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She was fucking sick of it. She didn’t need to do penance, and she didn’t need to keep a candle lit for him. He’d made his way home, inevitable as a salmon swimming upstream. And she was mad enough at Cass right now that she didn’t want to keep her One Thing. Also, she kept sitting on it, and it took a literal fortune in conditioner to maintain.
“I need a haircut,” she said. Tara whooped. “And I don’t want to be blonde anymore.”
“Well, my friend, for that you need to talk to my former fiancée. Your cousin must have someone up there, with all that hair.”
“Okay.” Hannah stood up, brushing herself off. “I’m going to see if she’ll take me. Maybe I can get Noelle to come with. She’s kind of still not talking to me, but who can resist a makeover?”
“Text me pictures,” Tara said. “And come get this fool man off my couch. You owe me.”
“I’m right on top of that, Rose,” Hannah quoted at her, and hung up.
Okay. She was going to roll into this bachelorette sleepover with incredible new hair, a hot TV star sort-of-ex-husband, and a plan to kidnap a grown man.
She was obviously cool.
Hannah:MIRI I NEED YOU. ALSO NOELLE. EMERGENCY.
Both Miriam and Noelle came running into the guest room, where Hannah was back to lying down on the bed, her braid hanging off the edge. She’d gotten overwhelmed by the entire thing and had to lie down again.
She looked up at both of them.
“I need you. To take me. To get a haircut. An amazing haircut. A traffic-stopping haircut,” she told them as they gaped down at her, “and dye.”
She was worried they would tell her a haircut wasn’t an emergency, but they both knew her better than that.
“Right now?” Noelle asked.
She nodded.
Miri chewed on her lip thoughtfully. “If you’re doing color, we have to drive into Lake Placid. You know Myrtle stopped mixing color last year after the Incident. But I know a guy. It’s going to be amazing.”
“Are you doing this for Levi?” Noelle asked.
“No,” Hannah said, sitting up. “He actually might hate it. I’m doing it because I’m tired of being stuck in the person I was when he left. I want to be Hannah, today.”
She put herself in Miri’s hands. They piled into Noelle’s vintage restored red Chevy truck, Miriam in the middle because she was basically child-sized, and they bounced along the old highway, the Chicks turned up loud. They ended up in a tiny salon in a strip mall.
“How did you find out about this place?” Hannah asked.
“Believe me when I tell you that every curly haired person in the greater Adirondacks area knows about this place,” Miriam said, “if not right away, then eventually.”
When Hannah sat down in the chair, the hairdresser crossed his arms. “I will cut this off for you. I’m happy to cut this off for you. But you need to look me in the eye and tell me you’re ready. There’s no going back once we start.”
Hannah looked him in the eye in the mirror and nodded. “Take all of it. I don’t want to feel it brushing my shoulders. I want it long enough to clip back, but that’s all I care about. I’m thirty-five fucking years old. I want a bob.”
He looked at Miriam, and Miriam nodded. “Trust her. She’s ready. She needs to be free.”
“You wanna donate this? There’s a lotta wigs in here,” he asked, holding her hair up.
Hannah nodded again.
“What the hell else am I going to do with it, keep it as a memento? Braid it into a rope?”
He shrugged as if to say,People are weird about their hair.
When he’d sectioned it into ponytails and took the first big snip, right at her collarbone, she breathed in more deeply than she had in years. The feel of scissors on her hair was magical. The sound of them gave her tingles all over her body.
“You okay?” he asked, looking at her as she shivered.
