When I was little, I thought of myself as very clever. It’s obvious to me now that this was 1) probably incredibly annoying, and 2) definitely a poor self-assessment. The latter point should have been obvious when I lost 25 cents to my older sister, after she bet me that she would finish washing the dishes before I finished drying them.
The clever part of me took a great interest in proving things right or wrong, such as the time my dad tried to tell me that if you kept dividing a number in half repeatedly, you would never get to zero. I quickly disproved this well-established mathematical fact with a simple demonstration: I stood five feet away from the nearest wall, then halved that distance, then halved it again and again until my feet hit the wall. Zero!
I was a hopeless know it all.
(My husband can attest to the fact that I am still, at times, a hopeless know it all.)
So it was with great interest one day that I read a suggestion—probably in a “Hints from Heloise” column—that if one were to find oneself in the unfortunate position of having bubble gum stuck in one’s hair, peanut butter would get it right out. This sounded like a handy fact to have at my disposal, and lucky for me, I had everything I needed to test it out: lots of long hair, a pack of grape Bubblicious Bubble Gum, and peanut butter, of the generic variety with white label and large black letters.
I shut the door to my room and broke open the Bubblicious. A single piece of gum would have been enough to test the hypothesis, but more is always better, so I popped four or five pieces in my mouth and started chewing. Once I’d amassed a purple gum wad the size of a small country, I spit it out and squished it onto the top of my head. Not at the ends of the hair, oh no—right on top of my head, and I really rubbed it in, to make sure it was good and stuck to the hair.
Next, I grabbed the peanut butter and scooped out a healthy chunk, which I plopped on top of my grape tumor. I assumed I could just rub it a few times and the bubble gum would come out easily. I also had great faith in Heloise, and hadn’t considered the possibility that this might not work.
It didn’t work.
I probably just needed a bit more peanut butter, so I added another large glop. No go. Maybe the peanut butter just needed to cover more surface area. I rubbed the whole mess around even more, recruiting still more hair into my growing blob. My bedroom smelled like a Goober Grape factory.
When that didn’t work, I rubbed the peanut butter in more, and more and more. It was getting worse, and I was getting frantic. I snuck into the bathroom and tried untangling it with water and a comb. No dice. I added more peanut butter. Nada!
And then I saw it—a simple way out of my troubles. Scissors. I’d just cut the whole thing off! Ten seconds later, my problem was solved.
Then I realized I had a new problem: a two inch diameter crew cut on top of my head. Surely it wasn’t that noticeable. Who would be looking at the top of my head? I couldn’t see the top of anyone else’s head. And anyway, I could just comb my hair across it. I cleaned up all the evidence and crawled into bed before my parents suspected anything.
By the next morning, I’d forgotten all about it, and didn’t think to camouflage my new ‘do as I headed to breakfast.
“LaShelle, what happened to your hair?” Mom asked.
Whoops.
“What do you mean?” I replied, the picture of innocence.
“There’s a bald spot on top of your head,” Dad said.
“What?!” My hand flew to the fuzzy patch as though discovering it for the first time. I probably dropped my mouth open for effect.
“You want to tell us how it got there?”
If my parents were asking me this question, it meant that they hadn’t figured out that I was the cause. I might still be able to throw them off the scent.
Thinking fast, I said with horror, “Someone must have come and cut it in the night!”
I was promptly grounded.
My hair grew back eventually, and my second grade school picture is adorable: me smiling with my buck teeth, mismatched pink cardigan, and a patch of inch long hair sticking straight up.
It took months, years even, before I figured out how my parents knew I was lying.
Very clever, indeed.
