The Cursed Kingdom

TWENTY-ONE

~ DYING ~

"It could be stress," Ingrid suggested while she took her time to assess my hair, shock evident on her face, although I knew she was doing her best to suppress it for my sake.

When she'd opened the door and first laid eyes on my appearance, she looked closer to fainting than when she had seen me covered in blood on Henrik's bathroom floor. If it hadn't been for my current situation, I probably would've laughed at how comically big her eyes had gotten.

Pulling me out my thoughts, Ingrid reached forward and gently grabbed a white strand between her fingertips, pursed her lips, and hummed a single low syllable, deep in thought. "Or genetics," she added after I looked at her with doubt clear in my features. "Either way, I wouldn't worry about it. I don't sense anything wrong."

Already full of frustration and confusion, her answer ignited something within me that felt close to irritation.

The way she said it made it sound as if my hair turning a completely different shade of color was nothing out of the ordinary. She didn't understand the sheer panic I felt when I first noticed the three unusually bright and almost white hairs along my hairline just a few days after Henrik had left, toothbrush in my mouth and eyes becoming so wide that it hurt.

Quickly, I had stopped what I was doing to observe, pulling and tugging on the finger-long strands to make sure they were really my hair and attached to my scalp. After I realized they were, I was quick to yank them all out and afterwards, I searched through my hairline for a couple minutes to confirm there weren't anymore. When I found none, I thought that was the end of it and quickly went to bed.

But by the next morning, there were dozens more and the day after that, there were hundreds—too many for me to even consider pulling them out with tweezers. Now as I stood in the center of a guest bedroom in front of Ingrid five days after the original discovery, nearly a third of my hair was as white as cotton, the unusual strands seeming to spread as fast as weeds.

Perhaps that's why I was so annoyed. Yes, it was relieving to hear it wasn't a sign of something fatal or dangerous. But I still wanted her to acknowledge what was happening to me was out of the ordinary—that a girl's hair turning white at the age of eighteen should not be something overlooked or belittled.

However, I kept my mouth shut and nodded slowly, telling myself that if Ingrid, a Healer, was unconcerned then perhaps I should not care as much either. "My mother did have light hair..." I trailed off, thinking back to the said woman and the bright blonde hair she was famous in our village for.

I could remember the feeling of it, soft, thick, and wavy, from the times she'd let me braid it while she sewed, humming a merry tune under her breath. Although it was beautiful, I'd never once desired to possess it, always preferring my golden locks that resembled hers only in texture.

She was the only one that could pull such a distinct feature, her beauty almost as unearthly as her hair. But I, an average-looking teenage girl who still struggled with spots of acne, certainly couldn't.

It wasn't until that moment that I realized how dire hair is for a person's confidence. It made me understand why people put synthetic colors on their graying hair or why people cry when they get a bad haircut, things I had originally thought to be ridiculous and quite selfish to fuss over. But as the realization set in that there was a chance of me losing the hair I'd loved forever, the vain part of myself, a part I didn't realize I possessed until five days ago, wanted to scream in frustration, feeling cornered like a caged animal and helpless like an infant.

Giving my hair one last look over, she pulled her hand away and reached to her side and into her famous brown leather bag, which Callie always teased to be endless. Sometimes, though, I could've sworn she was right. Ingrid's bag, for how small it was, did seem unusually innumerable and charms weren't unheard of either. But Ingrid would always wave Callie's remarks off with a laugh, so I never questioned it, figuring if she wanted to share that she had an enchanted bag she would tell us herself.