makeover

chapter 14

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With the excess money in my pocket, I was finally able to expand my wardrobe beyond the couple hundred dollars my parents allotted to me at the beginning of each school year, and with a girlfriend I also had someone to help direct me as to what to buy, which, in hindsight, is embarrassing to admit. Before the first week of junior year, Tommy was elected to drive us to Albany to go to the mall and do some shopping.

“The best thing a dad can buy his kid is a car,” Mr. Goodspeed explained to me when, at Tommy’s sixteenth birthday party, a new Chevy Impala was unveiled as Tommy’s birthday gift. I had never heard of any parent in Veddersburgh buying their kid a car. “A car is one of the worst investments you can make. It loses its value as soon as you drive it off the lot. Then you gotta pay it off, and by the time you do, you gotta get a new car again. Not to mention all the maintenance along the way. But at the same time…gotta have one. And if I could take that burden off Tommy, I was always gonna do it.”

I don’t know why he felt the need to tell me this. He did so as an aside, like a secret between us. Presumably, he felt bad knowing that my parents would never be able to do such a thing for me and had to justify such an extravagance. If so, it was the first time I’d ever heard him justify any purchase of his at all.

As for myself, he would have been correct: there was no way my parents would ever buy me a car. But there was the old Town & Country van that my sister inherited from my deceased grandmother, and that had, in turn, been passed down to me. It was silver and had a bit of rust along the bottom, along with roughly a million miles on the odometer.

It sat unused in my driveway. I was terrified of driving and was yet to get my license. If my penchant for daydreaming crept in while operating a motor vehicle, a missed stop sign was of far worse consequence than bread squashed by soup cans.

Instead, I was glad to have Tommy drive me around, even if I was nearly as terrified of his driving as my own.

I grimaced and gripped the seat as Tommy sped us down the thruway on the way to the mall, only refraining from making comments on his driving because the others seemed unconcerned, laughing and chatting despite his lead foot. Emma sat up front with Tommy, while Cynthia sat between Danveer and me in the back.

“Jude needs his hair cut,” Cynthia said, brushing it away from my eyes.

“We can do that too!” Emma said as we got off the exit. “Auntie Anne’s Pretzels later, Cynthia?”

“Hell yeah, I can’t wait to see how many pretzel sticks I can fit in my fat-ass mouth!” Cynthia said, making all of us laugh. Except for Tommy.

“Let’s place bets. How many do you all think? Three? Maybe four?” Danveer said.

“No more than three,” Emma said.

“I’d say four,” I said.

“Whoa now, Jude probably has some insight to this that isn’t fair, if you know what I mean,” Danveer said, ribbing me. Cynthia smacked him.

I could tell Tommy was in a mood because he was quiet. He was never quiet unless he was mad. He wasn’t like this around his family. When he was mad at his mother or father, the Goodspeed household was awash with his words, spilling from him at the same rate as usual but imbued with incendiary harshness and honesty. He was silent around our friends, though, because he knew this was an unsavory side of himself. He could be forgiven among those whose love was unconditional, but perhaps not by us, around whom he was more insecure.

I saw Emma give him a concerned look, and I realized the aggressiveness of his driving was maybe a manifestation of his mood. I had seen Tommy like this before and was certain it had to do with their burgeoning relationship.

We got to the mall, and Emma arranged for us to split into groups, no doubt hoping to address the tension between her and Tommy with Cynthia, although I wished she’d address it with me, because I was certain I could give her answers Cynthia could not. But it was suggested Tommy and I split off from the other three, as he had to get a gift for his mother for her birthday, and then we would meet up with the others later to get my haircut and shop for clothes.

“Dude, what is up?” I asked him as we sauntered around the Yankee Candle store. “You’re doing your quiet thing.”

“Yeah, it’s Emma. We got into a huge fight earlier,” he said. I knew it. Emma and Tommy fighting was one of my least favorite things at that time in my life. It made me angry: what could two beautiful, amazing human beings blessed to be together have to fight about?

“What about?” I asked.

“Well…” he sighed. “It’s my fault.”

“Obviously.”

He scoffed with his little half smile.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“So, my parents weren’t home this morning and she came over so, of course, we started to do stuff. And she puts her hands on my chest, looks up at me, and goes ‘Oh, I love how tall you are!’”

“Uh…okay. What’s wrong with that?”

“I hate it when she compliments me on my tallness. Like, that is just something I was born with, something I have no control over. I just am tall. It feels like she’s reducing why she likes me to inherent physical traits. Sometimes it feels like she just ignores the rest of what makes me, me. So, I told her so.”

