My 8-Year-Old Shaved Her Sister’s Head Before Prom — Then She Showed Me A Pink Tape Recorder

My daughter’s scream pulled me out of a dead sleep at 6:13 in the morning.

I know the time because I looked at the clock, which is a thing people do even in an emergency, and because that number is now burned into me the way certain numbers get burned into a parent.

It was a Saturday. The sun was just coming up over the roofline of the Okonkwos’ house across the street. The whole place smelled like the coffee I’d forgotten to turn off the night before and like the lavender shampoo my girls fight over, which somebody had used in the hallway bathroom.

Out on the street somebody’s SUV door slammed. A completely normal Saturday-morning sound.

And upstairs, my seventeen-year-old was making a noise I had never heard out of her in her life.

I ran so hard I clipped my shoulder on the doorframe and had a bruise there for nine days.

She Was Sitting Straight Up in Bed With Both Hands on Her Head, and There Was No Hair Under Them

Her prom dress was still hanging on the closet door in the dry cleaner’s plastic. Navy blue. We’d picked it up on Wednesday.

Kayla was bolt upright in bed with both palms pressed flat against her scalp.

And her hair was everywhere. Across the pillowcase. In long blonde ropes on the sheets. In clumps on the carpet by the bed, in a trail toward the door, like somebody had been trying to erase her while she slept and had done it badly.

Shaved. Not cut. Shaved down to maybe a quarter inch, unevenly, with two raw patches near her left ear where the clipper had gotten too close.

Prom was that night.

For three months — I’m not exaggerating, since February — that girl had talked about almost nothing else. The dress. The corsage. Whether to do an up-do or leave it down. Who was riding in which car. The fact that half the senior class had been telling her she had queen locked up.

She got out of that bed and went into the hall bathroom and turned on the vanity lights and looked at herself.

And then she screamed in a way that genuinely frightened me, because she didn’t stop to breathe.

My Husband Found Our Eight-Year-Old Sitting on the Edge of Her Bed With His Electric Razor on the Nightstand

Reese. Eight years old. In unicorn pajamas with the feet cut off because she’d outgrown them and refused to give them up.

Sitting on the edge of her mattress with her hands in her lap and her bare feet not quite reaching the floor.

My husband’s beard trimmer — the Wahl, the one he keeps in the medicine cabinet — was on her nightstand, plugged in, with the guard off.

Her face was dead white. She looked like she was going to be sick.

But she did not look sorry. I want to be very clear about that, because it’s the thing that made me so angry I had to put my hand on the doorframe.

Not one bit of apology anywhere on that child’s face.

“Reese,” I said, and I was fighting my voice the entire way. “What did you do.”

And she looked up at me with those enormous brown eyes and she said, very quietly:

“I saved her the only way I could.”

I Want to Tell You Honestly What I Was About to Do, Because It Matters

I was going to lose it.

Not hit her — we don’t do that in our house. But I was about four seconds from screaming at an eight-year-old. I had my hand out for that razor and I was going to take her phone privileges, her tablet, her birthday, her everything, and I was going to make her stand in front of her sister and look at what she had done.

Because there is no explanation. There is no sentence an eight-year-old can produce that covers a bedroom floor covered in her sister’s hair on the morning of prom. There isn’t one. That’s what I was thinking.

And this was Reese. My little shadow. The kid who still came into Kayla’s bed during thunderstorms at eight years old and who nobody ever said anything about. The one who followed her sister from room to room asking how mascara worked, and why high school girls laugh so loud, and whether she could have the same color nail polish.

She worshipped her. Everybody knew it. It was a family joke.

I had my hand out for that razor.

And then the front door opened downstairs.

Steven Let Himself In the Way He Always Did, and Called Up the Stairs About Corsage Colors

That’s the part people stop me on now.

He let himself in?

Yes. He let himself in. He had our keypad code. We gave it to him, in the fall, because he was over four days a week and because my husband said it was easier than getting up to answer the door.

Eighteen years old. Senior at the same school. Clean kid. Short hair. Polo shirts. Called me “Mrs. Adams” in that voice that adults — and I include myself, I include myself completely — mistake for character.

He’d sat at my kitchen table probably two hundred times. He drank my husband’s root beer out of the garage fridge. He helped carry the Christmas tree in. He fixed the back gate.

And that morning he came through my front door at 6:20 in the morning and called up the stairs:

“Mrs. Adams? Kayla said to ask about the corsage — did we settle on white or the blue ones?”

