melanie.
"Sis!" Chloe screams at me from behind my door.
"Yes!" I say, pulling it open to see what she wants.
"Are you going to that party tonight, 'round that lad's house? What's his name again? Leonard?"
"Larry." I correct her. "And yeah, but you're not." I tell her. No way am I being at the same party as my sister.
"What if I was invited?" She provokes me.
"Who the fuck would invite you love?" I say, being sarcastic at the end.
"Doesn't matter, a party is a party and I'm going."
"Why are you like this?" I roll my eyes.
She gives me the middle finger, her favourite gesture.
"What you gonna do about your face, Mel?" She asks, a bit more sincerely.
"Wish I knew, Chlo. It's pretty fucked isn't it?" I sigh, taking a quick glance in the mirror, the bruises still black and purple, without the slightest hint of fading any time soon.
"Yeah, just a bit." She giggles a little. "Maybe I could help patch you up?" She asks, it was unusual for my sister to show any affection or sympathy towards me, so I didn't really know how to respond.
"Uh yeah, alright." I say suspiciously, wondering why she was offering her services to me.
"I better not end up looking worse." I say.
"Not sure that's possible." She jokes. I hit her a playful slap.
She concentrates dead hard as she tries to patch up my face. She uses all sorts of lotions and potions to try cover up the damage done because of my inability to shut my mouth.
"How'd you even get banged up so bad?" She asks, frowning disapprovingly at my sunken eye.
"Take a guess, how do I always get myself into trouble?" I say, mostly cause I just don't want to say it myself out loud.
She lets out a dry laugh. "Are you ever going to learn to shut your mouth? " She shakes her head.
"Hopefully, after I've been banged up bad enough." I joke.
She shakes her head again and continues to try patch up my face.
After a while she puts down her brush with a sigh and says "I've given up, that's the best I can do." She puts her hands up, surrendering.
"Give me a look then." I say, picking up the mirror, prepared for the worst.
To my most pleasant surprise, it wasn't half as bad as I thought. Of course you could still see my face was a little discoloured and bumpy but for the most part she had made me look better than I probably ever could have.
"This is some good handy work." I tell her and she smiles.
"Well, I better go get myself ready then, consider that my good deed done for the rest of my life." She laughs, and flicks her blonde hair out behind her. She grabs the makeup she had on the bed and runs off into her own room to no-doubtedly out on the same amount of make up as she put on me.
I shook me head when she left the room, what a funny little thing she was.
I opened my wardrobe and for the first time that day, my thoughts directed themselves to what I was going to wear. I hadn't thought about it because I had absolutely no idea.
I flicked aimlessly through the clothes that were hanging up in my wardrobe. Nothing looked appealing enough to wear for a party. Everything I had just seemed to either be too casual or too much. I think I was overthinking my choice a lot.
I finally settled for some black skinny jeans and a lacy red top with some black boots. I called out to Chloe to see what she had decided to wear, probably something a lot nicer than what I was wearing.
She came out to meet me in the hall, she was wearing a leather skirt and fishnets with pretty white top.
"Please let me do something with your hair!" She yells, running over to me and picking up a strand of my limp, dark blonde hair.
My hair was naturally really wavy but I nearly always straightened it because it was too wild, whereas Chloe knew how to tame her hair so it looked smooth and yet still wavy. I had no clue how she managed it, but she always had it looking nice.
She runs back into her room and comes back with some hair dye.
"Oh Christ, I'm not letting you dye my hair, are you fucking insane?" I say. But ten minutes later I was on the ground with an old jumper on letting her dye my hair.
"I swear to God if this turns out ugly I'm telling mum you started smoking and she'll ground you for a century." I say as she covers my hair in the dye. At this time, I have no clue what colour my hair is going to be, but I somewhat trusted Chloe at this stage to not make a balls of it, considering if it was shit, she would be related to me still, and she knew that, and so in her mind she thought she didn't want to have a sister with ugly hair ruining her perfect image. That was enough motive for her.
She washed out the dye and blow dried my hair, leaving some of the natural waves in it. When she was finished she held up a mirror so I could see her work.
My hair was a platinum blonde now, even lighter than Chloe's, of course at the back my hair was quite a bit darker because it was nearly brown back there and not blonde, but still it looked nice, maybe a bit strange, but nice.
Chloe came back with some scissors. She gave me a look that said she knew what she was doing. I decided that I wouldn't say anything (for once), and just let her have at it. She hadn't done a bad job so far.
She cut off my hair until it was just longer than shoulder length, and I watched as locks of it tumbled to the floor, one after another. Apprehensive, but sure my hair couldn't look worse than it did when it was dead from being straightened and untouched by hair dye. The change was good, it was probably needed after all this time.
I looked in the mirror at my new, short hair. It looked like it didn't belong to me because it was so nice. It looked like it belonged to someone who didn't get into fights or who shut her mouth when she knew she had nothing good to say. It belonged to someone so much more mature than I was.
"Come on then, lets go." Chloe sighs, dragging me down the stairs.
We pop into Mum in the living room to tell her we're going out.
"Together? Really? Never thought I'd see that day so soon. Have fun, look after each other." She tells us, and then goes back to drinking her wine and watching countdown.
We come out into the cold night that was descending over our small town. Not many people were around and so the sounds of our shoes on the footpath was quite loud.
We held a comfortable silence, which was usual for us, being sisters for so long. There was only good in saying things we needed to say, instead of wasting breath on small talk that neither of us wanted to engage in. A part of me wished I could always be so quiet as when we were alone together. I could do it now, but I could never do it anywhere else. And I didn't really know why that was.