I sighed. “Tommy, I get what you mean, but that’s ridiculous. It’s perfectly natural to compliment your significant other on a physical trait. Especially when, like, in a moment of physical intimacy. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t like the rest of you. Imagine this, okay: if I’m looking at Cynthia and I compliment her eyes, it wouldn’t really make sense for her to flip out over that because she was born that way.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s not really about that, though, it’s about more than that. It escalated to other stuff. It’s part of a pattern. She never compliments me on anything real. Like I asked her if she could tell me five things she liked about me that weren’t inherent, that were, like, my personality traits.”

“I would say maybe personality is inherent, but okay, I get what you mean.”

“She said I’m nice, funny, smart, caring, and strong—in the emotional sense, I guess. Basic stuff.”

“Could you tell her five things you loved about her?”

“Of course, but she wouldn’t give me a chance to.”

“Text her those things now,” I advised. “And apologize, you dick. I’ll pick out a candle for your mom.”

I found a scent called Summer Breeze Clothesline while Tommy texted on his LG Chocolate.

The bottom line to all of this was that Tommy was a drama-creator. That is what I would have told Emma, had she consulted me on the matter. Part of his demand for constant intrigue and depth of personality was infusing his relationships with heightened stakes that went beyond typical teenage escalations. One of the main reasons we had remained friends was my talent for remaining even-keeled, for realizing that not all slights were personal and that moods were, by nature, transitory.

We met back up with the others at the barber in the mall, and I could tell by how Emma and Tommy greeted each other that he had taken my advice. Once again, I had successfully played the role of band-aid. No doubt he had texted her the five things he liked about her in a poetic tome wrapped in metaphor and flowery allusions.

It felt strange getting my haircut in front of all my friends, and I resented Cynthia a bit for suggesting that we take care of it then, but it turned out to be the best thing I could have done for one simple reason: guidance.

My hair was something I never gave much thought to. My whole life, the most amount of styling I ever did was letting it dry after the shower. The only time I ever got it cut was when my mom made an off-hand remark about how long it was getting. The only place I ever got it cut was my mom’s friend’s place in Albany, and by now this friend knew that any attempt to guide her as to what style I was seeking was met with a shrug from me. So she had given me the same haircut for the past six years, a sort of pseudo-bowl cut that looked alright enough the first week after cutting but achieved a messy bush-like appearance soon afterward.

The older I got, the more apparent it was that while perhaps I did not give much thought to my hair, others clearly did.

The barber asked what I wanted and awaited instructions, but I had no idea what to say. Cynthia and Emma sat in the waiting chairs looking at magazines while Tommy and Dan were outside eating Chinese samples.

“Uh,” I said. “Slightly shorter?” The barber laughed.

“Short on the sides, long on top, blend it in with scissors,” Emma said, leaping up and coming to the chair, sensing the indecision from me.

“How short on the sides?” the barber asked.

“Five,” Emma said. She stood by the chair, hands on hips, smiling at me, and I couldn’t help but feel some sort of Freudian impulse towards her.

The barber began and after a mere eight minutes, I was transformed. It didn’t look bad; the dark curls still fell forward above my eyebrows, but there was a fresh and trimmed look to it that was not me—or at least, wasn’t the old me, and perhaps I had become a new me.

“Whoa, looking good, Jude,” Danveer said as we left.

“Very, very good!” Cynthia said, holding my hand and looking up at me. Emma looked smug.

Next, we shopped for clothes.

Like my hair, clothes were a non-issue for me, so long as others did not point them out. I wore what I had, what I could afford, and what was simple. T-shirts: band T-shirts (Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Black Keys, White Stripes), retro brand t-shirts (Fender, Gibson, 7-UP, Gillette), rare international soccer jerseys (Tasmania, Morocco, Canada) and the occasional hoodie. In the winter I’d supplement the t-shirts with a long-sleeved thermal underneath. I almost always wore baggy, husky-sized jeans, no matter how hot it was outside, and my feet always—always—had on a pair of Adidas Sambas (a bit ahead of my time, perhaps), no matter the snow or rain.

We went into a brand-name clothing store popular among youths of that time that my parents had always deemed ‘too expensive.’

“I have no idea what to get,” I said. I didn’t wish to supplant my ‘style,’ if it could be described as that; I only wanted to supplement it for times I needed something more than a T-shirt. I always felt inadequate and informal doing things like, for example, going to dinner with Cynthia’s parents. Whenever I needed to look nice for something, it was always a mad scramble for my parents to dig up what I had, discover it no longer fit, then run out to Kohl’s or something to buy a button-down.

