A Real Human Girl

I've said before that it took my brother an awful long time to resemble a real human boy. Adam went through an awkward phase. His awkward phase included such joys as acne in unfortunate places and--the real kicker--puffy nipples. The doctor explained that the puffy nipples were no big deal, that they were the byproduct of some sort of strange flux of hormones, that they would go away after awhile. Still, for several months, whenever my brother took off his shirt, there they were, those puffy nipples that looked like they belonged on the body of a thirteen year old girl.

There were other things, too. Incidents. The first involved a family reunion, a bag of golf clubs, a wayward swing by one of the cousins, and Adam's jaw that got knocked clear out of its socket and hung crooked from his face while the reunion and all its barbequed hamburgers were disbanded in favor of driving Adam to the emergency room. Once my family got him to the emergency room, the doctors wired Adam's jaw shut, and it stayed that way for months. He couldn't eat anything solid. We liquefied everything for him: spaghetti and meatballs, mac and cheese, beef stroganoff. He even went back to school with his jaw wired shut. We had to pack him special lunches, and he had to eat with the nurse every day to make sure he didn't choke. I remember feeding him a McDonald's french fry--a real treat--through the space in his teeth. He gummed at that thing like it was the best thing ever. Ambrosia! Heaven! A solid fry!

The other notable incident that shaped my brother's awkward period again involved a cousin, a wayward squirt of gasoline, and a bonfire. My brother had been standing too close to the edge of the flame, and when it roared up from the shot of gas, my brother's leg flared up with it. The skin and hair puckered. My brother screamed and screamed. And off he went to the emergency room one more time, where they treated him for burns, where they did the best they could with his leg. For years, his one leg was completely hairless and smooth, like a girl's or one of those cats you see--the ones who are all skin, no fur.

Adam did not have it easy. He had it worse than I did. And I have spent years watching him bumble through his awkward phase. I watched and watched and watched. Then, after I came home from Minnesota, I looked at my brother and said, "There. Finally. Almost a real human boy."

I had forgotten, though, how long it took me to look like a real human girl. Sure I've mocked myself considerably on this blog--oh, those old pictures!--but I never really sat around and thought about how long it took me to look the way I see myself in my head.

I was thinking about that a lot this weekend. When I was over at Amy and Becky's on Saturday--to celebrate Becky's 26th birthday bonanza--we stuffed ourselves full of tacos and then spread out on the living room floor. Then Amy put in a tape of her surprise birthday party from eighth grade.

Suddenly there we all were (well, not me--I was suspiciously missing from the party) on the screen. All our old friends were bouncing around in Amy's basement. They were singing. They were dancing. They were inhaling sugar as fast as they could get it clutched in their palms. Everyone was twelve, thirteen years old and wearing the best 90's apparel: scruchies and plaid shirts and boy jeans. It was really quite a sight.

"I'm HIDEOUS!" Becky shrieked.

"No, I'm HIDEOUS!" Amy shrieked.

I tried to tell them that, no, neither of them was hideous. That's just what thirteen year old girls looked like back then. We didn't wear short skirts or belly shirts. We didn't flounce around in the fashions we saw on the backs of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. We emulated Angela Chase. We had her shirts, her pants, her baggy clothes. We were exactly what thirteen year old girls who didn't have boyfriends (and wouldn't for years) looked like at that point in time. The popular girls--the ones who were rumored to have lost their virginity in sixth grade, the ones whose boyfriends were the boys we had devastating crushes on--didn't exactly look like us, but that's because they were busy being popular, and we were busy practicing our slick dance moves or fake-singing into our fists or hairbrushes. I wouldn't trade a second of that, even if someone told me I could've had Ryan McLean for my boyfriend.

But somewhere along the way, all that "hideousness" fell away. Our voices changed, we got taller, we shopped for better clothes. We got better looking. We got a handle on ourselves. For some, though, it took longer than others.

Here, for example, is me in eleventh grade:



Of note: the mullet-ish hairdo, the bloated face, the untamed eyebrows, the hideous vest. I look like I've been asleep for fifty years. I look sad and boyfriendless. I look a little bit like I might never come out of it.

But then, then, then, there was some sort of transformation, some sort of something that took place in my body over the course of a few months, something that took me from a girl with a shaggy mullet to this:



A real human girl.

(For the most part.)

(And, for those of you who are keeping score, the girl on the right is my former best friend, the girl who cried when I told her I lost my virginity.)

Jess: Now with More Bang

There comes a point in a girl's life where she needs a change, something's gotta give, big things have to happen. Maybe she's going on spring break--ironically to a place that's actually colder than where she lives now--in two weeks. Maybe she's sick of looking in the mirror and thinking blah. Maybe she lets her best gay friend--the one who's always lecturing her on serum (You need serum in your hair, Jess! Serum!)--talk her into going to his hairdresser. Maybe she feels a little reckless, a little like the time she had a hair appointment before she went out with New Boy for the first time, and she says the same thing she said then: "Do what you think will make me look best."

Maybe she gets bangs. Maybe she gets really cute bangs:



I'm pretty sure after I get my eyebrows waxed next week, I am going to rule the world.

The Hair Confessions

When I was twelve years old there was nothing I liked to do more than sit on the steps that led up to my best friend's bathroom and watch her do her hair.

My best friend--this is the girl we're calling Tammy--had great hair. Amazing hair. She had a bathroom separate from her parents' bathroom, and that was pretty amazing, too. In it she stored all sorts of velcro rollers, hot rollers, curling irons, crimpers, hair spray, and gel.

