Sprout

finding Kansas and had I seen Cats before I moved away from New York and did I miss the ocean, the mountains, traffic jams? She drove a pickup—I won’t tell you what make—and we all had to crowd on the single bench seat, and just to drag the ride out an extra five minutes she missed the turn at 81st and had to drive down to 69th. “ Dios mio ,” she said, presumably in response to the three crosses that marked some accident or other, although maybe she was just put off by the lavender-and-chartreuse paint job of the house on the corner, and then she asked me if it was true that Israel was behind 9/11, not Osama. Her voice died away in a single “Huh” when she pulled into our clearing and saw the shimmering green cocoon of our trailer. It was her son, Ian Carlos Abernathy, his right leg pressed up against my left from hipbone down to the muscle of his calf and his left leg similarly pressed against his mother, his thatch of rock-star hair ensconced beneath the brim of his Yankees cap still damp with my sweat, who took one look at the house my dad had chosen to raise me in, and said in a perfectly calm, completely honest voice:
    “ Cool .”

Attendons: entendre!
    The first time I did it, it hurt. A lot.
    The second time I did it it hurt even more, because I had a rash from the first time, which broke open, and bled.
    I waited a while before I did it a third time.
    I even wondered if it was worth doing again, but eventually—uncontrollably you might say—I gave in. I went to Ruthie for advice though, because she’d been doing it for years. But Ruthie said what I was doing and what she was doing were two com plete ly different things, and passed me off to her mom. Mrs. Wilcox was “on the market,” which meant she had every kind of health and beauty aid you can imagine (and some that, well, you can’t). She gleefully filled me in on all the “tricks of the trade.”
    “Nowadays people prefer to use a water-based lubricant instead of vaseline, but I think a petroleum product is crucial —absolutely crucial. And always shower beforehand. I mean, not only does it improve the effect, but, well, you’re a teenager. An extra shower is never a bad idea.”
    Mrs. Wilcox had one of those shower nozzles on a long bendy hose, which was a lot better than having to use the little sprayer attached to the kitchen sink (not to mention about a ba zil lion times less messy). If she was home when Ruthie and I went at it, she’d even lend a hand.
    “Don’t worry,” she’d tell me afterwards, bending me over the tub and rinsing me clean with smooth, practiced sweeps, “I’ve done this for longer than I care to remember, let alone admit. We’ll make you look like a regular leprechaun.”
    Why leprechaun? Because leprechauns have green hair, pervert . Get your mind out of the gutter!
    The bleach was the hard part. In the first place, it stung like crazy, and if it dripped in my eyes it felt like acid (probly because it is acid, duh). That’s what the vaseline was for: you smear a thick border of it from ear to ear, just under the hairline, to keep the bleach from dripping down your forehead. We’d stick one of those granny showercaps over my head too, but even then the fumes leaked out and my eyes would water and my head would itch and all in all it felt as if a colony of fire ants was eating its way into my brain. This lasted for at least a half hour. You had to leave the bleach on long enough that all the pigment in the hair was leeched away, but not so long the strands became brittle and broke like dead grass. A couple of times I ended up with bald patches that I had to color in with green magic marker, and one time when Ruthie and I got sucked into a particularly bloody episode of The Ultimate Fighter we left the bleach on so long that I just had to shave my head, and went to school with an eighth of an inch of green fuzz clinging to my scalp like moss on the north side of a tree. In fact moss grows on every side of a tree, but we’d just read Huck Finn , and there was that question the Judith Loftus character asks Huck when he’s dressed as a girl, and, um, why did I bring this up? I can’t remember now …
    Anyway, after about a year we had it pretty much down to a science, and from then on my head was covered in three to five inches of bright green hair. Although I could do it on my own, I went to Ruthie’s house whenever I could, not just because the Wilcoxes had better facilities, but also because