My stepmother had been talking about turning my hair into a wig for months. I always thought it was a tasteless joke. Then I woke up one morning to find most of my hair gone and my severed braid sitting on the bathroom counter. At first, I thought she had done it to save $250. The truth turned out to be much worse.
At 18, I understood that grief was a strange thing.
People liked to talk about it as if it were a storm. Something violent that arrived suddenly and then passed. What nobody told you was that grief could settle into ordinary objects and stay there for years.
I inherited my mother’s long ginger hair, the same copper-red waves that used to spill down her back whenever she laughed. When I was younger, she would sit behind me before school and braid my hair while telling stories about people I’d never met.
I could still remember the feeling of her fingers moving through it, patient and gentle, never pulling too hard when she found a knot.
Mom had been gone for two years, but sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I still caught pieces of her. In my smile, the freckles scattered across my nose, and every red strand I refused to cut.
Maybe that sounds sentimental, and maybe it was.
But grief doesn’t always attach itself to logical things. Sometimes it lives in a sweater hanging in the back of a closet, sometimes it hides in old voicemail messages you can’t bring yourself to delete.
The house felt different after Mom died, quieter and somehow smaller.
For a while, it was just Dad and me trying to figure out how to move through days that no longer made sense.
Then Diane arrived.
At first, I genuinely tried to like her.
Dad seemed happier than he had in a long while, and I wanted that for him. I wanted to believe we could become some version of a family.
She had opinions about everything: the way I dressed, the books I read, the amount of time I spent studying, and, most of all, my hair.
Every few weeks, she’d find a new way to bring it up.
“You’d look so much prettier with a proper haircut,” or “That much hair has to be a nuisance.”
And my personal favorite:
“If you cut half of it off, nobody would even notice.”
At least, I tried to.
The irony was impossible to miss.
Diane’s own hair had been badly damaged by years of bleaching. What remained was a short blond pixie cut that she constantly complained about. Every time she passed a mirror, she seemed to find a new reason to be unhappy.
What happened next changed everything… continues on the next page.
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