Page 21 of Every Step She Takes

Sadie’s fingers tangle themselves into her ponytail again as everyone shares hair stories, until Rebecca sets down her glass of Vinho Verde with a pointed thunk.

“I’m as gay as Dolly in ‘Jolene,’ but I’ll be damned if I ever fuck up my hair on purpose.

” She pets her blond halo like a starlet in an old movie.

Everyone laughs, and Sadie finally releases her hair shackles.

“See?” I tell her gently. “A rite of passage.”

“Why would Sadie care about queer rites of passage?” Ro asks. “She’s straight.”

Ro has all the subtlety of an acme anvil falling on the roadrunner, and when I glance up at Sadie again, I expect to find her hair strangling her wrists.

But she’s holding her fork instead as she saws off a piece of sandwich and dangles the bite in front of her mouth.

I wait for the panic to return to her expression, wait for her to blush or fluster or slink away to the bathroom to hide.

But Sadie doesn’t do any of those things. She looks at Ro and conjures their casual shrug from before. “I’m thinking about fucking up my hair.”

“I can’t do this.”

Sadie clutches the starched towel draped across her shoulders like a smock and looks up at me with the full weight of her terrified eyes.

“You can totally do this.” I slice the scissors open and closed a few times, trying to pump her up, but the gesture looks more menacing than intended, especially because they’re a cheap pair of kitchen scissors we found at the Foinz.

She winces at the two shiny blades. “But what if I don’t want to do this?”

I pocket the scissors like a cowboy holstering his gun. “You absolutely do not have to do anything you don’t want to do,” I tell her, emphasizing each word so she knows I mean it.

“Yes, you fucking do!” Ari shouts from the other room. She’s sitting on my bed with a bottle of Quinta Costa she’s sharing with Vera. The hostel bathroom isn’t big enough for anyone but me and Sadie, but a small crew insisted on joining us.

“You don’t,” I say again. Sadie looks up at me from her makeshift salon chair, also known as the toilet. “If you don’t want to cut off your hair, you don’t have to.”

“But it’s a queer rite of passage,” she mumbles.

“There isn’t one single right way to be queer.”

Sadie arches her head so she can glimpse her silky hair in the mirror above the sink. One hand releases the towel so she can stroke her fingers from crown to tip, admiring the strands that luxuriate all around her. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asks, tilting her chin at her reflection.

It’s so fucking pretty. “Uh-huh.”

She shakes out her hair, and it swishes around her in mesmerizing waves. “Everyone loves my hair,” she says, more to her reflection than to me. “It’s always the first thing people notice about me.”

“But do you love your hair?”

“Yes,” she says to the woman in the mirror. “But also, it’s so hot when we’re walking, and it’s so thick and heavy, it’s giving me a headache to wear it up.”

“Do you want to know what I think?”

She finally pulls her gaze away from her reflection and stares up at me with those terrified eyes.

“If your favorite thing about your hair is that other people think it’s pretty, I say… let’s fuck it up.” I snip the scissors in her face once more, and her trance breaks.

She steals one last glance at her reflection, then faces me, resolute. “Okay, yes. Let’s fuck it up.”

“Hell yes!” Ari shouts from the other room.

“Finally,” Stefano grunts. He’s in the middle of a Vinyasa flow on the weathered hardwood floors of our Esposende hostel, and for an age-ambiguous man somewhere between forty and sixty, he’s shockingly limber as he moves from plank to cobra.

Sadie repositions the towel around her shoulders, and I carefully take a strand of her silky hair between my fingers.

“Are you sure you can do this?” Sadie squeaks at me.

“I’ve been cutting my own hair for twenty years.”

“That is not reassuring.”

She tenses as I flip her hair at the ends and ready the scissors.

From this close, it’s easy to see the twitch of her jaw muscles and the small lines around her pursed mouth.

I’m so close, in fact, that I can count her individual freckles; I can feel her nervous, shallow breaths; I smell her lingering shampoo after her post-Camino shower. It smells like wildflowers.

I’m so close to her, I can see her blush spreading down the column of her throat, and I feel a little dizzy, knowing that blush is because of me.

I clear my throat. Without further ado, I lob off a long chunk of her hair. We both watch in a mixture of horror and fascination as the red strands fall to the linoleum.

“Do we like it?” Sadie asks for the dozenth time.

She keeps reaching up to her shoulders to grab the invisible strands of her memory.

The gorgeous, thick hair that ran down her back is gone, replaced by a choppy bob that sits about two inches above her pale shoulders.

