Makeoverlover
Tara Hillford was feeling restless.
She was the youngest member of the writer’s team at a major fashion site, and writing something from the biggest hair show of the year was, of course, expected. But the thumping music and the seeming endless stream of models having their long hair cut on the stage was beginning to feel a little bit impersonal to her. At least twenty A-line bobs, in various lengths and colors, pointed or asymmetrical fringes and the occasional clipper short detail was what the artists had been creating this year.
Tara needed to write an article, and she had trouble finding the right angle for it.
She held one of her braids in her hand, caressing it thoughtfully. She had four tight french braids in today, all thick, coming together at the nape of her neck. They were pulled over her shoulders to the front, where they framed her boobs and fell towards her waist just the way she liked, and her contrasting frizzy fringe tickled her nose as she moved. She’d had Julie at the salon freshen up the intricately highlighted champagne blonde just the other day, and she knew it all looked fantastic.
But she couldn’t shake this wild idea from her mind: What if she just walked up to the stage. What if she had them cut it? Wouldn’t that make the perfect angle for her piece? The Journalist who was also a model! And she needed to deliver the Goods, for Pete’s sake.
It was impossible – she was pretty sure they had a pretty strict schedule, everything timed and arranged in advance. One did not just walk up to them and ask to join. And even if she was to do that, there was no way they could even hear her over the din of the music in here. But she just couldn’t shake the idea.
Tara dithered for what felt like an hour – probably just a few minutes in reality, watching cut after cut on that stage. Finally, watching a smiling, pregnant model get her long hime cut exchanged for a clipper ed bowl cut to Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, Tara made her way through the standing crowd up to the edge of the stage. Waved at the hairdresser as the model was turning around, showing off her short locks.
The hairdresser somehow saw her, and made eye contact. Tara waved her over, and she, impossibly, crossed the stage to the edge, as the smiling model was walking out and the song ended. Tara yelled ‘DO ME!’, and before she knew it, she was being hauled up on stage by two sets of strong arms that had appeared out of nowhere, to whoops and cheering from the crowd.
– We had a last minute cancellation! the hairdresser shouted in her ear – Are you sure? This will have to be really rapid, and it’s going to be quite a bit shorter than what you have!
– OK! came out of Tara’s mouth – backing down at that point, in front of a room full of hundreds of people, would have been impossible.
But those words ‘quite a bit shorter’ echoed in her mind over and over as the butterflies in her stomach rose to a new all time high. So far, that hairdresser had shown little in the way of hesitation before relieving models of rather large portions of their long hair.
The hairdresser led her to the big chair in the middle of the stage. A chair that was surrounded by a just wild amount of discarded hair, blonde and red and brown, even a few bits of blue and green and fiery orange. Long and short, braids and ponytails and loose, all discarded, surrounding the chair.
Tara somehow managed to walk gracefully to that chair, stepped over the pile, and sat down as fluidly as she’d ever done, heart in her throat. A black cape came swirling around her and settled down, surrounding her with a flourish, snapped close at her nape.
The hairdresser chose a moment of relative silence in the music, said ‘Hello ms. Hillford, I recognize your face, and know what you’re doing. I’m Gail, and don’t worry, I’ll give you a story to write’. She was looking right into Tara’s eyes with a great lopsided grin. A grin Tara found herself mirroring, heart thumping loudly.
The music swelled, something new, with a heavy thump to it and a sultry singer Tara couldn’t place.
She felt her top braids being deftly, rapidly undone, and, leaving the bottom two still tightly done, Gail rapidly ran her fingers, then a comb right through all the long, heavy, loose hair. She started at the front, carefully lifting Tara’s bangs vertically up out of sight on her comb, and a flash of silver scissors took something off. Again, lift and cut, and this time, a lock of champagne hair at least two feet long came sailing down in front of Tara’s face. Okay, that was more than she expected, but Gail had indeed said ‘shorter’, and apparently, she did not lie.
