Nobody Does It Better Read online

  Dan shuffled through his messy desk drawers searching for the battery-operated beard trimmer he'd bought last year during a week of experimenting with the length of his side-burns. He moved on to his little sister Jenny's room, and finally found it under her bed, inexplicably rolled up inside an old pink bath towel.

  Little sister lesson number one: If you want to keep your shit, put a padlock on your door.

  Not bothering to return to his own room, he went over to the mirror on the back of Jenny's closet door and tugged at the outgrown Mr. Trendy Artiste haircut he'd gotten soon after one of his poems was published in the New Yorker. Now that he'd made the switch from bohemian poet to gritty rock star, it was time for a change.

  Eek! Doesn't everyone know not to try a new look the day before a big event?

  The trimmer buzzed to life and Dan began shaving the back of his neck, watching the light brown strands gather on the faded chocolate-colored carpet in mousy clumps. Then he stopped, worried all of a sudden that a beard trimmer didn't have exactly the right sort of blades to shave one's entire head with. It might leave weird red track marks all over his skull, or shave his head unevenly so that it looked like his hair had been eaten rather than cut.

  Sure he wanted to look hard-core, but not chewed-head hard-core.

  He debated whether or not to continue. If he stopped now, the shaved parts would be completely concealed by the rest of his hair until he bent over, and then, voilá—a shaved neck. It was kind of cool knowing the shaved part was there without being able to see it. Then again, an unnoticeable haircut wasn't exactly the look he was going for.

  He put the beard trimmer down, propped a Camel between his lips, and reached for Jenny's phone. If there was one person who knew anything about shaving heads, it was Vanessa. She'd kept her own head shaved since ninth grade, and, shunning the expensive salons like Frederic Fekkai and Elizabeth Arden's Red Door that her coiffed classmates frequented, insisted on shaving it herself. Secretly he'd always thought she look prettier with a little more hair, but since she obviously thought she looked great bald, he wasn't about to say anything.

  “If this is about the apartment-share, I will be calling you once I've reviewed your online application,” Vanessa said robotically when she picked up.

  “Hey, it's me, Dan,” Dan responded brightly. “What's up?”

  Vanessa didn't answer right away. She'd wanted to give Dan space to grow and blossom into the next Kurt Cobain or John Keats or whatever the fuck he wanted to be, but breaking up and kicking him out of her apartment hadn't exactly been easy for her. The casual let's-just-be-friends tone in Dan's voice made her heart feel like a deflated balloon.

  “I'm kind of busy actually.” She typed a bunch of nonsense into her computer to make it sound like she was drastically preoccupied. “I have a lot of applications to go through—for the new roommate—you know?”

  “Oh.” Dan hadn't been aware that Vanessa was looking for a roommate. Then again, with her older sister Ruby gone on tour with her band, it would be kind of lonely and boring living all alone in the apartment, especially without him to keep her company.

  For a fleeting moment Dan was so overcome with regret he felt like grabbing a pen and writing a tragic breakup poem using the words cut or shaved, but then his newly shorn neck began to burn and prickle, and he remembered why he'd called Vanessa in the first place.

  “I just had a quick question.” He took several quick puffs on his cigarette and then absentmindedly dropped it into a vase of daisies wilting on Jenny's desk. “You know when you shave your head? Is there like, a certain kind of razor you use? Like a certain blade?”

  Vanessa's first impulse was to warn him that with a shaved head he'd look like a skinny seven-year-old leukemia patient who'd just been through chemo, but she was tired of protecting him from his own mistakes, especially now that they were “just friends.” “Wahl blade number ten. Look, I gotta go.”

  Dan picked up his beard trimmer. It was from CVS and didn't have a blade size. Maybe he'd be better off going to a barber. “Okay. I'll see you at my gig tomorrow night though, right?”

  “Maybe,” Vanessa replied breezily. “If I get this roommate thing figured out. Gotta go. 'Bye!”

  Dan hung up and picked up the beard trimmer once more. “Crack me like an egg!” he shouted, holding it in front of his chin like a microphone. He whipped off his T-shirt and stuck out his pale, skinny gut, trying to look saucily bored and rebellious, like a shorter, thinner, less-fucked-up Jim Morrison. “Crack me like an egg!” he wailed, falling on his knees.

