side of Penn's grave. She'd gotten so used to her crisply elegant teachers at Shoreline that Mr. Cole looked almost frumpy in his bunched-up tawny suit, with his mustache, and his brown hair parted straight as a ruler just above his left ear.
Luce scrambled to her feet, sni ing against herwrist. "Hi, Mr. Cole."
He smiled kindly. "You're doing well over there, I hear. Everyone says you're doing very well."
"Oh ... n-no ...," she stammered. "I don't know about that."
"Well, I do. I also know your parents are very happy to get to see you. It's good when these things can work out."
"Thank you," she said, hoping he understood how grateful she was.
"I won't keep you but for just one question."
Luce waited for him to ask her about something deep and dark and over her head about Daniel and Cam, good and evil, right and wrong, trust and deceit. ...
But all he said was "What did you do to your hair?"
Luce's head was upside down in the sink in the girls' bathroom down the hall from the Sword & Cross cafeteria. Shelby carried in the last two slices of cheese pizza stacked on a paper plate for Luce. Arriane held out a bottle of cheap black hair dye--the best Roland could do on such short notice, but not a bad match for Luce's natural color.
Neither Arriane nor Shelby had questioned Luce about her sudden need for a change. She'd been grateful for that. Now she saw they'd only been waiting for her to be in a vulnerable half-dyed position to begin their inquisition.
"I guess Daniel will be pleased," Arriane said in her coyest leading-question tone of voice. "Not that you're doing this for Daniel. Are you?"
"Arriane," Luce warned. She wasn't going there. Not tonight.
But Shelby seemed to want to. "You know what I've always liked about Miles? That he likes you for who you are, not for what you do with your hair."
"If you two were going to be that obvious about it, why didn't you guys come down in your Team Daniel and Team Miles T-shirts?"
"We should order those," Shelby said.
"Mine's in the laundry," Arriane said.
Luce tuned them out, focusing instead on the warm water and the strange con uence of things owing over her head, into her scalp, and down the drain: Shelby's stubby ngers had helped with Luce's rst dye job, back when Luce thought that was the only way to start afresh. Arriane's rst act of friendship toward Luce had been the command to chop o her black hair, to make her look like Luce. Now their hands worked through Luce's scalp in the same bathroom where Penn had rinsed her clean of the meat loaf Molly had dumped on her head her rst day at Sword & Cross.
It was bittersweet, and beautiful, and Luce couldn't gure out what any of it meant. Only that she didn't want to hide anymore--not from herself, or from her parents; not from Daniel, or even from those who sought to harm her.
She'd been seeking a cheap transformation when she rst got out to California. Now she realized that the only worthwhile way to make a change was to earn a real one. Dying her hair black wasn't the answer either--she knew she wasn't there yet--but at least it was a step in the right direction.
Arriane and Shelby stopped arguing over which guy was Luce's soul mate. They looked at her silently and nodded. She felt it before she even saw her re ection in the mirror: The heavy weight of melancholy, one she hadn't even known she was shouldering, had lifted from her body.
She was back to her roots. She was ready to go home.
Chapter Eighteen
THANKSGIVING
When Luce stepped through the front door of her parents' house in Thunderbolt, everything was just the same: The coatrack in the foyer still looked like it was about to topple under the weight of too many jackets. The smell of dryer sheets and Pledge still made the house feel cleaner than it was. The oral couch in the living room was faded from the morning sun that fell through the blinds. A stack of tea-stained southern decorating magazines covered the co ee table, favorite pages bookmarked with grocery receipts, for the distant time when her parents' dream came true of the mortgage's being paid o and their nally having a little extra money for remodeling. Andrew, her mom's hysterical toy poodle, trotted over to sni the guests and give the back of Luce's ankle