The first time we saw Leona’s armpit hair, it called to us. Us! The smooth-pitted girls of third period AP Environmental Science. Can you believe it? Though we seemed unlikely candidates for its magnetism, the armpit hair electrified something dormant inside our hearts, a primal edge, which had been plastered over with vanilla scented lotion and glitter nail polish.

Later, when we looked through our school yearbook (wondering, how could we have missed her all along, this armpit pioneer?), we had to hunt for her smudged form in the background of candid shots, her face pixelated beyond recognition, her combat boots and dark clothes rendered into shadows on the page. But something incredible possessed her in class that day and she snapped into view.

The edges of flowing armpit hair peeked out of her tank top, like a whisper of tantalizing gossip in the hallway. It was the first day of our senior year, and it appeared that Leona had failed to shave over the summer.

“Someone call the zoo,” a boy snickered.

Leona rolled her eyes. “Shut up.”

“APES stands for AP Environmental Science, not what you’re supposed to look like,” another boy hollered from across the room.

Defying the boys was a sure way to become their target, so we didn’t say anything in her defense, our desire for that kind of freedom not yet understood. We’d begun shaving our pits around the fifth grade, fourth grade, or third grade, after a kid made fun of our diaphanous fuzz, or we realized that other girls were doing it, or in our rush to grow up. If our mothers didn’t allow it, we stole their razors, using only water, the process leaving our skin raw and nicked. Or if we did have mothers who encouraged it, they bought us expensive razors with moisturizing strips, and showed us their ways. However we entered the world of hair removal, we perfected our techniques over time. We washed our flesh with soap, pressed pink foam into our palms, shaved our pits smooth, and then deodorized them until they smelled like dreams rather than body parts.

We tried to put Leona’s armpit hair out of our minds, but she kept coming to school with pits bared and fuzzy. A taunt, a provocation. Us girls of slick pits passed notes to each other in class, never identifying who wrote what with a signature, our words pressing into each other, which is how we learned that the hair had infiltrated our subconscious: I had a dream last night of this lady with the longest armpit hair I’ve ever seen.

WHAT! Same!

In my dream, it was so long it wrapped around her body like a dress.

After that, we couldn’t deny our curiosity. So, as teenagers do, we looked up what we could online. We typed in women celebrities long pit hair, and then is long pit hair normal, and then how long can pit hair grow? We searched for home remedies for hair growth, for supplements and hair stimulation routines. It would take about a month to grow armpit hair, we learned, and so we agreed: we’d give it that long and see how it went. We did so in secret, wearing only shirts with sleeves to school.

When the stubble arrived, we hated how wrong it felt, how cruel, how biting. Our pits smelled sour, like our new hair held onto our stink. We could have quit then—it would have been easy to shave—but every time one of us wavered, the other girls said, “You’ve spent so much time growing it out and it only takes a second to undo it. You can’t stop now.”

We wanted to see how far we could take this. At the drugstore, we pretended to buy Rogaine for our fathers and then slathered it underneath our arms, blinking away the eye-stinging cloud of chemicals. We choked down triple-strength fish oil tablets and moisturized our pits with jojoba each night, massaging our fingers into our underarms as if they were beloved pets. Soon, our hair started growing—like, really growing. We gained an inch in a week. By spring semester, it grew to the end of our ribs. Once the hair became long enough, we braided it, crimped it, wore tiny clips in it copped from the dolls that our families had long ago put into storage. We stopped wearing deodorant because it made the hair appear crumbly and, anyway, we came to like the way our bodies stunk, the celery crisp, the acrid bite, the yeasty must. We cut the sleeves off every shirt we owned so the world could see.

We felt so free! We didn’t realize until then: our whole lives, we’d done exactly as we were told. We’d draped ourselves in nice, clean clothes and curled our hair in waves and worn necklaces with our birth stones and eaten only one piece of birthday cake when really we wanted two or three. What had that gotten us? The boys resented us before we grew out our pit hair, too, it’s just that they were more open about it once we stopped caring about them. The thick underarm hair that was once the bane of our existence had become a lucky charm. We gelled our pit hair into mohawks and split it into zig-zag parts and separated it into precious pigtails. We dyed it and highlighted it.

Our families acted like we’d gotten brain transplants. Our fathers said, “I don’t want to comment on a young lady’s body, but I just don’t get it.”

Our little brothers said, “Gross!”

Our mothers asked, “Honey, is everything all right at school?”

The answer was yes and the answer was no. Our numbers grew beyond AP Environmental Science and, at lunch, the girls with long pit hair gathered on the quad to braid each other’s underarm locks. We girls got along better than we ever had. Hierarchies fell away. We lost the old markers of judgment that we once levied against each other. In this new world, was it better to have a shrub of crinkly hair or dense curls or blonde wisps that turned translucent in the light? Who was to say! We loved our own hair and we loved each other’s hair in equal turn.

Leona didn’t join us. Though she’d been the origin of our fascination, her armpit hair remained a normal length. She didn’t style it or even bare it every day. She eyed us suspiciously when we waved for her to join us on the quad, staying close to her smooth-pit friends.

The boys wouldn’t stop harassing us. “It’s like a horse tail,” they said, pinching our armpit hair as we walked past in the hallway. We yanked away from their appraisal, but it wasn’t always enough. One of the sophomore girls caught fire in chemistry when a boy held a Bunsen burner to her pit hair. She went to the nurse’s office for second-degree burns.

The next day, Dean Clipton banned long, visible pit hair. “Our goal is to maintain a learning atmosphere where all students can focus on their education,” his voice crackled over the P.A. system. “Some forms of personal grooming, including the visibility of excessive body hair, have disrupted the learning environment and created a distraction among students.”

