The day the boys laughed at her was, her mother later told me, one of the worst days of an already unbearable year. Millie came home and said she never wanted to go back to school, that she’d rather be sick at home where no one could see her, that she felt like a monster.
Twelve years old, fighting for her life, and made to feel like a monster by children who didn’t understand what they were doing.
And then my daughter — who knew exactly what it was to watch someone you love lose their hair, who’d sat with her dying father and learned young what illness does to a person’s dignity — cut off her own beautiful hair and turned it into a gift.
The wig mattered. But it wasn’t really about the wig. What Letty gave Millie was the thing Millie had lost: the sense that she was not alone, that she was seen, that someone had looked at her on the worst day of her year and decided she was worth a sacrifice.
