That Was Then

2-Now

I finger comb through my waist length dark hair and chew on my bottom lip. I study the loose beach waves in the mirror. "Maybe I should straighten it?" My reflection just stares back but a heavily accented voice shouts at me through my phone.

"No! Leave it!" Petra sounds exasperated and she has every right to be. She's faking sick to get out of work so she can provide me with some much needed moral support. I have changed my outfit seventeen times in the past hour and she's over it. We finally settle on a plain white t-shirt and a pair of Kita jeans. My ever present charm bracelet jingles on my left wrist. "Keep it simple." Petra insists. "You don't want to look like you're trying too hard."

"Is it weird wearing Kitas?" I wasn't sure if I should really wear my mama's brand of jeans for my first day back.

"Oh for fucks sake, Blake!" Petra loves saying this and it always brings a smile to my face with her thick French accent. "Half the girls in your school will probably be wearing Kitas." Smiling, the same pride I felt as a kindergartner washes over me. "Now, you'd better get going or you're going to be late!" Technically, I was already late, fashionably late for the school year anyway. Classes had started a week and a half ago, but that was all part of of the plan. Reluctantly we say our goodbyes and I give myself one last look in the mirror. If only I could take Petra with me today.

My eighth grade school picture is taped to the side of my vanity. Braces covered a fake smile and even with the trendy glasses on, I can see the sadness in my green eyes. I had chunky blond and black highlights in my hair that I'd thought were super cute until I went to school the next day and was told that they weren't. I was bigger, taller and wider, than most of the girls and even a lot of the boys back then but I wasn't huge. Not nearly as big as I thought I was at the time or as I was made to think with all of ugly things Kya and her friends had said to me. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and try not to remember, try not to go back to that place.

When I open my eyes I say to myself "that is not who you are anymore!" Gone now are the extra pounds, the glasses have been replaced with contacts, the braces left me with perfectly straight teeth, and my hair was just done last week by one of the most elite stylists in Paris. But none of that is what I'm talking about when I say that isn't who I am anymore. I mean that I am not the depressed, lonely girl who lets other people tell her who she is, I am not a victim. It took me a whole summer at a treatment center, two years at a ridiculously expensive private boarding school, supportive parents, a pushy therapist, and a friend like Petra to get me to this point. But I am finally ready to face my demons. Particularly the petite blond one that used to call herself my best friend.

I tuck eighth grade Blakely into my back pocket for courage, grab my bag and head downstairs. Mama has an entire buffet set up for breakfast, muffins, scrambled eggs, turkey bacon, even doughnuts but I skip straight to the coffee. She knits her eyebrows in concern. Breakfast foods are usually my favorite but the unease sitting in the pit of my stomach warns me against eating anything.

"Are you sure you don't want me to drive you, pumpkin?" Dad asks without looking up from his newspaper, his plate heaped full of bacon and eggs. A mug of coffee, and glasses of both water and orange juice are lined up like good little soldiers behind his plate. He is capitalizing on the moment. It is not often that Mama cooks. 

I smile into my coffee. "I'm good, Daddy, thanks." Mama wraps her arms around my shoulders and asks me for the thousandth time if I'm sure that I'm ready to go back. "Technically it's not going back." I tell her. "It's a new school with tons of new kids who don't even have any idea who I am." I left after middle school, a small school comprised of spoiled rich kids. Myself included, I suppose. The high school, on the other hand, is made up of three different middle schools. Therefor, only approximately one third of the school might remember Blakely Deel; the chubby, four eyed, brace faced loser. But they will only recognize me by name. As far as the other two thirds are concerned, some of them just might recognize me from Teen Vogue or the other magazines where the Kita teen line is advertised.

When Mama started her teen line last year she used me as her model to pitch her designs and her marketing team loved my look. That wasn't something I had ever thought would happen to me, former chubby girl whose confidence level resided somewhere in the negatives. But with my long dark hair, porcelain skin and bee-stung lips I was practically the second coming of Nikki Tate. Mama had been a model before she started designing. I'm not nearly as tall as her, and possess curves she claims to be envious of, but the resemblance is undeniable. At 5'7" I'm too short for runway modeling but I'd caught the attention of a few other designers and was even on a billboard in Time Square for almost a month the year before.

"I just don't understand why you would even want to go back. I thought you liked Hotchkiss?" Mama asks, referring the boarding school I'd gone to for my freshman and sophomore year.

"I've told you already Mama, Lonna thinks it will be a good way for me to come to terms with my past. To heal old wounds." Lonna is my counselor and this is mostly true.

Lonna wasn't ever for me running away to a boarding school to begin with. After my summer of treatment she had wanted me to return to Colorado and start high school with my classmates. I'd done a lot of work on myself that summer. The treatment center hadn't just focused on mental health, but also physical health and I had blossomed.

I was bullied badly through middle school but nobody outside of my family knew what it had driven me to do. Well, almost nobody. So Lonna had really pushed for the new and improved Blakely to start high school with the same kids who had made middle school a living hell. I wasn't ready so my parents sent me to Hotchkiss and I got the opportunity to reinvent myself.

Now, partially at Lonna's insistence and partially because Petra was also leaving Hotchkiss to be tutored through the rest of high school on the set of the soap opera she had recently landed a major role in, I was going back to public school to face my past. And I had a plan.

"Well, if Kya gives you any trouble..."

"She wont." I insist as I finish off my coffee. I was akin to the classic ugly duckling tale. Now, as the beautiful swan I am going back to face everyone from my past and I am not going to let any of them, especially not Kya Dillard, ruffle my feathers. Pun intended.