Chapter 17 THE POWER OF A GOOD HAIRCUT
THE POWER OF A GOOD HAIRCUT
A good night’s sleep can fix many things, but not a love triangle. Or a bouffant with magical origins. I’d tried it all: washing it, straightening it, hexing it, squishing a hat over it. And yet my hair remained a giant puffball.
Feeling like the Phantom of the Opera, I’d remained hidden in my room until the others had left to go about their days.
Then, grabbing one of Rosie’s giant silk scarves and a pair of the biggest sunglasses I could find, I’d gone racing down the boardwalk into town, not making eye contact with anyone along the way.
Made it.
There I was, outside Deep Cuts, a cosy salon with black-and-white tiling and a dramatic chandelier that gleamed in the sunlight that streamed in through the huge front windows.
The salon was helmed by Pandora, a stunning older goth woman with a blunt-cut fringe and crisp eye makeup that surely took hours to apply every morning.
Or night, given that I was pretty sure Pandora was nocturnal.
A green-eyed black cat by the front door meowed a greeting as I entered, ducking my head to try to hide my wayward hair.
Siouxsie and the Banshees played softly on an old record player, and rows of candles glowed softly in one corner.
The shop smelled of incense and freshly ground coffee, and I instantly felt at home.
I’d only ever had one haircut here – the time Lara and I, at thirteen, had decided that bleaching our hair in the bathtub and then colouring it with permanent markers was a good idea – but I’d tagged along a few times while Rosie had her roots touched up.
I loved listening to her and Pandora chat, and the smell of the salon had always put me at ease.
‘Hey there, Molly!’ Pandora, who was on the phone while sweeping up after her previous client, waggled bejewelled fingernails at me. ‘One second.’
She went back to her call. ‘I’ve never had that happen with the serum before, Anita. Stop by and I’ll replace it with a fresh one. We’ll get that frizz sorted out.’
She rang off, then turned her attention back to me. ‘Sorry about that. Apparently I messed up the hex on my serum bottles. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. Oh, but you’re a vision, aren’t you? Just the spitting image of your parents – and they’re both stunners.’
I flushed, spinning Josephine’s ring awkwardly on my finger.
‘Nice ring,’ said Pandora, gesturing for me to sit down on the middle of the three vintage black chairs facing a series of ornately framed mirrors. The chair spun slightly as I settled into it.
‘It’s definitely a curiosity,’ I said, glancing down at the ring with its three darkened moonstones. The other stones remained bright and shimmery, at least.
‘Magical?’
I nodded. ‘It seems to have a vested interest in my love life. In fact, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with this.’
I untied the scarf with a grimace, revealing my head of frizz in all its glory.
‘Wow.’ Pandora’s thin eyebrows arched in bemusement. ‘Although, the Bride of Frankenstein look isn’t terrible on you. Yours is the bone structure that launched a thousand ships.’
‘Thanks. I’m not quite sure what we’re dealing with here,’ I admitted, regarding myself in the multiple mirrors, all of which reflected an incredibly flattering version of myself back at me.
Yes, even with the wild hair. This was Pandora’s magic: she always brought out your inner beauty.
Mostly by making any haircut look good, even if you were the type of person whose idea of styling was going to bed with wet hair and letting nature do its thing. (I.e. me. I was that type of person.)
‘Well, I’m here to help.’ Pandora touched my hair with a comb, as though to check it wasn’t going to zap her. ‘Do you have a preference for length? Colour? Style?’
‘Just not this,’ I said ruefully.
‘Understood.’ Pandora brought me some herbal tea in a delicate cup decorated with black blooms. I sipped gratefully, feeling its warmth spread through me. ‘So, do we know what triggered the magic burst that caused this?’
I sighed.
‘I’m trying to choose between two boys.’ I turned the cup in my hand, feeling the gentle sparkle of the charm its maker had infused into it. It was probably from All Fired Up, the pottery studio behind The Scoop.
‘Only two?’ Pandora winked. ‘I’d expect at least four.’