Trust is a strange thing. Sometimes it shows up in a clean hoodie and says yes ma’am.

He Came Up the Stairs, Saw Her Under the Vanity Lights, and for Half a Second His Face Was Completely Empty

I was standing in the hallway. I watched it happen from four feet away and I will be seeing it for the rest of my life.

He got to the bathroom doorway. He saw my daughter’s shaved head under those bright lights.

And his face went blank.

Not shocked. Not horrified. Not the way an eighteen-year-old boy’s face goes when the girl he loves has had something terrible happen to her.

Blank. For about half a second. Like a machine recalculating.

And then he put concern on over the top of it, and I mean that literally — I watched him apply it, like a shirt — and he stepped in and pulled her against his chest.

“Baby. Baby, don’t cry. Hey. We can fix this. We’ll get a wig, there’s that place at the mall, it’s going to be fine. You’ll still be the prettiest girl in that room.”

And my daughter folded into him, shaking, and held on.

My Eight-Year-Old Came and Stood in the Doorway and Said It Out Loud

Reese had come down the hall behind me. I didn’t hear her.

She stood in the bathroom doorway in her unicorn pajamas and she said, in a voice much flatter than an eight-year-old’s voice ought to be:

“I cut it so she couldn’t go to prom with you.”

Steven laughed. One syllable, way too loud, up in his throat.

“Okay. Wow.”

And Reese didn’t move. She did not move one inch.

“You hurt my sister all the time,” she said. “I saw the purple marks where you grab her.”

The Faucet Dripped Once and Nobody in That Bathroom Said Anything

That’s what I remember about the next few seconds. The faucet. One drip into the sink.

And Kayla stopped crying.

Not gradually. She stopped like a switch. She went absolutely still against his chest and she did not look up.

And Steven’s arm tightened around her shoulders.

I saw it. I was four feet away and I watched his forearm flex across my daughter’s upper arm, and I watched her not react to it, which is its own answer.

Then he looked at me over the top of her head and he smiled with the bottom half of his face only.

“Kids make up crazy stuff, Mrs. Adams. You know how it is. She’s eight.”

And then, down at my daughter: “Tell her, Kayla. Tell your mom how good I am to you.”

Tell her.

Kayla stared into the sink.

Then My Eight-Year-Old Picked Up My Phone Off the Counter and Opened the Photo Roll Like She’d Practiced It

My phone was on the bathroom counter because I’d come running in with it in my hand and set it down.

Reese walked over, picked it up, swiped, and had the photo roll open in about three seconds.

She had taken them on my phone. Over weeks.

11:48 p.m., Tuesday. Kayla’s left arm, close up, four distinct oval marks on the inside of her bicep, spaced like fingers.

7:02 a.m., Thursday. Her ribs on the right side. A dark bloom under the skin about the size of my palm.

Sunday, 9:15 p.m. Her back, below the shoulder blade. Yellow in the middle, going purple at the edges, which I know now means it was about a week into healing when that picture was taken.

Eleven photographs. Over nineteen days.

My stomach went so fast that I had to put my hand on the towel bar to stay upright.

Because here’s the part I have to live with: my daughter had been getting dressed in that house, every single day, for months, in long sleeves in April and a hoodie at dinner and a one-piece instead of the suit she’d worn the summer before, and I had noticed every single one of those things individually and never once put them together.

My seventeen-year-old had learned to dress like a magician hiding a card.

And the person who caught it was in second grade.

I Asked My Daughter If It Was True and She Didn’t Answer Me

“Kayla.” My voice came out as almost nothing. “Honey. Look at me. Is this true?”

She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say one word. She stood there with her hands at her sides and her head down and she looked at the drain.

And Steven’s face went red — not white, red — and here is what came out of his mouth:

“Those could be from literally anything. She plays volleyball, Mrs. Adams, she gets hit with the ball. This is insane. This is actually insane. I spent like six hundred dollars on tonight. I got a limo. The limo’s paid for.”

The limo.

Not I would never. Not how could you think that. Not one single word about my daughter.

Receipts. He gave me receipts.

That’s the moment — before the recording, before any of the rest of it — that’s the moment I knew, all the way down, that my daughter’s little sister was telling the truth.

Then Reese Pulled a Pink Tape Recorder Out of Her Pajama Pocket

I bought her that thing at a drugstore when she was six for eleven dollars. It’s bright pink plastic with a handle and three big buttons, and it takes those little cassettes, and it was for a game she played where she was a radio host and interviewed the dog.

