Very carefully he reached up with the scissors and snipped at a curl. It fell into the sink on top of the foam. Where the curl had been, there was now just a small tuft of hair. It was sticking up. Straight up.

He stared at it. It was the beginning, he realized, of a punk haircut.

He snipped another curl and watched it drop into the sink.

And another.

He began to wonder whether, when he finished the top, he would be able to figure out how to make the little tail in the back.

He snipped again.

Twenty minutes later, through the closed bathroom door, Sam could hear his mother's footsteps coming up the stairs. He could hear her voice.

"Anastasia?" she was saying. "Sam? It's awfully quiet up here. What are you guys doing?"

"Homework," Sam could hear his sister call.

Sam put his scissors down. He looked around the bathroom. The beard foam had dissolved and was mostly gone. But there was hair everywhere.

"Is Sam in your room?" he heard his mother ask.

"No, he went downstairs a long time ago," Anastasia replied.

"Sam?" his mother called.

Sam leaned over the sink and looked once more into the mirror. Foam had dried on his chin and cheeks, and snippets of hair had dried in it, so he had a fuzzy beard. His curls were mostly gone. Here and there a curl remained, but most of his head wasa"well, it wasn't what he had hoped.

He had hoped for little tufts and spikes, like Adam's hair, and a small tail in the back.

But something had gone wrong. It was chunks. And there was a bald spot right in front. He hadn't wanted a bald spot at all.

"Are you in the bathroom, Sam?" His mother's voice was louder.

He looked at himself again. The head looking back at him didn't look like Sam Krupnik at all.

"No," he called. "Someone else is in the bathroom."

His mother knocked on the door. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

"Are you looking for your cute little boy, Sam?" Sam called nervously.

His mother chuckled. "Yes, I am," she called through the door. "It's his cute little bedtime."

"Well," Sam replied very slowly, "Sam has disappeared. He turned into someone else, I think."

His mother opened the door. She opened her mouth, as if she were going to say something, but no words came out. She stared.

"I'm not Sam anymore," Sam whispered miserably.

His mother's mouth remained open, but she didn't speak.

"I'm a porkypine," Sam wailed. "An ugly one!"

For a very, very long moment his mother still said nothing. They stared at each other in absolute silence.

"Sam," she said at last, "I have never ever wished to have a porcupine instead of a son."

"I know," Sam said, sniffling.

"And for the very first time, I feel a terrible desire to spank you," his mother said. "An urgea"an almost uncontrollable urgea"to spank you. A need to spank you."

Sam poked out his tongue to catch a tear that was coming down his sticky cheek. He tasted hair and dried foam.

"I don't think," his mother continued, "that I am actually going to spank you. But I want you to know that I would like to."

Sam nodded. "Me too," he said miserably. "I want to spank myself."

"Do you think," his mother asked, "that we could try to laugh, instead?"

"I don't feel like laughing," Sam said, spitting out some stray bits of hair.

"Neither do I," said his mom. "But here are the choices. You could cry. I could spank you. If I spank you, then I will cry, too. Or we could both laugh."

"Let's try to laugh," Sam said sadly.

"Ha ha," they both said, and turned the corners of their mouths up very slightly.

Sam's lower lip was still quavering. He laughed again. So did his mom. At first it wasn't easy. But after a moment, the laughter was real. It got louder and louder. Anastasia came running in to see what was going on. Sam's father came upstairs with the newspaper in his hand.

For a very long time, all four Krupniks stayed in the small bathroom together. Sam's father was sitting on the edge of the tub. Sam was still standing on the closed toilet seat. His mother and sister leaned against the wall where the towels hung.

They howled with laughter. They laughed until they were exhausted.

The next morning, bright and early, Sam went with his mother to the barber for repairs. For four weeks, until his curls grew back, he had the most interesting punk hairdo in town. It was even better than his friend Adam's.

12.

"Katherine," Sam's daddy said at dinner, "this is terrific fish chowder."

"Thanks," said Sam's mother. "It is good, isn't it? It's fattening, though. All that cream."

Sam looked up from his own chowder. He liked it because he could mash up crackers in it, which was fun. But he wasn't thinking about his chowder. He was thinking about something that he had just noticed for the first time.

"Why," Sam asked his father in a thoughtful voice, "do you call Mommy 'Katherine'? But I call her Mommy?"

"Well," Dr. Krupnik explained, "I can't call her Mommy because she's not my mother. My mother was named Ruth."

"Did you call her Ruth?" asked Sam.

"No, I called her Mother. But her name was Ruth."

"What was your daddy's name?"

Sam's father grinned. "His name was Sam. Like you. That's why we named you Sam when you were born. It was Anastasia's idea."

