“I don’t want to colour it again,” she says. The way someone else might say, “I don’t want to go to prison.”
“Then don’t,” I reply, arranging her hair around her face. “It’s a good colour. Chestnut. With some auburn highlights in the sun. Lots of people dye their hair this colour. You could wear it short and dark…” I pull her hair back into a ponytail and hold it so the front poofs out. “You’d look good with a quiff.”
Niamh doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are hard, and her eyebrows are tense.
She’d look very, very good like this. Her face looks severe with her hair scraped back into the bun. But this makes her look … fierce instead. Oh, I suppose Niamh looks fierce no matter what. With that nose. That crushed plum of a mouth. That mean chin. But this takes her from fierce to something else … Something very nearly intolerable. She looks like Marlon Brando.
I let her hair fall back down around her face. “You should wear it however you like,” I say. I start walking again.
When we get to the car, I stand by the passenger side, waiting for Niamh to unlock the doors.
“Agatha,” she says, “you drove.”
“Oh … right. Right.” I push the unlock button and go around to my side of the car. “I hope you aren’t going to be late.”
“Late for what?”
I get in and wait for her to sit down. “For your thing.” I start the car. “That you had to get back for. In London.”
“Oh…”
I look over at her. She looks embarrassed, I think.
“There isn’t a thing,” she says. “I just didn’t want to get stuck hanging out with you and your friends … No offence.”
“You can’t just say ‘no offence’ after you say something offensive.”
“It’s nothing against you,” she says. “I just didn’t want to be the third wheel.”
“The third wheel? I’m the third wheel. I was possibly the third wheel the entire time Simon and I were dating. If anything, you’d be the fourth wheel, Niamh. You’d balance everything out.”
“I didn’t want to crash your reunion…”
“There was no reunion, ” I say. “We were just … herding goats in a friendly manner.”
“I was worried we’d, like, end up at a pub.”
“Heaven forfend.”
Niamh sighs and rubs her forehead. She looks like she’s experiencing a migraine. She hasn’t put her hair back up.
“You don’t like pubs?” I ask.
“Pubs are fine.”
“You don’t like my friends?” （ Are Simon and Baz my friends? Now isn’t the time to do the math.）
“I’m sure your friends are fine!” A debilitating migraine. “Look, I’m not trying to offend you, Agatha. I’m just not a … people person.”
I wasn’t ready to laugh so hard at that. It comes up the back of my nose.
Niamh sighs again and rolls her eyes. “Obviously.”
“Is that why you became a veterinarian? Because you like animals better than people?” That’s why I want to become a veterinarian.
“No,” she says.
I wait for her to expand. Of course she doesn’t.
“Why, then?” I ask.
She glares at me, but eventually answers. “I like the way bodies work.”
She takes a second to huff. “And when they’re not working, I like to think about why. I like taking things apart and putting them back together.”
“Why animals, then, instead of people?”
She shrugs. “Variety.”
I laugh up my nose again.
“Stop laughing at me, Agatha.”
I don’t stop laughing. “Variety?” Still laughing. “Oh my words … You’re so strange, Niamh.”
“Fine.” She’s fed up. “Why did you want to become a veterinarian, Agatha?”
“Because I like animals more than people! Like a normal person!”
“I also like animals more than people!” she says. “That just wasn’t the deciding factor!”
Still laughing. I can’t help it.
“Agatha.”
“Yes?”
She’s rubbing her forehead. “Do you want to stop and get something to eat?”
“With me, a human being? Won’t you feel like the second wheel?”
“Do you want to go to a pub?”
“Yeah,” I laugh. “All right.”