“We all know Stella,” she was overheard snorting to Leonard the next day. “She’s immature and always has to have her own way. In her mind, just because she finally decides to get her hair styled, that means the whole world should stop in its tracks. So when my car breaks down and Mom has to pick me up instead of driving her into Seekonk for her all-important appointment, what’s her natural reaction? Tizzy overdrive!”
As with many wrong theories, this one also wasn’t completely devoid of truth. My mother had promised to drive me to get my hair cut, and in fact, this was the third appointment the distracted woman had made me cancel due to last-minute “emergencies.” And I was indeed desperate to fix my appearance. It probably sounds strange, but after the move I started obsessing about things. I felt self-conscious about how much I’d grown over the summer—I’d always been on the tall side, but now I stood just over six feet in my socks. And my superlong hair was suddenly all wrong. I was all wrong. It didn’t help matters that on my second day at my new school, as I ambled down the aisle to take my seat in Algebra, I passed a girl in a mohair cardigan and overheard her whisper, “Hippie Bigfoot,” to the girl beside her, another mohair cardigan. I nearly died. Clearly, some drastic change was required if I was going to fit in around here. And since there was nothing I could do about my height, I suddenly felt my ’do was the obvious place to start. Something shorter, with more style, more oomph. Even though it would be a sacrifice, I was determined to make it happen as soon as possible.
But it wasn’t my family’s constant crises that led me to the radical mutilation of my coiffure.
Some people say it was because of Mr. Brenigan, the Vice Principal at Opequonsett High School. They point out that the very day I got busy with the scissors happened to be the same one in which the high school Powers That Be sent me home for wearing an allegedly obscene article of clothing. All it had been was a plain army-green T-shirt, albeit snug-fitting, onto which I’d added two handprints in yellow acrylic paint. But the small-minded autocrats in the front office felt that since the two handprints happened to fall on my breasts, the shirt was somehow inappropriate for a learning environment. The shirt was, of course, art. It was also the trademark look of Sista Slash, the famous activist and musical anarchist. I used to wear mine at my old school all the time, so when I picked it out that morning I honestly hadn’t thought anything of it. But Mr. Brenigan insisted that I could return to school only after I’d changed into more appropriate attire.
Even now I can remember his exact words:
“Opequonsett High doesn’t have a dress code, exactly. It’s just that we have an unwritten line and that shirt crosses it.” Mr. Brenigan, who looks like a tired Michelin Man with a receding hairline, leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers together while he talked, as if what he was saying was deep.
“But . . . what about freedom of expression?” I asked, trying to hide the fact that I was nearly crapping in my jeans. It wasn’t as if I’d ever been sent home from school when I lived in Tempe. Juvenile delinquency was new to me.
Mr. Brenigan gave me a steady gaze that went on and on. I began to wonder with growing alarm whether I’d missed something. That’s another thing you ought to understand about me—I often found myself struggling to keep up, and it freaked me out a little. Maybe because every other member of my family was certifiably brilliant. My father, a biochemistry PhD like my mother, was working on a cure for pancreatic cancer in St. Louis. My sister was at Brown. My mother ran a lab that sounded like something straight out of science fiction, for godsakes! Even my step-family was impressive. Leonard had started his own software company and was a millionaire by age twenty-five, and the step-monkeys, at eight, were already demonstrating a surprising aptitude for taking apart their electronic toys and putting them back together again. My own apparent dumbness was a source of constant embarrassment. In biology class on my very first day, for example, instead of paying attention to Mrs. Birch’s long, boring speech about some moth in England, I’d found myself staring at Mrs. Birch’s belly, which stuck out from her otherwise-slender body like a beach ball. At the end of the lecture, when the teacher asked if anybody had questions, I raised my hand and asked, “Are you pregnant?” At this, the boy next to me quipped, “No, Einstein, she just stuck a pillow under her shirt. It’s the latest fashion.” The class broke out in fits of laughter. I tried to shrink in my chair.
