Smart Mouth Waitress (4 page)

“Very funny.”

His eyes grew bigger, and for several seconds, he said nothing but a string of swear words.

“Be careful what you wish for,” I said, doing a quick twirl, my damp hair swinging out lightly. “You wanted me dreadlocks-free, and now I'm ready to take over the world.”

Finally out of swear words, he gave me a big hug. “You look pretty, bro.”

“Don't make me cry.”

“Don't tell Mom, but I'm really glad the hair ropes are gone.”

“Thanks, bro,” I said.

He finally let me out of the hug and I went to find my father, at his computer. His reaction was more painstakingly neutral than Jay's or my brother's, but I could tell he was pleased.

“You'll have to tie it back at work,” he said. “You don't want loose hairs getting into the food.”

“I'm glad you love it,” I said.

“You're the spitting image of your mother when we first met,” he said.

“I'm not her.”

“I know, sweetie. Go eat your gelato.”

Back in the kitchen, stooping down to pull open the freezer drawer of our refrigerator seemed like too much effort, so I left my gelato for another day. My stomach didn't seem that eager, anyway, and one of my rules for keeping my weight down is I don't snack unless I'm a little hungry. You'll still catch me nibbling out of boredom at times, but I try to alternate between baby carrots and high-calorie items.

I had work in the morning, so I took my Magnesium and Vitamin D pill and started getting ready for bed.

Up in my room, I sent a text message to Courtney, telling her I had a surprise for her the next day and she'd better not call in “sick” like she had that day.

She didn't send a message back. Courtney doesn't like it when you call her on her bullshit, and that was what her being “sick” that day was. We both knew she'd taken the day to spend with her new girlfriend, but she was too chicken to just be honest with me.

I tried to push away my annoyance and accept my best friend for being imperfect, but the new girlfriend had been nothing but trouble, and I hadn't even met her yet.

Once in bed, I couldn't get my pillow quite right. Without my dreads, I was missing something. My head was naked.

I wondered how the people at work would react. I wondered if guys would suddenly start flirting with me.

The next morning, shampooing was pretty delightful. So delightful, I did it twice. When you have dreadlocks, you still shampoo and condition your hair, mostly the scalp, but you have to do it gently so you don't unravel the dreads. That morning, I gave myself the most wonderful scalp massage. With a big grin on my face, I felt like one of those ridiculously happy girls in a shampoo commercial.

The only problem was the amount of hair that came off in my hands disturbed me. After all the shedding I'd done the night before, still more was coming out? I didn't want it to go down the drain and mess up the ancient pipes in our house, so I plastered a clump of my hair against the tile wall in the shower, to be retrieved later. The clump looked like a furry little monster, so I made him a smaller clump as a friend.

I spent so long in the shower, I didn't have any time to put on my usual makeup, which for the last couple of years had been a thick, black, liquid eyeliner that covered a lot of eyelid, plus gobs of mascara on top and bottom. If I'd had time, I would have penciled in my pale eyebrows—they're quite sparse at the outside edges, thanks to my Scottish-English heritage—to give my face more balance.

Most white girls my age with dreadlocks wear flowing skirts and no makeup, going for that hippie look, but I liked my black jeans and big boots, the more buckles the better. You might say my look was Edward Scissorhands, except female, and with lighter hair. If I got a good dose of pale streaks, I could almost call myself a blonde. My hair looked more colorful out of the dreads, which by comparison had a gray cast. The ends Jay had chopped off were in my garbage can, and looking at them in there with garbage and wrappers gave me an
ick
feeling.

I was already late for work, though, so I had to skip makeup entirely, for the first time in forever. I dashed down to the front door with my wet hair falling to my shoulders in light waves. Mom hadn't taken all her shoes and clothes with her, and she wasn't around to say no, so I helped myself to a pair of her light brown, suede pirate boots and her matching jacket. They went well with the ivory-colored gypsy dress I'd also liberated from her closet.

