The toilet's full of blackened hair, chopped and swimming in the blue; the top layer's still dry. Sylvie sits and pees and, when she stands to flush, jumps out of her skin at the sight of the damp fur, seemingly pissed straight out of her. The scissors lie on the counter, all rusty and sticky, and Sylvie eyeballs her new-shorn head in the mirror above the sink. She tucks the smiling ends behind her ears and thinks it's not so bad, she sort of looks like that actress, what's her name, Heda-something? Anyway, she's dead.
     Plucking out excess body hair is one of Sylvie's favorite habits. She does it with tweezers or the pinchers of two fingernails: out come eyebrows and pubes, any stray hair poking out of a place other than the top of her head. Sylvie hates to look in the mirror. Hair of any kind grosses her out and makes her hate all of mankind. The only secret lush place on Sylvie's body lies in the dark and warm shallows underneath her arms. There, silky and sweet, hair grows untouched, adored even, and in bed at night Sylvie loves to run her fingertips through its sparseness, soft little wisps. Razors are her enemy.
     Sylvie's grandmother bought her a book called One that was full of faces, faces, most of them hairy and strange. Sylvie guessed she was supposed to realize that all these humans were actually beautiful in their own diverse and natural way, but instead she determined to become all the more vigilant within her depilatory world, distancing herself, the further the better, from all those monkey-faced people. Fuck her, Sylvie thinks about her grandma.
     Sylvie smokes pot and waits for Emma to come and pick her up for school. She feels light and pulls and tugs at the tiny blonde hairs on the top of her knuckles and wonders what Emma will say when she sees her hair all black and short. Flipping through channels on the TV, Sylvie stops on an old sitcom, one where the teenage daughter finds out about her cheating boyfriend and it is the exact episode Sylvie remembers watching as she lost her virginity, biting on her thumbnail and watching "Malory" cry as Chad sort of grunted on top of her, fucking her for the first time.
     Sylvie leans back on her grandmother's purple sectional couch and tries to remember what she was thinking, if she felt anything at all. She doesn't think so, so she puts on giant black sunglasses, swiped from Walgreen's after school, and lies down, lights a cigarette, reflects on all the TV shows and songs that relate to almost every pseudo-important event in her life. Getting drunk for the first time to Guns 'N' Roses, tripping to Pink Floyd's Animals, getting fucked to "Family Ties."

*

     Emma says she's suicidal again, she says she can't eat anymore, instead she hides behind the chintz curtains in her mother's living room and waits for something terrible to happen. Emma says thinking about not eating sometimes takes her mind off of her inevitable and ultimate nihilism. When Emma sees Sylvie's new haircut she says Sylvie is only adding to her visual instability and asks her to wear a hat.
     On the way to school they stop in at the Maid-Rite for orange juice and dry toast, compliments of Emma's mom, MaryAnn Pustka, Maid-Rite manager and, according to Sylvie's grandmother, town floozy. Emma's mom slides their toast down the counter and checks her squirt-gun pink lipstick in a tin napkin dispenser while simultaneously flirting with Bud Kruck of Kruck's Plumbing and Heating. Emma holds her stomach and moans Oh I can't take this.
     Walking down Boone Street, they smoke cigarettes and Sylvie drags her gloved fingertips along all the vacant store windows, People's Clothing, Ross', Dad and Lad, all closed and gone. Only Marla's House of Large Sizes remains and Marla waves at Sylvie when they go past, Sylvie's grandmother is one of Marla's best customers.
     "Oh shit, that bitch saw me smoking. If she tells Grammy I'll fucking kill her," Sylvie says and quickly flicks her cigarette away before waving back and smiling. Emma's not listening, she's too busy sucking in her cheeks and eyeballing her reflection in the windows as they pass. "Fuck you too," Sylvie tells her and Emma pouts out her bottom lip for a better reflective profile.

