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trust my reflexes.” She reached in her bag for a pair of scissors and a brush. Who brought scissors on a train?! Wasn’t that considered a weapon or something?
    My back pressed into the cushion and the hair on my arms stood up when she snipped the long scissors through the air.
    “Listen, they would have found out anyway.” I said, growing angry. This had gone far enough. She couldn’t scare me.
    Eva smiled, her head slightly shaking side…to side. “And you would have told on me anyway. Am I wrong?” I bit my lip so hard it bled. She did that eerily well. Reading people. “Now, how about that cut?”

CHAPTER EIGHT—Mind Cut
    M y eye twitched for the final time. I lost count about 30 snips back. It wouldn’t shock me if I developed a permanent twitch after this so-called “hair cut.” More like a mind cut. Especially when my heart would lurch every time the train jumped on the rails and Eva uttered a careless “oops.”
    The last thing I wanted was to look in the mirror. She must have deformed me real good.
    “All right, payback’s over,” Eva announced. “You can look. Go on. Promise it’s not that bad. Doubt it’s what you wanted, but I like it.”
    I winced with one eye. Wait…so she didn’t want to gouge my eyes out?
    Night had fallen, and the reflection of the window showed only my face. And my hair, or what was missing of it.
    I screamed. Not out loud, but oh, how I screamed on the inside. If Eva hadn’t gouged my eyes out, I would’ve done it myself. This couldn’t be happening… I looked like…like some kind of rebel!
    She had parted my hairline on the side and flipped half my hair over to intrude on the right side of my face. The rest, she cut on a diagonal so my hair was to my neck on my left and to my collar bone on my right. It curved like a winding stairway around my head. Completely transformed. And completely abnormal.
    “I like it,” I choked out and leaned back against the cushion, my eyes shut. I had to keep calm. If I revealed all of what I truly felt on the inside, she would have won.
    Eva scoffed. “No, you don’t.” My eyes shot open. “But it suits you, don’t you think? New style, new hair, new school.” She smiled. I looked at her in awe. True enough, it did reflect my inner self—when I designed a game character, I always went for a punk look—and she had done a great job, especially with the train moving, the spiral in a smooth geometric curve and the tips trimmed just right. I felt the layers in the back with my hand and could tell the cut was professional, even if I hated to expose myself like this. How is it I knew absolutely nothing about this girl with whom I shared a classroom?
    “My sister taught me how to cut my own hair. She used to cut it before. I was her guinea pig. At first, she was terrible.” She chuckled. “I used to get teased at school for it too. I really hated her for that. But she got better, and eventually, I picked it up too. She wanted to be a hair stylist, see, but my family would never allow for it, no matter how high-end. Her dream was to become a stylist for celebrities. She always told me to pretend I was Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie when she’d style my hair.”
    Mist came over Eva’s eyes. Somehow I got the feeling her sister’s dream came to an end. But how?
    I waited for her to tell me.
    “I guess you deserve to hear it now, since you so bravely earned it. My ability.” She sighed. “You see, my ‘contamination’…is self-reproduction.”
    I stared at her as though into oblivion. She was kidding. She had to be. “You mean…like…an amoeba?”
    Eva wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. Her features turned melancholy.
    “Worse than that, I’m afraid. My eggs self-fertilize somehow. I get pregnant…at least twice a year.”
    My jaw floored. And at the same time I felt like a complete and utter jackass.
    “So…you and Mr. Presley weren’t…”
    “None of the pregnancies are successful. I didn’t even know I had