When I was twelve years old there wasn't much you had to do to my hair. There still isn't. My hair has always been low-key hair--hair that I worship and give thanks for, mainly because my best friends have been telling me all our lives that they would kill someone or something for my hair, that they would actually crack skulls or spill blood to trade their hair in for mine.

It can sit straight and still--it's normal position--or it can do big, big curl if I put gel in it and attach a diffuser to my hairdryer. It goes up and stays. It obeys. It likes to show off.

When I went to get my hair done for my thesis reading the up-do specialist sucked in her breath the minute she put her hands in my hair. "Your hair is brilliant," she said. "It's not going anywhere. It's the perfect hair."

I did my own hair for prom and saved myself forty bucks and the embarrassment of showing up with fake daisies or glitter stuck in my curls.

Even though I love it now and find no fault with its easy-going, eager-to-please attitude, I wasn't its biggest fan in my adolescence. For one thing, I was born in the 80s and when I went to school I worshipped the high school girls who rode my bus. They breezed on in the mornings with sky-high hair and spandex. They smelled of Aqua-Net and Charlie perfume. They had bubble-pink nails and bubble-pink lips. They carried combs and picks in their purses. And I wanted that. I wanted it bad.

So I went off and had my head wrapped up in chemical twists every six months so I could go to school the next day with a hip new perm, so I could pretend I was those pinked and casual girls who were always talking about boys and that beer they snuck out of Tina's fridge.



The picture is bad, yes, but there I am in the upper right corner. I remember this night like it was yesterday. Yesterday! I must be around ten or eleven years old, but, interestingly enough, four of the six people in this picture are members of the Pink Torpedoes--the group of us from Holland Central that are still, still, still obsessed with each other. Amy and Steph are sitting on the top row with me, and Anne is the one looking bored in the lower left.

Anyway, that night was one of Jane's famous sleepovers. She always had the best Dorrito selection and bowls full of those short-lived pizza-flavored chips. We had fashion shows in our pajamas (I never won) and worked on elaborate dance routines to Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted Snake."

This particular Friday had been a dual-event Friday. First there had been some event at school--a talent competition? a play? a circus?--and we'd all gone together before going back to Jane's. While out at school, I caught a glimpse of the love of my life. Ryan McLean stood against a wall with his Holland Raiders jacket and spiked hair. The mere sight of him made me delusional. I swooned. I fanned myself. I recovered, and then I did a strut. I thought I looked so good. My mother had let me select my outfit--which is why I'm wearing a paint-splattered shirt and acid wash jeans--and she let me do my hair, too. I wasn't allowed to look like that when I went to school. During the day I had to look combed and respectable. My mother didn't think that paint-splattered shirt really said serious student, so it was banned from the daytime.

When we went back to Jane's that night I told everyone about what happened. I talked fast. I couldn't stop myself. I told them that I'd seen Ryan and it was so clear that he saw me and the outfit I was wearing and boy was he impressed. I told them I even thought I saw his eyes widen when he got a glimpse of me. I thought that finally! finally! when I went into school on Monday morning Ryan would come up to me and admit he was wrong to never pay attention to me.

That didn't happen.

That never happened.

Probably because I went on to look like this:



and this:



and this:



But the year I turned twelve it didn't really matter anymore. Things started changing that year. Tammy and I were new best friends, and I was always spending the night at her house. Saturday nights were the best nights to stay, because that meant we would spend two hours getting ready for the racetrack. There were so many boys at the racetrack, and her father knew many of them. We were thirteen years old and hanging on the notion that someday, somehow, one of those young boys whose daddies had bought them busted-up Challengers would notice us, chuck us under the chin and say, "Just you wait one more year, baby-girl, then you'll be old enough, and we'll finally be able to be together."

I was never chucked by one of those racers. Tammy married one of them. Possibly because this is how different we looked:



Her skin! Her hair! Her bangs! Her giant hoop earrings! Everything about her was perfect. She had the perfect stand, the perfect wait, the perfect lean, the perfect smile. I, on the other hand, had braces and bangs that looked like they were cut by a rusty lawnmower. Nothing about me was perfect. I was nervous and itchy and strange. So I watched Tammy like a hawk. Anything she did--the lean, the stand, the smile--I memorized. I hoped her grace would somehow become my grace through osmosis or some other miracle.

But for Tammy to come out looking so good required a lot of prep time. She fussed over her bangs especially. And I loved to watch this. It made me feel accepted and in and like I was part of some female cult that only she and I understood. I thought someday I might have nice hair, and, thanks to Tammy, I would know how to take care of it.

Of course, all of that was hard, too. Because I watched her so carefully, I was intimate with the knowledge that in our friendship Tammy's function was beauty. I was the tag-along. I was her best friend, and because of it I got to sit next to cute boys who were actually clustering around her, trying to get her attention, and only speaking to me to say things like, Hey, Jess, did you see that?! or Pass the pizza. She got whispers and flirts and touches. She got the tall, sandy-haired, beautiful-eyed boys. I got her sweet but overweight cousin.

People were always stopping to look at Tammy. No one stopped to look at me. Or, if they did, it was to notice that I was with her. I was just That Girl Who's Always With Tammy.

Still, those were some of the best years of my life, and to this day I think Tammy taught me some of the most important lessons a girl needs to learn during those formative of years--the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years--and I wouldn't be the girl I am today without those lessons. She taught me about losing friends, certainly, and about jealousy and hope, but she also taught me a lot about grace, about confidence, about how to be the girl who walks into a room and says with her face, her body, even her hair--Hello. I'm here. Take note, and take it now.