Word Count 1423

“What would you like to do today?” asked the slender man behind me. Italian. I stared into the oversized mirror directly ahead. Slowly, he pushed his fingers through my long, wavy, burnt-orange hair toward my scalp, lifted, then ran them back down toward the ends.

“Cut it above the shoulders, please,” I said flatly. I knew there would be pushback. I pretended to check my texts to avoid confrontation.

My relationship with my hair was complicated. I hated being a redhead as a child. When I was 15, I was grounded for unsuccessfully trying to dye my hair blonde. Staring at the rows of dyes on the drug store shelf, I chose the box with the prettiest model—not understanding that the “temporary” label meant no bleach, and, thus no blonde. “You’ll like your hair when you’re older,” my mother would say in her thick southern accent. Older women were always stopping me. “You can’t get that color in a bottle,” they would say, seeming awestruck. They don’t know what cool looked like, I thought.