FRESH YARN presents: You Think G-D Would Have Given you Hair Like That if He Loved You?... by Deborah Stoll

FRESH YARN presents:

You Think G-D Would Have Given you Hair Like That if He Loved You?
By Deborah Stoll

My head is bleeding profusely from being pushed off the monkey bars by Thandie Gross, whose nose is bleeding as a result of my having socked her in the face, the sock itself the result of being pushed off the monkey bars in the first place.

I grimace in pain at the front of the administration desk in an attempt to be noticed by Miss Sherry, who is in charge of handing out passes which are needed for EVERYTHING. Right now, I need to get to the infirmary. I can feel the blood running down the back of my head in a rivulet, snaking its way underneath my dirt-stained collar. Miss Sherry has already told me to stand quietly and wait my turn, but there are no other turns for which to wait. I stand alone. I sigh.

"Ms. Stoll, I will attend to you once you have obeyed the rules -- remain quiet and stand behind the dotted line."

I turn to look behind me -- a dotted line painted like a highway stretches along the floor from one end of the front counter to the other. I move behind it. And wait. Miss Sherry continues to read whatever it is she's reading with the kind of intent usually reserved for Members of The President's Cabinet when deciding whether or not to invade, you know, Whoever. I start to have what must be an acid flashback. My two older brothers often spend the night with their friends sneaking booze out of our parents' liquor cabinet (called the White Piece for some reason -- the thing is red) talking about all the awesome times they've had, almost always involving acid flashbacks. I believe that I've caught one because that's what happens sometimes and it is called a "contact high".

Plunk! The delicate sound of a blood droplets hitting the linoleum floor.

"Ms. Stoll, I can feel you moving. If you continue to fidget, you will have to wait even longer."

There is no one around. There is nothing Miss Sherry has to do that can possibly be as important as attending to a child's bleeding head. I am nine years old and I know more about prioritizing than she ever will.

"Miss Sherry?"

"It's Miss Cherrier," she snarls, pronouncing it as if it were French, which I know it's not.

"My head is bleeding."

"Speak when you're spoken to."

"But you won't speak to me!"

With the most apathetic look possible she glances up. "You are a spoiled brat with no respect for your superiors." She is saying this and staring straight at me. She can see my bleeding head. She can see the pool of blood congealing beneath my feet and she doesn't care! She continues, "So when you stand behind the dotted line and I decide that I am good and ready, I will attend to you."

Dotted line?!!! The pain has grown so intense that everything looks dotted to me! The pool of blood swirls around like a riptide and turns into a mess of snakes. I hate snakes! I start shaking, which has an immediately contagious effect on Miss Sherry. "IF YOU SAY ONE MORE WORD, I WILL HAVE YOU THROWN RIGHT OUT OF HERE!" On the wall behind her is a poster of a bunch of happy girls holding hands and singing around a campfire. It says, "Where girls Become Strong, Independent, and Courageous Young Women".

The pay phone is just off to the side of the front desk -- a stone's throw from where I stand. I glance toward Miss Sherry, hunkered into her Very Important Papers. I hope they're divorce papers. No way! Who'd marry her? They're probably death papers. Yeah! I hope someone she knows died! I hope her house has caught on fire and all her cats are burning! And because I am a Strong, Independent and Courageous Young Woman, I make a mad dash for the phone.

The second my feet leave the dotted line Miss Sherry is up, her arms made of rubber like that guy Gumby, and she reaches out to envelop me in her stretchy green globules.

JUST HOW MUCH TROUBLE COULD A SEVENTY-POUND-SHORT-SHORTS- WEARING-LOPSIDED-PIG-TAILED-HEAD-BLEEDING-GIRL BE? I'm no Firestarter! I'm no Nancy Spungen (having just last month snuck the book about her, And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder, out of my brother's room and reading it cover to cover, swore off forever having children or getting involved in punk rock). Miss Sherry drags me away from the telephone. The receiver clinks violently against the plastic side five times before settling into a gentle swing, and then, it stops.

"You think I'm blind, child? Do you think I was born yesterday? You have horns!"

"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.