I grimaced. ‘Four sounds stressful. Two is plenty.’
‘So, a love triangle, hmm?’ Pandora took a brush and began gently combing my frizzy locks, her magic going to work counteracting the spell from last night. ‘Now this is the stuff of great literature.’
‘I’d prefer to be reading about it than living it.’ I set down my teacup on the tray on the shelf in front of me. ‘Anyway, they’re both aware, and things are getting complicated.’
Pandora lifted the ends of my hair, regarding it thoughtfully. ‘They both have magic, hmm?’
I nodded. ‘There’s a lot of it in the air right now.’
‘I bet.’ Pandora chuckled. ‘Let’s do a wash, shall we? I think a charmed rinse can handle the worst of it.’
She rolled me over towards the back of the salon, tilting my head back against the padded sink.
‘So, tell me about this ring,’ said Pandora, as the warm water coursed over my scalp. My skin tingled as Pandora’s gentle magic went to work undoing the spell that had caused the frizz.
‘I dug it out from the sand near the Heart Tree – I guess it was calling to me somehow. And I found the owner’s diary at The Last Word.’
‘Talk about fate.’
I nodded, marvelling at how Pandora was somehow managing to wash my hair without getting water in my ears. Unlike pretty much every other hairdresser I’d visited over the years.
‘Especially when it turns out that we have the same romantic woes. Her diary says that she found herself torn between two men for years. The son of a wealthy business owner and her childhood sweetheart.’
‘Who did she choose?’ asked Pandora, twisting a towel around my hair and rolling me back towards the mirrors.
‘I don’t know,’ I said with a groan. ‘She just stopped writing her diary right when she started getting to the good bit. And there’s no record of a marriage or anything like that. And the other pair of initials is scratched out on the Heart Tree.’
‘Ah,’ said Pandora. ‘I know the set you mean. JL.’
I smiled. ‘We call her J.Lo. But it turns out she was Josephine. Josephine Lovell?’
I said it like a question, in case the name was familiar to Pandora. But she shook her head.
I hesitated. I hadn’t confessed this to anyone else yet, but Pandora had magic. She’d understand.
‘But I think she’s talking to me through the diary,’ I said. ‘Last night, some text showed up on the blank pages, like she was writing to me.’
Pandora considered this. ‘Maybe you should try writing back.’
‘That is … actually really good advice.’ Who needed a therapist when you had a witchy hairdresser?
Pandora winked. ‘I’m not just a beautifully made-up face.’
Wrapping a cape around my shoulders, she pulled a pair of scissors from her pocket, then tapped the handles to her cheek as she considered.
‘So, do you trust me to work my magic?’ she asked, shaking out my hair, which was already starting to look better.
I trusted Pandora’s perspective more than I trusted mine, that was for sure. Long, short, curly, straight, side part, centre part, long layers or a shag – they all sounded equally appealing to me right now.
If only I could have someone make all of my decisions for me. Namely, the Finn and Noah decision.
And my next coffee order, if I were being honest.
Pandora went to work, snipping away with a practised hand. We chit-chatted about the Summerween Festival, Pandora’s plans for a trip to the West Coast, and an article of mine on an up-and-coming baseball player that Pandora had read via the monthly newsletter we emailed out.
‘I don’t even follow sports,’ she said. ‘But Soraya is a huge fan of yours, especially after the write-up you did for Ernie. Every time you have an article come out, she texts it to everyone to read.’
I blushed, feeling flattered that my work had such a cult following in Whisperwind Cove. Especially since I only spent a month or so here each year.
Then I swallowed, thinking about the offer Lara had dangled in front of me.
While hiding in my bedroom this morning, I’d read over the job description she’d sent, drawing in a breath when I’d seen the salary and benefits.
It ticked so many boxes that my current role at Easterly Sports didn’t – a living wage, for one – but would it reach people in the same way?
I couldn’t imagine anyone laminating a PR piece and putting it up on their wall.
Or sharing an ad campaign across an email chain.
