"Are you sure you want me to do this?" She asks, holding her hand right above his head and trying to stop it from shaking with nerves.

"El. I wouldn't have written the slip if I didn't want you to do it. Now do it before I change my mind."

"Change your mind?!" She asks, panicked.

A short laugh leaves his throat and he turns his head, peering over his shoulder to make eye contact with her. "It's fine. We've already been over this. I need to do it. Now. Are you going to help me or am I going to have to enlist the help of someone else?"

"Okay, okay. I'll do it. Just shut up and turn around."

"Ouch," he says, feigning hurt as a smile plays at his lips. Still, he follows her instructions and turns back around.

She glances down at his beautiful head of blond hair, every fiber in her body trying to stop her from destroying it. But against her better judgment, she puts the brush to his hair to apply the brown dye.

"I feel so guilty," she mumbles, carefully brushing the dye down each strand of hair.

He continues writing on the piece of paper in front of him, a deal they'd made when they started this. Ellie dyes his hair. Cooper writes slips for their adventure jar. At the time, Ellie thought it was a fine arrangement. But now that the idea of him hating his new hair has sunk in, she's regretting ever agreeing to it.

"Ellie. My hair is falling out anyway. I've been blond my whole life. This is new, different. I've always wondered what I'd look like with brown hair."

As she watches his almost-white hair be covered by the dark dye she snorts involuntarily. "Well, you're about to find out." She looks back down to the bowl, dipping the brush in it to soak up a bit more dye before returning her attention to his head. "What're you writing?"

"Can't tell you. It's meant to be a surprise."

"Am I not supposed to be a part of this?"

He laughs as he continues scribbling on the ripped piece of notebook paper in front of him. "You are a part of this. You're dying my hair."

"I meant the jar thing. Didn't you say you wanted me to write things down too?"

He nods and she pulls down on his hair, mumbling, "Don't move."

Once he gets past the pain of her yanking on his head, he says, "Yes. You can write some slips later when I'm doing your hair."

She stops moving the brush along his head, giving herself a chance to let his words sink in before she kneels over in laughter, clutching her stomach in an attempt to stop the pain in her abdominal region. Cooper looks over at her, raising his eyebrows as his lips tug upwards. Half of his head is slicked back with the dark dye while the other half sits untouched. For some reason, this makes her laugh even harder.

"I'm sorry," she says through her laughter, trying her hardest to catch her breath. "I thought you said that you were going to do my hair."

His smile widens. "I did."

She wipes away a loose tear, letting out another healthy chuckle. "Good one, Cooper. Not happening."

His grin fades and he crosses his arms over his chest, sending her a challenging stare. "Why not? The slip said 'dye my hair.'"

She lets out a sigh of relief, finally calming down from her laughing fit, before standing behind him once more to finish his hair. "Exactly. It said dye my hair. You wrote the slip. 'My' would be inclusive to only you."

He shakes his head and Ellie yanks down on his hair once more as a warning, eliciting a small hiss in pain from him. "We both do the slips in the jar. That was our deal."

"I'm not dying my hair."

"So you just want to be brown and boring forever?"

Biting down on her lip, she pulls on his hair once again and he screams, "Ow! What was that for?! I wasn't even moving!"

"That's for calling my hair boring. Besides, I'm literally dying your hair brown right now. If you really thought that brown was boring, you wouldn't be letting me dye yours that exact boring color."

He laughs, though she seems to fail to understand what's humorous about this situation. "I don't think brown is boring, El. I think normality is boring."

"There's nothing wrong with being normal, Cooper. Most people strive to be normal."

"Most people are boring."

"I swear to God I will not hesitate to rip every last strand of your hair out if you keep insulting me."

"Remind me to never let you dye my hair again. I did not expect this amount of aggression." He shakes his head and she's half-tempted to pull on it again, just to remind him that he needs to stop moving, but she resists, instead deciding to calmly continue stroking the brush across his light locks.

"People get aggressive when you call them boring."

"Stop reading into it, loser. I didn't call you boring. I said, normality is boring. The idea that we always have to be the same to be normal. Change is cool. It helps remind us that we're alive when we do things out of our comfort zones. We have to do something with these beating hearts while we can."

