Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
━━━━━━━━━━━━
I woke up far too early on Friday morning and couldn't get back to sleep, the sound of traffic outside our window too loud to block out and the lights too bright to ignore.
I wasn't going to miss this.
Lottie rolled over, dragging the covers over her head and making some sort of muffled groan. I didn't bother to say anything until the faint sound of Mum's alarm clock could be heard — it would be best for everyone else to sleep for as long as they could.
"Lottie? Lottie! Come on, come on, you have to get up!"
"I'm awake, idiot." She flung the blanket off the bed and glared at me, but I already knew it was a joke. "God, we're both sappy fools."
I hadn't realised that Lottie still had the other one of our teddy bears — 'silly little things' that Dad had bought on a whim when we were born. They were both brown, and incredibly grubby by now, but over the years we'd ended up adding things to them and fixing torn bits of fur with patches and making Mum sew in new buttons when Thomas tore their eyes out...
They were loved.
Lottie's didn't have its stupid pink ribbon anymore, though the ribbon around my bear's neck was hardly a colour you could call blue. The bears themselves were starting to go grey, but there definitely wouldn't be time to put them through the wash now. And I wasn't sure I wanted to take mine with me anyway.
"Here, Kit, try putting them in the sink for a few minutes." Lottie tossed hers at me, and I almost threw myself off my bed trying to catch it. "Idiot. What are you giving me that look for?"
"Charlotte, Christopher?" Mum stuck her head into the room, giving the two teddy bears I was holding a funny look. "Good, you're up... what on Earth are you doing?"
"Uh... washing them?"
"Why... I'm not going to ask. I want both of you in your best clothes, alright? Lottie, did you actually wash your hair? Oh, dear Lord, I'd better put the immersion on..."
Lottie grimaced.
"You can use my shampoo? Sweetheart, you'll want to make a good first impression on people wherever you're going. You know the reputation of red hair."
She didn't look at me.
"Guess I'll dunk them in the bath," Lottie muttered when Mum left to go and shake the others awake. "I don't see how this'll help, mind."
"Yeah, the red-head with the cursed brother."
I gave her a weak half-smile at that, already starting to worry. The white patch in my hair certainly did seem unnatural, but it had just started changing as I grew up. We had pictures of us all when Lottie and I were five or six, and while they're black-and-white pictures you can still tell that my hair was fully red — with no lighter patch to speak of.
