Orange Peel Days

I spent the summer before freshman year dyeing my hair the exact shade of a traffic cone. My mom said I looked like a walking safety hazard, which honestly? Same. But in a school where everyone already had their friend groups locked in from kindergarten, I needed something to make people notice me.

The first day of high school, I walked through the front doors with my orange hair blazing like a flare gun, ready for my character arc to begin. Instead, I spent lunch period eating a sandwich in the bathroom because the cafeteria felt like a social minefield I hadn't trained for.

That's when I met Jordan. We were both hiding from the same thing—his older sister's friends were relentless about making him sit with them, and I was avoiding the terrifying reality that I didn't know a single soul in room 204. We bonded over mutual awkwardness behind the gym dumpsters, where he'd smuggled out his emotional support animal: a tiny, ancient chihuahua named Pickles who wore a denim jacket and looked like she'd seen some things.

"She's my emotional support dog," Jordan said, as Pickles surveyed my orange hair with zero judgment. "Or I'm hers. Hard to tell sometimes."

We became the kind of friends who communicated mostly through shared looks across classrooms and Spotify playlists. Jordan introduced me to the concept that everyone was faking it. Even the popular kids were just playing a role, he said, which felt like the most useful vitamin for my anxiety that anyone could've prescribed.

The thing about orange hair is that it fades. By November, my roots were coming in darker, and I realized I didn't need the traffic cone color anymore. I'd found my people. Jordan and I started sitting at a regular table, adopted by a group of theatre kids who didn't care if I was loud or awkward or occasionally said the wrong thing.

Now it's spring, and I'm sitting on Jordan's front porch while Pickles snoozes on my lap. My hair is back to its regular brown, but sometimes—when the sun hits it just right—I catch a glint of orange in the mirror. A little reminder of the girl I was when I decided to stop waiting for things to happen and started making them happen instead. Some transformations are permanent. Some are just phases. And some, like friendship, are the best kind of vitamin for growing up.