she doesn't live here anymore, pt. one

just found the memoir that i was writing last year about my grade eleven experience. it's kind of rough, but has potential. here's the prologue.

Bled White.

Graduation day I bleached my hair shock white. The fumes rose from the tiles, swore it smelt like genocide, and lingered in the for weeks, an accidental brush with a stranger. Summer crept into Heather's blue and white seashell motif bathroom as my hair fried. I has just traded in my kilt and tie for flannel, sunwashed jeans, candy coloured flipflops. I was rising to the surface for that last gulp of air before the inevitable return plunge into two more years of private education. Three months. Three months to pretend I existed in the world of my best girls who wore whatever the fuck they wanted to the public high school down the street and didn't have to hurry to make it to morning chapel on time.

I wanted a summer of change like only a girl who had seen them in movies could. I wanted to be Weetzie Bat, Thisbe Newton, my own coming of age heroine. 5'7 and a bit I was inexperienced but not naive. Been kissed, but never been fucked. Done shots, but never done crack. An undamaged girl. I was young, pristine sixteen, but mostly, I was waiting. Waiting for my life to start, ready to experience all that I could, the thought that it could hurt me, laughable; met with a shrug and the flick of a cherished cigarette.

I leaned against the sink, watched my hair turn from mousy brown to wedding band to anthrax, I steadied myself against that smell and the peroxide war being waged against my scalp. That first time bleaching my hair I saw the chemical burn as almost a virgin sacrifice. Like the Salem Witch Trials, I strung myself up and let the fire burn away my hangups, pretensions, my moral obligations until there was nothing left but raw energy.