Monday, October 6, 2008
My name is Jamie Smith and I have the most basic name in America.
I have to admit I’ve always wanted to start my story that way. I like the statement; it makes an all too true motto for me: a basic name for a basic girl with a basic life.
Who is this basic-named Jamie Smith? Well, here’s the gist: Have you ever watched those movies about the girl who never gets a chance to sit down at dances because she’s too busy getting whisked away onto the dance floor by several teen males anxious to dance with her?
Yeah, you know her.
Don’t you just hate her?
Yeah, I do too, especially since I wasn’t that girl. That girl – or, more correctly, just in case my Lit. teacher is reading this, these girls – are my friends. Me, I was the “to the side” girl, you know, the one who has plenty of chances to sit down during dances because there isn’t a teen male in the vicinity anxious to dance with her. I was the one who always ended up befriending the beautiful petite girls with enticing laughs, sparkling personalities and well-honed pheromone releasing systems. If my friends were magnets, guys were the scraps of metal that flew to them. What was I in the scenario? I was the piece of wood that attracts nothing but mold and termites.
You may call me extreme, but it’s the truth.
I guess you could call me one of those who hadn’t “come out of her shell” yet, cursed with a shy personality and an arsenal of self-esteem problems, I never was like my friends. I would only talk to someone I didn’t know if they talked to me first (that way I knew they actually wanted to talk to me) and you can bet I wasn’t one to attempt conversations with the good-looking chaps I happened to be crushing on. My friends, however, had no idea what the word “shy” meant, and were quite capable of walking up to any random person and striking up the longest and greatest conversations ever. But they had every right to be outgoing, they were all beautiful and guys didn’t mind talking to them.
Now I’m not saying I’m hideous or anything, because I’m not. Overall, I could say with almost complete confidence that I’m an attractive person: long thick hair, pointy nose, okay eyes, heart-shaped mouth, and basically flawless skin. I don’t have to wear make-up and I rarely do, it just makes me look like a prostitute. So all in all, I’d say I was a good-looking person…if it wasn’t for one thing.
When I was five, a fire broke out in my house and I was trapped in there for a while before I was rescued. I remember something kind of exploding and a piece of burning debris hitting me in the face. From the left side of my hairline to my temple, I got a tear-shaped burn that narrowly missed my eye but took half of my brow. I got out with no other injuries luckily, but the burn was enough. Like most scars, it is very noticeable, pink and textured, and I still don’t have half of my eyebrow.
And that stupid little scar has been the big hurdle of my life. Elementary school was the worst. You can’t understand the cruelties of children until you have endured daily situations including staring, questions and teasing. You can’t really wrap your head around the sometimes pure wickedness of the human mind until you’ve had rocks thrown at you when walking home while the chants of “Scarface” and “Freddie Krueger” fill your head. Even when you grow up and realize they were just children and they most likely didn’t mean it, you don’t understand how such things can haunt you, mold you, until you’ve experienced them.
That stuff sticks with you, man.
Middle school was slightly better. They stopped the staring and most of the teasing (“Scarface” survived up until 8th grade I believe) but it only began the next stage of the ugliness of the scar. For with middle school came that utterly heart-breaking complication of noticing boys in the whole new light. No longer were they the idiots who chased you around the playground, now they were guys and suddenly you find your poor adolescent body betraying you by becoming attracted (not repulsed) by them. You know what I mean. I was no different from the other girls in middle school; I liked plenty of boys – pardon, guys – and spent the appropriate amount of time swooning over them in the overly-maudlin ways of the female middle-schooler.
The catch was none of those said guys liked me back … ever. Bad luck you could call it or just plain normal for the moronic middle-school-aged boy to not like a girl back, but I can’t agree with either. Because they were liking girls, just other girls. Other girls had boyfriends, other girls got their first kisses, other girls got to experience that special joy of realizing a member of the opposite sex had the hots for her. I was not a lucky other girl but - yes you guessed it - my friends were.
This phenomenon of chronic unrequited love juxtaposed with my unfortunate weight, my pre-braces teeth, my stunning inability to walk without tripping and not to mention the scar were what caused me to keep my feelings to myself. I wasn’t like my friends who could just walk up to their 13-year-old crush and say, “I like you” only to walk away hand in hand with him for the week their relationship would last (what middle school relationship lasts longer, I must ask?) I couldn’t do that and not just because I was too afraid of them rejecting me – because I was – but also because I couldn’t stand the idea of them feeling bad that the girl with the missing eyebrow liked them. That chubby, snaggle-toothed Jamie Smith was smitten with them. What sucky luck! Of all the girls in the school, they had to have hopeless Jamie Smith after them.
Isn’t the human mind just cruel? I sometimes think our own brains can be the cruelest and mine was no exception.
From then on, well into high school, I basically remained with the above mentioned mindset about guys: if I liked them I would never let on I did, only to spare them the humiliation and the guilt for having to turn down a girl known for being nice but not for being a looker.