But I owed it to myself to move up, didn’t I? Lara certainly seemed to think so. And Mom and Tiff had been clear about what they thought.
The cat at the door meowed, and I turned.
There at the door was Noah Tucker. From the look on his face, he was as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
I glanced in the mirror, then winced. Even with the help of Pandora’s ultra-flattering mirrors, I was still at the drowned rat stage of my haircut.
Haircuts were like doing a deep clean of your house: everything got worse before it got better.
But drowned rat was better than giant magical puffball. Especially since it meant that I didn’t have to explain said giant magical puffball situation to Noah, and how he just might have been behind it.
‘Noah!’ said Pandora warmly. ‘Why don’t you take a seat over on the chaise. Molly and I are just finishing up.’
My ring crackled on my finger, growing so hot that I almost tried to yank it off.
Every time I snuck a look at Noah in the mirrors, I realized that he was looking right back at me.
With each look, my cheeks grew redder and redder, until I was a veritable fire engine beneath the drowned ratness of my half-finished haircut.
Had Noah always been so handsome? It was a thought I kept having, and I couldn’t quite figure out the answer. Either he’d changed, or I had, because there was something to the intensity of his dark eyes and the way he held himself that utterly fascinated me.
Even though I’d agreed to go on a date with Finn.
Although I hadn’t gone on the date in the end, had I? I’d cooked dinner with Noah instead, even if that had mostly been because I’d been trying to do something nice for Rosie. But still, on some level, I’d chosen Noah.
Until I’d gone running into the house with Finn, anyway.
Why was this so difficult?
As Pandora started up the hairdryer and began returning me to a human state, Noah pulled out a small sketchbook and pencil and started sketching, the way he always did when he had a spare moment he didn’t know how to fill.
Or, as he’d once said over breakfast, something he needed to get down on paper so that he wouldn’t forget it.
I was watching him so intently in the mirror that I barely even noticed that Pandora had set aside the hairdryer and the round brush she’d been using and was adding a lightly hexed serum to my hair.
‘Fingers crossed you don’t end up in Anita’s situation,’ she said, crossing her taloned fingers. ‘The hex is usually stable. But for some reason my magic has been unpredictable since that Summerween storm.’
‘I’m waiting on tenterhooks,’ said Noah, glancing up from his sketchbook.
‘As long as it’s better than what I came in here with.’ I bit my lip, hoping Noah wouldn’t have to hurriedly edit his drawing to add some hair floof. Well, assuming he was drawing me, that was. Perhaps he was sketching the cat. Or Pandora. Or even the dramatic light fixture.
‘I promise it won’t be as bad as that,’ said Pandora with a chuckle.
She stepped back to regard my newly styled hair.
‘Well, the good news is that the hex appears to have got over whatever was bothering it. And the other good news is that we’ve undone the dark magic that brought you in here in the first place. ’
‘So we won’t have to cut it all off?’ I teased.
‘Not this time,’ she said. ‘Although, please, if things get complicated enough that you’re thinking about a change that big, make sure you call me first. I’ll talk you down.’
She whipped off the cape and held an ornate mirror up to my face.
‘So, what do we think?’ Pandora’s voice was warm, as though she knew exactly what I was about to say.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Noah and I said simultaneously.
In stark contrast to the frizzball I’d come in with, my hair now fell in perfect glossy waves to my shoulders, with layers that framed my face just so.
Pandora hadn’t added highlights or colour, and yet somehow my hair shone with soft reds and purples depending on how the light caught it.
I felt shimmery and iridescent. And rather desperate to spin in a circle to show it off.
I resisted the urge, but only because I didn’t trust my sandals on the salon tiles.
‘Absolutely breathtaking,’ Noah added, his pencil still.
Hearing the quiet awe in his voice, my heart galloped.
My ring fizzed, and a magic-tinged breeze swept in through the door, dusting the salon with shimmery sparks of gold and purple.
And with the breeze came one of Whisperwind Cove’s famous whispered missives, this one straight to my own ears.
I wonder if she knows how beautiful I think she is.