The New Normal Read online

  the new normal

  Ashley Little

  Text copyright © 2013 Ashley Little

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Little, Ashley, 1983-

  The new normal [electronic resource] / Ashley Little.

  Electronic Monograph

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 9781459800755(pdf) -- ISBN 9781459800762(epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.I898N49 2013 jC813’.6 C2012-907450-0

  First published in the United States, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952945

  Summary: Tamar lost her sisters to a drunk driver and her parents to grief. Now she’s losing her hair—and possibly her mind.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  Author photo by John Harkin

  In Canada:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Station B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  In the United States:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1

  For Mom and Dad

  Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  one

  I am losing my hair. I don’t know why. I’m only sixteen. I’m not starving myself. I’m not undergoing chemotherapy or radiation treatments. But I have been losing shitloads of hair. It started with my pubic hair. I went to the can one morning and a big gob of hair dropped out onto the toilet paper, like a chunk of moss falling off a log. It was horrifying. That was on a Monday. By the end of that week all the fine hairs on my arms and legs had vanished. Now there are bald pink patches on my scalp. I lost my eyelashes. My eyelashes! I went to see my doctor about it. “Wait awhile,” he said. “See if it grows back. In the meantime, we’ll get inside you for some blood tests.” Perv. He said it was probably stress. But I’m not stressed! Well, I wasn’t before. Now I am about losing my hair. What will be next? My nails? My teeth? My bone marrow? I see my future self as a shrunken dried-apple-head, with caved-in holes for eyes and a mouth like a cat’s asshole. I might as well drop out of high school now and join a frigging circus sideshow.

  You can’t tell anymore, but I used to have beautiful hair. Mahogany with natural amber highlights. Wavy. When they were younger, my sisters fought over who got to brush it. I brushed it one hundred strokes every night before bed with a genuine boar-bristle hairbrush. Or, if I was feeling charitable, I would let my sisters do it for me. Fifty strokes each, to be fair. Neither of them had hair as nice as mine. They’re dead now. Their deaths did not involve hair loss. They died from riding in cars with boys. Stupid, drunken boys. Boys who had to show off, race, play Chicken. Chicken is a moronic game, more dangerous than Russian Roulette. I don’t know why my sisters put themselves in that situation, but I’d bet two hundred dollars they did it to look cool. But dead people aren’t cool. They’re just dead. I’d like to think they couldn’t have seen it coming, but when there’s a car in your lane flying toward you, that’s all you see coming. The headlights. The windshield. The darkness. Forever.

  I used to say they only got one brain between them because they were twins. Well, live fast, die young, as they say. They were fifteen when they died. I’m still the oldest, but now I’m also the only. The parents are devastated, obviously. Both of them lost their minds right after the twins died. Mom has completely checked out. All she does is be weird and do yoga and meditation. I guess she’s coping the best way she knows how. Sometimes she seems normal again, but if I look closely at her mouth, I can see that her smile is fake. Dad doesn’t say much anymore, so I’m not too sure about him. Neither of them has experienced hair loss.

  The parents and some of my teachers thought I would have to repeat grade eleven because I missed so much school due to the bereavement period and all. Abby and Alia have been gone eighty-three days now. They died on Halloween. I started going to classes again two weeks ago. At first I thought I’d do correspondence courses, but I wasn’t very motivated to do the work, plus everyone thought it best that I do more socializing. I don’t make friends easily, because I think most people are useless idiots. I don’t see that as being a flaw on my part. There is no such thing as a “people person”; some people are just better at faking niceness. I put in an effort occasionally. I joined the chess club at the start of this year. I’m the only girl in it. All the guys in the club think they’re real smart, but only two of them actually are: Brian Walton and Roy Lee. Roy is in grade twelve. He has short black hair with a cowlick in the front and eyes like oil slicks. He’s the only member of the chess club I haven’t beaten yet. Roy and I are the MVPs in the club.

  Every month the chess club participates in tournaments with other high schools in Alberta. Once a year, in January, we send a player to the nationals, where we compete against the best high-school chess players in Canada. It’s high pressure, but nothing that would make your hair fall out. Roy got to go to the nationals last week. I wanted to go to cheer him on, but it was in Toronto, and the parents didn’t have enough Air Miles, and I couldn’t afford the plane ticket. Roy got to fly for free and stay in a fancy-ass hotel. He phoned me from the hotel every night between eight and eight thirty to update me on who was popping power plays, who was coming up stale and what kind of Bobby Fischer-esque drama was going down. Our conversations were usually brief and entirely chess related, but one night he told me about walking on the glass floor at the top of the CN Tower and how he and his dad had dinner there in the revolving restaurant. “It was awesome, Tamar. You can see three-hundred-and sixty degrees out over the whole city. All the lights! I wish you could’ve seen it.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I cleared my throat. “You know, the Calgary Tower has a restaurant too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It’s not as high, but I think it revolves.”

