After the Dye Job

Three a.m. and I'm staring at my reflection like it belongs to a stranger. The box said "Midnight Raven" but my hair looked more like "Sad Grape." My mom's going to kill me, but honestly? That wasn't even the worst part.

The worst part was that Jordan was going to see it tomorrow at school, and I'd spent three weeks trying to work up the courage to sit at their lunch table. Three weeks of crafting perfect opening lines in my head, and now I looked like I'd dipped my head in industrial slime.

"You look like a zombie," my little brother announced the next morning, wandering into the bathroom with his cereal bowl. "Like, if zombies had bad nights and then tried to fix it with discount hair dye."

"Thanks, Leo. You're a treasure."

I pulled my hood up. All morning, I kept catching my reflection in windows and wanting to evaporate. But third period, Ms. Patel was going on about this chemistry lab we had to do, something about hydrogen bonds and surface tension, and she said that thing about how water molecules stick together because they're basically lonely little dipoles searching for connection.

And I don't know why, but that hit me weird.

At lunch, I sat by the fountain instead of hiding in the library like usual. The water kept doing that thing where it breaks apart and comes back together, over and over, and I sat there thinking about how maybe that's just what growing up is — breaking and reforming until you figure out what shape you're supposed to be.

Jordan walked past, stopped, and looked at my half-exposed, half-grape hair.

"Did you dye it?" they asked.

"Yeah," I said. "It went wrong."

"No," Jordan said, sitting down next to me. "It didn't."

And for the first time all day, I didn't feel like hiding.