Page 44 of The Narrow

“I thought you were a senior,” I say. “Aren’t you applying this year?”

“I missed too much time when I was sick. I’m a year behind you,” she says. Her lips twist mirthlessly. “I’ll get a whole new hired friend next year. I wonder who will be desperate enough to take the job.”

“What about a real friend?” I ask. “You’re in classes. You must talk to people. What about when you do group projects?”

“I use AtChat for projects,” Delphine acknowledges. “But I don’t know how to make friends. Or hold a normal conversation.”

“You do fine with me,” I tell her. She gives me a skeptical look, and I chuckle. “Okay, you don’t have themostpolished social skills in the world.”

She walks over to the window, staring, but she isn’t actually looking outside. She’s looking at her reflection. “My mother thinks she can lock me in here like I’m in a time capsule, and I’ll stay perfectly preserved,” she says, almost a whisper.

“She wants to keep you safe,” I say.

“She doesn’t even know who I am,” she says fiercely, and turns to me. “Look at me, Eden. I look like I’m twelve. I’m seventeen. But my mother buys all my clothes. I’ve never been allowed to cut my hair because she likes it long. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of beingthe weird girl locked up in her room, and now I don’t even have Aubrey anymore.” Her eyes are feverish. She stalks past me to the kitchen. “I’m tired of being stuck in here. I’m tired of wearing what she says to wear and doing what she says to do. I’m tired of never being able to leave these rooms or talk to people.”

I follow behind her. In the kitchen, she looks around wildly, then wrenches open a drawer and takes out a pair of scissors. She wraps her hair around one fist and raises the scissors.

“Delphine, stop,” I say, alarmed.

She looks at me, her teeth bared. “I want it gone,” she says, and her voice breaks. She squeezes her eyes shut. Her preternatural calm is shattered.

She’s so alone. So utterly alone. “Let me do it,” I say.

She opens her eyes.

“Let me do it for you,” I repeat.

“My mother won’t be happy.”

I glance up at the camera in the corner. I have to hope that Madelyn Fournier hasn’t chosen this moment to look in on us. “She’ll be happier than if you hack it all off and leave it looking like you used hedge clippers,” I point out. “Let me help you, Delphine.”

I reach out, palm flat. She hesitates a moment more, then sets the scissors in my palm. I take them, then touch the ends of her silky red hair with my other hand. It’s beautiful—coppery red, perfectly straight.

“Do you think it’s ridiculous? Throwing a fit and cutting off my hair?” she asks. Her voice is equal parts challenge and vulnerability.

“Is it even boarding school if you don’t rebel and cut off all your hair at least once?” I ask her, a touch playfully. Then, more serious, I say, “Hair is important. The way you look is important. I understand wanting to look on the outside the way you feel on the inside. Or the way youwantto feel.” I still have that length of hair between my fingers. I let it drop slowly.

“Okay. Let’s do it,” she says.

I take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. Her room is as anachronistic as the rest of her clothes, with its four-poster bed and thick rug. A mirrored vanity sits at one end, and I guide Delphine to sit in the stool in front of it. I stand behind her and set a towel over her shoulders, letting her hair fan out across it.

The mirror frames our reflections. Delphine with her elfin features and coppery hair, parted neatly in the middle. The perfection of her face is almost unsettling, her build so delicate you can see at a glance that she’s fragile, that she ought to be handled with care. Behind her, I look almost brutish with my hair scraped back and contained in its protective cap, my face broad and plain.

She’s beautiful—but anyone can see that. It takes another look to see that she’s more than that. To see not the vivid blue of her eyes but the sharpness behind them. Not her soft lips but the way they tighten when she’s uncertain of something.

“What do you want?” I ask her, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

“I don’t know,” she says, a helplessness in her confession. “Not this. Do whatever you want.”

“I can’t do what I want,” I say. “It has to be what you want.”

“But I don’t know what I want.”

I haven’t ever touched her. Haven’t been allowed to touch her.But I can’t avoid it now. I brush my fingertips as lightly as I can along her hair, let them hover near her shoulder. “Like this?” I ask. “We could cut off a few inches.”

“No. Shorter than that,” she says.

“See?” I say. “You know something.” I reach forward and slide my fingers into her hair at her temples, the backs of my fingers bumping against her scalp. She jumps at the touch, but I only run my hands down, sliding through her hair until I reach her jaw. I use my hands to hide the lower length of her hair. “What about that?”

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