Free Sister Golden Hair: A Novel by Darcey Steinke

from another.
    I knew, with my short haircut and knobby knees, that I would never join their group. If I were a boy I would have escaped into a football obsession, comic books, or Star Trek reruns by now, but girls, girls had no such escape hatches.
    I hadn’t always been like this. Before we moved from the rectory I rode my bike everywhere and all the neighborhood kids loved me, because I was the best at making up games. We often enacted scenes from the Bible. My favorite was the raising of Lazarus, whereI’d make my brother rub dirt on his face and lie down on the grass. I’d stare at him with my glowing eyes as I commanded Rise!
    But that period was over. In Roanoke nobody cared if you had a good imagination, if you knew everything about mummification rites or had acted out every detail of the burial rituals of the natives in Timbuktu. The teachers at Low Valley Junior High were mostly female, with thick Southern accents, heavy makeup, and carefully teased-up hair. At lunch I saw my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Remsly, eating deviled eggs out of a Tupperware container. The only men were the grim-faced janitor, the young AV guy wearing bell-bottoms as he rolled his overhead projector down the hallway, and the principal, whom so far I knew only as a deep baritone coming over the intercom, leading the Pledge of Allegiance and asking us not to throw food in the cafeteria. I darted from class to class like a small stunned fish. Nobody was particularly unfriendly, but nobody was nice to me either.
    I needed a guide to help me negotiate the local customs, and that guide had to be Sheila. She had the power. At lunch, I saw the birthmark girl, whose name was Pam, sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. Pam had a Holly Hobbie lunch box and thermos and she ate while she read, not caring if she had milk on her upper lip or a smear of mustard on her chin. She invited me to sit with her, but I pretended I didn’t hear. Instead I sat alone and stole glancesat Sheila, who sat with a bunch of girls, laughing and nibbling her sandwich.
    After lunch I watched how expertly Sheila rolled her combination, swung open her locker, glanced at herself in the little mirror she’d taped inside, then pulled out her math textbook. When I walked behind her I wanted to place my finger on her delicate collarbone. I wanted to ingest her like one of my father’s communion wafers and let her instruct me, like Jesus, from the inside.

    One afternoon when I got off the bus, I walked behind Sheila. It was still hot. A warm breeze blew through my hair and in front of 3B I saw the leaves of the ratty sunflowers dropping, the dirt around them dry and red. I’d been rehearsing what to say to her. Saying I liked the braids in her hair sounded too intimate, but complimenting her clogs didn’t seem personal enough. All day I’d weighed which part of her perfect body to concentrate on. Finally I decided to tell her I liked the birds stamped into her leather belt. It showed my eye for detail without being creepy. But before I could say anything, Sheila swung around.
    “Are you following me?”
    “No!”
    “Why are you walking so close to me then?”
    “I’m not,” I insisted.
    “And why did you touch my hair in health class?”
    It was true. During the menstruation movie, while the soap opera music blared and the egg made its way down the fallopian tube toward the uterus, the projector light had been so silver on Sheila’s head that she had not looked real. That’s when I reached out beyond the edge of my desk and set the pad of my index finger gently against the back of her head.
    “I was brushing away a spider.” It sounded lame even to me.
    Sheila looked at me. She had her hands on her hips and her head tilted sideways.
    “Yeah. Right,” she said. “You should just admit that you’re a lezzbo.”
    Jill ran up behind us.
    “Leave her alone,” she said. “She’s just trying to be nice.”
    Sheila looked from me to Jill.
    “Freaks,”