Stella85 — Not being fashionable and ‘super cute’ made me a minority of sorts. I didn’t get asked on dates for example. It took me two years that nobody else was getting asked either.

My roommate never got asked on dates. Her family lived in Westchester and had come down in a Lexus SUV to unload her things into our small room. She introduced herself as Stacy (Names changed to protect the innocent ) and I felt like I had just met one of Barbie’s best friends, or at least one of Barbie’s best friends who loved chocolate and thought working out would ruin her makeup. She looked as though she were waging the battle of the bulge and loosing. The pink tube top she showed up in would have been alluring on a slimmer girl, but on her it made me think of pigs in a blanket. I smiled and tried to be nice.

Her father lugged her clothes in, box after box and you could see a family resemblance in girth. Her mother, no dainty thing herself, settled onto my bed and waited for her husband to finish unloading the car. It was August in New Jersey and all three of them were sweating up a storm. As Stacy’s red-faced father brought in armfuls of garment bags, Stacy shoved my clothes to one side of the closet and started filling it up with the expensive-looking hanging bags. I thought it was rude, but didn’t say anything. Stacy smiled at me and said she’d be back tomorrow with another load.

It had taken a solid week for Stacy to finally get fully moved in. Her father had assembled a free-standing closet to keep her clothes in. I was squeezed into one corner of the room and my world shrunk down. She brought boxes of makeup, hairspray, shampoo, body lotion and conditioner and stacked them up beside the room’s one window, cutting out the light and contributing to its cave-like feel. I resented her for that. I love seeing the sunlight.

And she had friends. I don’t know if she had brought them and unpacked them, or if there was some sort of spoiled-girls secret society that had sent each other post-cards before school started. Whatever she did, a cadre of girls swarmed around her.

I don’t mean to say she was popular. She wasn’t. Popular people become increasingly secure the bigger the group they’re in becomes. She was the sort of person that grew increasingly giddy and nervous. Her friends seemed of the same ilk, and the effect of having a greater group was to magnify their obnoxiousness.

I wouldn’t have wanted to have been a part of her clique. They embraced every new fashion with vigor and aplomb, no matter how silly it looked: flip-flops with two inch soles for fall and Ugg brand boots with fur lining for spring. It seemed silly to me. And it was their silliness that made them unattractive. Each could have been a moderately attractive girl in her own right. The right wardrobe of appropriately concealing clothes would have masked the obvious lack of exercise, or certainly wouldn’t have drawn attention to it as their over-zealous attempts to be sexy and attract attention from boys. But I still would have liked the chance to turn them down.

No Comments »

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed