Orange Hair, Running Scared

My hair was supposed to be rebellion. Instead, it looked like a traffic cone.

The first day of sophomore year with ORANGE hair, I sat in the back of homeroom, hoodie up, praying nobody would notice. Spoiler: they noticed.

"Nice hair," whispered Maya Chen, the girl I'd been lowkey obsessed with since seventh grade. "Very... visible."

"Yeah, well," I mumbled. "My mom's gonna kill me."

That's when I started RUNNING. Not literally—well, yeah literally too, I joined cross-country because nothing says 'I'm totally fine' like RUNNING yourself into exhaustion at 6 AM. But mostly I was running from everything. From my parents' divorce. From the fact that I hadn't come out to anyone yet. From the crushing weight of existing.

I became a SPY in my own life. I'd watch from the edges as everyone else lived. I'd scroll through Instagram stories of parties I wasn't invited to, conversations I wasn't part of, lives that seemed so much easier than mine. Maya's stories were the worst—everything golden and effortless and perfect.

Three weeks in, I found Maya sitting on the bleachers during practice, orange hair dye box in hand.

"I was gonna dye mine," she said, like that explained everything. "But I chickened out. Your hair gave me courage."

We skipped practice. Walked to her house. Dyed her hair in her bathroom while her mom was at work. When we were done, we stood side by side in the mirror, two orange-haired disasters, grinning like we'd just gotten away with murder.

"We look like twins," she said.

"We look like a cautionary tale," I said.

She laughed. "Good."

We're not dating or anything. But we're something. Friends who sit together at lunch. Friends who send each other terrible memes at 2 AM. Friends who both dyed their hair back to brown last week because our parents finally noticed.

Sometimes I still feel like I'm running. Sometimes I still spy on everyone else's seemingly perfect lives. But then Maya sends me a text—"ur hair looked better orange btw"—and I remember that some things are worth stopping for.