Page 8 - The Mermaid Call

Mum’s homecoming
Three weeks earlier
Hair. Well, if I think about it, you could say it pretty much all started with hair. Short, long, glossy, greasy, straight, wavy, curly. . .very curly.
Hair. It’s what I think of first when I picture Mum. And right then Mum was all I was thinking about. She was arriving that very evening! My stomach could not stop whizz-pop-banging. After two years of might be, would she, why hasn’t she? Mum was finally coming to Lake Splendour – her and her fairytale head of silk.
Hair. It’s what greets me first when I catch my reflection. Mum’s crowning glory bypassed me. I have sort-of-toffee-coloured, tight coils of curls that never – ever! – grow past my shoulders (I have tried. I have tried very hard). It’s the first thing people notice about me (I wish it wasn’t), and not in the way people notice Mum’s. I get whispers, a lot, behind my back, sometimes fingers even reach out to touch and I have to act like I haven’t noticed, or I don’t mind, or, ha-ha, I share their joke. I get questions from girls I hardly know when I change for PE: “Can you brush it? “What’s it like when you first wake up?” “Really? It’s natural?”.
I’d asked Mimi that morning if I could buy some straighteners for Mum’s homecoming (“No way, no chance!”: Mimi), and I was trying to think of other ways to tame my frizz, when Eleni clicked her fingers.
“Are you actually listening, Vivien?”
Hair. What Eleni had done to hers was still bothering me. She’d chopped her long black mane off to her chin last Saturday: I’d been sitting opposite Imposter Eleni all last week of term. The worst part was she’d never even told me she planned on cutting it. We tell each other if we trim our toenails! Well, we used to. Eleni was changing.
“I said, Hero invited us to sit with them – the MPs.” She was pointing tentatively across the school canteen: the table of the Mighty Protestors. Older students. Ones with podium-loud voices and cool names and rebellious twists to their uniforms. Confident, opinionated. Scary.