Ashley Three

Ashley Three

My name is Ashley Cage and there is nothing interesting about me.  I grew up an hour outside of Las Vegas but never went into town.  I never did much of anything when I was a kid.  It was so goddamn hot.  I guess I was okay in school.  I mean, I didn’t get all A’s or anything, but then again I never really tried.  I guess I could’ve done better in high school.  I never tried.


I think it began when I was thirteen.  Maybe fourteen.  Maybe I’m a liar, I don’t really know.  There were three other Ashleys in my class, I remember that.  Two of them had blonde hair, just like me.  I envied the third, who was a redhead.  I was Ashley Three.  Ashley three out of four.  Sometimes I was just Three. I don’t know, I guess I felt like I really was a number.  I was just like all the other uninteresting kids at that godforsaken middle school--was it high school?  Whatever, they were both godforsaken, and I’m sure there were a million Ashleys in high school that I never even knew because everyone looked the same and spoke the same and we all could have been Ashley Cage and no one would have noticed.


I think I was sixteen when I began spelling it Ashleigh.  I thought that would make me different.  Then I met a girl with rusty curls and a nose piercing who had been Ashleigh since she was born, and I just felt like a fake, a dumb blonde holding a sign saying, “Love me, I’m different!”  I’m not different at all.


I must’ve been seventeen when I dyed my hair green.  I don’t know why I picked green.  I should’ve realized that as a blonde living in Nevada it just looked like I swam too much.  I wanted to pick something different and unattractive to draw people’s eyes away from the “classic beauty” my mother loved so much.  My mom was somewhat of an alcoholic; I don’t know if she ever even knew I dyed my hair.  She bought me a new conditioner, saying, “That should do the trick” and played with my long hair, sighing, “I remember when I looked just like you, long wavy hair like yours, small little figure, but always conservative.”

I cut my hair the next day.  Did it myself, too.  Got a pair of scissors and hacked it all off.  And when I say all off, I mean it.  I didn’t give myself cute shoulder-length layers or a bouncy bob, I cut it all off.  Short, uneven bangs and a two-inch spiky lion’s mane of a haircut.  I can’t say it looked attractive, but it was just what I wanted.

Now for the posse.  I couldn’t be a badass without any friends.

With a safety pin through your bellybutton (which took a couple of weeks of screaming to persuade through) and a cut up shirt to show it, you could get anyone to do anything you wanted.  I got a guy to buy me Jack Daniels and a pack of Marlboro’s, and standing outside a liquor store with booze and smokes gets you noticed.  I had myself a gang of greasers by noon.

Joe had a rockabilly haircut and shined his shoes every morning, but hadn’t ever bothered with deodorant.  Jesse was the registered creep, never talking, always touching, and never seen without a cigarette.  Dianne said she wanted to be called Di though no one did, and her blonde hair was blown out and her red lipstick always got on her teeth.  I said my name was Antigone and nobody found it strange.


By the time the green had completely faded, so did my love for prowling around Vegas with a smoker’s cough and a swimming vision with Joe who just laughed all the time, Jesse who never made any sound at all, and Dianne whose sow squeal rang in my head on repeat.


I dyed my hair a red more closely associated with watermelons than blood and molded it into a mediocre Mohawk, the sides flat against my head and a small line of red hairs clinging to each other down the middle.  My bangs grew into my eyebrows, which shadowed my black-lined eyes and I bought a leather choker.  Bill was a skinhead, but he resented the term: he just happened to have a shaved head and a taste for beating up niggers and kikes.  Boy had a Mohawk much longer than mine, his black hair buzzed on the sides and the blade in the middle dyed a yellow the color of pencils, making him kind of look like a dirty skunk.  I don’t know why we called him boy.  Jimmy was fat.  They were in a band called Suburban Rejects that was composed of Bill screaming nonsense that was probably racist, Boy plucking his bass guitar, and Jimmy smacking the drums with broken sticks in no coherent order.  They didn’t have a guitarist, so I joined them in a leopard skirt and ripped fishnets, moving my fingers around an instrument I didn’t even know how to hold and trying to look cute.  They just called me Red.

Bill was in nigger territory one day and felt uncomfortable, so he called Boy over so we could leave (Boy was buying cigarettes), and one extra dark black boy thought Bill was talking to him and we all got our asses beat. I don’t know what kind of fuck hits a girl, but it gave me an excuse to leave.


All of my old friends were leaving home for college, but I had already left home to try to find myself.  When I bleached my hair out to a platinum blonde, I became Gwen, which I learned means white.  When my hair was blue, I was Meena, which means blue sandstone.  When I had no hair at all and lived in a meth lab run by a kid named Danny, I called myself Halyn, unique and special, unlike any other, though I knew I was just like every other punkass kid out there without a job, without a hobby, without anything interesting about them besides the fact that they’re bored with themselves and their lives and this meaningless world filled with people named Ashley and Joe and Bill and Danny and no matter how many names I had and how many colors I dyed my hair I was still skinny and pale with blue eyes and blonde roots and my mother still drank and I was still named Ashley.


I was nineteen.  I hadn’t been home in two years.  My mother took me back in.  She cried when she saw my hair, ran her fingers across my fuzzy buzzed head and choked on the air, her eyes folding into upturned wrinkles but there were no tears, her eyes as dry as the gin in the glass she clung onto, and I kissed her on the cheek and she wiped her dry eyes, saying, “Oh, I hope my make-up doesn’t smear.”

“You look great, Mom,” I told her as she led me into the living room.

We sat and she reached into her purse with her alcohol free hand and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, asking if I still smoked Marlboro’s, and pulled two out with a shaky hand and I took one from her.

“Mom, you ought to stop smoking,” I told her, putting the cigarette to my lips.  “And you drink too much.”

She lit my cigarette for me.  “Just one more with my daughter.  One more with my beautiful daughter.”  Her eyes caved into her eyelids again and I breathed in deeply and sighed out smoke.

“It’ll grow back, Mom.”

“I know, baby,” she said, smiling as she rubbed my head.  “I know, Ashley.”