The Prince Music Library was Kensington’s oldest building, perched at the southwestern tip of campus. Tall and elegant, with slender colonettes running up its dark walls, the library looked like a watchtower. A coppery sign stood outside, burnished by 160 years of terrible upstate New York weather, explaining the building’s historical significance: A slightly important soldier had stayed here for a night, one time.
I made sure my wig was secure, my hair curled into locks and pinned beneath, and pushed through the ancient doors. As they boomed shut behind me, I stopped.
Most of Kensington’s Gothic-style buildings were beautiful on the outside, but their interiors had walls the color of oatmeal and carpets the undecided green-gray of ditchwater. The interior design smacked of dentist waiting rooms. Not Prince Library. Here, copper-bracketed sconces on the walls peeked out from book-cases that loomed like beasts. Overhead, miniature spotlights aimed their beams at artful positions to avoid shining on the books, drawing pools of light on a weathered oaken floor.
I wound through the imposing bookcases toward the center of the building: a sunken lounge space outlined by red sofas. Above, the ceiling was conspicuously missing. Instead, the hollow expanse of the music library stretched up overhead. Upper levels with wooden railings gazed down on where I stood. Iron staircases glinted on the corner of every floor.
This, I thought, was the Kensington they’d had in 1850, when nobody like me could have set foot inside. This was the unchanging part of this place that belonged to the older world, the part that I could only ever spy on.
Shaking off the feeling of having time traveled, I headed for the basement door.
I was early. I waited. I’d half-expected to find ancient catacombs down here, lined with flickering torches and maybe some disturbingly humanoid skulls, but the basement wasn’t as old-fashioned as the rest of the music library. The underground halls had the shabby appearance of something built on a whim in the seventies and totally ignored ever since, with chintzy still-life paintings dangling here and there.
After a few minutes, a tall kid shouldered his way out of practice room 003—my competition. He was handsome in a baseball-player sort of way, with a round face and floppy chestnut hair. He nodded to me before disappearing upstairs.
Shit. Did the Sharps care how good-looking the auditioners were? That was part of their whole shtick, right? Being stupidly attractive? Maybe I could pass as a guy, but I somehow doubted I could pass as a hot guy.
J. Crew Junior wasn’t hot, I reassured myself. But that was because he hadn’t looked old enough to be hot yet. Even he was pretty, like one of those weirdly old-looking Renaissance babies from art history slides.
I should’ve found a suit. A suit could turn a 6-out-of-10-looking dude into a solid 8.
My watch’s second hand ticked across home base: seven thirty. I knocked, and deep within practice room 003, a muffled voice called something that the soundproofing blurred into nothing. I cracked the door and slipped in.
The room was bigger than I’d expected. Filing cabinets were lined up along one wall, and a grand piano sat against the other, sleek and black, lid down. Isaac Nakahara sat on the lid, legs crossed. Baritone God—Trav—was perched at the piano bench with the ramrod posture of a soldier. He was even more solemn up close. His face looked as smooth and unlined as marble, like he’d never smiled in his life.
Dr. Graves was nowhere to be seen, but the other Sharps littered the room. They weren’t all hot, thank God. Mainly, they were just intimidating, eyeing me with such obvious evaluation that I got the urge to somersault under the piano.
The seven of them made up a decently representative sample of Kensington kids: majority white, but not by much, overall well-dressed, and covered in symbols of the Kensington “middle class,” which was a pretty ill-defined term around here. They wore crisp neon running shoes, Mizuno or Asics or Nike, barely broken in, a new pair bought every season or so. On wrists gleamed watches that bore zero resemblance to the scrap of Walmart plastic on my arm. These were a different species, muscular chunks of silver with miniature dials set into their generous faces, which made sense, because if your watch is as expensive as multiple watches, why not get a few extra dials in there? And tossed over shoulders were Kensington hoodies from the bookshop, soft and thick.
I only envied the school gear. Everything emblazoned with the Kensington logo was marked up obscenely for no other reason than that it was part of this place, and if you wore it, then you were part of this place, and eighty dollars—for most kids here—wasn’t too steep a price to belong a little more.
“Julian!” greeted Isaac from the piano, with so much familiarity in his voice, you’d think we’d known each other for years. “Great to see you.”
“Y-you too.”
“You have a good weekend?”
“It, um, yes, good,” I blurted, and resisted the strong urge to whack my forehead repeatedly on the door. God, get it together.
