Page 8 of Persephone's Curse
She smiled. “No, you can keep it. It looks better on you. With your hair.”
We had the exact same hair. The exact same shade of brown. The exact same curl on the left side. Just one single curl in a whole head of hair. She touched mine now, and I touched hers. Inverted mirror images. Long and tumbling down our backs.
“I know,” she said. “I know exactly what we’re going to do.”
When we got home, three hours later, Evelyn was standing on the stairs holding a mug of tea she’d been bringing up to her room. When she saw us come in, her jaw dropped down to her chest.
“Holyshit,” she said.
“I donated it to kids with cancer,” Bernadette replied proudly. She gave a little twirl. Even though I’d been there when it had all come off, I still couldn’t really believe it was gone. A messy, short pixie cut was all that remained. Her black eye was shiny and raw and still swollen mostly shut. She’d put the leather jacket back on for our walk from the hair salon, and I didn’t think she’d ever looked cooler than she had in that moment.
Then Dad came around the corner holding a bag of recycling and he actually dropped it when he saw her.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can do this. I can handle this.”
“Dad,”Evelyn said.
“It looks. Very. Lovely,” he said.
“Thanks,” Bernadette said.
“Bernadette, it really looks so nice,” Evie said.
“I love it,” I said.
“I love it,” Bernadette repeated.
But then the faucet opened up again, and she was crying so suddenly that I didn’t even have time to react before Dad folded her up in his arms.
“Go upstairs, girls,” he said to Evie and me.
He didn’t have to tell us twice.
“What were you thinking?” Evie hissed to me when we reached the second-floor landing.
“What wasIthinking? I didn’t do anything!”
“That’s exactly my point,” she said.
“What was I supposed to do? She said she wanted a haircut.”
“This has nothing to do with hair,” Evie said when we reached the third floor. She paused there, waiting to see if I would go into my room or come up to the attic with her. We sometimes still called it that. A ghost in the attic sounded cooler than a ghost on the fourth floor.
“If this has nothing to do with hair, why are you upset with me?” I asked.
“You were supposed to go to the museum,” she complained, and I followed her upstairs. “You weren’t supposed to facilitate any major life decisions.”
Clara was at her easel and Henry was sitting on the love seat we’d brought up a few summers ago when Mom and Dad had replaced the ground-floor living room set.
“What major life decision did she facilitate?” Clara asked, not turning around from her easel. Henry was mostly transparent and kept winking out altogether. He was much better at manifesting at nighttime, and I was surprised to see him at all, except I knew how much he liked to watch Clara paint. They’d always had a bit of a special bond because he’d been there when she was born. (The rest of us had been born at the hospital and Henry had met us only a day or two later; I’m sure Clara had been very exciting for him.)
“Bernadette cut off all her hair,” Evelyn said. She wasn’t looking at me, for some reason I honestly couldn’t understand, and she was pacing back and forth now, fuming.
“Really?” Clara said. “Huh. I didn’t see that coming.”
“She looks beautiful,” I offered.
“Of course she looks beautiful.”
