Shorn

For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn.” — 1 Corinthians 11:6

Nov 23, 2025

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I was a kid in the rain, soaked and furious. Walking the daily route home from school, I raised my arms and shook my fists at the sky. Rain-soaked hair plastered to my face, I opened my mouth to the storm and let it pour in. If obedience was the price of salvation, I chose hell. Olinger’s Mortuary and Cemetery marked the midpoint of my walk. I clutched my chest, thinking of the friends buried there—Paula, leukemia at five; Ronnie, killed on his go-cart just after our eleventh birthday. Gone before twelve. Safe. Then there was Gene—not buried here but everywhere in the air around me. Twenty-seven when he died. The cult says we must choose to serve God by age twelve. Gene missed the cut for mercy. The crows seemed to gather. I could almost feel Satan breathing down my neck. I kept walking.

Pants are not allowed in our church; culottes are considered a compromise by my mother, who sews me a pair. The little Asian-print top she buys might not be in style, but it’s close enough. I love the bold material, slashes of gold, black, and red. I wash my long hair and condition it. My mother likes to tell her friends, “Scissors have never touched her hair.” My hair is brown. Plain. I blow-dry it in front of the vacuum cleaner’s blower, brush it until it shines. I part it on the side to hide the forehead I’m convinced is monstrous, then fasten it low on the back of my neck. It’s the closest I can get to the straight, swinging, late-sixties hair the other girls have. If I were allowed to cut it—and if it weren’t so ragged—it might have been a great feature. I brush my teeth twice, then again. No makeup. No jewelry. Neither allowed. I dot my lips with Vaseline. They shine; that will have to be enough. The yellow culottes, freshly ironed, are crisp going on and feel like… courage. I feel guilty, if pretty. My eyelashes are thick on their own, my skin translucent with youth. Behind my parents’ backs, I run wild.

The split is already there—rain-drenched fury on one side, ironed culottes on the other. If I had to choose between heaven and hell, I’d already chosen. The bowling alley rises like a sanctuary of the damned. Its sign flickers over wet asphalt. Inside, bowling balls thunder down the lanes, smashing against pins—lusty, mechanical music. French fries sizzle. Cigarette smoke curls in the air. It smells like freedom and danger and salt. I wander through until I find the others—friends at the pinball machines, bodies leaning in, hands pounding the sides, the small metal ball dinging, helpless against gravity. Someone offers me a ride home. Maybe Henry. Red-headed, six feet tall, hovering in the margins of my memory like a guardian or a warning. Later we learn he’s a narc. Looking back, we remember the day he told us not to go to a party that ended up getting raided. He always seemed to know. Outside, across the street, the Northglenn Mall glows. We cruise it endlessly, looking for each other, looking for boys with shaggy hair and belt-loop thumbs. At night someone’s mom drops us at the cinema behind the mall. We go through the front doors, wait for her car to disappear, then slip out into the night again. We hitchhike. We climb into Thunderbirds and Mustangs. We end up in houses on the edge of nowhere. I tell my mother I’m at the movies; she believes me. She wants to.

By then, we’ve had the conversation where I told her I didn’t want to profess or go to church. I said I didn’t want to be a hypocrite, but what I meant was: I hated myself. At midnight she picks us up after her night shift, and we slide into the backseat like we’ve come from the wholesome world she wishes we inhabited.

But even the mall nights and the bowling-alley chaos were just surface currents. Underneath was something older—the wordless knowing that I didn’t belong in the life I’d been assigned, no matter how many times I tried to force myself into it. So I ran. Seven times at fifteen, but not in order—the year fractured into shards. I remember the last time clearly. The rest flicker, kaleidoscopic: colors, danger, numbness, escape.

I do remember the first time coming home. And the beating. My father telling me to take my pants off so he could whip me. Me refusing. His fist. The black eye blooming. My mother buying makeup as coverup, and tapestry bell bottoms as if a new pattern could fix whatever was splitting inside me. She wanted reasons. I had none she could bear.

I kept drifting—toward whoever was going somewhere, toward whatever might let me disappear for a while. Sometimes it was intentional; sometimes it was the accidental slide of staying out too late, drinking too much, doing too much—and realizing it was too late to go home as the girl I was supposed to be.

At fifteen I didn’t have language for what I knew. At thirty, sitting across from my father in a booth, I didn’t hear truth—I heard the system speaking through him, naming me the thing he feared in himself. The orange plastic booth at Dunkin Donuts. The fluorescent lights buzzing. A fly zapping in the bug light. Sugar glaze sticking to my fingers. His face unchanged, his certainty untouched. “You were born without a soul,” he said. And I understood that I hadn’t run because I was lost. I’d run because even as a kid, soaked in rain and fury, I already knew what wasn’t mine to carry.

I carried that line back into the past.

And suddenly the runaway year came into focus for me again.

Running away wasn’t a single event; it was a rhythm. A pulse. A reflex. I would go with anyone. Anywhere. Half the time it wasn’t about leaving—it was about not going back. Some nights it happened by accident: stay out too late, drink too much, take whatever someone handed you—and suddenly it was easier to vanish than to explain where you’d been. Other times it was deliberate, a kind of dare to the universe: show me something real.

Walking down a leafy street on Capitol Hill in the dark, high on psilocybin, next to some guy who had a framed poster of himself in his bedroom—the kind of guy whose ego entered a room before the rest of him did. Climbing into cars with guys who promised to score drugs for me and my friends, getting ripped off, realizing too late their intentions were never clean. Buying a hundred white crosses I hid in my jeans, only to have a girl scream that the cops were there—throw them out the window—and then realizing there were no cops at all. She’d set me up to keep the stash for herself. Going to school high on acid. Eating dinner with the family high on acid, nodding and passing the potatoes like nothing was wrong while the table breathed.

The first time I did acid was right after seeing a movie in the school gym warning us not to take psychedelics. A public service announcement meant to scare us straight. I told my sister I’d done it before—a lie—and took my first hit at her house. Then threw up out of a car. Somewhere in all of it, I fell in love for the first time—though he wasn’t my first sex, and I wasn’t his anything official. He was a kind of boyfriend, but not really. A flicker of tenderness inside a storm of chaos. None of it is in order. Except the last time.

But the first time—now I remember. The first time I ran away, I cut my hair. All those years of “Scissors have never touched her hair”—gone in a single act. I hacked it off, uneven and reckless, strands falling around my feet like something being shed. Then I dyed it black. I stood there with hacked-off hair and dye staining my neck, and for the first time I wanted to know the girl in the mirror.