Bixie This
Gisele
There’s a special kind of chaos that happens when your hands know exactly what they’re doing but your mind is somewhere else entirely.
You can organize every drawer, follow every step, make every cut with absolute confidence—and still end up holding the wrong tool, wondering how something so precise went sideways so fast. Funny thing is, that kind of mistake rarely travels alone.
It tends to show up in pairs, in different cities, at the exact same moment, proving a point no one asked for.
And if you think you can outwork it, out-plan it, or out-discipline it into behaving? Well. I admire the optimism.
Playlist: “Stupid” by Tate McRae
The hotel room in Minneapolis is perfectly fine.
Clean, neutral, the kind of aggressively inoffensive décor that exists specifically to offend no one, which means it also delights no one. I’ve been awake since five-fifteen because my body apparently didn’t get the memo that I’m supposed to be resting before a full day showcase.
I have two hours until it starts, a continental breakfast waiting downstairs, and absolutely no reason to be lying here staring at the ceiling.
I pick up my phone.
This is a mistake. I know it’s a mistake before I do it, the way you know touching a bruise is going to hurt but you do it anyway because some part of you needs to confirm the damage is real.
I open social media.
The Slammers’ official account has posted something. I see the logo in my feed and my thumb pauses without deciding to, the way it apparently does now when anything Slammers-related crosses my screen.
I tap it.
It’s a video. Game footage, last night, the camera angle from just above the penalty box. The caption says: ILLEGAL EQUIPMENT: A LOVE STORY (sound on) with approximately forty-three fire emojis, which tells me exactly who wrote it.
Shep. Obviously Shep.
I turn the sound on.
The clip is eleven seconds long. I watch it once without understanding what I’m seeing. Then I watch it again.
Bennett is on the ice.
He’s holding something that is not a hockey stick.
It takes me a full three seconds to identify what it is because my brain keeps rejecting the information.
It’s a goalie stick. He’s holding a goalie stick.
He’s standing at a faceoff dot in the middle of a professional hockey game holding a goalie stick like this is a completely normal thing to be doing, and the referee is skating toward him with an expression I recognize because I’ve worn it—the expression of a person encountering a problem they have no framework for.
I watch it a third time.
My stomach drops somewhere around my knees.
This is not the goalie stick. This is Main Street. This is a man standing in the middle of traffic staring at nothing, this is Bennett Foster coming apart at the seams again in public, this is everything I was afraid would happen when I wasn’t there to—
I call him.
Voicemail. Immediately, no ringing, the flat click of a phone that’s off or out of range.
I text him. Are you okay? Send. Stare at the screen. Nothing.
I call again. Voicemail again.
I text Boone. Is Bennett okay? I saw the video.
Send. Nothing. They’re on a bus, probably, somewhere between last night’s arena and the next city, and nobody has their phone on, and I’m sitting in a Minneapolis hotel room at five-thirty in the morning watching an eleven second clip on repeat trying to figure out if the man I—
If Bennett is okay.
I watch it a fourth time.
The crowd laughs, yells, throws things at him while he’s in the box.
That’s the thing I keep missing. The arena is laughing, not gasping, not going silent the way crowds do when something’s actually wrong.
The referee looks exasperated, not alarmed.
And Bennett—Bennett just stands there, and his shoulders do this thing, this small drop.
He’s not falling apart.
He’s embarrassed.
Those are different things. I know they’re different things.
I’ve spent weeks learning exactly what Bennett Foster looks like when he’s actually coming apart, and this isn’t it—but the fear got there before the logic did, and now my heart is beating at a frequency that is not compatible with eating a sensible breakfast and delivering a professional showcase.
I text Boone again. Please just tell me he’s fine. One word is enough.
I put the phone face down on the nightstand and go shower, because I am Gisele LaRue, and I do not sit in hotel rooms catastrophizing when I have places to be.
I catastrophize in the shower instead, which is more efficient. He did text me ‘we won’ last night. The fallout can’t be too bad, can it?
The showcase venue is a training facility attached to a salon supply distributor, the kind of place that smells like developer.
There are twenty of us in the room—working stylists, salon owners, people who applied for this six months ago because continuing education at this level matters and spots are limited and getting one holds meaning.
