i_assist Of Hair Dye and Cosmopolitans
Her roots were showing, and from the look of it they had been for at least a week and change now. But with no one to tell her and everything else that was going on, Max just hadn't noticed. There was definitely a good amount of brown peeking through by this point. She'd noticed accidentally on the way home from school, catching sight of her blurred reflection in the dark partition glass that separated her in the back seat from Alfred driving up front.
Confirmation was needed, as the glass wasn't really a mirror. With a good deal of thumping around in the back, Max finally found a small mirror hidden in one of the compartments. She looked into it, tugging on a piece of hair. It was growing, that was good, but still, brown roots were a bad thing. Roots reminded people that her hair wasn't actually pink.
"Alfred?" Still examining her hair, Max reached over and pressed the little intercom button.
"Yes, Miss?"
"Can we stop by a drugstore?"
"Of course, Miss. Maxine."
"Thanks."
Satisfied, though still feeling the need to cover her head and not let anyone see until it was re-dyed, Max sat back in her seat and waited. She only hoped that this didn't require trips to multiple drug stores. Pink dye and the perfect bleach could be difficult to find in the same place. Alfred pulled the car into a parking lot about ten minutes later and Max got out, ditching her backpack in the seat for just her wallet which she slipped into her coat pocket. "Back in no more than twenty," she told Alfred, before dashing straight into the store.
It was one of the larger drug stores in the city, which looked promising. What she needed wasn't going to be in one of the smaller ones. After glancing up at the aisle signs she headed towards number four, hair products and body washes.
Max spent a good amount of time deliberating as she stood in front of the hair dyes. Sometimes she really did love this city. Never before had she seen so many choices for pink dye, and she couldn't help but wonder if the store was always stocked like this, or if the city had known she was coming. Whichever it was, she was glad. She finally picked one which looked to promise an even brighter pink than what he had now, and then grabbed a low grade bleach. She took a perm too, as she was leaving the aisle. Max figured if she was going to do this, she might as well do it right and not only were her roots looking a brown, they were a little too much on the curly side as well.
The last item she picked up before going to the counter was a box of sweetener packets (they softened the sting of the bleach on her scalp).
The lines in the front were long and snaked back almost into the first few aisles. Max sighed and then chose the shortest one to stand in, but even that put her in the first aisle which housed magazines and candy. It was a bad place to have to wait. Barely thirty seconds had gone by before Max had added a bag of skittles and a pack of Hershey's Kisses to her basket. Then, realising it was going to be a long wait, she turned on the magazine section.
Well, it was magazines and romance novels, but the latter didn't interest her. Actually, neither did much of the former. She scanned the magazines quickly finding something with some random celebrities she didn't know on the cover, another toting Richard Wilkins, The City's mayor, and a bunch of other stuff that looked like random gossip rags.
She passed over them all until two things caught her eye. One was a science-fiction magazine with something about Star Trek on the cover, and she grabbed it to purchase because, well she was a science-fiction geek, and sometimes that included a healthy dose of Trek. And to her, the crew on this cover was vintage. The next thing she ended up grabbing was an issue of Cosmopolitan. Max had never read an issue of Cosmo in her life, despite often hearing Dana and her friends swear that it was a bible of sorts.
But now the glaring font on the cover which clearly said, 'Separated by a generation or two? Tips to keep YOUR age-gap relationship going strong!'. She got curious.
Max picked it up and started flipping through, against her better judgment, because she'd always seen magazines like this as pointless. Except… maybe it wasn't completely pointless. In fact, it was kind of interesting. And, hey… maybe even helpful?
By the time she'd moved forward in the line a bit, Max was pouring over the magazine. The majority of it was packed with sex. That was it. And, as Max had never heard of most of this stuff before, it was all very interesting. She hadn't even gotten to the article that had caught her eye on the cover, she was too busy reading about how to give Jesse the perfect hand and blow jobs (which, yes, she'd heard of before, but as to the application of said things? She was clueless). The latter was a bit intimidating in theory.
Nudged by someone behind her, Max moved up again, her eyes still on the magazine. She was getting past all the sex tips now, though there was still more that she could've read, she just decided to do it at home. On to the tips for people separated by a generation gap.
Alright, so mostly it was just common sense stuff; 'make sure you have similar interests', 'make sure you have something that goes beyond the physical', and 'make sure he/she is not just in it for the money'. But then there was some pretty valid stuff in tucked in between the obvious as well. Like how it wasn't necessarily a good idea to hide it from people, which Max took to mean as, 'huh… probably shouldn't have snuck it around Bruce and Alfred like that'. A lesson that, of course, had already been learned. Then it said that once you did tell people, you were supposed ignore all the negative responses you might get. She hadn't really had to deal with negative responses yet, but it was a good thing to keep in mind because she was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. She was convinced it had to, because that's what parental figures did.
She kicked her basket forward as the line moved up some more, not noticing that she was nearly to the checkout girl. She kept reading, finishing the small article, and then flipping back to 'sex tips from guys' and '60 things that'll drive him crazy in bed'.
"Hey're you getting that too?"
Max glanced up. Her stuff had all been rung up by the clerk, and she was holding out her hand for the magazine. "Oh, yeah, here." She handed it over, and then took it back quickly once it had been scanned as well.
Holding her plastic bag of hair supplies in one hand, and the cosmo flipped open in the other, Max walked out of the store engrossed. She only looked up to find Alfred and the car, but then from the moment she slipped back into the backseat until they'd pulled back up at the manor, she kept reading.
When she got out of the car, she closed the magazine and slipped it into her bag, prepared to look at it again while she waited for the dye to set in her hair. She wondered if Jesse knew about half of this stuff, and if he didn't, whether he'd be adverse to her demonstrating.
But, that was a question to be answered later when she saw him. Max caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror of the car, and frowned.