  His dad, Rufus, suddenly appeared in the doorway, wearing a cigarette-burned gray Old Navy sweatshirt and the pink terrycloth headband Jenny used to keep her hair back when she washed her face. “Good thing your sister's too busy to hang out with us after school anymore. She might not be too thrilled to find you stripping in her room,” he commented.

  “I'm rehearsing.” Dan rose to his feet with as much dignity as he could muster. “Do you mind?”

  “Go right ahead.” Rufus stood in the doorway, scratching his chest and fingering the unfiltered Camel tucked behind his left ear. He was a work-at-home single dad, the editor of lesser-known Beat poets and esoteric writers no one had ever heard of. “I think if you put the emphasis on every other word, it might be more effective.”

  Dan cocked his head and handed Rufus the beard trimmer. “Show me.”

  Rufus grinned. “Okay, but I'm not taking my shirt off.”

  Thank the Lord.

  He held the beard trimmer away from his face, as if worried that it might turn on by itself and buzz off his famously unkempt beard. “Crack me like an egg!” he howled, his brown eyes gleaming. He handed back the trimmer. “Try it.”

  Of course Dan's dad had sounded just exactly the way Dan wanted to sound. He tossed the trimmer onto Jenny's bed and pulled his shirt back on. “I have homework to do,” he grumbled.

  Rufus shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, I'll leave you alone.” He winked at his son. “Decided where you want to go next year yet?”

  “No,” Dan answered hollowly, then shuffled out of Jenny's room and back to his own. His dad was so gung-ho about the whole college thing, it was seriously annoying.

  “Columbia's close!” Rufus called after him. “You could live at home!”

  As if he hadn't already mentioned that a thousand times.

  Alone in his room, Dan found a rubber band in his desk drawer and tied his hair up into a stubby ponytail, leaving the shaved part exposed. He picked up the beard trimmers again. “Crack me like an egg!” he whispered, imitating his father as best he could. He grimaced. There just wasn't enough gristle in his voice to sound convincing.

  Trading the trimmer for the pile of college catalogs he'd been thumbing through for the past three months, he flopped down on his bed. Only one more week to choose between NYU, Brown, Colby, or Evergreen. He flipped to a picture of a tweedy, intellectual-looking Brown student, his back propped against the trunk of a giant elm tree, scribbling away in a notebook like a young Keats. He looked exactly as Dan had envisioned he'd look himself next year—before he'd been discovered by the Raves and before he'd just shaved the back of his head.

  He ran his finger over the shaved part of his head and glanced down at his outfit. He'd have to go shopping, because none of his clothes went with his hair anymore.

  And you thought that was something only girls worry about.

  If only Jenny were there to help out, Dan thought grimly. But his little sister was too busy being a supermodel to go through his closet with him and tell him what was lame and what was acceptable. Dan picked up a cup of Folgers instant coffee that had been cooling on the floor since that morning and took a sip. He grimaced at his reflection in the mirror, and for an instant he could almost envision himself up on stage, giving the audience the same annoyed, pissed-off grimace. Maybe, just maybe he could pull this off, without even his sister's help.

  Or maybe not.

  V Takes the Roo
m Out of Roommate

  Fireeater: i keep a pretty sick schedule, like i sleep all day and work at night.

  Hairlesskat: what do you do?

  Fireeater: duh, i'm a performer

  Hairlesskat: you really eat fire?

  Fireeater: i'm working on it. mostly i dance with my snakes.

  Hairlesskat: snakes?

  Fireeater: yeah i have four snakes.

  Fireeater: you're okay with pets right?

  Fireeater: you still there?

  Fireeater: yo, hello?

