Read A Ticket to Ride for Free Online Page B

of freckles on my thigh, a sort of X marks the spot— you are here —reminding me that in every way that mattered, I was still that Bakersfield girl, the leave-able one who’d been stuck for more than a decade in a house full of old and indecipherable ghosts, who knew more about willow trees and grasshoppers and characters in books than real people, who seemed destined to receive only pathetic and unfathomable kisses.
    If it wasn’t too late, I wanted something else, but what exactly? I felt lost, as if I were tangled in the vague throes of a hedge maze, running toward a center I couldn’t see or even imagine. What would I be when I got there? Who? Fawn knew, or seemed to as she rode beside me on the city bus, headed toward the glamorous new haircut. Fawn seemed so certain of herself and the world at large that I felt relieved to be guided by her, trusting Fawn’s sense of things, her compass. And that Bakersfield girl? She would have to be sloughed off or rooted out. I looked critically at the lead freckle on my thigh and began to pick at it.
     
    At the beauty college we spotted on Ninth Avenue, my “student stylist” was named June. She looked like a June, like she’d been trapped under glass in 1952 and would never change or outgrow her mousy brown flip, frosted pink lipstick, or her smock. I was worried and so was Fawn, I could tell, but I sat down in June’s chair, letting myself be swaddled with the cotton draping and squirted down with a spray bottle of water (shampoos were three dollars more). In the end, it was fine. Fawn stood next to me the whole time, making suggestions, critiquing when necessary. June might have worked the scissors, but Fawn gave the haircut. When the cut was finished, I didn’t even need to swivel around in my chair to face the mirror. The expression on Fawn’s face said everything: I looked amazing.
    When we stepped out of the beauty school, it was late afternoon. Bullets of sun ricocheted from the doorknob to the chrome bumper of a Plymouth Stardust in the parking lot to a Fresca can wedged fast in the gutter grate. I blinked and shook my head lightly. It felt weightless now, streamlined, and more itself—as if the hair had been unnecessary, a sort of husk that required shucking as part of the natural order of things. I lifted my hand and touched my neck. It was so long, so flexible—a stem, bending. Was everything slenderer now? I glanced into the shop window for verification, but the sun was dead behind me. There was nothing to see but a shadow blob, a thick marriage of myself and Fawn, borderless and indistinct.
    We walked through the parking lot toward the bus stop, passing a doughnut shop and a hopelessly outdated women’s clothing store called the Dress Corral. In the window display, a wigged mannequin wore an unspeakably awful yellow pantsuit zippered to the neck. “Yee haw,” said Fawn. To the left of the Dress Corral, wedged between it and a dentist’s office, was a church, of all things, the Cornerstone People’s Church, according to the signfront, which had bubble-plump letters, making the Os in particular look like inflatable rubber rafts. (Float your way to Jesus!) I stopped to peer in the window, framing my eyes with my hands to shield out the sun. Inside, folding chairs stood in two ordered rows with a large aisle between. The carpet was blue and plush but for the strip of aisle where a red runner pointed the way to a pulpit up front, behind which stood several rows of risers, the same variety my sixth-grade choir had stood on to sing “Send in the Clowns” at an all-school assembly.
    “Ground control to Jamie,” said Fawn. “Come in, Jamie.”
    I turned away from the window, blinked to bring her into focus.
    “The bus is coming, Space Case.”
    And so it was. We took off at a run across the parking lot and boarded it laughing, tripping up the three oversized steps, digging in our matching white purses for the fare. The driver scowled menacingly, but