Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [34]
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
My friends prided themselves on being able to spot a whole range of nearly invisible details that separated a knockoff from an original. If a single stitch was the wrong shape or color or in the wrong place, they would catch it. To be seen in fake Pappagallos was a bigger shame than owning none at all.
“Maddie has twenty-three pairs,” my friends would announce every time her name came up in conversation. And the rule held for all of us: “Deedee has sixteen. Kathy has eleven.” They had memorized the stats for everyone’s closet the way the boys memorized home runs and RBIs. And in this way, they provided me with a measure of safety. As long as I followed their rules and regulations to the letter, I would always fit in.
I was proud of the way my sorority sisters were fashion geniuses. At our most memorable sorority meeting, someone’s aunt—a part-time model—came to offer us her helpful hints for living a better life. The evening began with her strolling slowly down the aisles between the desks in a borrowed classroom, addressing each of us individually to let us know, for our own good, if we were “too fat” or “too thin.” Not that any evening ever needed more, but this one ended with an exhaustive lesson in eyebrow shaping. “You want to take a pencil and outline the arch, then pluck around it,” she advised, while I sighed with relief at having managed to avoid being labeled as too fat. Luckily for me, I had grown nine inches that year.
I had only begun to scratch the surface of this wellspring of social expertise and grooming advice when in the middle of ninth grade, my mother and father called my brother and me into the living room one evening after dinner to explain that the family was moving to California. In that awful moment, the bottom fell out of not just my brand-new plucking studies but my hard-won secret-society standing as well.
California threw me for a loop. First of all, there were no Pappagallo shoes, period. It was hard to imagine, but no. There were none for sale anywhere. I conducted an exhaustive telephone search.
Even more disturbing, the cute girls at my new high school were working from a whole different style catalogue connected to surfing, a complete mystery to me even though I had been living exactly as close to an ocean in Florida as I now was in California. But back in North Miami, when we talked about “the beach,” we were referring to the best shopping mall for buying Pappagallos.
A radical reassessment of everything I knew to be true was now in order.
“I am the world’s most thoroughly out-of-it teenager,” I fretted in my diary shortly after we moved to the other coast. “At North Miami Junior High, all I wanted was to be a member of the popular group. But since I got to California, I am no longer interested. I guess I’m the big weirdo here. Plus I am shy and self-conscious around boys, which is mainly their fault because they don’t like me and I know it.”
I wasn’t really telling the whole truth. Where boys were concerned, at North Miami Junior High I had been having the same exact problem. I wasn’t sure why this was, but it definitely wasn’t because I didn’t care. I was always deeply in love with someone. Unfortunately these relationships were never reciprocal. And the situation was made even more difficult by the fact that the boys I loved most I had never actually met.
“If you looked at last year’s reports I was positively swooning over RG,” I had written back in North Miami in the beginning of ninth grade about a guy I had never talked to. “I got goose bumps just looking at him. But it is interesting to note that he means nothing to me now. Even less, perhaps. Now I like Michael. I wish he’d like me. But of course he really hasn’t even met me yet.”
Next thing I knew, there I was, trapped in California: three thousand