Chapter 2: "The Night Before"

It was 1976. I think I was lucky to go to high school in the 1970s. It was in the age before the Internet. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. There was no YouTube. There was no cyberbullying. It was the night before the yearbook portraits were taken. My copper-red hair was shoulder-length and slightly curly. People called it my "lion's mane." I wasn't much for glamour and didn't really want to fool with my hair. Other than shampooing and an occasional haircut at the barbershop, I didn't do much with it. Oh, yeah. I got my haircuts at the barbershop with all the men. Cheaper that way. Going to the barbershop was all by itself enough to get me labeled weird. The year of my senior yearbook portrait, however, was different. That year, I went to a salon to get my hair done. It was my first trip ever to a hair salon.

"Off with the lion's mane!" I told the hair stylist. I opted for the classic "Pageboy" cut. The stylist wanted to straighten my hair, but I declined. "So I'll have a curly pageboy," I said. I sat quietly in the hair stylist's chair hoping she would finish quickly so I could get home and get my usual four hours of homework – oh, how I hated the backbreaking homework load! – out of the way. By the time I ate dinner and finished my homework, it was usually time to go to bed. Sometimes I had as much as seven hours of homework. Those nights I didn't get to bed until midnight, and was exhausted the next day. I was number four academically in the senior class, but when I rode the bus to school already exhausted before the schoolday had even begun, I sometimes envied the idiots who the rode the bus with their hands in their pockets. No books. The idiots never did their homework. I envied them for the full night of sleep they always got.