Bad Haircut by Tom Perrotta Read Free Book Online Page B

grabbing him as he stumbled.
    “Hey Buddy,” Caravello said. “You wanna go home now?” He looked at Tina. “It's past Buddy's bedtime.”
    “Shut up, Mike,” I said.
    “Well, it's after nine-thirty.”
    “Fuck that. I go home when I want to.”
    Caravello shrugged. “Hey Tina, you go down the shore a lot, don't you?”
    “Yeah. We have a summer house in Point Pleasant.”
    “You got a boyfriend down there?”
    She blew a series of quivering smoke rings at the rearview mirror.
    “Sort of.”
    “Is he a lifeguard?”
    “No.”
    “How old is he?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Do you go all the way?”
    She flicked her cigarette out the window.
    “You are so queer, Caravello.”
    For some reason, Tina leaned all the way back, as though I wasn't there. I sank down into thebucket seat beneath her weight. She and Caravello started arguing about the radio station, but I was too absorbed in her body to pay attention. I rested my forehead against the ridge of her spine. She smelled like maple syrup, just the way she had on Friday night.
    Tina shifted in my lap. “Am I all right?” she asked.
    “You're fine,” I told her.
    Tina went to Catholic school out of town. When she started showing up at the park that spring, she never talked to me and I couldn't tell if she was stuck up or shy. Now, even after what had happened between us, I still didn't know if she liked me or not.
    I closed my eyes and remembered watching her dance. She was wearing a football jersey that hung down past her shorts, number 24. I couldn't take my eyes off the numbers. It was a warm night, but I was wearing an air force shirt that had belonged to my father. I'd recently found four of them inside a trunk in our attic. They were musty from twenty years’ storage, but I imagined I could smell faraway places in them, the Philippines, Korea, Japan. During a break in the music, Tina came up to me and tucked a finger in one of my epaulets.
    “I love your shirt,” she said, her voice sweet with Boone's Farm.
    I brushed my fingers against the soft mesh of her jersey.
    “I like yours too.”
    “I'm a little drunk,” she whispered.
    The band started up again. They were a bunch of gas station attendants who thought they were the Doobie Brothers. Tina grabbed my wrist and pulled.
    “Come on and dance.”
    “I'll watch,” I said.
    And later, when Tina asked me if I could walk her home, I felt like I was in a dream, it happened so easily.
    She lived across town, up in the hills. On the way, we held hands but didn't talk. The world was as still as a photograph. Near her house we took a shortcut through a patch of woods. It was way past my curfew, but we leaned against a tree and started making out. I slid my hand up her shirt in the back and tried to unhook her bra, but I couldn't find anything remotely resembling a hook. After a few minutes of fumbling, I dropped my hands to my sides and collapsed against her, baffled. She reached inside the jersey.
    “It snaps in front,” she whispered.
    I put my hands where hers had been. We stopped kissing and just looked at each other. After a while I pulled up the jersey and burrowed my head beneath the numbers.
    Her father was a dentist, and she lived in a bigwhite house, the kind families live in on television. We kissed good night under a porchlight swarming with moths.
    “You want to come in?” she asked. “My parents aren't home.”
    “Sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”
    She tilted her head; her expression was serious, oddly adult.
    “Buddy,” she said. “Is this just one of those things?”
    “One of what things?”
    “You know,” she said. “One of those things.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
    As soon as she shut the door I started running; my sneakers slapped a steady beat on the sidewalk. The clock in the drugstore window said it was after eleven-thirty, the latest I'd ever been out by myself.
    I was panting for air by the time I pushed open the front door. Except for the