Girl with a Mustache
By Dan Morey
“So this stupid nun calls me a lesbian. And paddles me. Twice!”
It’s Thanksgiving break. We’re in the woods. She’s pale and skinny, shivering in a pea coat. I want to kiss her, but she looks like Groucho Marx.
“What’s with the mustache?” I say.
“It’s magic marker. I’m making a statement.”
“What statement?”
“I can do anything boys can do.”
A squirrel scampers by, rustling the leaves. I whip a stick at it. “I’m a boy. I can’t grow a mustache.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s a joke, right?”
“Maybe.”
*
We’ve known each other since we were kids. Grew up on the same block. Walked to school together. One day, in fourth grade, a stray dog followed us to the door and she let it inside. The dog ran through the halls, leaving muddy paw prints, urine puddles, and plenty of dookie. When the principal disciplined us, she laughed.
“A janitor was bitten.”
“Ha!”
“We had to call animal control.”
“Ha! Ha!”
“You two are in serious trouble.”
“Wee!”
Of course, I loved her. But she was also my hero. I never had the guts to laugh at the principal, and when I went shopping for school clothes, I always picked out Nikes or Reeboks, and whatever boring jeans and t-shirts the other kids were wearing. She hit the thrift store and stocked up on bowling shoes and stripy pants and leopard print sweaters. One winter, she wore a fur coat every day.
“Look,” said a girl in homeroom, “she’s shedding.”
The day I kissed her was pretty typical for junior high. We were hanging out in her sister’s room playing Smiths records. Her sister had disappeared years ago, after a concert in Cleveland, and was presumed dead. If she missed her, she never said so. The room was like a 1980s time capsule: shirtless Adam Ant posters, stacks of candy-colored bracelets, a Cabbage Patch Kid hanging by a noose from the doorknob.
We were listening to “Girlfriend in a Coma.” She jumped up and down on the bed, laughing.
I said, “It’s not really funny. She’s in a coma.”
“It’s hilarious!” she said in her Pee-wee Herman voice. “La, la, la…girlfriend in a coma…la, la, la!”
She sprang off the bed and skipped to the stereo, flipping the record and dropping the needle. It thumped down on “I Won’t Share You.”
“Come here,” she said.
I stood up and she leaped into my arms. Her green eyes twinkled; she began to kiss my face.
“I won’t share you,” she crooned, smooching away.
She pushed me onto the bed, still singing and kissing my ears, my nose, my chin. “No, I won’t share you.”
I kissed her smack on the lips, and she jerked away.
“Hey!” she said. “I’m only kidding!”
“Kidding?”
“C’mon. Let’s go vandalize something.”
A few weeks later, her mother sent her away to a Catholic boarding school. We saw each other during the summer and over breaks. When she came home, her hair was always a different color.
*
And now she has a mustache.
“So, are you a lesbian?” I say.
“Only one way to find out.”
She shoves me against a tree and sticks her tongue in my mouth. I taste cranberry sauce and magic marker. She stops kissing, looks at my face, and laughs. Snot comes out of her nose. “Now you have a mustache!”
I grab her wrist. She breaks away. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go start a forest fire.”
*
The next day, she bangs on my door. The mustache has changed from Groucho to Snidely Whiplash.
“Looks like I don’t have to go back to school,” she says, barging in. “Got any apple butter? And bread? I’m hungry.”
I follow her into the kitchen. “What do you mean you don’t have to go back to school?”
She roots through the fridge. “Can I have one of your dad’s beers?”
She’s wearing a tartan kilt and canvas sneakers with black socks and some dead guy’s Salvation Army sock garters. Her legs are unbearably cute. She hops up on a stool, takes a slug of beer, and scrunches her mustache. “This stuff is terrible. Your dad is one cheap bastard.”
“Why aren’t you going back to school?”
“Oh, yeah. So my mom had this stroke yesterday, and now I’m basically emancipated. I mean, I still have to go to school and all, but I don’t have to go back to the nuns. Pretty awesome, huh?”
“Your mom had a stroke?”
“Yeah. Her face looks weird, but she’ll be able to talk okay in a couple months.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. Ain’t life a kick in the rump?”
“So what happens? Do you have to go live with your dad?”
“Sure. If I wasn’t bullshitting you.”
She bursts out laughing and sprays a mouthful of beer in my face.
I wipe it off, and ask her to marry me.
*
The night before she goes back to school, we’re in her sister’s room, lounging on the bed, listening to Haircut 100.
“This room never changes,” I say.
“It does. In little ways.” She grabs a fluorescent Swatch from the nightstand. “Look. It stopped running.”
I put my arm around her. “Tell me something about your sister.”
“She was way older than me. I hardly remember her. But she was trouble, I can tell you that.”
“How do you know?”
“Same genes.”
I pull her toward me and try to kiss her. She rolls onto her back and laughs. “You have no idea what you’re messing with.”
“What am I messing with?”
“Pure trouble. I’m doomed, you know.”
“You can’t be doomed if somebody loves you.”
She puts her hand on my cheek. I kiss her. She kisses me back. Her mustache twitches. We take off our clothes and slip under the sheets.
*
A month later, I see a moving truck in her driveway. The curtains are off her sister’s bedroom window and her mother is inside removing posters from the walls.
Time passes. Bill Clinton becomes President. I date some girls. They make me talk on the phone for hours and I learn to be really interested in what Julie said to Becky in study hall. There are dances: bad music, worse hair.
I don’t see her for a long time, but she calls now and then and sends the occasional jokey letter. One says she’s ready to take her vows: “It’s your fault. You’ve driven me to celibacy.”
*
Out of the blue, she shows up at my graduation. We hug.
“No mustache,” I say.
“No mustache.”
We go to the woods and make a little fire. She sits on a stump, poking the cinders with a stick.
“Are you still doomed?” I say.
“Sure.”
“I like your lipstick.”
“It’s aqua. They call it Drowning Girl.”
“So can we get married now?”
She laughs. “How do you know I’m not married already?”
That evening, she leaves. Says she has her own graduation to go to, if I can believe it. College? Maybe in a year or two. Wants to see some stuff first. Did I know there’s an island in the South Seas where everybody dances and nobody works and if any Catholic missionaries show up they boil them in a big pot and eat them, skin and all?
As I pack my bags for State, I see her on that island, dancing in a grass skirt, munching missionaries. I want to join her, but I know I never will. I put an extra pair of Reeboks in my bag and zip it up.
Dan Morey (he/him) is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania. His creative work has appeared in Hobart, Hawai'i Pacific Review, McSweeney's Quarterly, failbetter, and elsewhere, and he's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find him on his website.