Chapter Text
Chapter One: Hair
January, 1986
Jefferson, New York
Honey blonde ringlets twist around thin, adolescent fingers. Pulled taut, the curls stretch out to full extension, before they are cut short and recoil back, flipping up at the ends with the new light buoyancy. Locks of hair fall into the sink, across the counter, and onto the bathroom floor. Those pink little fingers, with bitten down nail nubs and little scissor nicks that spot with blood, go back and pull out another curl. It gets amputated with shiny kitchen shears, and the strands fall to the floor.
Mom saved locks of hair from all their first haircuts as toddlers, taping each bundle into a pink baby-book and writing beside it how lucky I am to have another beautiful blonde baby girl.
Ten inches sheared off from all sides, Vic finally looks at himself in the mirror again. His bangs still hang heavy over his eyes, the way he likes, but the rest is short and messy and looks bright yellow under the flickering bathroom light. He puts both hands in it, letting the strands slip through his fingers and feels his scalp tingle from the air.
In his reflection, he sees the short hair and the dark green army t-shirt he wears, and he feels an immeasurable weight lift off his shoulders. It’s amazing how, at eleven, the length of your hair and the color of your clothes seem to change so much about who you are. He gives himself the first uninhibited grin he’s ever smiled, for once not caring about the way his snaggle tooth juts out strange. He finally doesn’t look like his sisters, or his mother. Finally he looks like himself.
Sophie pounds on the bathroom door when the lock doesn’t give.
“Vicky open up! I need to get my stuff!” Screechy, indignant, and sixteen, Sophia Criss hopes the next house they have will have more than one bathroom to share between four kids.
When she calls him Vicky his stomach flip-flops and reality settles like a heavy pit in his gut. His bare feet kick up the dead hair on the floor, pushing it all into a pile. Maybe he should throw it all away before anyone sees what he’s done what am I thinking everyone’s gonna know as soon as they see me stupid stupid stupid!
Sophie probably wants to pack all her hair stuff up. The bathroom counter is littered with stray foam curlers and bobby pins, and an electric crimper that left a nasty burn on Vic’s cheek the last time Sophie pinned him down to forcefully do his hair. Well, now she can’t do that anymore, there’s barely enough left to grab onto. Cluttered in as well are Lucy’s tubes of lip-glosses and packs of eyeshadows, the latter of which Daddy said she couldn’t wear anymore because it makes you look like a fucking hussy. And besides those, there are Daphne’s collection of nail polishes, each with glitter crusted along the rim and giving off a strong sour odor that gives Vic a headache the longer he is exposed to the fumes. With the strands of severed blonde hair spread out, Vic has made his mark on the bathroom counter as well. The mark of a boy who has had enough of all the saccharine pink clothes and slimy makeup and miles of hair that have weighed him down.
By tomorrow it will all be gone, hair swept into the trash and beauty paraphernalia all packed up in the car and on the way to Derry, Maine. Daddy is on leave for the whole rest of the year, and wants to move off base and back to his home town. It doesn’t matter that all four kids have to transfer to a new school in the middle of January. It doesn’t matter that Mom looks like she wants to scream, because she’s lived on big army bases for 17 years and doesn’t know how to adjust to living in a backwoods hick-town. It doesn’t matter what anyone wants, because if Daddy says they’re moving then they are moving.
So is the life of an army family.
Vic’s already taken care of packing, because he refuses to chicken-out again and really plans to let this time be the time for change. He’s already cut all his dresses and the hand-me-down blouses and skirts that he got from his sisters to unmendable pieces. There’s no going back now. He only saves a pair of jeans with dark grass stains at the knees, white tennis shoes with the pink laces replaced with black ones, and a blue camp T-shirt he saved from last summer. All the girls at camp were supposed to get purple t-shirts but he had begged and begged and begged until the councilors finally let him have one of the boy shirts. He counts that as his first win. The rest of his clothes are from his dad’s old stuff, army-shirts and camo coats and cargo-pants cut short so they fit. Vic doesn’t care that they’re torn and stained and oversized, because they’re green and blue and black, with no prissy floral patterns, and they don’t make him feel like he’s being exposed to the world as a freak.
“Mo-AHM!” Sophie yells to their mother, sounding like to a feral cat on the inflection. She pounds on the door again, angered by Vic’s silent refusal to open up.
Everyone’s used to silence from Vic. He keeps his head down and stays in the background, clenching his fists and watching from beneath his bangs, doing as he’s told just to stay under the radar. The only times he’s ever pressed to speak is when someone calls him ,Victoria to many times, or when his sisters tease him gratuitously, or when Mom tries to make him wear a dress to church on Easter, and he feels like he’ll explode if he doesn’t snap back and say NO a thousand times. Last picture day Daphne wouldn’t stop saying how Vic had to wear a skirt for the class picture and he got so fed up he smacked her and said I’m never gonna wear a stupid skirt again, and she ran off to Mom crying. When Lucy called him ugly and said that no boys are gonna like you if you don’t start wearing make-up he grabbed her pony tail and yanked until her scalp turned red, and then called her a slut when she screeched in pain.
Vic sets the tips of his fingers on the latch, ready to unlock it and then bolt past Sophie and run to his room. If he can go fast enough he can hide out in there and won’t have to deal with the aftermath of his haircut until the morning. Daphne would see it, as they shared a room, but she wouldn’t tell on him because it would make Daddy mad, and when he yells it makes her afraid. Maybe if he went straight to bed and covered his head in a pillow no one would know until tomorrow when they left.
It’s never that easy though. Not for Vic. Because as soon as he turns the lock and yanks the door open, he runs straight into his mother and father, both at the door to see what Sophie is yelling about. In surprise Vic jumps back and slips onto the bathroom floor.
Hair hanging just above his ears, oversized clothes swallowing him up, and gaze locked with his parents looking down on him, Vic wonders why he couldn’t have pretended to be Victoria a little while longer.