The voice of nineteen

Turn 25 of 26

Stand at attention and wait for the intakes at hair station 2. After 10 hours, intakes arrive at the station, they are dressed, move and yell the same as you. Their hair is the same black slickback ponytail slathered in gel with no part, Just like yours before the donut bun. Instructor yelling at 1 through 5 to sit. 5 sits down, the exact face as you. You see the spray, donut bun and band.

The wait runs ten hours, and the five of you hold it without cost, because waiting is only another form of attention and attention is permanent now. The hall empties and fills around you — details of officers passing to and from the far doors, the recitation swelling and fading — and your body stands at station two through all of it, eyes front, breath level, the styling table's steel pan throwing back the white light.

Then the intake doors open and they come through, and the sound of them is the sound you made on the first day: boots out of step, breath ragged, twenty-some women in identical slate-navy that still hangs like it was borrowed. But they move in step now. They halt in step. When a passing officer yells a correction into an ear, the fixed angry blank face snaps into place on each of them the way yours did, and by the time the column reaches the styling queue they march, yell and hold attention exactly as you do. Their hair is the last thing left of them — flat black, one foot in length, slathered in gel and slicked back with no part into tight high ponytails, the cinched stage, the stage your own head passed through on the way to the bun. Ten hours of processing, and hair was postponed for them too.

'HAIR STATION TWO!' an instructor bellows across the hall. 'NUMBERS ONE THROUGH FIVE — SIT!' The first five intakes break from the queue, and Number Five sits at the chair in front of you — drops onto the stool with the exact economy you used, back straight, arms cupped, chin level, and the face underneath the pulled-taut ponytail is your face. Not similar. Exact. The same dense squared build, the same white skin, the same fixed angry blank pulled taut at the forehead by the cinch of the gel, ten hours from being finished and identical to what sat in front of a mirror wearing your coat two days ago.

The table beside the chair holds everything in its row, and you see it the way the book said an evaluator sees it: the comb, the band waiting to cinch the braid, the donut form, the pin, and the spray canister standing at the end like a verdict. Five sits at attention in the chair and does not look at you, because looking at the officer who is about to style her is not something a recruit does. Her scalp shines with the metallic-smelling solution. Her breathing is your breathing.

The four twin officers at your station stand ready at their own chairs for One through Four, hands empty, waiting — but nobody has called a station number for you. The instructor who yelled the command has moved on down the queue, and the silence that comes back around your chair is a different silence from the waiting one. It is the silence of a decision that belongs to the woman standing at the table. The book named you the eye of the station. The head in the chair is ready or it is not, and no one in the hall is going to say which — not the instructor, not the twins, not the Lead Instructor, whose office door is closed somewhere behind the far walls. Five sits at attention under your gaze, and the spray waits at the end of the row.