My 12-year-old daughter cut off her hair to make a wig for her term*nally ill classmate — the next morning, the principal called me and shouted, “Come to school immediately. You won’t believe what happened!” Only three months had passed since canc*r took my husband. Our daughter, Saffy, was heartbroken. She had always been a daddy’s girl. One evening, she locked herself in the bathroom far longer than usual. “Sweetheart, is everything okay?” I asked, knocking gently. The door opened, and my heart stopped. I noticed long blond strands scattered across the floor. My beautiful, long-haired girl stood in front of the mirror with her hair hacked off to her shoulders. Uneven. Jagged. Her hands were shaking. “Saffy… what have you done?” I whispered. Her lips began to tremble. “There’s a girl in my class named Odetta,” she said. “She has canc*r. Today, everyone saw that she’d lost her hair, and some boys laughed at her. She ran into the bathroom crying, Mom.” Saffy lifted the hair she had carefully gathered and tied with a ribbon. “I read that real hair can be made into wigs. Maybe mine can help.” My chest tightened. Saffy had watched her father lose his hair during treatment. She still remembered the day he asked me to shave what little remained while trying to smile for her. I pulled my daughter into my arms. “Your dad would be so proud of you,” I whispered. That very evening, we took the hair to a salon to have it turned into a wig. When Saffy brought the finished wig to school, she was glowing with happiness. And so was I. The next morning, my phone rang. It was the principal, and the strain in his voice immediately frightened me. “You need to come to school right away. It’s about Saffy.” My hands went cold. “Is my daughter h*rt?” There was a pause. “You need to see what happened here with your own eyes. Please come immediately.” I dropped everything and raced to the school, imagining every terrible possibility. The principal, Mr. Kwan, was waiting outside his office. His face had gone pale. “Come inside,” he said without explaining. I opened the door — and what I saw in that room nearly made me collapse. There were eleven girls sitting in Mr. Kwan’s office. Eleven. All of them from the seventh grade. Every single one of them had cut her hair off. Badly, at home, with kitchen scissors, the night before — in bathrooms across eleven different houses, without telling a single parent. Ponytails tied with ribbons sat in their laps like small animals. And at the end of the row, in the last chair, holding the longest one, was a girl I had never met before. She had no hair at all. “Mrs. Dunlap,” Mr. Kwan said quietly. “This is Odetta. She cut her mother’s hair last night.”

Editor

Three months after canc*r took my husband, my twelve-year-old locked herself in the bathroom and cut off all her hair…