I go where my camera takes me

Today I let one of the girls at my internship paint my nails. A few girls exclaimed, “that’s weird!” and one boy timidly asked, “are you actually letting her paint your nails?” I told them that boys are allowed to paint their nails and asked them who told them they couldn’t? None of them had an answer. And one-by-one the boys came over to the nail painting station and started doing their own nails, and each others nails, and one boy even got really excited and asked if he could do my other hand and it was just a really cool thing to see. When the parents came to pick up the kids, the boy who had enthusiastically painted my nails, started scraping off his nail polish. I asked him why he was doing that an he said that one time he wore his sister’s nail polish and his dad gave him a “whoopin’”. And then, in the meekest voice I’ve very heard, he whispers, “but next time I come to [the program], I think I’ll just paint them again, anyways… I think sometimes parents can be wrong about stuff too.” I half-smiled and whispered back, “I think you might be right.” And helped him take the rest off with nail polish remover.