Greenscreen Summer

My hair had never been this color before. I mean, technically it was still brown underneath, but the silver dye job made me look like I'd aged forty years overnight. Mom said I looked 'distinguished,' which is parent-speak for 'you look like your grandpa.' But that was the point. It was the summer before junior year, and if I was going to reinvent myself, I might as well go all in.

The transformation started when my nutritionist aunt sent me a lifetime supply of vitamin gummies shaped like tiny bears. I'd been taking them religiously, but apparently they didn't help with confidence or talking to crushes, which were my two main problems. The third problem was my apparent inability to not make everything weird.

Enter Tyler, who worked at the health food store downtown and had hair that defied gravity in ways I didn't know were physically possible. I'd been going there every Tuesday and Thursday for three weeks, pretending to care about organic produce while just staring at him.

"You gonna buy that spinach, or just hug it?" Tyler asked, leaning against the counter with that effortless cool that made my knees forget how to be joints.

I looked down. I was indeed clutching a bag of spinach like it was a emotional support vegetable.

"It's for..." My brain scrambled for something that didn't sound pathetic. "My bull."

The silence that followed could've powered a small city.

"Your... bull?" Tyler's eyebrow did that thing where it tried to escape his face.

"Yeah, he's super into greens. Health-conscious bovine, you know?" I heard myself committing to the bit. "His name is Kevin. He's very particular about his leafy greens."

By some miracle, or possibly because Tyler was too nice to call me on my obvious nonsense, he just nodded slowly. "Kevin the spinach-loving bull. Cool." He paused. "You want to see something?"

He pulled out his iphone and showed me his TikTok page, which was entirely videos of his pet chickens doing absolutely unhinged things to hip-hop music. We spent twenty minutes discussing chicken personality dynamics until his manager gave him the look.

"Same time next week?" he asked as I finally paid for the spinach that Kevin the imaginary bull would never eat.

"Absolutely," I said, feeling something warm and unfamiliar blooming in my chest. "Kevin's gonna need more spinach anyway."

That night, as I facetimed my best friend while eating salad for dinner (because I'd bought SO much spinach), she asked what was different about me. I thought about it — the silver hair, the vitamin gummies, the bull-sized lie that had somehow worked.

"Nothing," I said, and for the first time, it wasn't completely untrue. "Just starting to figure out who I actually am."