I found my daughter sitting on the edge of our bathtub with my razor in her hand.
It was a Friday night in October, a little after nine. I’d gone upstairs to put away towels and heard a sound through the bathroom door. A small sound. The kind of sniffle you make when you’re trying very hard not to be heard.
I knocked once and opened the door.
Emma was sitting on the edge of the tub in her pajama pants and an old Girl Scouts T-shirt from when she was ten. Her left arm was stretched out across her knee. In her right hand was my pink disposable razor, the one I keep on the shelf in the shower. There was a can of my shaving cream on the floor beside her bare foot. She hadn’t started yet. The razor was dry.
Her face was red and wet.
“Sweetheart,” I said. “What are you doing?”
She jumped. She tried to hide the razor behind her back, which was silly, because I’d already seen it. Then she gave up and just held it in her lap and looked at the floor.
“Mom,” she said. “Is it normal for girls to have so much hair on their arms?”
I sat down on the closed toilet lid across from her. I looked at her arm.
Emma is fourteen. She has her father’s coloring. Dark brown hair, thick and wavy, the kind that frizzes in summer. Dark eyebrows. Dark eyelashes so long that strangers used to stop me in the grocery store when she was a baby to tell me so. And yes, on her forearms, there’s hair. Dark and soft and fine. The kind of hair you’d never notice unless the sun was behind her or unless somebody pointed it out.
“Of course it’s normal,” I said. “Everybody has hair on their arms, honey. Some people have more. Some people have darker. That’s all.”
She looked down at her arm and started rubbing it with her thumb. Hard. Like she was trying to erase something.
“Tyler said mine look like a man’s,” she said.
My stomach dropped.
“He said I should shave them,” Emma said. Her voice was very small. “Because it’s embarrassing when we hold hands at school. He said people were looking. He said his friends were laughing.” She swallowed. “He said it like he was trying to help me. Like he was doing me a favor.” 