Free Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry Page B

from where his lip was split, but he had three days of very uneven beard growing. It was not a music teacher look.
    “Arvo,” Giselle said, “we need to go shopping.”
    He hobbled up on the crutches. “Yes, I am looking …” I could see him searching for a nicer word than “revolting.”
    “You need to look tidy,” I said, “like a music teacher. We need a razor and I guess—”
    “Deodorant,” Giselle barged in.
    I was not going to say that out loud. “Umm, would you like a comb?”
    Arvo nodded.
    “And I hate to say it, but I think you are going to need some makeup.”
    “Lots of makeup,” Giselle said. “Come on, girl, we need to go to the KDW.”
    I trailed after Giselle up the riverbank. We stopped in thebushes to make sure the road was empty and then headed toward the Kaufhaus des Westens in the busy shopping part of the Kurfürstendamm.
    Shopping with Giselle was a revelation. She walked into the store like she owned it. She never compared prices, and she had an opinion about everything. Leather jackets—hot. Spike heels—not worth the trouble. Levi’s with rips and tears already in them—so last year. Blue mascara—please! We filled up a basket with the things Arvo needed to get cleaned up.
    “Makeup!” Giselle announced, striding in the direction of the bright lights and mirrors in the cosmetics section of the department store. “I have no idea what you white people use.” She breezed past a cluster of German grandmas, oblivious to their disapproving clucks, and took up space at the makeup counter.
    “Oh. Umm …” I loved Giselle, but sometimes she made me feel like a little kid. “I’m not much of a makeup expert. I really have no idea what we should buy.”
    “Seriously?”
    “None.”
    “Girl, you have got to stop shopping with your mom.”
    “Okay.” I liked shopping with my mom.
    “Promise me you’ll shop with your girlfriends when you get to your new school.” Giselle sat me down on a tall pink stool at the makeup counter and motioned for one of the ladies in a pink smock to come over and wait on us.
    I tried to imagine myself in one of those American malls I’d heard my cousins talk about.
    “Your mom wants you to be pretty and she doesn’t,” Giselle went on. “Moms are like that. It’s because they all just turned forty.”
    “Guten Tag. Kann ich euch helfen?”
the makeup lady said.
    “Jody needs a new look,” Giselle said.
    “Yes, I see.” The makeup lady switched to English like flipping radio stations. It would take me forever to get that good at German. She had perfect hair and perfect makeup. Even in her dorky pink smock, I could imagine her modeling for a magazine. I tucked my grubby tennis shoes underneath the stool and felt even more like a second grader. “Some pink for the cheeks,” the makeup lady said. “And for the eyes—”
    “She needs foundation,” Giselle said firmly. “The really good kind. For when she gets zits.”
    I could have died right there.
    “What a shame! Such lovely skin even with the freckles,” the makeup lady said.
    I bet she never had a zit in her life.
    “Do you suffer in your cycle?”
    I was never going to shop for makeup ever again. I closed my eyes and thought about Arvo and all the bruises on his face. “Yes,” I said. “I suffer a lot.”
    She gave me some makeup that felt exactly like the school paste I used in kindergarten and smelled like insect repellent.I think Giselle felt a little bit sorry for me, because she bought me the brightest red nail polish in the store. On the way back to the bridge, we got a timetable for the train and a tourist map of Berlin to help Arvo find us at the Spandau Bahnhof on Friday.
    The next day my classes felt like they were five hundred years long. We spent all day listening to people give their dreams and goals speeches. Yawn. But the whole time I was listening, I was thinking how fun it would be to give a real dreams and goals speech.
    “Yes, my goal is to run away