Chapter 2 — Scissors

Marlowe Grant looked like a man walking to his own execution over breakfast, which — given how much whining I'd heard through the wall last night — felt about right. "You heard, right?" He didn't even touch his eggs. "Dad's making me go Thursday. Trials. I could lose fingers, Marlowe. I could lose *worse* than fingers." "You could." I poured coffee I had no intention of drinking, just to have something to do with my hands that wasn't strangling him. "Or you could not go." "You think he'd let me get away with that?" Grant laughed, short and bitter. "He'd drag me there himself. Chain me to the gate. This isn't a request. It's a Calloway obligation, whatever that even means." *Whatever that means.* Nineteen years watching this family worship a dead man's memory, and my own cousin still didn't understand what it meant. I understood it in my bones, in the sting still humming across my cheek from last night, in the chair that had never existed for me. "What if it wasn't you," I said, testing the shape of the idea out loud for the first time, "who went?" Grant blinked at me like I'd suggested sending the dog. "Who else is there? I'm the only son in this house." *You're the only son. I'm the only nothing.* "Forget it," I said, and left before I could say something I couldn't take back, straight for the bathroom mirror, before the plan already forming in my chest could talk itself back out of existing. --- Ten years of hair came off in fistfuls. I made myself watch every second, because for once I wanted to see my own face change under my own hands, instead of somebody else's cruelty doing it for me. I was halfway through — one side cropped close, the other still hanging past my shoulder, looking less like a plan and more like a crime scene — when the door handle turned without a knock. "Marlowe, have you seen the—" Marla stopped dead in the doorway. Her eyes went from the scissors in my hand, to the hair on the tile, to the half-finished disaster staring back at both of us from the mirror. "What in God's name are you doing?" I didn't lower the scissors. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my burned wrist, in my stinging cheek, in every mark she'd ever left behind. "Grant's not going Thursday," I said. "I am." For one long, terrible second, I thought this was it — caught with scissors in my hand and half my hair already gone, no story ready, four hours into a plan that had taken me a decade to build up the nerve for. Instead, she just looked at me. Really looked, the way she hadn't in years, like she was doing arithmetic instead of feeling anything as simple as shock. "You'll need real wrap," she said finally, flat, clinical, the way she'd discuss laundry. "Bandages won't hold under a hard hit. And you'll need Grant's papers. Do you even have a plan past *cut your hair?*" I stared at her. "You're not going to stop me?" Marla folded her arms, and something crossed her face I had never once seen aimed at me in ten years under this roof. Not warmth. Nothing that generous. Something colder, more useful. Calculation. And underneath it, so deep I nearly missed it — the smallest, most reluctant flicker of respect. "If you get caught," she said, "they will not be gentle about it. And I will not be able to protect you. Do you understand that?" "Yes." "Then finish the other side. You look ridiculous." She left before I could figure out whether I'd just been threatened, helped, or somehow both at once. I stood there with the scissors still shaking slightly in my hand, staring at a stranger's uneven jaw in the mirror, and understood one thing with total, cold clarity. I had exactly four days to become someone else — or this whole plan died in a bathroom, with half a haircut, and no way back to who I used to be either.