Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
As black women, our hair forms a hierarchy, and from when we’re just little girls getting our virgin locks pulled tight into afro puffs and braids with brightly-colored, plastic barrettes at the end, we get a place on it. Long hair is most beautiful and to be desired. Short hair is not unless you are a strong, businesswoman type, a radical sistah, or the wrong type of dyke. Those we try to avoid.
The looser the curl the more beautiful, of course, because looser curls do not have the kinky, unruly roots that accompany tighter curls. Those roots become edges and edges must be smoothly tucked anyway into a ponytail or under some kind of gel, flat against your forehead in perfectly swirled shapes.
There are the Ebonys of the world, dark little girls whose hair would come up in thick tufts a few months after her braids were put in. We made fun of those girls when a loose braid of kanekalon hair was found on the playground, the style loosening, begging to be redone. Then there are the Marlees of the world, the mixed girls whose genes got just the right amount of black. Her hair is never nappy, no, she has long, flowy curls that could land her a Netflix original, the kind that falls down her back like the white girl hair we all refused to admit we envied.
Hair defines who we are, how we interact with each other. Marlees and Ebonys don’t mix. Marlees get all the sweet, smiling adoration of boys and girls alike while Ebonys get rhymes made up about them at lunch, the Marlees chanting in hushed grouped whispers.
Trinity and I were of the girls whose moms had long given up on them, tired of daily wrestling with incessant knots and kinks, leaving her to shove uneven locks in a puff atop her daughter’s head: the kind of style you were only supposed to wear out to bargain stores. The kind only uncared for, nappy headed little black girls wore.
Our friendship blossomed in the back of the music room with a fierce affection, playing with each other’s hands, long brown fingers intertwining in unspoken agreement, a quiet knowing. When we’d play hair salon I’d braid her hair in careful imitation of what I thought a mother should do, coaxing disagreeable strands into roughly parted plaits. It was always hard for me to look at myself lovingly, to see beauty in the tufts that came up around my face, but with Trin, it was easy. I loved her before I even knew it; it was the soft feel of her curls between my fingers, her gentle tug at the end of my braids.
But something changed as we got older. In those days she was to me like a mirror, a reflection that with time I resented, rejected. Suddenly Marlees had boys trailing behind them with hearts in their eyes and jealousy bittered my tongue to a different taste. I longed for the sweet affection that girls like Marlee got for their easy beauty.
I guess I wanted more than a brief, hidden loving could offer.
One good thing about black hair: it can be changed. With just a bit of heat those rough coils became straight, flowy strands: good hair, church hair, graduation hair, white hair. But good hair is expensive. $150 for a silk press, money saved from a summer job taking orders and dropping fries, all to have good hair before leaving home for university, away into a world of whiteness where their laws ruled supreme. It seemed to me the most natural of progressions, to try and leave my old self behind—
I spent hours staring in the mirror after my session, loving the way my hair fell and swung, finally below my shoulders. Nothing like when Mama would burn my ears with a hot comb cooked on the stovetop that would frizz up my birthday hair by noon. No, I would make this one stay.
I woke up every morning at least two hours before my classes, even the eight ams. Enough time to shower, eat breakfast, and go over my hair with a few passes of a real flat iron—a L’Oreal like the white girls use—my worn strands crackling as the shock of heat ironed persistent, sweated out kinks until my reflection—flat and smooth—satisfied me.
It was in my roots, sharp and angular, that I felt my old self creeping up behind me and rushed to burn her out.
As I only knew one person from my hometown who went to my university, I desperately wanted to maintain the image of myself I had created. That was how I liked it. When I picked that school I knew that I wanted to be far enough from home that no one would know anything about me except what I showed on my instagram feed.
But that one, that awful, singular, spotlit one—she haunted me. Trinity Cabrera. She always seemed to follow me, inevitably, sitting opposite of me in Geometry, drummer to my bassist in Jazz band. I got such a funny feeling watching her leg bounce on the bass pedal, or her fingers twiddling a pen during tests. I attributed it to the unsightly appearance of her hair, so obtrusive and obnoxious, always following.
And there she was again: shouting my name and waving as I biked to class one morning. The sight of her stopped me in my tracks. I nearly fell off.
Trinity ran a hand over her short-sheared cut as I dismounted beside her, curls no more than an inch tall, like that of a boy’s. If the sound of her voice wasn’t so clearly imprinted in my mind, sharing space with the low warbling bass tones and shrill violin wines, I’m not sure I would have recognized her.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever, how you been?”
