A short bob

He hadn't seen her for what, five years?

She looked so different.
She was tall, almost as tall as him.
Her hair, that used to be so long, was now cut in a short bob.

Now that he thought about it, he should have known that she would have cut her hair by now.
She used to complain about it all the time. It would get in the way of her running, jumping, hiking, climbing trees, wrestling. All the things they used to do all day during the summers in the village.
She only wore it long because her mother wouldn't let her get it cut.

"Girls have long hair, and that's that", she used to say.

At least, Fiona had managed to obtain to not wear dresses.
But even that didn't come without its lot of efforts. For two whole weeks the summer when they were 7, she had conscientiously made a hole in each and every dress her mom bought her.

Usually, they would come naturally. She would fall in the mud, have to crawl under something or it would get caught in a branch when she would jump off a tree she had climbed on.
But one day, it was 6 pm, the time where they had to each be in their home was very close and there was still no hole.

Jake smiled at the thought of her meticulously burning a hole in her dress with a lighter he had stolen from his father. The dress had, of course, caught on fire, and she had had to jump in the river in order to extinguish it. He remembered very well the image of her, walking towards her house, wrapped in his shirt, and the face her mom had made.

After that episode, he hadn't seen her for a whole week.
He would come knocking on the door every morning. Her mom would yell at him, telling him she would never let him see her again and that he should stop coming and that Fiona was anyway not going to get out of the house at all until she had promised to not damage her dresses ever again. On Friday, she had threatened to go talk to his parents in order to get them to lock him up or something so that he wouldn't be able to come anymore.

Jake didn't fear being locked up, his father had never managed to keep him in the house when he didn't want to be there. However, he feared the good beating that could come with the locking up.

So, the next week, he had stopped going to the door. He went directly to her window. He could never go in of course, her mother watched her too closely, but the simple fact that she could see him through the window, see that he thought of her, that he was there, helped her keep the courage to go through with her absolute life or death decision to never wear a dress again.

He laughed every time he saw her cause she was never dressed in anything else than underwear and socks. She was being true to her beliefs, even inside her bedroom.

After a week of her leaving her bedroom only to go to the bathroom or eat, her mother finally yielded. On the third Monday since what they would go on to refer to as "The Burning", he was skimming stones in the river when he had seen her run towards him, wearing a brand-new pair of jeans. They were the exact same ones that she had seen him wear all summer and that she had begged him to try on several times.

When she had reached him, she had jumped in his arms, making him fall over, and they had stayed there like that for a long time, just enjoying the fact that they were together again. And then they had gone to the forest, to catch up on their hut-building project.

She was still blonde though. Her mother described it as "dirty blonde". The first time he had read the fifth Harry Potter, when he was 15, he had called her on the phone to tell her about Luna and her diry-blonde hair and how she made him think of her.