  “Well…maybe we could check that out when I get back,” he said.

  “I’d like that.” And then there was this sort of long pause that was kind of awkward but kind of nice too, because there was nothing else to say yet neither of us wanted to hang up.

  At the end of the week, Roy was ranked fifth-best youth chess player in Canada, and I got a postcard with the CN Tower on it.

  Sometimes I think about what it would be like to have a boyfriend, but they’re all so frigging immature, I might as well w
ait a few years. Who wants to be a babysitter, really? Besides, high-school relationships never last more than a month, and the ones that do? Well, usually it turns out one of them is gay. Take Andrea and Scott, for example. They’d been together nearly two years, and they were this picture-perfect couple. She’s our school president, and he gets the lead in all the plays. They’re both ridiculously good-looking with naturally great hair. Nice, popular, smart. You know, the kind of couple that makes you want to vomit when you see them skipping down the hall holding hands. But last week, it came out (excuse the pun) that Scott is actually gay. Call in the bomb squad, because I’m pretty sure no one saw that coming. Poor Andrea. Her shiny raven hair looks like a matted bird’s nest now. I guess it’s true what they say: things aren’t always what they seem.

  Anyway, dating is extremely overrated. It’s a sick ploy for guys to show off their fast cars and their fast moves. Where would that leave me? Crunched up in some rank backseat with my pants around my ankles, or splattered all over the pavement like my sisters. Thanks, but I’ll pass.

  Even if my sisters hadn’t been in that particular car on that particular night, they probably would have crashed eventually anyway, because they were always pulling shit like that. People used to call them the evil twins. Because they were both little delinquents and always looking for trouble. I don’t even know what all they were into. Heavy stuff. I’m pretty sure they were selling weed. Maybe more. They were very popular. A little too popular, if you know what I mean.

  Most people didn’t even realize we were related until they died and I was named in their obituaries: Survived by sister, Tamar. Doesn’t that sound so strange? I had to survive their lives, and now I have to survive their deaths. It’s fucked up.

  When I went back to school, people who had never spoken to me before, never even given me a second glance, came up to me and said nice things about Abby and Alia. How they were so lovely, such sweethearts, so kind. Which, let’s face it, wasn’t true. Beautiful, sure. Nice? Not so much. Not to me anyway. And all the kids said they were sorry. Sorry. They all said sorry. As if it was their fault. And I guess, in some ways, maybe it was.

  One day I was waiting to use the water fountain, and a girl with a blue mohawk ahead of me spun around, her face crumpled up like a paper bag. She threw her arms around me and started sobbing so hard into the side of my head, I was worried she would knock my bandana off and expose my patchy scalp. And it was all just so dramatic, such a show. I mean, if you’re going to be upset over the deaths of my sisters, that’s fine, but don’t make a production out of it. Don’t use it as an excuse to bring attention to yourself.

  I think there are two kinds of people: those who want to bring attention to themselves, and those who want to deflect attention from themselves. I happen to fall into the latter category. Which is why this hair-loss thing is a critical pain in the ass for me. Nothing, I guarantee you, nothing, could bring a girl more attention than cruising the halls at school with a gleaming chrome dome.

  Fortunately, I have been able to hide it thus far through the genius of false eyelashes, bandanas and hats. Mom showed me how to apply false eyelashes, those delicate, spidery things. I perched on the edge of the toilet with a mirror in my lap while Mom did one eye for me; then I tried to attach the other side. My hands were shaky from coffee, and I had to peel the lashes off twice and start over to get them on straight.

  “Use the glue sparingly, Tamar, so you can reuse them,” Mom said, sharpening an eyebrow pencil.

  “How do you know so much about this stuff anyway?” I asked as she traced my eyebrows with clean, firm strokes. Her fingers smelled like strawberries.

  “I never told you this?” She turned my face so I could see it in the mirror.

  The eyebrows she had drawn looked better than the originals. They had a high and delicate arch and were the color of unpeeled almonds. I wiggled them around. Scrunched them together. They opened up my face, made my dark eyes stand out.

  “Told me what?”

  She stepped back to admire her work and smiled a secretive little smile. “I ran for Miss Alberta once.”

  “What?” I almost fell off the toilet. “When?”

  “It was nineteen seventy-six.”

  “Did you—?”

  “I was a finalist.”

  Then Mom got this dreamy, faraway look in her eyes and seemed to stand a little taller while she put the makeup away. It made me wonder how many things there are to know about a person, and if you can ever really know them all.

