You’d think that the hijab—the word in Arabic means “partition” and is commonly used to refer to the head scarf of an observant Muslim woman—would at least prevent bad-hair days. But Halima Aden, who made headlines last winter as the first hijab-wearing high-fashion model on runways in New York and Milan, says that isn’t so.

“Your hair has to be smoothed down or it’s going to be puffy—it won’t look as clean and neat,” explains the nineteen-year-old Somali- American, born in a refugee camp in Kenya, as we travel by car to her hometown of St. Cloud, Minnesota. With an adorably dimpled smile she adds, “But everyone has days when it looks a bit ‘off.’ ”

That’s the thing about Halima—her past experience may be unfamiliar to others, but she finds common ground wherever she goes.

A small photograph of her from a few years back hangs in a hallway of her alma mater, Apollo High School in St. Cloud. Teenagers—some in head scarves, others in flannel shirts and work boots—jostle by it on the way to class and during the call to prayer. There’s still a bit of baby fat on the ninth-grade girl in the picture, who wears a printed hijab but shows no hint of shyness in her dazzling grin. Today Halima is a slim five feet five inches tall—petite for a fashion model—but her unstoppable ebullience, meteoric career, and 182,000 Instagram followers (@kinglimaa) make the sign she’s holding in the picture seem eerily prophetic. On it she’d written, “I was born ‘2’ stand out!”

And stand out she has. A year ago, she was elected the first Muslim homecoming queen in her high school’s—and St. Cloud’s—history. “I saw how even something as small as that brought my community and my school together, how it encouraged other girls like me to join student government and clubs,” she says over lunch at a food court popular with high-schoolers. A mauve head scarf frames her expressive black eyes and full lips that cover a mouthful of braces. A black abaya—a long-sleeved, floor-length robe—flows over the spiky, three-and-a-half-inch heels in which she moves about easily. Other girls in head scarves, she recalls, “were coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, I want to go to prom’ or ‘How do I get into orchestra?’ Stuff that I had no idea about, but they were still coming to me for advice.”