2010-2011 Editors’ Choice Award Winner

The girl I see in the mirror looks just like me. She has identical big brown eyes right above her identical small nose. Her mouth opens slightly to show her professionally placed teeth. The same brown hair falls messily towards her neck. I see her as she sees me. I see her outline but can’t see inside her.

My family thought I was an award-winning artist. I drew pictures for every family member; my pencil never left my hand and paper was never blank. I saw and felt confidence in everything I did; I breathed Van Gogh’s confidence. It seeped out of my pores. One day I decided to draw a lions face with every intricate detail including every mangled part of its ravishing golden main. As I started drawing, the lion looked less like what it did in my imagination than what was on my canvas. I sat tight-faced with clenched teeth as I threw the pencil to the hard ground. I sat alone while moments passed. My hands went sifting through folders and folders for an old photo. It was of my mental interpretation, a perfect representation of what I had wanted to draw, an exact representation of my art through my family’s eyes. As I traced this perfectly shaped lion I smiled at future compliments, of the words I was used to hearing. Every hair seen in tact one by one, both eyes with a serious stare, it was my best creation. My all-loving stereotypical grandmother embraced my guilty body and bragged to all the likely bragging grandmothers at church. Her finger pressed button after button making copies for everyone in the family. Guilt bled out of every part of my body. Each family member roared over and over over my masterpiece until I bled out completely. The girl in the mirror was a liar. Deep down, even being so young, I knew that’s not what I wanted to be.

I held my new tracing tightly in my grasp. My eyes were transfixed on its dishonesty. Anybody’s hand could have recreated this picture. The precision of the lion’s sharp teeth struck me right in the heart; this hurt more than any real lion’s tooth would. My finger slowly traced over the outline wishing it was mine, one I had drawn. Its eyes looked at me with disgust. They stared right into my soul, into the depths of me. The thick black symmetrical eyes saw my fake identity while piercing my own that was true. I felt guilt in the lion’s eyes as well as my own. I used that lion as a promise that day as I crumbled it up into the tightest ball and shoved it deep down into the trash.

What always used to get me was seeing those groups of girls in high school. Their blond hair froze in perfect spiraled curls, like a beautiful main, every day of the week. They flirted and dated the same five guys one right after another. The same short skirt worn with the same revealing tank top listening to the same popular music and laughing the same laugh. I could not be one of those girls.

Being placed in a group with one of the blond bombshells was a tragedy; one no one wanted to be cast in.  Their minds were full of empty thoughts: which shade of Chanel nail polish to put on next and what was going to happen on Laguna Beach that night. I suffered time after time being asked, “What’s the Civil War again?” and “What are we supposed to be doing?” Each time I imagined myself clawing their face, disrupting the perfectly applied makeup and interrupting the peace of their perfectly designed main. The entireties of our blank stares never instigated a different type of behavior or even slightly affected their idiocracy. My hands always wished to grab their bony shoulders and shake them, shake any kind of sense into them.

I became one of those girls. I reeked of hair spray, I dated that guy, and I dumbed myself down. My face melted towards the aerosol can, the Hollister shirts and the D pluses. Inside, the entire time, I knew what I was doing. The feeling of the hot curling iron burning my neck and the smell of the nail polish remover as I touched up the bad spots was not me. My close friends were constant; not one of my friends ever said anything about my change and for that, I questioned their friendship. I knew I wasn’t the normal Kaylie, but if they didn’t mention or seem to notice it, was it actually the real me? One morning I woke up with my curls flattened, black eyeliner smudged down my eyes and my individuality deceased. I threw down my pencil once again.

Dinnertime was an outdoor picnic thrown only for my parents and I. We smiled, laughed and had a good time each and every evening while enjoying my mom’s delicious home-cooked meals. High spirits danced around us. Every night was the birth of a new cousin or waking up on Christmas morning. Nothing was better than this. Once my hair began to dry out by the heat of a hot African sun and as soon as my face turned into an exaggerated piece of art, the evenings felt more like a cold funeral. The air was stale with silence. The ill feelings were tangible. My parents lost their voice in the cold, contagiously as did I. I missed those Christmas mornings.

I’m sitting in this uncomfortable small classroom with fifteen other students. It’s completely silent, except for the watch to my left, ticking mindless seconds away. The teacher fumbles through her papers occasionally looking up at us, but still no sound. She eventually raises a bewildering thought. “Who are you?” I’m thinking easy, I’m Kaylie. But she continues to ask, “Who REALLY are you?” I am a hanging sloth; I am a mime. My thoughts ran circles around each other for a while. All I could keep asking myself is that same question she continually relayed to us. I could be my school’s sweetheart or even king of the jungle.