Iggy and Me. Jenny Valentine

on my catching, so I can’t really cheat.

      Dad was cutting the grass outside and Mum was working in her room with the sign on the door that says, Be Quiet Your Mother is Thinking. Maybe if the lawnmower hadn’t been on one of us would have noticed how quiet Iggy was being, because Iggy is not normally quiet. As soon as she stops filling the house with noise, you can almost guarantee she is up to no good.

      So when Dad finished and I couldn’t hear the mower any more, I couldn’t hear Iggy either and I knew there was going to be trouble. Maybe Mum couldn’t hear her at the same time because she opened her door and said, “Iggy? Where are you?”

      And Dad came in from outside and said, “It’s a bit quiet in here.”

      When Iggy came out of her room she acted like nothing had happened. She came past my door, quieter than normal, and I stopped throwing the ball and trying to remember what seven times four was before I caught it.

      “Iggy,” I said. “What are you doing?”

      “Walking,” she said.

      “No,” I said. “I mean what have you been doing?”

      “Nothing,” she said, in her lying voice, which is very easy to recognise because it’s not her real voice at all. It’s what she thinks people who are telling the truth sound like.

      “Come here,” I said, and she turned back and put her head in the room.

      Her head with practically no hair on it.

      “Iggy!” I said. “What have you done?”

      “I’ve cut my hair,” she said, smiling.

      I put my hand over my mouth like a shocked person on the telly and I said, “Mum and Dad are going to kill you!”

      “They’re not allowed,” Iggy said.

      “You can’t stick hair back on, you know,” I said.

      “I know. I don’t want to.”

      I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I said, “They are going to be so cross!”

      “No, they’re not,” Iggy said. “They’re not going to notice.” And before I could argue or stop her, she smiled and went downstairs. So I followed her. The back of her head was all different patches, like where Mum fixes the holes in my jeans.

      When Iggy walked into Mum’s room I counted to two and then I heard Mum shriek like there was a spider down her shirt or a mouse in the fridge or something.

      “What’s happened?” Dad said. He ran past me in the hall and went into the room with Mum and Iggy in it. I counted to two again and then Dad made a noise that was more of a bellow than a shriek. He sounded like a balloon popping in slow motion.

      “What did I say?” Mum said. “What did I say this morning about cutting hair?”

      “I haven’t cut my hair,” Iggy said.

      Mum and Dad said, “What?” at the same time, like they’d heard her wrong.

      “I haven’t cut my hair,” she said. “You can look at my room if you like.”

      “We’re looking at your head,” Dad said.

      “There’s no hair in my bin,” Iggy said.

      “There’s no hair on your head either,” Dad said.

      “There’s no evidence,” Iggy said. “Go and see.”

      Mum wasn’t saying anything. I peeped through the crack in the door and she had her hand over her mouth, just like I’d done, and her eyes were watering like when she peels onions. Dad said he didn’t need to go and see because he could see very well from where he was standing.

      “Your beautiful golden hair,” Mum said.

      “You didn’t notice Flo’s,” Iggy said.

      “It’s not quite the same,” Dad said.

      Iggy’s voice began to go all wobbly. Her words were starting to run into each other, into one long word. You could tell she was going to start crying, any minute.

      “You found the hair in Flo’s bin,” she said. “But there isn’t any hair in mine so you aren’t supposed to. Thereisn’tanyevidence.”

      Mum and Dad smiled at each other over Iggy’s head. But when Iggy looked at them they looked cross again. “Show me where you put it,” Mum said, and she made Iggy go upstairs in front of her.

      Dad came too and he winked at me in the hallway. “You’ve got to see this, come on,” he said. We followed the back of her head up the stairs and into her room.

      Iggy’s room has floorboards painted white with a little red rug on top. We couldn’t see any hair. It wasn’t in the bin and it wasn’t in her bed or under the pillows.

      “Where’s the rest of your hair?” I said.

      “It’s not here,” Iggy whispered. But I saw her eyes look down at the red rug and then I knew.

      We lifted it up together and, underneath, Iggy’s chopped and golden hair shifted in the breeze like plants at the bottom of the sea, like the very last bit of a princess who was turning invisible. It looked so pretty lying there that Iggy must have missed it because she burst into tears.

      Dad said, “it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”

      Mum said, “When you stop crying I’ve got something to show you.”

      I counted in my head to a hundred and Iggy was nearly finished. Her shoulders were still going up and down, but she wasn’t filling the room with noise like before.

      “Come with me,” Mum said.

      We went back downstairs to Mum’s thinking room and she opened a drawer, looking for something. Iggy was still sniffing. “Here it is,” Mum said, and she pulled out a photo which she gave to Iggy.

      “Let’s see,” I said.

      It was a little girl about the same age as Iggy.

      “That’s me,” Mum said, and Iggy giggled.

      “You look funny,” I said.

      “I know,” Mum said. “I’d just cut my own hair.”