The voice of nineteen

Turn 13 of 26

March to the standards station and Watch the others ahead of you lose their hair color and length one by one from the sweat being rubbed into their hair, turning to same black color that is the officers hair color. Their length all becomes one foot. When it’s your turn, you hold still so yours comes out exactly the same. You fall back in line now with the same hair color and length at one foot.

The column marches through the far doors into the standards hall, and the hair station is the first thing you see: a row of low stools before a line of mirrors, and beside each stool a small table holding a basin, a comb, and a shallow steel pan of something clear and faintly oily. 'HAIR STANDARDS!' the Lead Instructor bellows. 'Color first! Length second! Style last! NUMBER ONE — SIT!' One sits, and an officer dips her gloved hands into the pan and begins working the liquid into One's hair, root to end, kneading it in with hard, methodical strokes while One sits at perfect attention on the stool.

It doesn't take long. Where the officer's hands pass, the color drains — One's hair pales at the roots and then floods the other way, darkening past brown into a flat, absolute black, the same black that shines in twenty donut buns across the compound. The officer keeps working the sweat-and-solution through the length, and the length itself begins to change under her hands, the ends thickening and extending until the hair falls one foot from the crown, every strand, a full uniform foot of black. 'COLOR: CORRECT. LENGTH: CORRECT,' the officer announces, and One is steered out of the stool and back into line.

Two. Three. Four. You stand at attention in the line and watch the heads lose themselves one by one — a head of red hair going black under the kneading hands, a head of gray, a head of tight dark curls loosening and lengthening to the same measured foot. The smell of the solution reaches you before your turn does, sharp and mineral, the metallic smell from the tarmac on the first morning. The line shortens. Six sits at her stool, and her brown hair, the hair you have known since the bus, goes black from the crown down in long strokes, and comes off the stool one foot long, glossy, wrong in a way you cannot hold onto because it is exactly correct.

'NINETEEN — SIT.' You sit. Your body settles onto the stool in the stance, back straight, hands cupped behind you, and you hold still. The officer's fingers hit your scalp and begin. The solution is warm, then cool, then warm again, worked in hard, sweat and fluid ground together into the roots, and where it goes the color goes. You hold still. You do not close your eyes, because eyes front is the stance. In the mirror in front of you your hair darkens strand by strand, brown surrendering from the ends upward, until the whole head in the glass is black — their black. The officer's hands keep pulling, drawing the length, and you feel your hair grow into her grip, the ends extending past your shoulders, past your shoulder blades, until the pull stops and the mirror holds one foot of black hair on a standardized head. 'COLOR: CORRECT. LENGTH: CORRECT,' the officer announces, and you are steered up and out, back into the line, where nineteen identical heads of one-foot black hair stand waiting and yours makes twenty.