Binny Bewitched by Hilary McKay

Author:Hilary McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Chapter 12

Wednesday Morning, Part One

What are you doing?” asked James, up before seven the next morning and peering at Binny in the bathroom. “What’s that smell?”

“Go away! You should knock, not just barge in!”

“I don’t knock,” said James, as if stating a truth beyond his control. “Your hair’s dripping brown drips.”

Binny mopped anxiously. Brown splodges appeared on her towel.

“Why are you washing your hair with dirty shampoo?” asked James.

“It’s not shampoo.”

“Why are you putting it on your head, then?”

“To change the color. I’m tired of looking like seaweed. What are you doing here anyway?”

“My toothpaste cooking.” James squirted a dollop of mint toothpaste onto the tip of a finger and looked at it consideringly. “Strawberry sauce?” he inquired of his reflection in the mirror. “Oh yes, thank you!” he replied, nodding politely, and added a swirl of Peppa Pig pink.

“Pudding!” he announced, between delicate cat licks.

“No wonder the toothpaste is used up all the time!” said Binny.

“I know. Especially the strawberry,” said James shamelessly. “Do you want to see my muscles?”

He pulled up his pajama top to display a set of bony ridges that Binny correctly identified as ribs. “Ribs are good too,” she told him consolingly, when he looked disappointed.

“Good as muscles?”

“Definitely. They stop you caving in.”

“What do muscles do?”

“Stop you falling apart.”

“Wow,” said James, and made another pudding to celebrate.

“What happened with Miss Piper last night?” asked Binny.

“It was very polite,” said James, after some thoughtful licking. “She said very polite things for me to do and then I very politely did them.”

“What sort of things?”

“ ‘Please pick those clothes up.’ So I did. And ‘Please go to bed.’ So I went.”

This was such an unusual description of her brother at bedtime that Binny looked at him carefully, checking for bewitchment. She would have asked more questions if James had not innocently remarked that it was taking ages for her hair to be done.

Binny had equipped herself with an alarm clock and then forgotten to use it. Now, after a horrified glance in the bathroom mirror, she shrieked, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” and hung her head over the side of the bath with the shower on full. Dreadful colored water streamed from her head.

“Have you changed your mind?” asked James.

“Shampoo!” ordered Binny, groping and blind.

James passed it, and the bubbles turned gray.

“It’s like when we studied about pollution at school,” he said, watching with interest as she drowned.

“Towel! Towel!” begged Binny, reaching out from the deluge. “There! It’s done! I’ve done it! I knew I could!”

“Have you?” asked James, and he looked first at the picture of the extremely dry and glamorous person on the hair dye box, and then at Binny, drenched to her waist, and so far from glamorousness as to have dyed her ears brown.

“Yes, definitely,” said Binny.

“What color is it going to be? Different to seaweed?”

“Urban Darkness,” said Binny, proudly. “Much different to seaweed, you’ll see!”

* * *

It was Gareth who had first looked at Binny’s crinkly hair and described it as seaweed colored.

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