Page 43

‘Well, I can de-blah you. Un-blah?’

‘Either,’ I said. ‘Both.’ I straightened up and closed my eyes.

If I was being honest with Brooke – and myself – I didn’t have a huge attachment to my hair. It was waist-length these days, because I couldn’t stand the idea of going to a salon and having other people touch me, and an unobtrusive light-brown color people calledmousey. I kept it long because my mom liked it that way, and I’d spent years trying to please her. Having long hair was standard at St. Catherine’s. The other girls didn’t dare cut theirs too short otherwise they’d get accused of being lesbians, even if they were the popular girls.

Heaven forbid.

I didn’t need to conform to that anymore, though. Chances were, I’d never set foot inside St. Catherine’s again, and I was done with letting my mom make decisions about my life.

‘Find something on TV,’ Brooke said.

The TV was ancient, like all the TVs we’d encountered so far, but it was pretty big. I found a channel that was showing back-to-back nineties sitcoms:Friends,The King of Queens,Frasier,The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,Everybody Loves Raymond. I couldn’t remember watching any of the shows, but all the sets seemed familiar, and I knew the characters’ names. Joey. Uncle Phil. Niles.

Brooke hummed as she worked, often coming around to study me from the front. Her eyebrows pinched together in a frown as she concentrated, and I sat still and tried to live up to her expectations.

Having Brooke this close to me, touching my hair, occasionally tipping my head to the side or angling my chin, was almost too much. More than once I decided I couldn’t handle it anymore and put my hands on the seat to push myself off and away from her. Each time, Brooke seemed to catch me before I could move and shushed me gently, pressing down on my shoulders to keep me in place.

I didn’t know how to explain to her that I wasn’t used to this. No one touched me casually or played with my hair or put me under this much intense scrutiny. To have that coming from the girl I thought was really, really pretty had set a fire in my belly that I didn’t know how to put out.

‘Have you ever been to New York?’ I asked, to distract both of us, as the show switched to a wide shot of Central Park in the fall.

‘Hmm? Yeah. Have you?’

‘No.’

‘New York is a hell of a diversion, Mouse.’

‘I didn’t mean we should go. I was just curious.’

‘We could. We’d just turn left instead of right at St. Louis.’

‘But then we’d miss Nashville.’

‘You want to go to Nashville?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’ A lot.

The reason why was embarrassing.

After my dad left, while it was still me and my mom on our own, she worked a lot. Mostly waitressing, mostly in diners. For a while she had a job in an Italian restaurant, but the owner kept making a move on her, so she quit. The one diner where she worked for the longest was called the 4th Street Diner in a small town in Idaho. It was themed like Nashville, and was famous for fried chicken. I remembered it well because I went there every day after school to sit in one of the booths at the back, or at the bar if it was busy, and either did my homework or colored while my mom worked.

The owner was an older guy, Sam, who had a huge white beard like Santa Claus and an equally huge round belly. He seemed to like me, or at least he tolerated my presence. Sam worked in the kitchen, fiercely guarding his fried chicken recipe and churning out pancakes and eggs and burgers and waffles for the families and truckers and high-school kids who were always coming and going.

When I was eight, 4th Street was the most fun place in the whole world. They had an honest-to-God jukebox that played country music classics, and pictures on the walls ofcountry music legends. One of the pictures was a woman carrying a guitar, wearing white cowboy boots and a red dress, and she was the prettiest lady I’d ever seen in my life. Back then I would never have categorized it as a romantic feeling – more like a quiet obsession that made looking at any of the other pictures incredibly difficult – but I guess that’s what it was.

Because of the diner, I’d wanted to go to Nashville more than anywhere else in the world. My mom said no, of course. Nashville might as well have been the moon with how far away it was and how much it would cost to get there.

So, my biggest dream was to go to a place that I’d been introduced to by a cheap diner in Idaho. Not to see the Pyramids in Egypt, or the beaches of Hawaii, or Paris, or Rome, or London. I didn’t dream of the great wide world, because even Nashville, goddamn Nashville, felt like an unobtainable fantasy.

There was no way in hell I could tell Brooke that.

‘Okay, you’re ready for dye,’ Brooke said, startling me out of my memories.

‘Oh, God.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, her voice easy and soothing. ‘I’m practically a professional.’

I’d already seen the outside of the box, so I wasn’t concerned she was secretly going to try to dye my hair bright pink. Though maybe bright pink was the change I needed. But at this point, I was happy to go along with whatever Brooke had in mind.