"Birds' Nest" by Charlee Olson
When mom didn’t have a job because one of my sisters was a baby, she used to take us to the cosmetology school to get our hair cut. With three small girls, it was the most fiscally responsible option. We wanted to go to “Kids Cuts,” where you could sit in a little airplane chair and get your haircut, but apparently it was too expensive, so we climbed into the minivan and hauled ourselves to North Charleston. There were a lot of windows at the cosmetology school, and it was very bright; I remember this because through the windows I could see an establishment that I would much rather be occupying: The Monkey Joes. It was a new, swanky trampoline park with inflatables and slides, and they gave you socks with sticky bottoms to wear just while you were there. I wanted to go so badly. I wanted to jump out of my seat, which was too big for me, and run away from my stylist with the orange hair and sprint across the sidewalk to the Monkey Joes. I knew that when I got there, it would smell like elastic and popcorn, and I could jump until mom’s haircut was over and she realized I was gone. But the orange-haired girl came back and started to brush my hair: it was too late now.
She started to cut my hair, and I realized my sister was already done, so she was running around the warehouse and laughing. I wanted to run too. Or jump. Anything but sit in this too-big chair and have the orange lady touch my hair. Mom told her to cut it short cause summer was coming up, and I wouldn’t want to deal with it long, which was fine. I watched my hair fall to the floor in chunks. Some got stuck on my neck and fell inside my shirt and got lodged in between the fabric and my back. I couldn’t stop thinking about it being there. It kind of itched and tickled. I wanted it to fall on the floor with the rest of the chunks because soon all the hairs in this chunk will split and spread, and then I won’t be able to get them out of my shirt.
“All done! What do you think?”
She spun me around to face the mirror. A Bob. A “Dora the Explorer” bob.
I looked so ugly I wanted to cry. I thought I would like it short, but I was sorely mistaken. I looked like the Polly Pocket character that my sisters and I never played with cause her hair was weird. And now my hair was weird too.
We drove home past the Monkey Joes, and I tried not to look out the window: mostly because I hated my own reflection, but also because the big fat inflatable monkey that sat outside was slowly becoming less visible. I hated that we couldn’t go. I asked Mom what the orange lady was going to do with all my hair, in hopes that maybe I could get it back. But she said that they took it out to the forest and threw it into the wind so that the birds could use it to make their nests easier. How fabulous, I thought. That my hair could make a home for the birds, I loved birds. I wondered what type of bird would want my hair for their nests: I decided I hoped it would be a woodpecker, my favorite kind.
When we got home, I headed outside to watch the birds in our yard. I hoped there would be a woodpecker. Our yard smelled like rosemary, and the bushes were in full bloom. I hid behind them so my sister would not follow me out to watch the birds. She was too loud and would scare them away. I secretly hoped that if I lay still enough, one would mistake my bob for its nest and come and sit on my head. Then, I had a wonderful idea!
I would spread hair in this yard so that the birds would know we like having them here. I thought that maybe I could convince my sister to let me use her hair, but she also got a bob, and Mom would notice, and then she would cry if she got mad and tell Mom it was me. So I decided to use my own hair for the birds. I hated my bob anyway; what would it matter if it was a little shorter? I snuck into the kitchen behind Mom’s back and took the orange handled scissors back into the yard behind the rosemary bush. I measured with blade pieces long enough for the birds to use. When I was done, I felt very proud. I gathered up all the hair and released it to the tree line. I sat back down to watch and see if the strands had any takers. I was suddenly very aware of the orange-handled scissors on the ground next to me; if Mom found them out here, she would be very suspicious. I went inside to return them and ran quickly back out the back door, but I felt someone following me. I hoped it wasn’t Mom.
“Hey bucket,” that’s what my uncle called me, “what happened to your hair?” I explained everything about the birds and the bob, and I made sure to tell him not to tell Mom. He asked if I was supposed to cut my hair on my own, and I thought, if only you had seen what it looked like before this, you wouldn’t be asking me that: this was necessary for everyone involved. After he went back inside, the wailing began. He had done the one thing that I specifically told him not to do! Mom came out crying, trying to understand why I had done it. Birds…bob…then I was crying too because if mom was crying, that means I probably looked uglier than I did with the Bob.
In the end, I chalk this experience up to a success. Unfortunately for mom, she had to take me somewhere to fix my hair, and after they made it even on both sides, I looked very much like a little boy. Mom didn’t want me to look like a boy when I went back to school, so she took me to Claire’s to get my ears pierced. I picked out small blue diamonds, and it didn’t even hurt that badly. And at the end of the day, I looked in the mirror to see a funky new haircut that no one else had. I felt special, nothing like Dora, and fancy blue diamonds in my ears, which I loved because hardly any of my friends were allowed to get their ears pierced yet. And when I woke up, some of my hair on the tree line was gone. I was sure it was in the trees, a stylish and functional addition to a nest, I think. And that, I thought, made the whole ordeal worth it.