Finding the Forger Read Free Page A

Frizz. Smell.”
    “It says it has a green apple scent.”
    “Well, yeah, but what about the other stuff? The last time I had a perm was when I was seven and my mom took me to the beauty parlor that my Aunt Rosa’s sister-in-law owns. Mom wanted me to get a cut for my First Communion, but they convinced her to let me have a perm.”
    “And?”
    “And . . . have I ever shown you pictures taken at my First Communion?”
    “No.”
    “Well, there you have it. We destroyed them all so no one could blackmail me when I was older.”
    “Aw, c’mon, Bianca. That was probably some Old World kind of thing. They have new kits now that aren’t nearly as strong.”
    (“Old World perm”? Was that the kind immigrants brought with them to the “new perm” country?)
    “Look,” Kerrie added. “We’ll do a little test and if you don’t like the result, we won’t go ahead.”
    I took a look at the smiling model on the box, her coiled locks as inviting as the Sirens’ songs, remembered how Doug had looked at me when he saw me in my festive ‘do, and decided, what the heck? If the test failed, we’d cancel the procedure, right?
    Do I even need to tell you how this all turned out? Aren’t you filling in the blanks yourself about now?
    Okay, okay, here are your choices:
    a) the perm test frizzed Bianca’s hair, thus warning her not to proceed;
    b) the perm test curled some hairs and frizzed others, and another test was conducted;
    c) the perm test went fine because the whole concoction was awicked prank the manufacturers devised to sucker unsuspecting beauty wannabes into their cackling clutches.
    If you chose “c,” you’ve entered the dark recesses of a heart broken by bad hair.
    No, my friends, “bad hair” doesn’t begin to describe this experience. It doesn’t even come close.
    At the end of an hour and a half of chemicals soaking into my head—chemicals that smelled like green apples all right, just green apples left to ripen for a month in a well-used litter box—after having my hair pulled and squeezed and tangled around little plastic rollers whose rubber band closures were modeled after tools used by the monks of the Inquisition, after looking at Kerrie’s troubled face and saying “what’s that burning smell?” only to realize it was the odor of my hair being singed by the strong “new world” perm compounds—after all this, my friends, I had the pleasure of looking in the mirror and realizing my life as a girlfriend had come to a screeching halt. I had the tire tracks on my head to prove it.
    Think white girl Afro. Think Annie. Think Brillo.
    My permed hair stood out from my head almost a foot in every direction, except for one lock on the side that dangled straight out. That was the test lock.
    “I’m sure it will loosen up overnight,” Kerrie said uncomfortably as I stared in the mirror, trying hard not to put my hands around her neck and throttle her. Why, oh why, did I let her talk me into this? So what if she had been feeling a little mopey lately? That didn’t give her the right to commit hair homicide on her best friend.
    “Yeah,” I said, “maybe.” Was there a patron saint of hair—St. Pantene, perhaps? Someone to whom I could offer prayers? Burn incense in front of? Sacrifice older brothers to?
    “In fact, I bet if you brush it out again really hard, it’ll relax a little right away.” She tentatively touched my hair but visibly recoiled. Who wouldn’t? This wasn’t hair any longer. It was a hundred slinkies attached to my head—a head that smelled like scorched fruit.
    “Umm, it’s getting dark. Maybe my dad can take you home,” she said. We both had heard him come in a half hour ago.
    Kerrie rarely asked her dad to drive her or her friends anywhere. The fact that she was going to ask him to take me home told me precisely what she thought of my hairstyle—a total disaster. It was like a polygraph scratching out the truth—my hair was unsuitable for public