The voice of nineteen

Turn 15 of 26

Watch 2 through 18 get styled, then sit for your own ponytail and hold still so it comes out exactly like One's. 20 does the same. They yell that was just the first part as they yell at you all to read your pocket books about the rules of this place, the job after you graduate and more info about being the same and why it’s the best. You all yell ma’am as you all do that. Soon, one is told to sit

You watch the queue eat the line. Two sits, is slathered, slicked, cinched, and rises with her forehead pulled taut. Three. Four. A woman with a face you half-remember from the bus — someone who laughed at something on the tarmac, someone with a silver ring on her right hand once — goes into the chair and comes out with her face stretched smooth and her eyes flat above the pulled skin. The ring went into a disposal bin this morning. The face goes into the standard now. By Twelve the room holds two populations: the styled, whose foreheads shine with tension, and the waiting, whose black hair still hangs loose to the measured foot.

'NINETEEN — SIT.' Your body folds into the high chair. The gel is cold, then warm from the friction of the officer's palms, slathered crown to ends in heavy strokes, everything dragged backward off your face. The comb rakes long and hard, no part, the scalp showing one clean direction, and then her fist closes around the whole foot of hair high at the back of your head and winds. She pulls. Your forehead draws back — you feel it happen, the skin at your temples lifting, your eyebrows riding up into the angry line, your face pulled smooth and taut as a drumhead — and the tie cinches down and down and there is no slack left anywhere on your head. In the mirror the reflection is One. Is Six. Is the officer standing behind you.

'SHAPE: CORRECT,' she announces, and you rise and fall in, and Twenty goes through the chair behind you and comes out the same, and the twenty of you stand in the styling room with twenty identical slicked ponytails pulling twenty identical foreheads, and not one strand moves when the ventilation cycles.

'THAT WAS THE FIRST PART!' the Lead Instructor bellows, and the room snaps to attention. 'The ponytail is the working shape. The bun is the dress shape. Before the bun, you will KNOW why you wear it! CASES!' The black cases come down the line again, and this time what comes out of each is the pocket-sized gray book, and the orders come with it: 'HOLD AT CHIN! READ! The rules of this facility! The duties of a graduated officer! The reasons the standard is superior to the individual — read them until you can recite them!'

You hold the book up like a reef point and read. The print is small and dense and the words go in clean, because there is nothing left in your head to argue with them: rule after rule, the duty roster of a twin officer, paragraphs on why one woman repeated twenty times is stronger than twenty women, why a name tape is a weakness, why the bun does not come down. The line reads in unison, pages turning in unison, and when the Lead Instructor yells 'DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU READ?' twenty voices detonate as one — 'YES MA'AM' — and the officers along the wall stand a little straighter at the sound.

'BOOKS AWAY.' The cases close. 'Now the bun. NUMBER ONE — SIT!' and One's body folds back into the high chair, ponytail standing off her head like an issue, and the officer behind her picks up a form of mesh and a long pin and reaches for the tie.