Fox in the Deep End

My hair had always been my thing—the one thing I actually liked about myself. Wild, frizzy, impossible to tame, a bright orange that made me stand out in a sea of browns and blondes. But then came the summer before freshman year, and suddenly my hair wasn't special anymore. It was just weird.

The pool party at Jessica's house was basically social suicide for someone like me. I stood by the snack table, nursing a warm soda, watching the baseball jersey guys cannonball into the water. Dylan was there, of course. Dylan with his perfect smile and his stupid baseball cap that he never took off, even when he was dripping wet.

"Hey, Orange," he called out. Because apparently my hair needed a nickname too.

I swallowed my pride—and I mean that literally. I'd been taking these new hair vitamins my mom swore by, choking them down every morning with orange juice. They were supposed to make you "shiny and strong" or whatever. So far, all they'd made me was late for the bus.

The real disaster happened when I finally worked up the courage to actually get in the pool. I was climbing down the ladder when something rustled in the bushes behind the fence. A fox. An actual, gorgeous, copper-colored fox with the same ridiculous hair as me, staring at all these chlorine-soaked teenagers like we were the weird ones.

Then Dylan's baseball came flying over the fence, landing way too close to the fox, who just stared it down with absolute zero interest.

"Whoa," someone said. "That fox has better hair than you, Orange."

Everyone laughed. I laughed. But somehow, in that moment, watching the fox trot away with its tail held high while the baseball rolled forgotten in the dirt, something shifted. That fox didn't care about being cool. It didn't care about fitting in. It just was.

I jumped in the pool. Chlorine burned my eyes. Dylan made some joke I didn't hear. But for the first time all summer, I actually felt like I could breathe.

My hair would frizz in the humidity. The vitamins were probably a scam. And Dylan was definitely out of my league. But at least I was in the pool, not standing by the snack table watching from the sidelines.

That was something, right?