Page 13 of Songbird: Black Kite
I am too.
Your fan,
Wren
Chapter nine
Wren
Nineteen Years Ago
“Areyousureyouwant to do this?” Sabrina asked, eyeing me warily in the mirror. “Your dad’s gonna shit a brick.”
I snorted. My dad could go fuck himself.
“Not like he’s going to notice, Bri,” I said, passing her the trimmer. “Besides, I’m only doing the bottom half. As long as I don’t tie it up too high, he’ll never even realize it’s shaved.”
He’d have to be awake to notice anything, and that wasn’t happening much these days.
Ever since the strike, things had been total shit. Dad and two of the other striking workers had tried to show Craig McQueen they meant business by sneaking onto his property and throwing Molotov cocktails through the windows of his family home. There’d been extensive damage and one of the housemaids had been burned pretty badly on her arm.
They had all been arrested, but not before some of the McQueen security guys had caught up to them, working Dad and his friends over real good with their boots and their fists.
Dad had been given a three-year suspended sentence and a crushed vertebrae in his back for his troubles.
He rarely got off the couch anymore.
Shortly after the fire, Mr. McQueen decided the strike was no longer amusing, and he shut the whole mill down, laying off all the employees and selling whatever was left.
Since then, the town had been slowly dying. With more than half the men out of work, it fell to the women to pick up the slack, and my house had been no different. Mom had to take on not one, but two jobs to try to match what dad had been bringing in, and when even that wasn’t enough, I started picking up shifts at Burger Barn. I didn’t make a ton of money, but it was enough to help with the groceries.
And sometimes Dad’s beer.
All of that would have been bad enough, but there was one other thing that was making my life extra miserable these days. Because one of those jobs my mom had been working for the last year or so?
Yeah, it was as the newest McQueen family housekeeper.
There just weren’t enough dirty words in the English language to describe how much I hated the fact that my mother spent her days cleaning Denise McQueen’s toilets.
Or that my father refused to do anything to stop it.
So, yeah. My dad could go fuck himself.
“Just do it, Bri,” I said decisively, and she nodded, taking me at my word.
That was why she was my best friend; that girl was ride or die.
Starting behind one ear, Sabrina slowly dragged the electric trimmer along my scalp, carving a path through my hair that there was no going back from. I watched, staring at her in the mirror over the bathroom sink as she finished on that side and then moved around to the other, attempting to create a somewhat symmetrical patch to the first. The buzzing of the trimmer was loud in the otherwise quiet bathroom, the sound bouncing back at us from the half dozen empty stalls, and I closed my eyes, trying to quiet the buzzing in my head.
There was just so much shit. So much that I didn’t want to be dealing with anymore, but simply had no choice but to handle. Like the shopping, the laundry, the cooking, and Jasmine’s homework.
It all fell on my shoulders these days.
Never mind that my own grades were slipping dramatically. It was everything I could do just to keep our heads above water. When my evenings and weekends were plagued with things like making sure the electric bill got paid and there was gas money for the car, how could I possibly think that studying trigonometry was of any real importance?
“Alright,” Sabrina said, silencing the trimmer and stepping back. “What do you think?”
Opening my eyes, I studied my reflection, turning my head one way and then the other, examining the new look I’d decided I wanted. The front was mostly the same, and if I wore my hair down and parted in the middle, no one would really be able to tell anything was any different. Reaching up, I combed my fingers through my hair, dragging it back from my face and exposing the new, bare sections on the sides.
