Bear Hat, by Ben Evans

Many of you have probably already become acquainted with my hat. For those of you who haven’t, well, you’d know it if you saw it. It’s shaped like a bear’s head, its mouth frozen in a permanent snarl. Lately I’ve been wearing it a lot, and the people at my school have more or less gotten used to it. It’s when I’m riding or waiting for the bus that things start to get… weird.

Now, of course I don’t find it at all strange that people might be a little, shall we say, surprised by the sight of a 16-year old boy with a bear on his head. And when I’m clumsily humming Don‘t Stop Me Now, well then all the better. What interests me is how often people try to look like they don’t find it surprising. It’s as if they think that I’d be genuinely offended if anyone looked at my snarling-animal-hat in a strange way. Sometimes they look at my hat out of the corner of their eye when they think I’m not looking, as if to say “Why is he wearing that thing on his head? Is that sort of thing popular these days? Or is he trying to make some sort of statement? Maybe that’s it, maybe he’s expressing his disgust with… oh god, what if he’s part of a gang?! Yes, I think I heard about them on the news… The Bears? Is that what they were called? The Bearheads? What if he’s trying to hijack the bus?!”

Now, all this doesn’t bother me that much. Except sometimes. You see, every once in a while it’ll take me a little bit to fully realize just why someone’s staring at me. And just like that, that troublesome little voice in my head known as “confidence” starts to say: “Dude! That girl’s checking you out!” And then, as if that weren’t horribly confusing enough, sometimes the girl will be with a friend, and they start to giggle. I tell you, it’s just about enough to drive a man mad, the knowledge that it is not you the girl is looking at, but the dangerous woodland creature on your head. And lately things have been getting even more ridiculous. Just a few days ago a girl literally stopped me on the street, just to ask me where I got my hat. Maddening.

I don’t mind though. It’s quite a comfortable hat. And even more comforting is the knowledge that, out of all the people who saw me that day, at least one of them must have gone home and said “Honey, you’ll never believe what I saw on my way home!”