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PICTURE DAY
a Brent story by Tanner

The thing about picture day is that it's the one day of the year when your face becomes permanent.

Every other day, if you look stupid, it goes away. You go to sleep, you wake up, you look normal again. But on picture day, whatever your face is doing at 9:42 a.m. gets printed on a sheet of glossy paper in eight different sizes and mailed to every relative you have, and then it goes in a frame on top of your grandma's TV, where it stays for the rest of your life, or hers.

Brent knew this. That's why he was worried about his hair.

"You need a haircut," his mom said on Wednesday night, which is the worst possible night to say that, because picture day was Thursday and the barbershop closes at six.

"It's fine," Brent said.

"It's in your eyes."

"I can see."

"Then what color is my shirt?"

Brent pushed his hair out of his eyes. "Blue."

"Green," said his mom. "Get it out of your eyes before tomorrow, or I'm calling your father and he's bringing the clippers."

Brent's dad had cut Brent's hair exactly once, when Brent was eight, with the electric clippers he used on the dog. Brent had worn a winter hat until Easter.

So at 10:30 that night, after everybody was asleep, Brent went into the kitchen and got the big scissors out of the drawer. They were the scissors his mom used for opening packages and cutting chicken. He washed them first. He wasn't an animal.

He went into the bathroom and turned on the light over the sink, which only had one working bulb out of three, so the whole room was kind of yellow, like an old photograph. He looked at his bangs in the mirror. He figured he just needed to take a little off the bottom. Like an inch. Maybe half an inch. How hard could it be? Hair is just hair. He'd seen it done a thousand times.

Here is what nobody tells you about cutting your own hair in a mirror: everything is backward. When you move the scissors left, they go right. When you try to fix the right side, you're actually cutting the left side. And when you try to make the two sides even, you just keep going up, and up, and up, chasing the line, like the guy in a cartoon sawing off the branch he's sitting on.

After about four minutes, Brent's bangs were not in his eyes anymore. They were not anywhere near his eyes. They were way up on his forehead in a line that went down at a slant from left to right, like a ski slope. On the left side there was one long piece he had missed completely. It hung down by itself over his eyebrow like it was the last survivor of something.

Brent stared at himself.

The bathroom door opened. His little sister Sydney stood there in her nightgown, holding her stuffed rabbit. She was seven. She looked at Brent, and at the scissors, and at the hair in the sink.

"Actually," she said, "you look like a lawn mower ran over your head."

"Go to bed."

"I can fix it. I cut Mr. Buttons's hair." She held up the rabbit. Mr. Buttons had a bald spot on his left ear.

"No."

"I'm telling Mom."

"Okay, okay. Fine. Just the one long piece. ONLY the one long piece."

Sydney climbed up on the toilet lid. She took the scissors in both hands, with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, and she cut off the one long piece. She was actually very careful. The problem was that the piece she cut was the wrong piece.

In the morning Brent tried hair gel.

He had a tub of the blue kind his cousin left at Christmas. The idea was that he could gel his bangs down flat and nobody would notice they were three different lengths. He used about half the tub. When he was finished, his hair was flat, all right. It was also hard. Like, hard hard. You could knock on it. It had dried in the exact shape of his hand, with finger lines in it, like a sand dune.

"Oh, honey," his mom said when he came down for breakfast, in the voice she uses when the dog throws up on the carpet.

"It's fine."

"Did you cut your hair?"

"No," said Brent.

"Actually," said Sydney, "we both did."

There was no time to do anything about it, because the bus was coming. His mom gave him the picture form with the check stapled to it. She had ordered package C and checked the box for the laser background, which is the one that looks like you're having your picture taken inside a pinball machine.

"Smile with your teeth," she said. "Not that smile. A real one."

At school it was worse, because at school everybody had eyes.

His best friend Justin saw him in the hall and did not say anything for a really long time. Then he reached out and knocked on Brent's head with one knuckle. It made a noise.

"Dude," Justin said, with respect.

By second period three people had asked if he did it on purpose. Brent said yes to all of them, because it seemed like the only way out. A kid in his math class said it looked kind of punk rock. A girl in the lunch line said it looked like he had been struck by lightning, which Brent thought was fair.

Picture day was in the library. They lined everybody up by homeroom, and the guy from the picture company handed out the free black combs that everybody gets on picture day, the little skinny ones that break if you look at them. Brent tried to run his through his bangs. The comb snapped in half.

The picture guy was old and bald and wore a vest with about eleven pockets. His name tag said FRANK. He had probably taken a million school pictures. He had seen everything. When Brent sat down on the stool, Frank looked at Brent's hair for a second, and his eyebrows went up a little, and then they went right back down, like a professional.

"Chin down," Frank said. "Little to the left. Little more. Now think about something funny."

Brent thought about Sydney on the toilet lid with her tongue sticking out, cutting off the wrong piece of hair with both hands, completely sure of herself.

FLASH.

The pictures came back three weeks later in a brown envelope. Brent opened it on the bus, slowly, like a bomb.

There he was. Laser background. Bangs like a ski slope, shiny with gel. And he was laughing. Not the picture-day smile. A real one, so big his eyes were almost shut, the kind of laugh you can't do on purpose.

It was, everybody agreed, the worst haircut in the history of the eighth grade. It was also the best picture he'd ever taken.

When retake day came, his mom asked if he wanted to go.

He thought about it. Then he said no.

The 5x7 is on top of his grandma's TV now. The wallet size is in Sydney's backpack, where she shows it to people at lunch. She tells them she did the haircut.

Actually, she's not wrong.