She had it in her pajama pocket. She’d had it in there the whole time.

She pressed the big one.

What Came Out of That Eleven-Dollar Toy Is the Reason I Am Writing Any of This Down

It was tinny and it was far away and it was absolutely, completely clear.

Steven’s voice. In my living room. Talking to another boy — somebody I later identified and whose name I will not use here, because he was sixteen and because what he actually said on that tape, several times, was dude, no.

They were talking about the afterparty out at somebody’s lake place.

Steven was laughing. He was talking about getting Kayla drunk. And then he was talking about putting something in her drink so that she wouldn’t be able to say no.

And then he said — and I am going to render this as carefully and as plainly as I can, because it does not need any help from me —

He said that if she got pregnant she wouldn’t be going to college in the fall.

He said it like a solution to a problem. He laughed when he said it.

My Daughter Made a Sound I Will Hear for the Rest of My Life

Not a scream. Not crying.

It was a sort of collapse of air out of her, one syllable, and her knees actually went — she caught herself on the edge of the counter.

Because she didn’t know. That’s what that sound was. Whatever he had been doing to her for however long, she had been managing it somehow, in whatever way a seventeen-year-old manages a thing like that.

She did not know about the drink. She found out in her own bathroom, from a pink plastic tape recorder, held up by her eight-year-old sister, with her head shaved.

My Husband Came Into That Bathroom and Told Him to Let Go of Her

Dan had been standing in the hall behind me. He’d come in during the photographs.

He stepped all the way in, which made it very crowded, and he said in a voice I have heard maybe three times in nineteen years of marriage:

“Let go of my daughter. Right now.”

And Steven let go of her.

He put both hands up a little and backed toward the hallway, and Dan moved and was in the doorway, and for exactly one second that boy looked like what he actually was, which was an eighteen-year-old in a stranger’s house with no plan.

And then I watched his eyes change.

They went from frightened to working. Calculating. I have described this to two different people and the only way I can put it is that he went shopping in his own head for something.

And he found it.

He looked at my husband and he smiled.

“I really don’t think you want to do that, Mr. Adams.”

A pause.

“And I think you know why.”

My Husband’s Face Went White and the Entire Bathroom Tilted

I want to be honest about the next four seconds of my life, because I have never told anybody how bad they were.

The color came out of my husband’s face so fast that I thought he was going to go down.

And in those four seconds, standing in my own hallway bathroom, I thought: what is it.

Nineteen years. Two kids. A mortgage. Every single day of my adult life.

And an eighteen-year-old boy said six words and I did not know what my own husband was about to be accused of, and some part of my brain started going through the list anyway, and I have never forgiven myself for the fact that it did.

I lifted my phone with both hands because one wasn’t steady enough, and I opened the camera, and I hit record.

The red dot came on.

Steven saw it.

And then he looked straight past me at my husband and said it.

What He Actually Said Was About a Felony My Husband Had Already Committed, Which He Had Not

“You’ve been paying a guy under the table to run that crew for two years. No workers’ comp, no I-9s, cash out of a coffee can in your truck. I’ve got pictures of the envelopes, Mr. Adams. I’ve been on four of those jobs.”

That was it.

That was the whole thing. That was the piece of leverage that an eighteen-year-old had spent eight months quietly collecting.

My husband owns a three-truck landscaping and hardscape outfit. Eleven guys in the summer. He has been running it since 2009.

And some of what Steven said was true.

Not the way he framed it. Dan has eight employees on the books with withholding and workers’ comp. But for about two years he had also been paying three seasonal guys in cash because that’s how those guys wanted it and because, in his words to me later, “everybody out here does it and I never thought about it twice.”

Steven had been going out on weekend jobs with him since the previous August. Carrying flagstone. Being helpful. Calling him Mr. Adams. Earning two hundred bucks a Saturday.

And photographing envelopes.

An eighteen-year-old boy had spent eight months building a hold on a forty-six-year-old man, against the day he’d need it.

That’s the part that still keeps me up. Not the bruises, not the tape. The eight months.

He didn’t improvise that in my bathroom. He’d had it loaded since fall.

And My Husband Said the Bravest Sentence of His Entire Life

He was white as the sink. His hands were shaking.

And he said:

“Then call them.”

Steven blinked.

