The Great Hair Catastrophe of Room 305 (The Extended Cut)

Here’s the thing about trying to give yourself bangs at 2:17 a.m.—it never ends in success or emotional stability.

I blame YouTube. And hormones.

And maybe Madison Blake, whose face somehow looks perfect under fluorescent lighting, which should honestly be illegal. Like, how does she look like a porcelain angel in the same lighting that makes me resemble a raw chicken nugget? Madison has these perfect, wispy little curtain bangs that whisper things like “Paris in spring” and “I own three types of lip balm.” Meanwhile, my hair whispers, “Please send help, I’ve been trapped on a fourteen-year-old’s scalp since 2009.”

Anyway, my name’s Leo. I’m fifteen, a Pisces, and according to the internet, experiencing a minor identity crisis. Why did I decide to change my hair in the middle of the night using kitchen scissors?

It started with gym class. Specifically, when Coach Hines made us do partner stretches and I got paired with freaking Madison. While I was internally dying over how her leg was, like, right there next to mine, and she smelled like shampoo and expensive justice, she looked me in the eyes and said, “Your hair’s kinda… in your face,”

I did what any rational, emotionally balanced teenager would do: spiraled.

I mean, she wasn’t wrong. It was in my face. But that’s only because my mom refuses to let me shave it all off and “go full egg.” I told her that it's trending on TikTok. She told me I could trend my way out of her house. Still, I tried to laugh it off.

“Yeah, I’m going for a cryptid-chic thing,” I said, while internally collapsing like a folding chair.

She just smiled—smiled!—and said, “That’s cool.”

So now at 2:17 a.m., I have committed the worst crime known to mankind: cutting your own hair and thinking it’s “not that bad.”

I took a deep breath in. “You are bold, you are powerful, you are the storm.”

I should have stopped when I said those words, but I didn’t.

Snip.

That’s when I met the Goblin in the Mirror. It was like if you gave a sentient dust bunny a haircut with safety scissors during an earthquake. The bangs were so short and jagged like mountain peaks drawn by a toddler. I looked like I had lost a bet with a lawnmower.

I screamed. Loud enough that Muffin—my cat, my emotional support animal, my betrayer—launched herself across the bathtub like a missile, skidded off the soap dish, ricocheted off the wall, and vanished into the shadow realm behind the laundry hamper. I hadn’t seen her since. I think she lives there now.

I blinked at my reflection. The bathroom light buzzed overhead like it was judging me. The hair across my forehead was uneven. Uneven in the way tectonic plates are uneven: jagged, disastrous, and destined to cause trauma.

I tried to fix it. Obviously. I’m not a monster.

Snip.

Okay, okay. Not awful. Wait—now the right side’s longer.

Snip.

Okay, now the left is longer.

Snip.

Now it’s short.

Everywhere is short.

I was stuck in a horrifying Möbius loop of uneven fringe, like some sort of hair-themed Greek tragedy. I couldn’t stop. My brain was shouting “abort mission,” but my hands were like “nah, we’re in too deep.”

By 2:43 a.m., I was staring at the mirror with the dead eyes of a boy who had seen things—terrible, jagged things. My bangs looked like they had been sculpted with a plastic spoon during an earthquake. Like a raccoon had chewed on my scalp in a very focused, symmetrical way. Like I had lost a custody battle with a weed whacker.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!”

I dropped the scissors. They bounced once, then clattered dramatically to the tile like in a crime movie. I looked at them like they were cursed. Defeated, I pulled my hoodie on backward so the hood covered my entire face like I was a monk of bad decisions, wandering the desert of shame in search of a decent barber. I climbed into bed, hood still on, and rolled over to face the wall, hoping the drywall would absorb my regrets.

Somewhere in the darkness, I heard a faint thump. Probably Muffin reclaiming her territory. Or the ghost of Good Hair Decisions Past coming to mock me. Either way, I closed my eyes and whispered to the ceiling:

“Never again.”

I walked into school like I was entering a crime scene. I wore a beanie so tight it gave me a mild concussion. No one could see the damage beneath. I figured I had two options:

1. Transfer schools.

2. Fake it harder than a B- in chemistry.

But here’s where it gets weird. I show up to school and people… compliment me.

“Bold look, Leo,” said Jenna-from-Bio, sipping an iced coffee like this was a casual Tuesday and not the day I lied to the entire student body.

“Very avant-garde,” said Mr. Crenshaw, my English teacher who once used “rizz” in a sentence and made the whole class cry.

Even Madison—beautiful, unknowable Madison—saw me by the vending machine and said, “It’s kind of edgy. You look like a drummer.”

A drummer.

At that moment, I became a man.

So obviously, I lied. “Yeah,” I said, adjusting my beanie with fake humility, “just experimenting with some post-punk energy. Paris is doing a revival thing right now.”

I do not know if Paris is doing a “revival thing.” I don't even know if I’m legally allowed to say that sentence. But it worked.

The lie spiraled out of control so fast.

By lunch, I was “the guy who doesn’t care what people think.” Someone described my look as “raw, unfiltered,” which I think also describes kale. A freshman asked me to rate his outfit. I told him to wear socks on the outside of his shoes “to feel unbound by capitalism.” He got detention.

I felt like a god.

People tried to keep up. Mason, the varsity basketball player, dyed one eyebrow green. Sadie, the valedictorian of my class, wore a jacket made out of, like, five smaller jackets. I don’t know what we started, but the principal definitely asked our art teacher if she’d been handing out hallucinogens. Again.

By Friday, I was a legend. People called my look “conceptual.” I was invited to sit at the Theater Kid Table, which is normally invitation-only and smells like essential oils and existential dread. I talked about “texture” and “narrative fashion.” I watched a single YouTube video on French cinema and quoted it twice. I even got called “brave” by someone who once told me I walked weird.

And underneath it all? The goblin bangs remained. Untouched. Hidden. Powerful.

My mom asked what I’d done to my hair, and I told her it was “a statement about identity in a world of prescribed images.” She made me do the dishes, but she seemed kind of proud.

So yeah. Maybe it started with a spiral, a crush, and a pair of scissors I found next to the soup cans. But somewhere between the chaos and the accidental bangs, I found something close to confidence. Or maybe I just got really good at lying.

Either way, I am never cutting my own hair again.

Unless Madison says she likes guys with mullets.

Then I’m grabbing the blender.