As always, he has a point. And as always, she doesn't want to admit that he may be right. So instead she settles on saying, "Don't call me a loser, loser."

Cooper's familiar laugh fills the room and Ellie's lips twitch up into a smile at the sound. She continues brushing away as a sense of calmness falls over them. After being sure she's applied the dye to every inch of hair on his head, she sets the brush back down in the bowl and lets him know she's finished. He stands up from the chair and turns to her to reveal his slicked back dark hair and she has to hold in her laugh.

"You look like you're either about to projectile vomit onto me or faint. Either way, neither of those seem to be a good sign," he says with a frown, turning to the mirror to finally see himself. When he sees his reflection his frown deepens. "Well, I mean, it probably will look better when it's finished, right? This is just the dye. Slicked back hair isn't really a good look on anyone."

He turns to her with an unsure look on his face and a soft grin spreads across her lips. "It'll look better when it's washed out. Anything will look better than this."

"Gee, thanks." He glances over at his reflection one last time before taking a seat on his bed and returning his gaze to Ellie. "So how about it?"

"How about what?"

"Your hair."

She frowns, making her way over to the mirror so she can really look at herself. He's right. She's always had brown hair. She's never been ballsy enough to do anything with it so it's always just lied flat on her shoulders. She sees his reflection eagerly staring back at her from his bed and with a sigh, she turns to him.

"I'm not dying my whole head."

"I can't believe you're trusting me with this," Cooper says with an excited grin as Ellie sits in the hairdresser's seat—they'd decided it was best that Cooper didn't touch her hair, seeing as he probably would've accidentally dyed it a murky green-brown somehow. The last thing she needed was for her hair to resemble the mud of Shrek's swamp.

She stares back over at the now-brown-headed boy, admiring the way he's somehow able to pull off both platinum blonde hair and brown hair, something she feels she would never be able to do. "Don't make me regret this."

"Even if you did regret it, it's too late. Gigi already dyed it," he says with a laugh, shooting a wink at the pink-haired stylist who they've recently become acquainted with.

"It'll look great," Gigi reassures her, her eyes meeting Ellie's in the mirror. "The boy doesn't have bad taste."

"I just can't believe uptight-El let me choose what we were going to do to her hair," he says, using a baby voice on the new nickname he's assigned her.

"I'm not uptight."

Cooper and Gigi exchange looks in the mirror and Ellie wants to scoff. Gigi just met her, how could she possibly have already gathered enough information about her to assume that she's uptight?

"I'm not!" Ellie protests.

Cooper places a hand on her shoulder, sending her a reassuring smile. "Hey, you're here now doing this. That's what matters."

She glares up at him, unable to move as the dryer sits over her head. Gigi laughs, making her way over to Ellie and drawing the dryer up. "Let's go wash this out."

Ellie grabs hold of the platinum blonde ends of her hair, admiring the way they look between her fingers. She'd never imagined herself as a blonde, and still, she's sure she could never pull off a full head of blonde hair, but the way her dark hair now fades to blonde is something she thinks she could grow to like.

"Look at us," Cooper says from beside her, pulling her attention away from her newly dyed hair, "a couple of new-hair pals."

"Thank you for not telling Gigi to turn my hair into an abstract piece of art."

He laughs, dodging a fire hydrant as they continue making their way down the sidewalk. "It was tempting, and then I remembered I have to continue to look at you. Couldn't go messing you up too much."

She reaches for his arm to shove him but he dodges her skillfully, raising his eyebrows in an embarrassingly annoying manner. A dog walking past them draws Ellie's attention away from the obnoxious boy beside her. Too soon, the dog's owner is towing it away from her.

"So, what do you think of my new hair?" Cooper asks, a smug smile sat on his lips.

She shrugs. "It's okay."

"Come on," he scoffs. "It's better than okay. I should have dyed my hair brown a long time ago. I was so attached to the blond though."

"I don't know if I'd go that far. But, yes. You look nice."

He smiles, watching his feet as he kicks at the sidewalk beneath him. "I think you look nice too."

She doesn't say anything, instead deciding to use her new hair to her advantage by hiding the smile that threatens to expose itself on her lips. And they continue on this way, gazes trained on the ground, smiles forcing their way onto the both of their faces. Met by a silence that could only feel right with each other.