Anyway, during Mr. Brenigan’s long silence I felt myself blush.
Eventually he half smiled. “You can’t change the world. We run a tight ship here, Stella, and everybody’s part of the same crew. I don’t know what you were used to back in Arizona”—at this point he eyed me significantly as if he were studying an obvious bad egg from a scandalous part of the country—“but you’ll soon learn that here, we respect the rules. Written and unwritten.”
As you might imagine, that almost sent me into a frustrated conniption. So it does seem plausible that the T-shirt incident, together with Mr. Brenigan’s speech, the memory of my stolen Arizona life, and the reality of finding myself an outcast in a new unfriendly school in a hostile new state, as well as my mother’s obvious disregard for my feelings might, in combination, have been enough to set off the whirlwind of snapping scissors and flying hair that soon followed.
But it wasn’t. Not quite.
Not to say that each of those points didn’t weigh on my troubled mind. They absolutely did. But what ultimately sent me storming into the bathroom that night was something else.
So what was it? All right. I’ll tell you.
The truth was, I didn’t really know. All I understood was that I’d had a feeling welling up inside me for a while, a feeling I’d barely noticed at first but that now was growing so fast it was practically taking over everything else. Like I was going to explode. Like all the atoms in my body were getting ready to burst and it was only a question of when.
I was a walking time bomb.
A piece of paper I received that day may also have contributed to The Hair Incident. In some other week, perhaps, the bad news delivered on this document might have rolled right off me instead of hitting me head-on like a renegade garbage truck. But given my volatile state in that monumentally crappy twenty-four-hour period, it’s possible that this little spark might have been all that was needed to set me off.
So what was it?
It arrived in the mail. At home that afternoon, waiting for my mother to drive me to my appointment (still unaware that said appointment wasn’t to be), I checked the mailbox. I noticed the envelope addressed to me right away—it was long and white and in the top left corner was the address of J. Edgar Hoover Middle School in Tempe, Arizona. There were several stickers eventually directing the letter to Rhode Island. I had a sudden idea what it was. Back in June, my old school had held a “Future Careers Fair” where a nurse, an insurance salesman, two artists and a veterinarian spoke to a crowd of eighth graders about their jobs. We could choose to take short written multiple-choice tests that were supposed to tell us about our personalities, aptitudes and the kinds of careers we might consider someday. Foolishly, I’d signed up and taken the tests. The results were apparently mailed late and, since my family had moved, had taken even more time to find their way to me. To be honest, by then I’d forgotten all about that fair.
But now here was the envelope. So I opened it.
Within seconds I felt like day-old crap.
Now, please forgive me if I don’t detail everything the letter said, except to say that it included an IQ score that confirmed my worst suspicions about myself. I knew something about IQ scores. My mother, a member of Mensa, the club for people with intelligence quotients in the top two percent of the general population, has an IQ of 164. I knew that 100 was average. So when I saw the number written by my name, that about-to-explode sensation I’d felt growing inside me for days quickly swelled until it was almost unbearable, until it literally throbbed through my body. Here was indisputable proof of why I so often foun
d myself lost in class, why I was bad at math, bad at English, bad at everything.
Eighty-four.
In a family of geniuses, I was now a documented dummy.
I believe there are moments that can make you burst out of yourself, smash through the boundaries of your everyday life, the unhappy existence you have until then accepted without protest, and make a change that is dramatic, unexpected and right. And that, my friends, is the only explanation I can offer for what I did to my hair that night, why I apparently lost my mind.
Within minutes after my mother came home, I was at the bathroom sink with my hands gripping the porcelain so hard my knuckles were white. In the mirror my bangs covered my eyes, and shapeless turd-brown hair framed my grimacing face like limp drapes. Eighty-four! I wanted to scream but didn’t. Instead, I held the scissors just above my left cheek and made the first cut. A long ribbon of hair fell to the floor. After hacking off the length from first one side, then the other, I reached behind my neck and bunched the remaining length in my fist.
It was gone in one vicious chop.
