Everything I Left Unsaid(42)

“She says he stopped.”

I shook my head.

“Goddamnit,” she whispered.

Tiffany arrived in the doorway of the trailer, holding a bucket aloft. She looked years younger. Radiant, even. And drunk as a skunk. “This one is Bucket-o-Daiquiri.”

“Bring it on,” Bebe said, waving her forward.

“Forgot the chips,” Tiffany said and darted back in.

Bebe grabbed my hand. “Stay,” she said. “Let’s have fun. A lot of fun. For Tiffany. She needs this.”

“Sure,” I said, because I needed it too. The proverbial rug had been yanked out from beneath me and I didn’t know how to process it. Processing Dylan while drunk seemed like a great idea. I had never in my life gotten drunk with girlfriends. I’d never really had girlfriends. This night seemed paramount to me. A matter, quite frankly, of survival.

The slush was now mostly liquid and I took another big swig. Alcohol burned down my throat.

Tiffany came back out with the bucket and the chips and an ice-cream scoop. “Hey, Annie,” she said, sitting down and pointing the ice-cream scoop in my face. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Yeah?” I asked, leaning out of the way. Bebe cracked open the daiquiri bucket and took the ice-cream scoop out of Tiffany’s hand, using it to dish out giant balls of yellow booze.

“What the f*ck happened to your hair?”

—

And that is how I found myself in the kitchen of her trailer (really, those double-wides were so spacious!), a towel around my neck and Tiffany putting peroxide in my hair. She’d already trimmed up my ragged edges and bangs. I felt like I’d had short hair before, but now it seemed…really short. Boy short.

I couldn’t quite work up the sobriety to care.

“It’ll just take some of the black out,” Tiffany said. “So you don’t look so f*cking scary.”

“I look scary?” I asked, and tipped my head back so I could get the last bit of Bucket-o-Daiquiri out of the bottom of my Barbie cup.

“Don’t listen to her!” Bebe warned from the couch. “When I was five she said she was only going to give me bangs and I ended up with a weird sideways Mohawk.”

“Shush,” Tiffany said, in her best stern mom voice. “You’re gonna scare her.”

“I’m not scared,” I said. And I wasn’t. This was all too much fun to be scary.

Tiffany applied the peroxide, which stunk, and Bebe refilled my cup, and all was really quite right with the world.

Until Tiffany touched one of the bruises on my neck. I jerked, thinking it was an accident. But then she touched another one. I opened my eyes only to find her looking down at me. All her pain, every time a fist had touched her skin, bruised her, broke her. It was all right there on her young/old face.

I know you, I thought. I know everything about you.

I reached up and grabbed her hand. “I got away,” I breathed. “I left him. He can’t hurt me anymore.” I don’t know why I said any of that, other than it seemed like the answer to the question she was too scared, maybe, to ask.

Her smile was lopsided. “Good.”

“Anyone want to try Bucket-o-Colada?” Bebe asked.

“Me!” Tiffany and I both said.

Bucket-o-Colada was the best one yet, and Bebe started telling the story of her five-year high school reunion, which apparently included the Prom Queen starting a fight, and we all lost track of time.

“Holy shit, your head!” Tiffany shouted, who the hell knows how much later. She jumped out of her seat and bent me backward over the sink. “Isn’t it burning?”

“I can’t feel anything,” I told her. Which wasn’t true. I was feeling those drinks. I was feeling them hard. The world was actually kind of swimming around me.

I closed my eyes and Tiffany’s fingers worked through my hair. After it was all rinsed out, she towel-dried my hair and then ripped the towel away, yelling, “Ta-da!”

“God love a duck,” Bebe gasped. “You look f*cking fantastic.”

“Not too shabby,” Tiffany said, finger-combing it. “Go check it out in the bathroom.”

I stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom, which was full of little-kid toothbrushes in the shape of whales and bath toys in a bucket by the sink, a little kid’s potty seat on top of the toilet.

God, I thought, touching a ribbon tied to a towel rack with a ton of little barrettes on it. How did she do this? How did she do all this with Phil like an evil shadow over her shoulder?

I glanced up in the mirror and then did a quick double take.

My hair was blond. Like white blond. My eyebrows looked darker, my tan, tanner. And my eyes. Wow. Were those mine? They were huge. And so blue.

What I looked like was totally not myself, and that was all that really mattered.

But I did have to admit it was better than the black. Way better.

I thought of Dylan and my body ached in response. A sharp lightning bolt of feeling—of lust—zapped me, and I wondered what he would think of my hair.

If he would like it.

I tried to shake off the thought, because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be thinking that way about him.

But the thought stayed.

Dylan.

Always Dylan.

“Like Miley f*cking Cyrus,” Bebe said when I came back into the main room. Tiffany was passed out on the couch, her hands tucked under her face.