Hair today and gone tomorrow - the tale of the Mohawk

Charlie sometimes defies description.  That's mainly because he won't leave his hair in the same style more than a few days running.  He is constantly experimenting with it and changing up, I guess because while in the orphanage he had no control.  When they were cutting hair, everyone got hair done, and everyone looked the same.  Everyone had the exact same cut, because the kids' preferences were never taken into account, and it was easier to just do the same exact thing to every child.  Now that Charlie is the boss of his own body, he wants to have some fun. 

I put up with it up to a point.  I won't allow tattoos until he's older and out on his own, because that's permanent, but hair?  It grows back. 

He has really tested me on that view, however. 

My mother at one point had been putting highlights in my hair, and there was some stuff left over, so she jokingly asked Charlie if he wanted some highlights, too.  He said yes, and unlike her, he wasn't joking. 

So she put them in.  And he loved it.

So the next time, he got bolder.  He decided he wanted to go blond--on one side of his head.  He bought a bleach kit and took it to my mother's house, and explained what he wanted.  The right side of his head blond, the left side leave black.  We tried to explain that his hair was not going to go blond.  He didn't care, wanted to try.  She looked at me, and I just threw up my hands, so she went ahead and did it. 

What Charlie ended up with was the right side of his head ORANGE and the left side black.  Hmmm, not quite what he had in mind, but it would do. 

He paraded around like that for a couple of days, but then the black started growing in at the bottom.  And that's when he got his grand idea...

His brother was going for a haircut, and Charlie's was starting to get long, so Rick took him along.  When Charlie told the nice lady at the Hair Cuttery what he wanted, she refused to do it until Rick called home and got me on the phone to tell her it was okay to do whatever he wanted.    I knew then it was gonna be radical.

The boy came home with a striped mohawk. Split down the middle, an orange stripe and a black stripe. All sitting on little black roots. Don't believe me?