The Braid Nobody in Town Understood
The kindergartners sang about a rainbow. The second grade did something with scarves.
Then the fifth grade filed out onto the risers, and I found Hailey on the top one, at the end, half behind the curtain.
They sang two songs. Two children came down and introduced them. Then Miss Carol nodded, and Hailey climbed down from the back with her braid in her arms and walked to the microphone at the center of the stage.
She let the braid go. It dropped past the hem of her dress and swung once and hung still, with the blue ribbon almost touching the stage.
Somebody near the front made a small sound. It was not a kind one.
Hailey reached up and pulled the microphone down to her height. It squealed. She waited for it to stop.
“I’m supposed to say that our next song is ‘This Land Is Your Land,'” she said. “And it is.”
She looked right at the back wall, where I was.
“But first. Mrs. Dunn asked my dad in the hallway what we’re waiting for. And he won’t tell her. He promised my mom he wouldn’t.” She swallowed. “I never promised anybody. So I’m going to.”
Miss Carol took a half step from the piano. Then she stopped. I will be grateful to that woman for the rest of my life for stopping.
“My mom’s hair fell out two times,” Hailey said. “The second time it didn’t grow back, because she didn’t get to.”
There is a kind of quiet that three hundred people can make. I had not heard it before that night.
“When she was getting her medicine in Amarillo, there was a girl there who was seven. She didn’t have any hair either. She told me she wanted hair so long she could sit on it. They gave her a wig, but it was short and it was plastic and it itched.”
She pulled the braid forward over her shoulder and held it in both hands. It still reached her knees.
“There’s a lady who makes real ones. My mom called her. It takes a whole braid to make one long wig for one kid. A long braid, that never got cut or colored. Grown-ups mostly don’t have that. I did.”
Down in the third row, I saw Pam Dunn’s clipboard go flat in her lap.
“So me and my mom got the sewing tape, and we picked. Seventeen inches past my shoulder. And my twelfth birthday, so it would be me deciding, and not a little kid whose mom was sick.” She looked out at them. “People say my dad won’t let me cut it until I’m seventeen. It was never seventeen years old. It’s seventeen inches. I passed that in third grade.”
She took a breath. I could hear it in the speakers.
“I’m three weeks short of the day. That’s what we’re waiting for.”
Nobody moved. A baby fussed somewhere and was hushed.
“It’s heavy,” Hailey said. “It does get caught in stuff. I know it looks weird. My dad gets up at five fifteen every morning to braid it, and he learned on a rope, and he never told on me one time. He let everybody think it was him.” Her voice shook there, once, and she straightened it out. “My mom wouldn’t be mortified. She’d know exactly what it was.”
She let the braid fall back.
“So nobody has to take me to Donna’s while my dad’s at work. I already have an appointment. May the eighth, at four o’clock.”