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“You really think it looks fine?”
Pacifica twists in front of the mirror again, tilting her head and watching the ends of her hair practically bounce as she tries to whip her head like if she turns fast enough she’ll be able to see the back.
“It looks good,” Dipper says without looking up from his book.
She turns to face him with a glare, hands finding a place on her hips and mouth pressing into a thin line. “You’re not even looking!”
When he drags his eyes up to look at her, he looks almost bored. “Paz, you’ve been staring at it for almost half an hour. I already looked at it,” he says. Then, after a second, he adds, “You look amazing. You always look amazing.”
She holds eye contact with him for a long moment before rolling her eyes and turning back to the mirror to scrutinize her reflection again, groaning. “I don’t know why I’m asking you. You’re biased.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him shrug behind her, shake his head, and look back down at his book with one corner of his mouth quirked up slightly in a gesture she broadly recognizes as fond annoyance. He thinks she’s being ridiculous. Maybe she is.
Pacifica was not allowed to have short hair growing up. When she had tried to ask for a bob when she was 8 years old, her mother had argued that it took such a long time to grow hair as long as Pacifica’s, and the moment she chopped it all off, she would regret it. Plus, Priscilla had pointed out, you can do so much more with long hair.
When she had asked Mabel to cut her hair, she really did only mean to get a couple of inches off to make sure she didn’t get split ends. She’d gotten her hair trimmed every six weeks routinely for as long as she could remember until she moved out and her parents cut her off, and nearly a year of no haircuts at all was starting to drive her a little crazy. Only Mabel had accidentally taken off a little too much, and Pacifica had liked how it looked a little bit shorter, and she asked Mabel to cut some more, and then…
As she turns her head again, the ends of her hair brush against her chin, and her lower lip catches between her teeth. Maybe it wouldn’t feel like such a big deal if she knew any other girls with short hair. That Mabel’s curls are gorgeous was one of the first things Pacifica was willing to admit after they first became friends, and they stretch now all the way down to her butt. For a moment, Pacifica wonders how long Mabel’s hair would be if it was straightened, but shakes this idea away. That’s too much hair to think about.
“Maybe it would look better if I hadn’t kept the bangs?” She speculates, but she’s not sure who she’s saying it to, because it’s clear at this point that Dipper isn’t listening to her. Experimentally, she finds one of Mabel’s headbands and uses it to push her bangs back. “Eugh. No.”
Brushing her fingers through her bangs and then the rest of her hair to straighten it back out, she still can’t help how… startling it is, really, how quickly her fingers escape the strands of fine hair into open air, and she thinks that’s silly. It’s silly to be so invested in the way running your fingers through your hair feels that you notice if it feels different.
“Maybe it’s the earrings?” She says. Most of her jewelry was left behind, but she takes out the diamond studs currently in her ears to replace them with large hoop earrings instead that do, at least, draw attention to the new, shorter length of her hair and the way it swooshes with every movement of her head.
She stares for a long minute as she tries to decide if this is better. She hates it. It draws too much attention to the haircut.
As she starts to look for another pair of earrings, she feels one of her elbows bump back against something solid and turns quickly to find Dipper right behind her, book tucked under his arm. “Okay,” he says, putting his hands on her shoulders when she turns to face him more fully. “This is obviously driving you crazy, and that’s driving me crazy. What can I do to help you put this whole haircut freakout to rest?”
She scans over his face for a long minute like she’s trying to find the answers there. “Do you really think it looks good?” She asks, and she thinks she’s probably steadily approaching having asked too many times if she hasn’t crossed that line already.
“Pacifica, it’s just hair,” he finally says, which is at least a break in all of the assurances that it looks fine. “If you don’t like it, it’ll grow back in like, six months. I don’t know why you care so much. I don’t care. I think you look great no matter what! I’d love you bald.”
They stare at each other with matching deer-in-the-headlights expressions. Despite the fact that they’ve been dating for nearly four months, the only person in their relationship who’s used the l-word is Mabel, and they’ve both asked her several times to stop. With Pacifica’s touch-and-go issues around intimacy and Dipper’s neuroticism, they’d agreed they’d wait until the right time.
“I mean, uh,” he starts, his voice pitching up a little bit with panic. “I’d love your hair even if you were bald. Or, uh, I guess, your not hair? Y’know, I just mean, like, I think you—”
She leans up to close the one-inch gap in height between them and press her mouth against his, and after he has a second to process what’s happening, she feels him relax against her, his hands dropping down to her sides.
When she pulls away, she doesn’t lean back very far, their faces still so close to each other that she can feel his breaths against her mouth. When he opens his mouth as though to talk, though, she snatches the hat off of his head and pulls it down onto her own, spinning around to check out her reflection with the new accessory. The lumberjack hat is nearly as long as her hair is, effectively masking the whole cut. “Hmm… Yep, I think this is what was missing.”
“Wait, w-what?” He says, a slight tinge of that panic starting to leak into his voice again. “Pacifica, I need that!”
She laughs and twists away from him as he tries to snatch it back from her, grabbing a hold of his wrist to keep him at bay. “Nope! This hat looks amazing on me, Pines, it’s mine now,” she says through a grin. Of course, it clashes terribly with the white knit sweater dress she’s wearing, but that doesn’t mean she’s not going to make him fight her for it.
Once he’s snatched it back, she keeps that devilish grin as she pushes his bangs up off his forehead to reveal his birthmark and leans up on her tiptoes to press a kiss right in the center of the Big Dipper. “Maybe you need a haircut, too,” she offers, and the sheepish grin he shoots back at her is almost worth the hat hair.