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I take control of my hair at age sixteen, the same year I take control of my ears and their lobes, the same year I take control of a car. The three are not unconnected.
The license arrives March 24, nine days after my birthday. I remember because it's my mom's birthday, and we go that night to Ruby Tuesday's to celebrate, all the way into Atlanta. I still have that license stocked away in a scrapbook--a relic from a time before the state collected them to keep underagers from repurposing them for alcohol consumption. In the photograph on the license, I have curly blonde hair. The curls are from a perm my mother had given me two weeks earlier. They are tight and tiny. The blonde is my own. I look perky and spunk, a teen in the late late eighties. I am a positive role model. I am cute.
The curls will calm down soon enough. My hair doesn't like them, and neither do I. Sure, they keep me from being Barbie beautiful, but they make me into some kind of high-school cheerleader instead (in fact, I am, but I don't want to be that kind of cheerleader, the one every boy dreams of, the ditz, the cheering cutie).
It's in April that I go to "Cecilia's ~ A Salon," tell them to make me a brunette. My friend Penny comes along to lend support (her own license only two more weeks away). I've saved three months for this. The lady shows me a book of haircuts. I select one like Jennifer Grey's in Dirty Dancing, curls again, but these are bigger, something I'll have to renew with an hour under the curling iron every morning or a night with curlers. My own hair will be slightly darker than Jennifer's, lest I be taken for dishwater blond, but nowhere near black, lest I be taken for some kind of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, goth. In the end, after a week with the curling iron, I'll let the curls go except at the bottom and around the sides, and I'll end up a homespun Mindy from Mork and Mindy, which is, I realize, exactly what I wanted to be all along. Wholesome, smart, but able to tear it up at a moment's notice.
And that afternoon I do tear it up, in my sixteen-year-old way--Penny and I go to the mall. I get my ears pierced at a kiosk outside Claire's Accessories (Penny's had hers pierced since age twelve), then enter said store for a set of big, jangly silver earrings with pink plastic rocks entombed in their center. Penny settles for a couple plastic bracelets--yellow and lavender. We go to Dillard's, wander the makeup aisles, giggle over of the old ladies sampling the perfume, and then we do the same ourselves.
Finally, I dare it. I ask one of the counter women for help. She's got a black bob that she's hair-sprayed into a helmet that comes three inches out from the sides of her head and red blush across her cheeks. She looks great.
I ask for eyeliner, black.
Penny and I put it on in the face mirror, the clerk watching. "I'll take it," I say, when we're done, and we stride out 1980s beautiful, the tube in a small white paper bag that I quickly drop in my purse.
Next we go to the music store. Penny picks out a Van Halen cassette. I get Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. It's my first rock album. My mom would freak if she knew.
At the mall that afternoon, at school the next day and the ones after that for the rest of the year, I am Barbie, but I am not that Barbie, not the Barbie you knew, not the nice, clean-cut cheerleading girl. I am a troublemaker, a hair-band fan, a rocker. (Except at home, where, in the driveway, while still in the car, I take off all the new paraphernalia--the eyeliner, the earrings--where I stow the cassette I bought in my purse, where I walk in, and the only thing that's changed is my hair. But that's enough. "Your hair," my mom says. "You're beautiful hair. What have you done?")
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