My grandmother was sixteen in 1964. Her hairstyle at that time was made up of wide blonde ringlets that framed her face and curled down around her shoulders. She had seen this hairstyle on the heads of her friends and in a picture of a model which hung against the glass at the hair stylist’s shop in town. When the hair stylist had been snipping away at her straight golden strands of hair with one hand and brandishing a black spray bottle in the other, she had (very swiftly and passionately) walked her through her new daily hair-care routine. Because the hair stylist had been wielding a pointy pair of scissors that were rapidly opening and closing several inches away from her eyes, she had had no choice but to sit still and listen. Every night she was to wash her hair thoroughly with shampoo and conditioner, comb it when it was still wet, dry it with a blow-dryer, brush it out again, and finally wind each strand up in rollers.

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It was this ritual she was performing in front of the mirror, alone in her family’s small yellow house in the middle of the boondocks. It was a still summer night. The sun had set hours ago, and the outside darkness was complete and all-consuming. Hers was the only light on in the house. She hummed a folk song as she curled her hair, taking each blonde lock and rolling and rolling and rolling it towards her and fastening it to her head with a bobby pin. She was nearly done, only one strand to go, when a slow and menacing shiver went through her body thoroughly from head to foot. She came to a stop, the roller still halfway up a ribbon of hair. Someone was watching her through the window. Her skin became aware of itself, and her senses sharpened to a fine point. She thought for a split second of the deer that she had stalked in the woods with her father. Her eyes were wide, and they watched themselves in the mirror’s reflection. She wound up the rest of the curl and fastened it, then yawned at herself in the mirror like a lioness and left her bedroom.

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She crept through the darkness of the house, into the narrow hallway, and then into her sister’s bedroom, her glassy eyes drinking in any glint or sliver of light that the moon offered. Like her own, her sister’s bedroom faced the backyard. She edged up to the window and peered through it into the night. There was a figure standing at the edge of the yard.

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In the pale moonlight, the backyard looked like a dim black-and-white movie on

television. Where the moonlight touched was a sickly white, and the shadows were a complete and total black. One half of the figure’s face was dully illuminated, and she recognized it as Gary Whitaker’s. He was just another son of a farmer and was a few grades older. At school, he had never shown any interest in her. It had been several years since they had spoken a direct word, and yet it was towards her window he now faced.

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He stood at the treeline, where an absentminded glance would not reveal his presence. In the thin colors of night, he faded into the woods like a chameleon. Every now and then, a hand would slink up to his mouth, and the mouth would take a draw on a cigarette. The rest of him was completely motionless. His body held an animal-like stillness, an animal who has learned how to keep quiet and focus. The only flare of color in the bleak night was the orange glow at the end of his cigarette. It traveled like a firefly when he raised and lowered his arm, and glowed brighter and hotter when he took a pull. When he exhaled, the smoke remained suspended in the air like a ghost before slowly dematerializing.

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She did not stay at the window and watch him out of fear; she knew he would do nothing to her. He waited for her to return to her bedroom, and she watched him wait. Many more minutes passed in a steady sameness, and then he dropped the end of the cigarette on the grass and stepped on it once and turned and walked into the woods.

 

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The next morning, something compelled her to go out to where Gary had been standing at the edge of the trees. In the daylight, the birds were singing high up in the branches. The grass was a pale, dead green, and the sky was a blinding white. She looked back at her own bedroom window but saw only a dark square against the bright yellow house. On the ground at her feet were dozens of cigarette ends scattered across the grass.