Linda Sinclair had one. Despite my sworn enemy status with this most popular of the popular girls, I wanted one too. The layered bi-level. The haircut of choice for Jennie Dean Middle School in 1984 when I entered seventh grade. Short and feathered in the front, with wings swooping over the top of the earlobe, and between chin and shoulder length in back, preferably curled under. For one year the preferred haircut of the redneck girls with their gigantic feathered key chains and the popular girls with their fake tans and shimmery lips merged: the layered bi-level, the mullet.
My mom took me to her hairdresser, Marlene, who smelled of bananas and perm solution.
“Layered bi-level,” I said, happy for once that my haircut had a name. My first real haircut to break the mold of the little-girl do, long in back with a straight fringe of bangs in the front, that I’d worn since I was five. I felt adult, sophisticated.
Marlene swooped around the chair, sucking her lips. “You really want layering all the way around? It’ll take forever to grow out.”
My gut lurched. “I want a layered bi-level,” I said, unprepared to pick apart this haircut of the junior high goddesses.
I’d overheard Linda telling her friend the name of the haircut. I already felt like I was transgressing the invisible barrier of the popular and the rest of us. Like every other girl, I wanted to be Linda. She wore an Esprit sweatshirt, and the next week the lunchroom was peppered with them in all colors, E-S-P riding up the front with R-I-T cascading down the back. Her casual disdain for everything and everyone was legendary. How I longed to disdain at her side.
Marlene’s brow knit in concentration as she ran her fingers through my scraggly dirty blonde locks. “I heard you the first time. I don’t think you want all those layers.”
My mom looked up from the Southern Living magazine open on her lap. “She’s right, honey.”
Linda Sinclair probably had her own stylist who didn’t kowtow to maternal demands. Her stylist had spiky bleached hair and new wave makeup and was as bored as Linda was with this enterprise we call suburban life.
Marlene explained her plan for my hair. Layering in front but not all the way to the ear and not around my entire head. “You’ll thank me later,” Marlene said, snapping her gum.
A little worried, I bravely stared into the mirror and watched my new haircut take shape. Sitting in the chair always made me a little nervous. The memory of my last haircut, a disastrous lopsided too-short cut that accentuated my chubby cheeks and my braces loomed large. I’d spent much of that weekend sobbing in my room until my mother’s sympathies for the haircut misstep evaporated.
“There are greater tragedies in the world!” She yelled at me. “Stop crying over a goddamn haircut!”
Greater tragedies, yes. But what of the tragedy of an overweight twelve-year-old with braces and glasses whose only redeeming quality was blonde hair? What of that?
In the salon, I leaned my head back into the shampoo basin. The name of my haircut-to-be ticked through my mind—layered bi-level, layered bi-level—like an incantation to dispel the aura of the previous haircut.
As chunks of hair fell away and Marlene worked at my layers, I allowed myself a fantasy of my layered bi-level life. Linda would love it and welcome me as a sister. The secrets of disdain for the petty world would be mine. On Monday, I’d wear my purple Esprit sweatshirt with the Calvin Klein jeans that turned my legs into sausages. Linda had resisted the power of my wannabe clothes before, sniffing, “Cute sweatshirt. I’ve never seen that before.” But now with the haircut, I’d overpower her, blind her to the reality of my fat-braces-glasses self. She didn’t know what she was up against.
This belief in the possibility that a haircut, a t-shirt, a watch—or rather a Swatch—can change your entire life is the beauty and tragedy of being thirteen. Transformation lurks around every corner. You never know where you’ll find the golden ticket to being popular or that one haircut that will suddenly accentuate your positive and eliminate your negative.
Marlene dried my hair, pulling the roller brush through my newly fashioned layers. My bangs winged like they were born to fly.
“Your hair feathers really well,” she said, tucking her gum behind her teeth for a moment.
I nodded, smiled at my layered bi-level. I was no Linda but it was a definite improvement over the little girl haircut that plagued my first five months of junior high.
The next Monday at school went as you’d expect. No invitation into Linda’s world, just a smirk at my new do.
“Hair Cuttery?” she said with raised eyebrow. Her minions giggled. Hair Cuttery was the hair equivalent of K-Mart. I could have said, “No. Charles Russell,” but I know talking back would only invite eye rolls and cut-downs, the tools of their trade. Not like Charles Russell was anything but a chain with five dollars more class per haircut, but I was certainly above the Cuttery of my youth.
And as advised on the shampoo bottle: Rinse and repeat.
This scenario replayed itself hundreds of times until my sophomore year of high school when I opted out—at least in theory—of the popular rat race by going “progressive,” which was the preferred moniker for punkish alternative folk at my high school in the eighties. My pre-progressive humiliation highlights included the day I wore my new peppermint-scented Swatch proudly and was accused by Linda of raising my hand in class just so that I could show off my watch. See also: Benetton sweatshirt (“She’s totally sticking out her chest.”), Ralph Lauren perfume (“Ugh. Do you smell that?”), Calvin Klein jeans (“Nice.”). Even her compliments were cut-downs, the sign of a true pro. Mercifully the rest have been blocked out, but somehow many years later, her blithely tossed insults still sting.
