Why I Let My Hair Grow Out Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  ninteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  About the Author

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin 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.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of

  the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  BERKLEY JAM and the JAM design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  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

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my mom, Rita,

  who is definitely at least half goddess.

  And for my dad, Eddie,

  who would have enjoyed a trip to Ireland.

  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, y
ou 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.

  Lucky who? Lucky you!

  Shopping here at 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.

  “i hate you i hate you i hate you.” tammy sobbed, kicking the back of the driver’s seat. Mom asked her to stop but she acted like she didn’t hear. Clearly this would be the longest trip to Lucky Lou’s ever. I didn’t care. Mom had insisted I come along, I think because after the hair incident she was afraid to leave me alone in the house even for half an hour.

  I ran my hand over my nearly naked head, with its screaming orange streaks in the two-tone stubble. Time for a change. That’s what Raphael had said to me two weeks ago, in late June, on the last day of school.

  “Time for a change, Morgan.” He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at the vending machine that stood between the locker room entrances by the gym, trying to decide which candy to buy. Boys on one side, girls on the other, candy in the middle. It’s the kind of thing Sarah and I would have wanted to interpret, finding a symbolic and hilarious meaning in the placement of the vending machine. If I’d said something like that to Raph, he’d point out that that’s where the electrical outlet was.

  Just get the Twizzlers, I thought as I watched him. You always get those. Don’t shop around for something better or the Twizzlers will feel really bad. He jingled some change in his hand. “You know I’m going to camp for, like, practically all of July and August.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Some part of me understood right away where this was headed but I thought I could fight it. “You’ll have a great time.” Raph was very smart and good at everything, and he’d gotten accepted to an elite gifted-leaders-of-tomorrow camp at M.I. frikkin’ T. That would be his summer of love. Raph and the gifted leaders of tomorrow. No surfer-dude he, no slacker, not Raph.

  “I’m gonna be a senior next year,” he said. Like I’d forgotten how old he was.

  “Look, they restocked the Butterfingers,” I said. If I acted like I didn’t get it, I could buy myself some time. That was a favorite strategy of mine when under pressure. Stall, play dumb, grab another precious thirty seconds of happiness before my world came crashing down.

  “Do you get what I’m saying?” Raph punched in the code for his candy and started talking louder, like I was deaf. “I’m gonna be away all summer, and next year is my last year before college, and I just think we could both use a change.”

  Raph always knew what was best for me.

  “I don’t want a change.” My voice sounded small.

  He scooped a Twix bar out of the machine and kept talking as if I hadn’t said anything.

  “It was fun going out with you this year. We had some fun, right? You’ll have a great summer, Morgan. You’ll meet people and, whatever.”

  I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking I was too young for him, too boring, too dim to keep up with that sharp-witted brainiac banter he and his friends traded all the time. He was tired of explaining his physics homework to me and me not getting it. He probably wanted a whiz-kid girlfriend, some glossy, fast-talking, put-together girl like the girls he’d meet at camp, a girl who’d run for student council president next year and let him manage her campaign.

  Raph would be good at that. Raph liked to pull strings from behind the scenes, and he was very concerned with people’s “images.” He would sometimes tell me that my “image” needed work. I never knew what he meant by it, except that obviously he was somehow disappointed in me. It had been his idea that I dye my hair dark, so I’d have more of an “edge.”

  All I ever noticed about people’s “images” was how different they acted compared to what they were really thinking. For some reason, I could always tell what people were really thinking.

  Time for a change, Raph was saying. But what he was really thinking was, I tried and tried to make you into a girlfriend who would be interesting to me, and it didn’t work. I guess you just don’t have what it takes.

  In the rest of Connecticut two weeks had passed since we broke up, but in my own personal space-time continuum I was still standing there on the last day of school, watching Raph unwrap his Twix bar while his unspoken words took up permanent residence in my brain. They were loud and constant, like the crash of
waves on a beach.

  I did my best, but you just couldn’t cut it, Morgan. That’s why it’s time for a change.

  It was hard to hear anything else.

  Case in point: Tammy was still sitting in the back seat next to me, crying, but I didn’t hear her at all.

  two

  i stared at the shiny travel brochure my dad had handed me and all I could think of was the game I used to play with Sarah: Come on, everybody! Let’s play Name an Irish Town! Killarney and Kenmare and West Cork and, excuse me, Dingle.

  “So you see, kiddo, it’s all set. It’s a week-long tour. You’ll have a blast.”

  I still couldn’t believe there was a town named Dingle, but there it was, right on the map. I wasn’t paying too much attention to my dad at that point. Just staring at Dingle.

  “So whaddya say? Sounds exciting, right?”

  Dingle dingle dingle.

  “Morgan?”

  “Sorry, what?” If I pretended I didn’t get it, I could buy myself some time. A brilliant strategy that had been working so frikkin’ well for me in my life so far.

  “I said, what do you think? About the trip?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “I think I missed what you said. I’m getting a new bike or something?”

  Mom was buzzing and whirring around the kitchen while Dad and I were having this delightful little talk, and I could tell what she was thinking from the careless way she emptied the dishwasher. “Why?” wailed the salad plates, as they clattered together in the cabinets. “Why did my firstborn child turn out to be such a loser?”

  Stupid for her to pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping, anyway, since you can’t not eavesdrop in my house. Mom and Dad were dumb enough to buy one of those “open plan” houses, where the kitchen is part of the dining room and the dining room is part of the living room, and when Tammy puts on her frikkin’ educational TV programs the whole house is one big Discovery Channel.