Photo by Esther Sweeney on Unsplash
“I have blue hair.”
This realization swept over Hugh as he lay flat on his stomach pressed into the pavement by the vermin scum, Felix Roth, a junior about 100 pounds heavier and a foot taller than Hugh’s, let’s just say, compact, build at the ripe old age of 15.
“I have blue hair,” he thought again.
Why it didn’t occur to Hugh until this moment, he was unsure. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his blue hair was now covering his eyes and most of his face. When this happened normally, he just wiped it back with his fingers and tucked it behind his ears. But there, as Felix pressed hard down on the back of his neck with his meaty paw, Hugh truly saw his hair, and it was, indeed, blue. Very blue. Like, blueberry blue.
Sure, he “knew” intellectually he had blue hair – he wasn’t stupid. But in this moment it was as if a stranger wandered in, and Huge was looking at said stranger from across the room, and said stranger had blueberry blue hair. It was a semi-out-of-body kinda thing.
Of course, the next natural question a person like Hugh might ask himself, right as Felix pushes his knee into the small of his back, is “Why do I have blue hair?” Hugh knew full well the circumstances of his blue hair.
THAT it had been done by his older cousin, Justina, who was currently enrolled in the Sandra Kennedy Elite School for Cosmetology and Hair Design (she colored his hair for free and said she wouldn’t tell anyone, but Justina was the only one in his whole family who could have done it so, of course, everyone in the family knew).
THAT it happened to match the color of the front man, Austin James, in his favorite band, The Bang Barfers (his real name was James Austin but the other way is much cooler).
THAT it made him more fully fit in with the group of punk geeky nerdy friends he had just started hanging out with (they listened to punk rock while building competition worthy underwater robots).
THAT, in a very cliché sort of way, it annoyed, maybe even pissed off his parents, especially his father with whom Hugh shared the same rust red (really orange) color hair (a characteristic prized by his father’s Russian lineage).
But it was now, with Felix’s full weight bearing down on him, that Hugh became fully aware that he did, indeed, have blueberry blue hair and that this hair sat affixed to the top of his head. It also dawned on him for the first time that he looked like a total and complete moron.
“Damn, I hate when my parents are right,” he thought and promised himself to never let them know.
Hugh also realized that it was odd he was thinking all of this at the very moment he should have been thinking about how not to die. Was this his way of dealing with a difficult situation? Was this his happy place? He really hoped blueberry hair wasn’t his happy place. He backtracked. How did this happen?
Things started out normally enough for Hugh. Wakeup, 6:45. Breakfast, two hard boiled eggs and a piece of pumpernickel bread. Quick check online, Instagram, Twitter, Github (to check the progress of an open source Minecraft world he’d been contributing to till 1am). Sent a text to Molly Ishii, his friend, president of the robotics club, and current crush. Molly, by the way, was amazing, wicked smart, inherently confident, spoke four languages, was a black belt in Karate, AND, because her mom was Irish and her dad Japanese, she was a stunning Asian redhead with blue crystal eyes and freckles. What was not to like?
School, 7:45, starting with precalculus, then English, and now, of course, lunch… with Felix.
So now what? Up until today, Hugh didn’t think Felix really knew he existed. It’s a big high school and there really wasn’t a Venn diagram where Hugh and Felix’s worlds overlapped.
But on this day, when Hugh walked into the cafeteria to sit and have lunch with his robotics club friends, it was as if Hugh was covered in neon because Felix saw him immediately. And when Hugh saw Felix, he could tell why. Not because he was smaller than Felix, or because he was a punk robotics geek. No, it was because of the hair. On this day, Felix’s hair was the same exact blueberry blue. It was as if Hugh showed up at prom wearing the same exact dress that the prom queen was wearing, but the prom queen was a 6 foot 2 inch wrestlemaniac with blueberry blue hair. Add a bit of giggling from the crowd, and this was not a good situation.
That’s pretty much how Hugh found himself under Felix. Of course, there had been the ensuing chase that had led them outside behind the school. And there had been a few choice words exchanged like, “stop” and “wait” and “help” and “no.” But none of this did anything to forestall Hugh’s current predicament.