What a coward! What bullshit! Who was really being disruptive and distracting? We all knew. Why should we have to suffer because the boys couldn’t mind their own business? And whose right was it to say that our hair was excessive? So we protested. We walked out of class and paraded outside with cardboard signs that read Don’t Trim Our Freedom, and Stop Policing Our Pits, and Is Dean Clipton Fur-Real?, and No Justice, No Pits, and We Won’t Clip It, Clipton.

The local news arrived. We told them that we called ourselves the Pit Crew and gave them pseudonyms: Pitrice, Pittoria, Pitmantha, Pitney. While the cameras rolled, we shouted, “Pits de résistance!” We knotted our armpit hair together—it had really grown quite long—and formed a human wall outside the campus.

Human rights advocates caught wind of what was happening and challenged Dean Clipton, as they found nothing in the dress code about bodily hair. They argued that the administration was sexist—after all, plenty of boys had pit hair, and none of them had been reprimanded. The school didn’t want more of a scene than had already taken place, so they allowed us to return to class with our underarm hair intact.

The protest went, as you might imagine, completely viral. There’s a scientific term called the hundredth monkey effect. Basically, when a hundred monkeys have learned something new—how to use a tool or what plant is safe to eat—that is a tipping point and then all the monkeys around the world do this new thing. That’s what it was like, except with armpit hair. One girl grew out her armpit hair and then another girl grew out her armpit hair and, eventually, girls across the globe grew out their armpit hair, and it was good. Their hair flowed, no longer mangled by razors or suppressed by wax.

We thought of those years we lost, years we could have had our armpit hair, and we wept. We’d been held back by the bondage of the razor! Our girlhoods sanitized! But we embraced what we’d discovered and what we’d created with it. Some of us became famous online, leveraging our pseudonyms from the protest to reach a larger audience. Boys, both at our school and online, couldn’t get over our hair, and some of them shaved their armpits on live feeds in protest and we watched and we laughed. We hoped they enjoyed being slaves to smooth pits!

But the struggle never went away, and isn’t that sad? We heard stories of girls whose mothers forced them to shave, who woke up in the night and discovered that their brother had hacked off their armpit hair with blunt scissors. We commented on their social media posts and encouraged them not to give up, and then we crowdfunded for adhesive wigs they could stick under their arms until their own hair grew back again.

Still, as summer approached and college loomed, fear of our dissolution flickered at the back of our throats. We were right to feel that way, because change came for us, as change does. It began with Leona, as we should have guessed it would. She traded her black clothes for neutrals, combat boots for flats, ripped tank tops for sweaters. Finally, during PE, Pittoria saw: Leona had shaved. The fresh razor bumps rose like a scourge on her delicate skin. We cornered her before AP Environmental Science.

“You shaved,” Pitrice said.

Leona shrugged. “Why do you give a shit? Doesn’t pit liberation mean I can do what I want?”

“Of course,” Pitney said. “But you made a choice—a choice to shave. We just want to know why.”

Annoyance flashed across Leona’s face. “Because I didn’t need armpit hair as a stand in for a personality.”

We realized what she took us for then. She had been a rogue armpit warrior in uncertain times, growing out her body hair naturally and without fuss, which made us…what? Posers, we supposed. We shrunk with embarrassment. What had felt so authentic to us now seemed cheap.

Worse, we understood that Leona’s rejection of pit hair forecasted something bigger: the movement had grown too large, too diluted. Meek girls had grown weary of the threats of violence. Follower girls never felt true commitment. Cool girls were poised to move on long before the trend cycled out.

Indeed, our liberation took on the rise and fall of a fad. Armpit influencers got sponsorship deals from razor companies or sugaring salons to remove their hair. We resented them, but we couldn’t blame them. They were just getting theirs while the getting was good. Back when this all started, we’d only planned to grow our hair for a month, but we’d had almost a full academic year with our pit hair before it trended out—we tried to be grateful for the time we’d had.

When we left for college, most of the Pit Crew returned to using our legal names and shaved our pits or, at least, trimmed our hair. “We want to be known for more than our bodies,” those unfaithful among us said. What they really meant was: they’d outgrown this phase as quickly as we’d grown out our hair.

Pitney kept her hair the longest. For years, she maintained a social media account dedicated to ASMR videos of her combing through her pits with a miniature boar-bristle brush. Eventually, she shut it down. A few years after college, she gave birth to a baby whose sticky hands yanked out a chunk of her armpit hair and, after that, she was done. She removed all her body hair; lasered it off so it would never grow back. She shaved her head and eyebrows, too, as if a world that couldn’t handle her armpit hair deserved none of her hair at all. Or, hell, maybe it was just to keep it out of the way of her grabby, sticky, icky baby. 

But I, Pitmantha, have lain in wait. Our high school reunion approaches. I have four months to prepare. My pits are smooth, but I oil them every night. I swallow biotin pills and chug collagen supplements. I finally understand the power of an unruly body, and I am ready to reclaim mine. I want to grow my hair past my knees. I want to walk into the reunion and watch faces twist in disgust, amazement, nostalgia. I want my hair to float into the warm beers held by the men who once threatened us, and for it to choke them as they drink.

The tendrils will spring up quickly, my old friends. I throw away my razor. I am ready.

---

Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, CA. Her short stories have been published by Wired, The Pinch, Salt Hill, Puerto del Sol, and others. She is the winner of New Ohio Review’s 2022 Editor’s Prize for Fiction and was a 2020 Writing By Writers fellow. In 2023, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut hybrid memoir, Holy Mother!, will be published in fall 2027.

---