September 11, 2017 | Occasus | Issue 7 | Fiction

Hair: A Short Narrative
I was six years old when I saw a girl's wrist.

I had seen a girl's wrist before, but this was the first time I noticed a girl's wrist. The way it collected delicately together in a sculpture of bone and dust. The way it swooped when she wrote something in her notebook, the way it twisted when she combed her fingers through her fine blonde hair and tucked it gently behind her ear. I thought of my long ragged chestnut hair hanging at my sides.

Her name was Stacey.

She carried a baby pink backpack on her right shoulder, the zipper left open 2 inches to reveal a fluffy pen sticking out. She held her colour-coordinated lunchbox tightly to her chest as she made the trip from her mother's Ford to the front doors of the school.

In October she began to smile at me from her spot at the work table. In December she would sit beside me, not saying a word. In March she would give me half of her PB&J when my mother would forget to pack my lunch. In May of my grade 12 year I realized I had been in love with her.

But sometimes things happen in ways we cannot expect them to, and in June Stacey's parents called social services on my mother before their career took them to Michigan, and I watched Stacey walk through the doors of our elementary school clutching her baby pink lunchbox, her wrists covered by her cardigan.

I never saw her again.
I was 12 years old when I saw a girl's shoulder blades.

They may not seem like the most appealing or elegant part of the human body, but to me, they were fascinating. They shifted below her skin, sticking out of the frame of her back on either side of her narrow spine. Sometimes they were covered by her long chestnut hair, and sometimes they were outlined by a tank top in the summer.

Her name was Cynthia.

She was the top of our year and sometimes I went to her for help with biology. I would pull up a chair to the left of her desk and smell her conditioner and push my knee cap so it brushed against hers. She talked to me on the first day of the year because her sister was named Abigail, too, and I flinched at the sound of the name. When she smiled a dimple appeared on the right side of her face, and when Thomas asked me to be his girlfriend, all I could see was Cynthia's face. But Cynthia told me he was cute, so I said yes, and we held hands during recess and sat together at lunch time.

When we graduated 8th grade, Cynthia got accepted to an elite boarding school, hugging me tight on graduation night and telling me I looked beautiful in the plain dress that felt wrong on my body. She said she would write.

I never heard from her again.
I was 14 years old when I saw a boy's chest.

I couldn't stop staring at the flat plane of muscle that runs from the collarbone to the bottom of the ribcage, skin beaded with sweat from the afternoon sun on our running track. He picked up the bottom seam of his shirt, lifted it to his forehead, and swiped the perspiration that had settled there. The beauty of a straight, horizontal line from the neck to the waist glared at me from my spot on the bleachers.

I didn't know his name.

I didn't need to know his name. He was nameless. He was a specimen born to his body, blessed with the absence of curve on his chest and the presence of curve on his throat. He was flat and deep and coarse and rough, sharp jawline glinting in the light. He was all of them.

He was a boy.

When summer came he wore shorts down to the knee, when he woke up he only wore a pair of pajama pants, when he was in the eighth grade he went from a sweet soprano to a blaring baritone. He wore button-ups and suit jackets and checked 'male' when he went for his monthly check-up. He was blue and not pink.

The strap of my bra seared into the top of my shoulder, the sun burning me alive.

I did see him again. I saw him everywhere, but mostly the backs of my eyelids.
I was 16 years old when I heard the word gay.

It began to spread around my school like a plague, like a thick black smoke that moved down my throat and out of my ears. She likes girls, she likes girls, she likes girls.

The problem was, I did like girls.

But the word gay settled in my lungs and made it hard to breathe. It was like an aftertaste in my mouth that unsettled me to my primal components. It wasn't right. Gay was the syllable attached to the way a girl looked at another girl like she was glass, the way she should look at a boy like he was steel. And that was not what I was.

I wasn't Stacey, and I wasn't Cynthia. I was not baby pink lunch boxes and I was not deep chestnut hair over tank tops. I was not long blonde hair tucked gently behind ears, and I was certainly not plain curved dresses at graduation with jagged bra straps beneath them.

It seemed I was nothing at all.
I was 16 years old when I burned myself alive.

I stood in front of my closet, plastic garbage bag resting against my right leg, empty, for the moment.

