Paper Confines

xxxix. What We Owe To Each Other

PAPER CONFINES.
39. / What We Owe To Each Other

✶

The hair fell in a sunlit heap on the grass, blonde blades crossing green.

"Are you sure you want me doing this? I don't even cut my own hair."

"Yes, Nadya, I am sure."

It was to keep it from her eyes when she flew, Colette had told her, but there was a distance in her gaze upon asking that she only had when she spoke of things from before: her family and French bluffs and supper parties on the coast. She told Nadya in pieces, and in turn Nadya told her of her own supper parties, the fishing boys on Marvé beach and the Banganga tank, struck by Rama's arrow, so that she would know she was not the only one who mourned for sites of water.

She did not tell her of Sachiv or her drowning, to try to explain that she also mourned the girl who went in the fountain and did not come out. Colette didn't seem to mind the one who did.

So her hair fell, legs criss-crossed in the grass while Nadya sat behind her, cutting inexpertly to her chin. It caught in the grass before scattering with the wind on the lake.

"You're going to be cold now," Nadya commented, flicking an exposed, pink ear.

It was a warm winter, with snow anticipated to come late, but it was still winter. There was a blanket draped over Colette's shoulders that was there as much to catch her hair as it was to keep her warm.

"You will not be buying a hat for me?" she teased, "With all of your wealth?"

"And hide my hard work under your... wool and frills? No."

The mirror in Colette's hand was angled from the haircut to her mirthful smile. She unwrapped a hard toffee from a morning trip to Honeydukes and popped it in her mouth. She unwrapped another and handed it over her shoulder. Nadya took it with her teeth and jokingly grazed her finger.

"Ah—hey!"

"Sit still," Nadya chastised with a little lisp, pushing the toffee to one of her cheeks. "I think it'll still blow in your eyes like this."

"Then cut it shorter."

"Are you sure?"

"You have never asked this question so much as today."

She scoffed. "Fine. To the ears, then."

"Bravo."

It was one of their three spots, the lake, the second which granted them seclusion. The first was the pitch, of course, though there was little time to talk when Colette was flying and Nadya was watching dumbly after her, pretending to study. They spoke tiredly in rests between her loops and that was all. The second was Hogsmeade, which was busy enough in all places not to have to worry about the Knights, and where Colette seemed most comfortable opening up. That made it Nadya's favourite. The third was this, their site of water.

Nadya feared it sometimes, in bodies this big, unlike a bath under her mother's soothing wash or a gargoyle over a shallow coin font. She thought about her father at sea and felt sick on his behalf. She thought about Banks' father on a tiny boat with no men at his disposal and felt sicker. The lake should have felt the same. It was dangerous and with no shortage of cautionary tales, but it was also a piece of Hogwarts at last claimed for herself, and not many things were.

Colette had given her that.

When the scissors cut the last strands, she looked almost boyish in the mirror. The hair curled to frame her cheeks, rosy and full, appled in a widening smile, a sweet shrunken and sucked behind her teeth. If she were older and the cut was better, it might have seemed androgynous in some fashionable way, but Nadya blinked at the face of a girl so suddenly and obviously fifteen.