I also gave her feathery bangs that sweep across her blue-green eyes and then frame her face on the sides.

It somehow makes her look both younger and older, with her cute, rounded cheeks and her staggering curves no longer hidden behind a curtain of her hair.

“We love it,” Ari croons.

Vera also nods emphatically. “We really really love it.”

Stefano rattles off a few words of rapid-fire Italian. I only understand about half of it, but from his tone, it sounds complimentary.

Sadie can’t stop reaching for what isn’t there. “It’s not too short?”

“If you keep searching for approval, you’re going to give me a complex,” I tell her as she ruffles her new bangs. “I think I did a damn good job.”

“You did. Of course you did,” Sadie rushes, “but I’ve just never… it’s so short .”

It’s not that short, but it was easily eighteen inches of Sadie that we left on the bathroom floor, so it makes sense that she’s going to need time to adjust. I know she doesn’t regret it, because when Inez knocks on the door and everyone is distracted by letting her in, I catch Sadie stroking her new hair and smiling to herself.

It’s not her awkward smile, or her apologetic smile.

It’s the smile she gives the blue sky and the sunshine when no one else is watching.

“Who ordered the ham and Swiss?” Inez asks from the doorway, and Vera’s hand shoots up. After our heavy lunch and a long day in the sun, no one felt like going out to dinner, so Ro helped Inez collect sandwich orders, and now they’re helping her pass them out to their correct owners.

“Sardine sandwich, right here!” I hold up my hand, and Ro holds my sandwich like a football and launches it across the hotel room with a perfect spiral.

“ Meu Deus! ” Inez shouts once all the sandwiches are divvied up. She claps her hand to her mouth as she stares at Sadie. “Your hair! It looks amazing!”

Sadie’s cheeks explode in fiery splotches. I guess I’m not the only one who can make her blush like that.

She reaches up for nothing, and then lets her limp arm fall. “Uh, thank you, Inez. Mal did it.”

Inez’s eyes shift over to me on the floor, and I can already hear the lecture that will be coming my way tomorrow. “Enjoy your dinner,” Inez says, turning toward the door.

“Stay!” Vera calls out. “Stay! Stay! Ro, you too! Eat floor sandwiches with us!”

And that’s how we all end up sitting on the floor of the hostel room eating subpar sandwiches. Rebecca joins after her shower, hobbling into the room with a towel wrapped around her hair. “My blisters have blisters,” she cries out, and Sadie passes her a pillow to sit on.

Everyone is either punch-drunk from the exhaustion of the last three days, or drunk -drunk from the extra bottles of wine that somehow materialize.

Stefano tells a story about getting travelers’ diarrhea on the twenty-fifth mile of an Ironman race in Ecuador, including a very vivid and hilarious reenactment of what took place behind an unsuspecting tienda.

Inez tells stories about the best and the absolute worst tour groups she’s taken on the Camino.

Then Rebecca has everyone howling as she describes the social politics of her HOA, and Ari tells stories about working as a barista in Portland, which are honestly more horrifying than Stefano’s desecration of that Ecuadorian tienda.

And it’s a nice night. Inez goes to bed first, and then Ro offers Rebecca an arm to help her up off the floor.

It’s a surprisingly sweet gesture from such an unrelenting curmudgeon.

They say goodnight, and one by one, the group winnows.

When Ari saunters out after kissing me on the cheeks eight times as a goodbye, it’s just Sadie and me.

She’s quiet and withdrawn, the way she always seems to be after the whole group has been together.

I putter around for a minute, cleaning up food wrappers and rogue bits of hair from the floor.

When she’s still quiet after all that, I gently nudge her.

“What are you thinking about, Freckles? Profoundly regretting the haircut?”

Her hand reaches for invisible hair, but she shakes her head. “No, no. I was… I was thinking about my geometry teacher, actually.”

I snap my fingers. “She was a smoking-hot dyke! I knew it !”

Her lips crack into a smile, but then she’s chomping on her upper lip again. “I honestly don’t know…”

I sit down on the edge of my bed across from her and wait for her to say more.

“Her name was Mrs. Daniels,” she continues after a long, heavy silence.

“She had this black-and-gray, helmet-shaped mullet, and all the boys in our class used to make fun of her. It took me a while to understand why they made fun of her, because she was such a good teacher, perfectly nice, sometimes even funny.”

Sadie draws her legs up beneath her, staring at some fixed point on the wall. “Back in ninth grade, I didn’t know the stereotype. I-I didn’t know that having a mullet made you a lesbian, but I quickly learned that being a lesbian made you a joke.”