I am a child life specialist at our county hospital, which means my job is to help kids carry the heavy things adults can’t see. Some days that looks like blowing bubbles during blood draws, and some days it looks like finding the exact stranger who knows the right sentence to save a child’s courage.
Maya is ten and funny in the way shy kids are funny, quick with a whisper that makes you blink back a laugh. She stopped joking when the last handfuls of hair gathered in the shower drain, then on her pillow, then on the floor like a soft brown snowfall in July.
Alopecia is the word, a long, round one that sounds gentle and isn’t. It took her eyebrows first, then her lashes, and finally all of it—her hairline, her ponytail, the way she used to tuck a stray curl behind her ear when she was thinking.
She wears hoodies even in heat, pulls the hood tight under her chin, and answers every kindness with a shrug that means please don’t look at me. Kids can sense edges; she became an edge in a room of soft corners, avoiding mirrors, ducking photographs, and calling in sick when school announced picture day.
Her mother, Isabel, works nights at a warehouse and days cleaning houses when she can find the time. She keeps paperwork in a shoebox—insurance forms, appointment cards, a little note that says “Ask about support group,” and a receipt for a wig Maya refuses to try on.
“I don’t want pretend hair,” Maya whispers to me, the way you make a promise to yourself and need someone to hear it. “I want my real hair back or no hair at all.”
We talk about bodies as weather, seasons that change and change again, storms that blow through. It helps a little, then not at all; she tugs at the seam of her hoodie and says she can’t go back to school, not with everyone staring like she’s a headline.
I remember June because I don’t forget the people who walk into a room like a sunrise and make everybody breathe easier. She is fifty-eight, a biker with soft hands and eyes that know what to do when a child is looking for a safe place to fall apart.
June wears her hair like a promise: there isn’t any. She shaved it years ago to stop letting it make decisions about her day, after an autoimmune storm and later a surgery left it patchy and unpredictable. She tattooed a thin ring of laurel leaves around the back of her scalp, nothing loud, just a circle that says I belong to the living.
Her club does hospital visits, but they are quiet about it, no merch, no patches with names that would make a mother nervous. They bring coloring books, sit on floors, and talk about engines like lullabies because some kids fall asleep to the idea that something strong is standing guard outside.
I text June while Maya curls around herself and refuses the world. There is no magic in my fingers, but sometimes there is magic in a friend’s shadow crossing a doorway, and June says she can be there by two.
When she walks in, she takes off her boots and carries them in her hand so her steps won’t sound like decisions. She nods to Isabel, grins at me, and lowers herself to the tile with the slow care of someone who has ferried a lot of pain to safer harbors.
“Hey, I’m June,” she says, voice low like a secret people are allowed to keep. “I heard there’s a girl here who knows how to survive a storm.”
Maya’s hood doesn’t move, but I can feel the room leaning toward yes. June mentions the weather outside as if it owes her money, then wipes pretend sweat from her brow and rolls her eyes at summer. It is ridiculous enough to make a smile happen, quick and reluctant, like a bird that wasn’t sure it wanted to land.
“I used to spend hours stitching my hair to itself with bobby pins,” June says, tapping two fingers above her ear. “Then one day I gave the mirror back to the house and decided I’m not a before-and-after. I’m a right-now person.”
Maya presses her mouth flat, the way children do to keep feelings from spilling. June, who is very good at hearing the rush of unshed tears, lifts a hand toward her own head and shows the laurel circle, pale green leaves fading into the gentle geography of skin.
“I don’t have eyebrows either,” June adds, drawing two lines of invisible comedy above her eyes. “Turns out eyebrows are just weather reports for your face. You can tell people you’re sunny without them.”
I watch the corner of Maya’s hood tilt, then inch back. It feels like the tide thinking about changing its mind, then deciding the moon is worth trusting.
“Did it hurt?” Maya asks, the first question she’s asked a stranger in months. She means all of it and also specifically the tattoo.
“Everything new hurts a little,” June says, not flinching away from the truth. “But new doesn’t stay new forever. New becomes yours if you let it.”
She opens her backpack and takes out a plain white helmet, the smallest they make that still fits a kid’s head. She sets it in Maya’s lap like a treasure and places a pouch of markers next to it, colors bright as candy wrappers.
“We paint crowns around here,” June says, wiggling her brows that aren’t there. “Kings and queens choose their own shape. I thought you might want to make one.”
