It is 7:30 on a Sunday night and I have school the next day. I am in a 5^th grade split class with some 4^th graders, and I sit by the window. I like school, but it’s still the weekend and I need to do something interesting with the rest of my free time. I decide to braid my own hair.

I run upstairs to my room and grab the American Girl magazine that is sitting on the bed. Flipping through the pages, walking down the stairs I come to the section with hair tips. Sitting down on the carpet in the living room, I open up to the page on ‘crimping.’ Inside the magazine there is a picture of two girls, mid giggle, with dozens of little braids across their heads. The ends are bound with tin foil. The reason for this, according to the magazine, is so that the ends of your hair won’t get a funny line in them from a rubber band. I look at the braids these girls have and think of how neat they look. Why would anyone take them out? I like that tinfoil idea.

My hair is still wet from the shower earlier, and I part it down the middle. Beginning in the front of my head, I slowly braid down little sections until my entire scalp is covered with small braids. Each of the ends is tied off with a thin strip of tin foil wrapped around the hair. I look in the mirror and marvel at the tiny braids. The front looks good; the back was kind of hard to do but people will understand that. I smile, and go to bed.

*

I wake up for school the next day and carefully pull my favorite pink shirt over the braids. I check them in the mirror, and they look pretty much like they did yesterday, perhaps a few hairs are out of place. Good to go. I notice that the look on my mom’s face as I walk out the door is not unlike the time I wore nylon pantyhose on my head as “hair” to a family reunion.

“What? Didn’t they hold up last night? How is the back?” I turn around so that she can check.

“ They are all…still there.”

I grin and walk down to the bus stop with my brother.

*

I can’t stop smiling as I walk into school and through the door of my classroom, whipping the braids off my shoulder and listening to the swishing sound they make when the tin foil collides.

“What did you do!?”

I turn to my left, and there is the boy, shorter than the rest of the class, laughing at me.

“What?”

“You look like Medusa!”

“Who is that?”

“The mythical lady with snakes for hair! Aaaaahahahaha…”

I refuse to be bullied into taking my braids out, and will wear them for the rest of the day even if every single tin foil fastener falls out. The nickname Medusa will stick until they come up with something else.

Luciana, 26