Seeing Stars by Diane Hammond Page A

hair up in a ponytail and then letting it fall. “Isn’t it the best? My mom used to brush my hair when I got allergy attacks, which was pretty much all the time. Now I have this health insurance plan that has an allergy program where a nurse calls you a couple times a year and asks if you’ve eaten peanuts lately, or whatever—tomatoes or tomato products, in my case. The last time, when she asked me what I did when I had an attack, I said I looked for someone to brush my hair, and she thought I was screwing with her. I wasn’t, though.”
    “I don’t have allergies,” Quinn said.
    “Lucky you.”
    “Yeah.” But it might not be so bad to have somebody call you up sometimes and ask how you were doing. He thought about asking the stylist for the name of his health insurance company, but the stylist had moved on.
    “I could give you a cut, just to tidy things up.” The stylist put down the brush and threaded his fingers through Quinn’s hair and pulled it one way and then another way.
    “I don’t have any money,” Quinn said.
    “No?” The stylist’s reflection was talking to Quinn’s reflection in the mirror. “Well, come back with twenty-five bucks and we’ll talk.”
    Quinn knew that no one cut hair for twenty-five dollars, not in West Hollywood and possibly not in the entire state of California. When he was living at Mimi’s, Quinn used to go to a beauty school in Van Nuys where the students practiced on you, and even they charged thirty. “That’s not what you charge, is it?”
    The stylist smiled nicely at Quinn’s reflection. “For you it is. I get to work with gorgeous hair, so it’s a win-win.”
    “Okay.”
    “So, okay.”
    When Quinn stood up, the stylist put his hand very briefly on Quinn’s back as if to steady him, even though Quinn wasn’t wobbly. Quinn felt his eyelids get heavy again—what was that?—and then the stylist dropped his hand to the small of Quinn’s back for a second, and Quinn walked to the front of the shop in a fog, trying to look as though people touched him all the time. When he got outside he closed the door carefully, so it wouldn’t rattle or break a mirror or something. Even out on the sidewalk he could feel the stylist’s eyes coming through the hole in his T-shirt. Maybe it should have been creepy, but it wasn’t. What would it have felt like if the stylist had kissed him? He felt a thrill of revulsion in his gut, which was too bad. It would have been nice if they could spend some time together, maybe see a movie or something, but he was pretty sure you couldn’t ask a gay man to spend time with you if you weren’t gay, too, because that would seem like a come-on, and despite what just about every other person in LA thought, Quinn was pretty sure he wasn’t gay, just lonely.
    Suddenly recalling he was hungry, Quinn headed east, past a gay erotica shop and a Minute Man quick-print place and a men’s clothing boutique and on up Santa Monica until he got to Los Burritos. No one was there except a homeless guy who halfheartedly extended an open palm toward Quinn. Quinn ignored him and ordered two burritos and a taco from a pretty little Latina behind the counter. She was tiny, not like a lot of the Hispanic girls. She probably didn’t eat any of the food here. She probably lived with her family in a small, immaculate apartment with wrought-iron plant stands and a framed picture of the Virgin Mary and a mother who told her all the time how pretty and nice she was. She was probably loved just as much as her younger siblings and she probably knew without even asking that she could live there as long as she wanted. No one would turn her room into a hobby room for somebody’s stupid fly-tying stuff.
    He took his food to a table as far away from the homeless guy as he could get, so the guy couldn’t watch him eat, and thought about the hair stylist. Thinking about how good his fingers felt massaging Quinn’s head gave him goose bumps. They didn’t make