Susan Woodings was the first person Sophie ever came out to by virtue of having been there when Sophie decided she should tell someone she liked girls.
For the most part, Sophie Walten stopped cutting her hair after the summer of 1974, and by her sophomore year of college, it was halfway down her back and never quite did what she wanted it to.
This made surviving her hockey practices a bit difficult, as no later than ten minutes in, her hair tie would have invariably left for parts unknown, and no number of barrettes or bobby pins could keep it out of her face under the helmet, either.
One night, in a fit of inspiration, she simply decided she would cut it off, and so she got a pair of kitchen scissors from her dorm common room, stood in front of the hall bathroom mirror because that’s how she’d heard these things were meant to go, and started on her hair with rather more care than one would expect from a college sophomore’s 3:00 a.m. impulse haircut in the dark.
Still, the result was choppy and uneven, closer to a bowl cut than to the bob she’d halfheartedly considered at some point during the whole endeavor, but for her purposes it would suffice. In the dim red light of the exit sign behind her, Sophie noticed that her hair was a lot puffier short. She absentmindedly cleaned off the old kitchen scissors as she looked at herself in the mirror, and though she couldn’t have said why, there was something familiar about that cloud of dark hair.
