I often wake up earlier than everyone in my house.  I slip out of my bed and tiptoe past my sleeping sister and walk as quietly as I can to the balcony.   We live in a high-rise apartment building right above the River.  From our balcony I see the city and in the morning it glows.  I go inside and get a bowl from the kitchen and fill it with Frosted Flakes.  They are my favorite!  I bring the bowl into the living room and sit on the floor so I don’t get any milk on the couch.  I eat the bowl of Frosted Flakes quickly so they do not have a chance to get soggy.  The reason I wake up early is to make sure that I can watch X Men Adventures.  The X Men are my favorite because they are a group of kids who look normal on the outside, but because of an extra gene in their DNA they have superhuman powers.  I thought it was cool, but the rest of the world mistrusted and hated them for their powers.   So they keep their abilities a secret and just use them to save the world from time to time.  There is a mark that all mutants have; it is an M that is traced with the outline of the lines on their palms.  I check my hands to see if I am a mutant, too.

Today, my sister Linda woke up right after I turned on the TV. She came out wiping the boogers from her eyes, smiled, and then went to get a bowl of cereal.  She didn’t like Frosted Flakes.  Her favorite was Fruity Pebbles.  I like my sister; she is younger than me by two years but not that much smaller.  She has long dark brown hair the color of Lincoln Logs.  She is always smiling and in a good mood.  She likes Hello Kitty a lot, so everything she was wearing; socks, nightgown and a barrette, had the smiling cat on it.   She sat next to me and ate her cereal.  She did not like X-Men as much as me, but she didn’t complain because she would get to watch her favorite cartoon next.

My Mom came out right when X-Men was ending.  She was already dressed.  That meant we were going somewhere: probably shopping.  My Mom is pretty.  She's tall and stands up straight.  She also has dark brown hair and light skin.  Her eyes are sometimes green and sometimes blue depending on the mood she was in, and that could change quickly if we did not listen to her.  That is why my sister and I stopped eating.  I had my spoon in my mouth and my sister was still chewing. 

“Okay, lets talk about what we are doing today”, she said and turned the TV off.  Both of us groaned in unison, but we were silenced by her look.

“ We are going shopping, and I want to leave in 25 minutes so I need both of you to get dressed right now.”

We knew this was an order and not a request, so we both raced to the bathroom and started to brush our teeth.  I finished first, so I went back to my bedroom and changed into jeans and a Batman t-shirt.  When I went back out into the living room my mother was fixing Linda’s hair.  She was brushing it with a black, squat brush with hard bristles.  I looked at her long shiny straight hair and how the comb looked like it floated through.  I thought about my own hair; tight, curly hair that frizzed in heat, and was a little bothered.  When my mother was done with my sister’s hair she started on mine.  It always hurt.  My hair is really hard to brush.  In-between “ows” I asked my mother the question that I had asked a million times before.

“ Why isn’t my hair easy to brush like Linda’s?”  She answered with the same unsatisfying answer she always gave:

“God gave you the hair you have, and in its own way it is as beautiful as your sister’s.”

This always made me mad

Shopping with my Mom is never fun.  She spends hours looking at dresses in stores up and down Palisades Avenue.  She  hardly ever buys much but she tries on everything.  Saleswomen loaded up with piles of clothing and brought them to the dressing room in shifts.  Linda and I waited not too patiently in the window of the shop, looking at the people walking by the store window.

When that got boring we decided to play hide and go seek.  In between and underneath the racks of dresses and shirts we would hide.  This got old really quick because we could always see each other’s feet under the racks. 

I heard my mother yell our names from the front of the store.  She was standing there with just one bag and her hand on her hip.  I ran to the front of the store to meet my mom.  I turned and noticed my sister was not there.   My mom yelled again and out popped Linda’s head from a rack of clothing.  We all walked out together into the midday sun.  My mom held my sister’s hand and I walked along side them.

Then I saw it!  My absolute favorite store on the Avenue: Marv’s Comic Emporium, the one I never got to go into.  I stopped to press my nose flat against the cold glass, and looking in at all the comics and action figures.   My Mom and sister walked ahead.  When they were about a half a block away she turned and yelled at me to catch up.  I took off towards her to catch up, running as fast as I could.  That’s when I bumped into him.

He was old and wrinkled all the way to the hand he used to stop me from falling.   When I looked up at his face he gave me a toothy smile through full lips.  His eyes were black, so black it was hard to see his pupils.  His hair was curly like mine but cut much shorter.  His face was kind and he gently tapped me on the head when I finally straightened out.  My mother came out of nowhere and grabbed me by the arm.  I looked up at my Mom and she looked just like the time I had almost been hit by a car.  I thought she was mad at me, and she pulled me away.

The dark man looked at my mother and called out a name that I had not heard before.

“Madelina?” 

I could see my mother knew that name, and that she also knew the man calling her that.  She did not reply, but grabbed my hand and picked up my sister onto her hip and started walking very quickly, so quickly I almost had to run to keep up.  I looked behind me as I trotted next to my mother.  The man quickly fell behind us, but he was still yelling out the name: “Madelina, Madelina.” My mother kept ignoring him and walked faster.   Soon he was gone, swallowed whole by the crowd on the avenue.

“Mom, who was that man?”  I asked.

She did not answer but looked behind her and then slowed down and put down my sister.   So I asked again.  She looked at me and stared for a moment like she didn’t know who I was.  She eventually answered me.

“That was your Uncle.”

“My Uncle,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.  I could tell she was annoyed as she explained, “Your father’s brother.”

“Oh,” I said and then kept quiet all the way back home to our apartment.

Brushing my teeth that night I looked at myself in the mirror.  I saw my long curly hair sitting on my head.  It was knotted up again, and I dreaded trying to pull my comb through it.   I thought that maybe my uncle would know how to comb my hair without knotting, or maybe I should keep it short like him.  Or better yet, maybe he knew my father and could get him to call me, and he would tell me how.  But I didn’t think that would ever happen, since he had not called on any of my birthdays, and I never even got a present from him at Christmas.  I imagined my Uncle at his house full of people who had curly hair like me.  There were tall ones and short ones, girls and boys running and playing.   There were some combing their hair and the combs passed through easily, with no grimace and no fuss.