Isaac grinned, showing pointy canines. “Well, welcome to callbacks. First, let me tell you a bit about us.” He flourished a hand at the guys. “We are the Sharpshooters. Originally, the group was called the Wing Singers, and they performed at the cathedral services, but that was ages ago. We’ve been here since Kensington added the music school in 1937. I mean, not us specifically, we haven’t been here since the thirties.” He reconsidered. “Except Trav, who has absolutely been here for eighty years.”
Trav closed his eyes. “Isaac . . .”
Isaac shot him a grin and barreled on. “In terms of workload, we practice every night from eight to nine. We’ve got two gigs for the school in fall, another three in spring. And this year, we have that competition in December against the other groups, and if we win, we’ll get to tour in Europe with Aural Fixation.”
From the corner, J. Crew Junior let out a snicker. “Oral,” he said.
Isaac looked like he was trying not to laugh. “Yes, Erik, thank you for your contribution.” He unfolded his legs, letting a mile of dark wash denim hang over the edge of the Steinway. Scanning his outfit, I felt a sudden flash of insecurity about how I looked in my cheap, formless disguise. I hated how sensitive I’d become to minuscule markers like the Polo player on Isaac’s gray V-neck. It wasn’t that I wanted to care about brand names, but they were loud. When I met one of those kids wallpapered in brands, it felt like they wanted me, specifically, to know they were wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of cashmere or cotton or silver or leather. It was the least I could do to acknowledge it.
Trav lifted the lid from the piano keys. It creaked very slowly. When he spoke, it was with sinister softness: “We will win that competition. Or else.”
Isaac nodded. “There’s that lighthearted attitude we love so much.”
I suppressed a laugh. Isaac looked at me in time to catch the tail end of my grin. “I think that’s it,” he said, looking satisfied. “Questions?”
I shook my head.
“Then it’s all you, Trav.”
“Mm.” Trav’s nose wrinkled. “Off the piano.”
Isaac rolled his eyes but jumped off the lid. He leaned deep into Trav’s personal space, pulling one of those boy-stretches that showed the flexing sides of his underarms.
Trav sighed, shoved Isaac away by the shoulder, and looked back to me. “Let’s get started,” he said, in the tone that most movie villains would use to say, “Prepare to die.”
The other Sharps leaned against the wall as Trav guided me through a range test, marking my results in a leather-bound journal. He played a series of notes on the piano and ordered me to sing them back, adding a new note to the end with each repetition. Finally, he played a set of chords and asked me to sing the top, middle, or bass note.
His facial expression didn’t flicker, offering no clue as to how well I was doing. Finally, he scribbled something in his journal and flipped it shut.
“Circle up,” he ordered, standing. “One last thing. A blend exercise, to see how you sound with the group.”
The Sharps came forward from the wall. I hesitated before joining the circle. It was one thing to fool them from a stage, another to do it a foot in front of their faces. I stood between Trav and a boy wearing a turban, keeping my face tilted downward.
“Erik, lights,” said Trav. The tiny bass hit the light switch and darkness clamped down. The sudden invisibility felt freeing. I waited for a pitch, for a direction, anything.
Then a hand grabbed me.
“Hey.” I twisted away from the contact, staring blindly around. Another hand landed on my shoulder. One grabbed my arm. “Dude,” I said, stumbling back. “What—”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Trav’s voice, calm and steely. It shocked me so much I went still. Someone’s hand found my face, and a piece of cloth stretched over my eyes in the dark, back behind my head.
What the hell?
I prayed the wig would hold. The clips were strong, but not that strong.
The tugging sensation stopped. The blindfold stayed in place, and the wig hadn’t budged, thank God.
“What ar—” I started, but a hand hit my back, shoving me forward. My hands shot out instinctively, feeling for the empty space in front of me.
The hand pushed me again. I stumbled into a walk. Soon, threads of dim light framed the top and bottom of my vision, creeping in around the blindfold’s edges. I focused on the feeling of my sneakers padding on the tiles of the practice room hall, then up the stairs, then over the moaning floorboards of the main library. The scent of yellowing pages and dust descended.
The shock had faded into a frenzy of disbelief. Initiation.
