Chapter 23: Hair

Whoa! I wrote a new chapter. I know, crazy, right? It's a short one that pretty much summarizes my feelings toward mustaches and mullets. Enjoy!


“Blue, give me your hands,” Teddy said, holding out his own hands for Blue. His best friend scowled at him; this proposition could only mean bad news. For this reason, Blue wrinkled her nose at Teddy as he guided them to a seated position on a couch in the lounge on their dorm floor.
“What?” she whispered softly, hoping if Teddy couldn’t hear her he wouldn’t say what he was planning on saying.
“I know it’s important to you that I let you know about these things, so…I’m going to inform you that on Friday I’m leaving and I’m going to be gone for two weeks,” he said in one breath, and Blue’s bottom jaw fell open and left her dumbstruck. This was terrible news! Teddy continued on, assuring her, “I know it sounds like a long time but it’s not that bad. And I talked to Pablo and he’s going to make sure you’re well taken care of. Also you have Malik, of course. You’ll be in good hands. I’ll text every day.”
Blue considered accusing him of hating her, but she decided to go with that weird logical part of her brain she didn’t like to listen to that posed a different question, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to visit some schools and talk to people, and…It’s hard to explain, uh…Blue, suffice it to say, I’m going to Canada,” he said.
“Canada?” Blue shrieked. “I hate Canada!”
“It’s not Canada’s fault,” Teddy insisted.
Nonetheless, as soon as Teddy left “I hate Canada” became Blue’s mantra. Her other mantra during this time was, “Malik your face looks stupid.” The reason for this was because Malik had gotten some crazy notion into his mind that he should grow a mustache. Miss Allberry took a poll on it the third day she noticed it.
“All those in favor of Malik’s mustache being dumb, raise your hands,” she said. Blue’s hand shot up immediately, and Gerda, Austin, Rashida, Evan, Ewan, Estela, and Jenny backed her up. “All those who think it’s acceptable looking, raise your hands,” she requested. Kip raised his hand and gave Malik an “I got you, man” wink as he and Malik raised their hands, and Pablo and Kakahi backed them up.
Blue gaped at her two friends (Pablo and Kakahi, that is, she knew Kip was just being a good friend to Malik and probably despised the mustache too), who she never would have thought would betray her in such a way. The poll had been her idea, after all, so it was obvious which side anyone who was friends with her should fall on. Teddy had assured her Pablo would be her temporary best friend, after all. He was not doing a good job. Miss Allberry was far too wrapped up in her strange relationship with Hammy’s younger brother to press the issue, but she made it clear she fell on Blue’s side of the debate.
As the group walked back to the dorms together, Gerda grabbed Blue’s elbow to get her attention, and they fell into step as they walked back to the dorms together. The Swede spoke to her casual friend, “I agree with your feelings about the creature on Malik’s face. It is unsightly.”
“Thank you!” Blue shouted. Malik apparently overheard them and started walking away quickly, not wanting to hear the conversation.
“Why has he decided to do this?” Gerda asked, and Blue folded her arms and scowled.
“Well next week is his birthday and Teddy’s going to miss it because Canada is stupid and I guess they’ve been together for every birthday since ever and so somehow he thinks that means he should grow a mustache!” Blue explained, waving her arms wildly for emphasis.
“Yes, yes,” Gerda replied, “I do not understand. Hakan has seen this mustache and now has decided he should also grow one. I am wondering, is it a disease, do you think?”
“Yes!” Blue shrieked. “It must be! And now it’s spreading! We must put a stop to it!” The teen ran off in the direction Malik went, leaving an amused Swede in her wake. Malik just stared at her as she shrieked on and on about people becoming completely covered in hair head to toe and mustache diseases. When he didn’t seem to understand what she was saying, she grabbed a pair of scissors (there were no razors close, and this was symbolic) and made snipping motions. In the middle of her shouts, Hakan ran into the room without announcing himself.
“How do you like X’s mustache Malik? Awesome? EXTREME?” he shouted, pushing past Blue. Unfortunately for the mulleted teen, the girl was still making snipping motions, and one those snips found its way to his party in the back. Malik and Blue froze as the hair fell to the ground, staring at each other in shock. Hakan looked confused, before asking, “Why is X’s head suddenly lighter?”
