Hello Beautiful

Alice took some pleasure in the fact that she apparently resembled her father. It made her feel like she had two parents, even if one of them was gone. Her father walked around with her — or his genes did, anyway — and that made her feel stronger. She needed the strength. When she started high school, she was too tall to make slouching — which she’d mastered in middle school — an effective tactic to look “normal.” There was no longer any way to contort her body so that she resembled the petite girls in her school. Carrie had stopped growing at five feet, which shone an even brighter spotlight on Alice’s height, since the two girls were always together. When Alice hugged her mother or Carrie, she had to bend at the knees in a way that always felt awkward. She walked faster than everyone else because her stride was so long. Her neck often ached at the end of the day because she had to look down while she spoke to people. She was regularly called Giraffe or the Jolly Green Giant by the kids she’d grown up with. A female math teacher said to her, clearly meaning to be kind: “You must always wear flats, my dear, to make the boys more comfortable.” Men on the street extended themselves to their fullest heights and puffed out their chests when they passed Alice, as if her size somehow challenged their manhood.

Alice decided, when ninth grade began, that she was going to stop wasting time feeling ashamed of her appearance. Whether she felt ashamed or confident, the result was the same: She was very tall, and people were going to talk about it and make fun of her. She was unable to blend in; her height kept her apart from everyone else, quite literally. This meant that Alice felt lonely, but since there was no alternative, she decided to accept her reality. She walked down the school hallways at her full height and made herself smile when some puny boy cracked a joke about how the school was going to need to raise the ceilings. More to prove to herself that she could do it than for any other reason, Alice wore heels to her first high school dance. “You’re very brave,” Carrie whispered, as they walked into the school gymnasium, but Alice shook her head. “It’s not bravery,” she said. “Everyone stares at me, no matter what shoes I wear.” She was shocked, though, when the captain of the basketball team asked her to dance. He was shy and had a stutter, but he looked her directly in the eyes while they danced, and that was exciting. When he asked her out on a date later that week, she was shocked again. The surprise cleared a space inside Alice, though, and she heard a small voice — was it hers, or her mother’s? — whisper no. She had separated herself from the other kids her age, and she would stay separated. She felt safer that way.

“No, thank you,” Alice said, in as kind a voice as she could manage, and walked away. She felt a welling of relief inside her. The tall boy had asked her a question she’d never considered before, and the truth had come out of her mouth. She wanted to be like her mother: independent. Alice didn’t tell anyone, not even Carrie, but by the end of the day the entire school somehow knew that she had rejected the popular senior.

It was strange, but in the weeks that followed, other kids’ faces turned toward her like flowers. Most of them were shy or social misfits in some way. They glanced in Alice’s direction from behind their bangs or over a textbook. They timed their locker visits to match hers. They fell in step beside her in the hallways. They thought Alice was brave, and that made them feel brave too. They wanted to feel better about themselves, and they found that they did, in Alice’s company. I’m not brave, Alice wanted to tell them, because these kids were regularly insulted like she was — called fat, or stupid, or ugly — and she didn’t want to mislead them. But she couldn’t think of a way to explain herself that wouldn’t make them feel bad, so she kept quiet and kept their company.

“What in the world is going on?” Carrie said, wide-eyed. She had spent all of middle school telling boys and girls off for teasing Alice about her height, and she’d started high school poised to do the same. Alice shrugged. She had a sense of what the truth was — she had refused to feel ashamed, and that gave her classmates permission to do the same — but she was unable to put any of this into words. No one else asked her out for a date, though, and that was a relief.