She Said People Would Stare. He Said Good.

Emily saw me looking at it. "One of the kids asked us to cover it," she said quietly.

I nodded. I kept looking at it for a moment longer than was probably comfortable for anyone in the room.

Then Jalen said, not with anger, just with the flat and specific exhaustion of a child who has had the same inadequate conversation too many times to bother dressing it up anymore, "Everybody says hair grows back. They never say what we're supposed to do until then."

The room went the particular quiet that happens when a child says something true that none of the adults in the room have managed to say yet.

I turned slowly, the way I always moved in spaces that were not built for my dimensions, and I looked at the four of them. I looked at Ava's hat. I looked at Jalen's cap. I looked at the yellow scarf Sophie kept touching. I looked at the covered mirror. And then I looked at my own hands, at the forearms below my rolled-up sleeves, at the beard that reached my chest, at the long gray-dark hair tied back at my neck.

"Do you have safe clippers?" I asked Emily.

She stopped moving. "Why?"

I did not answer right away. I walked to the center of the room, found the small blue children's chair, and sat down in it. The chair made a sound that was somewhere between a creak and a complaint, and my knees stuck out at angles that had no good solution, and my boots on the colorful foam tiles looked like two large animals that had wandered in from somewhere entirely different, and I was aware that the visual was not subtle. I did not mind. Subtle had never been a particular strength.

I looked at Mateo, at Ava, at Jalen, at Sophie.

"They did not get to choose what happened to their hair," I said. "So let them choose what happens to mine."

Ava looked up from the craft table for the first time. She had a way of looking at you that felt like she was checking the math before she decided whether to believe the answer.