Eyes

Miss Burroway is intelligent, warm-hearted but detached, and particularly good on the unspoken-of elements in difficult relationships; she goes on writing better and better.

Jadeen took one whole side of her hair between thumb and forefinger and, pulling hard, anchored it behind her ear with a severely plain tortoiseshell clip. It immediately, before she had finished doing the same thing to the other side, began straining and releasing, spring-like, a multitude of hairs in every shade of cadmium, copper, wheat, brass and flax, the hairs working individually but tending to one deep-looped wave toward the eyebrow on each side. She frowned insincerely at the failure of the effect and caught the back into a rubber band, around and over which the curls snapped like a flytrap, concealing it entirely. The warning bell sounded for the end of second lunch.

I’m just beautiful, Jadeen thought with an upward rush of astonished emotion, just beautiful. I could be in a movie about pioneers, I’d wear a pink gingham dress and a sunbonnet; or in an ad for menthol cigarettes.