People Forget

“You have to get inside. You can’t look through windows and expect to gain knowledge. It’s no different with sex.” These words would ring in her ears for too long.

High school was beyond awkward. Where junior high had been blasé with periods of uncomfortable, peppered with anxiety, high school was an angst filled train wreck replete with acne to rival a large papa john’s pizza and sexual tension strong enough to suspend circus talent. People forget that the ugly duckling is in fact ugly and she was most certainly ugly. Puberty and early adolescence were not kind to her; they beat her up and took her lunch money, routinely. The colorful mountainous zits, gangly appendages that at times waved like octopus arms, paired with different breast sizes and a profound lack of coordination that rendered her unable to traverse stairs without staring directly at them doomed her to the high school wasteland. The land of misfit girl teens ever staring up at the prom queens and cheerleaders and sluts in wondrous awe, thinking it will always be this way…on the bottom.
Wondrous awe. That is exactly what everyone experienced when they saw her at the five year reunion. She was a vision, a free spirited, comfortable-as-comfortable-can-be-in-her-own-skin vision of beauty incarnate. Everything on her and in her blossomed. Her rich, silky black hair flitted and glistened with every turn of her head. Her skin was now a flawless, smooth sand covering wave after wave of perfect symmetry. The shoulders to the breast to the hips to the thighs to the calves was a rolling delight of female form to which all others would be judged. She smiled her pouty lips genuinely and her dimples bred a sense of cuteness below swelling brown eyes that effortlessly hypnotized even the most unwilling.
Her timing was perfect. If the ugly duckling becomes the swan too early, they don’t know what hits them and they don’t know how to handle all the newfound attention. Not her, she had grown into the beautiful swan as she matured intellectually and she would not let herself be sexualized on someone else’s terms. She owned it, she owned her beauty and the attention she received. She wasn’t mean or vindictive about it because she knew where that path led.