to the salon the next day and got our hairdresser to take care of it. Seems to me like Tiffany has the right idea. I’m going to go bitch about it in my journal.”
It was a blessing that they weren’t threatening to go over to Moonbeam Cabin and start a fight or, worse yet, shave Keelan’s and Bailey’s heads for not giving them high-dollar haircuts.
“I hate mine, too,” Ashlyn admitted, “but it looks like crap anyway with my dark roots growing out and my pink streak gone, so I really don’t care. No one except a few people in church are going to see it anyway, and we go to a different place every Sunday. Speaking of that, I didn’t like the service this morning. The sermon was so dry that I fell asleep. I think Tiffany and Carmella just need something to gripe about today. They’re homesick, and both of them are wishing for school to start so they can see their friends. Me, I don’t give a good hot”—she paused and sucked in air—“darn if I ever see any of mine again. I’ve decided to never drink again, not even a beer, and I may ask my folks to put me in a private boarding school. They’ve wanted to for a while, but I thought I’d die without my friends.”
“Afraid you’ll get drunk and dye your hair pink again?” Jayden asked.
“Nope.” Ashlyn shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ll get behind the wheel and hurt someone. I’m going to go inside and write about this in my journal. I really, really hate this place tonight, just as much as Tiffany. I want to see green grass and rosebushes. Not even those flowers right there”—she pointed at the petunias and the lantana growing in front of the cabin—“can come close to the gardens at our estate. I want to sleep in a bed that’s big enough I can sprawl out and not fall off onto the floor where spiders and bugs crawl around, and I want my clothes back. I will never take my bikini underpants for granted again.”
“That’s the whole idea of this place. To teach you teamwork and to build your self-esteem so you can be a leader instead of following the wrong influences.” Jayden sat down in one of the chairs.
“Well, it’s damn . . . I mean dang sure working. They should have named this place Nightmare Cabin instead of Daydream,” she said. “The only thing I daydream about is going home.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Jayden said.
Ashlyn didn’t flip her off, but her expression said that she sure wanted to. She whipped around and went into the cabin, but she didn’t slam the door. Evidently, she was serious about wanting to keep her nose clean so she could go home.
Jayden caught a movement out of her peripheral vision, and, thinking it might be Elijah, her heart did one of those crazy flip-flops that it did when he was around. She was more than a little disappointed when Novalene eased down into a chair.
“I thought the beauty shop went well until I got home.” She sighed. “I overheard my two girls talking in the bathroom at shower time about deliberately making a mess of your girls’ hair. They said it was payback for Tiffany threatening to roll Bailey in the hog wallow when Lauren was still here. I’m going back and forth between giving them each a demerit or giving them a good talking-to. What do you think?”
“That’s your call, but because this is their first offence since Lauren left, maybe a talking-to would do,” Jayden said. “They were all doing so well a couple of days ago. Is this normal behavior for the halfway mark?”
“Oh, yeah,” Novalene sighed. “It happens, but then they’re teenage girls, not angels. They have to have a little drama and hatefulness. Have you given any thought to what we talked about?”
“You mean staying here?” Jayden wished that she could go over to Moonbeam Cabin herself and give those two girls a piece of her mind, but that wasn’t her place. “The possibility has got a lot of pros, but I’m weighing the cons as well.”
“I think you’d be perfect for the job, but you’ve got to figure this out for yourself.” Novalene sucked in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. “I’ve got a confession. When we learned that Skyler wasn’t going to be with us this summer, I almost backed out. I didn’t like the idea of