Freshman/High School – Ten Years Ago
Six months after Dad left, I dyed my hair blue.
It was a harder process than I could have ever anticipated. My hair was naturally dark brown, so bleaching it broke it, essentially.
I tried box dye after box dye, toner after toner until finally it turned into a brassy orange colour that grabbed onto the turquoise Manic Panic Mom picked up for me.
She didn’t know what she was buying, just that it would give me something to do. Something she didn’t need to do for me. Something that would occupy my own happiness all on my lonesome.
My hair turned into this horrible green shade. It looked like sea moss, or moldy Jell-O. Could Jell-O get moldy? I believed it. I believed everything back then.
My elementary school friends distanced themselves from me. No one wanted to associate with the girl who lost her father, let alone one taken by alcoholism. They already made assumptions about me. Said that I was probably drinking at the age of thirteen. I think Mrs. Meleni spilled the beans to someone about the state of my home, and that person spoke to another person who gossiped and bam.
I was a freak.
And now, I was a freak with blue hair.
Those assumptions changed the trajectory of my life. No one would make bad assumptions about me again. I didn’t belong to my father’s legacy, nor my mother.
I was Blu Henderson. Not Beatrice.
When people asked me why I dyed my hair blue, I told them it’s because I recently discovered a movie called Coraline. It quickly became my favourite since the main character had this bright, cobalt hair. I liked her. I saw myself in her.
Lost.
Neglected.
Sad.
No one needed to know that I dyed my hair because I felt close to my dad; in some way, those walls, those curtains, those sheets – it was all I had left of him. It was all he left me with.
I got bullied, surely. Every kid does. I embraced it, though. I bullied those scoundrels back. After all, we were the same age. The rats weren’t above me, they were beside me. They just buried their ugliness better.
Then one day, I met Fawn Vanderstead.
She moved from some town three hours away because her parents landed a good job at The Factory.
She was rich and pretty.
She got bullied too.
Like I said… Rats.
I wanted to be her friend. Maybe it’s because I wanted to be like her, or have the things she had or dressed the way she did. Never had I ever approached someone the way I approached Fawn, but when I did, I knew we’d be friends.
Sometimes two people, completely opposite and far apart were tied by an invisible chord. No one could see it but the people inside the knot. That knot was too hard to break, so we didn’t break it. We let it tighten around us, we let it shape us, until we morphed into someone new. Someone better.
Someone Blu.
“Do you like my hair?” I’d asked Fawn who at the time, was standing by her locker painting her nails a pretty pink shade. Well, pretty enough. I never liked pink.
She looked up at me with big brown eyes. They kind of reminded me of my own. Her hair was black and slicked back into a nice ponytail. Long, unlike my chopped, turquoise mess.
“I hate it, actually,” she deadpanned. I was about to turn away when she grabbed my wrist and spun me around. “But we can fix it. My aunt is a hairdresser. Come over after school.”
So I did. And the day after that, and the day after that.
Fawn became my lunch buddy, my dinner partner, my everything.
It sounded dramatic, but when you had nothing, the people you gave yourself to filled the void that was left stripped and barren.
Fawn repaired me. Her aunt repaired my hair. I mended the broken pieces of myself.
But broken pieces always remained, especially when they sat right underneath your skin. It looked like flesh, felt like flesh. Shards became soft. Glass became smooth.
Pain became happiness. Happiness became pain.
Pain became comfort, and that comfort was bliss.
