. She tells him I’m the daughter of one of her oldest and dearest friends and he mouths, the jumper? when he thinks I’m not looking.
She nods and takes a seat in the waiting area.
Cory takes me to the back and washes my hair.
“So what kind of look are you after?” he asks over the water, and I feel really gross for liking how his old-man hands feel massaging my scalp.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Marilyn Monroe.”
He laughs. Why does everyone think that’s a joke? He finishes up and takes me back out front. The chair he puts me in is in front of three mirrors and next to the windows, so everyone can look in and see. I hate that. It’s like being put on display.
“Have you always kept it long?” he asks, drawing my wet hair back with his hands. My hair stops just in the middle of my back. It always has. I nod.
Beth looks up from the gossip rag she’s reading. “Doesn’t the length drag her face down? No wonder you’re always so sullen looking, Eddie.”
“You look ready for a change,” Cory tells me.
“Cut it all off,” I say. I imagine myself bald. Shaved head. I almost say that but think better of it. “I mean—short but long. I mean, just different. But short. But long.”
Beth gives Cory a wry look. “Did you get all that?”
Cory ties up my hair into a ponytail. My palms start to sweat. I wipe them on my pants. He notices and says, “Relax. This won’t hurt a bit.”
He grabs the scissors.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror and realize my father will never see me like this. I am becoming a person my father will never get to know. I am trying to force that thought out of my head at the same time Cory cuts the ponytail off. Just like that. Before I’ve even had time to prepare, to change my mind, it’s gone and I’m that person now.
I dig my fingernails into the arm of my chair.
“Hey, kid—are you okay?” Cory says, noticing. “Beth—”
“What’s the problem?” Beth is beside me before I can blink. She takes one look at my face and says, “Eddie, what’s wrong with you?”
I’m not ready to be that person now.
Beth is convinced I have diabetes or hypoglycemia or something because I went all “rigid and strange” while Cory was cutting my hair.
She won’t fucking leave it alone.
“My first thought was it’s her sugars,” Beth tells Mom over lunch, which consists of scary green smoothies for both of them and me sitting there and not eating anything. Now that Mom’s out of bed, I want to be in the house less, but Milo hasn’t called me and I know it’s because if I said a fight was on, I have to tell him when it’s off, but secretly I think he should end it because everyone’s daily goal should be making things easier for me while I’m in mourning. “Does your family have a history of diabetes or anything like that?”
“What?” Mom asks. She’s been staring out the window.
“And she’s pale all the time,” Beth continues. “Look at her—sallow, even. I can see it now that her hair is finally out of her face.”
Mom stares at my hair for a long time, until she finally spots the difference.
“It’s a nice haircut, Eddie,” she says.
Beth frowns. “But look at her complexion. So pale.”
“Maybe I need more Vitamin D,” I suggest.
“Well, I’ve been saying that forever—”
“So I’ll get some.” I get to my feet. “Like, right now. I’ll get some.”
“Are you going out?” Mom asks. Something about this much of her voice after a forever of almost total silence is setting me on edge. “With Milo? I never see Milo around anymore…”
“When would you even notice that?” I ask.
It doesn’t even come out of my mouth meanly, even though that’s what I feel in my heart, but because she’s my mother, she senses it. She knows where my heart is when I say it.
And she cries.
I leave the room awkwardly, my chest winding itself tight. Hearing your mother cry never gets easier to take. It’s a sound that goes through you each time. I’d never seen her cry before he died. I’d never made her cry. I have made her cry. I push through the front door. I’m halfway down the walk when Beth appears.
“I got her to promise to try today,” she says, furious. “She was trying and you ruined it.”
It’s the meanest thing Beth has ever said to me.
She goes back inside before I can say something equally mean to her.
Hate her. Hate this. Hate this. Hate this. I hate this. I grab my bike and pedal fast, hard. I focus on the way it feels, the air against my face. I’m going to tell Milo about this and then we will go to the river and he will have his flask and I will hate Beth and drink until I love the world again and everything in it.
But when I get to Fuller’s, Missy’s car is there. Of course.
I do a few laps in the parking lot next to Fuller’s and debate going somewhere else, but fuck it. She can be his girlfriend all she wants. He was my friend first. And even if she is his girlfriend again, she’s only here for the summer. Totally still a temp.
I pedal over, toss my bike on the ground, and practically throw myself inside, saying, “So! What are we all doing today?”