Maya’s hand rises and falls without touching anything. I hold my breath without meaning to, long enough for the air to get thin in my chest. Isabel’s fingers find the edge of Maya’s sleeve and rest there, heavy with love, light with permission.
The hood slides back. It isn’t dramatic because drama belongs to audiences, and this is a private moment in a public world. Maya’s head is beautiful in the way new moons are beautiful, a clean curve where light will always know how to sit.
She takes the gold marker first, the one that squeaks a little, and draws a slender band above the forehead line of the helmet. She adds tiny stars along the temple, then a bolt of lightning where a part used to be, then three small dots at the back like a constellation that hasn’t been named yet.
June can’t help it; she claps once, fast and soft, the sound of a landing. “That lightning,” she says, nodding like she’s been waiting her whole life to see this exact shape. “Some storms build mountains instead of damage.”
The next day I call the principal, who has a voice that always sounds like she is smiling even when she is worried. We talk about back-to-school and kindness and how to help kids make room for difference without turning a person into a lesson.
June calls five friends and they call five more. They arrange to meet two blocks from the school, where they will shut off their engines and walk their bikes the rest of the way. Nobody wants noise; this is about presence, not proof.
Isabel isn’t sure at first because she is tired and the world has taught her to weigh every favor for hidden costs. We sit with the calendar between us, and she touches the blank square that says first day, and then she nods.
The morning is bright the way nervous days are bright, everything turned up a click past comfortable. Maya wears a simple headband, no hood, no hat, a small gold star sticker on the corner of her temple because she liked the way it looked in the mirror.
They arrive exactly fifteen minutes before the bell, a quiet river of bikes and boots and leather softened by the decision to be gentle. They dismount as if they have been practicing all week at a kindness nobody will give them awards for.
June kneels to look Maya in the eyes and asks, “You ready for these people to see what courage looks like at ten?” Maya nods because she doesn’t trust her voice yet, then slips her fingers into her mother’s hand and into mine with the other.
We walk up the sidewalk together, flanked by motorcycles that are more sculpture than machine right now. Kids stare because that is their job, and adults smile the way you do when a story shows up at the end of your street and asks to be believed.
A boy near the door says something because some children try out power the way others try on hats. He points to his own head and then to Maya’s, a reflex of a reflex, a script he didn’t write and doesn’t fully understand.
Maya stops with one foot on the first step and breathes big, the kind of breath you take before jumping into cold water. June tips her chin toward the sky, and Isabel squeezes once, a code mothers learn early and never forget.
“My name is Maya,” she says, steady now, the wind catching the edge of her voice and lifting it. “I have alopecia. I’m not sick, I’m not contagious, and I picked a crown that fits me.”
The boy’s hand drops because she didn’t leave him anything to hold. The principal, who has been watching with the practiced calm of a leader who understands how small moments bend big ones, steps forward and says, “Welcome back, Maya. Your seat is by the window, like you asked.”
That afternoon I sit in the back of the cafeteria during an assembly about kindness that isn’t called an assembly about kindness. We call it “What Makes You You,” and June is the guest speaker who does not speak from a stage.
She stands on the floor with the kids and asks who wants to design a helmet stripe that tells the truth. Hands shoot up like fireworks, then more softly as the shy kids decide they want to belong to the noisy ones for a minute.
June tells them the rules: no names of teams or companies, no slogans that turn people into signs, only symbols you can carry when you’re alone. She shows them the laurel leaves on her scalp and says they are for finishing a race she didn’t know she’d entered.
Maya draws a tiny comet on a paper crown and later transfers it onto her helmet with June’s help. It is a small thing floating above something round and important, trailing a brief tail of light toward a place you can’t see yet.
Days pass. Some are good and some are the kind that need to be put gently into a drawer until they make more sense. The kids stare less, or maybe Maya notices less, or maybe it is both and that is the math of becoming okay.
A teacher prints out a flyer for a new lunch group called Crown Club that meets on Tuesdays to talk about differences that won’t be hidden. They sit at the table near the windows and trade stickers and fears and strategies for walking into rooms like they belong there.
Isabel finds a rhythm that means she sleeps sometimes, and I find her once in the hallway with a coffee she didn’t buy because someone left it on her car with a note that said, “For a mother who keeps going.” She doesn’t cry in front of me, so I look away to give her privacy and make the world bigger again.
The hospital where I work holds a family night where we bring in therapy dogs and bad pizza and call it a gala. June arrives with a small stack of vinyl decals that say STILL HERE in a gentle font and presses them into children’s palms like medals they already earned.
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