*

     Sylvie's is the big white house with foot-high varnished wooden address numbers hammered in a neat diagonal next to the plate-glass front door. Sylvie lives with her grandparents and calls them Grammy and Grampy; they make everyone call them Grammy and Grampy. The way Grammy insists on always being called by that childish nickname makes Sylvie think that she was actually born and named Grammy, with no other fancy, intermediate name in between. Grammy cooks for Sylvie and Emma, bringing them bowls of chicken and stars soup when they sit in Sylvie's shrunken tree-house, smoking pot, and Sylvie says, "Grammy, we're trying to relax."
     Grampy is hardly ever around, he's always downtown, hanging out with the old boys in business at the Colonial House, smoking Vantages and drinking coffee out of blue and white china. Every once in a while he displays some greeting-card love and Sylvie never knows whether to laugh or cry, she usually just reads it and throws it away. Grampy hasn't been around much lately because of the Bowl games and he's in a betting pool with Kruck and Beckwith, all the boys from downtown that own grocery store chains and apartment-houses, out betting Chryslers and riding lawn mowers.
     Sylvie's bedroom is all peach and white with lacy curtains and her name spelled out on the wall in the same varnished letters from outside. Her bathroom is pink and white with two sinks and her closet is yellow and well-lit with a window, her Barbie Dream House is still in the corner beside her white and lavender vanity with its huge round mirror and clippie-animals clipped all around it. When Sylvie's mother left her with her grandparents when she was three, Grammy promised her Sylvie would never be left wanting of anything.
     Emma says sleeping in Sylvie's house feels a lot like sleeping in a hotel. They eat the sandwiches Grammy makes for them and lie around all day in Sylvie's giant brass-canopy bed. Sylvie's bed is so big they could both lay in it spread-eagle without touching, but they never do, they always lay back to back or all twisted together, whispering cheek to forehead, chin to chin. Emma says Sylvie's house is luxurious compared to her dark little trailer with windows on only one wall and stinky brown-maroon mottled carpet. They go to Sylvie's house to get fed.
     Sylvie even has a pink Princess phone with a spin-dial and candy-striped cord. When Emma has to use it, she says she feels like she's in a movie, spinning out numbers with long red fingernails and diamond bracelets, slinky black gloves draping off her arm. Emma crank calls exterminators and complains of rabbits mating in the basement, her punchline goes: I know they're mating because I found their eggs behind the dryer, and Sylvie laughs, rolling a little joint, using her white windowsill as a table.
     They're getting stoned, blowing smoke out into the backyard and when Grammy calls Dinner! they are buzzed and crabby and walk silently to the dining room. Sylvie and her grandparents always eat dinner in the dining room, lunch in the kitchen, and breakfast in the breakfast-nook. Sylvie's grandparents even call each other Grammy and Grampy, and Emma thinks it's like Sylvie named them or something.
     For dinner, there's stuffed green peppers, apple-mayonaisse-walnut-banana salad, buttered bread folded neatly in half, iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots with Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, and milk poured into big crystal mugs. A little black and white TV sits on a shelf, blaring out 60 Minutes and everyone eats silently and watches, Grammy eats standing at the buffet. Grampy grumbles about the stories during the commercials and bellows laughter at Andy Rooney's Last Word and Grammy says "Now, Grampy," and "That Andy Rooney." Emma feels like she's in an After-School special gone wrong, with stoned kids sitting at the dinner table with their oblivious, respectable parents and groovy, kind of scary psychedelic music playing in the background as everything swirls and pitches convincingly, hopefully discouraging other kids from the same pathetic route. Emma thinks No wonder Sylvie is such a crazy slut, who wouldn't be with a home-life like this.

*

     Sylvie's plucking out her pubes, one by one, forming a perfect triangle-shaped patch between her legs, the smaller the better. Plucking's so much better than shaving, Sylvie thinks, no stubble. Ouch, ouch, ouch. She yanks the covers over her bare legs when her bedroom door creaks open a little and squints toward the widening crack.
     "Hi Pumpkin," Grampy walks in and sheepishly closes the door behind him. "Your Grammy told me you were seen smoking uptown this afternoon," he says. Sylvie leans back and sighs, deposits the tweezers down by her feet, under the blanket, so he won't know what she's been doing, so he won't have to ask. "Tell me," he says, "Is it true?" He's absently rubbing Sylvie's red and blue silk underpants she forgot lying at the foot of her bed, rubbing the flimsy fabric between his thumbs. Sylvie feels self-conscious in her T-shirt and watches Grampy in the mirror at the foot of the bed, reflecting his face from the mirror above her own head, and back and forth, reflecting Grampy again and again, smaller and smaller. When finally he leaves, he kisses her good-night, stubble scratching her face red.

