Orange Hair, Ethernet Heart

The first time I dyed my hair orange, my mom said I looked like a traffic cone. Which was exactly the point.

I was fifteen, tired of being the quiet kid in the back of every class, the one whose name teachers constantly forgot. The orange was a scream in neon, a middle finger to beige existence. And it worked – people noticed. They stared in the hallways, whispered behind their hands. Good or bad, I was finally *seen*.

That's how Marcus noticed me.

He was the kind of guy who existed in glorious color – varsity jacket, confidence that spilled out of him like sunlight, smiles that made my chest do weird little flips. We'd barely spoken, but I'd caught him watching me across the cafeteria. Or maybe I'd just *wanted* him to be watching me.

"Hey," he said one afternoon, appearing beside my locker. "Your hair... it's sick."

I almost dropped my books. "Thanks."

"You gonna be at Maya's party Friday?"

My heart played hopscotch. "Probably."

"Cool. I'll be there."

He walked away like he hadn't just made my entire week.

Friday came and I was spiraling. My room looked like a bomb had gone off in a clothing store. My cat Luna watched judgmentally from the bed as I changed outfits for the seventeenth time. My dog Buster sat by the door, tail thumping, because he sensed my anxiety and thought we were going on an adventure.

"What do you think, Luna?" I asked, holding up two shirts.

She blinked slowly.

"Helpful. Thanks."

I settled on a black long-sleeve with orange accents – subtle, but still me.

The party was chaos. Too many bodies, too much noise, someone's terrible taste in music rattling the windows. I grabbed a soda from a cooler and found myself on the back porch, breathing.

"Hey."

Marcus. Of course.

"Hey back," I said, trying to sound casual instead of like I was internally screaming.

"You good? You looked like you were escaping in there."

"Yeah, just... lot of people."

"Yeah." He leaned against the railing. "You know what helps?"

"What?"

"Vitamin C and actual quiet. Come on."

I followed him around the side of the house to where he'd set up a laptop on a patio table. An ethernet cable snaked across the grass from a neighbor's open garage – *bold*, unauthorized, exactly the kind of rule-breaking I admired but never dared.

"We're stealing wifi?" I asked, impressed.

"Their signal is strong and they use 'password123'. That's practically an invitation."

We sat on the grass and he pulled up a game. "I suck at this," he admitted. "Like, *really* suck. You wanna help?"

I played while he watched, occasionally yelling directions that were definitely wrong. But we laughed, and it was easy. No posturing, no performing, just two people in the dark, stealing internet and being terrible at a game.

"You know," he said later, as my character died for the tenth time, "I've been wanting to talk to you for like, two months."

My stomach swooped. "Really?"

"Yeah. But you always seemed like you were in your own world. Which is cool, by the way. The orange hair... I like that you decided to just *be* something."

Something opened in my chest, warm and terrifying. "Thanks. I decided I was done being invisible."

"Well," he said, "it's working. I see you."

Luna was still asleep on my bed when I got home, but Buster's tail thumped harder than ever. I lay in the dark, my orange hair fanned across my pillow, unable to stop smiling.

Some things, I decided, were worth the risk of being seen.