The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter (4 page)

Sylvie blinked and cried. Blinked and cried. Pebbles reached into her purse and pulled out a compact. Then she showed Sylvie how to apply a line of foundation to her nose to make it look less wide.

“Make sure you blend it in,” Pebbles said. She tapped her fingers along the bridge of Sylvie’s nose.

“I’ll help you do that,” I said. But really, I didn’t think Sylvie’s mom would let her wear makeup. Her mom had told her she had to wait until she was fifteen. And then she could wear lip gloss and blush and that was it.

Grandma bought Sylvie and me each a hair product of our choice. I chose shampoo with sunscreen in it that would protect my hair from harmful UV rays. Sylvie picked a leave-in conditioner that was supposed to optimize strength. In the end, Grandma decided to pay for our haircuts too, which was supernice. Because I had brought money, but I didn’t want to spend it.

“I bet strong hair grows faster than weak hair,” Sylvie said.

“Totally,” I said. And then I nodded enthusiastically. Because a trick Grandma taught me was that enthusiasm always cheered up seriously bummed-out people.

And then, while Grandma dropped Sylvie off at her house, I chose to wait in the car. Because sometimes
Sylvie’s mom frightened me a little bit. Because she wasn’t a very fun person. In fact, she was a little cold. And stiff. For her job, this was pretty useful. She worked for a local doll maker called Country Buttons. Mrs. Potaski’s job at Country Buttons was to paint eyelashes on all the ceramic doll heads. And she never lost control or got shaky, and she sat for hours and painted perfect lash after perfect lash. Which made her a great eyelash painter, but she wasn’t always enjoyable to be around.

I watched Grandma lead Sylvie by her elbow to the Potaskis’ front door. When Grandma went inside the house with Sylvie, I felt anxious. It never occurred to me that Sylvie wouldn’t like her pixie cut. It didn’t take long before Grandma was heading back to the car.

“Did you smooth things over?” I asked.

Grandma let out a big, exaggerated sigh. “I’m not a magician.” Then she started the car. “Where did you get the idea to whack off all your hair anyway?”

“The podiatrist’s office.” I was usually pretty honest with Grandma.

“Did you see somebody with a haircut you liked?” Grandma kept her lips pressed tightly together as she drove.

“I saw it in a magazine.”

Grandma’s eyes got a little big, like she was hearing
surprising news. “I thought they just had foot-disorder magazines there.”

“No. I found one with a ton of heads in it. In fact, I almost got the wrong haircut. Pebbles looked at the wrong picture and almost left my hair long in the middle and shaved designs into my sides.”

Grandma stopped at a red light and sucked in her cheeks. “Do
not
tell your mother that story.”

“Okay.”

The whole time Grandma drove home, I kept thinking that she had something else that she wanted to tell me. But she never said anything. So I figured that the pixie cut was going to blow over. Like a storm that settles over your house for an hour and dampens your yard and then drifts away.

When I got home, I went to my room and pulled out a bunch of my new school clothes so I could try them on and admire how they looked with my pixie cut. I also got out all my bags of school supplies so I could hold up various items and see how they looked with my new outfits. I posed with my pencils. I slipped on my backpack. I operated my heavy-duty scissors in front of the mirror. I guess I heard the phone ring. I guess I heard some arguing. But I was involved in a very comprehensive fashion show and I wasn’t paying total attention. I didn’t suspect
that my life was heading toward the gutter until Grandma opened my bedroom door and told me that she had some very bad news.

“Are you experiencing hip pain again?” I asked.

Because when Grandma experienced hip pain, which had happened twice before, I had to sleep in the basement and she got my room. And I didn’t enjoy sleeping in the basement, because it didn’t have wall-to-wall carpeting or a radio or sunlight. Also, there were big spiders down there.

“Sylvie and her mom are coming by to have a talk with you and your mom.”

“But it’s not three o’clock. Mom’s still at work.”

“Your mom is coming home early.”

I took a step back. Mom never came home early. Things were more serious than I had realized.

I stood there in my new brown corduroys and pink sweater and sneakers with the pink tongues. “The pixie cut was too extreme, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Bessica,” Grandma said. “Life is a fluid thing. It doesn’t always go in a straight line. You might want something that is right in front of you, but sometimes you’ve got to take a journey other than the one you expected to get there.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear Grandma talking about
journeys, because she was a direct descendent of the pioneers. And so if you let her talk long enough about any subject, eventually you ended up hearing about handcarts, and the whooping cough, and oxen stuck in mud holes. I ran my fingers through my pixie cut.

“Will you be there?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ve got some news to deliver as well.”

And I wasn’t worried when I heard her say that, because I thought I knew what she was talking about. Grandma had been complaining about the air quality in the basement for a while, and I suspected that she was going to buy some sort of air-purifying device. But before she was allowed to buy anything that required electricity, she had to check with my parents. There had been an incident involving an electric blanket, and a massage chair, and a minifridge that knocked out all the power in the house, and in the middle of the night my dad had to do something involving a flashlight and the circuit breakers to get us light again. After that, she’d been put on notice about her wattage consumption.

I changed out of my new clothes and brushed my teeth. That way, if I needed to make a powerful argument, I would have clean and persuasive breath. I remember sitting on my couch thinking that I was going to have an unpleasant conversation. But that was an understatement.
Because until this meeting, I had no idea that Sylvie’s mom secretly hated me and had been plotting to destroy my life. I thought she was an okay mom. But I guess that just goes to show you that you don’t really know somebody until she comes to your living room and flushes all your dreams down the toilet.

hat were you thinking?” my mother asked me. “And where were you during the big shearing event?” She pointed into the kitchen at Grandma. We were sitting on the couch, waiting for Sylvie and her mom to arrive.