“Call whoever you want. Call the labor board. Call the IRS. I’ll pay whatever it costs and I’ll deserve it.” And then, louder: “You are not walking out of my house with a deal.”

I have been married to that man since 2007 and I have never been prouder of nine words in my life.

Because I know exactly what he was weighing in that four seconds. He was weighing penalties, back taxes, possibly losing the business, the house, three kids’ worth of plans — against his daughter.

It took him four seconds.

I have thought a great deal about men who would have taken longer.

Then I Called 911 Standing in My Own Hallway and I Did Not Hang Up

I want to walk through exactly what happened next, because this is the part where people tell me we should have done something dramatic, and we did not, and I would make the same choices again.

Dan did not touch him. Not once. He stood in that doorway with his arms at his sides and he did not lay a hand on that boy, and if he had — if he’d grabbed him, if he’d put him against the wall, which every single part of me wanted — the next six months of our lives would have been about that instead of about what was on a tape recorder.

I called 911 and stayed on. I gave the address. I said there was an eighteen-year-old in my home who I believed had been assaulting my seventeen-year-old daughter, and that I had photographs and an audio recording, and that he was still in the house and was not leaving.

The dispatcher — her name was Rosalind, I found out later and I sent her a card — told me to get my daughters into one room and shut the door and stay on the line.

I got the girls in Kayla’s room and put Reese on the bed with her sister and shut that door and sat with my back against it with the phone on speaker on the carpet.

And Dan stood in the hallway between that door and Steven and did not say another word for eleven minutes.

Steven kept talking the entire time. He talked about lawyers. He talked about how we were overreacting. He told Dan twice more about the envelopes. Then, somewhere around minute eight, he started to cry and said he loved her.

Two officers came at 6:47. I know because the dispatcher told me they were on the street and I heard the car doors.

Nobody Was Arrested in My House That Morning, and I Need to Say That Plainly

Because the version of this story going around online has him taken out in handcuffs through my front door while my daughters watch from the window.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that two officers separated everybody — one with Steven downstairs, one upstairs with us. They looked at the photographs on my phone. They listened to about ninety seconds of the tape and then stopped it and asked me not to play any more of it and to put the recorder down and not touch it again.

That officer’s name was Yetunde and she was maybe thirty and she was extraordinary.

She asked Kayla to come out into the hallway with her, alone, and they were out there about twenty minutes and I was not in that conversation and I have never asked my daughter what she said in it.

Steven left in the back of a patrol car about an hour later, for an interview, not in custody.

And then there was a detective at my kitchen table at eleven that morning, and a woman from a child advocacy center at two in the afternoon who interviewed Reese in a room I was not allowed into — on video, with a trained forensic interviewer, which I did not know was a thing and which is apparently the single most important thing that happened that entire day.

Because an eight-year-old’s statement has to be taken correctly the first time, or it isn’t worth anything, and Yetunde knew that at seven in the morning in my hallway.

My Eight-Year-Old Had Been Collecting Evidence for Nineteen Days and Nobody Had Any Idea

Here’s what the advocacy center interview established, which I learned afterward in pieces.

It started with a bruise on a Tuesday. Kayla came out of the bathroom in a towel and Reese saw her upper arm, and Kayla said she got hit with a ball at practice, and Reese — and I want everybody to hear this — Reese, age eight, said “it looks like a hand.”

She started taking pictures on my phone. She knew my passcode because every child on earth knows their mother’s passcode. She took them at night and in the early morning, when Kayla was asleep or in the shower with the door open.

She told her sister she knew. Once, about ten days in. And Kayla told her she’d be in massive trouble if she said anything to Mom and Dad and made her promise.

So she tried to tell me anyway, twice, and I missed both of them.

This is the part I have had to sit with for seven months.

About two weeks before prom, Reese came into my bedroom at night and said: “Does Kayla have to date Steven?”

And I said: “Nobody has to date anybody, baby. Go to bed.”

And four or five days before, in the car on the way to her gymnastics class, she asked: “If somebody is being mean to somebody, and the somebody says don’t tell, do you have to not tell?”

And I said something about how we don’t keep secrets that make people unsafe, and then the light changed and we talked about something else.

I had it. Twice. An eight-year-old put it in front of me twice in the plainest language she had and I answered the question instead of hearing it.

And then on the Thursday night before prom, she recorded the tape.

Steven was in our living room with another boy. Reese was supposed to be in bed. She was on the stairs, around the corner, with a pink plastic tape recorder from a drugstore, because she’d figured out on her own — at eight — that nobody would believe a kid.