I was burning so hot that I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d finally figured out why everybody else always seemed to make the decisions without asking me, why the universe was out of my control, run by the crappy ideas of other people. It was because I was stupid. I hated my life. And each slice of the scissors felt like a stab at my whole messed-up world.
Here’s what I thought of Mr. Brenigan. Yank-snip!
Here’s what I thought of natural selection and genetic variation. Yank-snip! Yank-snip!
It was only when I noticed the impressive piles of hair in the sink and on the floor that I came out of my trance. I balled my fists, each breath short and sharp. I blinked at the stranger who looked back at me from the mirror. My bangs were gone, and all that remained elsewhere on my head were short wisps that jutted out at harsh angles.
I’ll admit it: I felt a brief moment of panic. What had I done? How was I going to face my mother? How would I get through the next day at school?
But then something unexpected happened. I stared hard at my reflection, truly studied myself. I could actually make out the shape of my head for the first time in forever. I leaned in closer. I couldn’t remember having such a clear view of my ears. My neck either. It was thick and white and strong. I liked what I saw. Even my wide cheekbones, which I’d always thought made me look like a gorilla, now seemed almost regal.
And then, standing in the bathroom with most of my hair at my feet, I felt an unexpected adrenaline rush. The girl in the mirror was a different Stella that I barely recognized. Yet at the same time, she was like a long-lost friend, somebody I’d known all my life but didn’t see a lot of.
I was looking at Sista Stella, my alter ego, my evil soul-sister.
The girl glaring back at me didn’t need friends. She was a rock. She didn’t care about geniuses or about Mr. Brenigan, or Mrs. Birch, or planet-saving Frankenstein plants, or her cliquey high school, or anything. She wasn’t some frightened puppy, willing to sit down and obediently accept whatever crap the world dished out. She wasn’t about to let other people make any more decisions for her.
In fact, Sista Stella was about to make a few decisions of her own.
CHARLIE:
The Ultimate Symbol for No Right Answer
I have to be honest English Comp is not my favorite subject. Which must be obvious to you since here I am having to do this extra paper just to squeak by with a C. But I’m terrible at writing. It takes me forever to get my thoughts organized. And I’m never sure how to begin either.
So I guess I’ll just keep typing.
The 1st part of my story is kind of embarrassing I don’t come off very well. In fact it kind of exposes the fact that I’m a big fat loser. You might even feel sorry for me. But I promise you it won’t last.
The very very beginning part is also a little complicated. And kind of weird too. So bear with me.
I was in study hall minding my own business listening to my headphones. My eyes were closed and I was drifting in and out to Tito Puente. Do you know Mambo Diablo? Anyway that was the tune that was lulling me into a dream where I was playing my timbales and Mo Banerjee was getting into the rhythm she was dancing and it was a really good dream except I kept getting distracted by the voice of my dead brother Aaron. Right then he was saying things like This is YOUR dream Charlie so why not make her dress shorter? or Get a grip! Stop playing your stupid drums and kiss her!
Sometimes Aaron can be a pain in the ass.
OK so to shut him up I gave her a very very short red dress and high heels that I know she’d never really wear in real life. Anyway my sticks kept whizzing through the air like my hands were on fire. Like my body was only there to support my arms, you know? The ecstatic crowd jumped to its feet. Mo kept moving her Hips and gyrating to the music. She was a good dancer in my opinion. Then the next thing I knew she danced right up close and I felt her dark eyes on mine and my heart started hammering because I suddenly realized she was about to kiss me but even so I just knew that Aaron was going to say something obnoxious and ruin it.
That’s when I felt the 1st spitball whack against my cheek.
I woke up with a lurch and yanked off my headphones. Gradually I remembered where I was. Mrs. Reznik the Music Teacher, a tiny scary old lady with a permanent cough, sat at a beat-up desk at the front of the room with her eyes closed like maybe she was having a dream too. The other kids sat quietly in their seats. Most of them were staring out the window looking bored out of their minds. Some of them were even doing homework. I touched my face. The wet wad of paper was dripping with someone else’s spit. It trickled toward my mouth. It was really REALLY gross. I scooped it off and rubbed my cheek on my sleeve. Yuck.
