By Amelia Rodriguez

I sit here brushing my hair. The front is dry, frizzy, bad. I tuck it behind my ears, keep brushing, always, you always keep brushing. Knots everywhere, but you keep brushing. Frizz, but you keep brushing. I first learned that pretty blond girls on the Disney channel do a hundred strokes with their hairbrush a day. That’s what they do, that’s what I’ll do. My mother brushes her hair upside down and sprays it with dry shampoo to get more volume. More volume? Why would she want that? I think. Volume is big hair, I knew that. My hair has volume. My dad says it’s like the small troll figures on my nightstand. The dry shampoo my mother uses smells bad and makes me cough. My dad does not like the dry shampoo either. 

“Now I can spray as much as I like,” she said when she moved to the new house. It still made me cough.

I learned my hair was curly. I learned that I had to put creams on my hair. I learned that it made my hair dry slower. I learned people liked to touch it. They said it was beautiful but first they said it was curly, so curly, leaning in and caressing it, squeezing it. Some would compare the curliness. The back of my head was more wavy. Maybe frizzy hair was better than curly after all. So now I sit and brush my hair.

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Amelia is from a small-ish city in Norway. She likes to read, write, play guitar, draw, and talk about feminism.