Amira rolls her eyes. “Yes. And about what a pain in the butt all her Chem I students are. But I bet your mother’s shoptalk is much more interesting.”

“That’s one way to put it.” I pull my phone from my pocket and text Landry, to make sure she was able to get a ride home with Norah Weston and her sister.

A minute later, the reply comes. Landry and Norah are making copycat Moose Munch to snack on when Fletcher Anderson shows up to work on their science project.

“Okay. Cross the street and hit the flower shop, or stay on this side and brave the salon?” Amira turns to look through the glass front window of To Dye For.

Nothing on earth could make me go into the flower shop after the owner and her daughter called me out on the national news. “Definitely the salon.”

Amira looks doubtful, so I tug her toward the door. The second I pull it open, a wave of familiar sounds and scents washes over me, immersing me in the upbeat chaos of the salon where my mother started bringing Landry and me for haircuts the year we moved to Clifford. Because when she’d tried to give my sister a trim on her own, three-year-old Landry had tilted her head at the last second, giving herself a lopsided bob that made my mother’s eyes widen in guilt and horror.

To Dye For has six salon chairs—three on each side of a single aisle running down the middle of the room. At the back are the shampoo basins and the staff room. Today, only four of those six chairs are occupied: the last two on the left and the first two on the right.

Heads turn as we walk in, flat irons and round brushes going temporarily still. But then everyone goes back to what they were doing, and the uncomfortable weight of attention—a burden I’ve grown to dread over the past few days—fades.

“Hey, girls! Just have a seat, and someone will be with you in a minute,” Renee, the owner, calls from the last salon station on the left, where she’s darkening the roots of a stern-looking woman in her fifties.

She doesn’t seem to recognize me, and I’m grateful for the anonymity.

I look at Amira, and when she shrugs, we find seats on the worn faux-leather couch. She sets her backpack on the floor at her feet and reaches for one of the outdated hairstyle magazines on a coffee table made of two repurposed chicken crates, painted black and topped with a rectangle of glass.

Around here, “vintage” and “reclaimed” are just fancy words for “affordable.”

I lean back and watch as a hair dryer, two pairs of scissors, and a dye brush dance in complicated patterns.