Someone to Love by Addison Moore

reason.
    “Oh. My. God.” She backs up clutching at her
chest as if I’ve deliberately set out to break some indelible girl
code. “You, my friend, are in need of the works. You don’t worry
about a thing.” She slaps a pink plastic coat over my sweater and
speeds me off to the sink. “This is gonna feel better than s-e-x.”
She belts out a laugh as the hose spits out a firm spray of
heavenly warm water over my scalp, and I moan into the
experience.
    Oh God, it does feel good. Like
triple-your-pleasure good. Not that I would know what that feels
like, but still.
    Boppy masticates at rocket speed while
filling me in on the finer details of her boyfriend’s professional
cage fighting career until something wet and hard flies into my
eye.
    “Oh my God!” She plucks it off and pops it
back into her mouth. “Please don’t tell! I swear you can come in
anytime you want for like a year, but if my boss finds out I
dropped gum on another client, my ass is grass and so is my rent.
Believe me, I’ll make sure you don’t leave here until you are satisfied .”
    Gah! Her gum ? As in the rubber cement
she’s been trying to wrestle into submission with her less than
hygienic sublingual juices? That gum? That’s the wet glob of
goo that just fell in my freaking eyeball ? I’m sure there
are an entire litany of diseases I’m now eligible to entertain,
like mono for starters, and the mainstay of the dead and dying the
world over, hepatitis. I knew I shouldn’t have come to the “Happy
Herpes and Molest Your Nails Salon.” And now she’s going to try and satisfy me, whatever the hell that means. I will so throw
her and her refried tresses down if she even attempts to initiate a
“happy ending.”
    “I’m fine.” I assure for the thousandth time
as she escorts me back to mission control. She pumps up the chair
until my stomach bottoms out from the g-forces she’s emitting.
    “Don’t you worry.” She combs my hair down the
front of my face and cuts straight across in one clean hack attack.
“Walla.”
    Holy shit!
    Did she just hack off my hair and follow it
up with a walla ? Why does it suddenly feel like I’m back in
fifth grade at Becky Zuckerman’s house and she’s giving my hair a
“little body”—code for a fucking mullet.
    She fiddles with a rubber band, that honest
to God she just plucked from the filth pit that is her mouth, and
flexes it over my head. She backs up revealing my new
unicorn-inspired ponytail sitting on top of my head as I struggle
to catch my breath. Clearly Boppy here is freaking insane.
Clearly, her not-so-cute moniker comes straight from the fact
someone took her to task with a baseball bat and now my hair is
reaping the grave benefits of a fractured skull trauma.
    She begins mixing bottles and solutions as if
they were potions while I plot my escape from this dungeon of
disaster.
    “We don’t want to get any of this crap
anywhere it’s not supposed to be,” she sings, ignoring the fact I
now have a miniature erect penis sprouting from my forehead.
    “Where it’s not supposed to be? Like my
hair?” I’m only half-joking.
    “Just some chestnut highlights. Nothing more,
I promise.”
    She spends the next leg of a decade basting
my hair with what looks like glue then proceeds to wrap it in
tinsel. Any moment now I’m expecting her to tune me like a radio
and dial into the mother planet. Personally, all of this wasteful
use of tinfoil is making me hungry for a Ding Dong.
    She spins me into the mirror, so I can
appreciate the full effect of her not-so-handy work.
    “Oh my God!” It flies from my lips without
meaning to. My hair has ballooned out two feet in every direction
and it looks as though I’ve donned an aluminum afro.
    “Here.” She opens a jar marked “avocado” and
slathers a green paste liberally over my face as her final descent
toward insanity plays out right here on my person. “You’ll be spit
shined and ready to go. New Year’s Eve, here you come