Towelhead Read Online Free

see her private parts. There was some writing next to the pictures, different opinions that the woman had about men and dating and food that she liked. Then there was the name of the man who had taken the pictures. When I saw this, I closed the magazine again and put it back in the closet. I went downstairs and sat in the living room. Soon Zack came down, too.
    â€œDid you put everything back the way it was?” I asked him.
    He nodded, then lay down on the couch.
    â€œYou can’t look at the magazines anymore,” I told him.
    â€œI can do whatever I want, towelhead.”
    â€œStop calling me that,” I said.
    â€œWhy?” he said. “You’re a towelhead, aren’t you?”
    â€œNo,” I said, even though I didn’t know what a towelhead was.
    â€œYour dad is,” he said. “If your dad is, then so are you.”
    I got it then, only it seemed stupid, since Daddy didn’t wear a towel on his head. He was a Christian, just like everyone else in Texas. One summer, when I was seven, he’d taken me to the Arab church and had me baptized in a bathtub. I’d cried for days beforehand, scared that I would have to be naked in front of a bunch of people I didn’t know, but the priest gave me a robe to wear. In the car on the way home, Daddy made fun of me for worrying about nothing, and I knew then that he’d known about the robe all along.
    Zack fell asleep on the couch, and I went back upstairs to make sure there weren’t any Playboy s lying around. I was disappointed when there weren’t, so I went to the closet and took one out. I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened it up to the centerfold, this time unfolding it. I was starting to get used to the pictures a little. They didn’t shock me as much as they had earlier. I especially liked the ones where the women had hardly any pubic hair. If I squeezed my legs together when I looked at them, I got a good feeling.
    Mr. Vuoso came home and asked if I’d had any problems with Zack, and I told him no. “That’s what I like to hear,” he said, reaching for his wallet. I thought I might feel more nervous around him now that I knew what kind of magazines he read, but I didn’t. Instead, I felt more comfortable. I felt like he didn’t think there was anything wrong with breasts or bodies at all.
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    When I got home, there was blood in my underwear. At least I thought it was blood. It was kind of orange and rusty. I got on the phone and described it to my mother, and she said, “That’s definitely blood.”
    â€œWhat do I do?” I said. It was the one thing I’d been most afraid of, getting my first period with Daddy. The night before I’d left Syracuse, my mother had given me a couple of her pads, but they weren’t going to last.
    â€œWhat do you mean, what do you do? Just put on a pad and tell Daddy when he gets home. He knows what a period is.”
    â€œCan’t you tell him?”
    â€œWhy would I tell him?”
    â€œI just don’t want to talk to him about it.”
    â€œWhy not? You’re going to have to talk about it sometime.”
    â€œYou don’t understand,” I said. “Daddy doesn’t like my body.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œYou’re making a big deal out of nothing,” she said. “Pull yourself together.”
    We hung up, and I went to my bathroom and put on one of the pads. As I walked around the house, I kept thinking I could hear it making little crinkling noises in my underpants. They’d shown us a movie in school saying that this was a special day, but mostly I just felt like a baby in a diaper.
    When Daddy pulled into the driveway at seven o’clock, I met him at the back door. “Hi,” I said.
    â€œHello, Jasira,” he mumbled. Daddy was rarely happy at the end of the day. The people at NASA bothered him