Page 56 of TJ Powar Has Something to Prove

After a few minutes, he turns off the trimmer. “Are we ready now?”

“No.” She hands him the baby powder.

“What’s this for?”

“It absorbs extra oil on your skin. Just do it.”

Shaking his head, he tips powder onto his calf and rubs it in. She can’t help but notice the muscle definition in his legs, most likely a product of his regular hiking, if his Instagram photos are anything to go by. She turns to busy herself testing the consistency of the wax. It’s ready.

She perches next to him on the ledge with her popsicle stick dipped in wax. “Stick out your leg.”

He does. “I’m starting to have a bad feeling about this.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re grinning. Maniacally.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” TJ finishes smearing her strip of wax and admires her handiwork. She reaches behind her and grabs one of her muslin strips, carefully smoothing it over the line of wax on his thigh. “Ready?” He nods. “Three, two—” She rips the wax off.

Charlie swears. Loudly. It’s so uncharacteristic coming from him that she giggles.

“Beauty is pain,” she informs him, pressing on the area to help the swelling. She holds up the muslin, now adorned with soft, feathery brown hair. Then she begins applying another layer of wax to the adjacent part of his leg. “Imagine doing that for both your legs every three weeks. At minimum.”

“Does it get... better?”

“Sort of.” She rips off the next layer and cackles when heswears again. “But also not really. Sometimes, when I waxed my armpits, they’d even bleed.”

“That’s so...” Charlie trails off, sounding aghast. When she merely shrugs in response, he picks up the wax container and examines the logo. “These people must be laughing all the way to the bank. They’re basically selling pain.”

“Well, yeah.” She climbs in the tub and kneels to apply wax to his knee. “They tell us wehaveto do it, because they need us to feel like shit about ourselves to make money. And we just listen to them.” TJ can feel herself getting angry. “But you know what? I’m done buying into corporate bullshit.”

Charlie sets down the wax container. “You really mean that?”

“Yeah.” TJ rips another wax strip off his leg with unnecessary force. “What are you trying to say?”

Charlie doesn’t swear this time. He just pauses before speaking again. “Well, there’s more than one thing corporations have exploited to make money. Take makeup, for example. So are you going to get rid of that, too?”

She stops her work to glare at him from under her mascara-coated lashes. He barely blinks at the ferocity of her expression. God. He’s supremely frustrating. If Liam was easy to talk to, Charlie is the opposite. He constantly challenges what she says.

But not to troll her. He’s honestly curious about her answer, what he’s missing from her rationale, so he can understand it better. And that, if she’s honest, makes all the difference.

She carefully lays another muslin strip. “Can I ask you a question, Charlie? Why do you dress so formally all the time?”

He doesn’t miss a beat, although the question probably seems out of nowhere. “I’m student body president at Whitewater,”he says, and it’s cute that he thought she didn’t know that already. “I’m constantly in meetings with staff or students or administration. It’s easier to just always be ready for one.”

“Do you like looking professional? Or you feel like you have to?”

He smiles with a dawning understanding. “Both, I suppose.”

“But it’s kind of hard to separate after a while, don’t you think? Whether something is your personal style or if society has just conditioned you to think it would look good?”

“Point taken. What came first? My personal style or the societal expectation? Chicken or the egg?”

She leans her elbow on the top of his knee. “I’m not going to pretend me wearing makeup is some feminist empowerment statement. It’s not. It’s still fitting into an expectation of what girls are supposed to look like. But Ilikemakeup. And yeah, part of that is advertising, but that’s true for literally every product on the planet.”

“So you agree, then,” Charlie says, “that some people might like hair removal as a preference, too, even if they can’t disentangle it from societal expectations.”

She glances at him curiously. He sounds like he has someone specific in mind. “Like who?”