I got one. I’ve been looking forward to this for months.
At least I was until the illegal equipment video.
I check my phone in the parking lot. Nothing from Boone. Nothing from Bennett. The video has forty-seven thousand views now, which is either reassuring or alarming, and I can’t decide which.
I put my phone in my bag and go inside. The showcase goes well right up to the moment it doesn’t. I section the hair. Pick up my scissors. I’m already thinking about Bennett.
The model is telling me about her sister’s wedding. How soon it is. How important it is. I’m nodding. Responding. Making the cuts.
My phone buzzes. I ignore it.
The third cut is where it goes wrong. I don’t realize it immediately. I’m not rushing. I’m making deliberate cuts with years of experience.
The model makes a small, wounded sound.
I look up. I look at the mirror. I look at what I’ve done.
She has a pixie cut. A very good pixie cut. It is also absolutely not what she asked for.
“That’s,” she starts, and her voice breaks on the word. “That’s very short.”
“It is,” I agree, because there’s nothing else to say.
“I wanted,” she tries again, and the tears arrive before she finishes the sentence—not delicate, polite tears but the full overwhelm of a woman who came in with beautiful hair and is now looking at a stranger in the mirror.
“I said bixie. I said I wanted to keep some length. I have my sister’s wedding in—”
“I know,” I say. “I heard you.”
“Then why—”
The Master Stylist, Clarice, appears at my elbow. She looks at the model. She looks at the floor. She looks at me with the measured expression of a professional who has seen things in decades of editorial work but perhaps not quite this specific thing.
“She asked for a bixie,” Clarice says.
The model wails.
Not a small sound this time. A full, genuine, from-the-diaphragm wail that turns every head in the room, twenty stylists and their models all swiveling toward my station with the collective attention of people witnessing something they will be talking about for years.
The model grips the armrests of the chair until her knuckles whiten.
Tears run down her face in earnest now. She looks at her reflection with the expression of someone attending a funeral, which I suppose in a way she is.
Most of her hair is deceased.
“I know,” I say again, because I’m a professional and professionals don’t panic. “I made a mistake. I am so sorry.”
“My hair,” she says, mournfully, to the mirror.
“I know.”
“It was so long.”
“I know.”
“My sister’s wedding is in April.”
“Hair grows approximately half an inch per month,” I tell her, which is true and also possibly the least comforting thing I’ve ever said to another human being. She produces a sound that suggests she agrees.
The room is completely silent except for the model’s grief and the hum of the ventilation system. Twenty people watching. Clarice watching. My own reflection in the mirror watching, a woman holding scissors and a comb with the expression of someone doing very rapid internal calculations.
I put down the scissors.
I crouch to eye level with the model, which requires me to get very close to a significant amount of hair on the floor that was recently hers. I wait until she looks at me instead of the mirror.
“I made a mistake,” I say. “A real one. I wasn’t fully present, and you deserved better than that and I’m sorry.
” I hold her gaze. “I cannot give you back the length. But I can give you the best pixie cut you’ve ever seen in your life, and I can do it right now.
You have the perfect face card to pull it off, and you are going to walk out of here and your sister is going to cry at the wedding but not about your hair. ”
She sniffles. “Promise?”
“On my scissors,” I say.
She laughs despite herself, which is the sound I was working toward, and I stand up and I pick up my scissors and I do exactly what I promised.
The room watches. I don’t mind. I’ve been performing precision under pressure since I was twenty-two years old and opened a salon on a shoestring and a prayer, and whatever just happened—whatever caused my brain to translate bixie into pixie with the complete confidence of someone who had absolutely no idea—it’s over now.
I’m here. I’m present. My hands know what they’re doing.
I make it perfect.
Not the cut she wanted. But perfect.
When I turn the chair so she can see the back, the model goes quiet in a different way—not grief, just looking. Taking it in. The shape is clean and modern and somehow exactly right for her heart-shaped face in a way the bixie might not have been.
“Oh,” she says softly.
“Yeah,” I say.
She touches the back of her neck, where the hair tapers close. Her expression shifts.
“It’s actually,” she starts.
“I know.”
“I didn’t think I could—”
“You can,” I tell her. “You absolutely can.”