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You
Think G-D Would Have Given you Hair Like That if He Loved You? PAGE
TWO: "I What?!" Miss Sherry thumps the top of my head, right where the blood is streaming from. "Your horns are bleeding. And if you think I'm about to disease myself with your Jew horn blood, you've got another thing coming!" What the hell is she talking about Jew horn blood? Miss Sherry grabs my left elbow and drags me to the bench next to her desk. I expect to be shackled and offered a bowl of gruel, which come to think of it, would be a step up from the snacks they gave us at recess which were a box of million year-old raisins, boiling hot Sunkist pouches and a Red Delicious Apple. I swear, Red Delicious Apples should be renamed Waxed, Not At All Delicious Things. "My mom's gonna be really mad when she comes to pick me up and sees me chained to the desk." "Your mother isn't coming to pick you up today, Debbie," she says, triumphantly. "Your mother is in jail which is exactly the sort of thing that comes from not leading a Good Christian Life." The worst thing you could be in Bradenton, Florida in 1983 is Jewish. Or black. "Just look at your hair." I reach up and touch my hair. It feels alright to me, if a bit sticky. "You think G-D would have given you hair like that if he loved you?" "I don't believe in God." "Evil. EVIL!!!!" She then sighs, "But I suppose it isn't your fault ; raised by wolves who themselves don't know right from wrong." She leans into me, no longer afraid that she will disease herself, I guess. "But with your sass mouth and loose way of walking, you're going to end up wishing you'd been sent to a convent when you get older because it's girls like you who end up pregnant and living in the streets addicted to glue." As she explains this to me more patiently than anything before, she turns her eyes and gazes fondly out the window upon a scraggly angel named Clarissa Dudack. Now let me tell you this: Clarissa Dudack has dyed black hair covered in half a tube of Dippity-Do to make it stand up straight in a pretty good imitation mohawk. She's paler than a dead person and, lest you forgot, the Florida motto is The Sunshine State. Clarissa Dudack is the most popular girl in Brownies a) Because she looks scary, and b) Because she practices witchcraft underneath the slide on the playground. She communes with people's dead pets for fifty cents a pop. She lives in a trailer with her alcoholic father, and her redneck brother is the biggest weed dealer in town. The thought occurs to me that perhaps Miss Sherry is stoned and that's what's got her so confused, because it doesn't take a genius to see that Clarissa Dudack is totally messed up and will continue to be totally messed up, and will most likely die TOTALLY MESSED UP even if everyone loves her. Sure, she attends Sunday School at the Church of Christ, but she hides Sweet Valley High books inside her Bible and I know because one time when we were still friends and I slept over at her house on a Saturday night, I had to go to church with her the next day. Miss Sherry is waiting for me to smart mouth her so she can continue her diatribe. She is waiting for me to say something derogatory about Clarissa Dudack so that she can explain to me, in her patronizingly patient tone how Clarissa is whatever it is she is, and I'm not, which is causing my head to bleed while nobody attends to it and while we're at it -- WHY THE HELL IS MY MOTHER IN JAIL?! But I remain silent. Because no matter what I say, I know it will be wrong. I know it will cause the both of us more pain. I know that when I grow up and become famous, a millionaire, The President of the Freaking United States, whatever, that I will still SUCK BEYOND UNDERSTANDING to Miss Sherry because I AM A JEW. And right then and there I realize that Strong, Independent and Courageous Young Woman never give up and so I rise, (I hope dramatically) and walk right out of the low, concrete building, on into the bright, Florida sunlight. I can hear Miss Sherry screaming her head off in the background, but there's no turning back now. My brother's baby blue Camero comes careening around the corner, Journey blasting out of speakers -- "Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world, she took the midnight train goin' anywhere…" And I'm not gonna stop believing, and I'm also not gonna stand behind another dotted line or eat another box of freaking raisins for as long as I live.
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"You
think I'm blind, child? Do you think I was born yesterday? You have
horns!"