“Good! I’ve been good.” I could hear the false highness of my voice.
There's an awkward dance two not-quite friends do when we meet in public like this, carefully assessing each other's reactions, considering the history between us, wondering what to do next.
She broke the silence first.
“How long has it been, like three years?” Again, her hand reached up to her head, as if feeling her hair’s lack almost as intensely as I did.
“Yeah.” I let my fingers caress the silky strands thrown carefully over my shoulder, eyeing her intently. “Since freshman year. I forgot you went here too.”
That was a lie. I loathed that my past lingered here still and felt it always in the back of my mind, doing double checks at any brown-skinned girl over 5’8.” My first week in the apartment I kept mistaking the shadowy figure of my neighbor on their balcony for Trin; now I knew it couldn’t be true. She lacked that cloud of unruly fluff over her head, and the only thing worse than having nappy hair was no hair at all.
“You look…different,” I said with restraint.
She chuckled, a low, gravely sound. “So do you. Not a bad different just, well, you don’t look how I remember you.”
“Maybe change is good sometimes.”
She smiled optimistically but I didn’t know how to respond to the—
Silence. Awkward silence. The kind that kept time to my beating heart, loudening, and made my eyes fall below her waist, tracing the sharpness of the veins that stuck out against the back of her hand, counting the nicks and scabs.
“I should get to class.”
For only a moment, her eyes widened with surprise, then she was rubbing the back of her neck with her arm, the sleeve of her shirt falling down to reveal taut muscles.
“Yeah, yeah, so should I. See you around?”
“Yeah, maybe.” I pulled my lips tight and polite, and began to pull my bike away. She stood still there in my peripheral for a few steps, then something unlodged in her. She jumped to my heels.
“Hey wait!” Her eyes were at her navel where she was typing something. My phone jumped in my back pocket: Snap message from Trin_nnz. She’d sent me a flier to a costume party that Saturday.
Of course I had no real intention of going, I wanted to pretend as if she didn’t exist, but she was smiling so big and so hopeful. I told her I would try to make it. Such a strange, unsettling feeling.
That weekend, it seemed, felt it too.
Back home in Long Beach it was always irrevocably hot, the native nature of SoCal mixed with the rising threat of global warming. There, the end of each school year was punctuated by a summer hotter than the last, rising further and further into the 100s.
The night before Halloween was one of those hot days when the sun shone like home, 89 degrees in Santa Barbara but it felt like 96. My legs baked inside my taffeta skirt, sitting on the steps going up to the apartment to escape the cold of inside. Our apartment sat in the back of the eight unit complex, just barely escaping the warmth of sunshine at all hours of the day.
When I imagined this town I saw it as sunny and bright, a home away from home, but that’s not how I found it. The cold of the ocean chilled the town.
It’s strange how the body adjusts to temperature. The first time I went back home my sister made fun of how much I sweat in the car through LA and Compton. I forgot how hot it can get when there are no trees, no ocean to splash at your ankles, and despite hating the rain and cold of Santa Barbara my body didn’t belong to home either.
I suppose I should have gone out that day, I’m sure the beach was brimming with girls in bikinis trying to get in their last tan of the season. But I chose to stay at the apartment, not inside but to swelter on the burning concrete, because it reminded me of home. I wondered if Trinity felt the same, if she ever thought of home in this way.
I couldn’t stop thinking of her and I hated myself for it. She’d thrown me off completely.
I thought with a heavy disdain of her boyish haircut, a burning affirmation of something she shouldn’t have wanted. Why would someone do that to themselves? Mar their only chance at beauty.
Sweat beaded on my forehead and the nape of my neck reminded me of her as moist droplets threatened to revert my hair, so returned again to the cold.
I soon learned after moving that in the world of the UCs, going out was a ritual, and Halloween was supposed to be one of the biggest nights of the year. Selma, my roommate, had found a couple parties through a group of girls she partied with at the end of last term. Emily had found our third roommate on Facebook and video chatted with her once before sending her the lease. I didn’t know much about Selma except that was from New Jersey and she had a lot of “friends” who were really just people she’d been drunk with before.
But this was the ritual.
By this time I was three months into my press and too dirt broke to get it redone. My roots were almost impossible to tame.
“You done yet?” Selma’s fist rapped impatiently on the bathroom door.
I grimaced. “Almost!”