I wondered for a split second if they were going to make me wrestle a bear, but on second thought, bear-wrestling was way cooler than most hazing I’d heard about. Usually, it sounded pointless and humiliating, like chugging hot sauce, or swallowing live goldfish, or sitting on blocks of ice naked until certain body parts went numb. If they even tried the goldfish thing, that was the end. I had limits.
We clanked up the iron steps that led from library floor to library floor. I bumped my shins repeatedly. I could already picture the watercolor of bruises that would be my legs tomorrow. After three staircases, a door clicked, the air cooled, and the floor scraped under eight pairs of feet, summoning up an image of worn stone. We walked up more stairs, steeper this time.
A hinge ahead whined. The hand at my back guided me forward and stopped me still.
I waited for a minute. Footsteps creaked and shifted in the darkness—and another sound, the distinctive strike and hiss of a match. Then a hollow shhh noise I couldn’t identify.
A slight pressure worried at the back of my head, and the blindfold fell from my eyes. I blinked rapidly, praying my eyebrows hadn’t smudged. Thank God I’d used enough setting spray to freeze a ferret in place.
The room was circular, like the top of a fairytale tower. The shadow of an upright piano stood opposite the door. Sheets of heavy cloth covered patches of wall where the windows must have been, creating thick darkness. The beat-up pinewood floor, scarred and uneven with age, reflected the only source of light: the line of long candles in the Sharps’ fists. Thin, dripping candles, propping up curls of flame that danced at the tips of their chins.
About eighty smartass comments jumped to the tip of my tongue.
There must be some mistake, I wanted to say. I auditioned for a singing group, not the Freemasons.
Wait, shit, I wanted to say. I forgot to bring all the goats I raised specifically for sacrificial purposes.
All right, I wanted to say with a sigh. Which one of you do I have to exorcise?
None of it came out. Their faces lit from beneath by the firelight, the Sharps looked weirdly menacing—even J. Crew Junior, who, true to form, was wearing salmon-colored shorts.
Directly in front of me, Trav—the only one without a candle—held an open book. I squinted through the flickering light. A list of names, handwriting leaning every which way, was splattered down the aging pages. One cursive scribble read “Demetrius Dwiggins,” and I blinked at it several times, expecting the name to disappear, sure that it was some terrifically ridiculous stress hallucination. Near the end of the list were Trav’s name, neat and printed, and Isaac’s, extravagantly looped.
“Um,” I said. “Should I sign this?”
Trav stared ahead as if he hadn’t heard a word. I took half a step and heard a gentle trickling, clicking sound. I looked down. My feet were surrounded by a spread of tiny cardboard fragments: an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.
I scanned the Sharps and their candles again. Each candle was a different length. I understood at once: finish putting this together before all six burned out, or . . . or what? Was some poor goldfish awaiting its fate in another room?
No time. I stepped out of the spread of pieces, crouched, and got to work.
The pieces were a chaos of bulbs and corners, layers of compacted cardboard loosened by years of hurried fingers. The first candle had already gone dark by the time I pieced together the border, an intimidatingly large rectangle.
I sorted the mess of black and white pieces by color and started forming patches. The activity was weirdly hypnotic, a mindless cycle of testing curves against each other, searching for a perfect fit. Time slipped away. Forming Rorschach blots against the floorboards, I nearly forgot where I was.
Then the distant Palmer bell chimed eight o’clock, and I glanced up to find that half the candles had already died. When I went back to the puzzle, the half-light started doing its work. Black and white both started to look like dark gray. The edges of pieces blurred. In the twitching shadows, their shapes became uncertain.
Then I linked two patches together and saw, suddenly, what this was. The fragment formed a sloppy but distinctive letter T. The puzzle was some sort of message.
A fourth candle burned down to a wax-coated fist, and the wick sputtered out.
My knees ached against the floorboards. My eyes were strained and watering. I squinted and rubbed them, focusing in.
Soon the first word was finished: THE. I bricked together an R near the bottom left and a K in the right corner. I shuttled an island of completed puzzle around, rotating it, trying to force the lines to match up. Then it joined to form THE CROW’S.
The light seemed to lurch. I looked up. The fifth candle had gone out. One left.
As the glowing tip of the fifth candlewick faded from red to nothing, Trav hummed a note, and the Sharps began to sing.
“Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”
The solemn arrangement of the Irish folk song was so full, so startling, that I couldn’t think. With the words curling into my ears, splintering my focus, I looked down at the mess of cardboard under my fingers and started to panic.