Malik blinked and searched for a pleasant way to tell Hakan what had happened as Blue fled the room. The shrieks of despair Blue heard moments after confirmed Malik had informed him of the tragic events that transpired.
“I’m so sorry!” Blue yelled from down the hallway, but it didn’t soothe the whale-like wailing emanating from Malik’s room. Gerda ran past her down the hallway, saw what had happened, and walked back to Blue calmly.
“Do not tell Hakan I have told you this, but I would like to thank you. His hair was unsightly. Now I owe you and must take care of the creature on Malik’s face?” she asked, and Blue nodded exuberantly, snatching the opportunity up as quickly as possible. In the meantime, she decided to go find somewhere to hide from Hakan’s shrieks of despair, deciding to stalk Pablo’s dance class and glare at him about siding with Malik on the mustache issue. She’d glare at Kakahi later, of course, but she figured Pablo was an easier first target.
He seemed pretty confused when he saw her. Blue went into stealth mode then, sending him mean thoughts like how he should stumble a little bit or something. But not full out trip though. Because that sounded dangerous, and Blue didn’t want Pablo to get hurt, just be embarrassed. Then, as she stared at Pablo, an unsettling feeling sneaked up on her. She tried to ignore it, she really did, but images of Hakan sobbing and threatening to throw out all his cool gadgets and go into hiding due to depression flooded her mind, and she finally decided to go back and properly apologize to Hakan.
She arrived outside of Hakan’s room and knocked on the door. Kendrick answered it and surprised Blue with what he said, “Did you have to cut off his hair?” After that his words got a little anti-Semitic, so Blue just decided to walk away, finding Hakan wasn’t present in his room. Her next thought was Gerda’s room, so she walked over to it, took a deep breath, made her most apologetic face, and knocked on the door.
Jenny opened it, sighed, and pointed behind her. Hakan was sitting on Gerda’s bed, cradling the leftover part of his hair, though Gerda was nowhere to be found. Blue shuffled over to the distraught teen and sat next to him on Gerda’s bed. When he saw her, he waved her away and whimpered, “Be gone, heathen! X doesn’t want to see you! You killed X’s dreams and X’s hair all at once!”
“I’m very, very sorry X. It was an accident,” Blue mumbled, twiddling her thumbs and sticking out her bottom lip. Because that makes you look sad, right? Right, Blue’s an actress, she knows these things.
“That changes nothing! Do you have any idea how long it took X to grow that?” Hakan snapped.
“Probably, like…a few years, maybe,” Blue replied with a shrug, sticking to her pouty lip guns in case Hakan looked at her.
Hakan glanced up at last, and couldn’t stop himself from laughing, “You look dumb.”
“No way!” Blue shouted back at him, folding her arms and glaring. They sat for a moment as the heaviness between them finally lifted, and Blue suggested, “Maybe you could superglue it back on? It’s not like it grows from the bottom, so…”
“Yes! Good idea! X will find some superglue!” Hakan shouted, bolting from the bed and ostensibly running all the way back to his room. Jenny looked over at Blue and shook her head then. This was a little confusing to Blue, and she knew the obvious answer was that Jenny was showing disapproval for her idea, but Blue never trusted the obvious. Logically, Blue worked through it to get to her real meaning. Jenny was friends with Malik, Gerda was missing, Gerda was sketchy sometimes, therefore Gerda was going to murder Malik to rid him of his mustache! With the sudden realization, Blue ran out of the room straight to Malik’s room.
Not bothering to knock, Blue burst onto the scene, expecting to come across a murder in progress. What she came across instead shocked nay appalled her! Malik and Kip were sitting on their little futon, watching something on their tiny TV with unicorns in it! One of Blue’s rules when she and Malik started dating was that if Malik did anything involving unicorns he would tell Blue about it.
“How could you?” she shrieked. Malik turned to look at her, and she laughed as he did. “I can’t stay mad, even, when your face looks so ridiculous!” she yelled indignantly.
“For the record, I just texted you we were going to be watching this, so no rules were broken,” Malik insisted, but Blue didn’t really hear it, because she was too busy staring at Malik’s mustache.
“It’s like…It just grew up out of nowhere,” she mumbled to herself, approaching Malik very slowly as if the mustache might make a move to attack her, “Gerda was definitely onto something…Probably a disease…It’s crazy how Mr. Mustache looks awesome with his mustache, but you just look like a pedophile…if Teddy were here he would know how to solve this…Oh! I could Skpertize him! Bye Malik, I have to go Skypertize Teddy!”