So that’s about it: Hugh found himself in some sort of military-grade death grip while Felix flexed his muscle and wielded all of the power. But there still were some unanswered questions. Why did Felix have blue hair? And why was he so pissed off that Hugh did as well? The matching hair color definitely seemed to be the key to all of this because Hugh had blue hair for over a month and no death grip. That was his way in, or hopefully his way out. Now if he could just get enough breath to form the words.
“How, erg, how, how do you know Justina?” Hugh could barely grunt as the weight of Felix pressed down on his back.
“None of your business, Dork-O,” Felix said with a gruff, I’m-in-charge tone and pushed Hugh further into the pavement. “How do you know, Justina?” He asked, pumping Hugh harder with each word as if he was giving him some sadistic form of the Heimlich maneuver.
“Dude, Felix, man, if you just ease off the back maybe I could…” Hugh gasped, forcing the words out with the little air he had to work with.
To his credit, Felix did let up, a bit, and this made what came next easier. But Hugh was still trying to talk out of the side of his mouth and drool had begun to flow freely out of it.
“Thanks,” Hugh said as he sucked some air back in.
“Now tell me, how do you know Justina? Why do you have MY hair color? She said she mixed it special for me,” he said, almost screaming at Hugh like a three-year-old having a tantrum.
“She’s my cousin. Do you like my cousin or something?” Hugh asked, already guessing the answer.
“Cousin?” Felix said, losing the hysterical edge as the word cousin began to sink in.
“Yup. I’m her cousin. Her favorite one too, in fact,” Hugh was finding his flow, “and if you like her, and if she knew you were currently plastering my face into the ground…well, I’m not sure that’s the best way to endear yourself to her,” he said as his plan solidified in his head.
Felix’s grip loosened. Hugh knew that Felix was beginning to connect the dots. A bit slower than he would have liked, but connect them all the same. And the picture Felix was forming in his head didn’t at all look like the one he thought it would.
Hugh took this opportunity to seal the deal. “I mean it would be awful if I were to go home and tell her that this big strong guy named Felix beat the crap out of me. I don’t think Justina would like that too much. In fact, I think she’d be pretty pissed off,” Hugh said, restaining the level of smugness he felt at the moment. Then he added, “liking the lovers and not the fighters and all.”
Proud of his quick wit even under such pressure, Hugh thought to himself, “Pure gold, pure gold.”
Then he said, “But how about this? Let’s make a deal. You get off of me. You apologize to me for your extreme and overly aggressive behavior. In return, I’ll do two things for you.”
“Two things, what do you mean, two things?” Felix said, now grasping the full extent of his miscalculation (as if he even knew what that word means).
“I mean, you get off of me, make sure I’m not hurt. Then you apologize to me, in front of my friends in the robotics club after school today, and I will not only forget this happened and never tell Justina that you brutally attacked me at school today, but I will also lose the blue hair,” Hugh said as confidently and as clearly as he could with drool sputter out of him with each word.
“Because it seems like you really like my cousin,” Hugh continued, “and I don’t think she would like this side of you, Felix.
“Yeah, OK, that sounds right. I mean, I’m sorry, I just thought that you were, I don’t know, I mean, I really like her and think that she could really like me if she got to know the real Felix,” he said in a melodramatic, third person kind of way.
“Yeah, I’m sure, but I wonder if we could continue this conversation with you NOT still pressing me into the ground.”
“Right, yeah, sure,” Felix said as he released his grip on Hugh’s neck and pulled his knee off of his back completely.
For Hugh it was as if gravity had been lifted and he almost felt weightless in the moment his lungs took in a full breath of air. That’s when he heard a quick grunt and thud on the ground next to him.
Still on the ground, Hugh turned his head and looked to his other side. There, laying next to him, was the unconscious Felix Roth, blood beginning to run out of his nose.
Hugh rolled onto his back and looked up and to see Molly Ishii on one leg with the other extended straight out in the sickest Karate pose he’d ever seen. She looked over at Hugh and gave him a wry smirk.
That’s when he knew he loved Molly Ishii. He also knew he loved his red (actually orange) hair.
Also published on Medium.