Book Lovers(19)

“Do you really have the emotional resilience to leave a checklist unchecked?” she says.

Something in me twitches.

I really do fucking love a checklist.

She pokes me in the ribs. “Come on! Live a little! This will be fun! It’s why we’re here.”

It is decidedly not why I’m here. But the reason I’m here is standing right in front of me, a melodramatic lower lip jutted out, and all I can think about is the month ahead of us, marooned in a town that’s nothing like the one she’s expecting.

And even aside from that, historically, Libby’s crises can be tracked by dramatic changes in appearance. As a kid, she never changed her hair color—Mom made a big deal about how rare and striking Lib’s strawberry blond waves were—but Libby showed up to her own wedding with a pixie cut she hadn’t had the night before. A couple days later, she finally opened up to me about it, admitted she’d had a burst of cold-feet-bordering-on-terror and needed to make another dramatic (though less permanent) decision to work through it.

I personally would’ve gone with a color-coded pro-con list, but to each her own.

The point is, Libby’s clearly reckoning with the arrival of this new baby and what it will mean for her and Brendan’s already strained finances and tight quarters. If I push her to talk about it now, she’ll clam up. But if I ride it out with her, she’ll talk about it when she’s ready. That aching, pulsing space between us will be sealed shut, a phantom limb made whole again.

That’s why I’m here. That’s what I want. Badly enough that I’ll shave my head if that’s what it takes (then order a very expensive wig).

“Okay,” I relent. “Let’s get made over.”

Libby lets out a squeal of happiness and pushes up on her tiptoes to kiss my forehead. “I know exactly what color you’re getting,” she says. “Now turn around, and don’t peek.”

I make a mental note to schedule a hair appointment for the day I fly home to New York.

By the time we return to the cottage that afternoon, the sun is high in the cloudless blue sky, and as we hike the hillside, sweat gathers in every inconvenient place, but Libby chatters along, unbothered. “I’m so curious what color you picked for me,” she says.

“No color,” I reply. “We’re just going to shave your head.”

She squints through the light, her freckled nose wrinkling. “When will you learn that you’re so bad at lying that it’s not worth even trying?”

Inside, she sits me down in a kitchen chair and slathers my hair in dye. Then I do the same, neither of us showing our hand. At the time, I felt so confident in my choice, but seeing how eye-burningly vibrant the color looks caked over her head, I’m less sure.

Once our timers are set, Libby starts on brunch.

She’s been a vegetarian since she was little, and after Mom died, I became one too, by default. Financially, it didn’t make sense to buy two different versions of everything. Also, meat’s expensive. From a purely mathematical standpoint, vegetarianism made sense for two newly orphaned girls of twenty and sixteen.

Even after Libby moved in with Brendan, it stuck. During her aspiring-chef phase, she won him over to a plant-based diet. So while it’s tempeh frying in the pan beside the eggs she’s scrambling for us, it smells like bacon. Or at least enough like bacon to appeal to someone who hasn’t had the real thing in ten years.

When the timer goes off, Libby shoos me off to rinse, warning me not to look in the mirror “or else.”

Because I’m so bad at lying, I follow her orders, then take over the job of transferring brunch into the oven to keep warm while she rinses her dye.

With her hair wrapped in a towel, she takes me onto the deck to trim mine. Every few seconds, she makes an inauspicious “huh” sound.

“Really instilling confidence in me, Libby,” I say.

She snips some more at the front of my face. “It’s going to be fine.”

It sounds a little too much like she’s giving herself a pep talk for my liking. After I’ve chopped her hair into a long bob—most of it air-dried by now—we go inside for the big reveal.

After matching deep breaths, preparing our egos for a humbling, we step in front of the bathroom mirror together and take it in.

She’s given me feathery bangs somewhere between fringe and curtain, and somehow they make the ash-brown color read more Laurel Canyon free spirit than dirty dishwater.

“You really are sickeningly good at everything, you know that, right?” I say.

Libby doesn’t reply, and when my gaze cuts toward hers, a weight plummets through me. She’s staring at the reflection of her Pepto-Bismol-pink waves with tears welling in her eyes.

Shit. A huge and obvious misfire. Libby may generally favor a bold look, but I forgot to factor in how pregnancy tends to affect her self-image.

“It’ll start rinsing out in a few washes!” I say. “Or we can go back to the store and get a different color? Or find a good salon in Asheville—my treat. Really, this is an easy fix, Lib.”

The tears are reaching their breaking point now, ready to fall.

“I just remembered you begging Mom to let you get pink hair when you were in ninth grade,” I go on. “Remember? She wouldn’t let you, and you went on that hunger strike until she said you could do dip-dye?”