Sprout

it gave Ruthie a chance to play hairdresser, which she enjoyed. In addition to dying my hair, she’d usually give me a trim, and then she’d experiment with different looks: gelling it flat and combing thick lines into it like a well-manicured golf course, or using a combination of mousse, hairspray, and spit to sculpt it into a fauxhawk or liberty spikes (as opposed to what I did at home, namely, rubbing a little goop in with both hands until basically my head looked like a shock of wheat left in the field so long that the wind has blown it half to pieces). Ruthie called this my “topiary look.” I didn’t bother to point out that a topiary is a hedge that’s been clipped and shaped to look like something , and it would’ve been more accurate to call it my “untrimmed topiary look” or my “overgrown topiary look,” or maybe just my “messy” look. Or maybe just messy. But hey, just because language is my thing doesn’t mean I have to shove it down everyone else’s throat.
    Then there were the stains.
    The stains were ev erywhere. Let’s start with my face, my neck, my hands. The first time I did it, I ended up with an olive forehead, a limy neck, and hands that looked like they’d been sifting through a pile of freshly mown grass for a dropped house key or a contact lens or something equally hard to find. Ditto the second time. The third time Mrs. Wilcox taught me the vaseline trick, which kept the dye from running down my skin, and she gave me latex gloves too. But even then I ended up with a green forehead and neck and hands, because I didn’t do a good job rinsing the dye out, and when I ran my hands through my hair the color spread like a virus in a kindergarten classroom.
    In fact, it was pretty much impossible to get all the dye out. I learned to wear bandanas—green bandanas, duh—for a day or two after I dyed my hair, but I guess I’m a nervous person, or, who knows, maybe dying my hair makes me nervous, or, you know, self-conscious, because I was pretty much always running my hands through it, which meant that I pretty much always had green palms, and fingers too, and wrists, if I did a particularly bad rinse job. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I can tell where I’ve been touching myself (again I say: get your mind out of the gutter) because of the pale green streaks and smudges on my skin. The collars of all my shirts are green, and my pillowcases, and the headrests of the passenger seats of my dad’s and Ruthie’s and Mrs. Miller’s cars, and then the fronts of most of my pants too, since that’s where I usually wipe my hands when I notice there’s dye on them. Bathroom towels’re pretty much a wash, and doorknobs, and the wall just beside the door, which is where your hand actually lands a surprisingly large percentage of the time, especially when it’s dark. Ditto the toilet handle, light switches, papers and books (especially my dictionary), the lock on my locker, the edge of my desk, shoelaces, the keys on my computer (before my dad broke it), the remote control for the TV (before my dad broke that too, about which more soon), the flag on the mailbox, and any mail I might pick up, and, well, just about everything else I touched that wasn’t washed immediately afterwards.
    By now you’re probly thinking that if I had a normal mom and dad they would’ve made me stop dying my hair a long time ago, and who knows, maybe you’re right. But my dad took a different view.
    “It’s like a record of your path through life. All the things you touch in the course of your daily routine. Like your toothbrush, or the cereal box, or that bottle of schnapps you tried to hide in number 22.”
    Did I mention my dad numbered his stumps? He numbered his stumps.
    “I didn’t—”
    My dad pulled the flat bottle out of his jacket, and there were the telltale green fingerprints obscuring the unreadable gothic script on the label. It’d been dark when I snuck it out of the house, so I hadn’t seen them.
    “Don’t worry, I’m not mad. And at least I know you didn’t drink any.”
    “How d’you know I didn’t drink any?”
    My dad winked. “I have ways of leaving my mark too.”
    In fact I hadn’t drank any—but I had poured some for Ruthie, and then added water till the bottle was filled back to its previous level. If I’d waited a bit, I could’ve just poured Ruthie’s drink back in the bottle, because she took one sip and spat it out. Schnapps is gross .