Free All She Ever Wanted by Lynn Austin Page A

Jesus’birthday,” I told him.
    “Then he must be a capitalist, too.”
    Eventually, Daddy got tired of holding up the tree, and he and my uncle rigged a stand out of scrap lumber. It looked as dilapidated as everything else in our house, but at least we had a Christmas tree. It seemed like a miracle.
    On Christmas Eve, an even bigger miracle happened. I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when I heard someone knocking on our front door. My heart began to pound. If Santa Claus did decide to venture into our neighborhood, he would have to use the front door since we didn’t have a fireplace. I heard voices, and I crept out to the hall for a peek. It wasn’t Santa, but the man in our doorway was carrying an armload of brightly wrapped presents. I wondered if he was Santa’s bodyguard. Then I recognized the second man—the Sunday school superintendent—and he had an armful of presents, too.
    “What’s all this?” Uncle Leonard asked. He had been getting ready for bed and had answered the door in his undershirt and boxers.
    “Some presents for your children,” the superintendent said. “Merry Christmas!” The two men piled their packages beneath our stolen tree and left as quickly as they had come. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I had to pinch myself the way they do in stories to see if I was dreaming.
    When I finally crept back to bed, Uncle Leonard was still standing in front of the tree in his boxer shorts, slowly shaking his head.
    Spring brought flowers—and another stomach-churning crisis. The entire school had to undergo a head-lice inspection. Mrs. Wayne made everybody in our class line up and walk down to the nurse’s office in a single file. The nurse wore rubber gloves as she examined us one by one. When she lifted the hair on the nape of my neck with a wooden tongue depressor, I heard her gasp.
    “Look here,” she told the high school girl from the Future Nurses’Club who had volunteered to help. “Those are nits !”
    The future nurse leaped backward so fast that she tripped over the scale and brought it crashing to the floor with a loud clang. Charlie Grout, who stood in line behind me yelled, “Kathy has cooties!” and Mrs. Wayne’s orderly line dissolved in chaos. The boys hooted with laughter and the girls shrieked in fear as if the Russians were attacking us.
    I was hustled home from school, thoroughly humiliated. They sent my brother Poke home with me. We slept in the same room and used the same comb and brush, so naturally we all got the same lice infestation. We were a perfect example of an equitable society with a free distribution of goods, just like Uncle Leonard wanted. Even Annie had lice in her matted snarl of hair.
    Mommy gave the boys crew cuts, which solved their problems. I’d always worn my hair long, but she had to cut it all off and throw it into the burning can along with our comb and brush. When I glanced in the mirror, my hair looked as though Mommy had plopped a mixing bowl on my head and trimmed around it. Afterwards she scrubbed me down with a special shampoo that smelled terrible and burned like fire. It was powerful stuff. Then she wrapped what was left of my hair inside one of our threadbare towels for fifteen minutes to make sure all of the nits died. I’d seen photographs of the devastation that followed a nuclear explosion, and I was certain that my poor head would remain bald for the next fifty or sixty years from the fallout.
    When the school officials finally allowed me to come back—following a preliminary inspection in the nurse’s office, of course—I learned that I had been rechristened. “Cootie Kathy… Cootie Kathy,” the boys chanted on the playground. The girls ran from me whenever I got too close, squealing, “Watch out! You’ll catch Kathy’s cooties!”
    Nobody wanted me on her team in gym class. Anybody who had to stand in line next to me was careful to leave a wide buffer of uncontaminated space