The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison Read Free Book Online

when she was done and I made a move to the mirror. “I have to put some product in it.”
    She dumped some sticky crap in her palms, rubbed them together, and then gunked it around on my head. “Okay, now you can look,” she said. Around us, the bathroom was completely covered in scraps of dark hair.
    Appearances count. The Bible teaches us this. Although I believe in God, I don’t put much stock in the Bible; it’s just way too long. But appearances do count. Look at poor Samson and that bitch Delilah. A different hairdo and everything would have swung the other way.
    The next day, I showed up at school in a tight white shift dress that stopped six inches above my knees and a pair of white go-go boots borrowed from Francie. My hair was gone; now it was just a spiky, dark crown at my skull. It looked great.
    Everyone stared at me when I walked into Physics. All heads turned at once. “Slut,” I heard Shana Miller cough under her breath. That was Shana Miller for you. Ms. Tinker pushed her glasses up on her nose and regarded me for a brief moment. “Valerie,” she said. “You’re late. See me after class.”
    Francie was sitting at her desk already, grinning from ear to ear.
    I’d thought it would feel different. To look like this, to dress like this. To be this person. I had thought I would feel powerful. Unstoppable, like Francie. Instead, I was embarrassed. Who did I think I was?
    Appearances definitely count, but I also had to wonder if Francie had missed the point of Samson and Delilah. Because, to me, the real question was exactly the question that she had glossed over. The question I asked Francie—the one she blew off—cuts right to the point of everything: Why’d Delilah do it?

Chapter Six
    Y ou take a seashell. You take a tube of lip gloss and a prissy silk scarf like an English teacher would wear. You take a mountain, and a cloud, and a molten pebble from the core of the world. Francie said this was how we were going to do it. Because the entire planet Earth is pretty fucking big. You have to start small and take a chunk at a time.
    That was Francie’s theory, at least.
    Francie claimed that she had been shoplifting for at least as long as she could remember, and even though I didn’t quite believe her, the thing is that it almost would have made more sense for it to be true. Maybe she had been born with a popped antitheft sensor in one hand and a rubber band in the other. Because when it came to stealing, Franciewas amazing, I am telling you. Amazing. Like that first day at the mall, at Wet Seal, when she’d stolen the red dress: one minute it was in her hand and then it was in my purse, in my size and everything. An offering of friendship. All she had to do was want something and it was hers. She had wanted not just the dress but, for whatever reason, me.
    Well, Francie wanted everything. By everything I mean every single thing. Sometimes it seemed like there was a clandestine line of ascendancy, like Francie knew she was waiting in the wings to rule an oblivious world. Francie had a sparkle in her eye that suggested she had a secret, and the secret was that you couldn’t even begin to imagine her destiny. A girl-queen in exile.
    “I have a plan,” she told me one day in November, a few weeks after she had showed me the Sign. We were standing by the glass elevator on the mezzanine level, looking down over early Christmas shoppers milling around the wide pavilion below us. The glowing signs and kiosks were laid out like a set of instructions to be followed, and Francie leaned out on tiptoe, palms facedown against the guardrail. She turned to me with a mischievous slant of the eyebrow and said, “All this is going to be ours.” The tiny silver lima bean around her neck quivered at the hollow of her clavicle. Breath in, breath out. I thought I saw a spark.
    Start with a shitty plastic charm bracelet. Have a plan. “Why stop at stupid, tacky Montgomery Shoppingtowne?”Francie wanted to know.