THE CROW’S . . . the crow’s what? With this music distracting me, finishing the puzzle was all but shot—could I figure it out with a guess?
No. I’d made it this far. I didn’t need to guess—I needed to work harder.
I gritted my teeth and hunched to the side, throwing my shadow away from the remainder of the puzzle. Problem pieces that hadn’t seemed to fit anywhere started slotting into place, even as they turned into fragments of nothing beneath my clumsy fingers. Fighting the Sharps’ serenade, I formed B, then E. I already knew what the phrase was by the time I pressed the last puzzle piece into position. THE CROW’S BEAK.
Our mascot was somewhere in this room, and it was carrying something for me. I shot to my feet, peering into the music-filled dark, when something tickled the back of my neck. I reached to scratch or slap it and my hand froze. A thick lock of hair had uncoiled from its bobby pins, slipped out of the wig, and fallen down my back.
The darkness offered cover. I twirled the lock of hair around two fingers and prodded it back into place under the wig. If the Sharps noticed, they didn’t show it. As they sang, they gazed uncannily ahead, their eyes out of focus, as if they’d left their bodies.
I tried to swallow and nearly choked. My mouth was drier than the yellowing pages of the initiation book. The final candle was barely a stub now, lighting up Isaac’s sharp chin. I turned—and found the crow.
Behind me was the door, painted red. On it hung a massive black flag with the Sharps coat of arms embroidered in gold. It looked disproportionately impressive in the flicker of the firelight, and the two crows stretching out their Latin motto looked almost alive. I reached for the birds. A patch of soft cloth was sewn below one of their beaks, and from the deep pocket, I extracted a silver fountain pen, its barrel cool and heavy.
I turned back to the seven boys, strode up to the initiation book, and scribbled Julian Zhang at the bottom of the list just as they finished a verse.
For a second there was silence.
“Aaand cut,” said Isaac, swiping the book from Trav. He snapped it shut.
The Sharps broke into enthusiastic exclamations. One of them stripped away the heavy cloths from the walls, revealing four round windows that framed porthole views of the darkening campus in thin iron. A wooden chest sat beneath one window, a cable peeking out from the lid, two black sound monitors keeping guard beside it. One of the Sharps broke the puzzle back into a box and slid it behind the chest.
Isaac blew out the last candle, which turned to an undramatic finger of wax in the evening light. A few of the guys closed around me to clap my back, and a nervous laugh dislodged from where it had stuck in my throat. I held my neck rigid, urging my hair not to come loose, overwhelmed by the whirl of chatter.
“—did it by yourself,” crowed a huge boy with dark flyaway hair. “Man, Nihal and Jon barely finished with two people—”
“Fucking nailed it,” said a tall blond kid at his side, and gave me a vicious high-five that definitely sloughed off a layer of skin or two.
“Marcus, lights,” called Isaac, and a boy with shaggy brown hair scampered over to plug in a power strip near the door. Lighting flickered into life: white-gold strip lights that encircled the stone wall, dim orange globes that dangled near each window, a rope of Christmas lights wrapped around one of the rafters. The place warmed a few degrees in the gold wash of light, and the boys became real all of a sudden, solidifying, their eyes bright and their hair shining. Isaac sprang onto the piano bench, rose to his tiptoes, and slid the book of signatures onto a crossbeam.
“So I’m in?” I said, breathless. My eyes prickled with the flood of light. I blinked hard several times.
“You are in,” said Trav, perching on the bench beside Isaac’s feet. “Initiation used to require the rookies to climb out a window onto the roof, too. Fifty-foot fall, if you slip. That’s been phased out.”
“What, did someone die?”
“It’s just the hazing policy,” Isaac said. He hopped down from the piano bench. “No one likes fun anymore.”
I looked around. “Is this a reading room?” There wasn’t a library book in sight, but an aging leather sofa stretched out beside the piano and matching armchairs flanked the door.
“This is the Crow’s Nest,” Isaac said proudly, flopping into an armchair. “It used to be a bell tower, but they took the bell out in the seventies, and it’s been Sharps territory since then.”
“Crow’s Nest,” I repeated. “Like a ship lookout?”
“Yep,” Isaac said. “Except instead of a ship, we’re looking out for the most haunted building on campus, and by the way I’ve definitely seen ghosts here before.”
“Shut up, you have not,” said the tall blond kid from the sofa.