*

     "I can't even get out of bed in the morning," Emma says, combing out her hair behind the 76 station. "It's so fucking terrible, my life." They are waiting for James to come and meet them. He's cool and 24, he rides a motorcycle and Emma thinks he looks like a star. "He'll be famous someday," she tells Sylvie, "and you'll be able to say you fucked him."
     When they see James walking towards them in his knee-length black trench coat and bandana wrapped around his head, Emma stands up and yanks down her too-tight miniskirt, opens up her jacket and sticks out her chest. Sylvie smokes her cigarette and hides behind her sunglasses.
     "Hey you," James says and pulls Sylvie up from the curb, presses her against the building. "Wanna fry?" Emma is frantically nodding yes behind him and so Sylvie says okay and James says Okay then, and squeezes her ass.
They walk to Emma's trailer and it's so cold Sylvie thinks, cold enough, even, to keep out her thoughts. She watches wispy white blow out of her mouth and feels the crispness of her cheeks and lips, she tries to go beyond not thinking, and tries to forget where she is.
     In this light, Sylvie can see every tiny hair on her arms as she walks, she pulls the sleeves of her jacket way down over her hands and when Emma turns around to talk to her she ducks her head, horrified at how hairy her face must look, too. Someone drives by and honks, a group of school kids pass by on the other side of the street, in pairs, holding hands. The two kids at the front of the line, right behind the teacher, are sort of fat and someone's taped signs to their backs. Sylvie squints and reads them, "Hog" and "Kick Me, I'm Retarded." The rest of the kids are laughing and sloshing around in the snow in their neat red windbreakers and grandma-knit hats, one of them gives her the finger.
     "Come on, fucko," Emma says. "Hurry up."

*

     James pushes her back onto Emma's bed and, keeping his knee on her stomach, unbuckles his pants, he says You are so hot. Sylvie lies on her back and the acid's turned the ceiling into the thick end of a ponytail, blunt-cut and waving, thousands of little hair-tips violet and rippling like water. She closes her eyes and the designs become a mix of Santa Fe sandglass, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Art Deco wallpaper. When Sylvie opens her eyes again, James is totally naked and trying to pull her out of her jeans.
     "Don't," she says and he ignores her. His dick is pointing at her in this accusing way and the sight of his incredibly long and gold and curly pubic hair makes Sylvie feel sick, a sharp ache twists deep in her stomach. "Where's Emma?" she asks and James says Mmm. Her jeans are around her knees and James pushes on top of her and Sylvie wriggles sideways. "You need a condom or something," she says.
     "Damn!" James yells and jumps up and stomps over and yanks open the door. He's back in a few seconds, but Sylvie is already standing up, half-way out of the room, jeans back on. James closes the door and comes at her, tries to push her back on the bed and Sylvie says Get off and he laughs and says I'm trying.
     "You're an asshole," Sylvie says and tries to shove him out of her way but he grabs her and tries to unbutton her jeans again while half-carrying her towards the bed. "Don't, don't, don't," Sylvie says and starts kicking her feet wildly, she scratches at his face and grabs a handful of his long golden hair.
     "You psychotic bitch," James says and backs away. He grabs his clothes and, before he storms out the door, he turns around, tight-lipped, and throws the blue-foiled condoms at her face.
     Sylvie hears the front door slam and Emma appears in the doorway, laughing and saying What the hell was that all about? God that was so funny, he just walks out naked then, two minutes later runs out the door in a fit. Sylvie sits back on the bed and stares up at Emma, still laughing by the door. She imagines walking up to her and grabbing her by the back of the head and kissing her, kissing her hard until she can feel her teeth cutting at her lips and making them bleed; kissing her and forcing closed her eyes so that when she opens them again everything will be new and blue and evaporating like a dream, just like when she was nine and in the alley behind the garage sniffing turpentine, fainting and waking up, face in the dirt; kissing her until she is dead.

Zoey Mondt

home