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James knew it was coming when he signed on the day of his 18th birthday. He didn’t think it would bother him, but, like a lot of things in life, he wound up only pretending that it didn’t.
All male foster children must have masculine haircuts, the rules state. So from the times James can remember, he’s had his shorn off once a month or so to keep within regulations. They never even asked his opinion on style until he was about 14 or so, at which point he took on the sort of hippie beatnik look that he liked, Tasha found hilarious, and everyone else tried not to hate. At least not too loudly.
So when James went to pick up his uniform and was directed first to the barber shop, he said “Oh, yeah,” and grinned whilst internally sighing with a big mental cringe. Off went the ear length waves he’d worn through high school. Off went everything except half an inch of vertical fuzz immediately concealed under a fresh US Army baseball cap.
“You’ll get used to it,” said his bunkie, who had apparently had his done three weeks ago. “It’s easy in the shower.”
Private Stewart was right, it was easier in the shower, but it was easier to cry in there, too. Mostly he cried because he missed Tasha and hoped to come home to find a girl instead of an obit. But the first time James lathered up, he found the tears spilling as a thousand miniature spikes jut into his palms like the grains on coarse sandpaper. He feelt like Jo in Little Women, though Winona Ryder had been left with practically shoulder length tresses. What James wouldn’t’ve given for those…
“Not too short,” he learned to say in Pashto once they’d all been shipped overseas. James folded down the collar of his uniform to reveal the acne of ingrown hairs on the back of his neck.
James may have been pleased with his non-buzz cut, but his commanding officer wasn’t so much.
“Get a haircut in your free hours tonight, sergeant,” he barked as James clambered into the armored vehicle.
“Yes, sir.” James adjusted his helmet, wondering how the fuck his commander had managed to see the hair beneath it. He seethed for a moment, then tried to get his mind back on the mission.
When the vehicle hit the IED, it’s the opposite side from where James is sitting that took the worst damage. The vehicle exploded up to its midline. In the nick of time before the AV blew, James leaned the wrong way and was jolted out of his seat.
When he regained consciousness seconds or minutes later, there was nothing attached to his left shoulder socket, and his helmet had been bounced off his head. His vision was blurred to hell, but he recognized the shapes and sounds of Stewart screaming a few yards away as his helmet literally fried his head, with nary a hair to protect his skull from the melting plastic and superheated metal. James watched for a moment. Then vomited. Then he lied down beside his old bunkie and squeezed his hand until he stopped moving. Then he swatted his eyelids shut.
In the hospital, no one paid attention to what James looked like. At all. He was bathed every day, either with disinfecting wipes or washcloths drenched in soapy lukewarm water, but that’s the extend of the offered personal care.
Once James moved from being bed bound to walking up and down the halls, he begged a stick of deodorant off one of the techs. “And a comb?” He’d asked. “Or a brush?” His hair was perhaps an inch and a half long all over, and prone to standing up at all angles.
James made fixing it part of his mornin routine. His therapist, the talking one, said it was obsessive. But his OT said it was perfectly fine to go back to familiar skills that got his body moving and promoted self care.
James took the OT’s word for it. He spent more than he ought to from his stipend on fancy shampoo and conditioner, and by the time he left the rehab hospital, his hair was back past his ears like it had been when he was a kid. By the time he settled down and enrolled and college, it was nearly to his shoulders.
When James looks at himself in the mirror before class now, he nods to his reflection. ‘That’s me,’ he thinks. ‘Finally.’
Tasha gets a kick out of sitting behind him and brushing James’s hair out for him before bed. They sit in the living room with Steve, watching TV, and pretending to be a serious, grown up kind of family.
Tasha pulls at a tangle, just because she can, and James smacks her softly. “Hey,” he says. “Gentle now.”
“Yeah, yeah.” But Tasha lightens her touch and quickly finishes up.
The next night, there’s a thunderstorm, and the power’s out. Tasha’s over at Maria’s place, and she staunchly refuses to be picked up like a child. James and Steve argue with her over speakerphone for a while, then make Maria promise to return her home once the street lights come back on.
“So,” Steve asks, once the call is finished. “What do you want to do?”
“Ugh,” James sighs. “Getting a headache. Can we just go to bed?”
“Yeah.” Steve looks at him, concerned. “You ok? Is it a migraine?”
“Not sure yet…”
“Well,” Steve says, retreating for a moment into the bathroom. “Let’s fix your hair and maybe get you some meds. Then bed, ok?”
James agrees and goes to sit on the floor as Steve takes a seat on the edge of the sofa. He gently pulls the hairbrush through James’s waves, roots to ends. He catches a slight tangle, and James shuts his eyes and winces.
“Sorry,” Steve says.
“No, it’s fine.” James replies. “I’m just a little tender today.”
Steve pulls the brush through a few more times. Then he asks, “You ever think about getting a trim? Taking off an inch or something?”
“Nope,” James answers automatically. “Not a chance.”