All the girls in my neighborhood, except for me and my sister were blond.  Our faces were different than theirs, longer and darker and my voice was deep even then.  My sister was very tough.  Once a boy who ended up being on Donahue for Satan worshiping threw rotten tomatoes at us. It was fall and cold and he was wearing his navy blue hat with white polka dots on it.  He always wore that hat and his mullet was shaped like it underneath.  She ripped that hat right off of his head and kept it on her dresser until she left for college.  When I moved into her room after she left I found it in a closet and remembered how she had put him in a head lock and how we both stunk like worms and rot on the walk back through the corn field.  Nothing had ever smelled more like Halloween.

We had our own well in the front yard that made our water taste earthy and we drank powdered milk because it was less expensive than cow milk.  When I had sleep over parties we would put chocolate in the milk, but it still smelled like yeast and rust.  Years later I wondered if that was why I used to have so much red in my hair. All the girls blond girls were the only girl children in thier families so they treated each other like sisters. Though they never made me feel different it was obvious that we were.  But really only our color. We ate the same country food as they did.  I used to tell some of the more impressionable kids that I could speak Italian and Greek. I remember wondering if Greek was really a language, because for a while I was convinced that they spoke English in England and American in America.

Then I started to get really tall. And by the sixth grade I was the tallest kid in school.  I got a bad perm and all of my hair turned orange and then fell out. I wore a training bra but didn't even need one until highschool.  And I wonder why I felt out of place.

Something happened in highschool. I tried to be a girly girl. I had this bow that was white and kind of see through that had this painful metal clip that broke my thin hair. It made me feel like I was from the 20's.  I wore pleated skirts for a while and tucked my shirt in. I wished I was an exchange student. I was scared of boys. I couldn't really bond with girls, except Anna who liked Sonic Youth.  We would eat chunky monkey on the swings at Allison Henderson Park and talk about how we were different.  It seemed like everyone else was the same and that we could see the future. And in the future we would fit into something that we couldn't even imagine, but we would be a part of it, or maybe even be the ones who created it.

That summer I bought a prom dress, tea stained it and started to sing for a punk band. I made up all the words on the spot and red a thesarus at night to expand my vocabulary.  I had dreams where people said all the the words that I dreamed of using when improvising.  I screamed and kicked things over on stage, and the band used a police scanner to know when to turn the amps off and run into the corn fields.  I told my mother I was trying to use up all my extra testosterone.

When I met my first boyfriend he said, I bet you could sing if you stopped screaming long enough. So I combined the two. It never really feels like singing unless it feels scratchy. There are other instruments whose job it is to be pretty. If I wanted that job, I'd be a lute.