The Hairpin Curve

I dyed my hair blue the same day Maya stopped talking to me. Not a subtle blue—like electric, look-at-me blue. My mom said it was a cry for attention. Maybe she was right. Because I was definitely screaming.

Maya and I had been best friend since sixth grade, bonded over our mutual inability to hit a baseball and our shared hatred of gym class. But freshman year hit different. She joined the softball team, actually got good at it, started hanging with the popular crowd. I stayed in the bleachers, reading and dying inside.

So I started spying on her. Not like creep level, but I'd check her socials the second she posted. Watch her from across the cafeteria like she was some kind of sphinx I had to decode. What did she have that I didn't? Why was everything so easy for her?

The hair thing was supposed to be my moment. My rebellion. But when I walked into school that Monday, Maya didn't even look up from her phone. That's when I realized—she wasn't drifting away. She was already gone.

I found her by the baseball diamond after school, throwing pitches to no one. The old pitching machine was broken again.

"Nice hair," she said, and I swear I almost cried right there because it was the first thing she'd said to me in weeks.

"I wanted to change something," I mumbled.

She stopped throwing. "You didn't have to. You were already—" She cut herself off, looked away. "Whatever. This is weird, right? Us talking?"

"Yeah," I said. "Weird."

"I miss you," she said so fast I almost missed it. "The softball girls are cool but they don't get my jokes. They don't know about that time we tried to bake a cake and almost burned down your kitchen."

"You were the one who left the oven on," I said automatically, and we both smiled. The real kind, not the fake ones we'd been giving everyone else.

"Wanna hit some balls?" she asked. "I promise not to judge if you swing and miss."

"I'll judge MYSELF if I swing and miss," I said, but I picked up a bat anyway.

My blue hair caught the light as I stepped up to the plate. Maya wound up and threw. I swung—and connected. The ball went flying into outfield, and for once, I wasn't watching her. I was just me, blue hair and all, finally hitting my damn shot.