As I opened the front door, my brother's alarm clock went off upstairs, which meant I was two minutes late leaving.

As
I stepped out the front door, I felt several pounds lighter—even though the dreadlocks couldn't have weighed more than a few ounces—and like an entirely new person. When I reached my hand into Mom's jacket pocket, I found a pink, sparkly lipstick. Just for kicks, I put on the lipstick before I walked in the back door of The Whistle.

“You can't use that door,” one of our cooks, Donny, said.

“Try and stop me, hamster biceps,” I said.

He did an honest-to-goodness double-take. He literally looked at me, looked away, then his head went BOING and he looked back at me, mouth open and everything. It was priceless.

“Smokin' hot!” he said.

After that, my mood was really great for all of five seconds, until I saw the heart-shaped birthmark on the back of Donny's neck and remembered I was down a set of dreadlocks but not up by a boyfriend yet.

“You're a guy,” I said to Donny, whose age I hadn't been able to pin down, but was likely somewhere between thirty and forty.

“Was it the sideburns that tipped you off?” he replied as he rearranged a row of sizzling bacon.

Behind me, Toph laughed. He normally worked as a prep cook, and had only helped me serve tables the day before when Courtney had called in “sick.” Toph is about my age, but a good twenty pounds lighter, so I always thought of him as a kid. He laughed at the cooks' jokes like it was a job requirement. Toph didn't find me very funny, but at least I had the customers to abuse.

“Donny, how do girls flirt? Teach me how to flirt,” I said.

“Don't play games,” he said, flashing me his custom-designed black and titanium wedding band. “If you like a guy, tell him you like him.”

“Ugh, you're so old. Hey, kid.” I poked Toph in the arm. “In your fantasies, when a girl flirts with you, what does she do?”

“She calls me by name,” he said.

“You guys are not helping.”

“Your hair looks pretty,” Toph said. “You look softer.”

“Ew, are you flirting with me?”

Donny made a horrible buzzer sound. “Wrong. Bad Perry. Bad. Why don't you try again. Try flirting with young Toph here.”

“Your name is Toph?” I held my hands up to my face, pretending I hadn't known. “Oh, God, I think I just threw up in my mouth.”

Again, Donny made the buzzer sound. As much as I didn't want to flirt with Toph, I wanted to hear the buzzer sound even less, so I tried again.

I stepped a little closer to Toph and straightened out my posture, which thrust my chest ahead. “You really know your way around a potato peeler,” I said.

Donny made the buzzer sound.

“Do you come here often?” I asked.

Buzzer sound.

“You actually have really nice eyes,” I said to Toph, who was being very quiet. “They're, like, not green and not brown, but in between. They're kinda … smoldering.”

I braced myself for Donny's buzzer sound, but it didn't happen.

Young Toph blushed and dropped the potato he was peeling into the peels bucket.

“That's it?” I said to Donny.

“You got it,” he said.

I gave Donny a coy look. “You have really nice sideburns. I like how they frame your face.”

“Aw, thanks, I like to shape them—hey, are you doing it? Are you flirting with me?”

“I'm on fire,” I said.

Donny wagged a finger at me. “Never say that phrase in a kitchen.”

I hung my borrowed brown jacket up on the wall. Usually, I wore a loose cardigan over my shirt so guys wouldn't eye-grope my boobs, but I was turning over a new leaf in my quest for love, and they could eye-grope away, within reason. The ivory dress I'd borrowed had shirring at the top, so it wasn't too clingy. I felt like a Roman goddess, or at least like someone playing one on HBO.

I stepped out to the dining area and was greeted by an appreciative wolf whistle, courtesy of my best friend, Courtney. I can whistle a pretty good tune, mostly on-pitch, but I can't do the big, loud whistle with my fingers in my mouth, like Courtney can. It's one of the many, many awesome things about her.

