It is Wednesday, lunchtime, and she is swallowing forkfuls of pasta. Several times, she makes a move to feed him and laughs when he ducks away, embarrassed, swatting tendrils of misty hair off of his face.

She styles her personality the way she styles her hair: free, easy-going, long. It looks like her laughter, and curls like the smile she wears on her face. She is loquacious and animated when she speaks, so much so that her friends wonder if there is a star where her heart should be, fueling her with fiery passion. She is the brightest when she is around him, though, and she is near him frequently.

“Clara, it’s in your hair.” Jillian, sitting across from them, points to a speck of bolognese tangled in a lump of curls. A few of the other girls snicker and Clara giggles, too.

“Maybe you should eat slower,” he says. She chews the sauce out of her hair.

He walks with her to math and takes his seat at the desk in front of her. She dutifully copies down the graphs and quadratics, doodling stars and swirls in the margins of her notebook. She watches him, twirling a strand of hair around her finger.

Clara walks home with him after school -- a short walk -- humming. He is staring at the sky, deeply pensive. She can see it on his face; she knows all of his faces.

“What’re you thinking about?” she says between melodies. He shakes his head.

“Nothing.”

They arrive. He turns to leave and she hugs him fiercely. When she releases him, he waves goodbye and starts down her driveway. His path is sprinkled with golden leaves shining with magic, and for a moment, he resembles an angel surrounded by flakes of light. She is entranced; her world, beautiful.

His text message appears on that very night. All at once, she feels every excruciating pain of her heart going supernova in her chest. She gasps, stumbling backwards until she hits the wall and her phone clatters out of her hand. Gravity is giving way, the weight of the universe collapsing in on itself. She feels herself floating in space somewhere, anywhere. Clara dives for her phone and dials his number. She presses it so tightly against her cheek that it etches marks into her skin. The ringing is hollow. When he doesn’t answer, she tries again, and again. Nothing. She hurls her phone across the room. The screen cracks. She does not notice.

Clara makes up her mind faster than she can form coherent thoughts. Her parents, at work, will not be home for another hour. Her father keeps a straight razor behind the mirror in his bathroom. She has always liked the old-fashioned way it looked. Her father would use it to scrape snowy shaving cream off of his face while she watched as a child, asking him when she could use the razor, when she could shave for the first time. That was the razor she wanted to use.

She thinks about him. The way he would play with her hair, braiding and unbraiding it, weaving it with dandelions, sometimes, in the beginning of their relationship. They would get ice cream together on their way to her house, talking, swaying. Arriving, she would discover that her hair was gilded in vanilla and he would accompany her inside to wait while she washed it in the kitchen sink. Him, lying on a mattress of her tresses on a grassy hill, studying the stars and pointing them out. Her, spending hours playing with her hair in the mirror, trekking through spray and combs and gels for a pristine look. For him. And now: pained grins, distractions, his gaze floating past her like driftwood on a river. She should have seen it, but she had loved him too much to search. One moment, one second she needs to make the cut. She poises, she prepares.

She hesitates. Her hand shakes on the sink counter. She breathes deeply, willing it to be steady. In the bathroom mirror, she watches her hair. Greasy and sticky, it cascades into her face. Tendrils of tangled cords, of twisted rope binding her to him. Her hand is firm; she is ready. With one fluid movement she grabs her hair into a tight ponytail and slices straight through it with the razor. It falls to the floor, dead.

She sits on the floor amidst a ring of the past. Silently, she weeps.

Clara goes to school the next day, but there is something different about her. Today, she sits far away from everyone, from the table she used to frequent, and stares at his back over a plate of peas and roast beef, habitually touching the air where her hair used to be before realizing it was gone.

“C’mon, cheer up. It’s his loss, not yours.” Jillian, sliding into the seat besides her, is the only member of his posse who stays by her side during the course of this calamity. The gesture is nice, but Clara almost wishes that she hadn’t, just so she could have more reason to stew.

“Whatever.” Her response is abrupt, terse, and short as her hair. Jillian follows her gaze to his table, where he is eating and talking merrily with his band of emotionless backstabbers that, until yesterday, were Clara’s friends. He behaves as though nothing has happened. Clara uses her flimsy plastic fork to crush the peas on her tray into a paste with baby-food consistency.

“I like what you did to your hair,” Jillian says. “It looks really go-”

Clara cuts her off abruptly with a glare. “Excuse me,” she says. She rises from the table, taking her plate with her to supposedly eat in the library, but she is almost certain that the only thing she will be using the meal for is releasing her frustration on its unfortunate peas. Her trajectory brings her, intentionally, directly past his table. Glaring at the nape of his neck as she passes, she imagines her eyes as magnifying glasses directing the heat of the sun onto his skin. He does not turn around or even flinch in response to his searing flesh.

Sitting with her back propped against a bookshelf of ancient biographies that no one ever reads, she thinks about yesterday, about his venomous words and the culmination, alone in her bedroom.

She stares at Joan of Arc’s name on the spine of the book across from her until the medieval-style letters blur in her vision. No longer able to obscure her face behind a curtain of hair,  she wipes her eyes quickly to avoid the judgemental scrutiny of each impressive historical figure.

The bell rings. She hasn’t eaten anything, but she was never really hungry, anyway. She carries herself to her next class, and it almost escapes her notice how much lighter she feels without mounds of hair pulling her down. The rest of the day passes in a blur, almost as if underwater. Math is the most notable subject. She spends it watching the back of his head and absently twirling that pocket of air on her shoulder, thinking.

She can feel her heart. It pulses like it always has, like she never bothered to notice before. She always assumed that her heart beat light through her body in the same way that a sun circulates light throughout the solar system. She can finally feel her blood, and it is more alive -- more real -- than the hollowness of light.  On the walk home, she is quiet. Nature pulses around her, livelier than any conversation they had, any stagnant laughs they shared. A breeze curls through the trees, plucks their rainbow leaves like apples, tickles the nape of her neck. It is fresh and chilly, an invitation for a new season, paving the way for change. She shivers.

By the time she reaches her house, she finds herself wishing that the walk were longer. She goes inside and climbs the stairs to her room. The trash can has not been emptied, but she does not spare it a glance. Instead, she peers into the mirror, almost smiles. She nods at her reflection, slightly, and a bead of satisfaction glistens in her eye. Joan of Arc cut her hair short. She agrees with Jillian: it does look good.