I fingered the strands hanging down to the middle of my back. Even if I did manage to get some contacts and develop a tan, the hair was a dead giveaway. The color is a silvery white, much the same as my fur when in wolf form. Sometimes you’ll see a little kid with my hair color, but never anyone over the age of five. My hair is the first thing people notice about me.
So what if I didn’t have any?
As soon as the thought hit, a plan started formulating. I could shave my head and then wrap it up in a scarf. My skin tone already screamed “sickly,” and thanks to the trauma of the past few months, my bones were a bit sharper than looked healthy. What better way to avoid notice than passing as a cancer patient? No one wants to look too closely at sick people, and if I coughed every once in a while, everyone would keep their distance.
Liam had one of those fancy electric razor things in his bag, but all I had was some cheap disposables, which meant I was going to have to cut it all off before shaving my head. Fortunately, Talley had been the one to pack my escape bag, a fact I realized the moment I opened it up to discover everything organized neatly into individual freezer bags. I dug through what was now a random assorted mess until I found the travel sewing kit. Inside was a tiny pair of scissors, but a test of the ends proved they would cut as long as I did it strand by strand.
I pulled the first strand out from my head and positioned the scissors an inch from my scalp.
Snip.
I had about a fourth of it done with my arms started getting tired. Halfway through I got so bored I thought I might scream. At three-fourths of the way through the door swung open.
“What are you doing?” Liam asked, setting some bags on the dresser.
I couldn’t even say anything I was so shocked. I just sat there on the vanity, my feet in the sink, with microscopic scissors in my hand and a pile of hair scattered about me.
“Did you cut off your hair? With those?” He looked at me as if I was completely nuts. “Why?”
“I need to be incognito.” I sounded like a little kid who just got caught doing something stupid, which pissed me off. What was it to him anyhow?
Liam reached in a bag and pulled out a brown wig. He cocked his head and lifted his eyebrows as if to say, what do you think this is for? I looked back at the mirror, actually saw what I had done to myself, and burst into tears.
If the little kid voice had made me angry at myself then the tears pushed me firmly into the livid camp. I hadn’t cried in weeks. I didn’t cry when Talley’s mom, the woman who took care of me when I was a kid, turned me over to the Alphas, or when my brother chose a mateless, Taxiarho-in-Training existence over my life. I hadn’t shed a tear when I saw the guillotine that was to kill me, when Charlie hugged me goodbye, or when I saw the devastation wrought from my escape. But now I was in full waterworks mode over my hair. Yet, no matter how furious I was with myself, I couldn’t stop. It was like a dam had broken.
“You’re crying,” Liam observed with more than a hint of horror.
I answered with a gasp for breath.
Since I buried my face in my hands so I didn’t have to look at the tragedy of my hair any longer, I didn’t see Liam move up behind me. But I smelled him. And I felt him tug the scissors from my hand and then begin lifting up strands of the remaining hair.
“I used to cut Alex’s hair,” he said. “We never really had the money to go somewhere to get it done. The first few times I cut it, it was horrible. I think I may have even given him a mullet on accident, but he somehow pulled it off.”
I looked up and watched in the mirror as the remainder of my hair started falling away. “I bet half the guys at school were sporting mullets by the end of the year.”
Liam smiled. It was the first time I’d ever seen him do it, and until that moment, I would have thought him incapable. He didn’t have Alex’s dimples, but his cheeks folded up in a way that was equally boyish. Because of his Dominance, it was easy to forget that Liam was just a few years older than me, but when he smiled he actually looked like the college-age guy he was. I found the corners of my mouth twitching upwards in response.
“You know, he didn’t even notice. The whole town started looking like a Billy Ray Cyrus convention, but he had no idea it was because he started a new hair fad.” He tilted my head forward and started trimming the hair at the base. “To be such a smart kid, he was pretty oblivious when it came to how other people saw him.”
“That was part of the charm,” I said, somewhat surprised I was willing to talk about him with Liam. “He was beautiful and smart and funny without being even the littlest bit arrogant.” And he had loved me, which was the most amazing part of all.
Liam’s hands paused. “You made him happy,” he said. “I’m glad he found you before he died.”
He didn’t mention how if it wasn’t for me Alex would still be alive, which both amped up my guilt and made me feel oddly affectionate towards Liam. Would I have been so generous if the roles had been somehow reversed? If it had been Alex who killed Jase over something Liam had done? Could I have stood there talking to Liam as if everything was okay? Would I have risked myself to save his life?
“Okay, turn around so I can do the front.”
I swung my legs around so they would dangle off the edge. The vanity was high enough that Liam and I were right at eye level as he began doing something with what would have been bangs if I had enough hair left. I didn’t know what to do. Looking at his face seemed too intimate, so I kept trying to stare at my hands, but that tucked my head down, which caused him to lift it back up, which meant he would touch me. And that was just all kinds of awkward. Because while Wolf Liam and I were cool, and Wolf Liam and Wolf Scout were BFFs, Human Scout and Human Liam were merely two people forced into a strange alliance. Touching was not part of that alliance.
“Well, that should do it,” he said, brushing stray hairs from my shoulders. “Sorry, but there were some patches I couldn’t do much with.”
Those patches were the places where I had snipped a little too close to my head. And while Liam was probably a better barber than most twenty year old guys, he wasn’t exactly a trained hair stylist. The result left me looking like an unsupervised three year old.
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
He shrugged and looked anywhere but at me. I tried not to laugh at his obvious embarrassment. “No problem. It’ll probably make the wig fit better, so that’s good.”