Malik blinked over to Kip, scowling, “Do I really look like a pedophile?” Kip pulled a strange face and proceeded to hold his fingers up to convey that Malik did indeed look a little bit pedophiliac.
Teddy wasn’t online, but Blue texted him that she had an emergency, so he got online pretty quickly. Once she informed him of the problem, she carried her laptop over to Malik and Kip’s room, then faced Teddy toward them. Her blond best friend snickered immediately, and Malik glared.
“Malik, Malik!” Teddy said excitedly, waving at him from the laptop screen. His best straight boy friend waved back at him reluctantly, not excited to hear how he felt about Malik’s newly grown facial hair. “I mustache you a question, Malik,” Teddy said delightedly, “but I’ll shave it for later.” Taken by surprise by the hilarious joke, Blue dropped her laptop as she doubled over in laughter. Luckily, Gerda strolled in at that moment and caught it, looking confused and like she might even have caught it by accident. Handing it back to Blue, Gerda took a careful look at Malik and the arrangement of the room, and then walked out.
“Oh!” Blue gasped, “I have to go help Hakan glue his hair back on! Watch my laptop and discuss this mustache thing with Teddy! He, heehee…He mustache you a question, and he, heeeeehee, can’t shave it for later.” Blue handed her laptop to her boyfriend before she turned back around and ran back to Gerda’s room, where she assumed Hakan was.
As she went she could faintly hear, “Wait what’s this about gluing hair on Hakan?” from Teddy on the computer.
Rushing back to the room, Blue returned just in time to see Gerda pluck the superglue from Hakan’s hands and shake her head sternly. The Swede explained Hakan’s options to him as she set the superglue aside, “You can tidy up your hair or get extensions. I will cut it for you so it looks acceptable if you would like that.” Hakan pouted as he looked between his detached hair and the superglue Gerda took away from him.
Finally, he relented, “X guesses you can cut it.” Without letting Hakan see, Gerda shot Blue an appreciative smile and waved her out of the room. Since she clearly wasn’t wanted there, Blue trekked back to Malik and Kip’s room to whine about Malik’s mustache and missing Teddy. It continued much in the same way for the next week, proving Teddy failed to convince Malik to shave. Blue made a “no kissing with that thing on your face” rule, but Malik still refused to shave it off. Eventually Blue gave up on her campaign against it, but not before she made posters and commercials.
Blue showed Malik the commercial Wednesday night, two days before his Friday birthday (February 25th), and he laughed at it like it was a joke. It opened up on a warning stating, “Viewer discretion is advised. This video contains images that some viewers may find disturbing.” It proceeded to an image of Malik smiling with a cleanly shaven face and then some cheesy effects faded the picture into one where Malik had a mustache and the image was dripping with blood. Some music Malik suspected was intended for a horror movie played in the background. The screen faded out to black and faded back in to a somber-faced Blue at a desk.
Shifting some empty papers around, she spoke very seriously, “Recently a tragedy has struck Baylor School for the Arts. I speak, of course, of the rampant disregard for human decency displayed on the face of one Malik Green. The disturbance very nearly caught on with other students, for example Hakan ‘X’ Harjo, who almost didn’t shave for a week after seeing the poor example Mr. Green set. Luckily Mr. Harjo was saved this fate when his mullet was accidentally cut off. He now sees the light that mullets are bad, just like mustaches, and says of his new haircut, ‘X’s head is very light. Also, X requires less shampoo. Less shampoo is a plus.’ When asked why he didn’t grow a mustache, Mr. Harjo replied, ‘Well, Gerda said they might be diseased, so it didn’t seem right. Also, X can do more dangerous fire related things with less hair and no mustache, so X is happy.’ Mr. Harjo ran away from me after that, and later burned off his eyebrows. It is clear that his consideration of growing a mustache was the cause of this accident. Mustaches are an epidemic that must be stopped. Please don’t let your beautiful boyfriend turn into a Malik Green. He was so pretty…now look at him.” The image of Blue faded into another picture of Malik, this time drawn on with sharpie. A mustache was drawn on him, since Blue really only had that one picture of Malik with the mustache. Other additions to the picture included the blacking out of a couple of his teeth, an arrow saying ‘the abs are negated by the mustache’ pointing toward his stomach area, and an eye patch over one of his eyes.