Another awesome thing about Courtney is she came out as a lesbian when she was sixteen, and she'd been so cool about it. For example, if someone at our high school called someone gay in a mocking way, Courtney wouldn't make a big scene and embarrass them if it was their first offense. She would gently take them aside and explain how insensitive it was, unless you were genuinely saying it as a compliment and you were also an out gay person. If it was a person's second offense, though, Courtney would let them have it. I saw her punch a big guy in the face once, and while I know it's wrong to use violence to support a cause, it was still pretty damn cool.

Courtney is Chinese-Canadian and barely over five feet tall, so she can get away with stuff like that, like how tiny chihuahuas can bite people or hump their legs and not get put down for public safety and decency.

The Whistle was still empty, with the first of the Monday morning breakfast customers not there yet, and Courtney was filling the ketchups, using a funnel. “Stay back,” she called out in warning. “I just crop-dusted over here.”

I kept a safe distance from her morning fart zone, on the other side of the bar, where I rolled up sets of utensils in napkins.

“I take it by the wolf whistle, you like my new hair?”

“I thought you were joking when you texted me. Give me a minute and I want to come over there and pet you like a llama.” She made a face. “Too much broccoli.”

For the record, Courtney doesn't look like someone who would be so proud of the power of her methane production. She always has perfect hair—a chin-length bob—and her makeup is magazine-perfect. The girl wears false eyelashes, and not just for special events, but
every single day
. The eyelashes are pretty, and they change the fold of her upper eyelids, giving her a more Western eye. She'd alternate between moaning about Asian girls who had eyelid-fold surgery done, berating them, and talking about getting it done herself. Like most people, she was a study in contradiction.

After Courtney was done with the ketchup, she ran over to me at the bar and admired my hair close up. “It's darker than I remember. Must be because you're older now.”

“I'm eighteen, not nineteen like you, old lady.” My hair had air-dried and was fluffy and soft around my face. “What do you think? Is this boy-friendly hair? I want to get some dates, like, immediately.”

“Who are you, and what have you done to Perry?”

“I've had an attack of the boy crazies.”

She tilted her head and looked wistful. “I miss your hair snakes. Did you keep them? I'm doing some found-art pieces and I could use something disturbing. Ooh, can I have your old dreads? Can I?”

Before I could tell her they were in my bathroom garbage bin, we both turned to look at the front door, still closed. This happens all the time, and my best guess, other than we're psychic, is that a human body in front of the restaurant's doorway absorbs both street noise and sunlight—not dramatically, but just enough that you can always tell when you're about to get the first customer of the day.

A familiar-looking guy reached for the door.

“There's your future boyfriend,” Courtney said.

I chortled. “Crossword Guy? No way.”

She ran to greet him and quickly escorted him to one of my tables, by the window on my side.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I whirled around, surprised to find Donny outside of his kitchen cave. “Practice your flirting on that guy.”

“I take back what I said about your sideburns. They're too pointy.”

“He wants coffee,” Courtney said, gliding by.

I rolled my eyes so hard I worried I may have hurt myself. “My wish is his command,” I said in my robot voice. “I am the Waitress Two Thousand, I live to service.”

Crossword Guy was, surprise-surprise, doing the crossword puzzle when I brought him his coffee and white ceramic mini-pitcher of cream. He wasn't doing just any crossword puzzle, but the New York Times crossword puzzle, as he'd mentioned to me on several occasions.

I felt the buzz of knowing Courtney and Donny were observing me.

Turn on the charm
, said the troublemaker voice in my head. Charm practice wasn't a terrible idea. If I could flirt with Crossword Guy, I could flirt with anyone. I was about to get my Bachelor's Degree in Flirting.

Instead of my usual opening, something along the lines of, “Well? What do you want?” I smiled wide, revealing many teeth. I couldn't think of anything remotely flirty, so I didn't say a word.

After what felt like an eternity, he looked up from his just-started crossword puzzle, surprised. “You're stealthy,” he said.