So no, I don’t know exactly how much hair I had when I was born, but my mother likes to brag that I had a lot of it. Which is kind of a weird thing to gloat about, if you ask me. I don’t like seeing a single strand of hair on my dinner plate. I can’t imagine an entire ball of it growing in my uterus for nine months and emerging from my body, sentient and screaming for food, and then being like, “Yeah, I made that. And now I’m gonna let it live in my house for twenty years.” In fact, in eighth-grade health class, that most sacred of American public school institutions, wherein children are first informed that hair will start growing from places previously unheard of in life, I distinctly remember watching The Miracle of Birth, a horrid documentary in which a Wisconsin woman with a bad perm is freed of an alien that’s been swelling in her abdomen. It astounds me, to this day, that we force thirteen-year-olds to watch a woman giving birth on VHS tape and consider this sexual education. I barely even knew what a vagina looked like on a regular day, let alone the day a screaming mass of hair decides to claw out of it. But that’s not the point. The point is, I had to watch that mess, and I remember viscerally gagging during the scene when It Happens, not because of the miracle of it all, but because of the sheer amount of hair that’s involved in the whole thing. Babies are covered in it. Vaginas are covered in it. I tried to avoid looking at it straight on by peering above my glasses and letting my blurry vision dull my ability to see what was happening, but I still remember, fuzzy eyesight be damned, the angry, throbbing ball of fur emerging from between that screaming woman’s legs. It was like watching a ball of rats crawl through the hole of a sewer drain. During a mudslide. (To make matters worse, my health teacher—who also happened to be my gym teacher, my history teacher, and the football coach, because American public schools are masters of efficiency—was a widower whose wife died in childbirth because, by some freak medical anomaly, a hair got into her bloodstream when she was in labor and murdered her to death. I’m not making this up. The bulk of my sexual education came from a man whose life was literally ruined by hair. And that’s not even mentioning the pictures of hairy, gonorrhea-stricken genitals he showed us on the first day of class.)