I totally didn’t recognise the guy at first—Nathan and Deep were the only two guys in the copyediting section—but half a second later it hit me. Nathan got a haircut! And what a haircut! His unruly halo of bouncy dirty-blond curls was completely gone, hacked away almost to the roots, and what remained gave him an entirely different shape, a subtle mid-fade that made him look ten years more dapper. Would you believe it?

“Oh my gosh,” I gasped, almost reflexively.

But he averted his eyes, and in the shift I could pick up notes of diffidence. He didn’t seem comfortable in his new look yet. Hints of dread. He was playing out the next interaction in his head, and so was I. Oh my god she’s probably going to say something about my hair, he was probably thinking, not realising that everybody else has said the exact same thing. And suddenly I wanted to prove to him, in this precarious split-second, that I could say something original instead. To free him from the tedium of suffering through the same exact conversation for the twentieth time, and thereby show myself to be a more empathetic person than the rest. So I froze up on the spot, because otherwise my next utterance was totally going to be “Haaaaaaaair!!!!”

“Heyyyyy!!!!” it came out instead, not entirely convincingly.

Nathan laughed one of those laughs that came out as somewhere between a nose-exhale and a snicker. “It’s okay,” he said, “you can say it.”

At the last second I massaged my originally planned utterance into something more reasonable. “Nice haircut!”

“Thanks. I hate it.”

What? No, don’t say that, that’s the first thing everybody else would say. You’re more original than that.

But … but you actually look good in it! No, don’t say that either. It might make him feel bad about wanting the hair he wanted. You’re also more original than that.

So I said, “Aw,” but not before adding, “but, I mean, it’ll grow back, right?”

“Thanks,” he chuckled, “that’s what everybody says.”