Page 154 of While I’m Still Here

That shuts me up.

His thumb brushes lightly against my temple. “I'm allowed to hate this for you.” Then he carries on.

By the time Marcus takes the clippers, there isn't much left. That's deliberate. He finishes it because he's the only person in this kitchen who has done this before. Marcus stands behind me and carefully evens everything out, his movements calm and familiar. When I ask if he cried when his own hair went, he tells me yes. When I ask whether he felt ridiculous for being devastated over hair when he had cancer, he tells me yes to that too.

“I thought being grateful for treatment meant I wasn't allowed to hate what treatment was doing to me,” Marcus says quietly as he works. “It took me a while to realise those were two completely different things.”

I watch his reflection.

His hair is thick now. Dark. Properly grown back. There is nothing about the man standing behind me that tells a stranger he once watched it disappear because chemotherapy was killing cells faster than his body could replace them.

I hadn't thought about that before.

Marcus finishes the final section and switches off the clippers. The silence is immediate. I raise my hand slowly and touch my head. “Oh.”

Bare scalp beneath my palm. Soft in some places, rougher in others. Warm. Smaller somehow. My head feels like a shape I've never touched before.

I stare at myself in the mirror. “I look like a boiled egg.”

Danny crouches beside me. “A very sexy boiled egg.”

The laugh comes out wet and broken and turns into another sob almost immediately. “I fucking hate it.”

Colin takes my hand. Danny wraps an arm carefully around my waist. Marcus rests his palm against my shoulder.

Nobody tells me I look amazing. Nobody tells me bald is beautiful. They just let me hate it. “I don't look like me.”

Marcus's fingers squeeze my shoulder gently. “Not yet.”

I can live with that, then Colin stands.

Before I understand what he's doing, he takes the clippers from the counter and runs them straight through the middle of his own hair.

“COLIN!”

A strip drops onto the floor.

Danny makes a noise of genuine horror. I stare at Colin's head, then at his face, then back at the catastrophic bald stripe he's just carved through himself. “You fucking idiot!” I shout at him.

“Bit late now.”

“Why would you do that?”

Colin looks at my reflection. “Because tomorrow morning, when you look in the mirror and think you look strange, I want you to be able to look at me and think I look fucking worse.”

I laugh so hard I cry again. Danny takes the clippers from him before Colin can make his head any more structurally offensive and finishes the job. Then, apparently deciding one terrible idea deserves another, Danny runs them through his own hair too.

He regrets it immediately. “Oh, fuck.”

I stare at him. “You look like a penis.”

Danny touches his bare head with genuine alarm. “I've made a terrible mistake.”

I'm still laughing when I notice Marcus.

He hasn't joined in.

He stands near the kitchen counter, watching us with one hand resting absently in his hair. Danny holds out the clippers. “Your turn.”