It sounds horrible, I know, and I wish I hadn’t felt that way but I couldn’t help it. Even though it improved a little with high school – being I grew taller, lost some weight, fixed my teeth and got a smidge more self-esteem – the evil voice was still there whispering. I could finally joke about the scar – with friends at least - and answer questions without getting the urge to cry. I was able to smile back at the children who stared at me in the grocery store and handle the shocked expressions from the adults who hadn’t realized my deformity until I turned my head; but it didn’t stop me from growing my bangs out long so even when they were tucked behind my ear they covered the scar. It took me twelve years to get this comfortable with it and I had no idea how long it would take before it didn’t bother me at all. Until then I just planned to always have hair in my face, preferring to deal with the comments about that then having to explain what was behind it.
So I went through high school with a little more confidence but nothing to show for it. No boyfriends, no guys liking me, nobody asking me to dances and nobody kissing me. That’s right, I was a senior and had never had any sort of contact with male lips. This didn’t help my fight against the evil voice at all and only caused me – on many occasions – to wish to be a prettier Jamie. Not only had my friends been kissed but they also had had numerous boyfriends and lost their virginities well before they got to senior year, which made me the one they felt bad for. In earnest I appreciated the sympathy but hated feeling pathetic, which was just how they made me feel.
They kept drilling me about getting some confidence, to just forget my self-esteem problems and just walk up to guys I like and say “hi” or smile or wave, because it really wasn’t “that hard to do.” Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends, they are some of the greatest girls you could ever know, but when they started in on this stuff I just wanted to punch them out.
They had no idea how easy it was for them, absolutely no clue. They had been beautiful and relatively popular their whole lives. When they approached guys, they usually got positive reactions; the guys were almost always interested. They never got the quick looks away, the pretending to have not heard their voices, the strange looks clearly stating they had no interest whatsoever. They never had that, but I had. So when they told me I needed to be confident, that it’s my job to initiate a conversation and it’s not as hard as it looks, I wanted to tell them to shove it but I didn’t. I usually just changed the subject.
As I made my way through high school I began to notice something about the teenage male. In my studies I conclusively deduced three main points:
1) They’re ridiculously obtuse in many areas, mostly sensitivity.
2) They love to play with a girl’s head.
3) They’re immensely immature.
I know it’s a generalization and it’s slightly stereotypical but, I tell you, most of the guys I had dealt with in my high school career up until senior year fit this profile. I’m sure there were a few who fell through the cracks but I’m almost positive they had other equally displeasing traits about them. Call me a Nazi-feminist (which I’m not) call me a bitter hag (which I am I guess) call me what you want, but I couldn’t deny it. The more and more I became accustomed to the enigma of the teenage male the more and more I wondered if I even wanted a boyfriend anyway (which I did, of course, but I still managed to have some reservations.)
So I decided to stop thinking that it was possible for a teenage boy to like me, they were too shallow and immature, and I shouldn’t expect them to go for anybody but pretty and outgoing girls. This left me to hope that someday, when I was out of high school, a blue moon would rise and someone – deep and mature - would actually want to be with me, but until that day came I gave up hoping.
So here I was, basic Jamie Smith, burdened with inner demons, annoyed with the constant ache of self-pity and echoingly single. I was almost halfway through my senior year without any sign of hope that my plight would stray from its seventeen-year rut.
God, could I feel sorrier for myself? Blegh! I hate it!
I just need to get the ball rolling on this story, right? Yes, let’s get away from the pity party: You must be wondering why I’m even telling my story after painting myself as a completely hopeless wretch with such a boring life. Well, if you can believe it, something exciting actually happened to me. Okay, maybe not exciting, but definitely bizarre.
It happened very quickly but started something that seemed to last forever. It occurred in the hallway of school of all places (lovely Vaquero High situated in the smallest town I ever had the displeasure to reside in) while my friend Melanie and I were waiting for my Lit. teacher outside her room. It was between classes - thus the halls were a bustling cattle herd - and Melanie and I were deeply involved in one of our strange conversations. I think it was about an episode of The Surreal Life she had seen, an episode that, for some reason, we both found extremely hilarious and were in the midst of laughing our asses off.
I lowered my head as I laughed and my bangs fell out from behind my ear, covering my scar. I didn’t bother pushing them back, I was so used to hair being in my face, and continued laughing with Melanie until something caught my eye.
Not so strangely – given the hall was swamped - it was a guy, one I nor Mel had never spoken to in our lives. A bit strangely, he was standing right in front of us, giving me the weirdest look I have ever seen on someone. To say his mouth was actually “quirked” would probably be the best way to describe his smile, that’s just how weird it was.
Anyway, Melanie and I stared back at him, wondering what he was on, when he suddenly reached out and tucked my bangs behind my ear. I was frozen, as was Melanie, so we just watched with wide eyes.
“Much better,” he grinned with his deep voice, his black eyes flashing, then he simply walked down the hall without a look back and disappeared into the crowd.
Whoa.
Labels: chapter one
♠4:43 PM
