Anyway, the girl attached to the hair has a name. It’s Charlotte, but nobody calls me that unless I’m in trouble.
Everybody calls me Charlie.
Charlotte sounds like somebody who remembers to put her laundry away.
I’m ten and I live in North Carolina with my mom, my dad, my little sister, my dog Scout, and a stuffed sloth named Simon.
I play soccer, grow plants on the kitchen windowsill, and love music. I know the words to almost every song I hear.
Enough about me.
The trouble started with a Starburst.
We were in the middle of social studies when Marcus threw one across the room to Jayden. It was the pink one, which is the best one, so I understand the risk he was taking. What he didn’t count on was me standing up at that exact second to hand Mrs. Patterson my permission slip.
The Starburst hit me right in the side of the head.
I froze. The room went “OOOH,” which is never about anything good, and my hand shot straight up to my hair.
“Don’t!” Mackenzie grabbed my wrist before I could touch anything. “You’ll push it in. Don’t move.” She shook her head at Marcus and rolled her eyes. “Can’t even throw.”
When you have this much hair, you are the last person on earth to find out something’s landed in it.
“Where is it?” I said.
“Back left.”
I tried to turn my head to look.
“Charlie. You cannot see the back of your own head.”
“I know that.” I did know that. It didn’t stop me from trying, though.
“Other side, Mackenzie!” somebody yelled from across the room, and now it was a group project. Half the class leaned in to supervise. Somebody offered a pencil. Somebody said they saw it, then admitted they were pointing at my ear. Jayden, who this was originally thrown to, stood up for a better angle. The whole time, my best friend dug around in my hair like she was defusing a bomb. I was starting to think the whole thing was kind of fun, which is exactly when Dylan Pruitt opened his mouth.
“Is there anything that hair can’t catch?”
I heard laughing from the back of the room, and just like that the fun was gone.
“Dylan, that’s enough.” Mrs. Patterson had finally caught up to what was happening. “And Marcus, we do not throw candy. Or anything. Ever.” Then, to me, in the too-gentle voice teachers use when they feel bad for you, “Charlie, are you alright, sweetheart?” Which somehow made it worse. Because now I wasn’t just the girl with a Starburst in her hair. I was the girl the teacher felt sorry for in front of everybody.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I didn’t even feel it.”
Mackenzie pulled the Starburst loose and held it up over her head like a trophy. Then she turned and dangled it toward Dylan. “Want it? You’re so obsessed with Charlie’s hair, I figured you’d want a souvenir.”
He jerked back like she was holding a dead bug. Whatever he was going to say next, he didn’t.
Man, I love Mackenzie.
She’s the kind of friend who tells you there’s spinach in your teeth and fixes the tag sticking out of your shirt before anybody else sees it. Everybody needs a Mackenzie.
Just not mine. Get your own.
Mrs. Patterson got the class settled again, and for everybody else, it was over.
My hair is probably the biggest problem I have in life right now. Not because of how it looks, but because of what it tells people. I don’t match my family.
My mom and dad adopted me when I was a baby. They’re white, and I’m biracial, and inside our house that has never made us any less of a family. But other people stare and ask the kind of questions that make my mom answer too politely, in the voice she saves for people she’s decided not to like.
By then, I usually want to pull my sweatshirt over my head until they go away.
At home, we’re just us, and US is pretty great.
My dad makes pancakes every Saturday, and he sings the entire time, even though he does not know the words to any song ever written. He gets through the first line, guesses at the second, and by the chorus he’s yelling things like, “FLIP THAT BABY,” to whatever tune he started with.
Every song becomes a pancake song eventually.
My mom dances through the kitchen when there’s no music playing at all. She spins around with whatever she’s holding, which is probably why she drops food constantly.
My dog LOVES her.
That dog is Scout. He’s a Bernese Mountain Dog, which is a long way of saying he’s the size of a small bear and doesn’t know it.
And then there’s Simon, my stuffed sloth. He’s been with me longer than I can remember. Mom says he was tucked beside me the day they brought me home, but nobody knows where he came from before that.
So Simon and I have that in common.
Last but loudest is Birdie. She’s three, adopted like me, and brown like me. Two years before she came home, I told Mom and Dad I wanted a little sister who looked like me.
I know that’s not how adoption works, but I’m still taking credit.
I knew exactly who my family was, and I wouldn’t trade a single one of them.
But every now and then, something reminded me there was a part of my own story I didn’t have.
A couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Patterson stood at the front of the classroom and announced our new family project.
We were going to trace where we came from, she said, and fill in a page about our families and the things we got from them.
The worksheet had not even reached my desk yet, and I already hated it.
I knew this kind of project. Everybody else would write down their mom’s eyes, their dad’s nose, or the exact same weird toe as their grandpa. I would spend the whole class pretending to think while trying not to look like the one kid with no answers.
Then Mrs. Patterson kept talking.
“Now, families come together all kinds of ways,” she said. “So if tracing your looks doesn’t fit your family, you have other options. You can write about what your family passed down that isn’t about faces at all. Maybe you dance because somebody in your house dances. Maybe you’re brave because they’re brave. Those things count too. They count just the same.”
The worst part was, she was trying to help.
But every new option made my face feel hotter. It was like the regular assignment was for everybody else, and then there was a special backup assignment sitting there with my name on it.
Mackenzie leaned over. “See? You’ll be fine. You’re the funniest person I know, and you definitely got that from your dad.”
That was nice, and probably true. It still didn’t make me want the backup assignment.
Everybody else dove right in. There was a diagram, a blank face in the middle with lines running off it in every direction, and you drew each line to the family member you got that piece from. Around the room, kids were lighting up as they figured themselves out. Aubrey found her mom’s dimples and kept pressing her fingers into her cheeks to make them show.
Houston drew a line from his chin to his dad and another from his eyebrows to his grandpa.
I did the backup version. I wrote that I got my sense of humor from Dad and my talent for burning grilled cheese from Mom. Everybody laughed, even Mrs. Patterson.
I drew two arrows and put my pencil down.
Then I looked at the blank face in the middle of my page.
Everybody else’s papers were filling up with eyes and noses and freckles and hair. Mine had two jokes and a lot of empty space.
Sure, I knew who taught me to be funny, but I still didn’t know whose eyes or nose I had, or where all these curls came from.
Two people had given me those things, and I didn’t know one single thing about either of them.
That’s the part that hurts sometimes. Not during the day, mostly.
But at night, when Scout is snoring at the foot of my bed and Simon is under my arm, that’s when I start wondering.
Who do I look like?
Where did I come from?
I tried talking to Mom and Dad about it a few times. Mom would suddenly find something to clean, like counters that were already clean. Dad would smile way too hard and ask if I wanted ice cream. They were trying, but ice cream doesn’t answer questions.
So mostly I kept wondering by myself, at least until the DNA kit.
It started at Christmas with a tube full of spit and a question nobody could answer.
That is where chapter one ends. There are twenty-six
more, plus an epilogue.
