Snip.
The shears went up the white river from the bottom, through the hem, a long clean slit, and the fabric fell open on either side of the blade like something being gutted.
"Hadley," I said.
It came out quiet. I want to be honest about that, because later when I told it to people I sometimes made myself louder in the telling, and I wasn't loud. I said her name the way you'd say the name of somebody standing too close to the edge of a roof.
She looked up at me. Her face was very calm and very red, both, the way it gets when she's been crying for a long time and has finished. She looked straight at me and opened the shears and put the lower blade into the crepe again and closed them.
Snip.
Every cut went through something. That's how I thought about it later, standing in the doorway with my keys still in my hand. Every cut went through a Friday. I'd worked twenty-four Fridays to buy that dress. Every cut went through a shoe counter and a fryer and a mop and the lane-six machine and a man named Mr. Hooper who came in every Tuesday and Thursday and bowled alone and tipped me a dollar in quarters. Every cut went through the pink layaway card in my wallet with twelve payments written on it in Mrs. Kibler's careful old-lady handwriting. Snip went a Saturday in January when it snowed and I worked a double. Snip went the Valentine's dance I didn't go to because I'd picked up a shift. Snip. Snip. Snip.
"Hadley, stop it. Hadley. Stop."
I dropped my keys. I didn't decide to. I heard them hit the floor and I was already across the room, and I got down on my knees on the rug and got hold of the skirt with both hands and pulled, and Hadley held on and lifted the shears up away from me, high, out of my reach, the points toward the ceiling.
"Don't," she said. "You'll get cut."
"Give it to me."