there's a picture of the side, edited by stormyhale, of elizabeth with blonde hair.
also
pleeeeasae tell me what you think of this chapter, because i'm not overly sure...
-
Originally, I had opted for black, not wanting to venture too far from my brown locks, but Matty pointed out that it probably wasn't the best, because it wasn't going to be the biggest change.
Sylvia suggested pink, blue, green and various other colours that I didn't really want to go anywhere near.
"You're going to have to bleach it no matter what, because it'll have to be lighter." she said. I nodded my head.
"Okay," I said, suddenly feeling very wary. "I guess I'll go for a kind of strawberry blonde." I said. She nodded her head, we searched a couple of photos of strawberry blonde hair up on her phone, and we all agreed it would be best.
So Sylvia went to the nearest Boots and left Tom and Matty with me, in case I had another 'outburst.' I playfully punched her arm when she said that.
"So," Matty said after Sylvia left. "Strawberry blonde, eh?" I sighed, dramatically falling backwards onto the large sofa in the living room.
"Don't remind me." I said.
It would probably look fine, it wasn't like I had dark brown eyes or anything, mine were icy blue, and my skin was quite fair, but it would just feel weird, living my entire life with dark hair, then suddenly being blonde.
"What else are you gonna do?" Tom asked me.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, you're only dying your hair, your face won't look any different." he said. I sighed quietly.
"I dunno, I could kind of change my make up or something, and just wear different clothes."
"You could get your lip pierced." Tom suggested with a cheeky grin.
Matty and him sat either side of me.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
"Seriously Tom?" I choked out.
"Sorry."
While Sylvia was out, Bryony came back. She dumped her bag and coat by the kitchen and came into the living room and looked at us.
"Wow, you guys look like you're having a barrel of laughs! Where's Sylvia?" she asked.
"She's gone to buy hair dye for Lizzy." Matty said.
"What, why?" she asked, furrowing her eyebrows.
"Just look on the Herald or whatever." I said glumly.
So she did. She grabbed her laptop, typed in the address, and sure enough, there was an article about me on the front page.
"Oh," she said as she read it. "I get it now." she said.
No one asked me any questions, like why I left, why I wanted to stay in London, why, if my dad and step mum had enough money to get my picture on the news, yet I only had enough for my share of rent for a month with a little bit spare.
Someone else may have found that uncaring, but I was actually happy they didn't feel the need to interrogate me.
Charlie got back ten minutes after Bryony, and we had to explain it again, then, Sylvia walked through the door.
"Right." she said, bouncing into the living room after shutting and triple locking the door, with a Boots carrier bag clasped in her hands, fuller than it needed to be.
She took out several packets of pads and tampons and threw them onto the sofa next to Bryony, the guys began to look awkwardly in the direction of them.
Then, she produced two boxes, one was bleach and the other was dye.
"Let's bleach it now." I said.
Sylvia chewed on her bottom lip.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
"Yeah." I replied.
So every single one of us legged it up the manky carpeted stairs into the small bathroom.
Sylvia didn't bother reading the instructions because she said she'd done it all about a million times before, which made me wonder how natural her lovely, cascading dark brown hair actually was.
I bent over the bath and she put the bleach on my hair.
"Fuck." I complained, as my head suddenly started feeling like it was burning.
"Yeah, it stings like a bitch, but don't worry, it'll get better after a little while." she explained.
I felt uncomfortable, with four people watching Sylvia slathering a burning paste onto my hair.
Eventually, the burning sensation left and was replaced by an equally unpleasant tingling on my scalp.
I kind of zoned ot and became completely unaware of my surroundings and what Sylvia was doing to my hair, but before I knew it, she had wrapped my hair up in a towel and patted the top of my head.
"Now, you have to wait twenty four hours before putting the dye in your hair." she said.
I turned around and noticed that everyone was sitting down on the floor, surrounding us.
"Ooh, I didn't know this was an Alcoholic's Anonymous meeting." Sylvia joked, cocking an eyebrow at everyone. We both sat down. I was in between Matty and her.
"Sylv, our whole house is an Alcoholic's Anonymous meeting." Charlie said, we all laughed uncomfortably.
We all sat there, talking about nothing in particular, but enough to make us all feel wanted.
"I don't know about you guys, but I'm starving." Bryony admitted. I nodded my head, my hair nearly coming loose from the rather unstable tower of towel.
"How about we make food and eat up here? By we I mean anyone but me." Sylvia spoke up.
"That's kind of gross." Charlie said. Bryony nodded her head. I think Matty, Tom and I were too scared to state any opinions at all.
"What about one of out rooms then? We could have wine as well!" Sylvia laughed into her hands.
There was a chorus of 'not mine's,' until Sylvia was left staring at Matty and I, in fact, everyone else was.
"You're the newbies," Sylvia said to us. "It's only right for your to throw us a party in your gratitude." she said. Matty sighed.
"Bitch." I said, grinning at her, she laughed at me.
"You'd better get used to it!"
So that was how Matty and I ended up trying to cram four other people, not to mention food and drinks into a bedroom that was barely big enough for the two of us and our luggage.
Everyone was sitting on the bed, apart from me, because at some point during my drunken dancing to invisible music, I had fallen off, so I got comfy on the floor.