Credits rolled at the end of the video, listing Blue as the writer, director, and star, the cameraperson as Gerda, the special effects as done by Hakan, and a little sentence claiming, “Paid for by the CAMRD (Commission Against Mustache Related Diseases).” Finally, the credits concluded by listing “the mustache guy” as Malik Green.
One appreciative laugh later, Malik asked Blue, “When did you make this?” Blue sighed, realizing she had failed yet again to convince Malik to shave. After this last effort, she decided to try what Teddy had recommended (did Blue mention she hated Canada?) and just ignore the mustache. Instead she planned out his surprised party. See Teddy told Blue he’d managed to rearrange his schedule to come back in time for Malik’s birthday and since Blue was basically a ninja, she arranged a whole party to surprise Malik with this fact on his birthday.
Basically she was an evil genius. Teddy arrived at Blue’s room just before the party was going to start, hosted at Kakahi’s house, so she didn’t get time to take a look at him before they hurried over to their friend’s house. If she had, she wouldn’t have been nearly so shocked when she realized Teddy had the saddest attempt at a mustache ever on his face.
“I know, I know,” he sighed, “now it’s clear I’m a bottle blond. Also testosterone isn’t my friend. I have a point with this Blue, trust me.” Blue trusted Teddy, of course, when his mind wasn’t being controlled by an evil mustache disease. As she closed her eyes and waited for Malik to show up, Blue could practically see the thing on Teddy’s face (barely a mustache due to Teddy barely needing to shave yet so a very awkward creature indeed) giving him orders to spread the disease to more people. After trying to picture everyone in the room with mustaches, Blue sighed and wondered whether Gerda had found a solution. A clicking noise got her attention, and she and everyone else pounced when Kakahi led Malik through the door of her house. Initially, Malik looked like he was either going to cry or punch someone, proving he wasn’t joking when he told Blue he didn’t like surprises. Then he looked excited to see Teddy, and he ran over to hug his blond friend but stopped short.
Malik stared at Teddy’s mustache attempt, wrinkled his noise, and looked disturbed. Despite this, he managed to lean forward and give his increasingly tall friend a hug. After that they had cake and ice cream and played games. Malik opened his presents from Blue and Teddy, the only two to bring presents, and a joke present from the both of them. The former were a set of coffee mugs with pop culture quotes on them, and the latter happened to be a pair of razors and some shaving cream.
As he stared in the box, Malik laughed quietly before looking up at Teddy, widening his eyes, offering Teddy a razor and taking the other one for himself. Kakahi dutifully pointed toward the bathroom and instructed the guys to clean up after they finished shaving because facial hair in the sink grossed her out. Blue figured out Teddy’s tactic while they were gone, namely that he wouldn’t shave until Malik did, and decided her friend could be forgiven for leaving her for two weeks. When the pair came back clean shaven, Blue pounced on her boyfriend, and he smiled into the kiss she planted on his mouth.
“Oh, I did miss that,” he sighed as they pulled apart. “If me having a mustache makes you feel how Teddy having a mustache makes me feel, I have to say…I’m very sorry. It was selfish of me. I love you, though, and eventually it was just funny to see what you’d come up with to convince me to get rid of it.”
Blue nodded, shot a thumbs up at Teddy, who apparently nicked himself while shaving and was pouting as Pablo comforted him, and turned her attention back to Malik. “Never again. Promise?”
“All right,” Malik agreed, “never again.”
And thus all was right in the land of facial hair once again, and the unsightly mullet Hakan thought he liked was finally, once and for all, taken care of. What happened to Gerda’s promise to help Blue out with Malik’s mustache? Well, in this case, never again was a bit more permanent than Malik had anticipated. When questioned, Gerda would pretend to forget English and act like she thought they were talking about sharing. Everyone was grateful to Gerda deep down, since she had prevented Malik from becoming “mustache guy” ever again, because mustache disease is a serious thing. If someone you know grows a mustache, be vigilant. If it appears to be spreading you know what to do: find the person who would look most ridiculous with a mustache and make him grow one. This will deter all others from the pursuit. Good luck and Godspeed in the war against mustaches. [This message paid for by the CAMRD (Commission Against Mustache Related Diseases).]