Free The Manifesto on How to be Interesting by Holly Bourne

his eyes lit up.
    â€œBlonde,” he said. “You need to be blonde!”
    Bree tried to control the grimace her face made. Blonde. There were so many things about blonde that she disliked. It insinuated stupidity – her worst nightmare. She quickly weighed up the other options. There was brunette. Nice, sensible, sophisticated brunette. Not exactly attention-seeking. There was black – but any Caucasian person who dyed their hair black always looked either stupid, gothic, or weird, like Chuck from English. Red. Red was definitely interesting…but was it a bit too in-your-face? A bit too desperate look-at-me-ish? Her natural colour, if she remembered right, was mouse. But who the hell ever asked for mouse?
    â€œBlonde it is.”
    Damian broke into a broad grin.
    â€œRight. We’re gonna be here a while. And I’m cutting your hair off… Don’t worry,” he said, seeing Bree’s panicked face. “Not all of it. But if you wanna turn heads, lovey, long blonde hair isn’t the way to do it. No, you’re getting a graduated bob and you’re going to rock it.”
    And he leaned towards her with a pot full of purple gunk and got to work.
    An hour later and Bree’s head looked like a Christmas turkey. Apparently Damian had added “three different types” of blonde highlights, including “toffee”, “honey”, and “treacle”. It felt a little bit like being a laboratory rat. But instead of curing cancer, Bree’s guinea-pig status was solely in aid of beauty. Such effort for such an unworthy conclusion. But she reminded herself that constant judgement of social norms hadn’t got her very far in her seventeen years.
    She wondered if Jassmine’s blonde hair was natural, or if she too spent the best part of a weekend having foil plastered to her scalp. It broke the magic spell a bit. Thinking of Jassmine reminded her of that morning and the unnecessary evil she’d given Bree. She wrinkled her nose, and her mum, who was leafing through a glossy magazine, noticed.
    â€œYou okay, honey? Is it the smell of the peroxide? It takes some getting used to. I quite like the smell now.”
    She looked up at her mother. “Mum?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWere you popular in school?”
    â€œIs that was this is all about? You want to be more popular?”
    â€œNot exactly. I was just wondering.”
    Her mum put the magazine down and looked straight at her. “No,” she said. “No, I wasn’t popular at school.”
    â€œDo you think it matters? You know, in the long run?”
    Her mum poked her tongue into the side of her cheek and thought about it a moment. “If I was a good mother I would tell you no, no, it doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. Not in the grand scheme of things…”
    â€œBut…?”
    Her mother didn’t break eye contact with Bree. “But I can still remember the full names of the popular kids in my year.” She listed them on her fingers. “Carly Carding, Nadine Morrison, Lauren Vegas, those were the girls. And the guys, the popular ones everyone fancied, were Ben Wireley and Steve Newington. How can it not matter if I still remember every single thing about them, even though it was decades ago?”
    â€œMaybe it’s just that everyone remembers the popular kids at school,” Bree said, surprised at her mother’s frankness. She always assumed her mother was just some Pilates-obsessed housewife. Maybe she’d underestimated her… Or just not really spoken to her before.
    â€œThat’s the thing though, the thing that still makes me angry now. I can remember all their names, who went out with who and when, even what they wore to the leaving ball. I can remember every snide comment they made to me or my friends. And so can everyone else in my school year who wasn’t them. But them…” She paused, and went to move one