The Boy With Grey Hair

Once upon another time there lived a young boy with grey hair. No one quite knew why his hair was grey, but it was. Occasionally people would stop and point and wonder how such a young boy happened to have such grey hair, but usually they forgot after a while.

His mother thought about dying the young boy's hair. She even bought a bottle once, full of thick dark liquid that oozed out of the bottle's thin neck, creeping over the glass like a strange prowling alien. Yet the boy refused to let her use it, mainly because it reminded him of his brother's comic books that he read after dark under his covers. He did not want that peculiar bottled creature touching his head and besides, he quite liked his grey hair. He quite liked being different.

People expected him to be smarter because of his grey hair, and to be honest, he was. Teachers would marvel at his imaginative pictures and go into spasms of delight over his stories. The child, they would say to his mother, is a genius. The boy would smile smugly and give his grey hair a little shake whilst his mother, who knew that really the boy was simply an annoyance, would sigh and wonder how much this genius would cost her.

One day, just before his seventh birthday, his mother bought a razor. Even though he kicked her shins and bit her hand, she managed to do quite a decent job of shaving away his greyness. The boy cried for days, cowering under his covers and holding his bare head in his hands. His brother would laugh, but his brother did not understand because he, after all, had brown hair. And brown hair, on a ten year old, is really nothing special. 

It was about a week later that they boy's mother had had enough of his whimpering. She pulled him out of bed by his skinny ankles and ordered him to take a bath. Yet, when his head finally emerged from the blue sheets, she gasped and stopped her ordering. His hair was back again, even greyer than before and curling over his shirt collar. Somehow, she realised, the boy's tears had watered his scalp in such a way as to make his hair return. Knowing that she could not fight against her son's sorrow (for it was indeed great) she instead hatched a plan.

She gathered together all of the evidence of the boy's genius, and even some of other people's genius, and piled it into the back of her car. Leaving the brown-haired boy behind (because after all, he was nothing special) she drove the seven year old to the local television station and marched up to the news desk. Look, she declared to the news reporters, my son is a grey-haired child genius! At first the news reporters laughed, but when she shaved the boy's hair again and he began to cry, they started to take her seriously. For, as he wiped his tears up away from his cheeks and onto his head, the grey hair began to sprout again and curl lusciously around his ears. This, thought the news reporters excitedly, is going to make us famous! And they clammered around the mother and her son until her pockets were full of green dollars and his eyes were empty of tears. (This was not because he had simply stopped being sad, but because he had cried all the tears that he had in his small body and could not even squeeze one more little drop out).

It was a little while later, when the news of this most amazing boy had spread across the nation and photographers camped outside the boy's home day and night, that things began to change. The boy, you see, had begun to grow older and, oddly enough, it was as he grew older that his hair began to darken and his genius seemed to fade. He became, in a short while, just like everyone else. One by one the photographers left and note by note the money disappeared. His mother, knowing that even a bottle of thick silver liquid would not bring back the fame she once had, turned to bottles of an altogether different kind. And the boy, though he grieved over his once-grey hair, was secretly a little relieved to look just like all the other children. No one stopped anymore to stare, and everyone treated him just like any other ordinary boy, which of course he was, on the outside anyway...