Orange Bull

The cable was out again. Third time this week, and naturally, it happened right when I was supposed to be binge-watching that show everyone at school was talking about. I stared at the NO SIGNAL message like it might magically resolve itself if I glared hard enough.

"Maya! Did you call the company?" my mom shouted from the kitchen.

"On it!" I lied, pulling up the provider's app on my phone. My thumb hovered over the chat button. Again.

This was fine. Everything was fine. Except my hair was a disaster, I had nothing to wear to Jessica's party tonight, and my crush had actually noticed me yesterday which meant I now had approximately zero room for error in the appearance department.

The hair situation had been brewing for months. I'd been growing it out since freshman year, convinced that long hair would somehow fix everything — make me more confident, more like the girls who seemed to glide through hallways while I tripped over my own feet. Instead I just looked like me, but with more split ends and the constant sensation of something tickling my neck.

Then my cousin Tío Mateo showed up yesterday with his truck from the rodeo circuit — his bull, Diablo, was in a trailer out back because apparently our suburban driveway was now bullpen-adjacent. Tío Mateo was convinced Diablo had "a gentle soul" which was definitely bull, considering the thing had thrown him twice last month.

"You need to embrace your wild side, mija," Tío Mateo had told me, watching me nervously edge around Diablo. "Fear holds you back more than any bull ever could."

Which was how I ended up at Sally's Beauty Supply at 4 PM, staring at a box of orange hair dye. ORANGE CRUSH, it promised. TEMPORARY. WASHES OUT IN 6-8 SHAMPOOS.

My hands shook. This wasn't me. This wasn't safe. But cable was still out, my hair was still wrong, and maybe Tío Mateo was right about fear holding me back.

The transformation took forty minutes. When I rinsed out the dye and looked in the mirror, orange-streaked hair fell around my face. Not the careful, subtle highlights I'd planned. Bright. Unmistakable. ORANGE.

My mom was going to kill me.

But when I showed up at Jessica's party, something shifted. People noticed. Not in a bad way — in a "who IS that" way. Even Lucas, my crush since forever, actually looked over from his videogame tournament.

"Did you... did you dye your hair?" he asked.

"Yeah." I stood taller. "It's orange."

"It's sick," he said. And then, because the universe apparently decided to reward my impulse control failure: "You look different. Like, confident different."

We ended up talking for an hour. About everything — his bull riding lessons ( apparently he was trying to learn), my secret obsession with horror movies, how the cable being out was actually the best thing that happened to me all week.

I still had to deal with my mom's reaction the next morning. And yes, she did freak out. And yes, I did have to call the cable company eventually. But something in me had changed.

Tío Mateo was right. Fear really does hold you back more than any bull ever could. Sometimes you just need to dye your hair orange and see what happens.

Besides, Lucas asked for my number. And that was definitely worth the cable being out.