“Scared?” said the dark-haired guy with the flyaway hair, and they engaged in a flurry of elbowing.
Realizing that the Sharps had all found seats, I went for the open armchair. With a creak of ancient springs, I sank a mile into the scraped leather cushioning.
My hair tickled with heat. I brushed a finger around the line of the wig. Still safe.
“So,” Isaac said. “Now that you’ve proven yourself, initiate, let’s do some introductions.” He made a sweeping gesture around the room that involved his whole body. Somehow everything he did seemed to involve his whole body, every motion of the hands, every sentence he spoke. The way he moved reminded me of very giant dogs who think they’re very small dogs and are accordingly careless with themselves.
He lifted a hand. “Again, I’m Isaac, your president. And the one who always looks like he just sniffed paint is your fearless musical director, Traveler Atwood.”
Trav’s nostrils flared. He said nothing.
“You met Erik yesterday.” Isaac pointed at J. Crew Junior. “He’s on bass and VP.”
“VP?” I said.
“Vocal percussion,” Erik said proudly, tilting his nose up. The light glinted on his freckled cheeks. Where everyone else was sitting, Erik was on his feet, stance comically wide, elbow postured against the wall. It really didn’t make him look any larger. I wanted to offer him some of my height.
“Beatboxing,” Isaac explained, interpreting my silence as confusion. “Drum noises. Weird explosion sounds. Whatever we need.” He nodded to the boy with shaggy brown hair, who had curled up to sit in the windowsill. “Other freshman, go.”
The boy waved. He was stocky, and his shoulders were slumped so low it looked uncomfortable, the sort of posture that suggested he wanted to disappear. “Hi. I’m Other Freshman, apparently.” He gave a nervous laugh and cut himself off with a cough. “I’m Marcus Humphreys, and . . . yeah.” Marcus’s searching, desperate eyes landed on the sofa. “J-Jon Cox?”
“Hey. Jon Cox,” introduced the guy sprawled over one arm of the sofa. His golden hair fell over one side of his high forehead, brushing one wingtip of his tortoiseshell glasses. Jon Cox looked more like a mental image of the Sharps than a real person—tall and handsome, with prominent cheekbones. The undone collar of his Polo showed a flushed patch of skin at the divot between his collarbones.
“And I’m Theodore Pugh,” said the guy sitting next to him, whose bulk took up a good third of the sofa. His deep, resonant voice smacked of movie trailers, and his eyes were a startling light blue.
Jon Cox gave Theodore a laughing look. “Bro, don’t even try. You’re never going to get rid of it.”
“Get rid of what?” I asked.
“His nickname,” Jon Cox said. “Call him Mama. Everyone calls him Mama.”
Mama aimed a scowl at Jon Cox. “Why are you so gung-ho about this?”
“’Cause you keep wet wipes in your backpack,” said Jon Cox patiently, “and it’s important that people know this about you.”
Mama folded his arms. “I like clean surfaces!”
The boy at the sofa’s other end, the boy with the turban, cleared his throat. He had patchy facial hair growing in on his chin and jawline, but puberty didn’t seem to have mustered up the energy to give him a mustache. “I’m Nihal Singh Sehrawat,” he introduced, in the driest deadpan I’d ever heard. “Your fellow Tenor 1. Welcome to the falsetto club.”
I nodded, trying not to look at his turban. I’d seen this kid around campus once or twice—it was hard to forget the number of people staring at his head. I didn’t want to be the next in a long line of turban-gawkers.
“Before you ask,” he said, still in that flat tone, “I’m a Sikh, not Muslim; and I’m Indian, but I’m actually from New Jersey. So. Do with that information what you will.”
“Cool,” I said. “Good to meet you.” I straightened in my armchair, trying to keep their names from slipping away. “I’m Julian. I’m a junior from San Francisco.”
“Juniors, represent,” Mama said. “Why didn’t you audition our freshman year?”
I shrugged, faking unconcern. “Trying to focus on theater stuff.”
Mama scoffed and scrubbed a hand through his dark hair. “Theater.”
“Um, sorry, what?” I said, defensive.
Nihal Singh Sehrawat intervened. “Theodore is convinced that everything that isn’t music is an inferior discipline, which is why I was mercilessly hazed all of last year.”
Mama gave a luxuriant roll of his blue eyes. “I didn’t haze you, you asshat,” he said. “I just said that it’s a national embarrassment that you don’t know what parallel fifths are.”
