Chapter Text
September 1979
“Olivia!”
Her mother’s voice is far away and sharp. Olivia frowns in concentration at the mirror, fingers catching in the gnarled remains of her braid.
Serena calls again.
“I’m coming!” Olivia calls back, trying to smooth the dark tangles into something more respectable than the usual snarl of her hair. The braids had been her mother’s preference, starting as pigtails when Olivia was a baby before graduating to two braids and then finally, halfway through sixth grade, one.
Not that she likes braids of any kind. But one is easier to quickly take apart than two.
She races out of the bathroom, alarmed to find that Serena has already gone downstairs. Her mother is a different person on weekday mornings, brisk and efficient and constantly watching the clock. She’s terse, but it’s better than the slow-thinking, slurry woman who appears behind her eyes after a few tumblers of gin every night.
Her mother’s gimlet eye lands on her hair as soon as Olivia’s sneakered foot hits the stoop. “Olivia Margaret.”
“It’s better this way,” Olivia mutters as she marches on, eyes forward. “I like it better.”
They’ve been having different versions of this standoff for the last several weeks since Olivia’s first day of middle school since their summer move to Bayside. Serena’s own vanity seems to recoil from the formidable nest of her daughter’s hair, but Olivia’s insistence isn’t going anywhere. So.
“Let’s go,” Serena sighs. “Maybe the rain will flatten it out.”
Several blocks later, the imposing brick facade of P.S. 159 swarms with students streaming up its steps and through the bright red double doors. Olivia swallows, fixes her face into another thousand-yard stare intended to discourage anyone from catching her eye. Inside, she navigates the crowded hallway with nothing but willpower and a few shoves. If she stares out far enough, walks fast enough, sometimes nobody notices—
“What the hell happened to Benson’s hair?” someone calls out.
Other students quiet and crane their necks, the herd sensing a predator. Cowards. Olivia’s face sets before she turns around.
The bully approaches, sauntering out of the cluster of seventh grade boys who cheer his every move.
“Seriously,” he quips, circling her as she seethes. Although the stream of kids through the halls never completely stops, enough people slow with curiosity to make her bristle. Elliot stops in front of her, his laughing friends blurring into the background.
“Seriously,” she says in a low voice. “My hair is none of your business.”
“It should be somebody’s business,” he retorts. “Animal control?”
As insults go, it isn’t the worst he’s thrown her way. He’s been like this since Olivia’s arrival at the beginning of the school year. The boys all seemed harmless at first, loud enough to avoid when she heard them around the corner of a hallway, until the day she wasn’t fast enough to disappear.
“Hey, new kid,” one of them had called. “What’s your name?”
“Olivia,” she’d answered quickly, regretting it as soon as she started to walk away.
“Oooooh, O-LIV-ia!” one of them mockingly crooned.
Someone else laughed, “She looks like a boy.”
“An ugly boy,” one of his friends added in a stage whisper.
The next time Olivia was too slow to disappear, one of the boys had pulled on her braid as they’d passed in the hallway. She’d spun around, furious, just in time to catch him wink at her. And he’d only grown bolder, never missing an opportunity to single her out for another humiliating skirmish.
Since then, she’s seen him everywhere: barely an inch taller than her, scrawny and dressed in hand-me-downs. But he’s fast and strong — she’s seen him at football practice — and his smile makes her think of wolves.
Olivia Benson has grown accustomed to living with difficult, inflexible truths. Now, as she pivots away from her tormentor with a flip of her unruly hair, she adds one more to the list:
She hates Elliot Stabler.