After the blacklisting of Noah Vail, some of his subsequent stories appeared under pseudonyms. This one was credited to "Myra Punzel." 

Upbraided 

by Myra Punzel

"You're not going to cut that child's hair!"

The scissors clicked on air an inch short of my eight-year-old braid. Clicked once and then were silent, clamped shut in the hand my stepmother's strident command so often stayed. My father turned his gaze from my head to his wife.
"He's not a girl. He's gonna have to get a haircut sooner or later." He lowered the scissors. The woman's glare was unrelenting. Scowling, he left the room, with two pairs of eyes aiming daggers at his back. Mine were blue, rimmed with incipient tears; my protectress's were large, dark, smouldering.
"Come here, Myra," she said, and her face softened into a smile as I leapt from the kitchen stool and scurried into her arms, my braided blonde pigtails flailing.

My hair had never been cut in my short life, and that summer-- the summer that I saw Hayley Mills in "Pollyanna" and the summer before I entered grade three-- it was long enough to be braided and curled and styled so I thought I looked like a preteen movie star. Maybe I did, too, when I played alone in the vacant lot behind our house, dressed in the kurta my stepmom sometimes let me wear. I sort of liked boys, but I didn't want to be one. I liked being pretty, like the man who lived in the little shack below the embankment said I was.

My dad had tried to teach me to play baseball, and when the ball went past me and down over the bank we had given it up for lost. It was the end of my baseball career, as far as my dad was concerned, but later I went down the bank to search, and the man in the cabin came out to help me. In the bushes and the tall grass, the ball seemed to have disappeared forever. 

When I came home late, my stepmom scolded me, but she wasn't really angry, I could tell. Somehow we were kindred free spirits-- exotic outsiders. Once she had wrapped a turban around my head and let me admire myself in the mirror. But she wouldn't let me wear it to school; she sent me off with a simple topknot. She was a dark subcontinental beauty; I was a blonde little androgyne. Now, in the luxuriant warmth of summer, we both flourished. Yet we both knew, too, that my father would have his way, and when school started in the fall, my locks would be shorn, and I would be just another little Canadian schoolboy.

I went down the bank behind the vacant lot every day that August, ostensibly to look for my lost ball, but really, of course, to visit the man who made me feel like a pretty little girl. We would laugh and chase each other through the bush. With a rat tail comb, he would undo the simple pleats my stepmother made, and weave the blonde strands into intricate braids. French braids, he called them. In his cabin, he would give me lemonade and show me my new hairstyles in a square framed mirror. I loved the way he made my hair look. One day he showed me a little dress, and I tried it on in delight. I was barefoot and naked under the wispy cotton fabric and it felt electrifying. I ran around outside feeling the warm breeze billowing the dress and caressing my tingling little bum and cock. I tossed my head and my braids flicked my shoulders. I was a sexy little girl! Being chased by a man!

At home, my stepmom admired my new braids with interest. "Let's take them out before supper, sweety," she said. A rich, spicy aroma wafted from the kitchen. My father sat impatiently at the dining room table. He snorted when I finally appeared, epicene face scrubbed and hair combed into an unobtrusive ponytail.
"Did you find your ball yet?" His sneer subsided as he took a mouthful of rice, and I felt relieved and somehow a little sorry for him, happy that he could at least enjoy delicious food.
"Not yet." I smiled into my plate. "But I will."
"I think Myra has some help looking," smirked my stepmom. My father glowered; he knew that upbraiding his wife for the mispronunciation of "Myron" would be to no avail.
"You mean that queer who lives in the shack down there?"
I was afraid of my father, but my stepmom wasn't. "He's a nice man, I think. Isn't he, Myra?"
"Yes, he is!" I blurted out.
My father's eyes bored into me. I'd heard the words written in his expression and I was beginning to understand them. Little faggot.
I was crying when I went to bed that night.

But next day, sheltered from the sweltering afternoon heat by the shaded little cabin's interior, I stood contentedly on the single bunk, facing a small mirror tacked on the wall, while the man softly brushed out my hair. He stood behind me, and I saw his smile reflected with my own. I wore my dress, and new cotton panties. A copy of the "Star Weekly" lay on the bunk, and as the man teased and backcombed my blonde hair, I began to look like the little girl on the cover.
"All finished!" he said, and still holding the brush, slipped his forearms under my armpits. He hoisted me up and set me on the cabin floor. I turned and hugged him, then ran giggling out the door into the sunlight.
He stood watching me from the doorway as I cavorted in the grass, pretending to be the happy little heroine I'd seen in the movies.
Later, when I came back inside for lemonade, he said he had something for me, and grinned. 
When I clambered up the embankment on my way home that evening, no longer an innocent Pollyanna, my baseball was tucked in the pocket of my jeans.

Under my jeans, though, I now wore a fresh pair of soft cotton panties, and I knew that it was only on the outside that I was a boy. That night I masturbated, panting and writhing as I stroked my little cock, my panties pulled down and then off, my legs splayed. A man was fucking me. He was touching me everywhere, and poking his big hot hard cock in my little bumhole. And sucking me. His moist warm tongue licking my little shaft, his lips sliding up and down on it until I arched my back and spasmed in ecstasy. He whispered in my ear, calling me little girl names, sweet names, dirty names, turning me over and fucking me in my little bum. My little cock rubbed against the blankets, faster and faster. I wanted to squirt, and I wanted to feel his hot sticky stuff squirt on me. It was a beautiful, thrilling dream. I slept.

Epilogue

The man who cut my hair before school started that year was not my father; it was the queer man who lived in the shack. He came to our house to do it, at the invitation of my stepmom, while my father was away at work. He brought clippers and gave me a brush cut. Soon after school started he went away, and I never saw him again. I missed him, and missed my braids and my bangs. The cabin was empty, and eventually vandalized. Windows smashed, door ripped from its hinges. Bums slept there. I went there with other kids to smoke cigarettes and found a pair of my cotton panties under a mattress, soiled and stained.