‘White?’ said Ferdie when she told him. He shuddered dramatically. ‘No, hon. The eighties called and it wants its look back.’
Ferdie was a breath of fresh air in Trinity’s life.
‘Never colour your hair, darling,’ he told her that first day, his expert hairdresser’s hands zhuzhing it so that it fluffed up around her face. ‘It’s almost impossible to get that natural shade.’
They’d been in his apartment and she’d looked at herself in his big mirror, trying to see the long auburn waves through his eyes. She was very pale, never tanned and freckled like her poor mother – Aunt Dara always said ‘your poor mother’ and somehow, Trinity had got into doing it too – but now, with her hair all wild and her green eyes outlined in Ferdie’s gold eyeliner, she looked like a maenad from a fantasy book illustration. She liked it, liked the slightly unusual look because, for so many years, Trinity had been a straight-A student, the girl most likely to succeed. Now that she had come spectacularly off the rails, it made sense to change her look.
She was sorry she wasn’t getting to say bye to Ferdie, but she knew she’d see him again. They were twin souls, she felt. Pete, on the other hand, was a different matter. Maybe she would do something to his precious guitar, after all. She skipped downstairs after dropping off her box, took the last of the chocolate – two full packs of Lindt white chocolate, her favourite – from the cupboard and found a felt-tip pen. Then, when she’d left the message, she headed off into the afternoon.
There were no buses to Dublin right now, but she’d hitch. Everyone said hitching was insanely dangerous. But then, moving hundreds of miles from home to be with your childhood sweetheart was not supposed to be insane and look at how well that had turned out. Therefore hitchhiking was possibly wildly sensible. If anyone tried to attack her, she’d stab them with the Orlando bottle opener. Correction: stab and twist. She practised the movement as she walked down the tiny path of the apartment block.
Yup, she could do it.
Hurt me at your peril, she thought, and pulled her woolly hat down on her head. It was cold but she was undaunted.
Hello, New Life. Goodbye, Old One.
They spotted the girl as she walked along the Dublin Road just outside Boyle, rucksack on her small frame, one hand stretched out with a thumb up.
‘Is that girl—’ began Lou.
‘—hitching,’ finished Toni. ‘Yeah. She must be mad.’
‘It’s not safe to hitch anymore.’
‘Don’t think it ever was,’ Toni agreed.
Without thinking about it, she began slowing the car down.
‘We should pick her up,’ Lou said. ‘Imagine if it was Emily.’
‘Emily would never be daft enough to hitch on a country road,’ sighed Toni, and stopped the car.
The girl ran towards the car and arrived panting at the passenger window. Her rucksack was nearly as big as she was. She was in her twenties, a sprite of a thing in jeans and a puffa jacket, with freckles, red hair in two plaits and a grey woollen hat pulled down on her head. She beamed at them as if they were her very own personal angels sent to keep her safe.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Toni.
‘Away from Boyle,’ said the girl.
‘More specifically?’ Toni continued, her voice sharp. She had no time for this right now.
‘Where are you?’ the girl said, still beaming.
‘Dublin.’
‘Can I come?’ said the girl.
In reply, Toni flicked the switch to unlock the back door.
‘You’re lucky we came along,’ she said as the girl got in. ‘You have no idea what sort of weirdos are out there.’
‘Oh I do,’ said the girl eagerly. ‘I totally know but today has been unexpectedly strange, so I thought I’d risk it. The safe people have turned cray cray, so I thought it was probably fine to hitch. ’Cos like, opposites, you know.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Toni, still disapproving. ‘Hitching is not safe.’
‘But you found me!’
Lou smiled slightly. Toni was expecting this to be a teachable moment, but the girl was on a different wavelength.
