Project D.U.D.E

(1) If You Minus the "Fe" in "Female"

CHAPTER 1 If You Minus The “Fe” in “Female”

This was weird. I mean, this was really, really weird. Never before in my life have I actually cut my hair. Yeah, sure, I’ve had it trimmed before, but the trim was only an inch or two, never more.

I’ve cut Addison’s hair before, and I’m pretty good at it, if I may say so myself, so good that I could get a job at Supercuts without so much as batting an eyelash. Not that it’s that hard to get a job at Supercuts, but I’m just saying… So, my lack hair-cutting of skills wasn’t what scared me about this, because I lacked a lack of hair-cutting skills.

So what was it that scared me?

I looked at my reflection in the grimy, water-spotted bathroom mirror. The fluorescent lights flickered like a scene out of a scary movie, which was fitting, I guess, considering how scary this was for me. It was so scary, that if you threw in some ominous music, you’d have a scene straight out of an M. Night. Shyamalan film. I licked my lips, and my poorly replicated reflection copied me.

I’d already taken off all my make-up. You can’t exactly pretend to be a guy with three shades of Maybelline heavy on your eyelids- or, you could, but you couldn’t be the kind of guy that I was going for. Now all I could see was my plain, unpainted face.

I have dark brown eyes, like my brothers. In fact, they’re so dark, that you can barely tell my irises from my pupils. Unlike Riley, I have short eyelashes that barely draw attention to the almond shape of my eyes. My brothers and I have Latin blood flowing through our veins, and it shows half-way in our skin tones. We’re lighter than our father, but darker than our mother, who we’re pretty sure is part-albino. It’s never been proven, though.

A slightly turned-up nose, just a hint of a cupid’s bow in my lips, a body with almost no shapeliness whatsoever- Well, no, that’s not true, I have a shape, and it’s called “rectangle.” I know why I was so scared to cut my hair off, it’s because my hair was the only physical feature of myself that I had anything to be proud about. I had one of the most well-cared-for heads of hair in all the western hemisphere. My hair belonged on the front of a magazine, with a fan blowing it back and a dozen cameras telling me to smile. The richest woman on earth could see my hair and pay me a quarter of her fortune to give it to her.

Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. But my hair really was my best feature. Was I really going to cut off all long, luscious, thirty-nine inches of it, just so that I could keep away from “Drama on Rosales Lane”?

The fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered once again.

Hell yeah I was.

I picked up the pair of perfectly in-shape scissors that Luke got out for me (why he was carrying around a new pair of scissors I didn’t know) and felt my body cringe as I heard that first snip of the blades cutting through my hair.

Bye-bye, long luscious locks...

Hello freedom.

. . .

I thought of keeping my hair, but then I realized I had nowhere to put it for the duration of my stay at George Ryan’s Baseball Camp. So I had to feel a painful twinge in my heart as I threw my brown locks into the trash and swept the remnants of my hair-cut along the bathroom’s cool cement floor until they reached a corner.

I’d changed out of my clothes and into the ones Luke gave me: a pair of jeans, an Ecko t-shirt, and a blue plaid button-up to go over it. I was honestly a little surprised when I donned his attire and found that they actually weren’t weird or smelly or dirty at all. I felt bad for thinking he’d give me unsanitary clothes or, clothes that actually made sense– unlike the wardrobe he was sporting when he revealed himself to us.