Some Day One Day

7

"Dang girl," Angie said with disappointment as she eyed me, "you used to fill out that dress something vicious."
I would've been hurt if her words weren't true.
Then her face lightened to a bright smile, "But you still look soooo pretty man. I hate you."
Completely unconvinced, I turned from her and glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I didn't look like the person that I'd become accustomed to for the past few months. I looked like the person that I used to be. It was almost like I was looking at somebody else.
Last night, which was Friday, I'd come to Angie with the excuse that I wasn't able to find anything suitable to wear for the party. Even though my check had come the preceding day, that didn't mean I could use it for coquettish things like clothing. I had bills to pay, so all that I was left with were the clothes that I had. I'd laid out on Angie's bed the poor choices of clothing that I had and by the look on her face, I knew she was thinking that I couldn't possibly go wearing any of those choices. Thinking that I'd been dispensed from having to attend something I didn't want to was short-lived because Angie reappeared from her walk-in closet with a silk, black dress that even I couldn't deny was breathtaking.
Now I stared upsettingly at the way the thin material cascaded all the way to an inch above my knees in her full length mirror.
"I'm so skinny." I said dejectedly with a small frown as I smoothed the dress over from my mid section to my thighs. I remember how in highschool, unlike enjoying myself like the other kids by eating pizza and fries, I would actually walk around with my fingers wrapped around a bottle of SlimFast due to the fear that I would become fat.
I can't believe there had been a point in my life where I'd purposely made myself hungry, when now hunger was one of the worst forms of rejection I'd ever known. Back then, I was too afraid to have a gaining weight. It didn't help that one of the features that acclaimed me some unwelcomed attention with the fellas was my derrière, I was far more affronted than flattered whenever they prated about it. Shawn would always try to assure me that there was nothing wrong with me but I wouldn't hear it.
So I'd strive tooth and Nail to be thin.
Now here I was a gangly woman in her early twenties. I wasn't exceedingly skinny to the point where I appeared awkward-looking. My face was especially the loudest ticket to hide away my unhealthiness.
"Trick please...well, yeah that's true, but that ass didn't go anywhere. Those niggas better watch out."
The dismal frown I gave Angie made her laugh. A lot had changed about me but my self-cautiousness about my behind had remained.
"Come on," she waved me over as she tottered to her dressing table, "That hair won't flatten itself on its own."
I glanced at my reflection one last time, this time focusing on my hair. Swooped around my nape, it was carried by my shoulder and tumbled down all the way the middle of my trunk. I'd always had long hair. Angie had even trimmed nearly two inches from it earlier today and it was still way too long. I mused over my hair's swarthy color-one that had once imitated finely polished mahogany-but now mimicked dry mud that longed for water. Since Angie had just washed it, it looked much better than it had for weeks.
I never used to love my hair because it was so hard to manage until everyone else showered me with compliments of how much they loved it. From then on, I always thought that I'd been blessed with great genes because my hair grew quicker than what I stereotypically thought were 'normal girls' hair. Its coloring was said by some to be exotic. Girls complimented me on it and some would even get jealous. Guys would enthuse over how I had the best hair that they'd ever seen. Back when I was younger, I'd enjoyed the attention so much that I too began to believe that I was a unique young woman who had what other girls usually craved for.
Now I hated it for a number of reasons. The facts that it was too long, too weighty, and made me feel too hot were only some frivolities to the true nature of why I hated it.
With this hair, I carried a life that had been insincere. With it, I carried the persona that I was anything but proud of. The persona that embarrassed me-the ignorance and the upturned nose that made me think I was better off than others.
That was truly why I hated it.
I longed to do something different with it, but I couldn't.
Because I was afraid.
I knew that when I was younger I fell under the stereotype of what some closed-minded people thought was 'pretty hair'. Most say I got it from my father's bi-racial background. To think I'd once thought I was 'lucky' because of that.
I shook my head contritely at myself as I walked towards Angie.
In no time I was sitting on the dresser, and without much thought, I sat with my back to the mirror. After that day when Angie had worked wonders on my hair before going to Ojay's party, it was almost some ritual that she'd do my hair and I wouldn't look at it until it was done.
It had been a while since she'd done my hair-or at least since I'd allowed her to.
It felt good.
Like old times.
"I don't know why you took me to get my Nails done Angie." I told her as I observed the Nails mirroring the lights in the room with their enamel of colorless Nail polish.
"Um, they were looking kind of rough." She said to me as though that were the simplest explanation ever.
"Exactly. There's no sense of getting them done if they're going to get messed up two days later." I explained even though the manicure I'd received made my once jagged Nails appear well taken care of. I'd received a hand massage too that rejuvenated the softness of what my hands used to be.
In a matter of a week though, I knew that the tenderness would be gone and soon replaced with the unappealing, course surface they'd become. All that scrubbing, dusting, and washing-all that manual work-altered my hands from the delicateness they had once been.
