I just graduated, turned nineteen years old, and became a cosmetology student all within three months. I graduated from Agora Cyber Charter School on June 18th and I didn’t know where to go from there. I started weighing my future career options. I wanted to be a teacher since I was 15 years old. I always imagined myself as a good teacher by helping my students as much as I could and the way I learned- through comedy. After some thought I realized I couldn’t teach. I didn’t have the finances to put myself through years of school and I didn’t want to depend on tens of thousands of dollars in loans. Not the mention the idea of teaching thirty students every forty five minutes was more challenging than I originally thought.

My next option was a writer or author. I spend countless hours a week at my computer typing away the scenarios that pop into my head. I see everywhere authors are judged, sometimes terribly, for their work. Being that I don’t take criticism well I didn’t think, and I still don’t think my ideas are good enough to be printed and sold; let alone being a bestseller. I also like to draw and create but them the barrier of judgment came to mind again.

On to the next interest of mine; animals. When I was 14, I wanted to volunteer at numerous animal shelters and really any place that dealt with animals. I love animals and I was never allowed to adopt one or two when I was growing up. Mainly because I spent my whole life renting and landlords are very picky- especially when it comes to animals. I wanted to become a vet tech or veterinarian. But I wouldn’t be able to deliver someone bad news about their pet or if a pet is suffering, wouldn’t want to be the one to put them to sleep. I’d love to help animals but people are so cruel to them and that is something that would kill me if I saw.

I started to think of careers that I could do and that I actually would enjoy doing. I like doing hair. There are just so many styles and so many types of braids that I would love recreating. I thought I would really enjoy being a hair stylist. It’s not a job where you’re doing one thing all day. People would come in and want a color, another person would come in and want a cut, and another person would come in and want a combination of the two plus a style.

My final career interest was food. I find so many creative and amazing recipes online that I just have to try. A few months ago, I made my boyfriend a hot dog that was stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. He said that they were so amazing that I could sell them. After he said that, it sparked in my mind that maybe I just could. I started writing up a menu and trying to decide where I was going to put a shop and what a shop would be called. But sadly I just didn’t know where to start.

And I went with becoming a hair stylist.

August 24th was my first day at cosmetology school and as of September 13th (Today, I’m not sure when this will be posted) I have had 14 days of school but I’ve only been there a few days. I’ve been having problems staying on the schedule and since my now 11 month old daughter is teething, I find some nights to be sleepless. 
I consider myself to be an eager yet anxious student. Even though I like learning how to do a million different types of braids, curls, and other styles, I want to move onto the fun stuff.

I want to give my male mannequin head a Mohawk and layer one of my female mannequin’s hair and dye another head a variety of colors. From that list, I want to color my mannequins hair so badly. That would be worth going to school running on 45 minutes of sleep for. I saw a couple of other girls have already dyed their mannequins but when I asked the teacher, she said that the girls started out long before me and they got to color first.

When I got home that day I told my boyfriend how much I wanted to color hair.

“I want my hair black with red tips.” He said “How about I wait until you’re out on the floor and you could do it for me?”

A light bulb rose above my head. “Or I can go down to Shop N Save, buy two boxes of dye and I could do it for you now.”

“Heh, heh,” He mutter “Your mum isn’t back from the store yet.”

“We can go when she gets back.”

“When she gets back the store will probably be closed.”

“It doesn’t close until 8. Its 3”

“Hair dye costs too much.”

“It isn’t that much. Like 5 bucks a box.”

“Ma probably won’t want us to dye it in the house.”

“We can go outside.”

“It’s cold outside.”

“It’ll be fine.”

He was nervous about getting his hair dyed.  I didn’t blame him. I had never ever dyed anyone else’s hair before let alone my own. But he’s been bugging for two years now that he wanted his hair dyed. It’s a win-win situation. He wanted his hair dyed and I wanted to dye hair. His hair’s not all that long so I thought it would be a piece of cake. After my mum came home she gave us the go ahead to get the hair dye along with other groceries that we needed. When we got to the store, we settled that I would dye his hair just plain black for now and later on I would get the red for the tips and since the box was a bit small I got two.

When we got home, we put the groceries away and I got my “client” situated in the dining room ignoring my mums warning that I was going to get dye on the carpet floor. I was going to be extra careful. I got my combs, clips, dye brush, and bowl and I started the dyeing process. I tried to clip my boyfriend’s hair into four parts or “blocks” as my teacher calls it. They are two equal parts in the front and two equal parts in the back but his hair was just too short to part and clip. It looks like I was winging it.

