"My momma told me not to use it!"

My mom didn’t teach me how to style my hair when I was in middle school. She never taught me how to style my hair at all, actually. She’s going to hate this, but I still have a tiny little half-ounce of resentment toward her inside me.

All my middle school friends seemed to have such magically perfect hair while I struggled to get my annoyingly plain, straight hair to do anything cool. My mom told me, “I would have given anything to have straight hair like yours instead of curly. I used to iron my hair flat.” My mom was into sunny-side-of-life morale boosters more than practical advice.

I tried replicating my friends’ magnificent hair on my own. And did a horrible job at it. I used half a can of Aquanet per application, but still my hair fell flat and lame. How did the other girls manage to look so chic? (If by “chic” I reinterpret hair history as being redneck Kentucky fashion with huge bangs and wavy, poofy long bits.) Mine was limp, flat, dull.

My bleakest memory of hair disaster happened during a middle school basketball game. My first boyfriend was going to be there, and I wanted desperately to impress him with perfect, magnificent hair. I prepped for hours before the big event. My method: I flipped my head upside down and sprayed my hair on the bottom with a liquid pint of Aquanet. I stayed that way while it dried. I waited, blood pounding in my ears, until at last the foundation layer had dried. I then sprayed another pint of Aquanet shellac over that. It took forever to dry.

At last I flipped my head up, and there, I had it, full hair with body. What was actually happening, however, was an umbrella effect. The rigid frame of plastered hair on the bottom was supporting my stalk-straight hair on top into and outward fan. That was good enough for me.

I arrived at the game, and my girl-rival who was after my boyfriend sneered nastily, “How’d you get your hair to do that?”

I answered, “It took an hour to do so don’t touch it.” I didn’t know she was insulting the umbrella-ness of my hair. And it turned out that gallons of Aquanet and basketball just don’t mix.

As I played and got sweaty, the hairspray goo re-liquefied and crept down my neck in sticky trickles. I swiped my neck with my hands, leaving them flaky and sticky, which should have helped my mad basketball skills except that I was the world’s crappiest pre-teen player ever.

The umbrella hair system broke down as the Aquanet dissolved. I ended up with spikes of hair frames separating from one another and creating gaps in between the hair armatures. The previously fanned, unsprayed hair slipped into the cracks of the fan, and I was left with straight hair flowing in between hair-sticks of shellacked do sticking at 90 degree angles from the bottom of my scalp.

Can you envision that? I only sprayed the underside of my hair, remember? It was beyond hideous and profoundly embarrassing. It really looked like a sprung umbrella sticking out from my flat hair. I made another player give me a rubber band for my hair, but the rigid bits were not really cooperating with going into the ponytail, while the limp bits seemed to be surrendering from apathy. I could hear the stiff bits crackling as they snapped in halves and folded into my ponytail. Now I had broken umbrella arms sticking out from a limp tail.

After the game, the rival sneered at me again, “What happened to your hair, Christine?” I finally knew I was being insulted, and I wished to fall into a pit in the basketball court and disappear forever. Of course, I was never that lucky, and instead I had to sit with them in shame while they sniggered at my miserable hair.

It’s ultimately for the best that I couldn’t style my hair; I don’t have any of the embarrassing middle school photos that could have haunted me. Instead I have emotional scars but great, timeless photos. I’ll settle for that.