Emalthya ran her fingers through her short hair and hated it. It was too short to tie up properly; it was always in her way. It fell into her eyes while she was reading, like now, in the library. She scowled at the innocent book she was reading, but silently, as not to disturb anyone else. She was feeling angry, and that was good, because if she didn’t feel angry about her hair, she would have cried.

When she was nine years old, just before she and her mother had moved to the United Kingdom, her aunt had taken to Emalthya’s hair with a pair of kitchen scissors and cut off over thirty centimetres of it. It was an extremely ugly bob cut which was longer in the back and very short in front. It was, apparently, too difficult to deal with the lice Emalthya had picked up from school while she had so much hair.

In the year and a half since, Emalthya’s hair had been evened out; the front and back were now the same length, but only just reached her shoulders. Her hair wasn’t even very tame; it stuck out around her ears in tufts too fine to clip back and too short to tie up. SO now it was short and unmanageable, instead of long and unmanageable.

It had taken a lot of work for her to keep her long hair as nice as it had been, before she caught nits. Her mother had tied her hair up in many thin braids at night. But everyone had commented on Emalthya’s long hair. Her mother used to run her fingers through it and say she’d wear it as a wig, which was odd, but complimentary. May, Emalthya’s mother, had hair that used to be wavy before she straightened it, and used to be blonde before she coloured it, and the chemical treatments she had used had told on her hair.

Emalthya had learned through her reading that lice could be removed by wizards with any of several extremely reliable potions, or with use of the scouring charm. This made her very bitter, because she would have loved to have kept her long hair. She wasn’t pretty, or tall, but people had made a point to notice her hair and compliment it. Nothing about her felt special anymore.

Hey eyes flicked across the pages of the charms book in front of her. It was a popular book, judging by the wear on the cover and some pages. This particular page was tatty, with creases in the corner. Emalthya hated dog-earing pages. At the top of the page was written the directions for the hair thickening charm. Perhaps she had read the word ‘hair’ and it had sent her on her hair-related thought tangent. The charm itself didn’t look too hard… Perhaps she could regrow her hair…

No, that was a bad idea. She turned the page resolutely and continued to read the book. This reading wasn’t homework related but she kept a notebook with her to write down any useful spells she would like to try. She was trying to read up as much as possible on the magical world. She didn’t want to make any muggle faux pas; even though she wasn’t a muggle born, Emalthya was mostly clueless about the fine details of wizarding life.

The next charm which caught her eye was the colour change charm. A simple point and recite spell. Yes, she could do that one… probably. She wrote it down.

When Emalthya finished the book she hesitated for a minute, before flipping the pages back to the hair thickening charm. She really wanted her own long hair back. She wrote the incantation down.

Later on, she sat in an empty classroom with her wand out and her notebook open in front of her. It was hard to concentrate in the common room, so she had empty classrooms noted down to practice in.

She pointed her wand at her white shirt. “Colovaria.”

Her shirt stayed white. It took her a few more tried before her shirt went red in some places, and a few tried more than that before it went a complete scarlet. Then she made her knee high socks scarlet, too.

Emalthya was buoyed up with her success and used the hair-thickening charm on herself. As she was used to, nothing happened on the first recitation, or so she thought. She used the spell again and now noticed her hair creeping down her back. She picked up a handful and watched her hair grow millimetre by millimetre… and centimetre by centimetre… and inch by inch- foot by foot! Soon, her hair was past where it had ever been before and still growing. Emalthya panicked; how did it stop? There had been no counter-charm to the hair-thickening charm.

Emalthya bundled her hair into her arms, feeling like a character in a fantasy novel, and bolted to the hospital wing, thankfully not too far away. Her hair was heavy and filled both her arms and then cascaded over them. By the time she got to the hospital wing to see the matron, her hair was down past her knees.

“Spell went wrong,” said Emalthya meekly.

“I’ll say,” said the matron, pursing her lips. She probed Emalthya’s skull with hard fingers. “It seems to have worn off now, but I don’t suppose you want hair you can use as a beach towel?”

Emalthya shook her head. “No.”

The matron took out her wand. “So, tell me where to cut.”

Emalthya walked out of the hospital wing with hair just past her elbows and a big smile. When she went up to the common room, she changed her uniform back to white and felt very pleased with herself.