Page 44 of Every Step She Takes
But Sadie doesn’t do any of those things. She looks at Ro and conjures their casual shrug from before. “I’m thinking about fucking up my hair.”
“I can’t do this.”
Sadie clutches the starched towel draped across her shoulders like a smock and looks up at me with the full weight of her terrified eyes.
“You can totally do this.” I slice the scissors open and closed a few times, trying to pump her up, but the gesture looks more menacing than intended, especially because they’re a cheap pair of kitchen scissors we found at the Foinz.
She winces at the two shiny blades. “But what if I don’twantto do this?”
I pocket the scissors like a cowboy holstering his gun. “You absolutely do not have to do anything you don’t want to do,” I tell her, emphasizing each word so she knows I mean it.
“Yes, you fucking do!” Ari shouts from the other room. She’s sitting on my bed with a bottle of Quinta Costa she’s sharing with Vera. The hostel bathroom isn’t big enough for anyone but me and Sadie, but a small crew insisted on joining us.
“You don’t,” I say again. Sadie looks up at me from her makeshift salon chair, also known as the toilet. “If you don’t want to cut off your hair, you don’t have to.”
“But it’s a queer rite of passage,” she mumbles.
“There isn’t one single right way to be queer.”
Sadie arches her head so she can glimpse her silky hair in the mirror above the sink. One hand releases the towel so she can stroke her fingers from crown to tip, admiring the strands that luxuriate all around her. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asks, tilting her chin at her reflection.
It’s so fucking pretty. “Uh-huh.”
She shakes out her hair, and it swishes around her in mesmerizing waves. “Everyone loves my hair,” she says, more to her reflection than to me. “It’s always the first thing people notice about me.”
“But doyoulove your hair?”
“Yes,” she says to the woman in the mirror. “But also, it’s sohotwhen we’re walking, and it’s so thick and heavy, it’s giving me a headache to wear it up.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
She finally pulls her gaze away from her reflection and stares up at me with those terrified eyes.
“If your favorite thing about your hair is that other people think it’s pretty, I say… let’s fuck it up.” I snip the scissors in her face once more, and her trance breaks.
She steals one last glance at her reflection, then faces me, resolute. “Okay, yes. Let’s fuck it up.”
“Hell yes!” Ari shouts from the other room.
“Finally,” Stefano grunts. He’s in the middle of a Vinyasa flow on the weathered hardwood floors of our Esposende hostel, and for an age-ambiguous man somewhere between forty and sixty, he’s shockingly limber as he moves from plank to cobra.
Sadie repositions the towel around her shoulders, and I carefully take a strand of her silky hair between my fingers.
“Are you sureyoucan do this?” Sadie squeaks at me.
“I’ve been cutting my own hair for twenty years.”
“That is not reassuring.”
She tenses as I flip her hair at the ends and ready the scissors. From this close, it’s easy to see the twitch of her jaw muscles and the small lines around her pursed mouth. I’m so close, in fact, that I can count her individual freckles; I can feel her nervous, shallow breaths; I smell her lingering shampoo after her post-Camino shower. It smells like wildflowers.
I’m so close to her, I can see her blush spreading down the column of her throat, and I feel a little dizzy, knowing that blush is because of me.
I clear my throat. Without further ado, I lob off a long chunk of her hair. We both watch in a mixture of horror and fascination as the red strands fall to the linoleum.
“Do we like it?” Sadie asks for the dozenth time.
She keeps reaching up to her shoulders to grab the invisible strands of her memory. The gorgeous, thick hair that ran down her back is gone, replaced by a choppy bob that sits about two inches above her pale shoulders. I also gave her feathery bangs that sweep across her blue-green eyes and then frame her face on the sides. It somehow makes her look both younger and older, with her cute, rounded cheeks and her staggering curves no longer hidden behind a curtain of her hair.
