I walked into her room which was bigger than mine and in the back near an azalea bush which I didn’t see much of in Indiana and an old window with glass horizontal blinds that could be cranked to open in front of a screen. Her bed was a mess. Full of red sox, inside-out underwear, a red plastic hair band bent in half, a rumbled mauve bedspread with white flowers, a grayish pink cover sheet, and beside the mattress without a boxspring, an old radio propped up on a metal footstool. I felt like I could sit wherever I wanted and so I chose the pillow at the head of her bed, sitting on and staring at a used cd of Cherie Currie and I opened it up to read her liner notes that were on the fourth to last page. Sheedy was taking stuff out of hangars from her opened closet and lying them over a blue computer chair that was filled with a shoebox full of hairbrushes and make up. I turned to see a “Most Improved” award on her wall with her name Scarlet on it and I asked about it and she told me that she changed her name a long time ago to this actress she really liked and I knew the one she meant. I bounced around a crystal snowball until she told me to stop and then the phone rang and she fell moving the chair in front of her, hungry to answer it. She made it in time and said a bunch of yeses and started pilfering through a cardboard box when she was through and had hung up the phone, taking out a yellow knit tank top, some jean cut-offs, some perfume, before running her hands through her short hair and calling out loud that she was a mess. I helped her get out her things and walked into her bathroom to get her blow dryer which she thanked me for and she stood in front of the mirror asking me to blow her wet hair dry which I did, watching the blue fade out some with the heat, and she took a brush and brushed away her short cut bangs until they were out of her face and above the right side of her ear.
“What’s the hurry?” I asked.
“It’s David. He’s sensational. I can’t believe he called. Usually he stays at work till seven but today he got out early cause their AC broke, he wants a ride back to his home. In Averndale.”
I winced. Isn’t that fourty five miles away?”
“So.” She said, “It’s love.”
“Oh,” I said, blowing dry her split ends at the top of her neck.
“He’s married.” She said. “He’s got a boy and another one on the way. We were together when she was conceived, it’s a girl.” I kept blowing. I looked in the mirror to see the expression in her eyes and they started to well up and she flicked at the hot air at the blow dryer like it was a fly or a bee that she wanted out and away from her and I turned it off and wrapped it up by its cord. I put it back in the bathroom and came back in my seat at the head of her bed. “Do you have a picture?” I asked. “What’s he look like?”
She turned to click on the mouse on her computer and cursed at how slow it was taking before she downloaded something from an email and showed me the half profile of a bald man with dark fly glasses in a white t-shirt. He didn’t look like anything special to me but she was hungry for him I could tell and he meant everything to her. She picked up a yellow stitched bag from the floor, flipped on a pair of brown sandals and headed out the door saying on her way out that I had to leave too.
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