Meanicures by Catherine Clark Read Free Book Online

“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it.” I waved hello to Olivia’s mom, who was at the host stand, while her dad was probably somewhere back in the kitchen. They made the best fish chowder for miles around—not to mention their fried clams—but they served seafood lots of different ways, too.
    “Do you remember when Kayley dyed her hair purple, so then I dyed
my
hair because we were Team Tay-Kay, only mine didn’t come out right and I had that magenta streak straight down the middle like I was a really weird skunk?” Taylor said. “My dad went absolutely ballistic, ‘You have a meet coming up and nobody goes into a meet looking like that, what were you thinking?’ and we had to go to the drugstore and stay up like half the night dying it back to brown, except it was more like black?”
    “How could I forget that?” said Olivia. “I think we went through about eight towels that day. So, if your mom wasn’t there when you got your hair colored, what did she say when she saw it?”
    “She’s trying to deal with it.” On my way out that night, she’d actually admitted that it was not a horrible thing.
    “So. What’s your idea?” Olivia asked. We all scooted in close to the counter.
    I looked over my shoulder at the restaurant to make sure nobody we knew happened to be in hearing range. I caught Cameron Hansen’s eye—he was there with his family—and waved awkwardly.
Hi, remember me? The idiot from this morning’s update with the red face and the green hair? Yeah, it’s the new and improved me, now
.
    I hope
.
    “Well, I was thinking we need to kind of clean the slate, you know, with Cassidy and everyone,” I said.
    “Clean the slate? How?” asked Taylor, squinting at me.
    “When Cassidy and I were friends, we said we’d always, always have our hair long,” I explained. “We had to have the same headbands, the same braids, everything. I just don’t want anything in common with her anymore. I want to cut all our connections.”
    “So, you’re done!” Olivia gave me a high five. “Hair cut, mission accomplished.”
    “Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it’s only a start.”
    “Um … what do you mean?” asked Olivia. “Are you planning to cut it even shorter?”
    I laughed. “No—I just meant it’s the start of something.”
    “You’re losing me,” she said. “Have a fry.”
    “What are you thinking?” Taylor asked me. “You sound like you have a plan.”
    I shook my head and felt the strange sensation of my short hair moving on my neck. “Here’s the thing. While I was having my hair cut, this other stylist kept talking about breaking up with this guy, and my stylist said she should write him a letter and then burn it. She said it would help her get him out of her life. He’d leave her alone after that,” I explained.
    “Burn his name? And a letter?” Olivia shook her head. “Sounds crazy. Who is this person, anyway?”
    “I don’t know. She was coloring my hair at the time. I might have missed some of the details,” I admitted with a smile. “But just think about it for a sec,” I urged. “We want the mean girls out of our lives, right? We want them to stop harassing us. So why not give the same thing a try?”
    “Sure,”
said Olivia, spraying me a little. “Something
like
that, maybe. But … that?”
    “I just wish I could completely ignore them,” I said. “I hate that it matters to me what they think or do, when they obviously don’t care about us.”
    “I know, it’s not logical,” Taylor added. “I keep trying not to care if Kayley does better than me this year or whether she goes to state or whatever.” She sighed. “But I do. So then I tell my mom, and she’s like, well, you just have to be teammates, you don’t have to be friends, that’s part of growing up, blah blah blah.” She paused. “So what were you saying, Madison?”
    I drained the last of my soda and pushed the glass