Sam frowned. It was all very puzzling. "But why do you call me Sam? I know my name is Sam. But your name is Myron, and I don't call you that. If I call you Daddy, why don't you call me Son? And why don't you call Mommy Wife?"

His father said, "Well, I suppose I could do that." He looked at Mrs. Krupnik and said, "Could I have another helping of chowder, please, Wife?"

"Of course, Husband," Mrs. Krupnik said, and she took his bowl to the stove where the pot of chowder was. "Would you like some more, Son? How about you, Daughter?"

Sam and Anastasia both said "No, thank you" and giggled.

It was all very confusing, Sam thought, as he finished his dinner.

Anyway, what he really wisheda"he hadn't told them thisa"was that they would call him He-Man.

Sam had daydreams about being bigger. Not only bigger, but also stronger and more powerful. He wanted to be someone who could catch criminals, beat up bad guys, fly airplanes, shoot rockets, and end up being He-Man of the Whole World.

All the guys at Sam's nursery school wanted the same thing. Their favorite games had to do with blasting off and zooming and bashing. They were so noisy that Mrs. Bennett was always saying, "Time Out, guys," and then they would listen to her read a story about Babar or Madeline or Curious George.

Sam loved listening to stories. And sometimes he liked to play the quiet games. He liked playing house with Leah and Rosie and Skipper when they would cook pretend dinners on the little stove and serve the dinners to the stuffed animals that they propped up in chairs.

But sometimes, while playing house, Sam would have an urge to race around with the pretend dinner in its plastic dish, and bomb the animals instead of feeding them nicely.

Then Rosie would always start to cry, and Mrs. Bennett would have to say, "Time Out, Sam."

Time Out meant that he had to sit quietly in the big green chair.

Sometimes Sam had Time Out several times every morning. He didn't mind that. Football players had Time Out, too; he saw it on TV when his daddy watched the Patriots.

"Why do they have Time Out?" Sam asked his daddy. "Were they bad?"

"No, they just need to take a rest and to think a little bit," his daddy explained.

So that's what Sam did, too, at school, when Mrs. Bennett said "Time Out," and Sam had to sit in the green chair. He rested and thought.

Mostly, he thought about being a He-Man.

"Do I have big muscles?" Sam asked Anastasia. He had pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, and he showed her the top of his arm.

Anastasia was busy with a school project. She was at her desk, with her feet wrapped around the rungs of the chair, and a pencil tip in her mouth. She glanced over at Sam.

"No, I wouldn't say so," she said. "Your arms are kind of skinny."

Sam stuck out his lower lip. "Well," he asked her, "how can I get big muscles?"

Anastasia glanced over again, impatiently. "You have to pump iron," she said. "There's this guy at the junior high, Ben Fraser, who has humungous muscles. And he got them by pumping iron."

"How can Ia"" Sam began.

But Anastasia interrupted him. "Sam," she said, "I'm busy. Please quit bothering me, okay?"

Sam sighed and wandered away from Anastasia's bedroom. He went downstairs. He thought about pumping iron.

He knew what an iron was. His mother had one. She kept it in the pantry on a shelf, with its cord all twisted around it. His mom was allergic to the iron, she said.

Sam went to the pantry and lifted the iron down very carefully from its place. He took it up to his room.

Then he went to his mother's closet. He kicked aside her sandals and her torn sneakers on the closet floor. He crawled inside the closet and looked around. He saw a couple of old pink slippers. Those weren't what he wanted.

Finally he found what he was looking for, inside a s...o...b..x stacked with others in a corner of the closet. They were high-heeled and black. There were two of them. Pumps.

He took one of the black pumps to his room and laid it carefully on his bed beside the iron.

Then he tried to figure out how to do it. How to pump iron.

But it was a mystery. He could do it backward. He could iron the pump. He did that for a while, but it was boring, and it didn't make big muscles at all.

But he simply couldn't figure out how to pump the iron.

Maybe there was another way. Sam went to his mother and asked her. She was in the big studio where she painted, and she was working at her easel, humming and holding a paintbrush with a blue-daubed end in her hand.

"Hi, Sam," she said. "What's up?"

"Do you know how to make big muscles on someone?"

"Well," said Sam's mom, "if I were making a picture of a person, and wanted to make big muscles, I would do it like this." She pulled out a large sheet of paper, drew a man very quickly with a marking pen, and then added a fat bulge on each of his arms. "See?" she said. "Big muscles."

Sam looked. The picture looked a little like Popeye.

"Yeah," he said, "but if it was a real person, not just a picture person, how would he get big muscles? How did Popeye get his big muscles?"

His mother laughed. "Spinach, of course. Don't you remember how Popeye gobbles spinach every time he needs more strength and bigger muscles?"

Of course. Sam did remember.

And he remembered something else. He remembered that there was some leftover spinach in the refrigerator.