Page 15

My jaw dropped. ‘You stole it? Brooke!’

‘ Steal is a strong word. I … acquired a few things, at the expense of one of the wealthiest families in America. It’s not like they can’t afford to share.’

‘You’re not Robin freaking Hood!’

‘Nah, I’m much better-looking.’ She winked. She actually winked at me, and my blood suddenly turned fizzy, and I had no idea how to deal with that. ‘There’s more in the bottom of the bag.’

‘More?’ I groaned. ‘Oh no, Brooke.’

‘I paid for most of it, you know,’ she said, still grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘Just not the expensive stuff.’

She’d picked up three more romance novels for me. All had been marked down, so I couldn’t be mad at her for spending too much, and it was a sweet gesture. I wasn’t used to people doing nice things for me. She must have noticed I had almost finished the last book from the thrift store.

‘I was going to get phones, too,’ she said casually. ‘Since we didn’t end up buying them in Salt Lake. But they were all security-tagged.’

‘You definitely would’ve gotten caught if you’d tried to steal two phones,’ I said, my stomach lurching at the thought.

‘Maybe,’ she said, turning to me and grinning. She was clearly riding an adrenaline high, and I didn’t want to drag her down. Brooke was fun when she was hyped like this.

She left the music playing loud for the quick ride back to the motel, and then we picked up our bags and dragged them to our room.

‘Come on, sit down.’

Brooke pulled the desk chair out into the space between the two beds and wrapped a clean towel around my shoulders.

She combed through my hair with her fingers first, then a comb.

I closed my eyes, not wanting her to see how that made me feel.

I was sure my thoughts about her were written right across my face.

‘Any requests?’ she asked.

‘You know what?’ I said, twisting around to look at her. I didn’t know where the feeling had come from, but suddenly I was so ready for something different. To be something different. ‘Cut it off. Cut it all off. I’m done with it.’

Brooke laughed. ‘We don’t have to cut it all off.’

‘I don’t care. I don’t want to feel blah anymore.’

‘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 called mousey .

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 of country 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.

She moved us into the bathroom so I could sit on the edge of the tub and she didn’t have to bend over to work the color through my hair. My butt hurt from the edge of the porcelain digging in. I took deep breaths and made sure not to complain.

‘It says we should leave it for thirty to forty-five minutes,’ Brooke said.

When I looked around, she was at the sink, stripping off the gloves from the box dye and washing her hands.

‘Okay.’

‘Then you can shampoo it out.’

I nodded, not wanting to say ‘okay’ again. I knew Brooke didn’t like it when I went along with plans instead of giving an opinion, and I was getting better at it, I really was, but right now I felt picked apart and raw with nerves.

‘Come watch TV with me,’ she said, wandering out of the bathroom.

The hair dye smelled so strongly of chemicals that it made my eyes water.

I didn’t want to complain about that, either, or confess that this was the first time someone had dyed my hair.

That was a normal thing, at seventeen, right?

To dye your hair? Or get a nose piercing, or something dramatic to piss off your parents?

My mom seemed pissed off with me most of the time anyway, so normal routes to teenage rebellion felt mostly pointless.

We watched an episode and a half of Friends , then Brooke ushered me into the bathroom again to wash my hair.

‘Shampoo it twice, then condition it.’

‘I know how to wash my hair, Brooke,’ I said lightly.

‘I know you know. Just do what you’re told,’ she said with a laugh.

‘Get out, then,’ I said, already shoving her through the door and pulling it closed.

The water pressure in this particular motel was terrible, the water spluttering out from a well-rusted showerhead. I tried really hard not to think of all the people who had used this shower before me, and how well it had been cleaned in between reservations.

When I was done, I wrapped my hair in a towel and dressed again in pajama pants and a loose T-shirt. Even though I was desperate to wipe the steam off the mirror and look at the results, I had a feeling Brooke might kill me if I tried.

‘Are you finished?’ she yelled through the bathroom door.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m going to blow-dry it for you,’ she said when I opened the door. She was waiting for me, her hands on her hips: business mode.

‘I usually just let it air-dry.’

‘I know you do. But I’m going to dry it so you can see the color.’

Brooke led me back to the chair in the bedroom and ran her fingers through my hair, her fingernails gently picking out the knots and tugging at my scalp.

At every tiny movement I had to fight a shiver.

This time I wasn’t going to run away, though.

I’d decided I liked this, and if Brooke was happy to do it, I was going to let her.

It was a typical falling in love with a straight girl story, one I’d read a hundred times. She was the classic beauty, I was the plainest of boring, plain Janes, and only in the hearts and imaginations of queer teenagers did we end up together.

I was a queer teenager. With a very active heart and imagination. Neither of those things were exactly revelations.

But … I didn’t care. I couldn’t make myself care that it was going nowhere. I didn’t want Brooke to stop touching me, to stop smiling at me or laughing at my bad jokes. Because, actually, she was starting to become my closest friend.

God knew, I needed a friend more than I needed a girlfriend. One who didn’t care about my tragic family situation and my inability to open up to people. I could keep admiring her from afar, and be her friend up close. That worked for me.

I would make it work.

Brooke shut off the hairdryer. ‘Are you ready to look at it?’

‘No,’ I said, suddenly terrified in case it looked bad. How could I tell Brooke I hated it when she’d spent so much time and effort helping me?

She laughed. ‘Well, you have to.’

She tugged me to my feet, then took one of my hands and covered my eyes with the other.

‘This is very unnecessary, you know,’ I muttered.

‘I don’t care.’

We hobbled to the bathroom and Brooke positioned me in front of the mirror. Then she dropped her hands.

I kept my eyes closed.

‘Mouse!’ she laughed. ‘Open your eyes.’

‘No.’

‘Please?’

It was the please that did it.

I opened my eyes.

And watched my face in the mirror as my jaw dropped.

She’d cut off a lot of hair. She had warned me that she was going to do that, but even so …

Brooke had done what she’d promised, creating a sharp edge along my shoulders that looked, well, edgy .

But the color was what threw me, because I wasn’t mousey brown anymore.

She’d cut through all the blah with different shades of golden streaks, not that much lighter than my natural color in some places and brighter around my face.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

I met her eyes in the mirror.

‘Holy shit, Brooke.’

‘Do you hate it?’ She looked genuinely nervous.

‘I don’t hate it. I don’t know … but holy shit.’

She reached up to fuss with the strands of hair falling on my cheek, tucking some of them behind my ear.

Then she rested her chin on my shoulder and looked at me in the mirror.

My heart thudded in my throat, and I wanted to pull away – it was too much, having her this close to me. It was all too much.

It occurred to me then that if I turned my head to the side even the slightest bit, it’d be the perfect angle to kiss her, and my fight or flight mode flared.

‘Mouse … I don’t think I can call you Mouse anymore.’

‘You can call me Jessie,’ I said absently, still distracted by how close she was.

I reached up to run my fingers through my hair, finding it lighter in weight as well as color.

‘Okay, Jessie,’ Brooke said with a smile.

Maybe this was what Jessie looked like.

I could live with that.