5
N oah washed his hands for the sixth time, scrubbing at the blue stains on his palms and fingers.
Then he glanced into the chipped bathroom mirror.
His ears and neck were also blue, as was his hair—though it was less noticeable than if he’d been blond.
He had to hand it to Conner, though; it was a respectable effort.
Finally turning off the water, he yanked his phone from his pocket and called the first person he could think of who might have the experience he needed. “Hey,” he said when she answered. “How would you wash the red out of your hair?”
“I wouldn’t. I paid a lot of money to look this good,” Olivia said.
Noah huffed at his reflection. “Okay, well, I didn’t, so help a guy out.”
There was a long pause, and he could almost feel her confusion.
“I’m missing something here. Did you dye your hair?”
“Not intentionally, no,” he mumbled, massaging his fingertips against the bridge of his nose. He instantly thought better of it and yanked them away before searching his reflection for any signs that the color had transferred to his face. Thankfully, it hadn’t.
Olivia snorted in a decidedly unladylike way. “Oh, I’ve got to see this!” she crowed. “What is it? Orange? Purple?”
“Just tell me how to wash it out!” he groaned, though her audible glee made an involuntary smile inch across his face. “And how to get it off my skin.”
“Do you look like an Oompa-Loompa? Please tell me you look like an Oompa-Loompa!”
“Pixie . . .”
“Okay, okay! I’ve got an idea, but I’ll make you a deal. Jexie has set up camp in my living room, and I’d rather not be here if I can help it,” she said, and Noah clamped his lips together to hold back a laugh.
“I thought we weren’t calling them that,” he reminded her, and Olivia sighed.
“Look, do you want my help or not? You give me someplace to hang out, and I’ll do my best to return you to your normal color.”
Noah looked around the small bathroom he shared with Conner, noting the towels hanging on every possible surface and the clothes piling up in the corners. The rest of the house wasn’t much better; even the air held the distinct smell of too many young men in one place.
“Alright, fine, but don’t expect the Taj Mahal,” he said, relenting. He didn’t see that he had much choice; his hair he could probably live with, but the only way to see the back of his neck was to hold a smaller mirror in one hand, and it would be a lot easier to fix if he had help.
He could almost hear Olivia roll her eyes. “Give me thirty minutes,” she said, and then the line went dead .
Noah gathered the laundry from the bathroom and dumped it into his hamper.
Then he wandered across the hall into the kitchen.
He eyed the orange paint splatters on the once cream-colored walls—courtesy of the indoor paintball ambush he’d staged earlier in the semester.
The green-and-white linoleum was scuffed and dirty, peeling along the baseboards.
Some of the cabinet doors hung crooked, and the thick carpet in the adjoining living room was the same dingy brown as the sagging couch along one wood-paneled wall.
It was a good thing Conner’s dad was planning to tear the place down after they graduated; it really wasn’t fit for human habitation.
He sighed, running his hand through his tinted hair.
There wasn’t much he could do about any of that right now.
The house was what it was, and what it was was a dilapidated bachelor pad.
He sent Olivia a text with the address and made his way to the kitchen sink before lifting the first of a large pile of crusty dishes from its resting place.
If he only had half an hour, he’d better get to work.
A knock on the front door interrupted Noah’s chaotic attempt to separate clean clothes from their already-worn counterparts and prompted him to shove the entire pile into his bedroom closet and shut the door.
The knock came again, faster this time.
“I’m coming!” he called, tripping over somebody’s discarded backpack on his way through the living room. Probably Conner’s.
The seldom-used dead bolt on the front door screeched when he unlocked it .
“Why didn’t you just come through the garage?” he asked, stepping out of the way as Olivia breezed inside.
“Oh, is that what you call that part over there?” she said, jerking her chin toward the far end of the house.
“It looks more like the kind of shed where serial killers hang the bodies.” She dumped two boxes of pizza and a Walmart bag onto the kitchen table and turned to look at him, her hands on her hips.
“Well? Let me see,” she ordered, beckoning him forward with a curl of her fingers.
Noah paused, having almost forgotten why he’d called her. His hand flew self-consciously to his head, but Olivia reached up and pulled his wrist away. Her other hand combed through his hair as she surveyed the damage.
