The Rockmore House

3 | Pretty in Pink

Saturday, September 24, 2016

My mom decided to release me from my grounded state on my eighteenth birthday. While I was relieved, I was also a little nervous to be around my friends outside of school. It had been almost a month since I'd hung out with anyone, other than the afternoon Kaitlin came over. At school, I saw Kaitlin, Laura and Sophie everyday at lunch but the conversation was stilted and topical thanks to my mysterious disappearance at the end of the summer that I refused to discuss. Eventually it mostly went unmentioned, other than when Sophie took a stab at guessing where I'd been.

Her theories included:

"You were kidnapped, and you can't talk about it because your kidnapper threatened to kill your family if you did."

"You joined a cult, but fled when your initiation was to include the sacrificial killing of an innocent animal."

"You went to a convention in another state for some kind of embarrassing subculture."

"Meth house."

"You took off with your secret boyfriend, but left him when you discovered he was a possessive asshole."

Then she'd tell me to blink three times if she'd guessed correctly, and when I didn't, she went back to icing me out. I couldn't blame her for being pissed at me. Sophie covered for me that summer when I went missing for a night here and there, but using her family vacation as my cover to go missing for five days without telling her was too far.

Laura had always been generally more understanding and forgiving than Sophie, and her reaction to my lies was more concerned than angry. But I grew tired of catching her looking at me like I was a person she didn't know anymore.

And Kaitlin checked in on me, tried to cheer me up, and offered to listen anytime I needed to talk. I did the same for her.

My birthday fell on a Saturday on a weekend I was staying at my mom's, so I was free to hang out with Kaitlin after the haircut appointments she'd made for us. I'd also agreed to go to a bonfire at Laura's boyfriend's house that night, which I was less excited about. But it was my eighteenth birthday, and I didn't want to disappoint my future self by staying home. Or my mom, who'd spend the entire evening asking pitying, probing questions about my social life if I didn't go out.

I planned to walk out of the hair salon that day with the scraggly, summer-lightened ends of my long hair trimmed, but instead left with a shoulder-length bob and bangs. The bangs were Kaitlin's idea.

She said they made a statement.

I huffed a short laugh. "The statement being, 'I am having an emotional crisis.'"

"No, that's crap. The statement is that this is just hair," she grabbed a handful of her own for emphasis, "and it's mine and I'll do what I want with it. And if I want to chop the front of it, or the back of it, or all of it, I will. And if anyone says shit about my decision that I've made about what to do with my hair, that's a reflection of their own self-doubt."

"That's quite a statement. You know what? Either way, I'm sold."

Kaitlin ended up having several inches of her blonde hair chopped off and the rest dyed cotton candy pink. We both felt a bit lighter when we stepped back out in the warm late September afternoon and squinted in the sunlight.

"Lou's?" Kaitlin suggested, as she put on a pair of lavender cat eye sunglasses and grinned.

"Um." I stalled as I glanced up the side street where Sophie's car was usually parked when she was working at Louisa's Cafe. I spotted her cobalt blue car immediately. "How about the Starbucks in Meijer?"