“I was at the bookstore,” Grandma said.

“I just wanted a haircut,” I mumbled.

Grandma walked into the living room carrying two dishes of fruit salad that she’d just sliced up and topped with crème fraîche. She handed one to me.

“Mrs. Potaski is furious!” my mother said. “She makes me feel like an unfit parent.”

Then the doorbell rang. And before I had a chance to tell my mom that she was a totally fit parent, Sylvie and her mom walked into our living room. I took a big bite of my fruit salad. Mrs. Potaski looked like she’d been painting all morning. She had black smears on her jeans and she smelled bitter, like paint thinner. It worried me that her shiny black hair fell onto her shoulders in a very angry way. I looked at Sylvie. She was in the clothes she’d worn to the mall. Her eyes looked red from crying. And that made me feel terrible.

“Care for a dish of fruit?” Grandma asked. “Topped with crème fraîche?”

This was one of the reasons Mrs. Potaski liked Grandma. Because she did grandmotherly things like make dessert. And she didn’t produce sugar bombs like other grandmas in the area who made things out of sweetened condensed milk and coconut and butterscotch chips. Her stuff had nutrients in it, even calcium.

“No. Thank you,” Mrs. Potaski said. I sat up a little straighter. She’d never passed on one of Grandma’s desserts before. I stopped eating. And then Mrs. Potaski didn’t even take a seat. She just stood in my living room and started saying horrible things.

“Bessica is a dangerous influence,” Mrs. Potaski said.

I waited for Sylvie to leap to my defense, but she didn’t. I had to wait for Grandma to do that.

“Let’s not overreact,” Grandma said. “A bad haircut is temporary.”

Sylvie looked so sad. I wished she’d told me that she had such pointy ears. Because we could have told Pebbles to modify Sylvie’s pixie cut and leave it longer on the sides.

“I have already had a long talk with Bessica about the haircut debacle,” my mother said. “And she’s grounded.”

This was the first I’d heard of this. I guess my mom wanted to look tough and not unfit in front of Mrs. Potaski.

“That’s not enough,” Mrs. Potaski said. “I plan to take action.”

Action? I had no idea what this meant. Was Mrs. Potaski going to beat me up? Was she going to sue me?

“Sylvie will not be attending North Teton Middle School,” Mrs. Potaski said.

This statement was so surprising and terrible that I couldn’t even believe it.

“Where is she going to go?” my mother asked.

“I’m sending her to South,” Mrs. Potaski said.

“No!” I said. “You can’t. Sylvie is my best friend. And she already has her classes. Plus, she’s been assigned a locker.”

But Mrs. Potaski didn’t look like she was going to change her mind. She looked ticked off. “I’ve called the principal. It’s done.”

“Over a haircut?” my mother asked.

Mrs. Potaski shook her head. “There is something else.”

When I heard this, I held my breath. Because I had no idea what else I’d done.

“Bessica led Sylvie into a dangerous construction area yesterday and instructed her to throw her diary into an open pit.”

My mother’s mouth dropped open and she looked at me.

“It’s gone forever. All her ideas. All her drawings. Every preadolescent musing she’s had since third grade. Poof. Erased,” Mrs. Potaski said.

“Is that true?” my mother asked.

And I wanted to point out that the drawings weren’t so hot and neither were the ideas, but I said something else. “It was a collaborative diary. It was half mine.”

My mother covered her mouth.

“Bessica!” Grandma scolded. Then she took away my fruit dish.

“I feel sick to my stomach,” Mrs. Potaski said. “I still have my own diary from those years, and I turn to it often as a source of immense pleasure.”

“But she kept ten pages,” I offered.

Sylvie looked down at the floor.

“Yes. I’ve seen those pages,” Mrs. Potaski said. She folded her arms across her chest and frowned at me.

And I didn’t know why Mrs. Potaski sounded so mad. Why would pictures of the ocean upset her?

“Do you know what was written on the back of them?” Mrs. Potaski asked me.

And by the tone in her voice I knew that it wasn’t another ocean picture.

“A list,” Mrs. Potaski said. And she hissed a little when she said that word.

“Huh,” I said. I tried to think of all the lists I’d written in that diary. But there were a lot.

“And do you know what it was a list for?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“It was a list of forty-two regrettable things you did during the fifth grade.”

I looked at Sylvie, but she was still looking at the floor. I’d forgotten all about that list. How could she let her mother see that? What was wrong with her?

“Well, we all have those kinds of lists,” Grandma said. “But not everyone writes them down.”

“I don’t have a list like that,” Mrs. Potaski said.

And I couldn’t take hearing people talk about me and my list like I wasn’t even there. “But I did those things a year ago. Plus, I regret them.”

“You still did them!” Mrs. Potaski said. “You are a dangerous influence. I only need to look at my daughter’s hair to confirm that.” Then she looked at Sylvie’s hair and groaned.

That was when I realized that Sylvie’s mom was most
likely crazy and I became worried that I might never see Sylvie ever again.

Then Mrs. Potaski unleashed a terrible lecture about personal responsibility and key growth years, and I kept wanting to jump in and yell, “I see your point, but Sylvie’s my best friend. You can’t separate us. That’s stupid. And mean.” But Mrs. Potaski never even took a breath, and when she was finished she did something that was the meanest thing anybody had ever done to me. She asked Sylvie to say something to me about this decision.