F = (16)(16)-6

i remember that shirt. i bought it from value city, or tj-maxx, some discount store or another where it was hanging on a rack, forgotten, pressed between dusty items in a forlorn place, languishing halfway between the manufacturer and donation (or, off-loading) to a third-world country. 90% cotton, 5% spandex. $7.99, sales-tax free. i still remember the way the fabric stretched, how i thought it hung just in the right way, and i waited to wear it for precisely that occasion, a party, maybe a birthday. maybe more like, "my parents are out of town, let's fuck shit up," but probably a birthday, because i wasn't a fuck shit up kind of gal.

i thought the shirt hung the way i wanted it to, clingy in the back with give in the front. the jeans i openly stole from my father's closet. he didn't care. he laughed, said he didn't really wear them, anyway, but why on earth would i want to wear his pants? underneath the shirt, a clearly ill-fitting bra; underneath the pants, a red plaid pair of flannel boxers, also purchased at value city, likely from a two-pack . i think the other pair were green. must have been chirstmastime cast-offs.

i like how i'm holding my left hand in that gimpy fist, with my arm curved, reminiscent of a stroke victim's unmovable limb. i remind myself of kevin spacey's character in the usual suspects, using the indignity of a disability as subterfuge. in that movie, he was a criminal mastermind, at the end he shook off his infirmities and walked away with an evil, cunning heart. i was just a fifteen year old girl, embarrassed by her watch, so much so that i can't even remember what was on its face. i stopped wearing that watch and for a while, i took to carrying an old fashioned pocket watch, a big gold pendulum with mysterious etchings on its case, roman numerals on its face. our uniform skirts didn't have pockets, though, so i'd clip it to the top of my tights and tuck and roll the watch in the band of my skirt so the chain would dangle in the appropriate way. then that watch broke, and i forgot about time.

those shoes are either chuck taylors, or a pair of one-stars, maroon suede. skater shoes to ride the skateboard i didn't have. i wore the chucks so much; eventually they were held together by safety pins, and my feet; eventually, my mom threw them out. i don't know what happened to the one-stars. i remember changing into them for work one day, and after that they sort of disappeared. truly, i'm an unfaithful shoe-holic.

it was a party so i put makeup on, lipstick probably out of the .99 cent bin at walgreens and this was possibly during my blue mascara phase. looks like i went overboard with the pressed powder, covering up blemishes i did not have with an un-matching shade because there weren't tones for people like me. so i used whatever i could find, poorly applied. my mother always said i shouldn't use makeup, and never taught me how. she said: don't shave (except your armpits) and don't use tampons (until you have sex). i did all of those things. it was just what normal girls did. i don't begrudge her for keeping these things from me. she was only trying to save me some trouble, to preserve the youth teenagers are universally in a hurry to get rid of.

i used to practice shaving by spreading body lotion on my legs and squeegeeing it off with the edge of a nail file.

as of this date, i haven't shaved my legs in 2 months. howdy, boys.

in the photo, i was probably wearing socks with those shoes. a short time later, i gave up on them. the socks. fucking socks.

speaking of undergarments, my mom used to buy all my bras for me but sometimes i'd get a little rebellious and used the little money i had to buy my own, the lacy, dangerous kinds my smaller-chested friends got to wear and, though i now see that it looks like i've got a harlequin mask strapped around my chest, and a plywood board underneath my shirt, i thought i looked pretty foxy.

kind of.

i still had fat bits bulging out everywhere and i could never get the boxers to peek out above my jeans the way i wanted to, being blessed with ass i was constantly trying to cover up.

i showed this photo to someone earlier today and that person remarked on the beads dangling from my braids. upon further remembering, those weren't beads. they were tiny rubber bands. like the kind you might find in the mouth of a twelve-year-old, connecting her top braces to the bottoms. i never had to wear braces, but those rubber bands came in handy. i remember getting my hair done, how the rubber bands pinched the root of each braid and my mother clicked her tongue when she came to pick me up.

sometimes, i hated my hair so much that i'd sleep with it in a ponytail because i didn't want to be ugly while i dreamt; i used to sleep with my bra on, because couldn't stand how my breasts fell into my armpits when i lay down, how they put an uncomfortable few inches of distance between me and the mattress should i turn on my stomach. i felt my underwear kept all my parts bound, and safe, out of my way as they needed to be.

i didn't spend much time in the shower. there was something so awful about being naked.

flipping through the photos, i had a mission: locate senior portrait, you know, the one where they pose you in some hackneyed way, airbrush you beyond recognition and your parents buy 50 of them to send to relatives and no matter what, you hate the end result, until about ten years later, the point at which misery becomes hilarity because you can't trouble with the bad feelings anymore.

the last 3 pages in that particular photo album are full with senior portraits from friends, because what else can anyone do with 35 wallet-sized prints but give them away? so there's about 3/4 of my senior class of 1998, wistful eyes looking into the future with expectation, posed with roses and velvet wraps displaying bare shoulders and by the way, didn't anyone think it was a little weird that we had to pull our bra straps down and show off a little skin for some ham-fisted photographer? it was a catholic school, after all.

people say i don't look the same as i do now in that portrait. my hair is different and there's a little less chub under my chin but i don't think i've changed all that much. or maybe that's what it means to age. an external process that happens faster than our brains, our self-perceptions, can keep up with.

my senior photo is a lot different than this photo. in this photo, i look at balled fists and ill-fitting clothes and dour, why are you taking my picture expression and i see someone who was so hopelessly scared of herself, of the parts and curves that made her female, weighed down by bacon-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and capri suns. this person was, albeit clumsily, trying to reject what she felt were the stifling notions of femininity, the rigidity of it, the standard impossible to attain. and yet, this person would get on the scale three or more times a day, decide she could stand to skip dinner, fill her belly up with water until the hunger got to be too much to bear. until the tin of spam in the pantry cried for attention and the frying pan waiting to be used.

there's only so much to chalk up to style, or fads. i can use the times to defend myself. things were mean. everyone was tired of the 80's, the plastic and leather, the songs about nothing, j.r. got shot, everyone shrugged and moved on. those times weren't about being pretty. they were about steeling yourself against the world because there was so little beauty in it. but, at some point, i have to realize i was hiding behind my hair and my awkwardness and my angst. i remember how it felt, like if i took a hard step i'd break through the floor, how i felt sloppy and greasy and generally malcontented. i never wanted to be anyone else, really. i knew i was a girl, and that was OK most of the time. i never wanted to be a white person, or one of any other race. i liked my name. i just wanted to be a better version of myself. in a way, i am still the girl in this photo, always ungainly on the inside, never quite sure of herself, trying to sort out what comes next, like feeling your way out of a dark, unfamiliar room.

so i look at those photos, everything ill-fitting and saggy or too tight, too wide in the leg, too loose in the chest, too manly in cut, too short in the skirt, and i can't imagine why anyone would look back on those adolescent days with any idyllic thoughts. after you start at such a base level, there's only one place left to go.