When he inevitably exploded (which was often, I was very annoying), no retaliatory target was as appealing as my hair. It was, after all, the thing I seemingly cared most about, and representative of my general stodginess and infuriating nature. If I were a terrorist looking to inflict the most symbolic damage on my annoying eight-year-old self, I would’ve chosen my hair, too. By then, I’d learned how to wet it, comb it, and spray it myself, and spent a considerable amount of time in the bathroom every morning getting every strand just right, so as to be best prepared for my daily regimen of aggressive pestering. My hair was precious to me.

I don’t remember what I did to piss him off this particular time. We were outside in the middle of summer. I might’ve taken his bike or stepped on his foot or sprayed his back too many times with the water gun I’d gotten for my birthday. But whatever it was, it sent him into a wild-eyed rage. He came at me, I screamed at an octave only birds could hear, he grabbed me by the shoulders and, taking a deep breath, spit the wad of chewing gum he’d been chomping on directly onto my scalp.

Now you’d think, given the amount of hairspray I’d covered it with, that my hair would’ve been protected by a sort of chemical force field, that the gum would’ve hit the hard surface and bounced right off, and I’d have been free to continue my pestering emboldened by my brother’s failed revenge plot. But you’d be fucking wrong. Because of course it didn’t bounce right off. It fucking stuck. Because that’s what gum does.

I figured, at first, that if it had stuck only lightly, I could reach in and pluck it right out, like picking a grape out of a shag carpet. (This is the best metaphor I could think of, and I’m sorry. Backup options included: “like fetching a hard-boiled egg from a patch of weeds,” and “like fishing a piece of orange chicken from a pile of hay.”) Naturally, my attempts to pick it out merely exacerbated the situation, and I ran wailing to my mother, whose own attempts proved even less effective, perhaps because my body was convulsing in dramatic sobs as her fingers spread the gum into more and more clumps. If you’ve ever tried cleaning shit out of a dog’s ass hair, you know exactly what we were dealing with here. Every time you try to wipe, the dog moves, and the shit somehow multiplies, until it has spread into a far larger, even shittier patch of destruction.