"My mate got proper singed at a place last week."
"Not here?" queried Frankie.
"Oh no, not here," came the hasty response, a mixture of twentysomething laddish bravado and a desire not to upset Frankie. The fear of a bad haircut from an accidental insult played across his face. Frankie knew that look.
"I was gonna say," said Frankie, continuing to establish authority, "we're all proper trained."
"It was over Weymouth," said the lad.
"Weymouth—what d'you expect?" smiled Frankie, gratified to see this new client grin and relax.
"Exactly! That's what I said to him."
He was looking at Frankie in the mirror now as Frankie set to work, selecting the shaver setting.
Here we go, thought Frankie. "Where do I know you from?"
"Dunno."
"Did you go Fairfax?"
"Mm-hmm." Frankie started work. Felt his eyes on them, like this was a Year 7 maths problem to be solved.
"When d'you leave?"
"Five years ago."
"After A levels?"
"No. Did a college apprenticeship." Frankie brandished the shaver and smiled. "So I don't set fire to people."
"So, if you're twenty-one now—"
"Soon—"
"Right, you'd've been two years below us then. What's your name?"
"Frankie."
The lad's brow furrowed as he silently began to ransack his memory. Frankie kept working, not making eye contact. Frankie had finessed this conversation over many haircuts. Here we go.
"But I used to go by Alice."
The lad looked in the mirror, staring now at Frankie. Checking the features beneath the short bleach-blond crop-cut.
"Alice Winters!"
"Frankie Winters, now."
"Yeah! I knew I recognized you!"
Long silence. Frankie worked away at the lad's neck. They had navigated this conversational slalom many times: one of the delights of identifying as non-binary in a public-facing job. Frankie could almost hear him thinking what to say or ask. Then:
"How long you been Frankie?"
"Four years, give or take."
The lad nodded. Frankie knew this was the moment things went one of two ways.
"My cousin did the same. She used to be Jessica. Now she's—no, sorry, now they're—Jack."
"Ah, right!"
"Nine months since. My sister's still not really sure."
"It takes some people a sec to get their heads around."
He was looking hard in the mirror, at Frankie absorbed in their work on the back of his head. "D'you get much shit for it?"
Frankie looked up, met his gaze. "Not really." This was the second pivot point, when the conversation could sometimes become a bit more tricky. Frankie had strategies to deal with that. They watched for a half second as the lad took this in.
He half nodded. "That's good."
A minor flood of relief washed through Frankie's body. They gave no outward signal of it. "Yep. It's mostly the pronouns people get worried by."
"Huh. Yeah. Same." Frankie noticed with gratitude that he'd finished with that subject now, lost interest, and was looking around the shop, when he remembered a juicy nugget. "Oh my God, you heard they found a dead body?"
Shit.
