Seeing Stars by Diane Hammond

was owned by a gay couple that clearly spent a fortune on hair care products.
    Not that Quinn had anything against gay people. Hell, you couldn’t have anything against them if you were going to live in West Hollywood, because West Hollywood was theirs ; well, theirs and a bunch of people who’d come over from Russia—for the climate, he figured, because it must get pretty old living in Siberia or Chernobyl or wherever, where it snowed a zillion inches a year and you had to wear dorky fur hats and stuff to keep from getting frostbite every time you went out to feed the skinny ponies. He’d seen Doctor Zhivago about twenty-five times—that and Fiddler on the Roof .
    Anyway, since moving to Baby-Sue and Jasper’s apartment, Quinn had developed this great gay character—not over the top, because that was too easy, but a gay boy who spent most of his time alone watching other people have fun, people he wanted to be like but knew he couldn’t; a character who, from the inside out, was beautiful and lost and sometimes brave. Quinn didn’t think he’d want to be gay, though, except as his character. Regular people didn’t really like gay people, no matter what they said. They looked at a gay person and all they could see were two of them doing it. He wouldn’t want to know that everyone who looked at him was thinking about his penis.
    He walked by a hair salon, Hazlitt & Company. Not much was going on in there. One of the stylists, a slight man wearing a brilliant white button-down shirt, was sitting in one of the salon chairs reading a back issue of Vogue . Just for the hell of it, Quinn went in.
    “Hey,” the stylist greeted him, getting up. He was one of the most beautiful men Quinn had ever seen. He had the delicate build and features of a faun. “Can I help you?”
    Quinn shrugged, scratched his arm. “I was thinking of maybe getting my hair colored.” He hadn’t been, but what the hell.
    “Really? Sit down and let’s take a look.” Quinn took his place in the chair. Beneath the mirror there were several headshots of chisel-cheeked, square-jawed men, presumably but not necessarily there to show off their haircuts. They could have just been the stylist’s boyfriends. In West Hollywood, you never knew.
    Quinn sat back and the stylist ran his hands through Quinn’s hair, which was long, almost to his shoulders, and hadn’t been brushed or combed in a while. He’d washed it last night, though, and it was shiny.
    “Yum,” said the stylist. “So you were thinking, what, highlights?”
    Quinn tried to come up with something. “Maybe you could just, like, bleach it so it’s pure white. Or white with red tips. That would be awesome.”
    The stylist made eye contact with him in the mirror. “You an actor?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then no can do. No should do. Unless you don’t want to work.”
    “No, I want to work.”
    “Well, you won’t, if we do something like that.” Quinn liked that the stylist said we . “No producer’s going to recolor your hair. They’ll just find someone else.” He ran his hands through Quinn’s hair again, contemplatively, and Quinn thought it felt better than maybe anything he’d ever felt before. It had been a long time since anyone had touched him. Baby-Sue used to hug him at first, but she didn’t anymore, probably because she was sick of having him in the living room. Jasper wasn’t the kind of person who went around touching people, and Mimi Roberts had been huggy before she’d kicked him out, but that was a long time ago. His mother hugged him sometimes, but it was mostly when he was leaving.
    The stylist took a brush out of a drawer and began brushing Quinn’s hair. That felt even better than his hands had. It felt so good Quinn was having trouble keeping his eyes open. The stylist said, “You know, you don’t see good hair that much.”
    “So I have good hair?”
    “And how.”
    Quinn yawned.
    “I know ,” the stylist said, still brushing, gathering the