I turned my L’oreal up to the highest heat setting and straightened each strand flat against my head. I doused my head in hair spray—five, four, three, two, one—then threw my head back—five, four, three, two..
In the day, lit up in the ocean's sweet glow, the town was almost beautiful, full of brightly colored bikinis and boardshorts—nothing but happy, beautiful students as far as the eye could see. But something changed in the town when the sun went down. Your first days there you wouldn’t notice it, you’d see a never ending stream of girls in crop tops and mini skirts down the sidewalks, alit in the golden glow of streetlights. The glitter dusted on their eyelids would make the town appear a kaleidoscope of bright pinks and blues and oranges. It takes a while to notice the judgment always present in the flitting glances of the girls' eyes, the thing that the darkness seemed to draw out in them.
After sunset the sky and the town no longer glittered. For it to do that again, we had to drink. And we did—a lot—our empty stomachs too abiding in only the way young peoples’ could be.
Around nine P.M. Halloween night a strong brown arm peeked through the blinds near our front door and pounded. Selma got up and let the five—was it six?—girls in. It all happened so quick. I remember that one handed me a tall thermos and told me to drink. The sharp, acidic taste ran to cover the length of my tongue. Then, there was a numbing where the flavor gave way to a medicinal sweetness. They passed around bongs and solo cups and Selma pulled down more bottles from the cabinet.
On the arm of the person who knocked was a girl, blue hair buzzed close to her scalp, and two blondes who I found particularly indistinguishable in matching fairy costumes—pink and yellow. They were all pretty drunk already. I watched, dazed, as one stroked the blue haired girl's hand. My stomach and cheeks burned warm.
In a hurry we were out the door. We were headed to some fraternity first, filled to the brim with undeserved confidence. Girls filled the streets in large herds, filtering in and out of apartment units and tall, columned greek houses.
The house we arrived at was a single room, stuffed full of girls in shein tank tops with angel wings and devil horns, or dressed as pop stars and fairies, short skirts and perfect, blonde ringlets down the shoulders. Maybe it was true that I was watching them long before they were watching me, but it felt as though their eyes burned into me in particular as we entered, whispering and short giggles I told myself I was imagining. Their intentions no longer masked in the dark, the honesty in their inebriation.
I felt the stranger and imagined big poofy curls coming undone against heavy, water-like waves. Like my hair, my sense of self coming undone the second I stepped outside, faced with the slightest resistance, the first sign of wind.
Selma and her friends found dancing partners instantly, then when she realized I wouldn’t on my own paired me off.
“This is Marcus, I think you’ll like him,” she said with a wink. The guy was black, of course, and tall like me. That was where our compatibility ended.
The guy tried to make conversation, but there was nothing to say. We stepped and nodded our heads to the music and after two songs I left him to get a drink, a solo cup of boxed white wine. I returned to find him talking to Selma’s guy.
“C’mon man, her?” his hissed tone cut through the jumping bass.
His friend sucked his teeth in amusement. “What, she’s cute.”
“She’s nappy headed as hell, you couldn’t find me a bitch with some good hair?”
The mix of alcohol in my stomach turned vile, putrid and slimy. I retreated to the back of the room, by the tabletops where girls danced with wild abandon and sipped and watched and let the bile in my stomach fester.
In my blurry vision, Selma and her friend danced closer and closer under the dim yellow light, their guys lingering behind them, almost drooling as their thighs intertwined; waists swinging in sharp, unnatural movements, rhythms never exactly syncing; facing each other but eyes never locking. The guys didn’t care. They were more focused on the prick points of their nipples so close together, the slide of smooth skin against smooth skin, the curve of her ass beneath her thin skirt as Selma squeezed it—
The dizzy in my stomach got the best of me and I rushed to the door. Outside the sky had just begun to drizzle, soft enough to bear at first but the pelting only got harder. I held skinny arms above my head and screeched to the unforgiving sky. A rainy day was my worst nightmare, but this meant nothing to them. Selma and another girl burst through the door behind me.
“God, here she is! We were looking for you.” She shaded her face with her hand and squinted. “What happened to your hair?”
She didn’t wait for an answer; one of the blondes had got a text. There was another party to go to, so they pulled me along.
The next party was a five minute walk away and my feet were beginning to blister from dizzied, swaying, waterlogged steps. I wanted to go home. As we walked I took long drinks from the thermos so that I would not feel the icy cold deep within me.
I knew we’d arrived when I saw a huge crowd hanging off the sidewalk of the house on the corner. Behind them a heavy beat pumped energy into the cold night.
