Becoming Dangerous by Katie West

Author:Katie West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633411388
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

There were other reasons — there are always other reasons; it wasn't as spontaneous as I might make it seem, the way you can tell a story any number of ways to prove a point. I'd shaved part of my head before, when I was nineteen. That year, I buzzed half my head because my grandmother died and I needed a visual expression of my grief. I was crazy with sadness, smoking too much weed and drinking during the day, and one April afternoon I went to my friend Nicky's house and said, ‘Please buzz it off, please.’ I parted my hair and waited for the blade to come, running my fingers along my scalp. For days after, I'd run my fingers over the soft, bare patch of skin, measuring time with its slow growth. Eventually, it all grew back, just the same as any other patch of hair, the way flesh knits over a wound.

A few weeks before I shaved my head — all of it this time — I was at a party at a friend of a friend of a friend's house. By party, I mean it was very late, and I was in a group of men, and I only knew two of them, and I was a pretty, anonymous girl with a long blonde ponytail who seemed like something that someone could grab and fuck. When I closed my eyes for a moment as the sun came up, someone in the room said: ‘Okay, someone tell me, whose girl is that?’ There was a silence, and then one of the men I knew said, ‘She's no one's’, and though I'm grateful for that moment, I was enraged that it had needed to come to pass.

And I was tired of it, of everything — of being so visible in the world, like a flame or a dandelion or a lightning bolt; of being feminine in predictable ways; of being desirable in ways that were uninteresting and invasive to me. I had just gone through a breakup — there's always a breakup in a story about a haircut — that seemed to have no end, as my ex and I kept stretching back towards each other like the snapping of rubber bands. It wasn't that I thought I was going to totally disappear, to be replaced with some shining and pure version of myself, but that I hoped maybe some kind of metaphysical metamorphosis would take place. I wanted everything to change; I wanted to be delivered some different future, some alternative path that I could just take without asking and without having to think.

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