The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters Page 0,10
remember?”
“That was earlier. Please?” She touched the half-heart. “Best friends forever?”
I groaned but gave her the brush from my dresser. Sitting in front of her with my legs crossed, I said, fingertips to my half of the whole, “Best friends forever.”
Humming “Vision of Love,” she started working out the tangles at the ends.
“I want hair like yours.”
“No you don’t. I want to cut it all off, but my mom says it’s too thick and I’ll end up with a giant mushroom on my head. Ouch.”
“Sorry.” She yanked a tangle of hair free from the brush and waved it in my direction. “Hello, I’m Mr. Octopus. Nice to meet you, yes indeed.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said with a giggle as she separated my hair into several sections, more than she’d need for a braid.
I reached for the mirror; she nudged it away with her knee. I tried to feel my hair, but she smacked my hand. “Nope, stop. I’ll let you see it when I’m done.”
“Don’t make me a porcupine,” I said.
She giggled again. “You’re not going to chicken out tomorrow night, are you?”
“No, but I still think it’s a bad idea.”
“It’ll be fun,” she said.
“Unless we get caught.” A super-skinny braid fell forward, and she snatched it back. “Bec-ca,” I said.
“Hea-ther,” she mocked, tugging a bunch of my hair. “Stop moving.”
As soon as she finished, I grabbed the mirror. My head was nothing but braids in all different sizes, some flat against my scalp, others sticking up.
Becca’s shoulders hitched. “You’re a wildebeest!”
“Am not,” I said. I wasn’t even sure what a wildebeest looked like, but it had to be awful. Tears pricked my eyes. I shouldn’t get upset over hair, but I couldn’t help it. I worked my fingers through the bottom of a braid, untwisting the strands as fast as I could; Becca rolled on her back, holding her belly, laughing so hard she wasn’t making a sound.
* * *
“I love them!” Rachel lifted the heart off my neck to turn it over and back again. I waved her strawberry-blonde hair away; as always, it needed brushing. “They’re so pretty. Gia, we should get some, too.”
“We got the last ones,” Becca said.
“Oh,” Rachel said, the excitement vanishing from her blue eyes.
“We can find them somewhere else,” Gia said, and Rachel brightened again.
We were outside Gia’s house. It wasn’t dark yet, but the edge of the sky was starting to change. Since we were all together, our parents didn’t care if we stayed out late. We were old enough to know not to talk to strangers or get in anyone’s car or help find a lost pet. And it was Saturday night. We were allowed to stay up later.
The four of us set off, me and Becca in the lead, our sneakers tapping along the sidewalk. It was warm out; not too hot, but still sticky.
My dad said our neighborhood was shaped like a tic-tac-toe, only with four lines each way, not two, inside a rectangle. Me, Rachel, and Gia lived on left-to-right streets and Becca on an up-and-down. Our row houses were all the same, with three bedrooms, bay windows, and fenced-in backyards. A road with the elementary school made up the bottom piece of the rectangle; a bigger road, the top; and a shopping center, the right. On the left was a field with little hills on each side.
We got near the end of the street, and Mrs. Keene, who had watched me and Gia when we were babies, was on her front porch and waved as we walked past.
“She looked prettier before she cut off all her hair,” Rachel said.
Becca poked my arm. “See?”
“What?” Gia said.
“Heather wants to cut off her hair,” Becca said.
“But you can’t,” Rachel said. “It’s pretty.”
I shrugged. Everyone said the same thing, but they didn’t have to brush it or wait a gazillion hours for it to dry.
When we went down the hill to the field, Rachel said, “What if someone sees us?”
“Sees us what,” Becca said. “Walk across the field? People do it all the time.”
“But what if someone’s there now?”
“Hel-lo,” Becca said, sweeping out one arm. “See anyone except us?”
“No,” Rachel said. “But I don’t think we should do this.”
Becca came to a stop. The rest of us did, too.
“Then go home,” Becca said, and started walking again without looking back.
We all followed.
The long grass swished across my ankles, making them itch. They used to play little league baseball and soccer games here, but the county had built