BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEE- Olivia Sterling rolls over. Her hand gropes around on her nightstand until it finds the snooze button. She groans, “Uhggg.” She slowly rolls out of bed and pulls her slippers on. 

Standing in front of the mirror, she cringes at her bedhead, her eyes adjusting to the harsh bathroom light. Olivia isn’t exactly a morning person. 

Her routine takes her a total of an hour and a half this morning. She’s going to be giving a speech to the whole ninth grade on how to look well groomed today and wants to look extra perfect. And after a few finishing touches on her makeup, she does. Grabbing a quick breakfast, she heads to the bus stop. Today is going to be a great day, she can just feel it. 

Olivia walks briskly down the street toward the bus stop. It’s a beautiful day, which is a nice change from the rain of the past few days. She is feeling very confident about her speech by the time she reaches the bus stop. While waiting for the bus, Olivia contemplates whether she should pull her hair back for her speech, but decides against it because it is already perfect. Impatiently, she looks down the street and sees her bus approaching, just behind a pickup truck. She’s excited to start her day. Glancing down, she smooths her skirt one last time and takes stock of her perfect outfit, not noticing the squirrel that decided to dart out in front of the approaching truck at that moment. Suddenly swerving to miss the squirrel, the pickup hits a large puddle on the side of the road in front of Olivia. She looks up just as a tsunami of cold, muddy water engulfs her from head to toe. Disgustedly spitting out a small piece of gravel, she blinks the mud from her eyes to see the doors to her bus slowly glide open in front of her.

Olivia stares at herself in the bathroom mirror. Based on the judgmental looks from the other kids when she had first walked through the doors to school, she knew it would be bad, but not this bad. Her formerly perfect hair is now stuck to the sides of her head in some places, and sticking up in others. “I need to wash my hair,” she whines. She looks down at the filthy sink in front of her. “Ugh.” 

As Olivia bends over the sink to try to fit her hair under the touchless faucet, it starts blasting the back of her head with ice-cold water. “AUGHHH!!!” she cries, quickly pulling back from the faucet. Looking up through clumps of wet hair, she notices an abandoned paint cup on the edge of the neighboring sink. Grabbing it, she holds it under the faucet briefly and then dumps it over her head.

The sudden appearance of blue water going down the drain makes Olivia gasp. She just put paint in her hair. “You’ve GOT to be kidding me!” she cries. She pumps out three squirts of the shiny pink hand soap in her hand and rubs it into her hair. 

Olivia stares at herself in the mirror, incredulous. The mud is gone, but her hair is now blue. Dripping water all over her almost-dry clothes, she attempts to wring her hair dry. It doesn’t work. She looks around the room. The hand dryer on the wall next to the sinks catches her eye. 

Drying your hair with a bathroom hand dryer is like trying to dry your hair with a leaf blower, but after several cycles, Olivia’s hair feels dry. Finally, something’s going right.

 Stepping back in front of the mirror, Olivia screams. Her now-blue hair is poofed out so badly, it makes her look like a human pom-pom. The class bell rings. “Seriously?!” she cries. Frantically, she pulls a hair tie out of her bag. But as she stretches it to fit over her hair-ball, it snaps off her fingers like a rubber band and catapults into the stall behind her. Olivia turns to see her only hair tie teeter on the edge of the toilet seat and fall into the murky water below. 

“But, Mr. Yelar-” Olivia pleads, standing backstage in the auditorium. “I’m sorry, Olivia, but this speech is worth seventy-five percent of your grade,” Mr. Yelar says at an ironically high volume. “I can see that you’re having a bad day, but the answer is no.” 

Out of fear of the whole auditorium hearing any more of their conversation, Olivia doesn’t argue. She takes her seat backstage and prays that somehow she doesn’t get called up. 

“Olivia! You’re up!” 

Olivia shuffles onto the stage, head down. She timidly approaches the microphone, taking it from the stand. Gathering her resolve, she begins her speech. “Today, I’m going to be giving a speech titled… *gulp* ‘How to make yourself look well-groomed and perfectly presentable.’” 

She pauses, looking out at the audience like she rehearsed. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, she thinks. Taking a deep breath, she proceeds. “It’s so important to start each day looking your very best…” Suddenly the audience erupts in laughter. 

“That was so horrible!” Olivia whines while walking with her best friend Vickie through a hallway crowded with students. “Everyone was laughing at me!” 

“They weren’t laughing at you as much as they were laughing at your speech,” Vickie interjects. 

“But my speech was supposed to be serious!” Olivia exclaims. “And then that one kid was like, ‘Are you an example of what not to do?’ I almost died!” 

“I know, right? Who says that?” Vickie replies. “I am so glad I didn’t take public speaking,” 

An announcement crackles on the loudspeaker. “Attention high schoolers! Today is the LAST DAY to get a date to the Sadie Hawkins dance! All you girls out there who have been putting it off, better ask him now!” 

Vickie looks over at Olivia with a raised eyebrow. “So, are you gonna ask him?”

