“I could have gotten more creative than an arrow, I guess, but I wanted something really simple. Something that I could look at and just think, ‘Fly away.’？” I bit the inside of my lip, remembering how teen me had felt in the chair at Black Cat Ink, Thistle Grove’s one and only tattoo parlor at the time. The buoyant hope for a different future, the sea of sadness churning just beneath. “I was still kind of a mess, but it felt amazing to wrest back control like that, to decide something so big for myself. I remember I felt like such a total badass.”
A faint smile ghosted over Talia’s lips. Then she lifted my hand to her mouth and pressed a butterfly-light kiss to the arrow, like a token of thanks.
“And this one?”
I let out a little sigh as she traced the outline of a stylized phoenix, thrown more off-balance by that tiny kiss than I should have been. “That’s, uh, the U of Chicago mascot. Phil the Phoenix. I got that my sophomore year, once I started feeling like I really belonged there. Like I’d made a good choice.”
“Because you weren’t sure before?”
I laughed through my nose. “Oh, not even close. I was miserable my freshman year. I missed home so badly and second-guessed everything, especially once my magic went. I barely had any friends, and I’m sure I drove the few I had nuts with the constant, high-key angst. Especially since it wasn’t like I could tell them what my problem even was.”
I swallowed hard, remembering. “But I was way too stubborn to call it quits, and then, at some point, everything just . . . clicked. I woke up and realized I could be happy there; that I was happy, for the most part. That it was the right place for me to be. A stepping-stone to the rest of my life.”
Talia brought my wrist to her mouth again, and this time the kiss was a little longer, a touch sweeter. When she slid her finger up to the next tattoo—a tiny pair of scissors snipping off a curling loop of thread—it was like a silent question. Like she didn’t want to derail me by speaking out loud.
“That was when I decided to finally cut my hair.” A swell of pain grew in my throat at the memory; the hanks of golden-brown and chestnut and honey-blond littering the floor around the salon chair like discarded pelts. “I used to love my hair. It was ridiculously long, and I’d do all this silly shit with it. Lots of little braids, sometimes with talismans or crystals from Tomes and Omens woven in—kind of like the way my cousin Delilah wears hers these days, that copycat. I always wanted it to be maximum witchy.” I shrugged, self-deprecating. “Overcompensation, I guess. If I wasn’t ever going to be much of a witch, hey, at least my hair could look the part!”
Talia half smiled at that, a corner of her mouth curling. “I remember. It was past your waist, and so many different colors, but you could tell it hadn’t ever been dyed. Really beautiful. Like summer going on fall.”
I started at that, surprised. “You . . . really? You thought that?”
“I did.” Now she smiled fully, her eyes warming. “I also thought it made you look like a little lioness.”
I swallowed past the coarse lump in my throat, a dart of pain zinging through me for my long-lost hair. As if my sleek haircut wasn’t the most high-maintenance thing about my appearance; as if I didn’t make a conscious choice every single month to touch up the color and keep it trimmed, to blow-dry and flatiron it relentlessly to keep it styled this way. All that effort was deliberate, a statement in itself—that I wasn’t ever turning back, taking so much as a half step toward who I used to be.
Sometimes I dreamed that it had grown back overnight, and I’d wake up feeling unutterably sad. But in my waking hours I’d never let myself consider growing it out again.
“I’d never even really had it cut before, just trimmed a bit. It was like . . .” I lapsed for a moment, trying to articulate my motivations. “Like I was staking out a claim for the person I wanted to be, without magic. And that person definitely didn’t have Witch Barbie hair.”
“You did not have Witch Barbie hair, Harlow. It was much classier than that.”
“Maybe, but you get the idea.” I took a deep breath, let it out in a shaky whoosh. “Anyway, you’d think a dramatic haircut like that would have been enough of a statement on its own, but it felt . . . bigger than just hair. Like another turning point. Maybe my hair wouldn’t always be short, but even if it wasn’t . . . I didn’t want to ever forget that I’d made that decision for myself.”