I Wrote the Sky

The next morning, April shaved her head.

I didn’t know that when she’d texted me that morning, though, so I took my time getting to her house. Had a shower, ate precisely one quarter of a slice of toast. I was making progress.

I knocked at her red front door and waited. I couldn’t hear anything from inside. Usually there’s some sort of background noise, like TV or music blaring, but there was just empty silence slipping through.

Rocking forwards onto the balls of my feet, I knocked again. Both her parents’ cars were gone. Kate was never home either, so it was just April.

Her house was miles bigger than mine, and on a better estate. If you had to draw ‘suburban home’, that would be April’s house. Perfectly symmetrical, with wide windows and tan bricks. It was lost in a maze of houses that looked exactly the same, bar the colour of their doors. It wasn’t quite “suburban nightmare” level, but it was pretty close.

I sighed, and rapped my knuckle against the wood harder. I heard a mumble from inside that had to be April, so I knocked again.

‘It’s open, s’what I said,’ she shouted from way inside.

And sure enough, with a firm enough push the door opened. I let myself inside like I didn’t really belong there, like I was hiding out in an unfamiliar house. The truth was that I’d been to April’s house so often that I knew which drawer held what in the kitchen, and her parents both liked me, but for some reason I always felt out of place. I never quite managed to shake that feeling.

‘April?’ I called, but I didn’t get an answer. She wasn’t downstairs, I checked and every room was empty.

The hallway was cold when I paced back there; the only window was north-facing so it never got a lot of sun. They tried keeping a house plant on the ledge of that window once, green and leafy, but it died after a couple of months.

I sat down on the small sofa alongside the opposite wall. It was soft and coloured that lovely shade of green that was light enough to appear cream in the sunshine, but dark enough to be noticeably one colour when you looked at it properly.

I unlaced my boots and slipped them off my feet, placing them in front of the sofa. In line with each other, and exactly in the middle. I walked up the stairs, and that’s when I heard the sobbing. It was quiet, but it was definitely April.

I followed the sound to the bathroom across from her bedroom, and waited. The door was locked, and I didn’t have to try and open it to know that. She always either left doors wide open, kept them locked shut.

The floor was hard, stiff carpet, but I sat down anyway. I leant against the wall next to the bathroom door and waited. The choked sobs were louder because I was closer, but they were slowing and being replaced by long drawn out breaths.

‘Jan?’ she called, voice dry and nervous.

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t freak out.’ The door clicked, unlocking. I stood up and brushed my skirt down, staring at my feet.

She opened the door, but retreated back into the bathroom. She was hunched up, sat on top of the toilet. She was wrapped in a large grey hoodie with the hood up – her dad’s probably – and was bent over herself, cradling her head in her hands.

Her perfect white tiled bathroom was covered in her sunny blonde hair. It was all over the floor in clumps. There were thick handfuls of it almost dripping off the sink and counter. There was nowhere that was hair-free.

‘Oh,’ I breathed, stepping inside. Hair stuck to my socks straight away and I cringed, but tried not to think about it. I could do that later, this wasn’t the time.

I sank down onto the floor in front of her. She was still in her pyjamas. I sat up, and pulled her hands down to rest in her lap. The hair pressed into my bare knees, and I still refused to think about it. I hauled April’s hood back and she just stared at me.

‘April,’ I said. There was nothing left, just the equivalent of head stubble. I couldn’t stop my eyes from going wide. She’d always had hair past her shoulders, way past her shoulders. Wavy blonde hair that fell almost to her boobs, it was her pride and joy.

‘What have you done?’ I said. The clippers were lying on the side next to the sink, still plugged in and circled with a halo of hair, like everything else in the room.

‘You’re not fucking Britney Spears, April,’ I said, and she laughed. I did too. The whole situation was incredibly ridiculous, and looking back on it now seems even more so.

‘I look like a monster,’ she sighed.

‘No, not a monster,’ I stood up, and pulled her up with me, ‘a fuzzy egg, maybe. Definitely not a monster.’

I cleaned the bathroom whilst she had a shower and rinsed all the hair off herself. It took less time than I thought it would, the cleaning. I swept the surfaces, letting everything fall to the floor, and then vacuumed it up. All whilst April sang early 2000s R&B into the showerhead two metres away.

She stepped out of the shower, and I threw a dressing gown at her. She pulled it tight around her shoulders, and padded off into her bedroom as I unplugged the vacuum and put it away.

Her curtains were drawn, and the only light in her room at all was coming from a string of cheap fairy-lights that were pinned to her ceiling.

‘So,’ I sat down on the bed next to her, ‘you shaved your head?’

She pulled a vest on, and I was so used to watching her hair get in the way of everything, it seemed so bizarre to see. No hair tumbling around her.

‘James couldn’t stop complimenting my hair.’

I nodded and lit a cigarette. She pulled the pouch out of my lap and started rolling herself one. She’d managed to get dressed pretty quickly, considering that just a handful of minutes ago she couldn’t even get her head out of her hands.

‘That’s why I wanted to leave yesterday,’ she said as she sparked up, ‘I was sat next to him, and all I could think was ‘Is he looking at my hair?’. I just couldn’t make polite conversation wondering whether his whole view of me was based on my hair.’

‘I’d say this is a little drastic,’ I reached over and stroked across the buzz cut, ‘but it’s you. I don’t think you can surprise me anymore.’

April didn’t do things by half measures. She either did something completely, or she wouldn’t even attempt it. This was probably the best example of that. Her parents went ape-shit. I had to leave as soon as they got home because her mum’s shrill voice made my ears sting.

‘April shaved her head,’ I told my dad when I got home. He was making beans on toast, and he shrugged.

‘Why am I not surprised?’ he said. The butter knife dragged across his toast. He’d burnt it a little under the grill, and I watched him scrape the worst off into the bin.

He looked up, and it felt like I was looking in a mirror. I saw all of my own sadness in him, and I could tell that he saw the same in me. ‘Do you want some?’ he asked, and I decided that yes, I did. If April could shave her head, I could certainly manage a plate of beans on toast.