Her words serve as disinfectant, scrubbing out the negative thoughts that cling to me. Some nights, after reading the poem, a stupid smile creeps on my face. I snuggle under the covers and think, Well, shit. Maybe I am a badass . . .

But while my bedroom can be a monument to endless possibilities, on days like today, it turns into a graveyard, where all my hopes go to die. And the artwork that once inspired me is now judging me. All the women in my room are looking down on me. I thought Harlem giving me the side-eye was bad, but that was before I got it from Michelle Obama; it’s brutal.

I call Naija on FaceTime, hoping she can give me some advice on what to do next. It would be insane to ask my mom again, but I’m desperate. Or should I just wait until next month, for the scavenger hunt? Naija appears on my screen, but where there should have been a face, there’s a wall of hair. I caught her right in the middle of her nightly hair routine. She’s seated in front of her vanity, and for some reason she’s wearing a jacket over her nightshirt.

“Hold on, girl, be right with you,” a voice says behind “the wall.”

I like watching her go through her nightly hair process. I find it soothing because her fingers are nimble, her movements graceful.

She uses a large hair tie to gather her braids into a high ponytail and looks into the camera. “What happened? What did she say?” she asks as she reaches over for the jar of edge smoother and gently applies the goop to her edges in an upward motion.

“She said I lost my mind and she’d give me time to find it again.”

“Damn, that’s messed up,” she replies as she picks out one of a dozen silk scarfs hanging on the hook by her mirror, ties the scarf around her head, and then puts on her trusty flowered silk bonnet. She stuffs all her hair under it; it piles up high behind her head, where it forms a dome. She looks like a funky Black Xenomorph, the creature in Alien.

Most girls I know would stop there with the nighttime hair routine, but not Naija Harris. She puts on another silk scarf to secure the bonnet. If Naija were on a desert island and could only have three things, she’d ask for her silk scarf, silk bonnet, and her Carol’s Daughter Black Vanilla Edge Control Smoother. She’d ask for those things way before she’d think to find food and shelter.

“All that prep work I did was for nothing. I couldn’t even get her to sign the paper Devonte gave me.”