as you girls aren’t planning to make me split the check twenty ways, I’m ready to take your order.”
“One check is fine, thank you,” Mel says.
The waitress scratches the back of her head with her pencil. “Is this some sorority hazing thing?”
Mel smiles thinly as she slides into her seat. “No. We’re teammates.”
“Let me guess. You’re the mascot?”
It takes a second or two before Grace realizes the waitress is talking to her.
“I’m kidding. I admire your bravery, sweetie.” Using her pencil to draw an invisible circle around Grace’s head. “Not every girl has the guts to walk around with blue hair in public.”
Grace ignores her. “Can I have an order of—”
“You know what’s funny?” Ali twists in her seat and stares the waitress down. “I was thinking the same thing about your root situation. Talk about brave! The contrast between your grays and that ashy brown … it’s the kind of look that says, without apology, ‘World, I give up.’?” The waitress sneers, and Ali leans tenderly against Grace. “Split a chocolate chip waffle with me?”
After their orders are taken, Grace slides out of the booth and walks to the bathroom to wash her hands. She focuses on the anemic squirt of foam, crackling in the cup of her palm, focuses on triggering the motion sensor to pony up another, but then gives up and focuses on conjuring a lather from what she’s already got. The soap smells suspiciously like nothing. Grace focuses on the sink; the sensor on the faucet is too sensitive, the blasts of water annoyingly brief. She focuses on the dye underneath her fingernails.
Grace generally avoids looking at herself immediately after interactions like the one with the waitress. From experience, she knows that whatever insult was lobbed will inevitably get reflected back at Grace like a fun-house mirror, warped and distorted.
That said, her preference—and yes, she knows how tragic that makes her sound—is actually this sort of disparagement, what Grace thinks of as Hot Takes from Passing Strangers. A clean, quick, straightforward punch in the ego, always a version of, Hey, no offense, but you’re fucking weird.
What Grace has always found much harder to shrug off were the slights she endured from her JV teammates. Cold shoulders, eye rolls, thinly veiled revulsion, or being rendered invisible. These behaviors rarely manifested into an insult, something Grace could process, or perhaps even proactively address. Like those superpainful chin zits that last forever and never come to a head, leaving you no way to squeeze out what’s festering. Instead, you’re forced to simply reabsorb your perceived grossness.
She has felt none of that tonight from her new teammates. No edge on Grace that they wish she’d sand down. Surely walking in with her bright blue hair tonight threw at least a few of them for a loop. But her teammates took it in stride and their reactions were overwhelmingly positive. Even if it wasn’t necessarily their style, they respected it was hers.
Coach was the only one who hadn’t directly commented on it, one way or the other. Yes, there was that one time Grace maybe caught him staring at her during his speech, but she was still operating on the assumption that, if Coach truly hated her hair, he would have said something to her. He’s not the kind of guy who holds back. Quite the opposite, in fact. The only girls who escaped Coach’s wrath this week were the girls who didn’t make the team. They weren’t spared so much as ignored.
But now, rewinding the evening, Grace can’t think of a single interaction she had with Coach tonight, good or bad. If anything, he regarded her as if she’d wandered into the wrong party.
And perhaps, in his mind, she had.
After all, the JV girls had known for years that Grace was different. But Grace doubted she was on Coach’s radar. Before tonight, he wouldn’t have seen her with crazy colored hair. And only once—in the moments just after the championship loss—was she in his orbit dressed in anything other than workout clothes.
She’s always held on to the belief that, so long as she played well enough, Coach would make a spot for her on the Wildcats. But Grace never exactly tested that theory either. Not until tonight.
Grace finds Mel standing outside the bathroom, one shoulder leaning against the opposite wall, looking down at her phone. Her lips, pursed and pouty, seem oddly pale, until Grace realizes that it’s because the pink gloss she always wears has worn off. Even