He doesn’t know why he did it. It was stupid. He shouldn’t have—
He just wanted to try and be like Tup.
They pin him to the wall.
“Aw, look at him, he’s crying,” Race exclaims, gleeful.
It’s true. Dogma’s always been an angry crier. And a scared crier. And a humiliated crier. He’s just a crybaby, really.
Gibberish leans in close, hands still braced on Dogma’s shoulders. “Alright, Dogma, are you ready for your haircut?”
“He’d better be,” says 3048. “Fuckin’ weirdo looks like a girl.”
Dogma should say something. Something intelligent. Something cool, maybe, something that’ll make them decide to let him go, or at least not shave all his hair off. It took him two months to grow it this long. It’s 20 centimeters now. His mouth isn’t cooperating, though, so he just says, “Please stop.”
“Ha!” Race brandishes the clippers, flicking them on and inching closer. “Brace yourself, freak.”
It hurts. Dogma didn’t know haircuts could hurt. It burns.
He cries so much.
When he gets back to the barracks, he cries more. The hair that’s left is uneven, sticking up in awful little tufts between bloody, ragged cuts and oatmeal-grey scalp.
“What happened?” Tup asks, coming up behind him and reaching out to touch. He doesn’t, though. His hands hover over Dogma’s ruined head.
Dogma doesn’t have words that come close to what happened. He just shrugs.
“Dogma, we have to tell someone about this.”
He shrugs again.
“Who was it?”
Tup has enough hair to put in a little ponytail now. Dogma turns and runs his hands through it, twirling the ends around his fingers.