VI: Snip-snip.
What Slade had done to her defied physics, defied common sense. She knew herself. She knew it was purple— it had been purple since her birth— and she knew its style. She had cut it into that style herself.
So she wondered, as it drifted to the floor and the sink, how Slade's crazy vision thing had managed to make it the exact opposite of how she had styled it?
Short in the back, long in the front. Wedge-shaped, really.
Never mind the question of how Slade had made it grow with his crazy vision thing. How did he make it grow short in the front, long in the back?
And how, exactly, had it tangled? It usually didn't tangle unless she became extremely active. So how did the process of growth tangle it?
She swore as she raked the brush through it yet again. All she'd managed to do was cut the hair in the back to its original length, after many doubts of whether that was her original length. She hadn't even started on her right side yet, and she wasn't sure she wanted to do so.
This was going to get hairy.
She pulled some of her hair forward, compared it against the length of her chin. Instead of working on the very front part first, she started at the middle. Once that met her exacting standards (at least on the right side; the left side was a mat of tangles, so she didn't want to start that until she had to), she started on the front. It took her a little while, because she wasn't entirely sure how much longer her hair had gotten. Eventually, though, she had gotten her right side to look normal.
Now, to start on the left. After she had managed to get the tangles out of her hair (this had required six cans of detangling spray and an entire jar of leave-in conditioner), she began cutting.
The scissors went snip-snip. Her hair fell to the sink and the floor. She had probably cut off six inches of hair, if not more. But when she looked into the mirror to see her usual self, she felt much better.
It was amazing, how much better you could feel after a hot bath. The water had made those markings go away.
She stared at her palms. The symbols Slade had somehow cut into them failed to appear.
Her world hadn't gone back to normal. But she could make it normal. And the first thing in her world that had go back to normal...
Happened to be staring at her from the other side of the mirror. And it looked normal enough, as normal as it ever looked.
The door hissed closed behind her, like a child closing a book on his least favorite chapter.