Free Best Girl by Sylvia Warsh

CHAPTER ONE
    M y life changed on October 23, 2010. Suddenly I didn’t know who I was. Before the phone call, here’s what I knew: I was adopted. My real parents died in a car crash when I was four. Shelley was the only mother I’ve ever known. As soon as I could understand, she told me I was adopted. Shelley’s husband—I never thought of him as my father—wasn’t home much. When he lost his job, he went out west to work in the oil fields.
    I didn’t have a lot of friends. It was mostly Shelley and me. I always cared too much and didn’t want to get hurt. Because people let you down. People are liars.
    All the time I was growing up, Shelley and I argued. She never saw things my way. Then she could stay mad for days and not speak to me. In the end she’d be all lovey-dovey, as if nothing had happened. When I was a kid, I was always relieved when she started talking again. It was hard living with someone who ignored you. Once I was a teenager, though, I didn’t mind being left alone. When she saw it didn’t bug me, she gave up the silent treatment.
    The best thing she ever did for me was make me take piano lessons. She said her own family was too poor to pay for lessons when she was a kid. Her mother laughed when she asked for them and said she was too stupid to play piano.
    Shelley loved listening to music (mostly bad music). She couldn’t hold a tune. To her, musicians walked on water.
    Where she got the money for the piano I never knew. It’s been there since I can remember. When I was young, I hated practicing. I was always a little rebel. Anything Shelley wanted, I didn’t. So she made me feel guilty. Her usual line—if she could scrounge together the money for lessons, the least I could do was practice. She found a music student a few blocks away who charged less than the going rate, but it was still a lot of money for a hairdresser. She said she had to cut and style two heads of hair to pay for one hour of lessons. Sometimes we ate Kraft Dinner to make up for it.
    So I pouted while practicing my scales, up and down, up and down the keys. Until I realized I was good at it. Then I just pretended to hate it. Shelley didn’t understand why the piano teacher started me on Mozart and Bach. “Doesn’t the teacher know any Billy Joel or Phil Collins?” she’d ask. I’d roll my eyes and say, “She’s teaching me music that doesn’t suck.” I stopped piano lessons when I was fifteen because I got interested in the guitar. My voice wasn’t bad either. But I only sang when Shelley wasn’t home.
    The radio in her hair salon was stuck on the “easy listening” channel, so those old songs were background music while I was growing up. They made me want to hurl. Even going into Shelley’s , the salon she owned on the Danforth, made me want to hurl. It was old and dingy and badly needed a facelift. Her customers were old too. When I was younger, some of them would comment on how I didn’t look anything like Shelley. I took that as an insult because Shelley was hot. Tall and thin with a long neck. Her ears were perfect little shells with earlobes. I was always jealous of her ears because mine were ugly. They were big and flat with thin round edges like clamshells. And no earlobes! She laughed when I complained, and said no one would notice my ears if I wore my hair long.
    I thought Shelley would be happy when I told her I wanted to sing with a band. But she wasn’t. It seemed to make her nervous. And I didn’t even tell her I would be playing guitar, not piano, for accompaniment. She said I needed to make a living, so she taught me to cut hair. I fought at first, but then I started to like it. I had complete control over someone for an hour. They sat in my chair and they couldn’t move. Not if they wanted a really cool haircut. Shelley showed me how to dye hair, and after that I was the only one she