Turn 8 of 26
Ruth asks you with her lisp and messed up speech if you want her to do your hair for you. You say in your lisp and messed up speech yes. You two walk into a place and she grabs your fuzzy ginger hair and puts it into low braided pigtails. You realize that all the girls in the class had fuzzy hair and their hair is done is a type of pigtails. You knew that their hair was ginger already.
"Do you want me to do your hair?" Ruth asks, and her voice does what all their voices do — the S's whistling through her braces, "hair" coming out soft and mangled. "It'th looking tho frithy, Emma. I can fix it for you." She's already holding a comb.
"Yeth," you hear yourself say, the lisp thick and wet in your own mouth, and the word comes out without a fight. That's the part you notice — no fight left in it. Two days ago you wouldn't have let this girl touch your hair with a ten-foot pole, and now you're following her across the quad like a duckling.
She leads you into the sorority house — your sorority house, though she walks in like she owns it, and no one stops her — and sits you down in the bathroom, facing away from the mirror.
"Not yet," she says, turning your chair. "Firtht the fix, then the look." Her fingers are surprisingly gentle as they work through the fuzz, combing, sectioning, braiding tight and low at your nape. Each tug sends a little ache through your scalp, and each ache is somehow pleasant, like the ache of a good stretch.
"There," she says, turning the chair at last.
The mirror shows the girl you've been avoiding all day. Heavyset. Pale as milk, freckles blooming across her nose. Taped glasses. Braces glinting when her mouth opens in shock. And now, low braided pigtails, neat and glossy-free, exactly like Ruth's — exactly like all of theirs. Your hair is ginger, fuzzy, and styled. It looks healthier than it has any right to, in its way. It looks finished.
"Every girl in the clath wears her hair like thith," Ruth says, gathering her own braids and smoothing them, patient as a nurse. "Firthty girlth. Thame hair. Thame pigtailth." She smiles at you in the mirror, braces and all.
"Now you match."