"Aw shut up Beyonce. It's okay for a person to pamper themselves once in a while."
"That's true. But only when they're able to." I answered automatically.
Angie growled in vexation but didn't say anything after that.
"Man I don't even truly want to go for this thing." Angie confessed after a while and I could hear and vaguely see the steam of the flat iron passing through my hair.
"Howcome?" I wanted to know.
"All of Ojay's business associates bore the hell out of me."
"Oh goodness." I murmured dismally.
"Shawn doesn't like them either."
My heart vaulted before crashing back down at the sound of his name.
"Oh."
I could imagine that he didn't like them either. He probably wore a blank expression whenever one of them spoke to him, not truly listening to whatever they had to say.
The mirage in my mind of that happening brought an impetuous smile to my face. Then I instantly felt like I had no right to smile about anything that had to do with him-much less think about him.
"Speaking of Shawn, Ojay told me that things didn't happen so great when you went to see him." Angie said, now passing a comb smoothly through my hair.
A tickling sensation of anxiety sprinkled all over my back and I shifted uncomfortably, searching for something to say but unable to come up with anything.
When I remained quiet, she stopped and I felt her looking down at me as I thoughtfully smoothed the pad of my thumb over the Nail of my other thumb. She patted my hair a bit before playfully bumping into me until I had no choice but to move over and give her a little space to sit on the restricted stool.
"Things between ya'll are pretty awkward huh?" she asked me and I smiled ruefully before looking up at her.
"There's nothing between us," my eyes dropped sadly because saying it was so painful since it made the situation more real to me, "At least that's what he probably thinks."
"Girl please. That nigga still cares about you."
Instead of making me feel better, I felt the crack of a thorny whip on my heart.
It almost felt like she was mocking me. I knew that Shawn didn't care about me and I knew that he'd never care about me like he used to. The help he issued me the other day was all thanks to him saving face for looking unkind and mean in front of Angie.
At my turned head, Angie progressed.
"I'm serious," she persisted, "Nigga called me at eleven trying to be slick by beating around the bush when basically he was asking me what's going on with you."
A strange feel of hope filled me up, but I didn't allow myself to let it take control of me.
Hope could be so deceiving... that's one of the things that Shawn used to say.
I didn't say anything.
"Well," Angie stood up with a heavy sigh, "Let me get this make up done so that we can get going."
I sat obediently, hating that she was putting make up on me yet appreciating it at the same time. I hated the fakeness of it, but I appreciated its ability to hide me.
I'd once used make up as a way to conceal the person that I truly was. The fear of someone truly seeing me for who I was forced me to apply it daily when I was younger. I was known as one of the pretty girls and didn't want to lose that title because for a long time, it was all that I had since I felt that my personality lacked in more ways than one, and none of the guys I knew really seemed to care about intelligence so I hid it.
Once she was finished, she stood back with a proud smile.
"Damn Beyonce, I hate you. You always were the pretty one." She said with a guileless smile and I knew her comments were all out of love. I wondered if she was just saying it to uplift my low spirits.
Twisting my mouth disbelievingly, I turned around to see my reflection, expecting to be wowed; expecting my appearance to fill in the void the way that it used to.
But nothing happened. I still felt the same way inside even though I looked different on the outside.
The dark circles that usually harbored themselves beneath my eyes were gone. Thanks to some eye drops, the redness in my eyes had cleared. The slight breaking out in my skin was covered up to perfection. Mascara enhanced my lashes and lip gloss accentuated my lips with its stark shimmering. The hair that had once been frazzled and haywire was now picturesque with its sleekness and shine. The lent earrings brought out the sparkle in my eyes, making me look much more alive than I truly felt.
"Girl, you should quit that housekeeping job and go back to modeling. I don't even know why you quit modeling." Angie commented as she cleared out her dressing table.
During highschool, one of my many off and on jobs had been modeling. Apart from my reasoning that modeling wasn't a definite career to base my future on, I just didn't like it no matter how many people told me I was good at it.
I would never go back to modeling even if someone paid me all the world's share of money. Then again, I needed to stop thinking in terms of 'never', because those very thoughts were the things I was doing now. Let's just say that modeling wasn't my cup of tea. It was part of the reason why my eating habits weren't so great.
In the span of time when I modeled, I'd ended up in the hospital once due to dehydration.
"Nah," I finally answered Angie, getting up to help her organize her room, "I don't think I could do it. It wasn't my style anyway."
For a compendious moment, I glanced at myself in the mirror wondering...What was my style anyway?
I mean, I'd always followed the norm. Or if I set trends for others, it had always been after someone else's approval.
I'd never truly done anything of my own or created anything with my own mind and passion because, in some strange way, I was afraid of myself.
I was afraid that my own ideas, that my own thoughts and opinions had never been good enough.
So instead of matching to the beat of my own drum, I'd followed someone else's.
I had always been a follower.