I put the two part dye mixture in one container and started shaking it up. I tried to put it on Zach’s hair when I saw it wasn’t mixed all the way. I stopped and sat down and shook the mixture a little more and then dumped it into my coloring bowl. I ignored more warnings from my mum that I should move to the kitchen and avoid getting dye on the floor. I kept telling her that was fine and I was being careful. I looked back at the bottle and saw it wasn’t all completely out of the bottle, so I had Zach hold the bottle upside down into the bowl. I separated the best I could a part in the back of Zach’s head and I started from there.

When I felt the shakiness from not eating much that whole day and the butterflies of nervousness in my belly I should have slowed down a bit. I saw that my bowl was already half gone and went to grab the mixture bottle to see if it all poured out.

I was shaky.

I grabbed the mixture bottle.

I pulled the mixing bowl down with it.

The bowl hit my ankle and somehow bounced up.

Zach tried to grab it.

The bowl hit his hand.

SPLAT. Decent sized blobs of black dye in a big area in the middle of the dining room floor.

We should have listened to my mum. She kept saying that I was going to get dye on the floor. She kept saying that we should have moved to the kitchen where if the dye fell it would be easier to clean. But no. I had to be stubborn. I had to do it right in the center of the dining room.

As I was screaming at myself inside my head, Zach was panicking. He did the worst mistake. A mistake worse than me spilling blobs of dye all over the floor.  He got the towel I spread out on his lap, held it to the blobs of dye just sitting pretty on the floor, and wiped them into the medium green carpet. I was lucky enough that my mum was resting on the couch so she couldn’t see the silent chaos taking place in her dining room. But I had another problem at hand. The dye was only supposed to stay on Zach’s hair for 25 minutes and it was starting to sting. I made the second box of dye and quickly painted it on every quarter inch of Zach’s hair.

After the dye was setting on Zach’s hair I timed 15 minutes. A thought popped into my head. I had neon green fabric paint. I figured if I could get the fabric paint to blend in with the carpet, everything would be fine and dandy and my mum wouldn’t notice a thing. I got the paint and started rubbing it into the char looking marks and streaks that were now embracing the fibers of the rug extra tightly. I tried to blend the paint the best I could and when we felt like we were done we stood and looked at it.

“Honey,” Zach said

“Yeah?”

“What do you think?”

“What do you think?”

We both looked at it and made a face “It doesn’t look worse. Just more noticeable.”

“Crap.”

I got to googling. I googled ‘how to get permanent black hair dye out of a carpet’ and they said a two part mixture of white vinegar and water. Crap. We never had vinegar in the house let alone white vinegar. The store was about to close and even if it wasn’t it would look mighty suspicious to go all the way back down to the store just for white vinegar.

Another light bulb flipped on above my head when I saw my mum’s fine tipped scissors sitting on the countertop. I got down on the floor and started to frantically spray ammonia on the stain followed by some hand sanitizer to get the bright green out of the floor. If only that could work as well as it did with the dye we’d be fine. Once the green was 90% out of the rug, I pulled the carpet up and started cutting the black. Chunk after chunk, we were getting somewhere. The black was starting to disappear from the rug. Zach vacuumed up the chunks of dismembered carpet and fluffed up the rest of the rug.

After about an hour of staring at the rug it all seemed blended and we were out of the woods. I’ve had a few dyeing experiences. The lady who was the very first person to dye my hair is now a teacher at my school. I went to her 4 years ago. At the time I really hated my hair and I just wanted something done with it considering it’s like three feet long and very thick. I went in for an all-over color and I came out with all-over highlights. I wasn’t very happy with them but I should’ve explained myself better. The second time I got my hair dyed it was all-over and it burned.

The third time I got my hair dyed the woman dyeing it decided to take charge of my hair and gave me a flame orange and blonde ombre. It was horrible. My boyfriend’s father-whose hair is turning from red to orange due to age-, matched my hair with his arm hair. The very last time I got my hair dyed was for my prom. The woman charged me five times as much for services I never received. I told her what I wanted done with my hair and she refused to do it because she wanted to go to the bar. She combed half- wet highly tangled hair out with a wide tooth comb and then asked how I was going to my hair for prom.

After all those experiences of dye, none of which were as equally memorable and terrifying than this one. Black dye doesn’t mix with you landlord’s shag green carpet.