This Could be Everything by Eva Rice

Author:Eva Rice [Rice, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2023-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

19 Double A Side

Diana had fallen in love every other week since the age of about seven months old, but her most meaningful encounter with the lure of boys had been with Andrew Adamson, the only son of the folks who lived across the road from us in Austin. Andrew was just ten – a year older than we were – and looking back, I think probably knew in his own soul even then that he was as gay as the day was long, but he loved Diana for her sheet of thick, straight white-blonde hair, and he would ask us over to his house nearly every Thursday after school to play hairdressers. Our grandma Abby would walk us over there, slow as slow, in her great big red and yellow flowery dress, her ankles swollen in the heat, plodding along the hot concrete waiting to cross the road, and when we arrived she would stay for one cup of coffee and a slice of apple cake in the garden under the shade with Andrew’s mother, Moira, and then she would plod slowly back home, and Diana and I would sit next to one another on high stools in the Adamsons’ newly modernized kitchen, holding magazines upside down and talking gossip like real ladies we had heard in Headspace, the salon on Cut Saddle Pass down the road, and Andrew would talk to us in his unbroken, pitchy Austin drawl, while he twisted our hair into knots and plaits and buns, handing us glasses of iced water from the new fridge, and packets of tiny salted crackers shaped like fish that we tipped into our greedy little mouths in ecstasy.

One baking June afternoon, Diana asked him to cut her hair. Andrew– give the guy credit – hesitated.

‘But I don’t want long hair anymore,’ Diana had said. She pouted and flipped her ponytail at us. I frowned at her. ‘Go on,’ she said again, looking at Andrew. ‘Do it!’

‘I might-could cut it,’ he said hesitantly. He was hard pushed to disguise the tremor of excitement in his voice.

‘No might-could about it,’ said Diana. ‘Just get it cut.’

‘Your mama won’t be pleased,’ observed Andrew, who was not the brightest kid on the street but at least knew how to read a room.

‘Mama won’t mind,’ said Diana. ‘She lets me do things I want to do, long as they’re good things.’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ I said. Diana had annoyed me that afternoon by telling Missy Jackson in our math class that I would help her with her homework, and I would be happy to be paid in cherries. Diana always had to be liked, even when it meant pulling me into her plans, whereas I didn’t really mind whether I was liked or not. Missy Jackson was a liar more slippery than a pocketful of pudding. I didn’t want to help her with her homework, cherries or no cherries.

‘I think Andrew could cut my hair real pretty,’ said Diana. ‘I’d like to feel it short in my fingers.

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