Hairstyles of the Damned Read Online Free

measured, perfect movements—a blink of her glittering fucking blue eyes, this smiling wistful sneer, her giggle sweet as someone ringing a tea bell—seemed to whisper, I am better than you in every way . And maybe she was right because her looks and smarts and charms always dared you to argue, but you never did because what did you have to argue with when you looked the way you did?
    That day, Stacy Bensen was wearing a button that said, Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here . So in the hall there, at the end of the day, between the noise of last classes— Are you going to play practice ? and Pick me up at seven, and He gave us so much homework again —the smell of hair spray and fucking perfume thickening with repeated after-school maintenance, Gretchen turned and bumped into Stacy Bensen and Stacy Bensen stopped and looked at Gretchen and said, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, you fat dyke?”
    OK, cut.
    OK, if you knew Gretchen and could like read her mind, here’s what you would know already:
    Cut to:
    Five years old, Gretchen, a ballerina in this tumbling class. OK, Gretchen, five years old, tumbling. She couldn’t do a somersault because of her weight, you know, and all the other little girls would laugh, and there was this mean-faced little brunette doll in her class in particular, who one time pointed at Gretchen and said, “She’s fat,” and when it was time for the ending recital, Gretchen was told to just run across the stage while the other girls did their handsprings and windmills and front flips and shit like that. Instead, backstage, Gretchen bit the other little girl and was sent home crying.
    And:
    Eight years old this time, Gretchen shopping for a Halloween costume in the aisle of Osco Drugs, the rows and rows of plastic masks attached to plastic one-piece suits—Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and a Fairy Princess and Frankenstein and Dracula and all the rest—and her mother suggesting that perhaps Gretchen would prefer a Frankenstein to a Princess costume because the Frankenstein had just a little more room.
    Then:
    In junior high, someone spray-painting FAT-ASS on the side of her garage and Gretchen watching her dad, Mr. D., trying to hide his embarrassment by quickly painting over it with a shade of brown a little too light, and Gretchen and me and everybody seeing the spot every day as she came home until the day she moved, everyone knowing the spot was there, still there, and why.
    So:
    So when Stacy Bensen said, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, you fat dyke?” Gretchen turned around and grabbed for a part of Stacy’s head, getting ahold of her fucking golden-yellow ponytail, and pulled hard until some of it came out, some of the hair tearing loose from the soft white scalp like the magical golden thread used to stitch together some lucky princess’ enchanted fucking wish, and then Gretchen, holding the girl by the front of her blouse, began pummeling Stacy Bensen’s face, breaking the fancy aquiline nose in one pronounced crack, followed by a dollop of bright red blood, over which Gretchen yelled, as loud as she could, “Why don’t you suck my fucking dick, Barbie?”
    In a moment, the lezbo gym teacher in her blue jogging suit, Mrs. Crone, tackled Gretchen around the waist and then the elderly school nurse hurried to Stacy Bensen’s side and all the girls stood around shocked, their tender and holy virginal hearts beating hard, all of them open-mouthed and struck dumb. Here, here was the part Gretchen almost always left out: For all the fights she had been in before with tough stoner chicks, heavy mascara streaked down angular faces, in random basement parties, or in the back of deserted parking lots while their boyfriends hooted or clapped or looked on frightened, maybe; or with the preppy girls, strangleholds around long, elegant necks and noses that would later have to be retouched by expensive plastic surgery; or with that