“I don’t like myself with long hair.”
“Then get it cut. It looked good at school.”
“I didn’t think you remembered it,” she says. “Or me.”
“I remember you now.”
Niamh is frowning very deeply at me. If I didn’t know her face always looked like that, I’d back off. Instead I smooth out the other side of her head. Itisnice hair. Thick and glossy, with just enough wave to take a style. My hair is too straight to wear any way other than how I wear it.
“I don’t want to colour it again,” she says. The way someone else might say,“I don’t want to go to prison.”
“Then don’t,” I reply, arranging her hair around her face. “It’s a good colour. Chestnut. With some auburn highlights in the sun. Lots of people dye their hair this colour. You could wear it short and dark . . .” I pull her hair back into a ponytail and hold it so the front poofs out. “You’d look good with a quiff.”
Niamh doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are hard, and her eyebrows are tense.
She’d look very, very good like this. Her face looks severe with her hair scraped back into the bun. But this makes her look . . .fierceinstead. Oh, I suppose Niamh looks fierce no matter what. With that nose. That crushed plum of a mouth. That mean chin. But this takes her from fierce to something else . . . Something very nearly intolerable. She looks like Marlon Brando.
I let her hair fall back down around her face. “You should wear it however you like,” I say. I start walking again.
When we get to the car, I stand by the passenger side, waiting for Niamh to unlock the doors.
“Agatha,” she says, “you drove.”
“Oh . . . right. Right.” I push the unlock button and go around to my side of the car. “I hope you aren’t going to be late.”
“Late for what?”
I get in and wait for her to sit down. “For your thing.” I start the car. “That you had to get back for. In London.”
“Oh . . .”
I look over at her. She looks embarrassed, I think.
“There isn’t a thing,” she says. “I just didn’t want to get stuck hanging out with you and your friends . . . No offence.”
“You can’t just say ‘no offence’ after you say something offensive.”
“It’s nothing against you,” she says. “I just didn’t want to be the third wheel.”
“The third wheel?I’mthe third wheel. I was possibly the third wheel the entire time Simon and I were dating. If anything, you’d be the fourth wheel, Niamh. You’d balance everything out.”
“I didn’t want to crash your reunion . . .”
“There was noreunion,” I say. “We were just . . . herding goats in a friendly manner.”
“I was worried we’d, like, end up at a pub.”
“Heaven forfend.”
Niamh sighs and rubs her forehead. She looks like she’s experiencing a migraine. She hasn’t put her hair back up.
“You don’t like pubs?” I ask.
“Pubs are fine.”
“You don’t like my friends?” (AreSimon and Baz my friends? Now isn’t the time to do the math.)
“I’m sure your friends are fine!” A debilitating migraine. “Look, I’m not trying to offend you, Agatha. I’m just not a . . . people person.”
