“Is that good?”
He puts both hands on my hair and then rubs his fingertips in, slow and gentle. “I like it,” he says, still barely touching my scalp.
“You can go harder,” I offer, and yes, I know how it sounds.
He hums, a noise I can barely hear above the water, low and rumbly. “I know.” He digs in a little harder, and I feel my shoulders relax. Then he pauses. “Is it supposed to be turning blue?”
“Yeah, some of the dye washes out every time. Your hands won’t get stained or anything, don’t worry.”
“Right.” He gets back to it. “Is it weird that I forget this isn’t your natural hair color?”
“A little.”
“I can’t picture you with brown hair.”
“Someday I’ll get tired of all the upkeep and grow it out,” I say, eyes closed, head back. Now that he’s not quite so focused on the task at hand, he’s really digging his fingers in, and it’sgreat. “I’m sure you’ll see it eventually.”
Javi doesn’t say anything for a moment, long enough for me to wonder at what I just said, whether it was too much, too fast. Whether I’m assuming something I shouldn’t.
“How long would it take to grow out completely?” he finally asks.
“A year or two? But I still like the blue for now.”
“You change it much?”
“When the mood strikes.” I shrug. “Every couple of months, sometimes. Once a year, sometimes. It was emerald green this time last year.”
“You’ve still got some in there,” he says. “I always thought it made you look like a mermaid.”
“I do like to lure sailors to a watery grave,” I say, and Javi snorts.
“That’s Sirens—get your mythical creatures straight. Mermaids put shells over their tits and look pretty.”
“Oh, that’swaymore doable than luring someone,” I say, and now Javi’s gently rinsing my hair out. I hope he uses conditioner, too. This is nice. “I could have shell tits by tomorrow.”
“I could be into that,” he says, and I laugh.
“Here, you can keep this,”Javi says the next morning. He’s on his way out the door, coffee in hand, bag slung over one shoulder, and he presses two keys on a key ring into my hand.“The square one is the downstairs door. The unicorn is this door.”
I blink at them. I’m technically awake, but we were up late last night, so my brain’s not fully online yet.
“That’s a unicorn,” I say of the key with a rainbow-maned unicorn on it. “Wow.”
“All yours.” He kisses me and then leaves.
I takewalks around downtown Sprucevale on my lunch breaks, just to see how it is. By the second day, everyone seems to recognize me. I know it’s the hair, but when the barista at the Mountain Grind says “Hey, welcome back,” I don’t know if it’s welcoming or off-putting. It’s not like Virginia Beach is New York, but it’s a real city, big enough that I’m just one more person instead of a noteworthy newcomer.
“Madeline?” a woman’s voice asks as I’m waiting for my vanilla latte. I turn to see an Asian woman in glasses go from frowning to visibly relieved. “Oh, thank god it’s actually you,” Kat says.
“If I were a different kind of person, I’d pretend I don’t know who you are,” I tell her. She wrinkles her nose but laughs.
“I would probably just leave if you did,” she admits. “Forget the coffee. There’s no coming back from that.”
“That happened to me a couple of years ago and it was pretty awkward,” I say. “I was sort of dating this guy at the time, and I was meeting him somewhere. I saw someone I thought was him and went up and grabbed his hand. Wasn’t him.”
Kat shudders. “I feel awkward about it when I try to open the wrong car door,” she sighs. “Even when there’s no one else around.”
“The guy I wasactuallyseeing witnessed the whole thing and made fun of me all night,” I add.