She told the interviewer: “Grown-ups believe things they can hear.”

And the Reason She Shaved Her Sister’s Head Is the Most Devastating Thing in This Entire Story

Because she had the tape by Thursday night.

And she did not come to me with it.

The advocacy center interviewer asked her why, and this is in the record, and I have read it maybe forty times:

“Because I told Mom twice and she said go to bed. And Kayla said if I told, she’d hate me forever. So I thought if she just couldn’t go to the party, then nobody would have to find out and she wouldn’t hate me and she’d still be okay.”

She didn’t shave her sister’s head for revenge, or for drama, or because she didn’t understand what she was doing.

She did it because she had concluded, at eight years old, that no adult in her house was going to act, and that the only power she personally had over the situation was making her sister physically unable to attend a party.

She solved it with the only tool an eight-year-old has, which is doing something so enormous that somebody finally has to look.

And she was right. That’s what gets me. She was right. If she had walked up to me on Friday with a pink tape recorder and no hair on the floor, I think — I genuinely think — I would have taken the tape, and been horrified, and then I would have sat down with Steven and his parents, and he would have cried and said it was a joke, and we would have “handled it,” and she would have gone to that prom.

It took a bedroom full of blonde hair to get me to actually stop.

What Happened Over the Following Fourteen Months Was Almost Entirely Paperwork and It Was Boring

I need to be accurate about this because the version online has a courtroom scene in it.

Steven was charged. I’m not going to list the counts, because they changed twice and because naming them tells you more about my daughter than she wants told. The conduct in the photographs and the conduct on the recording were both part of it.

It did not go to trial. It resolved in a plea, eleven months in. He received a juvenile-to-adult split disposition — he was eighteen but most of the conduct spanned his seventeenth year — with a custodial component, probation, mandated treatment, and a no-contact order.

He did serve time. Not a lot. Less than people want and more than nothing.

Reese never testified. The forensic interview was recorded properly and the plea came before any of that was needed, and I will be grateful to Officer Yetunde Balogun for the rest of my life for the twenty minutes of competence she showed in my hallway at seven in the morning.

And my husband self-reported.

I want that in here because it’s the part I’m proudest of and the part nobody asks about.

Eleven days after that morning, Dan hired an accountant and a lawyer and went to the state voluntarily about the cash payroll. Back taxes, penalties, interest, the full amount. It came to a little under twenty-six thousand dollars and we put it on a payment plan that runs until 2028.

All three of those guys are on the books now with workers’ comp.

He did it before anybody asked him to. He did it because an eighteen-year-old had held it over his head in a bathroom and he was never going to be holdable again.

Steven’s parents never spoke to us. Not once. Not a word, not a letter, nothing, for fourteen months. His mother unfriended me on Facebook on a Sunday in May and that is the entirety of the communication.

Kayla Did Not Go to Prom and She Did Not Leave the House for Eleven Days

The dress went back. The limo was somebody else’s problem. I called the school on Monday and told the counselor as much as I had to.

What I was not prepared for was the eleven days.

She didn’t cry much after that first morning. She stayed in her room and she slept a lot and she wore a knit cap she got out of the winter bin and wouldn’t take it off, including at the table, which we allowed.

And she would not look at her sister.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. For about three weeks, Kayla could not be in a room with Reese. Not out of hatred — out of something much more complicated that it took a therapist to name for me, which was that her little sister had seen everything, and knowing that somebody had watched her let that happen for nineteen days was more than she could carry on top of the rest of it.

Reese took that very hard. She kept trying. She kept leaving things outside Kayla’s door — a drawing, a granola bar, her own tablet once.

What Fixed It Was Not Me, and It Was Not a Conversation, and It Happened in a Bathroom at 10:40 at Night

Day twenty-two.

I was in the kitchen and I heard the clippers go on upstairs.

I came up those stairs with my heart in my throat and the hallway bathroom door was open and both my daughters were in there.

Kayla was sitting on the closed toilet lid with the clippers in her hand.

And Reese was sitting on the bath mat in front of her with her back turned, and her hair — which is thick and dark and goes to the middle of her back and which that child has never once let me cut above her shoulders — was on the floor.

She’d asked for it. She told me later she’d knocked on the door and said “you can do mine, so it’s the same.”

Kayla looked up at me in the doorway with the clippers running and said:

“Mom, she asked. She asked four times.”

