Page 70 of Late Bloomer
Her eyebrows lift. “What do you mean?”
“With the farm. And the competition. Everything. You’re terrified of trying. I want to understand why.”
“You don’t know me,” she spits, face twisting in anger. She holds my gaze for a moment longer, then drops her eyes.
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t know me,” she repeats, face stony and stare fixed out the windshield. “And what I do is none of yourdamn business. You don’t get to spend a few weeks with me and pretend like you care. Like you want to fix me. I’m not broken.”
A fist of guilt clenches around my gut, and I wish I could take every word back, erase the past few minutes. “I never said you are. That’s not what I meant. I—”
“Why don’t you focus on your shoes and your bags and your mountain of antique crap and stop trying to psychoanalyze me, okay? We don’t mean anything to each other so let’s not pretend.”
Pepper undoes her seat belt, tumbling out of the car and storming into the house. The bang of the door as she slams it behind her echoes around me.
And I stay sitting in my shitty car with my shitty stuff and my shittier mouth, regret pulling me down from the inside out.
Chapter 24OPAL
I can tell I’m in a bad mental place because, instead of making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror this morning, I grab a pair of scissors.
And proceed to annihilate any remaining shreds of dignity I have left.
I let out a groan of regret as the last broken clump of hair falls.
Okay. This is fine. This is so fine. I can be a person who pulls off bangs. Just because the past ten years of experimenting with them have ended in a mad spiral of self-loathing doesn’t mean this time will be a problem.
With a shaky breath, I evaluate the damage.
It’s… it’s pretty bad. I can’t say it’s necessarily worse than White-Hair-Gate, but the fact that both are existing at the same moment has a rather horrifying effect.
I was aiming for a shaggy fringe look but went too short,and the fried strands are stick straight and standing forward like they’re held up with static from a balloon.
Okay. Again, totally fine. I can fix this. Maybe a color change will help… I don’t know, round out this disaster of a look? I clomp to my room, digging through my boxes of dyes.
Because I learn from my mistakes, thank you very much, I grab a tub of Lime Crimetemporaryhair dye, which apparently won’t damage my hair any further. Small mercies. I skim the directions, then glob it on, setting a timer for half an hour. I slump on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall, entering the worst mental place in the world: alone time with my thoughts.
Guilt chews me up, gnawing at my soft heart and hard head. I hate myself for being so mean to Pepper last night. Honestly, who am I to call someone wishy-washy? It takes me at least nine hours to decide on something to stream on Netflix.
I just… I want this thing with Pepper towork. I want to team up on this competition and show her I can do it. I want to live with her without driving her to an early grave. I want to be her…
I want to be her friend.
But like with everything else in my life, I overreacted. I latched onto an idea like a raccoon digging through trash and became rabid when even the smallest thing challenged it. And now I’m sitting here with fucked bangs and swollen eyes from crying in frustration all night, hating everything.
I wish I could lose myself in a distraction (other than my hair), but my brain is spinning and twirling and leaping from thought to thought, leaving me a queasy mess as I fail to keepup. I tried sketching last night and painting this morning, but my hands won’t work, won’t translate any of the feelings eating me whole into art, my mind wandering far and wide.
The harsh trill of my alarm cuts through my dissociation, and I stare at my phone for another minute before shoring up the energy to turn it off. With a sigh, I trudge back to the bathroom and rinse out my hair.
After drying it, I give it another look.
It’s not much better. I was hoping for a Sailor Neptune vibe but ended up a mix between Cosmo fromThe Fairly OddParentsand Greta the Gremlin.
Cute.
With a defeated sigh, I flick off the lights in the bathroom and head back to my room. I stare at my messy bed in the doorway for a while, tempted to fall face-first on the mattress, pull my sheets over my head, and lie there in my stale stench of self-pity until the cloud clears. Or until the next cloud replaces it.
Actually, what I’d rather do is drive to the store, buy a box of wine, and drink straight from the spigot while I lie in bed until my thoughts are fuzzy and ticklish and my tongue is heavy and unusable. The idea is a delicious itch, a vibrant need that permeates through my skin to grate against bone. It’s the overwhelming, teeth-gritting confusion of wanting both stimulation and numbness, any source of oblivion that makes it easier to exist in my head. The need to flee my own unbearable thoughts, mute every feeling trying to bubble through me. Because it’s all so sharp and real, and numbness is much easier to deal with.