  “Nice try, loser!” Vanessa Abrams logged off her computer and went over to her closet. She'd taken off her hot and hideous maroon wool Constance Billard School winter uniform—the only uniform she owned—two hours ago and hadn't bothered to change into anything else. Even though the girl Vanessa was supposed to interview in three minutes had sounded cool in her e-mail that morning, she probably wouldn't be too psyched if Vanessa greeted her at the door in her black cotton Hanes underwear. Vanessa pulled a folded pair of pants off the top shelf in her bedroom closet without even looking. Everything in her closet was black, and she was a strong believer in shopping in duplicate. If you owned six pairs of straight-legged black stretch Levis, you never really had to think about what you were going to wear, and you only had to do laundry once a week. She pulled the jeans up around her pale and slightly pudgy hips, yanked her black long-sleeved V-neck tee down over them, and ran her hands over her shaved, dark head. She might have looked odd to all the so-called “normal” girls she went to school with, but the girl she was about to meet sounded more interesting than they could ever hope to be—well, at least she had online.

  The downstairs buzzer rang, just as she'd anticipated. Vanessa went over to the window and pulled aside the curtain, which was really just a black poly-blend Martha Stewart Everyday bedsheet she and her sister Ruby had bought at Kmart last Halloween. On the street two floors below, a drunk homeless guy was shouting at empty parked cars. A little boy with green spiked hair and no shirt on sped down the sidewalk on a mountain bike that was way too big for him. The crumbling cement block that served as Vanessa's front stoop was empty. The prospective roommate was already on her way up.

  “Please be normal,” Vanessa murmured. Not that she actually liked normal girls. Normal girls, like the girls in her class at Constance, wore pink lip gloss and different versions of the exact same pair of shoes and were religious about things like highlights and pedicures. In her e-mail application this girl Beverly had said she was an art student at Pratt, so she was older, for one thing, and was probably kind of alternative. Hopefully she'd be as cool as she sounded.

  Vanessa opened the door to the apartment just as Beverly mounted the top of the stairs. And to Vanessa's complete surprise, Beverly wasn't a she, she was a he.

  Vanessa had sort of forgotten to specify that she was looking for a girl roommate in her Web posting.

  A deliberate mistake?

  “Bet you thought I was female, right?” Beverly asked, extending his hand for Vanessa to shake. “The name is totally old-fashioned and totally misleading. Don't worry, I'm used to it.”

  Vanessa tried not to look surprised, which wasn't hard for her. She'd mastered the unexpressive stare long ago while eating alone day after day in the Constance Billard School cafeteria, tuning out the senseless babble of her beautiful, bitchy classmates. She tucked her fingers into the back pockets of her jeans and nonchalantly led the way into the apartment. “I was just IMing with this weirdo chick who dances with snakes. You don't have any snakes, do you?”

  “Nope.” Beverly pressed his palms together in praying position and surveyed the starkly decorated apartment. The walls were white and the wood floors were bare. The kitchen was tiny and opened onto the living room/second bedroom, which was furnished with a futon and a TV. The only decorations were framed stills from the dark, morose films that Vanessa notoriously made in her spare time.

  “Whose work?” Beverly asked, gesturing at a black-and-white photograph of a pigeon pecking at a used condom in Madison Square Park.

  Vanessa discovered she was staring at Beverly's firm, round buttocks and quickly averted her eyes. “Mine,” she replied hoarsely. “It's from a film I made earlier this year.”

  Beverly nodded his head, keeping his palms pressed together as he examined the other photographs. Vanessa loved that he didn't start babbling about how offbeat or depressing they were, the way people usually did. Just the way he'd said, “Whose work?” made her feel like a real artist.

  “Would you like a beer?” she asked. Her fridge was uncharacteristically full of beer from her insane eighteenth-birthday party two weekends ago, and she'd take any opportunity to get rid of it. “Sorry, I don't have much else except water.”

  “Water would be fine,” Beverly replied, and Vanessa found herself liking him even more. Ask any high-school boy if he wanted a beer and he'd down a whole six-pack in three seconds flat. All Beverly needed was a little water to whet his palate, and a place to live—for instance, with her.

  Whoa … Slow down, Nellie! What about the interview?

