Page 151 of While I’m Still Here

“You didn't fancy me at fourteen.”

“Thank Christ I didn’t. You were really weird back then.”

I laugh again, and when I stop, Colin looks at the loose hair around my shoulders. “When?”

I swallow. “Today.”

He nods. “Today.”

I squeeze his hand. “Will you do it?”

Colin goes very still. His eyes move to my hair, then back to me. “If you want me to.”

“I don't think I can.”

“Then I'll do it,” he promises.

My throat closes. “Okay.”

Danny arrives forty minutes later carrying coffee and an emergency bag of pastries because Colin apparently messaged the group chat. Marcus arrives seven minutes after him with clippers.

Of course he fucking does.

I am sitting cross-legged on the sofa when the door opens, and Marcus walks in carrying a small black case. Danny, already sitting beside me with one arm stretched across the back of the sofa, looks at the case. “Please tell me that's not what I think it is.”

Marcus closes the door behind him. “Clippers.”

Danny's expression changes and any he joke he was about to make disappears. “Right.”

Marcus looks at me. “You sure?”

I nod. “Yes.”

Marcus doesn't ask me again. He doesn't check whether I'm certain or remind me I can wait, because we’ve already had that conversation and he knows me well enough now to understand that asking twice will only give me another chance to get frightened. Instead, he crosses the living room and puts the small black case on the coffee table with a quiet click.

I stare at it.

It's ridiculous how much difference that makes.

Marcus arriving with the clippers was one thing. The clippers actually sitting on my coffee table is another. Until now, shaving my head has existed as an idea, something I decided in the bathroom this morning while standing with handfuls of my own hair coming loose between my fingers. Now there's a case on my coffee table, an old towel waiting in the kitchen, a bin bag Colin found beneath the sink, and one of my dining chairs pulled into the middle of the tiled floor because apparently we're doing this somewhere we can sweep up afterwards.

My hair is coming off.

Today.

I reach up without thinking and touch it again, running my fingers carefully over the side of my head. I don't pull this time. I've done enough of that today. Strands are already on my jumper, more upstairs on my pillow, and far too many sitting in the bathroom bin because I kept testing it long after I knew exactly what was happening. Some stubborn part of me apparently believed the fifteenth handful might produce a different result from the first fourteen.

It didn't.

Danny's arm is still stretched along the back of the sofa behind me, close enough that I can feel his warmth without actually being held, and I look from him to Marcus before glancing toward the kitchen, where Colin is making tea.

“This feels dramatic.”

Danny turns his head towards me. “You have three boyfriends. Everything you do is statistically more dramatic now.”

From beside the coffee table, Marcus frowns. “According to whom?”

Danny points at him immediately. “Stop undermining our relationship laws, man. You can dress like a lawyer; that doesn't mean you have to act like one.”