In my mind the word “bitch” conjures the image of Linda’s flat face, upturned nose, and perpetually tanned skin. Numerous times I’ve asked myself—was she really so bad? Was she behind all the cruelties I attribute to her? Can’t I just let poor Linda Sinclair be? She probably faced difficulties too. I remember her frozen smile at our senior class dinner when the class president announced that Linda was voted the “Girl Most Likely to Install a Remote Control in the Small of a Man’s Back.” Who knows of the dark nights of Linda Sinclair’s soul. How many of those football Neanderthals did she have to blow to retain her status as queen bee? Any of her so-called friends would have surely slit her throat in order to ascend to her throne.
In junior high, as soon as the rest of us sheep imitated Linda’s layered bi-level, she effortlessly grew it out into her next do, a precursor of the floppy skater boy hair that would become popular my sophomore year of high school. Chin length on one side and short on the other so that she had to hold her head at an angle to peer out from beneath the curtain of Sun-In brassy blonde. My mom wouldn’t let me imitate this haircut, citing potential neck problems and how stupid it looked to walk around with your head tilted to the side.
“But it’s cool,” I begged. She rolled her eyes and tossed out that line about if your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too? With all the crazy things that teenagers do—drug use, guns in schools, and filming each other while they beat up another kid to name a few—I think we can definitively answer this question in the case of teenagers: Yes, I would gladly jump off a cliff to be cool. Next question?
The last I heard of Linda Sinclair was my freshman year of college. A friend of mine who attended a different high school ended up befriending Linda in college.
“But she’s such a bitch,” I said, feeling like I’d been punched in the gut.
“No way. She’s nice. She likes The Smiths,” my friend said.
I shivered. Linda Sinclair can’t like The Smiths. She’s not allowed. “But she was popular. She was the fucking queen.”
My friend wouldn’t relent. “Shall I pass along your regards?”
I wanted to send a message “Go fuck yourself” but I still felt a paralysis. No matter what I did, Linda always had her revenge. No matter how I had tried to please her, to become her, to hate her, I just fueled her unflappable disdain for me.
I don’t know what’s become of Linda. For years she’s evaded my social media sleuthing and intermittent googling. I suspect she’s taken her husband’s last name and she’s either a soccer mom or one of those aging Sex-in-the-City ladies teetering around on shoes named after a fabulous man. Or maybe The Smiths helped her get in touch with the sadness of the world and caused her to recant her evil deeds, to beg God and Morrissey for forgiveness.
While I was still enveloped in the fog of early motherhood, I received the invitation to my twenty-year high school reunion from a Classmates.com knock-off website.
You going? I messaged Emma, my best friend from high school who still lived in our hometown.
Not without you, she replied.
Her lobbying efforts were intense, but I couldn’t imagine a cross-country trip with a five-month-old, much less facing Linda Sinclair with leaking boobs and a muddy, sleep-deprived brain, without feeling panic flutter in my chest. Instead, I convinced Emma to go to the reunion and be my spy. She debriefed me when we next got together during my trip home for the holidays.
Like me, Linda Sinclair was a no-show. Even without Linda in attendance to reign over the Class of ‘90, the social divisions endured but with a veneer of solicitousness. Emma told me that a new narrative of our high school years emerged: We had all shared this crazy, pivotal time of our lives and had somehow both chosen our places in the social hierarchy while our places were simultaneously dictated by forces outside of our control.
At the pre-reunion reunion held at a local bar, a former football hero playfully punched Emma on the shoulder, laughing as he reminisced about his campaign for class treasurer that had torpedoed her bid. Because of course he, the alpha-jock and master sexual harasser, would prove victorious over her, the smart and serious girl. “Sorry, but I needed it for my college application,” he said. “Had to be well-rounded.” She threw him a tight smile and fake laughed along with him. To challenge the all-in-this-together narrative was seen as churlish, sad, and to be hopelessly mired in the past. There was no repentance for past cruelty and no apologies to the unpopular. My friend wished I was there to witness the mass amnesia, to step up to the microphone as disco ball lights swirled around the overly air-conditioned hotel ballroom and bravely tell the hard truths of the layered bi-level. I would be ready with my short, choppy, stylishly mussed hair to finally claim my slow-clap reward.
Katherine Sinback’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, daCunha, Gravel, The Hunger, Clackamas Literary Review, and Oyster River Pages. She publishes her zine Crudbucket and writes two blogs: the online companion to Crudbucket, and Peabody Project Chronicles 2: Adventures in Pregnancy After Miscarriage. She can be found on Twitter @kt_sinback.