  Vanessa went into the tiny open kitchen and got out a vintage Scooby-Doo glass and some ice and a pitcher of filtered water from the refrigerator. She filled the glass slowly, surreptitiously studying Beverly as she did so. His small, intense eyes were pale blue, and his short, tousled hair was nearly black. The palms of his hands and his fingernails were stained black with some sort of ink he must have been using in his artwork, and his drab green T-shirt was flecked with what looked like sawdust. His black pants were just the sort of loose black cotton poplin slacks she would have worn every day if she were a guy, and on his feet were a pair of those thin orange rubber flip-flops you can buy at the drugstore for ninety-nine cents. He was so not like the people she went to school with, Vanessa couldn't help but feel kind of excited.

  Could that have anything to do with the fact that he's a guy?

  She walked around the counter and handed Beverly the water, already envisioning what it would be like to stay up late and watch movies together. She could bring him water and he would nod his head at her in that thoughtful, sexy way of his. And then they'd begin to dissect Stanley Kubrick's work, film by film … naked.

  Vanessa took a seat on the futon sofa and Beverly sat down beside her.

  “So, I'm kind of between places right now,” he explained. “I was in a dorm and now I'm in this group work-live arrangement with a bunch of artists in this warehouse space down by the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It can get pretty crazy there sometimes, though.” He chuckled. “I just need a place to crash where I don't have to worry about my fingers getting hacked off while I'm sleeping—you know, for someone's ‘body parts’ sculpture or something?”

  Vanessa nodded happily. She knew exactly how he felt.

  Really?

  Of course, she'd never expected to share an apartment with a guy—other than Dan—but she was eighteen now, an adult, able to make her own decisions and mature enough to have a guy roommate and no intention of jumping his bones. Right.

  “The thing is,” Beverly continued, “it would be kind of weird living with someone I'd never even breathed the same air with before, you know?”

  Vanessa's big brown eyes widened. So he didn't want to live with her? “I guess so,” she responded glumly.

  “I wondered if maybe we could like, hang out for a few weeks first. Do stuff. Get to know each other. See if it could work out,” he added.

  Vanessa sat on her hands, feeling embarrassingly like one of those so-called normal girls she hated after some hottie had asked them to a prom or whatever they called those ridiculous dress-up parties they were always going to because it gave them the opportunity to buy a new dress. Beverly did want to live with her. He just wanted to get to know her first. How refreshing and exciting to finally meet someone so intelligent, creative, cool—and hot!

  “Well, I am interviewing other people,” she responded, not wanted to appear too eager. “But th
at sounds like a good idea. I mean, you're right. It's important to know who you're about to move in with.”

  “Exactly.” Beverly polished off the water, stood up, and carried the glass over to the sink.

  Wow, he even cleans up after himself.

  He flip-flopped back into the living room. “We could do something this weekend or—”

  Suddenly Vanessa had an idea. What better way to show Dan that she'd moved on and had a life of her own beyond him and his selfish self than to bring a guy to his first gig? “Actually, an old friend of mine is singing with the Raves tomorrow night. Want to go?”

  Thankfully Beverly was mature enough not to jump up and down and freak out about the fact that she knew someone who sang with the Raves. He pressed his palms together and nodded his head in that sexy, monklike way of his. “Sure. I'll call you tomorrow to make a plan.”

  Vanessa walked him to the door and then rushed to the window, following his nice ass with her eyes as he flip-flopped his way down South Sixth Street and then disappeared into the maze of old factory warehouses that made up Williamsburg's landscape. Saturday mornings she and Beverly would sit by that very window, making use of its southern exposure to make their art. He would work silently at his canvas, smearing black ink all over it with his hands while she filmed him. And both of them would be … naked.

  Of course.

  How exciting to live with an artist. Of course, Dan was a poet, but that was different. All he did was scribble in notebooks all day, drinking bad coffee and getting shakier and more neurotic by the hour.

  Of course she would continue to interview other people—at least on Instant Messenger—until everything was worked out. But she was already pretty sure she'd found what she was looking for, the perfect mate.

  Wait. Doesn't she mean roommate?!

  B Can't Stop Running Away from Home

  “Excuse me. What are you guys doing?” Blair demanded. Eleanor Waldorf and Blair's stepbrother, Aaron Rose, were standing on the bed in Blair's makeshift bedroom, thumb-tacking some sort of large map to the wall. Blair stood in the doorway with her arms folded, awaiting an explanation.