“Fuck, how are we going to get in?” Selma looked accusingly at the blonde, dripping wet. “It’s packed.”
“Umm,” her friend was typing away frantically, big blue eyes bug-like. “The guy said he would get us in…”
“What guy? Please tell me it’s not the one you met on Tinder.”
“Goddammit, Bella, you did not drag us here for some musty Tinder hookup.”
“No I swear, he’s legit just—just give me a minute!”
The edges of my vision blurred and their conversation became shrill gibberish remarks. I was watching a girl underneath the cover of the house's shade, smile lopsided against a sharp jaw as she laughed at someone’s joke. Such a pretty sound.
I pushed myself towards her, her name on the tip of my tongue. T something. Tif, no. Ti. Tip. Tri…
“Trrrin. Trin. Trin!” Her eyes lit up as they fell on me.
Her long brown arms parted the sea. “Yo, everyone out the way! Let my girls through!”
We linked arms and she pulled us through the sweaty crowd to even ground. In a fit of ecstasy that surprised even me, I threw my arms around her shoulders and she spun me round, her face pressed into my neck. My cheeks warmed as I pulled back. Her eyes, like mine, were glazed and unfocused, uninterested in formality and manners, instinctual.
“I didn’t think you were coming. You’re soaked,” she laughed, her smile so big it warmed my insides. I couldn’t help but smile back.
“I didn’t know! I didn’t know, didn’t know…”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
Her long fingers lingered on each curl, touching them so tenderly I felt something in me, something I forgot existed. Back before frills and glitter, before I knew what to hide, before, before the night began to blur—
Somewhere inside the house Trin’s fingers trailed up my bare thighs. The pressure in my stomach found release in her movements, hips locked in place with the beat, hands circling my waist.
My mouth was dry when she finally grabbed me and pressed her nose to mine. When we kissed it was hot and wet and forceful. Her hands tangled in my strands, gently tugging, lips brushing against them as she whispered in my ear. I’m a child in the back of the classroom, loose, ungelled strands a wild flurry around her face, stuck in a private moment between just us in the place where all lost, unwanted things find their beauty.
Then a flash shone. We looked up to find a large group forming near us: Selma and the girl with the blue hair, flanked on all sides by drunk boys recording: their cold unfeeling lips pressed against each other, tongues twisting in that sickly familiar voyeuristic dance.
My stomach burned hot with shame, a guttural clenching, as something clicked in Trin’s mind from our kiss to theirs, the flashes of the camera all around, and there was a look of accusation in her eyes. As if to ask, Is that what we are to you? Is this what we’re doing?
And I realized I didn’t have an answer for her. I didn’t know. I stepped away and the space between us became a chasm, our limbs finally unlinking, and she stepped back too. Before my mind could catch up to the hows or whys she was gone. And I didn’t want to be there anymore.
Outside the rain soaked me through, reverting me back.
I woke the next morning still spinning, my stomach churning. My reflection was a ghost of the night before, smeared lipstick and my hair a short frizzy bob. Phantom warmth smothered everywhere she touched until the heat became unbearable and I threw up my guts into the toilet bowl.
My hair was perfectly ruined and there was nothing I could do about it. I let the world see me as I felt, overworked, processed, worn in half and tired of trying.
I didn’t hear from Trinity all week. I shouldn’t have expected to, but my mind made up fantasy worlds, worlds where she knew how to untangle the knots growing from my scalp; worlds where she’d suddenly understand and invite me over and we’d sit on her bed, palms radiating want, and she’d braid my hair.
By Wednesday of that week I still hadn’t heard from her, and my roommates were starting to give me odd looks about the bird's nest sprouting from my head. So I braided my hair myself, straight back cornrows flat against my head, the kind I would give to her. I noted the angles of my chin in the mirror, the shape of my head. I still didn’t look like the kind of girl Marcus would want, the type that would blend in with the town, so the next week when my paycheck came in I blew it on a fresh silk press. That type of consistency, the ability to blend in, was too comforting to resist.
That Saturday I decided to send Trinity a text. I couldn’t say what I really wanted. I asked her if she knew any parties that night. She told me she was out of town, but when I passed the same house it was lit up again, pumping music and life. When I saw her by the gate, I just kept walking.
At the age of 20 Maya Johnson is a black, lesbian writer from Long Beach, California as well as a student of Writing and Literature at University of California, Santa Barbara.