“See what I have to deal with?” Nihal said to me. “Asshat. I will never recover.”
I decided not to admit that I also didn’t know what parallel fifths were. “You’re not School of Music?” I asked, relieved.
“No,” Nihal said. “Visual Arts.”
“Nihal actually doesn’t even sing,” Isaac said, his eyes sparkling with enjoyment. “We just hired him to Photoshop our posters so they look like Beatles album covers.” Sprawled in his seat, his legs spread obscenely and his hands tracing circles over the chair’s leather arms, Isaac looked like an emperor surveying his kingdom.
Nihal raised one eyebrow. “If you want to look like a Beatle, Isaac, you may have to get your first haircut since you exited the womb.”
“Yeah, over my dead body,” Isaac said, one hand flying defensively to his man bun.
Trav cleared his throat. Everyone fell silent.
“To business.” Trav turned his eyes on me. They glinted brighter and harder than the stud in his ear. “For rehearsal tomorrow, arrive at least five minutes to eight. Lateness is not acceptable.” Trav fished a thick spiral-bound journal from his backpack. “Don’t schedule anything over the eight to nine o’clock hour. Ever. And yes, we do rehearse Friday and Saturday night. If you need an exemption for any reason, talk to me well in advance—two to three weeks.” He tapped the journal. “I keep everyone’s schedules here, but Sharps should always be your priority.”
“Got it,” I said, wondering about the air of obsession that hung around this guy like a strong cologne. Was he getting paid for this?
“Other things,” Trav said, stowing the journal. “Firstly, our faculty sponsor is Dr. Graves, but don’t bother asking him anything. To put it generously, he’s very hands-off. Secondly, we take a three-day retreat at the beginning of Thanksgiving Break. Talk to your parents; factor it into your flight plans.”
I nodded. It wouldn’t be an issue. With the obscene cost of flights around Thanksgiving, I stayed at Kensington for break every year, so my parents never had to know if I left campus.
“Thirdly,” he continued, pointing at a scrap of paper nailed above the piano, “don’t discuss our competition set with anyone. You’re bound to secrecy. And fourthly . . .” Trav tugged a black pouch from his pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it, pulled the drawstrings loose, and tugged out a silver key.
“That’s a key to this room,” Trav said. “Prince automatically locks at midnight, but one of the practice rooms has a broken window lock. Easy to sneak in. So, this place is always open for you, 24/7, 365.” His voice grew stiff and uncomfortable. “The Nest is like a second home for most of us. That’s how it is.”
“Aw, Trav,” Isaac said, with a lopsided grin. “I’m getting all warm and fuzzy.”
“Fifthly,” Trav added loudly, “ignore everything Isaac ever says. President isn’t a real job.”
Laughs bounced off the high ceiling like the sound of pealing bells. With my sound lost in the mix, I let my voice rise high.
The moon was a bright disk outside my dorm, and I sat across from my mirror with a pair of scissors. The empty swirl of a new wig sat on the desk. I’d swapped out the first for a copy of my hair as it looked now, waist-long and simple, straight locks stitched tightly into the cap.
I’d been sitting here for minutes, waiting for the urge to hit. I couldn’t trust my hair to stay put, so the solution was obvious: cut my long hair short, swap out a short wig for long, and use the wig to look like a girl instead. But cutting my hair felt so irreversible, a symbolic sign of total commitment. There’d be no rewinding, no panicking, no second thoughts. I’d be halfway through college before this regrew.
I narrowed my eyes at myself in the mirror. I was already committed. I was initiated. I’d conquered auditions, solved the puzzle, weathered Traveler Atwood’s icy stare for a truly inhumane amount of time. It wasn’t going to be for nothing.
My hair swung around my shoulders and face, crumpled by the grip of the pins. I let myself touch it for a minute. Then I lifted the scissors, took a steady breath, and cut. The metal brushed my jaw, a little sting.
Tinny shearing sounds tinted the air. I accelerated, snipping ends at angles, scything it all away. Years’ worth of hair fell into the trash can between my knees, forearm lengths of it. I was weightless. My mother loved the thickness of my hair—“you’ll never go bald”—but in the San Francisco summers it always glistened, oily, a heavy beacon for the sun.
Cut by cut, my new reality settled around my head. Every kiss of the scissors was a goodbye to what I used to be. The only thing left was December.