Let Down Your Hair Read Online Free

half an hour taking her through the essay topics, and her earnest gratitude warmed me to the core.
    At the next tutorial she sat beside me, and the following week she invited me to lunch after class. After a month of walking among aliens, one had finally rolled out the welcome mat.
    Jess had just graduated from high school, where she had more young people in her circle of friends than I’d met in my entire life. As her new Gender Politics friend, my job was to listen to the tales of these friends and give a feminist analysis of their behavior. Jess seldom asked me about myself, but I didn’t mind. I had no tales of my own, and I enjoyed being entrusted with hers.
    Near the end of first semester, Jess invited me to her nineteenth birthday party. She’d booked a private room for twenty in a karaoke bar to “get trashed and sing cheesy songs”.
    At half past eight, Andrea dropped me off in Chinatown, where I steered through the crowds to a flight of granite steps. At the top was a bar, behind which lounged a bored Chinese youth reading a magazine. I gave him Jess’s name and he pointed me down a corridor with muddle of discordant voices leaking through the doors.
    I opened the door labeled “4” and a wall of noise smacked me in the face. The room was windowless and dotted with orange vinyl couches. The only light came from a television screening what looked like a Korean romcom with suggestive subtitles scrolling along the bottom. In front stood three off-key young women holding microphones. One was fondling her body as she sang, one was pretending to give her microphone oral sex, and the third finished every line with an inaccurate swig from a bottle. Of the people nursing drinks on the couches, the only one who gave me more than a cursory glance was a stocky young man with a humorous mouth and skin the color of sarsaparilla.
    He held out an oddly formal hand. “Hi, I’m Sumeet.” His palm was cool and dry, and his voice was deep and lilting, with an Indian accent.
    Sumeet had featured in several of Jess’s tales. He’d arrived at her school from India when he was fourteen, and was one of the few guys who could see through Bitchy Caitlin, a redhead who thought herself the “hottest thing ever”.
    “Hi, I’m Sage.” I attempted a smile in return. “Is this Jess’s party?”
    Sumeet nodded. “Take a seat.”
    I slid onto his couch a careful arm’s length away. The song ended and the three women rambled over, looking me up and down as if they couldn’t quite believe what they saw. For the first time in my life, I sensed there was something terribly wrong with me.
    “You’re Sage, the feminist, aren’t you?” said the tallest of the women, with the smile of a circling shark. She wore a skin-tight black dress that bared most of her thighs, and her long, wavy red hair identified her as Bitchy Caitlin.
    “How did you know?” I asked, trying to be friendly.
    She darted a sidelong look at her friends. “Call it a hunch.”
    Her two friends giggled, still looking me up and down. Both wore low-cut tops that exposed half their breasts, one with a mini-skirt and one with black pants. Like Caitlin, they had long glossy hair, lashings of glittery makeup, and heels so high they walked with a strange, stilted strut.
    I could have been of a different species from these women. Everything I was wearing had been bought by Andrea: my loose hemp shirt and pants, my Fairtrade canvas shoes and the green men’s jacket she found at a charity shop. Andrea often bought secondhand men’s clothes. They’re better quality than women’s clothes , she told me, with an eye roll to say this was only to be expected. My hair was very short, and the only thing on my face was a pair of Andrea’s glasses, recycled and fitted with my lenses.
    The thought of Andrea bolstered me against their stares. Don’t be cowed, be compassionate , she would say. They were raised in a world where a woman’s worth is measured by her sex appeal.