Orange Hair Season

The bathroom fluorescent hummed as I sectioned off my hair. Three in the morning, the only time the house was actually quiet. I'd ordered the bleach and dye online, used my savings, and now here I was—about to turn my naturally black hair a screaming neon orange.

My parents would lose it. My friends would definitely have opinions. But I needed something to change.

"You're actually doing it?"

I jumped. My little sister, half-asleep, leaned against the doorframe. "Go back to bed."

"You're gonna look like a traffic cone."

"That's the point."

The next morning at school, the stares were brutal. People whispered. Someone made a papaya comment because apparently that was the only orange thing they could think of. But when Maya saw me, she just said, "Finally."

We'd been fake friend-ing each other since seventh grade—same lunch table, occasional homework copying, but never real. That afternoon, she showed up at my locker with an actual papaya she'd swiped from the cafeteria.

"Try it," she said. "It's not bad. Kind of like if mango and melendez had a baby."

We sat on the bleachers behind the gym, eating this weird orange fruit with plastic spoons while she told me about her parents' messy divorce and I admitted I'd dyed my hair because I felt invisible.

"You're not invisible," she said, like it was obvious. "You're just quiet."

"Same difference."

"No, it's really not."

She pulled out her phone, showed me this video of her dancing at this competition she'd never told anyone about. She was amazing.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"Same reason you didn't dye your hair until 3 AM on a Tuesday. People are judgmental."

The bell rang. We had chem together, and for the first time ever, we didn't sit in our usual seats. We sat together.

"So," she whispered, passing me a note. "You gonna keep the orange?"

I looked at my hair in the reflection of my phone. Looked at her, who'd just shared something real with me.

"Yeah," I wrote back. "I think I am."