Part Seven: What Grew Back
That afternoon, I called Alison’s school and kept her home. Then we went to a salon. A stylist named Camille spent nearly an hour carefully evening out the jagged pieces without making Alison feel worse than she already did. When she finished, Alison stared silently at herself.
“You look beautiful,” I told her.
Her lower lip trembled. “But I don’t look like Rapunzel.”
“No,” I said, kissing her temple. “You look like Alison.”
“Will it grow back?”
“Every bit of it.”
“Even the curls?”
“Even the curls.”
That finally earned a tiny smile. We kept the bag of hair. Alison asked me to put it in the top drawer of her dresser, beside her Rapunzel crown.
That evening, Gavin called. “Janice left,” he said.
“For the night?”
“I don’t know.” After a pause, he added, “Ria, I didn’t know.”
“I believe you.”
“I should have noticed.”
There was no point pretending otherwise. “Yes,” I said. “You should have.”
Over the following weeks, Alison stayed primarily with me while Gavin sorted out what was happening in his marriage. He saw Alison without Janice present. A month later, he told me he and Janice were separating. I never celebrated their marriage ending. What mattered was that Alison slowly became herself again.
At first, she wore hats everywhere. Then headbands. Eventually, she stopped hiding her hair at all.
Part Eight: Team Rapunzel
Several months later, I found her standing in front of the mirror with her Rapunzel brush. Her curls were just beginning to form again around her ears. She touched one carefully.
“Mommy?”
“Yes?”
“Can I be Team Rapunzel again?”
I smiled. “You never stopped being Team Rapunzel.”
She grinned at her reflection, then picked up the little plastic crown from her dresser and placed it on her head.
The hair Janice had taken would never magically reattach itself. Alison would need years to grow it back to the length she’d loved. But Janice had been wrong about one thing.
It had never been “just hair.” It was Alison’s hair. Her choice. Her trust. And the moment an adult convinced a five-year-old that she needed to trade part of herself for the right to be closer to her own mother, it stopped being a haircut.
It became something I would never stay quiet about again.
