I’m sure there are plenty of mommy bloggers today who know the exact mixture of peanut butter, vegetable oil, and angel tears you need to get gum out of a kid’s hair without resorting to the nuclear option, but this was 1998 and all we had was a dial-up connection. We weren’t about to wait thirty minutes for the computer to connect to the Internet so we could figure out how to get gum out of hair the fancy way.

So, having protested that I would rather live with the mangled, patchy hairstyle of an off-brand clown than shave it all off, my mother proceeded to perform spot surgery and literally hacked the gum from my head until every sticky trace had been excised. We spent the next several days traveling from one suburban Supercuts to another. At every stop, my mother would spin me around, point to the spot where she’d taken an axe to my skull, and look expectantly at each stylist to see who could conjure enough magic to make me whole again. But the desecration had been too deep. My crown had been broken. And there was no fixing the damage that had been inflicted on my soul.

It probably grew back in like a week, because kids’ hair grows like mold on old bread. But I learned a valuable lesson that day. Hair can never be trusted, no matter how religiously you wash it, condition it, wet it, part it, and hairspray it. The second it gets the chance, it’ll gleefully ruin your entire goddamn life. One chopped gummy patch at a time.

•  •  •

As I got older and the children who once knocked on my hardened hair grew into judgmental teenagers eager to pounce on anything even slightly unordinary, I abandoned my hairspray in favor of the more relaxed, no-frills vibe of a thirteen-year-old with split ends. Which is to say, I spent most of high school with hair that had the consistency of straw because it had been blow-dried to within an inch of its life every single morning. But it worked for me.

Of course, my hair, knowing full well that I’d found some sense of equilibrium in life, couldn’t let well enough alone, and began conspiring with my hormones to bring life new hellish meaning. Hair began appearing in places it had never been before, bringing with it fresh new odors and itchiness and discomfort.