“Stay here,” Cynthia and Emma told me, and they went to work flicking through the racks. Tommy rolled his eyes and began to stroll around. Danveer—something of a fashion aficionado—seemed to find the store beneath him.

The girls came back with armfuls of clothes: jeans (of the tighter variety), polos, henleys, and button-downs. We went to the changing rooms, and I began to put them on and come out to model them.

“Wow, Jude,” Emma said, looking me up and down. “The haircut, the clothes. I feel like we just Queer-Eyed you. And it is working. Damn.”

Another pulse of (maybe) Freudian attraction.

Tommy was quiet, but I could see his eyes shoot laser beams through Emma’s gaze.

“My man,” Cynthia said, smiling.

“Dapper,” Danveer said.

Then Tommy finally spoke: “You know, I think it’s a little ridiculous for you guys to be dressing up Jude like he’s some sort of doll. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes Jude wears now, like, nothing at all. In fact, I think Jude wears awesome clothes. I wish I wore clothes as cool as Jude. And now you guys go and make him like this mainstream douchebag-looking prep guy.”

“It’s fine, Tommy—” I started, but Emma cut me off.

“Douchebag-looking guy? Tommy, this is how you dress. You wear polos and sweaters and stuff. Are you really that self-unaware?”

“No, I don’t,” he said, and I could tell that he realized he had just put himself into an inescapable hole. “I just don’t like how you see Jude as this thing to be shaped in your image. It’s a little weird, don’t you think? Especially since he is already, like, the coolest guy I know.”

“I asked for their input,” I said. “It’s totally fine.”

“It’s really not. They want to change you because they think what you are isn’t right, Jude, don’t you see that? If they thought you were fine the way you were, they wouldn’t have any advice to give,” Tommy said.

“NO ONE IS SAYING JUDE NEEDS TO CHANGE!” Emma yelled. We drew looks from the other customers.

Tommy shook his head and left the store.

Tommy Goodspeed had a penchant for running, in a figurative sense as well as the literal. Whenever conditions became unsuitable, he always made sure to extricate himself from whatever group or environment was making him upset, until sometime later he’d return in a gladdened state, seemingly cleansed of the memory of the incident that had troubled him in the first place, just like he did that time when I beat him at the water gun game at Six Flags. I don’t think others could understand how such escapes were healthy retreats for Tommy, that it was his way of dealing with things.

The problem this time was that he had the keys to our ride back to Veddersburgh.

I paid for a subset of the clothes I tried on (it was too much for all of them), and we got Orange Julius and threw some coins into the fountain. I watched Emma as she did so, and I couldn’t help but hear her scream a wish from the inside of her skull. Tommy ignored our texts and calls.

“What do we do?” Cynthia asked the group.

“Let’s just call a cab and leave his ass here,” Danveer said.

“We can’t do that,” Emma said.

I sighed and whistled the minor third from ‘Hey Jude’ into the domed ceiling of the mall, a vestige of our friendship from the pre-phone era.

The others looked at me in confusion until we heard it, a very slight echo returned to us from somewhere on the upper level, a minor third of its own.

“Come on,” I said to the others, whistling the minor third again and heading in the direction of its response.

A few minor thirds later, Tommy emerged from a throng of shoppers.

“Sorry,” he said to us when he approached. He had in his hand an ornate picture frame, without a bag and without a receipt. “Had to get my mom something else for her birthday, not enough just to get a candle, you know?”

Tommy, much like his family, had a way of pretending nothing happened, to act so nonplussed and completely fine such that it left you feeling like you had no choice but to act the same, as if the thing that had happened were a million years ago and therefore inconsequential, and you, in fact, were the crazy one for ever having been mad in the first place.

Emma clenched her jaw with a look of anger I’d dream of facing in years to come. She would surely give it to him once they were in private.

I’m glad that malls are a thing of the past. That may be the last time I remember ever seriously going to one.

“You guys wanna come to the basement and hang out tonight?” Tommy asked the rest of the car once we were on our way home.

“Not me. We got our game tomorrow, remember?” I pointed out. I never slept well at Tommy’s, and our varsity soccer game was the next morning.

“Oh yeah! Their soccer game. Cynthia, are we going to that?” Emma asked.

“I was planning on it,” she said, reaching over and stroking my face.

“Me too,” Danveer said. “Getting the hooligan crew together. Someone from marching band is bringing a bass drum.”

“Excellent,” Tommy said, pushing the accelerator.

I closed my eyes and prayed we’d make it back.

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