Why I Let My Hair Grow Out

Table of Contents

 

 

 

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

 
Copyright © 2007 by Maryrose Wood.

 
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BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley JAM trade paperback edition / March 2007 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 
Wood, Maryrose.
Why I let my hair grow out / Maryrose Wood.—Berkley Jam trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-425-21380-3

[1. Bicycle touring—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. 4. Fairies—Fiction. 5. Self-esteem—Fiction. 6. Ireland—Fiction.] I. Title.

 
PZ7.W8524Why 2007
[Fic]—dc22
2006033506

 

 

acknOWledgments

Writing this book was a pleasure from start to finish, and that is due to the witty and wise stewardship of editor Jessica Wade. Much appreciation to the copyediting genius Jenny Brown, and to Sarah Howell, Monica Benalcazar, and Rita Frangie for the wild and magical cover art.

A tad irreverently,
Why I Let My Hair Grow Out
references characters and incidents from the rich tradition of Irish mythology. I encourage any interested readers to dive into this material; it's vastly entertaining and you'll love it. There are many marvelous retellings of the legend of Cúchulainn; I especially recommend Rosemary Sutcliff's
The Hound of Ulster
. For more suggested readings (as well as a playlist of some truly shamrockin' Irish music) please visit
www.maryrosewood.com
.

Hurling is an ancient sport that is still played with passion and enjoyment by athletes all over the world. To learn more, visit the website of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) at
www.gaa.ie
.

As always, I'm grateful for the savvy guidance and unfailing encouragement provided by my agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, and my dear friend Emily Jenkins.

Thanks to the late, legendary editor Leona Nevler, who acquired this book for Berkley. I deeply regret that we never had the chance to meet.

One

the first thing i did Was take scissors to my bangs.
Snip, snip.
Or maybe I should say,
bang, bang.
My heart was beating kind of hard.

It looked okay. The hair formerly-known-as-bangs was sticking up and out, like the brim of a baseball cap that was tilted way back on my head. Too jaunty for my current state of mind, though. I picked up the scissors again.

Snip, snip.
You never realize how long your hair is till you chop off a piece right next to your scalp, smooth it out and hold it in your hands. That was a good two feet of hair lying there. Dark, except for the roots. My hair is naturally a pale reddish-blond color. My mom used to call it “strawberry blond” with this kind of pride, like,
Smell me, I have a kid with strawberry-blond hair
. I put an end to that crap in January when I started dying it black.

Chop. Chop. Chop.
Some things are hard to stop, once you begin.
Chop.

When it was all over, and I looked at what I had done, I was pleased.

 
from October to June, raphael had been drawing a map of me, but everything was in the wrong place. That's how it felt. Raphael patted my skinny ass and made remarks about my big booty. He found it amusing to introduce me as “Morgan, my girlfriend who has no sense of humor,” but my friends (back when I used to have friends) always thought I was the funny one.

Raphael looked at my favorite
New Yorker
cartoons and didn't “get” them. He called me sweet when I was trying to sound mad. He met my family and found them “perfectly nice” and “too sentimental,” when it was obvious that both my parents were control freaks and my little sister was a battery-operated robot girl who'd been programmed by Disney.

If Raphael described me to you, you would never know it was me. If you took his map of me and tried to find your way from my nose to my chin, you'd get lost before you got past the nostril.

The thing is, after exactly one school year minus one month of going out with Raphael, I started to think maybe his map was right, and mine was wrong.

And then he broke up with me, and I didn't have a map left at all.

the look On my mother's face When she saw my hair was an amazing thing to behold.

“Morgan—” she said. Her eyes got all wet looking and she covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh, my. I wish—I wish you'd—” She stopped, and her car keys slipped from her fingers to the kitchen floor.

“Time for a change,” I said.

I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that I was taking the Raph breakup way too hard and acting like a huge drama queen and doing stupid crap with my hair to get attention and sympathy and whatever. It was such a waste of breath for my mom to say nice things to me, because I always knew what she was really thinking and it was never the same as what she said.

“Yes.” She picked up her keys and didn't look at me. “A change, yes. And you have such a beautiful face, you look great with short hair.”

Obviously I had not gone far enough.

 
“stripes!” tammy screamed, When i got in the car. “Orange stripes! Morgan looks like a clown!”

“Buckle up, Tam.”

“Mommy, did you see what Morgan did to her hair? She put stripes in it!”

“Yes, Tam. Did you buckle?”

“And she doesn't hardly even have any hair left! It's just—fuzz. Fuzz with orange stripes!”

“Morgan, would you please buckle your sister?”

Seven years old and the brat couldn't work her own seat belt. I yanked the belt too hard as I roped her in. “If we're in a head-on collision and this saves your life, you'll owe me forever,” I said with a growl.

“Shut up,
clowny
.”

“No calling names, Tammy,” Mom said, checking her lipstick in the mirror. “Hurting names hurt people, just like hitting hurts people.”

“You know what really hurts people?” I whispered in Tammy's ear. “When you're in a car and it plunges off a bridge into the water and you can't get your seat belt open, and there's water pouring in all the vents and windows and you're trapped and you know you're gonna drown and there's nothing you can do about it, all because of your goddam seat belt.”

“MOM!” Tammy started crying like the baby she was. “Make her stop!”

“Stop what, Tam?”

“Stop being
evil
! I hate her! Why do I have to have the worst sister of anyone?”

Mom sighed and said nothing and pulled out onto the road. I sat back, contented. Tammy's misery was especially satisfactory because we were on our way to Lucky Lou's, and Tammy always loved going to Lucky Lou's.

Lucky Lou's is an enormous grocery store, known far and wide in the state of Connecticut for its commitment to obscene overkill of every kind. The food is piled in enormous, towering, wasteful heaps, in cruel mockery of all those third-world countries where people are actually starving. In each aisle there's a grinning Lucky Lou employee who trails your every step, trying to help you find stuff in this pushy, phony way.

Sadly, Lucky Lou's real claim to fame is that inside the store there are dozens of freak-show mechanical figures crammed in every corner, on the tops of the shelves and hung from the ceiling. There are zucchini and cucumbers and tomatoes dressed in farmer outfits, chickens in little bonnets and leering, wide-eyed cartons of orange juice and eggs, plus a life-size, horrifying cow, all lurching and waving their rusty limbs and screeching tinny songs about the goodness of milk and vegetables and the supreme magnificence of Lucky Lou's.

 
Tammy would dance around the store singing along with this crap, providing even more proof of her battery-operated robot-girl status. But now she was too upset to have fun, and that was my doing. Lucky who? Lucky me.

 
 
my friend sarah and i (this is back When i had friends, which was before I started going out with Raphael), we used to play this game called “Name a Connecticut Town.” There are three lists of words and you take one from each, and it always makes the name of a Connecticut town. The first list is words like:

 
North

South

East

West

 
Old

 
And the second is:

 
Nor

Green

Port

 
Stam

 
Mill

 
And the third is:

 
Haven

Walk

 
Chester

 
Ford

Which

 
It totally works. Everyone in Connecticut lives in a town called South Norford or East Greenwalk or West Porthaven or Old Stamwich. That's where my family lived too. A Connecticut town, not far from Lucky Lou's, in which Raphael was no longer my boyfriend. Pick any name you like or invent your own. It really doesn't matter. Maps are only paper, anyway.