Chapter Five The Haircut Spell

When we’re at Babs’s, her mum is asleep anyway. Her bedroom door is shut, and some kind of power is radiating out from it, though I don’t know now if it’s my imagination because Babs told me she is a witch, or if it’s from something else.

Babs shows me her mum’s library of magic books. ‘She’s got heaps of stuff. If you ever want to borrow something, you can ask her.’

‘Wow.’ I look at all the titles. There are books about the moon, dreams and palmistry, and lots about herbs and cooking. There are some books on crystals, too.

We make dinner out of a few leftovers in the fridge, watch another movie, and end up doing our homework. I’m in the higher maths class than Babs, so I help her out.

‘Babs . . . do you think a haircut would count as a spell?’

Babs takes my hair, not a handful, not a tiny bit. Somewhere in between. Her breath is warm on my skin, rushing past the hairs on my neck, sweeping over my shoulder blades.

‘How much?’ she asks. Her voice is closer than it has ever been, somehow. Closer than when she leans into my ear to whisper something in class, closer than when we’re hugging and say goodbye. These words are so close they heat every part of me in a way I don’t understand, and it scares me a little.

‘All of it.’

Like a plant, it’ll grow back stronger, bushier, quicker, if you cut it at the right time.

I don’t know if I want it to grow back.

She takes another curl in her hand, lets it fall through her fingers like water, like sand. ‘Are we talking a pixie cut or stubble?’

‘Stubble.’

I need it gone, and right now she’s the only one who can give me what I want. She’ll do it right, I know.

‘I’m going to cut it off so it’s short and then shave it, is that okay?’

I swallow, and I want to stop, to take it all back. I can keep the length and I can keep hating it. Nothing needs to change. But I say, ‘That’s okay.’

She keeps her hands on my hair for just a moment, and then she lets me go. A pang of loss in my ribcage blossoms into something else when she touches me again, sparks flying up to my throat. ‘Okay,’ she says, breathy. ‘Let’s go.’

She begins at the bottom of my head where it starts to become my neck. The scissors are so close to my skin, there’s a scrape against my head a couple of times, but she never hurts me. When she’s near my ear, she cups the soft skin to make sure she doesn’t cut anything by accident. In the mirror, her brow is furrowed in concentration. She’s not looking at me, and I think if she did right now, well, I don’t know what I would feel. She is taking parts of my body away; I asked her to. It’s strange when I think of it that way.

Half my hair is gone; I’m lopsided, I’m uneven. It feels right, I feel more of myself. My eyes fill with tears.

‘You okay?’ she asks.

A tear slips out, barely brushing my cheek before it falls onto my arm. ‘Yeah,’ I say. She grips my shoulder and I put my hand on hers, just holding. She’s got bits of my hair on her fingers and they get everywhere, some falling onto my arm where the tear fell. There is no going back. ‘Please keep going.’

‘You sure?’

‘All or nothing, right?’

It’s like some part of me is dying. There’s loss, but something new’s going to emerge. Tiny bright-green shoots.

She smiles at me in the mirror. ‘Right.’

I let her hand go and she continues, maybe a bit slower.

All the length is gone soon, an age later – it’s been minutes but it’s been years. The centimetres left behind are uneven and ugly, short and long, and I love them.

She turns on the clippers and brings them closer; I can feel the vibrations in my bones.

‘Wait,’ I say as I turn to face her, properly face her.

She turns off the clippers but otherwise doesn’t move.

‘I want to keep it like this. I love it.’

She smiles again and puts down the clippers. ‘You look great.’

I want to be seen. I want to be recognised. I feel like she’s given me that.

‘Want a shower?’ she asks. ‘I can give you a fresh shirt that’s not covered in hair.’

‘Yes, please.’

She gives me a shirt that says This must be my dream, a towel, a face washer. She shows me how to work her shower and then leaves me alone in the bathroom, standing in the warmth of the light. It’s an old room; some of the wood has rotted away near the base of the shower from time and too much water. Ours is the same.

When I undress, my hair that was caught in my clothes falls to the floor. Pieces of me not mine anymore.

The water cleans me, warms me. When I dry myself off I sweep up the slivers of hair with my hands and put them into the bin with the toilet rolls and the tissues and the cotton balls. All waste, now. I step into her clothes and they’re soft, slightly bigger than my own.

My hair’s now a little jagged, strange, but it shows off the bones in my face. Without the frame of soft curls, my features look squarer. More like myself.

Babs is sitting on her bed, reading. ‘Did you want to stay up for a bit?’

‘Not really. But you keep reading, it’s okay.’

She swivels around and gets under the sheets; I curl up beside her, my head resting on her hip. She reads out loud now, without me asking, tales of trees and magical lands, and I fall asleep as she moves her hand across my new hair, her fingers gentle and warm.