"Can you pass a sandwich?" I asked Matty.
Sylvia had agreed to help make the food with Charlie and Tom, because Matty and I explained it was only fair, seeing as she forced us into having a 'party' in our 'room.'
The sandwiches were awful. They were dry, and they had all forgotten to put butter in them. However, after a few drinks, they were bearable.
After the right amount of time, Sylvia whisked me off into Matty and my little bathroom so that she could sort my hair out.
I re-entered the room with considerably lighter coloured hair.
Everyone laughed at me, not because I looked stupid, because I was so drunk that I fell over my suitcase as I tried to prance around, showing off my new look or whatever.
At some point in the evening, Matty and I got out our guitars and started serenading each other, both singing different songs that we occasionally changed. But most of the time I sung I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone, and he sung Tainted Love by Soft Cell, but we were both pretty awful seeing as we could barely speak.
I think at some point before that we may have all taken some sort of drug, but I couldn't remember, and by the morning I barely rembered anything, luckily, Bryony ended up filling me in with most of the details.
However, one thing I couldn't forget, was when everyone left and Matty and I turned the lights off and clambered into bed, he turned over to face me, and I faced him, because my body felt like slush, like the cold, over cooked porridge that she would begrudgingly serve up for me in the morning when dad was around, which wasn't very often.
"Can you tell me about your parents?"
"Only if you tell me about yours." I whispered back to him.
"Deal."
"Well, when I was seven, my mum left my dad and I. He loved me back then, I think everyone did. I was that child who everyone wanted to have. The cute little naive rich man's daughter who always wore a smile so big it was almost painful, and her hair in little plaits that her single dad had managed to figure out how to do, and dresses. Tons of cute little dresses, usually blue. I loved blue. Anyway, a year later, he got remarried-" words kept spilling out, and I couldn't stop myself. The worst thing was, I was almost grinning all the time, throughout the entire story, like I was reciting a poem or chapter from a book. That made me sick.
Matty frowned.
He didn't say sorry, and I didn't want him to.
He pulled me into his chest and held me there for around ten minutes, as he told me about his past, his voice crackling occasionally.
He said when he was fifteen, he started taking drugs. His parents didn't realise until two years later. He got kicked out, he got into some deep trouble with other people. He was sofa surfing, he was almost dying. He busked to get money to buy more drugs. After two years, in desperation, he went back to his parent's house. They took him back in. His entire life seemed like an on and off situation, going back and forth constantly, until one day he realised that he was five years away from being thirty, and he still lived with his parents, who really didn't want to be around him for much longer. So he just left.
Then I hugged him back.
"Did I ever tell you, I have a thing for blondes?"
I laughed quietly, trying to disguise the fact that his words made my cheeks heat up.
"Unfortunately, it's not natural." I said, pulling back from his chest, but we were still holding onto each other.
"Don't mind." he said. I grinned at him, even though he couldn't see in the dark. But I was pretty sure he was grinning as well, because I could smell the whiskey and wine on his breath.
"Matty?"
"Yeah?"
"Are you going to kiss me?"
"I'm kind of tempted."
"You can- I mean, you can if you want to." I shrugged, he laughed.
"You're sixteen."
"Matty, if she gets her hands on me again, I'll be dead in a few months. You might as well while you still can." I said, he winced at my words, I didn't.
"Okay. But it's not illegal, right?"
I laughed. "Who even gives a shit?" I asked. "I've left home, people are looking for me, I'm drunk, I don't know what the hell those pills were that Sylvia passed around, but I'm more giddy that I ever was, I wouldn't hesitate before killing most people in the world, and I may or may not have stolen a few things in the past. As for you, you've definitely done more illegal things than I have, and being twenty five and kissing a sixteen year old isn't illegal, just kind of immoral in some cases, and I highly doubt it'll be the worst thing either of us have ever done or are yet to-"
He kissed me.
His lips tasted nice.
I wasn't very experienced in the fields of making out at all, so team that with the alcohol and drugs in our systems and you receive quite a lot of teeth-bashing and lip biting, the latter may or may not have been intentional.
He was the first person I had ever kissed, and the last one I wanted to kiss as well.
I stupidly said that sentence out loud.
It all sounded so stupid and young and naive, slipping out of my poisonous mouth while I was drunk and secretly, almost crying.
My skin felt as raw as my hair did.
Bleached.
He laughed.
"I'm not that good." he said.
"I don't care." I said.
We were breathless and I was kind of sweaty.
I knew he didn't feel what I did.
It was just typical of me.
I didn't even deserve him anyway.
We were drunk.
We only kissed.
I blurted out some stupid, fairy-tail expectant poetic words.
He tried to stop me.
"Lizzy?" he asked.
"Matty?" I replied.
"Do you believe in love?"
"No."
"Good. Because it fucks people up. You know that?"
"Do you think I wouldn't have realised that by now?" I asked.
"Sorry." he said, sensing the water he was stepping into.
There were horrible, aching, dry moments of silence after that.
"Please don't fall in love with me." he said. His voice suddenly sounded strangely fragile for him.
"I won't. You deserve better than me." I admitted.
"No, Lizzy. You deserve better than me." he said, then we fell asleep, tangled up together, and we woke up the same way.