Orange Hair, Green Truth

The first time I dyed my hair orange, Mom said I looked like a traffic cone. That was the point.

Junior year was supposed to be my glow-up era, but instead I was navigating the cafeteria like it was a minefield, my newly orange curls drawing stares like I was radioactive. The plan: bold hair, bold me. The reality: hiding in the bathroom during lunch because Jordan from AP Calc was definitely laughing at me with his friends.

"You look like a different person," my best friend Maya said, sliding onto the bench next to me with her tray. "Like, finally the person you've been trying to be."

I shrugged, picking at my food. "More like finally a freak who can't blend in if I tried."

That Friday, Maya dragged me to Kyle's pool party. "You're not hiding forever," she'd said. "Besides, Jordan will be there."

The pool lights turned the water blue-black, kids doing cannonballs and screaming like they'd never experienced joy before. I sat on the edge in my oversized t-shirt, knees pulled to my chest, watching Jordan swimming laps with this easy grace I'd never possess. He looked like he belonged everywhere. I belonged nowhere.

Then my stomach growled loud enough to echo.

Maya appeared with a paper plate. "Eat. You're hangry and it's making you weird."

The salad was mostly spinach—dark, earthy, honest stuff. I took a bite, and of course that's when Jordan chose to climb out of the pool right in front of me. Water dripping from his hair, grin easy and warm and completely unfairly perfect.

"Love the hair," he said, and my chest did this embarrassing flutter thing. "Seriously. It's brave."

I tried to say thanks, but I still had spinach in my mouth, so I just nodded like a malfunctioning bobblehead while mentally calculating how fast I could fake a contagious disease and leave.

"Anyway," Jordan continued, not noticing I was dying, "a bunch of us are getting breakfast at Sally's tomorrow. You should come."

Then he was gone, leaving me there with my orange hair and my spinach salad and suddenly the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I didn't have to hide. That maybe the version of myself I'd been scared to be was the one someone actually wanted to know.

Maya found me five minutes later, still sitting there, grinning at nothing.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. But it wasn't nothing. It was everything. It was the beginning of whatever came next.

"You've got spinach in your teeth," she said.

And instead of dying, I just laughed.