A horrible makeover
1376 Words
MIRABELLA
Lucy’s words stay with me for days, running through my mind on some kind of twisted loop.
“That house is cancer for women.”
I turn them over and over like a stone I can’t put down, trying to decide if she’s a bitter, unhinged woman grasping at anything sharp enough to draw blood, or if she’s the only person who’s actually told me the truth since I got here.
I haven’t landed on an answer by Thursday.
I slip out of third period to use the bathroom, and I’m already pushing through the door before I register the sounds coming from inside.
Moaning.
Unmistakable, rhythmic, and completely brazen.
I stop dead.
Kaden has a girl bent over the sink, both hands gripping her hips, and he doesn’t stop when I walk in. He just glances over at me, eyes narrowing with some expression I can’t read—and don’t particularly want to—and keeps going like I’m furniture, like I’m a crack in the tile, like I’m absolutely nothing at all.
The girl hasn’t even looked up.
I stand there, completely frozen, my brain short-circuiting in real time.
And underneath the shock—quiet and unwelcome and humiliating—there’s an ache. Deep and settled, the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly but just moves in and makes itself at home in your chest like it was always going to end up there.
I didn’t think it was possible to break an already shattered heart any further, but the Windsor twins apparently have a gift for finding new ways.
“You gonna stand there and watch?” Kaden snaps.
I back up, turn, and walk out fast, rounding the corner and pressing my back flat against the stone wall, my eyes closed and my heart doing something loud and stupid behind my ribs.
I’m such a bloody fool.
Even after everything I heard through that wall, some idiotic part of me had been holding onto the kiss like it meant something. Like maybe he felt it too. Like maybe it was the one honest thing that had happened since I walked through the doors of Windsor House.
And he’s in there with someone else.
Three days later.
Not even bothering to lock the door.
My face is hot and my hands are balled into fists, and the feeling running through me is something I eventually identify as fury—which is at least more dignified than the alternative.
He doesn’t care.
Not about the bond. Not about that girl bent over the sink. Not about anything beyond whatever he wants in any given moment.
I know that.
The problem is that knowing something and feeling it are two entirely different things.
When I tell Sophie about it at lunch, she chokes so hard on her iced tea that I have to hand her a napkin.
“Right there in the girls’ bathroom?” she blinks at me rapidly. “He’s usually more discreet about it.”
“More discreet,” I repeat flatly.
All those moments he got close, the way my skin went electric whenever he was near, the kiss I’d been quietly replaying for three days—it all curdles now into something I’d rather not examine.
“What a creep.”
“So all the girls just know he’ll sleep with whoever he wants, and nobody cares?”
Sophie shrugs. “He’s handsome, popular, and rich. Of course they all want to sleep with him.”
I look at her for a moment, and it occurs to me, not for the first time, that I have no idea how Sophie actually feels about either of them. I haven’t told her they’re my mates. She has no reason not to want them.
I wonder how many other girls Kaden has been with.
And then I decide I genuinely don’t want to know.
My stomach feels like it’s been packed in ice.
“I don’t want to sleep with him,” I murmur, more to myself than to her, putting my fork down.
Sophie gives me a look that is gentle and skeptical in equal measure but doesn’t push it—which is one of the things I like most about her.
I tell her I’ll see her later and make my way to the principal’s office.
***
My next class, I’m sitting at my desk flipping through the pamphlets they gave me, having been told I need to participate in more extracurriculars.
Looking through the options, my eyes snag on orchestra, and something in my chest shifts unexpectedly.
I played the harp when I was younger—before things got bad for my mother, before money became the kind of problem that swallows everything else whole.
I’d almost forgotten.
I’m circling it on the form when a hand shoots out and snatches the paper clean from my grip.
Bianca stands over me with a sneer pulling at her mouth, holding my form between two fingers like it’s something she found on the bottom of her shoe.
My hands are shaking, but I don’t say anything. I look forward instead and pretend she isn’t there.
“Don’t you dare,” she hisses, dropping the form back on my desk but keeping her hand flat over it. “You try out for the orchestra, and I will make your life a living hell. More than it already is.”
I look up then, meeting the sharp blue of her glare straight on.
“Well,” I say, pulling the form out from under her hand, “I guess that’s a challenge.”
She opens her mouth, but the teacher walks in before she can say anything else, and I spend the rest of class staring at the board and not hearing a single word, the form folded neatly in my pocket.
***
Kieran drops me at the café after school, and I throw myself into my shift with the same quiet desperation I always do.
Because this job is the only place in my life right now where I know exactly what’s expected of me—and how to deliver it.
Nobody here is running a psychological campaign against me.
Nobody kisses me and then tells their brother they were drunk.
By the time Belinda lets me go, my feet ache and my back aches and my eyes feel like they’re full of sand.
I remember getting home.
I remember going upstairs and sitting on the edge of my bed to take off my shoes.
After that—nothing.
***
The next thing I know, I’m waking up with what feels like a hangover.
My eyes are sticky and heavy, my mouth is bone dry, and there’s a migraine sitting behind my temples like it’s been there a while and has no plans to leave.
I lie still for a moment, blinking at the ceiling, trying to work out why I feel so strange.
Then I reach up to push my hair out of my face.
My hand stops.
Something is wrong.
The texture is wrong.
The weight is wrong.
The length is wrong.
And I’m sitting upright before I’ve fully processed why, scrambling out of bed and skidding across the bathroom floor on legs that haven’t fully woken up yet.
I make it to the mirror.
I stare.
The person staring back at me is wearing my face—and absolutely nothing else I recognize.
My hair—my long, silver blonde hair waves that I have had my entire life—is gone.
In its place is a pixie cut.
Short. Choppy.
And so aggressively, blindingly, violently orange that for a full second my brain simply refuses to accept it as real.
Not auburn.
Not copper.
Orange.
The specific, saturated, electric orange of a traffic cone, of a Halloween pumpkin, of something that exists to be seen from a very significant distance.
I grab a handful of the short, bright strands and pull—just enough to confirm it’s attached, that it’s real, that this is actually happening and I’m not still asleep.
I’m not still asleep.
A scream leaves my mouth, sharp and raw, and it bounces off every tile in the bathroom before the silence swallows it whole.
- Writer
