Chapter 139: The Dynamic Trio.
Mateo, Liam, and Darren stepped out of the barbershop, and the second the door swung shut behind them, Darren was already grinning like a proud contractor admiring a finished project.
Mateo’s hair had been completely transformed. The barber had gone with a low taper fade, tight and clean along the sides, blending up into a textured curl pattern on top with just enough length to have movement — full and defined, styled slightly forward with a soft part cut cleanly along one side. It softened the roundness in his face in a way none of them had expected, drawing the eye upward instead of settling on his cheeks, giving him an angle he hadn’t had an hour ago. There was an easy confidence baked into the cut itself — sharp enough to look intentional, loose enough to look effortless, the kind of style that read as someone who knew exactly what he was doing even if the person wearing it hadn’t a clue five minutes prior.
Mateo caught his reflection in the car window and just stared for a second, genuinely stunned.
“Bro,” he said, turning his head side to side, watching the light catch the fade. “I look—”
“Different,” Darren finished, satisfied. “Good different.”
“I look like a completely different person,” Mateo muttered to himself.
“That’s the point.”
Mateo kept checking himself in every reflective surface they passed — the car window, his phone screen, the barbershop’s glass door — a grin plastered across his face that hadn’t fully faded since the barber spun the chair around to show him the final result.
He felt, for maybe the first time in longer than he could remember, actually good. Not just fine, not just tolerable — good, in the specific, overwhelming way that came from having two people put real effort into him without expecting anything back. He didn’t fully know what to do with the feeling. Liam and Darren were just — cool, in a way that felt effortless and real, and being around them made him feel like a slightly better, slightly more capable version of himself.
He didn’t want the day to end. Not even a little.
They climbed back into the car, and Liam pulled out of the lot, already mentally routing toward the cinema a few blocks over — an idea that had formed somewhere in the middle of Mateo’s haircut, fully unplanned, just a thought that struck him while sitting there watching the barber work.
“We should catch a movie,” Liam said, glancing at Mateo through the mirror. “New Spider-Man’s playing. You seen it?”
Mateo’s eyes lit up. “No, not yet!”
“Cool. We’re going.”
That was when it hit him.
“Wait.” Mateo sat up slightly. “I still gotta finish my homework.”
Liam paused at the light, considering it for half a second. “How much do you have left?”
“Like, five minutes’ worth. Barely anything.” Mateo dismissed it but his voice wasn’t as confident as he would have hoped.
“Alright, cool.”
Darren, sitting in the passenger seat, turned his head slowly to look at Liam with something between disbelief and amusement.
“You’re just gonna take his word for it?” Darren asked him.
“Yeah?” Liam was confused as to why he wouldn’t.
“He’s sixteen. ’Five minutes’ from a sixteen-year-old could mean anything from five minutes to five days.”
“He said five minutes and I trust the little rascal,” Liam said which would in turn make Mateo feel guilty if he was truly lying.
“Liam.” Darren called him out
“What?”
Darren shook his head, letting out a short laugh, already resigned. “Man, you are so far from ready to be a parent, it’s actually kind of impressive.”
“I’m not trying to be his parent, dumb ass,” Liam fired back.
“You could have fooled me an hour ago, buying him a full salon experience.”
“That’s different.”
“Sure it is.”
Mateo, in the backseat, just grinned quietly to himself, entirely unbothered by being the subject of the debate, mostly relieved that homework negotiations had apparently concluded in his favor without much of a fight.
Liam merged onto the road toward the cinema, and Darren settled back into his seat, still shaking his head slightly, though the smile on his face gave away that he wasn’t actually annoyed by any of it. If anything, watching Liam fumble his way through these small, unplanned acts of care — impulsive, inconsistent, clearly making it up as he went — was its own kind of entertaining.
“Spider-Man, though,” Darren said after a moment. “Solid choice.”
“Figured he’d like it.”
“I like it too.”
“I didn’t ask,” Liam shut him down right away.
“Buying my ticket anyway.”
Liam huffed a laugh, pulling into the cinema’s lot a few minutes later, and Mateo practically bounced out of the car the second it stopped, still riding the high of the haircut, the food, the entire unplanned, impossibly good day stacking up behind him with no signs of slowing down.
–
Vanessa sat frozen on her couch, phone still warm against her ear even though the call had ended minutes ago. She replayed the conversation over in her head, and one word kept snagging on something in her chest.
Sophia.
He hadn’t said anything about her. Barely anything, really — just this name surfacing in this phone call. But the way the kid said the name, quick and slightly guarded, like he was deliberately not elaborating, had lodged itself somewhere Vanessa didn’t fully understand yet.
She hated how much it bothered her. Hated it more because she had no actual claim to feeling bothered in the first place — they weren’t together, had never really been anything concrete, and yet her stomach had done something complicated and unpleasant the second that name left his mouth.
Before she’d consciously decided to, she found herself pulling up his Instagram, thumb scrolling straight to his following list, eyes scanning every name for the one that mattered.
Nothing.
No Sophia.
She frowned, scrolling slower this time, more deliberate, refusing to accept the first pass as final. That was when she spotted it — a username close enough to catch her attention. [Sowfie.]
Her heart rate ticked up slightly. Close enough. Had to be her.
She tapped into the profile immediately, expecting photos, tagged locations, something to build a full picture from.
Instead, the page loaded almost entirely blank. No posts. No bio. A generic default photo where a real one should’ve been.
Vanessa stared at the empty grid for a long moment, jaw tight, something uncomfortable twisting further in her chest the longer the silence stretched.