Electricity seemed to arc from her fingertips across his scalp, and it was all he could do not to lean against her hand like a cat.
As it was, he had to tell himself to stand still as she moved slowly around him, first rubbing a lock of his hair between her fingers, then grazing her thumbs along the back of his neck and ears.
Every cell in his body was on high alert by the time she’d made a full circuit.
“I’m gonna guess color-depositing conditioner of some kind,” she finally said, breaking the silence. She reached for his hands and turned them until they were both palm up. “You’re supposed to wear gloves.”
“Well, thankfully, I noticed the color before I washed the rest of my body with it.”
“You wash your skin with shampoo?”
“I’m out of body wash,” he answered matter-of-factly.
She wrinkled her nose as if that weren’t a perfectly acceptable answer. Then, she turned and made her way back to the table, where the things she’d brought still waited .
“You didn’t have to bring food,” he observed, though his stomach growled in disagreement. He stepped up beside her and opened the top box of pizza before removing a slice of sausage-and-pepperoni. He folded it in half and then devoured it.
Olivia ignored him and continued sorting the contents of the plastic sack. “I know, but Jake had just started Ghostbusters , and I’m really grateful for someplace else to be—even if it is with you.”
“Oh, ha, ha,” he said dryly as he reached for another slice. “I’m glad my predicament was useful for you.”
“The timing was convenient, yes,” she replied. She held up a bottle of blue Dawn soap, and Noah narrowed his eyes skeptically.
“Dish soap? That’s your big idea? You could have told me that over the phone,” he said between bites.
“Yeah, but this way I get to see the problem for myself,” she replied. She was grinning from ear to ear.
“You think it’ll work?”
Olivia raised both shoulders before looking down at the bottle and pointing to a picture on the front. “It washes crude oil off these adorable baby ducks, so surely there’s hope for you,” she said, her eyes flashing with humor. “Now, go scrub.”
He took the bottle and started back toward the hall. “What, you’re not going to help?” he asked when she didn’t follow.
She rolled her eyes, but a smile gave her amusement away. “As much as I’d love a chance to waterboard you, I think I’ll pass,” she said. She reached for the pizza box and lifted a slice with one hand. “Now, hurry, or I’ll eat the rest of this myself.”
Noah heeded her warning and went to shower, collecting new clothes from his dresser on the way. Two shampoos later, he emerged to find Olivia waiting for him in the kitchen, surrounded by a makeshift salon of her own creation .
“Sit here and lean forward,” she said, pointing to a chair she’d turned backwards beside the table. He threw one leg over it and crossed his arms along the back rail before resting his forehead on top of them. Olivia assessed his hair again, this time moving more slowly than she had before.
Noah found his eyes drifting closed.
“The dish soap should help open your follicles and release the excess color, but it’ll still take at least a week.
You’re lucky you aren’t blond; you’d look like a blueberry lollipop,” she said.
“The staining on your skin is going to take some scrubbing, though.” She brushed her hands over his neck again and tipped his ears forward to check behind them.
Then she tugged the neckline of his shirt back, as if she were peeking between his shoulder blades.
“I can take that off if you want,” he murmured, and she smacked the back of his head in a playful way.
“I’m just checking the damage!” she insisted, and Noah grinned, though he knew she couldn’t see his face. He wished he could peek back to see hers; maybe he’d finally gotten her to blush.
Her hands moved away, and Noah heard her step closer to the table.
He opened his eyes and looked down at her socks, which were red and had little pom-pom things around the ankles.
He didn’t remember seeing her take off the boots she’d been wearing when she came in, but he was glad she’d decided to make herself at home without asking.
There was something about that that he liked—a lot.
Noah raised his head and eyed the supplies she’d laid out on the tabletop: rubbing alcohol, Q-tips and a bag of fluffy cotton balls. She pressed a piece of white fluff to the top of the alcohol bottle and tipped the whole thing over and back in one quick motion .
“This will be cold,” she cautioned.
Noah put his forehead back down on his arms. “I can handle it,” he said, but he flinched when she pressed the cotton ball to the nape of his neck.
Olivia chuckled before scrubbing the soft material along his hairline. “I thought you could handle it.”
“Well, yeah, but you’ve had that in the freezer!” he declared.
“Just my car, and only for the drive over,” she countered. “Now stop whining and be a man about it!”