Gingritta: Little White Girl

Blue eyes, blue eyes… all the adult said she had beautiful blue eyes.  She hated them.  It was bad enough that she was so different.  All the other kids never thought twice to mock her thin, messy, un-brushed looking hair that she had learned to brush obsessively.  They would point and laugh at her pale cheeks that always seemed to have a dirty smudge on them, and push her onto her knobby little knees that quickly and constantly bruised a garish purple tone.  Often in the mirror she would notice how her blonde eyelashes barely defined her eyes, and she swore that on a bright summer day it was impossible to find the difference between the whites of her eyes and the bright white of her eyelids and cheeks.

She was a lonely, different kid.  She wished she could say that it was because she looked so different, but there were two other white kids in her class, almost as pallor as her.  No, people didn’t pick on her because she was pale, they picked on her because she was poor.  She was so poor that the kids in her class that whose parents mowed lawns for a living, left bags of hand-me-down clothes at her home. She wouldn’t have looked so poor if her mother or older siblings had ever taught her how to dress or take care of herself, but as the fourth child of eight, with a mother who was again pregnant,  she learnt the hard way that looking wrong would make the  other kids either avoid her, or threw things at her for fun. 

Every night, she would stand in front of the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth, staring at those creepy little eyes in the mirror. They looked like shallow, shallow pools of water, flecked with little wisps of yellow, almost as if a derelict urinated into a puddle of rain.  They held no depth.  They held no warmth. They were cold, wet puddles of hobo urine.

Like all previous nights, she glared.  She glared and wished that her wispy, thin, blonde hair would suddenly become smooth, thick, and dark.  She wished her easily burnt, forever pinkish-purple, almost death tinged skin would magically turn into the color of melted caramel.  She wished that tomorrow wasn’t the first day of middle-school.  Six years of torment and mocking made her bitter and angry.  Her older sister jokingly called her “Surly,” because of the dour mood that she adopted as an emotional coping method. 

She turned off the light and glared some more.  She glared into those eyes, those eyes that adults told her were so pretty.  They did not look pretty now, they looked angry.  They looked villainous. They looked sinister.  They looked cunning.  They looked evil.  They looked brilliantly evil.  It was at the moment that she finally realized. She didn’t care anymore. She didn’t need people to like her; she didn’t even need people to accept her. She said it once, “Bloody Mary.”

Her eyes faltered a bit, and remembered how Joey called her pig-girl through-out first grade.  She recalled how Tyrell would throw crayons at her every time Mrs. Franklin would turn her head in second grade.  She seethed at how everyday of third grade started with Maria calling her a dirty, trash girl. She squared her shoulders and said it again, “Bloody Mary.”

She noticed a shifting in the color of her eyes; her pupils dilated, and her face twisted into something evil. She thought about her first best friend, whom she met in fourth grade.  The first person that wanted to spend time with her, well that was until Shayla made better friends, more popular friends.  She even thought about fifth grade, a time when people finally learned to ignore her, and she used the solitude to pay closer attention at school.  How she had no one to congratulate her when she tested into the gifted program.  No one would miss her, so she stared at those shifting eyes and in a determined voice said, “Bloody Mary,” one last time.

Just like the mythical friends that all kids have, just like all the parental adoration that all adults assume children receive, just like the normal colored eyes that God saw fit to grant all of her classmates, Mary decided not to come.  She stood there alone in the dark, looking into fearless and sinister eyes, and realized she had nothing left to lose.

The next morning, during an extended homeroom that took place on the first day of her sixth grade career, a tiny, pale-skinned, raggedy-haired, blue-eyed girl stood up when asked to introduce herself, and said, “I am different than most people, you can like it, or you can hate it, but just remember two things: I don’t give a s@#t what you think about me. Just don’t f@$k with me because I won’t back down.”

It was the beginning of a very happy childhood.