The place itself, sandwiched into a suburban strip mall, is decidedly unlovely. It has cheap acoustic ceilings, white and pocked, stained in some corners with brownish rings. The walls need paint. The door frames are gray with the smudges of people’s hands. The lighting is fluorescent – harsh and unforgiving.

But the floor of A’ Art College of Beauty is fabulous – big, shiny, black and white tiles charging out under rows of sit-down dryers and barber’s chairs that face long mirrored vanities. The chairs mark territories, student stations. The students build small altars in the vanity spaces, arranging photos and trinkets and geegaws, making the space their own. Most stations have party-scene photos and high school graduation portraits in silver or brass or bright plastic picture frames. One station is a paean to Marilyn Monroe.

The walls are splashed with posters of Nagel women – those animated vixens in muted grays and yellows and blues. They stare out from the posters, vacant and sexy, surveying the not-so-sexy clientele of A’ Art, the women and men who can’t afford to get a haircut or a manicure elsewhere. Sometimes these clients are little and old, dusty and fragile. Sometimes they are frumpy and scornful. Once in a while they are yucky and unclean, and still the students must clip, must touch and rub and clean. The students must learn this special tending-to. They greet and seat, offer magazines for clients to read while they are transformed.

When the students don’t have practice clients in for discounted services, they practice on each other. Vivian dyes Nicky’s blonde hair carrot-orange. Nicky says she loves it, although it is brassy and too strong for her delicate coloring. “My boyfriend is just really mean to me when I’m blonde – he’ll like it that I’m a redhead – he’ll probably be nicer,” she says. Jamie leans in close over Nessa’s bare foot – filing at calluses, clipping at cuticles. These students are always primping each other, touching each other’s eyebrows and foreheads and hands and preening at themselves in the vanity mirrors.

Just about every female student at A’ Art College of Beauty has known from childhood that she wanted to be a beautician. Heather is about two-thirds through her program. She has fair skin with a lovely smattering of freckles across her nose and cheekbones that she covers with a layer of bone-white powder. All around her eyes, she smudges crazy shades of shadow – it is the first most interesting thing about Heather. One day it’s grenadine red, the next day it’s turquoise. It depends on what she’s wearing.

The second most interesting thing about Heather is her hair. It is a severe, jet-black bob with a thick fringe of bangs, washed in an eerie red highlight – the red is weird, but gorgeous in an otherworldly sort of way. The bangs are cut higher at the temples and shaped to a point in the center of her forehead. She pulls two long locks over and in front of each ear and smoothes them flat along her jaw line. She teases the back and top so that they are poofy and gnarled all at once. It makes her look like a pretty vampire with a strong wind at her back.