Day 84.

The Samson twins, whether from habit or from need, were never found apart. In their classes, their desks were an inch closer together than the others students', so that their elbows met over the aisle, and when they walked through the halls of Lincoln High School it was together, one drifting in the same weaving, dreamy way as the other, so that their shoulders were not jarred into separation. They almost seemed to exist as halves of a whole, the opposite of a person with multiple personalities: like the two shared one personhood. Jane never cringed when teachers mistook her for Jasper, and Jasper didn't mind that people tended to call him Jane.

In the first few months of their freshman year, other students didn't seem to notice Jane and Jasper. If they turned their heads when the pair passed; if their eyes lingered on the twins' long, tangled thicket of blond hair that tumbled to their waists in twisted ropes, it was only for a moment. Until someone did notice, and then, at once everyone noticed, in the curiously glossy way of children who have registered that something is out of place but cannot decide what to do about it.
And the twins' hair, combined with their baggy jeans and nondescript backpacks, did make them look like poorly-disguised god-children, mischievous refugees of a fairy-tale world. They quietly enjoyed the muttering, the stares. The twins made it a game: who could get Lincoln High to believe a more ridiculous thing? Jane told anyone who would listen that she and Jasper were allergic to sunlight and grew their hair long as protection. Jasper started a rumor: their sibling, the third triplet, had died of a scissor wound, and their mother, broken with grief, had forbade them from going near scissors of any kind, raised them to fear the twin silver blades. Then, one sunny December day, Jane whispered to a boy in her history class that she and Jasper kept their strength in their hair. That if it was cut, they would not live to see the next day.

Even teachers heard the rumors, which floated up to their desks as students rummaged for pencil or paper. The splash of the drinking fountains seemed to murmur them. If Frank Klimt and his friends had not herded the twins into the quad at lunch, someone else would have. But it was Frank, baring his teeth at Jasper (or was it Jane?), Frank cracking jokes like seeds between his teeth, Frank's head swiveling to find a grin in the surrounding crowd that would be the spark of something happening.
Jasper and Jane kept their heads slightly bowed, Jane's arm around Jasper's shoulder. They shot glances between them like a magician and his assistant, drawing out their secrets.
They did not struggle as Frank pulled the curtains of hair from their faces, turned them up like sunflowers towards the cloudless sky. There was a moment of impatient silence from the throng of people, but the twins did not burn or break into hives or so much as sneeze. Now their small smiles had vanished. They shook loose from Frank's minions and stood back to back, spines straight, each vertebrae of each back finding a notch in the other. The minions were prepared: five pairs of stolen scissors were drawn like pistols from pockets, brandished wildly.
The twins exchanged a second's glance but did not show fright as the crowd, buzzing with disappointment, pressed closer: the second rumor was also false. Frank grabbed hold of their arms and motioned for his friends to bring their scissors. Jasper did not have to look at Jane to see that her face was crumpling; he fought his own brimming tears. They were surrounded on every side, reaching hands trying to pull out strands of that strange yellow hair. Then two pairs of scissors flashed in the golden sunlight, and two locks of hair fell into the melee.

* * *

The twins were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they had slipped away, although no one could understand how it happened so suddenly. But there was a distraction: a unique epidemic had afflicted all the students and teachers, administrators and custodians: everyone was losing hair in massive chunks. One girl's bangs fell off in her morning shower. A teacher's scraggly beard simply slipped off his chin in the middle of a lecture about friction. In a matter of days, everyone was bald. The phones in the office were disconnected due to the constant threatening calls from family lawyers, and attendance at Lincoln High School plummeted. The students who did come to school touched each other's smooth scalps in wonder. Everyone was strangely androgynous; friends didn't recognize each other in the hallways. Some girls hid out in the bathroom and cried, caking on ever more makeup, and the less bulky boys hid too, eating lunch in cramped stalls. Mothers cradled their now baby-headed children and told them what pretty eyes they had, how their forehead acne would improve dramatically. The punk kids replaced their gelled spikes with scalp tattoos.
And slowly, the regrowing of Lincoln High began, watched in mirrors over months of mornings. Some students kept their old hair as it grew back, but most took up shaving their heads. For one thing it had become the norm, but there was another reason: they found that there was a certain pride in facing the world raw.