By Lushia Anson

Photo by Abby Burgess

A six-year old Madie Mullinix ’15 watched in awe as her mother, a hairstylist, carefully cut a customer’s hair. Many young children aspire to be like their parents, but Mullinix decided to take those ambitions into her own hands.

The next day, her father was supposed to take care of her while her mother was out of the house, but he fell asleep on the couch.

“I somehow managed to get upstairs and I don’t know why… but I had … I’m pretty sure they were safety scissors… and I actually took a chunk of my hair and cut it so it was really short,” Mullinix said.

Unfortunately, her mother was not very happy with Mullinix’s attempt at hairstyling.

“My mom got home, like 30 minutes later and she saw this and completely started yelling at me,” she said.

Heartbroken, Mullinix decided to take drastic measures: she decided to run away from home.

“I had watched like Home Alone and all that jazz,” she said. “[I thought] ‘I know what I need to do to get out of here.’”

Before leaving, Mullinix gathered up her provisions.

“So I stole a towel,” she said. “And I put a pair of pants, a stuffed animal, and I think a granola bar and wrapped it up in the towel. And I was like, ‘okay, I’m good .’”

She then snuck out the back door and out to the side of the road, planning to run away to a big city like Los Angeles or New York.

“I stuck out my thumb,” she said. “I was like, ‘okay, this is going to summon a taxi.’”

After a while, she grew weary waiting for the taxi that would never come for her, and was also starting to get a bit hungry.

“I snuck into my neighbors’ house through the back door,” she said. “They didn’t know I was there because they were just sitting in the living room. I knew my neighbors a little bit … but not well enough that I would just mosey on into their house.”

Eventually, her neighbors came downstairs and were shocked to discover Mullinix.

“Well, first, they told me I was doing a crappy job because I only went next door, and they were like ‘your parents are really worried about you, you should go home,’” Mullinix said. “I was like, ‘I’m bald on one side, they don’t want me!’”

However, her neighbors managed to convince her to go back home and face her mother, who then, to her dismay, grounded her.