Billie Girl

Chapter Twenty-Three

My mother also joined in the quest to supply Leslie with a nice date while she was visiting. We had no idea how long she planned to stay. But she would have to go back sooner or later, all her stuff was still there in her LA digs.

Leslie was quite the brave girl to come to a city that most people were casually avoiding. It was still getting some pretty scary press.

One headline I read on the internet home page said:

"Cold blooded killer stalks cold town."

Tourism was down over the holidays. Not that this city ever had much tourism to begin with. And it was very common to see media trucks whiz by with satellite dish antennas on the top of their roofs.

Then Leslie did something impulsive. One afternoon, she spontaneously set a hair salon appointment, disappeared for at least four hours, and came back with a radical layered look featuring deep violet spiky ends and playful patches of bright pink highlights. She looked amazing, like an English pop star. She had always been ahead of the fashion curve even now at the ripe old age of thirty.

I was the only person who was not shocked by her new hairdo, but I still could not figure out what had prompted such a bold move on her part.

Then she told me.

As I was touching her now brittle punkish hair, Leslie said, "I am doing this for solidarity with you, Billie. This is my way of saying that I will not hide from those that will send fear into the hearts of this community. We have to stand proud and be unafraid. Plus, I thought a hot new look might help me land my man, wherever he is."

Then, together, my mother and I found a premium date for Leslie. He was a gentleman who had run for congress and once even campaigned for the presidency. He was a handsome black man, who went to the best colleges and all that good stuff. He was also almost six feet tall. He came over and brought a cake for everyone to share and we all ended up talking and joking around.

As he was telling us all about his illustrious past, I joked, "You had me at lawyer."

I was rephrasing the movie Jerry Magiure (a favorite of Leslie's) and we all had a good laugh. Yet this dashing bachelor kept eyeing me whenever he could, and I could tell he felt self-conscious about being attracted to me since I was still jailbait. That was the downer part of being almost eighteen. Older men, and men in general, always acted so very tentative with me. I could tell that they were too scared to even compliment me no matter how bad they probably wanted to. I bet they thought if they so much as called me"beautiful" that they would be thrown in the slammer, and if I chose to be really flirty, that would just taunt them more.

That's why I could not wait till April when I was to finally turn that very important page in my life. I would be eighteen! Then all the guys could rest easy and take a chill pill. And by then for sure, Blake and I would have made love and achieved everlasting life together!

Maybe I was just some kind of a nut with all my crazy ideas, but I got high on my thoughts and my nutty notions, and so Dr. Moody saw no need to prescribe meds to the fragile balance of my brain. Chances were if they gave me Ritalin or Adderall I might have muted who I really was and all that wonderful stuff that was screaming and kicking inside me like an unborn baby.

I felt that Leslie's date with this very eligible Democrat might have gone better had she not just a day prior gone to the beauty salon and turned herself into pop diva wannabe.

Visually she was now sending the wrong message. Leslie was not a hot-headed, fashionista anarchist. And that was the message her hair conveyed. It also smacked just a tad short of desperation. My sis was a bit long in the tooth for such a crazy cut.