Why I Let My Hair Grow Out by Maryrose Wood

modern-day types prefer to use indoor plumbing when it’s available). While I was in there I pulled the bottoms of my pant legs back down over my socks. They were still only sweatpants, but no way was I going to put the moves on Colin looking like a kid in knickers.
    I rolled the waistband down a bit and stretched my arms up high in a big practice yawn, just to make sure it would flash a bit of belly button. It did. Perfect.
    I didn’t have any mints or a toothbrush handy but I swished my mouth out with water the best I could to alleviate my shepherd’s-pie breath. That pie was awesome—I’d finished my whole plate. I’d seen Carrie Pippin gobbling down her mashed potatoes and gravy too, like a starving woman— or, to be more accurate, like a woman who hadn’t eaten any carbs or meat products in a really, really long time.
    I did one last mirror check before leaving the restroom. The lack of hair and the gym-class outfit made me look unavoidably boyish, but it was the best I could manage for now. My plan was simple. Lay some big flirty move on Colin to give him something to think about this afternoon, and then, tonight, when we were all done sweating for the day, I’d take a bath and change into something frisky and get a little makeup going on to make me look older and more girl-like. Then we’d have a beer and see what happened.
    This kind of man-trap thinking was both strangely enjoyable and totally out of character. I’d never been the aggressor with Raph. He’d picked me, quiet me, out of the sea of sophomore girls. I wasn’t sure why, but I was so surprised and grateful that I never questioned going along with the you’re-my-girlfriend-now plan he’d quickly established. Just like I’d gone along with his now-we-hang-out-with-my-friends-not-yours plan, and the Morgan-needs-a-makeover plan and all his other plans, until finally we reached the this-was-fun-but-I’m-moving-on plan.
    Final mirror check. Check. Raph had made a lot of plans, true, but those plans were ancient history and an ocean away. Now I was making my own plan. And Colin was going to go along with it. I could tell.
    Â 
fek that Colin.
    Fek fek fek. That’s all I could think.
    While I was in the “loo,” Euro-twit Heidi had somehow convinced Colin that the seat on her bike was loose. By the time I got outside to where the bikes were parked, he was bent over with his face next to her ass and an Allen wrench in his hand, checking the height of the seat while she moaned “Higher, Colin! Lower, Colin! Ooh, that’s wunderbar Colin, my buttocks have never felt so good!” or something very close to that, at least in my suddenly crazed mind.
    Plus—maybe this was what really ticked me off—she’d taken off her helmet and let her hair loose and it was thick and blond and falling halfway down her back, and all of sudden the tall-as-a-supermodel jock looked like the cover of Sluts Illustrated .
    And Colin was laughing and chatting and plying his trade about six inches away from Heidi’s buff, spandex-clad butt, with all that hair swinging in his face.
    And then there was me. A bald under-aged shrimp in a baggy sweatsuit.
    Fek that Colin. All of a sudden I felt like crap, and it was completely his fault.
    I was just about to go lay down in front of the van so he could run me over by accident when he drove off (that would cost him his job, heh heh), but he spotted me.
    â€œHey Mor,” he said, grinning. “C’mere for a minute.”
    Only an idiot would try the belly-button move now, so forget that. I shuffled over to where they were, trying to look as reluctant as possible. Colin handed me a camera.
    â€œBe a luv, Mor. Heidi wants a photo taken of me and her. Can you manage it?”
    â€œYou push the little button,” said Heidi, smiling.
    She was pushing somebody’s buttons, all right. “Sure,” I said. “Smile!”
    I