An instant later a 2nd spitball hit my left ear. Somebody stifled a laugh and when I turned to look, there were Scott Pickett and Ray Beech and Dean Eagler engrossed in their studies.
Yeah right Aaron said somewhere in my head. I wasn’t surprised he was still there. He’d been making occasional appearances in my thoughts for days. They’re not fooling anybody.
These guys were part of Mudslide Crush which as you know was a popular local rock band and everybody seemed to think they were the coolest kids ever to walk the hallways. They seemed convinced of it too. Ray especially enjoyed giving freshmen like me a hard time. He liked to call me Buffalo Boy. I guess because I have a lot of frizzy hair I keep kind of longish and I’m a little chubby. Not that Ray was exactly svelte. In fact he was a giant toad of a guy but that didn’t seem to matter. He had a name for everybody. Earlier that week I saw him knock Lyle Dwarkin into a wall. Lyle’s 14 but looks 10 and has to be the shortest kid in our grade. He was one of my few friends and he was ahead of me coming out of Metal Shop when Ray bumped into him and kept walking without even looking back. Like he didn’t even notice.
Ray was a real bastard.
I wiped out my ear. I figured I had 2 options. On the 1 hand I could try for revenge on the other hand I could just ignore those guys. After all there were 3 of them plus I had a list of Irregular Verbs to review for 6th period Spanish and my Mother had been on my case about the 72 I got on the first quiz. It wasn’t fair for them to get away with being such jerkoffs but what could I do? Everyone has to have their turn being freshmen I guess. Maybe if I studied quietly and didn’t make a big deal of the spitballs Ray and his friends would leave me alone.
It was definitely the safer plan.
Go for it Aaron whispered. Look at Scott’s wet fingers. It was him! Hurl a fat one right at his head!
Shut up I told him silently.
I want to stop right here and say that I’m not crazy in case that’s what you’re thinking. I knew perfectly well that Aaron’s voice was only in my imagination and that he was really long gone. But my 14th birthday was only the previous weekend and my Mom and Dad and I went to visit his grave. After that I started thinking about him and what life might’ve been like if he was still her
e. Or if I’d of been the one stillborn with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck instead of Aaron. It’d just been the luck of the draw, right? And people do say twins share a special connection. I read one time about a guy that fell in a deep hole and his twin who was miles away started getting these weird vibes until eventually he went out and saved him so the way I figured, it wasn’t completely whacked for me to have these imaginary discussions with the brother I never knew.
Still, I know it’s not normal, is what I’m saying. No need to send me to the guidance counselor, Mr. Levesque. Or lock me in a padded room or something.
My eyes fell on a drawing somebody made on my desk. A circle with a curved line down the middle, 1 side filled in with pencil. Yin and yang. Of course. With my cheek still warm from the spitball here I was staring at the ultimate Symbol for no right answer. The struggle between opposing forces. Action and Inaction. Success and failure. There was an uncomfortable balance in the Universe and who was I to try and tip it?
I couldn’t make up my mind what to do so I pulled out a quarter and tossed it into the air. Heads I’d throw a spitball of my own, tails I wouldn’t. When the coin landed I was staring at George Washington.
Decision made.
I slid down my chair and quietly tore half a page from my spiral notebook. I wadded it up and popped it into my mouth. As I chewed, Ray whispered something to Scott and then Scott looked over at me and grinned. I dropped my eyes and pretended I was studying my list of Spanish conjugations.
Yo tiro. Tú tiras. El tira. Nosotros tiramos. Ellos tiran.
A moment later I held the spitball under the table and rolled it between my fingers. When I judged that the moment was right I wound my arm back. I focused on the skin between Scott’s ear and his annoying smirk. Then I let it fly. It whipped through the air and landed with a loud, soggy thwack!
Lemonade Mouth Page 2