  I wished she had won. I wished I could say that my mom was Miss Alberta 1976. That would be something. I looked at her in the bathroom mirror, humming to herself. She was beautiful. I guessed she always had been. She was tall, but soft in all the right places. Her hair, which tapered toward her chin, was the color of new pennies. She had bright green eyes and a sprinkle of freckles across the thin bridge of her nose. Abby and Alia looked like her. I got my dad’s looks. All sharp angles and awkwardness, eyes too small and nose too big.

  But it doesn’t matter. The prettier you are, the more hassles you get. That’s why I’m fine being the way I am. The girls aren’t jealous and the guys aren’t lustful. So it’s actually better to be unattractive. Nobody bothers me at all.

  “Why don’t you come to yoga class with me tonight?” Mom said as she poured us some orange juice.

  “Nah.”

  “I think it could really open you up, Tamar.”

  I picture someone sawing my torso in half when she says that. Yoga seems to have helped her find some peace, but I don’t think stretching can regenerate hair growth.

  I have been eating a lot of peanut butter lately. Peanut butter supposedly works miracles for hair growth.

  Smooth peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches

  Crunchy peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches

  Peanut butter on celery sticks

  Peanut butter and cottage cheese on toast

  Peanut butter and cheddar cheese on a bun

  Apples and peanut butter

  Peanut butter on crackers

  Peanut-butter cookies

  Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

  Reese’s Pieces

  Peanut butter and marshmallows

  Peanut butter and honey on toast

  Spoonfuls of peanut butter throughout the day

  Sometimes I rub peanut butter into my bald spots. I’m still waiting for my miracle.

  I have also started praying, really hard. Although I’m not entirely sure if I believe in God, I guess if my hair grows back I will, and if it doesn’t, I won’t. Ask and ye shall receive, as they say.

  Dad renounced God when Abby and Alia were killed. It was strange, because the five of us used to go to church every Sunday and say grace at dinner and all that jazz, but after they were gone it just…stopped. How can you believe in something for all those years, and have all this faith and love and devotion, and then walk away and never look back?

  I suspect Dad still talks to God sometimes when he thinks no one is listening. He must talk to somebody, because he sure doesn’t talk to us.

  He used to be a pretty fun dad. He told us jokes and drew cartoons and made hats and boats and swans out of the newspaper after he had finished reading it. He carved animals out of wood, and when we were little he used to help us make castles and moats out of the furniture. We were the princesses trapped inside the castle, and he was our shining knight come to rescue us on his shoulders. He made us chocolate mud pies and his world-famous spaghetti sauce and colossal cheeseburgers on the barbecue. He took us to the lake and on drives and to movies and out for dinner and ice skating and bowling and hiking and to the zoo. And sometimes he would take us to Banff, just for the day, and we’d get a bag of licorice allsorts from a giant candy store and then drive back home, just because we could. And now, he doesn’t do an
ything. He sleeps for most of the day and then watches TV on the couch or sits out in the garage until three o’clock in the morning, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

  Mom told me he used to smoke when they first met, but she made him stop because it’s disgusting and bad for your health. I guess he doesn’t care anymore.

  Sometimes I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him and yell in his face, “I’m still here! I’m Tamar, your oldest daughter, and I’m still here!”

  I know he loved my sisters more than me, and if I could bring them back for him, I would.

  two

  Today in biology class we discussed rare diseases, and I thought I’d better get a second opinion about my hair loss. At lunchtime I went to 7-Eleven with Roy to get Coke slushies and dill-pickle chips. Roy was wearing sunglasses. That was irritating, because I couldn’t see his eyes. Roy has what my sisters called “story eyes.” They used to say you could tell by someone’s eyes if they were going to be a significant person in your life. If the eyes reflected you, this was just another stranger passing through your line of sight, but if you saw deeper into their eyes, saw the patterns, the layers, all the flecks and specks and sparkles, you would come to know their story, and maybe even be a part of it. I used to tell my sisters they were so full of shit their eyes were turning brown. But Roy does have supernice eyes: black-brown with flecks of orange layered with green and gold speckles. They’re always changing, like a kaleidoscope. I plucked his shades from his face and put them on myself. He pretended not to notice as he flipped through a sleazy men’s magazine.

  “How come you’re always wearing these bandanas now, Tamar? Are you in a gang or something?” Roy asked, sliding the magazine back on the rack.

  “No.”

  “Can I be in your gang?”

  “Shut up.”

  Then he pulled off my bandana, and a big clump of hair came off with it. Roy threw it on the floor as if it were going to attack him. I covered my ugly scalp with my hands. “Fuck you, Roy!”