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of the swing; I smiled as I imagined myself there beside him, tuckedup under his arm with my head pressed against his chest. I could see his face, not real good, but good enough to know he was just hungover and drinking coffee.
    After a few minutes, he put the cup on the ground. A fat bumblebee flew by him several times, but I don’t think he noticed. He just stared at the cup for the longest time and then put his face in his hands. A while later he looked at his watch and trudged back into the house like an old man. I saw him go upstairs. The shades were up in his bedroom, which was unusual. He took some clothes out of a drawer and went into the bathroom.
    I lay back down, dizzy from the thought of Winston naked in the shower with water rippling over his lean body. I closed my eyes, exhausted from wanting him. How many times had I reminded Mama how dangerous it was to fawn over a man, even more dangerous if he were to actually take notice.
    I heard the screen door open again. I saw Winston turn and lock the kitchen door. He shifted some books around in his arms, opened the car door, and slid into the seat of his little sports car. With one great puff, the morning breeze suspended the curtains in the air so that if he had been looking at my room he would have seen me. I ducked down in the bed like I hadn’t been spying on him and lay there with the covers pulled up to my chin and my heart racing the way it did every morning with his engine.
    I’d spent so much time spying on Winston, I only had ten minutes to get ready for school. I knew I’d get the eye from Mrs. Cathcart. Everybody did when they came to school without fixing their hair or doing their makeup just right. The crying girl always got the eye, which made her cry even harder. Sara Jane and I were the only ones who didn’t make fun of her, but we did roll our eyesat each other sometimes when we heard that pitiful little wail before she cut loose.
    I tried to slip into my workstation unnoticed, but that was impossible. I was grateful Mrs. Cathcart didn’t call me out. Then she started up again. “Remember, class, tardiness is one of the seven deadly sins of cosmetology. Your clients will not tolerate it for long, and neither will I.”
    Dolly, Mrs. Cathcart’s German shepherd, came wandering back to our classroom for a dog biscuit. Mrs. Cathcart kept them in a glass Barbasol container, the kind you pour that blue stuff in to sterilize combs, but Mrs. Cathcart was too busy lecturing me and the rest of the class on the other six deadly sins to tend to Dolly. Poor Dolly went and laid her head in the crying girl’s lap. The crying girl hadn’t cried all morning, but the minute Dolly looked up at her with those sad old eyes, the dam broke.
    The girl cried and Dolly cried; only Dolly quit when Mrs. Cathcart gave her a biscuit. Mrs. Cathcart must have felt sorry for that girl because she was always trying to help her, but the crying girl needed more help than Mrs. Cathcart could give.
    *
    We’d been in school about three weeks and had not touched a human head of hair. Mrs. Cathcart said after four weeks of studying, she would let us shampoo some of the customers when the girls in the class ahead of us got backed up. Every day was spent practicing on faceless, black-haired mannequins, doing pin curls, updos, and spit curls. I was horrible at spit curls, but not Sara Jane Farquhar. She could do anything with hair.
    Mrs. Cathcart had the best-looking mannequin head. Shenamed it Dolly, after her beloved, who spent her days sleeping under the seat of any one of the hair dryers that happened to be on. Mrs. Cathcart loved to run her hands through Dolly’s artificial hair and demonstrate techniques we all knew we would never do in a real salon. Things like upsweeps that had gone by the wayside ten years ago but would still be a part of our exam. Most every day Mrs. Cathcart got flustered. Before she could finish her long and involved how-to explanation, Sara Jane had