The parking lot was almost empty. Two trucks, two puddles and a BMW. The girls must park in back or something.
Brayden Bellman’s imagination started rolling.
Maybe they have a secret apartment in the basement, the girls from Madam Blades, and they all share the BMW.
Nah, pretty girls don’t live in basements. They like balconies and swimming pools and stuff.
Brayden started thinking about swimming pools and bikinis, and wondered if the hair stylists at Madame Blades ever did a bikini day.
Maybe it was Thursday, which was today.
He looked at his phone. His appointment was in 17 minutes.
Franny Reuter told him not to go in super early and gawk at the girls because he’d look like a damn pervert toad or something. Her cousin worked at Madam Blades in Evansville, so she knew.
“There’s a pinball machine in the commercial. If they really got a pinball machine I could play that. That ain’t perverted,” Brayden had told Franny.
“Two things,” Franny said. “One, you’re about to pay 22 dollars for a haircut, plus tip, so I don’t think you wanna put another dollar in the pinball machine, but number two, you probably can’t anyway, because Roy Hebert is the biggest pervert in town and he just hangs out up there all day playin’ pinball and tryin’ to get with the girls.”
Brayden asked Franny how she knew that, if her cousin worked at the Madam Blades all the way in Evansville.
“I know a bunch of stuff you don’t know,” Franny said.
Brayden had a bunch of questions for Franny, but she was leaving for work at Sizzle Platter and didn’t have time.
Brayden kept thinking about Googling how much to tip a girl barber, but his mind was bouncing between pretty girls, his mom, Sergeant Mike, and Coobie.
His mom took him to Sergeant Mike first when he was like two.
Sergeant Mike had been cutting Brayden’s hair his whole life except for the summer his stepdad got a job in Oklahoma and he had to get a haircut down there.
Every male human in town got their haircut by Sergeant Mike until Madam Blades opened in the Sunrise Travel Plaza.
Coobie washed the windows at Sergeant Mike’s, and Pickle’s Card’s and Gifts, and Jalopy Joey’s Oil Change and at least ten more places in Laver.
Brayden looked at his phone again. One of the trucks must belong to Roy Hebert, who Brayden knew of, but didn’t know, but apparently he was a pervert too if Franny was right.
Brayden wondered what a pervert really was.
He was sitting here at Madam Blades because his mom forbade him to get his hair cut at Sergeant Mike’s.
Because Coobie was a pervert.
Brayden had a hard time making sense of it all.
Coobie couldn’t talk, so no one could ask Coobie his side of the story, but it seemed pretty simple to Brayden.
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