It was beautiful, and it had to go.
Ceri didn’t have any scissors, but she guessed where she could find some: in a supply closet she’d passed on her way back in the night before. She dodged the parents and students juggling bags, trunks, and the occasional animal carrier and retrieved the scissors, along with a few spare notebooks and pens for good measure.
Back at the looking glass, she pinched the hair into a neat row with one hand as she held the scissors in the other.
How hard could it be?
She didn’t think, she just cut.
A huge chunk of silver fell apart into strands and came to rest in the sink below.
She let out a high-pitched giggle, looking at the chunk that was shorter than the rest. It felt insane.
It felt good.
She kept cutting, chunk after chunk until the sink was littered with silver. Finally, she’d gotten all of it.
Her hair was just to the bottom of her neck, every strand seemingly a different length than the one next to it.
She screamed.
“Oh my Gods!” came a voice from the bedroom. “Are you okay?”
Ceri was so shaken by her ridiculous mistake that she had not heard someone come into the room. That someone, as Ceri saw when she rushed into the bathroom, joining Ceri in front of the looking glass, was a Halfling. (Only the very top of her pink bun was visible.)
Ceri’s new roommate.
“Oh, you’ve really gone and messed it up,” said the Halfling.
“Pardon?” said Ceri. She looked down at the girl, shocked to be spoken to in that way.
From her accent, the girl clearly wasn’t from Loegria, although there was nothing obviously foreign about her appearance. She was of fairy ancestry judging by her shell pink hair, and her other parent was likely human, judging by her full lips and soft jawline. There was a softness to her in general, in everything except her voice.
“Your hair,” said the Halfling. “Where is he?”
“Who?” Ceri was baffled by this girl.
“The guy that hurt you badly enough to make you screw yourself up like this. I know he exists. Or she, I guess, but probably he if we’re being honest. Hang on, let me get my stool. I’m Polliana, by the way. You can call me Ana.”
Well, Ana was right about one thing: there was a “guy.”
Ana carried a short stepping stool into the bathroom and set behind Ceri. “That’s better,” she said once she climbed on top. Now her entire face was visible in the looking glass.
“How did you know—”
“That it was a guy? It’s always a guy,” said Ana. Then she held out her hand. “Scissors.”
Ceri wasn’t sure if this was a good idea. The hair needed to be longer, not shorter. There was magic for that, but to maintain it day in and day out until her hair grew back on its own? Ceri had never tried to keep magic going for that long.
“Scissors,” repeated Ana. “Unless your mother is a hairdresser as well. But judging by the tears in your eyes, I think that’s unlikely.”
“Alright,” said Ceri. “But don’t take too much.”
“Go back in time and tell that to yourself from five minutes ago,” said Ana. “Still, I’ve seen worse. We can work with it.”
Ceri watched as Ana gripped sections of hair, carving into the bottoms of them in a way that looked entirely too chaotic to produce a good result.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” asked Ceri. “Shouldn’t you be trying to cut it straighter across than I managed, not less straight?”
