Cruel Intentions

I was convinced I had permanently blinded myself.

If you suffer with racing thoughts, you can probably understand the distress that I felt when this possibility entered my mind, as in a second I was hit by literally hundreds of hysterical screaming thoughts about how not being able to see would change my life.

That is when I started to cry, and staggered out of the bathroom in just my towel in search of help, unable to open my eyes because the sharp, burning pain was too bad when I tried at this point.

Somebody else had been in the shower in the small bathroom outside my room when I needed to use it, so instead I had to use the shower on the other side of the third floor.

This meant that not only was Charlie’s room the nearest, and the most identifiable, due to its location in between three fire doors, usually her door was open.

Feeling my way along the wall with my hand, eventually I found Charlie’s room and stumbled inside.

At first I was met with laughter.

“Oh my God Rach, your hair looks like candy floss,” Charlie howled.

“Why have you done that to your hair, Rach,” Amy asked, sounding unimpressed.

Then Charlie must have noticed my scorched red eyelids and tear strained cheeks because she stopped laughing.

“It’s in my eyes, and I still can’t wash it out,” I sobbed.

“Oh shit,” Charlie exclaimed, but she didn’t follow her statement up with a solution or an offer of help.

“Come on,” Amy was already next to me. She took me by the shoulders, turned me around, and led me slowly and carefully back to the bathroom, where she placed me by the sink while she went to get a cup. If you aren’t thirty five like me, or older, you may not remember the dawn of unnatural hair colours becoming popular. As I experienced it, it started out in the “alternative scenes” that I was a part of. At this time named brand, and therefore professional brand, box dies in unnatural colours wasn’t an easily accessible thing to get your hands on as a member of the non hairdressing public, if it was even a thing at all, I had certainly never encountered one and I had been a hairdressing student. You would have to go to an alternative shopping centre, such as Quiggins, if you were in Liverpool – yes I really am from Liverpool, I really am thirty five, and I really was an emo – or, markets like Camden market in London, to buy these weird, obscure, therefore probably not safe, specialty dyes, in brands that you never seen anywhere else.

Camden market is where I had bought this particular obscure, pink, semipermanent box dye.

Only once had I dyed my own hair, all the other times it have been professionally done by a hairdresser, and that was when I had dark brown hair with bleach blonde streaks for the dye to go on to. So, what possessed me to put pink streaks into my now entirely bleached hair myself, is honestly a mystery to me, but that is what I had attempted to do.

The event started out mildly successful, with me managing to apply it mainly to my fringe as my hair was quite short at the back, but not exactly how I wanted it.

The problems began in the shower. Maybe I had applied too much dye, or shampoo, or both, or maybe it was just wasn’t as safe as it should have been, as I dye my own hair all the time now, and I still can’t wash it off without getting it in my eyes. The difference is, that these days I don’t end up in severe pain that makes it hard for me to open my eyes, and causes me to have temporarily, extremely foggy vision when I managed to.

As soon as I got it in my eyes, I tried to wash it out with my hands, but it felt like I was just rubbing more of it into my eyes.

“Get out of the shower, wash your hands properly with soap, and start again,” I told myself, desperately trying to control the panic that was rapidly taking over my mind and body, but when I did the same thing happened, I was just rubbing more dye into my eyes, but now I was also struggling to hold my towel in place while I did.

That is when I became hysterical, and realised I really needed help.

However, when Amy returned, she was having the same problem.

“There’s too much of it still in your hair,” she explained. “It’s all running down your face. We need to wash it off first. Wait here while I go to get myself a towel.”

“No. No. No.,” Insisted understanding immediately what she was suggesting. “You are not getting in the shower with me. I can wash it off myself.”

“Is that how you ended up in this situation, because you can wash it out yourself?” Amy quipped.

“My ability to wash the dye out of my hair isn’t the issue. It’s in my eyes that’s the issue,” I argued.

“It’s in your eyes because you fucked up washing it off. Did you mean for all your hair to turn fluorescent pink?” She shot me down.

“No. No, I didn’t,” I agreed.

“Okay, well, listen, you stand in the shower so nobody else gets in,” as she said this she help me inside the shower. “I’ll be right back.”

“Please, don’t look at me,” I begged her when she returned, lock the door and began to undress. It didn’t seem fair that she could see and I couldn’t, and I already felt so vulnerable in the situation.

“I won’t, I promise.”

Eric was the first to mention it to me afterwards, and in true Eric form he was extra slimy and douchey about it, “Amy told me about you and her taking a shower together.”

As the days went on though, everybody commented to me about it.

When I confronted Amy, she shrugged it off and laughed about it, even though she had disgusted seeing me naked.

“You promised you wouldn’t look,” I fumed as though that, and not her talking about my body to other people, was the issue.

“Oh, be serious Rach. You couldn’t have believed I wouldn’t look. Of course I looked your hot,” She had rolled her eyes, as though I was being over dramatic.

After that, every time somebody brought it up I’d respond, “Remember that time Amy pissed herself in the woods when we were drunk, then just got on the tube into central covered in piss?”

“I can’t believe you’re reminding people of the time I wee’d on my shorts! I can’t believe you’re telling people who didn’t know that I wee’d on my shorts that it happened!” Amy complained when people started mentioning it to her.

“Keeping secrets works both both ways,” I informed her. “You keep mine, I keep yours. You tell mine, I tell yours.”