The Riddle of Bad Hair Days

The first day of sophomore year, I accidentally turned my **hair** the color of a radioactive highlighter. I'd wanted subtle auburn highlights—something whispered-adjacent, not the neon orange disaster staring back from my bathroom mirror.

"It's... bold," my mom said, her voice doing that careful thing people do when they're trying not to laugh.

I pulled my hood up. "I'm staying home forever."

"You're going to school," she said, handing me a bottle of pills. "And start taking these **vitamin** E supplements. They're supposed to help with... whatever happened here."

Great. Now I was a cautionary tale AND someone who swallowed horse pills for lunch.

The worst part wasn't the hair. It was that *he* would see it. Lucas, who sat behind me in homeroom, who smelled like cedar and cheap cologne, who'd once asked if he could borrow a pen and I'd frozen for seven full seconds before managing to wordlessly hand one over. The man, the myth, the socially awkward encounter I replayed while falling asleep.

I kept my hood up through first period, second period. And then I walked into Mr. Henderson's English class and froze.

New kid. Front row. Dark hair falling into eyes that were studying everything with an intensity that made me want to squirm. Not Lucas—some girl I'd never seen before, wearing a dress that looked like it belonged in a museum and an expression that said she knew exactly what everyone was thinking and found it wanting.

"You're loud," she said, without looking up from her book. "Your hair, I mean. It's shouting."

I slid into the seat behind her. "It's supposed to be auburn."

"It's orange," she said. "I'm Riley, by the way. And you're sitting in the wrong seat. That's Lucas's spot."

My stomach did something unhelpful. "Oh. Sorry."

"I didn't say you had to move." Riley finally looked at me, and her eyes were gold-flecked and unreadable. "I said that's where Lucas sits. Which means you're nervous about your hair AND you're mentally calculating whether sitting here is worth potentially having an actual conversation with him later, or if you should flee now and pretend this never happened."

My face was definitely the same color as my hair. "Are you a **sphinx** or something?"

She smiled—a tiny, surprised thing. "Maybe. Answer me this: What has roots but no hair, a mouth but never speaks, runs but has no feet?"

"A river," I said automatically, then frowned. "Wait, that's from The Hobbit."

"Riddles are classic." Riley closed her book. "Here's another: What costs nothing but means everything, can be given but never taken, and breaks when you hold it too tight?"

I opened my mouth, closed it. The bell rang.

Lucas walked in, stopped in the doorway, and looked directly at my hair.

"Whoa," he said. "Did you... do that on purpose?"

"No," I said.

"Cool," he said, and sat in front of me.

I waited for the laughter. The teasing. The anything.

"It's really bright," Lucas said, twisting around in his seat. "Like, it's basically a mood ring but for confidence. You gotta own that level of commitment."

Behind me, Riley made a sound that might have been a laugh.

"The answer to the riddle," she said, so quietly I almost missed it. "It's trust."

I looked at my ridiculous orange hair in the reflection of my phone screen. Thought about my mom's carefully neutral voice, the vitamins in my pocket, Lucas calling it commitment, and Riley's impossible riddles.

"You know what?" I whispered, pulling down my hood. "Screw it."

My hair was still radioactive. I was still going to have to explain this to literally everyone I knew. But Riley was right—some things break when you hold them too tight. And some things, apparently, you just have to let glow neon orange in the fluorescent lights of sophomore English.