Fairy Godsister

When I was in the seventh grade, a dance was held at my school. There were one or two every year, but this was the first one I was old enough to attend. My best friend Amanda and I had been waiting years for this moment.

We were so excited! We went to the mall together and picked out fancy clothes: long, flowing skirts; sheer shirts over lacy camisoles; high-heeled, sequined sandals. We pored over stacks of teen magazines for advice on how to put up our hair and get boys to ask us to dance.

The big night finally came. Amanda’s mom gave us a ride, dropping us off at the front door of the school. Our hearts pounding, we walked into the gym-turned-dance floor. We looked around. And then we stopped flat and looked at each other.

We were wearing the wrong things.

The boys were in baseball caps and their most expensive sneakers, their baggiest jeans, and their brand-name T-shirts. The girls were in tight pants and tops that were probably intended to be bras. Their hair was loose and their eyes were rimmed with dark make-up. I knew we had made a huge mistake.

I grabbed Amanda’s hand and pulled her into the bathroom before anyone could see us. Before she could say anything, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I wiped them away in embarrassment. This was a time in my life when I cried often and with much less provocation, but until then I had been able to hide it from other people.

The door opened, and I thought I would die. Bad enough my best friend should see me like this, but now someone else would, too. The girl who came in was someone I didn’t know. I’d seen her around, but never spoken to her. She was an eighth-grader.

“What’s wrong? – I see,” she said, answering her own question as she looked us up and down. “It’s all right.”

She took some tissue and wiped away my tears. Then she poured the contents of my little sequined handbag out onto the sink counter. She used my nail scissors to cut off the bottom half of my long dress, turning it into a miniskirt. She pulled every bobby pin out of my hair so that it spilled around my shoulders and used the pins to hold the skirt together, making it ripple fashionably. She pulled off my sheer cardigan and crammed it into the handbag, and rolled up the hem of my camisole to expose a hint of midriff. And she took my eyeliner and painted my eyes to look smouldering and mysterious instead of innocent and distressed. Then, she did the same for Amanda.

We looked in the mirror. Without sounding vain, we looked better than any other girls who were there that night. We looked classy, sophisticated – the way I always wanted to look.

The girl replaced our things in our purses. “You see,” she said, “you already have all you need to be who you want to be. You just have to use it.”