Hairstyles of the Damned Read Online Free Page B

really didn’t give a shit about Stacy Bensen. I knew her but I didn’t have a problem with her. I wasn’t punk rock at all; I didn’t go looking for fights. Like I said, I was into metal and hard rock like AC/DC, Mötley Crüe, Metallica, stuff like that mostly. I guess I was kind of a pussy. In high school, I dressed the same every day: lame—blue flannel shirt over the white button-down shirt and black tie I had to wear, black pants, and black dress shoes that were scuffed almost gray. I had dirty-brown hair that hung in my eyes, like a mop I guess, and also my huge brown plastic frame glasses which I needed to wear because my eyesight was so weak. Also, I had a wicked-bad case of acne—on my face, on my neck, even down my back. Like I said, I guess I was a quiet kind of kid. There wasn’t anything punk about me in the least. I always thought the punk kids were a bunch of fucking phonies; I thought they tried too fucking hard, maybe. I mean, I had grown up with Gretchen and Kim—we had been losers together in junior high on the Bloom Junior High Math Team, in which Gretchen had been the club president—and that was the only reason we hung out anymore, I guess: We had gotten used to being losers all together, maybe.
    “And I got a note sent home,” Gretchen bragged, digging in her school bag, “and a three-day in-school suspension.” She rifled through her folders and pens, found the blue paper note, and held it up proud—over her head, like it was a scholarship or an aced test or something. I just nodded and looked away.
    “Are you guys going straight to Gretchen’s house?” I asked.
    “I got to go to work,” Kim said.
    “Well, I dunno. I don’t really wanna go home,” I said.
    “What’s your malfunction, Brian, you pussy?” Kim asked, and shoved her finger into my chest. I looked down at her shiny black combat boots, then over at Gretchen, who was wearing dark black sunglasses and still waving the letter up high, and then I lowered my head.
    “I’ve got a serious problem,” I mumbled.
    “What’s your serious problem?” Gretchen asked, laughing.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    “What? What is it?” she asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “Just fucking say it,” Kim hissed. “What’s your fucking problem?”
    “My dad. It’s kind of weird. He started sleeping down in the basement,” I muttered, and then lowered my head.
    “Well, what the fuck does that mean?” Kim asked.
    “I don’t know. Before I went to bed, like a few nights ago, it was late, you know, and I saw him on the couch and then he saw me and he said, ‘It’s OK, Brian. I’m going to be sleeping down here for a while.’”
    “Well, do you think they’re going to finally get split ?” Kim asked.
    “I dunno know, I guess so,” I said.
    At night, my pops, who worked at the Tootsie Roll plant and who, no matter what, always smelled like chocolate candy, had started sleeping downstairs, where my room was also located. I liked my dad a lot; he was quiet like me. When I was a kid, and even now, he’d come home from work and hold his hand out and make me guess— which one? —and then he’d drop a few Tootsie Rolls into my palm. My mom said that was why my acne was so bad. My dad had acne, too. It didn’t bother me, because my dad was always singing and telling corny jokes. He would come home with bags and bags of Tootsie Rolls and we’d build these enormous structures—the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx, all from Tootsie Rolls—for their annual Employee Father and Son Contest. Sometimes, he’d take off his glasses and wipe them and stare off into the future like he had something important to say, but then he wouldn’t say anything, just like me. And now he was sleeping in the basement, alone and lonely, and it made me feel awful. I didn’t know what was going on with him exactly.
    About my mother, well, I don’t want to say too much except this: When I was in grammar school at Queen of Martyrs, there was this pumpkin-carving