I Do

Chapter 16 - Hide and Seek

July 26, 2013

2 months later

“There is hair everywhere! Why is there hair everywhere? What, are we living in a barber shop? Is there a mutant dog I don’t know about somewhere?” I end my rant by pulling on the ends of my own strands growing out of my head. 

I feel my blood begin to pump harder and harder in my chest, as if my heart knows I’m living a real life horror movie. 

“Gahh!” 

Charlie lets out a baby squeal and claps her chubby hands together in joy at watching her mother race around like a chicken with her head cut off. “Oh, Charlie, you just love other people’s misery, don’t you?” I ask her in a high voice, a mixture of amused and desperate. 

She just giggles at me and puts her thumb in her mouth in response. 

“That’s what I thought,” I say with a sigh. 

BAM! BAM!

I jump out of my skin, leaving it in a pile on the floor. Charlie’s face turns from laughing to a pale white, tears brimming on her lids. I hurry to scoop her into my arms and rock her, trying to soothe as much as I can with my heart beating furiously in my chest. 

The door peeks open just slightly past the frame and I hold my breath...

“Lauren! Are you ready, dear?”

All the air I’d been withholding escapes like a balloon with a hole. “Clara! You scared m-I mean, Charlie, half to death!” 

But when our eyes flicker to my baby the only emotion on her face is happiness as the image of Nash’s mother is soaked into the infant’s retinas. 

“Are you certain Charlie is the one who was scared, or was it you?” Clara asks with conviction, though I know for sure she already is aware of the answer. 

“Shut it.” I glare and turn around, placing Charlie in her swing and sitting myself back down in the chair in front of the vanity. My hair is done up in a French twist, and the specific instructions for not a hair to be left out of place accounts for all that did come out of place coming out of my head. 

 

“Did you really ask Pierre to make my hair cement?” 

She smirks the snooty, crooked smile that I once mistakenly used to classify her as the Wicked Witch of the Rich. And yes, she does have some Wicked Witch qualities. But she also has good enough moments to cancel some of the... others. “If your hair isn’t perfect, the ball won’t be perfect. Therefore, reflecting imperfectly on me. And that would be bad.”

“So, let me get this straight,” I say, abandoning the powder in my hands. “The status of my hair is directly correlative to the ball being a success or failing epically?”