And I stood in that doorway and I said the only correct thing available, which was:

“Then let me get a towel, because you’re making a mess.”

They were both bald by eleven o’clock at night. Kayla did a much better job on Reese than Reese had done on her.

And they slept in the same bed that night for the first time since it happened, and that was the end of the worst part.

Seven Months Later, Here Is What It Actually Looks Like, and It Is Unremarkable

Kayla is eighteen. Her hair is about four inches long and she has decided she likes it short and is keeping it that way, which I did not see coming.

She started at the state school in the fall, which is the single most important fact in this entire story, because that boy said out loud on a tape recorder that he had a plan to make sure she didn’t.

She’s in a dorm an hour and ten minutes away. She comes home about every third weekend. She sees a therapist named Priyanka every Thursday on a video call and has not missed one.

She is not fine. I’m not going to tell you she’s fine. There are things about doors and about people coming up behind her that are different now and may always be.

But she is eighteen and in a dorm and taking a biology class she complains about constantly, and I will take it.

Reese is nine. Her hair is back to her shoulders. She’s in fourth grade. She has decided, with total seriousness, that she wants to be a police officer, and we have not discouraged it.

The pink tape recorder is in a box in our safe deposit box downtown, because the detective told us in May to keep the original and never record over it, and I would not have it in my house anyway.

I bought her a new one. A purple one. She has never once used it.

What I’d Tell Any Parent Who Has a Kid Asking Them a Strange Question in the Car

Three things. The third one is the one that actually matters.

One: a bruise shaped like fingers is not a sports injury, and long sleeves in April are information. My daughter wore a hoodie to dinner in a warm house for about two months. She switched from a two-piece to a one-piece. She stopped changing in front of her sister. I noticed every single one of those things individually, on the day it happened, and never once stacked them up next to each other. If you are noticing a series of small odd things about somebody you love and you keep producing a separate harmless explanation for each one, write them down in one place on one piece of paper. That’s all. Just put them on one page. The page will tell you something the days didn’t.

Two: if a young person ever tells you a thing like this, call the police before you call the other family. Every instinct I had that morning was to call Steven’s mother and have a terrible, honest, adult conversation. That instinct is wrong and it would have ruined everything. A trained officer came into my house and knew — immediately, without being asked — that an eight-year-old’s statement had to be taken on video by a forensic interviewer or it would be worth nothing later. I did not know that. You don’t know that. Dial the three numbers, say what you have, and then do what they tell you, and do not touch the evidence or let anybody play it again.

Three: when a child asks you a hypothetical question, they are not being hypothetical.

That’s the one. That’s the entire thing I’d want anybody to take away from a story about a razor and a tape recorder.

Two weeks before prom, my eight-year-old stood in my bedroom doorway at night and asked, “Does Kayla have to date Steven?”

And four days before, in the car, she asked, “If somebody’s being mean to somebody, and the somebody says don’t tell, do you have to not tell?”

Those are not questions. Those are reports, filed in the only language an eight-year-old has available, which is the third person and the conditional.

Children almost never walk up and state a thing. They test the water with a hypothetical first, to find out what the adult will do with it, and if the adult answers the hypothetical — reasonably, kindly, in about nine seconds, the way I did, twice — they conclude that the real version is not welcome here.

So my daughter went and got an eleven-dollar tape recorder instead. And when that didn’t feel like enough, she took her father’s razor off the bathroom shelf at six in the morning and did the biggest thing a second-grader can physically do, because she had run out of other ideas.

If a kid in your life ever asks you a question that starts with if somebody — stop the car. Turn the radio off. Sit down on the floor if you have to.

And ask: “Are we talking about somebody real, baby?”

Four words. I had two chances at them and I missed both, and the cost of that was my seventeen-year-old’s hair on a bedroom floor and a little girl who thought she was alone in a house with four people in it.

Now I want to hear from you.

Was she right to shave her sister’s head — the only thing an eight-year-old could physically do to stop that night from happening — or is there a version of this where she just hands her mother the tape?

And here’s the one I really want argued out in the comments on the Facebook video: this mother was asked two hypothetical questions in two weeks, by an eight-year-old, and gave two reasonable nine-second answers. How much of those nineteen days belongs to her?

If this story got you, share it with your friends and family. Somebody on your list has a kid who’s been asking strange “if somebody” questions lately and getting a reasonable answer every time — send it to them, because that’s the only part of this story that could still change an outcome for somebody.

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