Dollface stared at the mattress above her, Regina having claimed the top bunk before Dollface could get home in time to see what happened to her room.
Michael was disappointingly quiet.
"Reggie?"
"I'm not Reggie."
"Sorry." Dollface said. She felt like something was wrong, like something should be covered.
But there was nothing to hide. "Regina?"
"What?"
"What's Dad like?"
After a brief silence, Dollface heard a very bashful and ashamed, "Never met him. But I know for a fact he is more powerful than any man in this town."
"Oh." Dollface sunk into her pillow, ears dully aching from yesterday when Sebastian had convinced her to get a second set of lobe piercings to balance out the ring in her cartilage. She'd actually been hoping to anyway, and he said that if Gramma got upset to tell her it was an early birthday present.
So she'd gotten stars.
She liked stars.
"What's yer last name?" Dollface asked.
"You know it's Cowatch." Regina grumbled, "And stop talking like a moron. It's obscene for me to be related to someone as uncultured as you."
"Ya do realize half th'people in this town are related t'ya in some way, right?"
"EEP!"
Dollface smirked evilly in the dark.
She put her hands over her face.
It felt good to hide it.
"What about….." Dollface trailed off.
"Mother?" Regina finished, "I only see her on holidays."
Dollface was quiet.
She wished to see the stars again.
From where she was sitting, she could see her upright bass by the closet and remembered last Oktoberfest where she got to play in the little white pavilion for an oompah band that was made up of her great uncle Barney and all his adult children.
She shifted with a sigh, rolling over, back away from the door, the closet, and her upright bass, put in a stand she and her grandfather had made when she was in seventh grade.
She was miserable.
She concentrated on the light behind her eyes.
As she drifted, Regina woke her with a question: "Could I maybe have a ring like yours?"
Dollface stayed quiet, and began to drift away on a raft of thoughts.
...
She was fourteen when she first met him.
He'd been limping home to his asylum on the side of the highway on Halloween night, leaving her small Southern Missouri town in a trail of blood and rattling pills. A bull of a man, over seven feet tall, black eyes, and a strange emptiness that surrounded him and seemed to suck her in.
And he'd called her when he finally collapsed.
Unbeknownst to her grandparents, she'd felt something was off and split away from her little herd of unsupervised wild girls that roamed the town when not trapped in school, and tromped all the way down the highway that had killed her homeland out of town for several miles.
The extraordinary child saw the huge man as cars whizzed past, leaving town, a true giant, hair matted with blood, and lifted her ghost costume made from a ratty bedsheet and hunched over him. A few feathers blew down the emptied street.
She'd been struck by how much the Boogeyman looked like her.
A square face, narrow black-brown eyes, a light smattering of freckles across his nose, strong cheekbones…
She was from a small town, meaning that was the norm. Everyone was related to eachother somehow, and since he lived as a kid down the street from her grandparents long before her teen mother had started showing signs, it wasn't an unusual thought.
She sat by him, draped the sheet over him, watched the blood soak in and bloom like roses.
And then they talked, never saying a word.
Cars stopped coming.
That was the first time something like that had happened.
Time stopping or changing paths.
Of course, neither of them noticed.
The man and the blonde had stilled, miraculously listening to each other as time shifted around them- something only beings like them and only them could do when stressed as a final fight for safety.
He'd shakely reached for her hand and she let him take it. She hated touch, and so did he, but there was no more left to give.
And as the shining, singing light in her head dulled and began to fizzle out, Dollface watched his empty black eyes cloud over, and ran when she saw that the world was catching up to them. A highway patrolman, alerted of the large man's new location, was arriving soon.
Dollface had hurled herself into a nearby ditch and snuck in her combat boots through a few wooded ravines, pillowcase full of candy still in her hand and escaped through the nearby woods. Soon after, she'd shown up with her friends and went home to Gramma and Grampa's, no sign of the encounter.
She was just as happy and extraordinary as she usually was.
Or so people believed.
That night, she'd woken up. Unable to stop, Dollface went into the bathroom cabinet and found the electric razor Gramma used to give Grampa his monthly buzzcut. She turned, looking at it with a strange need.
She was unfashionable.
All her friends had big hair, or fun colors and bouncy curls, while Dollface had the same bob with softened bangs since kindergarten.
Cyndi Lauper had big, pink hair.
With messy spirals.
And a shaved undercut.
Unless she tucked her hair behind her ears, no one knew Dollface had earrings.
Dollface took the rattail comb Gramma used to separate her permed curls and brushed at her ratty hair, limp and too straight. She looked into her black eyes, thinking about the man she'd seen by the highway and parted her hair.
She turned with shaking hands and took the electric razor from the shelf over the toilet and let out a quavering breath.
With a gulp, she plugged it in and carefully shaved under the new part.
Hunks of dirty blonde hair fell into the sink and around her feet, but she ignored it.
She could alway clean up later.
Dollface switched off the blade, leaning into the mirror.
She'd never seen her scalp before. She had so much thick hair that it had been impossible. It was a little paler under the fresh stubble, but her usual summertime habits would fix that soon enough. Her hair, which grew surprisingly fast, would get used to its new position quickly as well.
She grabbed a pin from one of her sewing kits and stumbled in the dark to the kitchen. Switching on the lights, she sliced a potato and grabbed an ice cube. Staggering to the bathroom, she looked in the tiny cabinet mirror purchased in 1953 and took a sharp inhale.
She numbed her ear with the ice cube until it was red.
She held her breath.
She'd gotten her ears pierced in fifth grade at the mall, but this was the way Izzy and Princess had gotten theirs' done.
And even in those cases, they had their mothers help.
Dollface inhaled sharply, placing the slice behind her ear, right at the top, just centimeters above the lobe.
What was the chance of a keloid?
Dollface stabbed the needle without a second thought into the cartilage, and left it there. Suddenly panicking at her irrational decision, he scrambled to her room, shutting out the light and closing the door behind her.
Turning on her bedroom lights, she hurried to her jewelry box, clutching her ear and fingering through, bleeding and swallowing sobs.
She calmed herself and pulled out the needle, shoving a thin gold hoop earring she didn't remember owning through.
Dollface calmed herself, reality hitting her as she closed the jewelry box, stopping Toureador's March mid-chorus.
Gramma would kill her!
Panicking, Dollface grabbed another ice cube during a trip to the kitchen to get the broom, ear swelling and red. She could see her ear, bright red and pulsating very clearly now.
She touched the mirror, pain almost completely forgotten.
Uncle Sebbie came the next morning for a surprise visit while Gramma was scolding her. Dollface had never done anything like this. Steal the occasional cookie, call someone a name, yes, but never anything drastic enough for a grounding.
He'd also scolded her, then swept her up to the big city for the best stylist there to finish the job and clean her up.
Sebbie then called her 'extraordinary' and gifted her with a new stuffed rabbit and Gucci bag, a makeup present for not being able to visit on her birthday, and took her to a nice dinner, where she ate a large steak and talked about airplanes.
Uncle Sebbie, a relative from her unknown father's side of the family, was too nice. He was the first to call her 'extraordinary'.
He liked to take Dollface on road trips in his small, black Italian car and give her nice presents when he visited.
When she returned home, Gramma, still sullen, wrapped up the mourning of her precious baby's pretty, feminine hair, and decided that a week of staying home and helping out the shop was a good enough punishment.