I looked at the row of fabric before me, and I knew I had to be fast. I didn't have much time before I heard the telltale screech of my mother's tires in the driveway.

With one swift breath I reached for the section of clothes to my left, separated from the others with plastic fuchsia hangers. I had been sorting them for weeks, one item a day, dreading this moment that I knew was necessary. I stuffed them in the black trash bag quickly and jerkily without looking down at it. It was like I was smothering a former lover, shutting my eyes and waiting for it to be over.

I took my trash bag, a body bag for the old me, the corpse of Abigail fighting for breath inside, and walked through the house to the patio door. Sliding it open, I walked towards the bonfire pit I had prepared the day previously. I placed the bag on the wood with shaking hands, poured the foul-smelling liquid overtop, and lit a match.

I walked away from the blazing fire with hope in my chest and dread in my throat.
I cannot recall the age I was when I heard the name Abigail.

My earliest memory is when I was young, too young, and I remember even then it had left a sour taste in my mouth.

"Abigail," they would say, "such a lovely young girl, such a beautiful young lady."

As soon as I had learned the name Abigail was an elegant name for a lovely lady, that the name, along with my biology, had pressed me into a box of pantyhose and long flowing shiny hair down to my waist that my mother never let me cut, I began to resent it. Every time it was said the acid in my stomach would come alive, reminding me of who I was supposed to be.

As the sun set each day, I would rest my head on my pillow thinking of a new name. A new life, a new birth, a new body, a new identity. After months and months of hours spent thinking before unconsciousness swept me under, I decided on Max. I liked the name Max. I thought I would have liked to be called Max in another life.

I began to request people call me Ab, not Abby, and certainly not Abigail. Ab was the only sound I could bare to hear, and looking back on it, the closest thing to something like Abe.

I never heard the name Ab again.
I was 18 years old when a boy touched me.

I was attending a house party that I had no business being at, that my friend at the time Claire had dragged me to. The night had begun with me standing in the corner of the living room belonging to a person I did not know, occasionally sipping from a red solo cup filled with diet Pepsi. Then, Claire had introduced me to a boy she knew from summer camp, and when he shook my hand and said his name was Max, I excused myself to the kitchen and garnished my diet Pepsi with far too much whiskey.

I then proceeded to garnish my whiskey with more whiskey, and scotch, and whatever the hell was in the host's liquor cabinet. I downed cup after cup until I could forget Max and his curly red hair and his strong, flat chest.

After this point, looking back on that night is like looking at the memory through a stained-glass window. A boy started talking to me, dancing with me, refilling my cup and asking for my name. I had replied "Ab", and he had said "okay Ab, I'm Alex", and maybe that's why I had followed him up the stairs. Because he called me Ab, because his name was Alex (and if I closed my eyes, Alex was a beautiful girl with flowing black hair), and most importantly, because his name was not Max.

So he took me upstairs, and he laid me down on the bed, and he started to kiss me and touch me and all I could do was stare at the ceiling above me. It's like I was paralyzed, only coming to life when he started to say "Oh Abby, oh Abby," over and over and over.

I started to mutter "no, no, no," starting as a whisper until I was crying it out. My name was not Ab, and it was not Abby, and it was not Abigail. I pushed Alex off of me as hard as I could before I ran out of the house and ran all the way home, leaving Alex and Claire and Abigail behind in my wake.

When I got home, still intoxicated, I stumbled to the bathroom before gripping the scissors I kept there in my hands. Staring at myself in the mirror, my eyes brimmed with tears, I began to chop off my hair in chunks. Pieces fell to my left, to my right, onto my sweater and my legs and into the white bathroom sink. I chopped and I snipped until my hair laid like a halo around me, below my ears and across my forehead.

I stepped back, admiring my work with a small smile, before meeting my eyes in the mirror.

I was not Abigail. She was in the trash bag out back, in the sandbox of my elementary school, on the bed that Alex had laid me down on.

I raised the blade of the scissor to the edge of my neck, pressing it softly against the fair skin, seeing if I liked the burn.

"I'm Max," I said to my reflection.

And I finally was.
JULIA ROOTH is a music student currently doing a minor in creative writing here at Western. Writing has always been a passion of hers, and pursuing writing in the future is something she would love.