Tara just sat there, feeling a weird tugging at her scalp where Gail had cut it, but settled into the rhythm. Lift, slice, fall, to the rhythm of that heavy beat, as the sultry sounding lady sang her song about heartbreak and change. She couldn’t see any of the big screens from her perch on the chair, but the strobe of flashes from the crowd was constant. Soon, Gail and her comb and scissors had meandered all the way to the back, and that weird feeling had spread all the way from the top of Tara’s head, down the back and all the way to the nape.
Tara’s eyes were wide and unblinking, and she was holding on to the armrests for dear life. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest. She had no idea just how short the cut portion of her hair was, but she was certain it was the shortest she’d ever had. ‘Quite a bit shorter’ echoed over and over in her mind. She could feel the breeze of the large room ruffle it, and thought it must be standing up straight from her scalp. It must look really wild, the lower set of braids still intact, covering the sides of her head, flowing to proudly frame the bulges of her boobs under the cape, the short hair on top standing tall over them. And her whole head felt weirdly light.
So fast. It could not have been more than a couple of minutes since Gail had started; that same song was still gong, as Tara let out her breath, then breathed in again.
‘Now, hang on to your socks!’, Gail said right into Tara’s left ear, startling her once more, and held large, humming clippers up in front of Tara’s face.
Those loudly humming clippers drowned out the music, but only in Tara’s left ear. Gail lifted the braid that ended right behind that ear and let the clippers run smoothly under it. Tara, who had never before felt clippers on her head, felt the hairs on her arms stand on end, as the loud hum made a slow, smooth pass, the shears going between her skin and that tight french braid from the nape, up, up, over the ear and all the way to the sideburns. Another pass, a bit higher, a bit slower and a bit longer, and the whole braid came loose, to be dumped unceremoniously on Tara’s lap, curling on top of the already insane amount of hair that already sat there, discarded.
Tara was stunned, just sat there staring at the braid that had so recently been attached to her head; there couldn’t possibly be anything more than stubble left behind in a swathe from the middle of her nape, over her ear, to her left temple. It took all of her self control to keep her hand from darting up from under the cape to check just what had happened so blindingly fast. Gail spent a little bit of time refining her work, loudly humming clippers over comb, and Tara watched some surprisingly long strands of champagne blonde hair tumble down over her shoulder to her lap.
Then it was the last braids turn. The steady hum rose again from behind Tara’s right ear, slowly, smoothly, over the ear, ending at the sideburns, and again, a bit higher, smoothly severing the final long, thick, lovingly dyed champagne braid, which was also dumped in Tara’s lap to join the ravaged masses gathered there. The blades felt hot against Tara’s skin as Gail refined the final parts of the devastation, clippers over comb again.
Humm. Humm. Comb here and there. Another loud hum, either side of her nape. A couple shots of hairspray, Gail’s hand tousling the top, and she was done. Gail whisked the cape off as the song came to a melancholic end, throwing both braids and the rest of what must have been the vast majority of Tara’s hair to the floor, to join that pile.
In the relative silence, the audience started applauding, and Gail helped Tara to her feet, somehow able to stand. As she turned and smiled for the cameras, she noticed that weird breeze again, this time all over her head, but mostly at the sides, and her small ears felt large, red and exposed. Gail led her to the backstage, where helping hands kept her steady down the stairs, to join the other models.
Finally, a mirror. Tara stopped dead, her surroundings lost to her completely.
Gail had cut her more than two foot long hair into a brutally short pixie.
Her hair had been split into three sections along lines curving from each corner at the temples, up well over the ears, and down to meet in the middle of the nape. Above this line, her hair stood tall like a freshly trimmed hedge, straight up and just over an inch long, with a bit of a longer spike in front that poked straight up into the air, just over her right eye. In the back, the longer section extended just a tiny bit past the shorter sides coming to a sharp point in the middle. Under that disconnecting line was a brutally short skin fade, maybe a quarter of an inch long at the top, fading smoothly right to the skin at the bottom.
It was wild. It was awesome. It was something Tara would never had dreamt of asking Julie to give her.
She loved it. And it was exactly what she needed for her story.
Gail, that cheeky bastard, had seen right into her soul ..
—
English is not my first language; please do tell me if stuff needs to be fixed.
