“Mom,” she whispered. “Is this okay? I didn’t tell them to. They just did it.”
“It’s more than okay, sweetheart,” I said, and I was crying, we were all crying, thirty children and a principal and a mother in a room full of shorn hair and something so much bigger than hair. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
PART 3
I want to tell you about Millie, because she is the center of this, and because her story is why what my daughter did mattered so much.
Millie had been sick for a while. Her family was exhausted and frightened, the way families are, and Millie herself had reached the point in a child’s illness that is almost worse than the physical part — the isolation. The being different. The other kids not knowing what to say, and so saying nothing, or worse, saying something cruel. She’d lost her hair, and with it, in a school where children can be thoughtless, she’d lost the ability to just be a normal kid among normal kids.
