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“Stay still, okay?”
Piper tried not to flinch as the hair clippers buzzed, veering dangerously close to her ear. The wooden steps of their old veranda creaked as she shifted slightly, batting at a flies before they could settle on her bare legs.
“Still!” Shel reprimanded, but her tone was light and obviously joking. Piper could hear the smirk in the other girl’s voice, half turned up at the corner of her lips, with a flash of crooked teeth peeking through the gap.
“I am being still!” She shot back, “Shouldn’t you be- hey, watch it!”
“Sorry,” Shel pulled the clippers away in a sudden jerk, and it felt like she’d shorn off Piper’s entire head in a single movement, “It doesn’t look half bad, y’know,”
Piper raised a hand to her head in an unconscious movement. The whole right side had been cropped right down, leaving only a thin covering of brown. It felt light and almost dizzying. She’d really done it. She’d shaved her head.
Shel had talked her into it a while back. She’d meant it teasingly; Did ya cut your hair blindfolded with craft scissors or something? and Piper had responded with something vague about wanting to get rid of it, which the other girl had immediately lept upon and offered up her services as a ‘fairly crappy hairdresser with a pair of old clippers in the back shed’. They’d laughed and forgotten it, until Piper had blurted out, after weeks of the idea churning about in her mind, that actually, it might be nice for a change. Shel had turned up the next day with the promised hair clippers, scissors and a comb, smirking in her trademark fashion.
Which was basically why they were sitting on the back steps of Piper’s family home, sticky with a coat of mid-may sweat as the sun set behind them, Shel straddling her from behind with a pair of clippers and limited hair-cutting abilities.
“Really?” she frowned, half-wishing for a mirror.
“Really,” the other girl said, gently pulling Piper’s hand away from her head as she lopped off the last of her choppy brown waves, leaving a similarly jagged cut ending just above her ears. The strands fell onto her lap and around her shoulders, sticking to her skin and tickling like feathers.
For a while, they just sat there. The sun had drooped down behind the hills, bathing the house in a mixture of orange light and creeping shadows. At some point, Piper’s fingers had intertwined themselves with Shel’s, and they rested on her knee, almost cautiously.
Shel was first to stir, somehow more fidgety and restless than Piper herself.
“Wanna take a picture or something? See how it looks from the front?” She asked, lips awfully close to Piper’s ear as she brushed the cut hair from her shoulders. Despite the humid air, she felt a shiver run down her spine.
“Yeah, alright,” she murmured as Shel pulled out her hand-me-down cellphone, spinning around so they were facing each other. The fading sunlight caught on her new rhinestone nose stud, which Piper had bought the other week at one of those quirky little stores in town.
“Wow,” was all Shel said, dark eyes taking in Piper’s new cut, “Wow,”
“A good wow, or a wow-what-have-we done?” She joked nervously.
“Definitely a good wow. You look… great,”
“Well, let’s see then,” Piper hoped the rapidly darkening night hid her blush.
“Oh, yeah, hang on… there. Have a look,” Shel handed over the phone, which Piper took cautiously - Demigods don’t use phones was still a mantra that was clear in her mind.
Any of such thoughts disappeared when she saw the photo.
Her breath caught in her throat. The girl in the picture was obviously her, yet she hardly recognised it any more. The long, choppy cut that had been her trademark for so long was gone, replaced by a side-cut like style, trimmed short and uneven.
It was nothing like ‘Piper McLean’, daughter of Aphrodite and the famous Tristan McLean, a perfect daughter, friend, girlfriend-
And boom, there it was. Like always, leaping out at her from the most ordinary things, at seemingly random moments, filling her mind until she was drowning in it, drowning in Jason, because after weeks that had turned into months and would soon become years, she still wasn’t over him. She still couldn’t say his name carelessly, still couldn’t talk about him without choking up. In a way, she was still there on that beach, yelling empty words and sobbing tears that she’d long ago run out of. Screaming at Apollo, throwing her anger like a knife, trying to find a way to save Jason, then blaming the former god because that’s all she could do. Because she couldn’t think about how it wasn’t all his fault, that Jason had died for her, that he’d known and done it anyway, even after she’d gone and broken up with him, because he loved her, and she couldn’t even give him that in the end, because Jason had always been the best of them, and-
“Piper? Are you alright? Pipes!”
She felt a cool hand on her wrist, a glint of rhinestone in the dark. Shel knelt in front of her, obviously concerned. Her cellphone lay face down on the ground below them. She must’ve dropped it while she was… thinking.
“Sorry,” she sniffed, embarrassed to find tears trailing down her face.
“Wha- hey, don’t worry about that,” she awkwardly wrapped her arms around Piper, smoothing down her new hair, “Do you not like it? ‘Cause we can change it. Kinda. Well, not really, but it’ll grow out eventually,”
“S’not that,” she muttered into Shel’s shoulder, “I like it,”
Because she did, really. It might’ve been nothing like ‘Piper McLean’, but it was everything like Piper McLean. Practical, tomboyish, and confident, reminding her of nights spent outside in the heat, cicadas and a woodsmoke-y smell, messy winged eyeliner, introduced to her by Shel, of course, and rhinestone nose studs.
“Okay,” was all Shel said, and they sat like that for the rest of the night, Piper leaning her head on Shel’s shoulder, their hands linked as they took turns pointing out new constellations and laughing at the names they came up with. One day she’d talk about it with Shel, explain why she wakes up in a cold sweat with tear tracks running down her face, and why she doesn’t want to discuss her life before Oklahoma. Why she leaves for New York every year.
But for now, they were content with watching the stars. And if they occasionally reached over to brush their lips together, savouring the taste of almost-summer, that was nobody else’s business.