Chapter Ninety-Eight

John watched as the bus pulled up to the barber shop, thinking about how odd it would be to have someone else cut his hair. He'd always trimmed it up himself since he never had any money for a real haircut, and that was why he'd always looked so crazy in elementary school and most of junior high.

"What kind of haircut are you gonna get?" Amelia asked, taking John's hand as they walked into the shop.

He shrugged, tapping his throat to remind her that he couldn't speak.

She nodded, watching as Claire sat as far away from John as she could get in the small shop. "Is Sweets mad at you?"

He looked up as the barber asked who was going first, standing and walking over to the chair. He settled into the seat, jumping as the man tied a little strip of paper around his neck.

Clarissa noticed his distress, walking over to help him calm down a little and tell the man what they wanted to do with his hair. "Relax John."

The barber smiled, draping the cape over John's shoulders before he started combing John's hair. "Alright, what are we doing with this?"

Clarissa looked at the length of the back of his hair, thinking about what exactly they should do since he was still trying to grow it out. "I think that we should clean the back up a little, and trim the dead ends off." She looked at the gray streak, knowing that he hated the lighter color. "And could you color this to match the rest of his hair?"

The barber nodded, spraying John's hair down with water and setting to work trimming him up.

John watched as his hair changed from a shaggy mess to a neat clean cut. He even let the man trim his beard up, surprising the family with the fact that he was letting someone so close to his neck with scissors.

Clarissa smiled as the man dried John's hair and started to dye it. She chuckled at how he wrinkled his nose as the smell of the chemicals in the dye, knowing how awful the smell was from her own experience with hair coloring. "I know. It stinks, huh?"

John nodded, making the little bit of tinfoil in his hair fall onto his forehead.

Clarissa looked up as Sam walked over to another chair to let the barber set to work on him. "Don't keep it too long." She pointed to Sam's chest length hair, and tapping her ear. "I think ear length is the way to go on him."

Sam groaned, knowing that his hair was long to help hide the tattoo he'd let Dominic do on the back of his neck. "Clarissa…"

She shook her head, remembering the snake he had colored into his skin. "I'm not letting you have long hair if you're not going to take care of it."

Sam sighed, rolling his eyes as the barber started working on brushing out his curly mess of strawberry blond hair. "Fucking hell."

"That's a dollar fifty." Mary stated, not even glancing up from the magazine she was looking at.

"God damnit!"

"Another fifty cents, for a total of two dollars." Jan smiled, happy that the jar was working slowly but surely.

Claire rolled her eyes, looking at the photo of Kevin Bacon in the latest edition of Tiger Beat. She remembered seeing his latest movie Footloose in February, when she'd gone with Jessica and her old friends on Jessica's birthday. Luckily, she hadn't been in a relationship with John yet so he hadn't seen her drooling over the actor, and if he had he would have lost his shit. That was the main reason that she didn't watch it when he was home and waited until he was out doing God only knows what on the streets.

John watched Claire in the mirror, wondering what she was thinking about. He glanced at his watch, remembering that he had to get to the mechanic shop on twelfth street and turn in his application before they closed in two hours. He knew that he should wait until he had his voice back in case he had to be interviewed right away, but he needed a job ASAP. He'd found the setting he wanted to use for Claire's ring in the jewelry store at the mall a few weeks ago, and he knew it would cost a little more if he had them use the diamond he wanted them to just because they'd have to take it from the earring and make the setting a little different to fit the stone. He wanted to get that ring for her so that he could propose on her birthday in June. He just needed to save the four thousand dollars for the gold setting and find the perfect spot to pop the question. He wasn't going to ask her while laying in a hospital bed this time, and he wanted to make sure it was perfect. Plus, this time, he wouldn't be drugged up with sedatives and whatever else they'd pumped into him to keep him alive that night. He also wanted to get a photographer to take a picture of her accepting the ring when he got down on one knee.

He twisted the old skull ring on his finger, remembering how Sid had proposed to Kaylie when they were fifteen. He remembered Kaylie accepting and how they'd gotten tattoos of each other's names from Dominic since they couldn't afford real rings and didn't even have enough for a professional tattoo. So, they'd gotten stuck with the black lines of Dominic's attempt at a nice tattoo, that was now a painful memory for Kaylie. He'd noticed that she'd been covering it up with makeup lately, the faded ink being masked until she went to gym and sweated it off.

He remembered how Dominic had wanted to practice on him, and how he'd flat out refused and ran off for a few days. He remembered the searing pain when the Black Hawks had found him and burned his feet and legs after stealing everything he'd had on him. He knew why they'd done it. It was the same reason John had cut the feet of the man who'd tried to rape Kaylie. It was so that he couldn't run to the cops to get them canned. He didn't remember much after that. Dominic had said he was in shock when he showed up at his house, and he'd had to call Kaylie and Sid on their date to have them help scrub the raw, blackened skin from John's legs and feet. He could vaguely remember Sid and Dominic holding him down as he screamed for relief from the pain, and how Sid had let him down a whole bottle of Jack Daniels to try and numb his mind enough to take the edge off. They'd saved their money for months to buy that shit, and John had downed the whole bottle after they'd broken the wax seal with hardly a breath between gulps of the burning whiskey. It hadn't even taken much of the edge off, but it had made him shit faced enough to not remember anything after that.

He was glad that Claire didn't know about that. Glad that she'd never asked about those scars, or hadn't noticed them yet. It wasn't that it pained him to talk about his scars, it's just that he'd gotten so drunk or high that he couldn't remember much of them because he'd been desperate to ease the pain. The only ones he'd forced himself to stay sober for were the letters of his last name. He hadn't wanted to forget the words his father had told him with each letter being branded into his flesh. He wanted to remember them so he could prove his old man wrong. He could still hear his voice as the scent of his burning skin filled his nose. "You are a Bender whether you like it or not. You can't escape it. And just so you never forget, this will tell the world who you are." Jacob had pressed the first letter to John's flesh a cruel grin spreading over his face as John had screamed and tried to pull himself up and away from the pain by the ropes tethering his hands to the celling of the garage. "You're like a calf, you belong to me and this proves it." He'd pressed the second letter into John's side, finding joy in John's broken sobs of pain as the tears had streamed down his cheeks. "You're always going to be part of me. You cannot escape it." The third letter was burned into John, making him scream until his throat was raw.

John jumped as Clarissa touched him, pulling him from the memory of what had happened to him.

She nodded to the mirror, as the barber pulled the foil from John's hair, showing him the dark brown that had been gone from the strip since he was a kid. "Better?" She asked, as the man turned the chair to lean John back over the sink and rinse the excess pigment from his hair.

John nodded, happy that he looked like a normal teen now. He smiled, as if to tell he thank you for all she did for him.

"You're welcome, Pumpkin." She patted his chest, not noticing the girl lurking outside of the shop.