 “Not today! Look at me! I can’t!” Olivia cries.

“Oh, come on.” says Vickie. “You don’t look that bad. Besides, you heard them! Today is the last day to ask him!”

 “Yeah, but—” Olivia starts.

 “And what do you know, there he is!” Vickie interrupts. “He’s with that other girl! And from the starry-eyed look on her face, you better hurry up!” 

“But—” Olivia tries again. 

“Just go, girl.” Vickie shoves Olivia in the general direction of her crush and disappears into the crowd.

Olivia stumbles toward Chase Meehan, a tenth grader who she’s been crushing on, but never had the nerve to speak to. 

Chase looks her over skeptically. “Trick or treat?”

“Heh heh,” she fake laughs, already wishing she could disappear.

“Do I know you?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Olivia, now really wishing she could disappear. “I’m Olivia. We have gym together.” 

“Do you always look like…” pause, “this?” he asks, looking her over. 

“No!” Olivia cries, offended. “I usually look much better.” 

“Well, that’s a relief,” Chase says, chuckling. “What can I do for you?” he asks.

“Well, you see, I was, uh, kindawonderingifyouwouldwanttogotothesaidehawkingdancewithme?” Olivia mumbles softly. 

“Come again?” Chase asks. 

Olivia prays for the floor to swallow her. When it doesn’t, she takes a deep breath, “I was wondering if you would want to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me.” 

“Oh,” Chase says. “Olivia, is it?” Olivia nods. “I am truly flattered by your offer, but I have no interest. Besides, I’m already going with Elise here. Thanks, though” Chase walks away with his arm around Elise, not looking back. 

Olivia turns away. “Can this day get any worse?!”

Olivia walks down the crowded hallway toward her next class, trying to ignore the whispers and snide remarks from her classmates as she passes. Thank god bad hair days aren’t permanent, she thinks.

“Good morning Olivia! Looks like somebody forgot today is school ID picture day,” says a teacher standing beside a sign on a door that reads, “Photo ID Pictures Today!” 

“What?!?!?” Olivia cries. “Not today! Seriously!?!?”

“You look fine. Nobody’s going to look at your ID anyway.”

“I’ll have to wear it all day, every day!”

“Olivia, don’t be difficult. It’ll only take a second.”

“Ughhh.” Olivia mutters.

Olivia sits in the photo chair, freaking out, trying to smooth her clothes. *Click!* Before she has a chance to compose herself, the photo is taken. “Wait! I wasn’t even ready!” she cries. 

The photographer glances at the picture and shrugs. “NEXT!”

Olivia stands in the back of the room, waiting for her ID. “Here’s your ID, honey. Don’t lose it, you have to keep it until you graduate.” says the lady handing Olivia her new ID. 

“Til I graduate?!?!?” Olivia looks down at her picture. “But I’m in ninth grade!”

“Sorry, sweetie, budget cuts.”

Numb, Olivia heads toward the door staring down at her new ID. Her photo is like no other that has ever been taken of her before. Her hair is a mess, her clothes are muddy and wrinkled, and she’s not even smiling! All of her other pictures capture her perfect self, not a hair out of place.

“Four years?” she groans.

Distracted by her photo and thinking about her horrible day, she walks out the door and bumps into a boy coming into the room. She stumbles backward, embarrassed. 

“Hey,” the boy says, “I know you. You’re in my gym class!” Olivia looks at him, searching. He is about four inches taller than her, has blue hair down to his cheekbones, and he wears a hoodie and jeans. “Watcha looking at?” he asks, snatching the ID from her hand and looking at it. “Nice picture.”

“Yeah, I know, and I have to live with it for the next four years now,” Olivia says. 

“No, no, I’m serious,” he says. “You look great.” 

Olivia looks up, shocked. 

He looks at her. “You know, I always thought that you were kind of stuck-up,” he continues, “It’s nice to see you let your hair down. Or up, as the case may be. And the blue is a nice touch, if I do say so myself.”

“Wait, really? No joke?” Olivia asks. She looks at him curiously. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Daniel, but everyone calls me Blue.”

“Well, thanks, Blue,” Olivia says, taken aback. “I’m Olivia.”

“Hey, Olivia, would you like to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me?” Blue asks.

Olivia looks at him. “Are you serious? We just met.”

“Haven’t you ever asked anybody out you don’t know?” he replies.

Olivia thinks about it, then smiles subtly. “Well, Blue, I would say yes, but … there’s kind of a problem, isn’t there?” 

Blue stares at her blankly. 

“Technically, you can’t ask a girl to a Sadie Hawkins dance.”

“Hmmm, I guess you’re right,” he says. “Got any suggestions?”

 “Well,” she says, gathering her resolve, “I suppose I could ask you.”

“You suppose?” 

Olivia smiles. “Will you go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me, Blue?”

At the end of the day, as Olivia climbs onto her bus to go home, a teacher asks her, “So, how was your day, Olivia?” Olivia pauses, thinks for a second, and says, “Surprisingly, it was the best day I’ve had in a long time.”

The End