As of my official prefreshman physical exam, I am five-nine-and-three-quarters, and I’m pretty sure there is more growth on the way. My doctor said jovially that all the supermodels are tall. Which was sweet and annoying. Because what was left unsaid is that supermodels are also thin and beautiful, which I decidedly am not. I’m not fat and ugly either, thank goodness. My weight is what one might call proportional. I’m well muscled, with boobs that I pray stop growing very soon, since I totally bypassed training bras for a B-cup when I was twelve, and my current D-cup is already more than plenty. I have hips that are beginning to widen, thick muscular thighs, broad shoulders. Nothing jiggles on me—well, boobs notwithstanding. I’ve always been athletic, so while I think of myself as something of a gargantuan freak, at least for the moment my delight in all things delicious is fully balanced by my high activity level.
I’ve been blessed with clear skin, if a shade more olive than I would have liked, pale porcelain skin being all the fashion at the moment; blue eyes of no particular luminance; and dark brown, nearly black, hair that is very thick and straight, but thankfully naturally shiny. I keep it long so that I can pull it into a ponytail or braid when I run. I’m also sporting some godawful bangs, which I thought might make me look cooler but instead are just an enormous pain in the ass. I immediately regretted them, and began growing them out the moment I left the salon five weeks ago, so now they are in the “constantly in my eyes” length. I do a lot of blowing them up out of my way with a quick and noisy blast of focused breath, which is apparently driving my mother batshit. I suppose if I were five or six inches shorter, I’d probably qualify as “cute-ish,” but at my size, towering over most of the boys my age on the planet, let alone my school, I’m just lucky that my face is what my dad always calls striking, and my mom refers to as attractive. Neither of these is the same as beautiful, and I’ve always been grateful for them treating me like an intelligent being and not overpraising my looks the way some parents do. I know people think they are giving us self-esteem boosts, but mostly they are fine-tuning our teenage bullshit radar, and it makes them seem less honest than they probably are.
As we all enter the classroom, heads down, you can feel the nervous energy in our group. This is the first chance to make our first impressions in our first class on the first day of high school. There’s a lot riding on it, and none of us look prepared. The woman at the front of the room isn’t what I expected. The sign on the door said Mrs. O’Connor, and I was imagining a roly-poly woman with pale skin, red apples on her cheeks, gingery hair going gray, maybe one of those Irish crown rings that you are supposed to wear one direction if you are single and another if you are married.
So the very tall, broad-shouldered, elegant African American woman with the short little dreadlocks standing in front of the chalkboard is a definite surprise. As we enter, I notice that the room is ringed with desks, leaving a big open circle in the middle, and none of the desks are labeled.
“Well, hello there,” Mrs. O’Connor says to me as I come into the room. She looks me dead in the eye, and might even have an inch on me. “What’s your name?”
“Eloise.”
“Don’t slouch, darling Eloise. You own the space you take up in this world. Abraham Lincoln said, ‘You have to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.’ You stand straight and proud in every inch of your magnificence. Otherwise you let me and all our blessed sisters of substance down.” She stretched out her swanlike neck and seemed to get even taller. Then she smiled, even white teeth in her beautiful face. I stood up straight, and she nodded appreciatively. “You’re going to love Maya Angelou when we get to her in the spring. She was six feet tall at fifteen, and she’s as fierce as they come.”
I blush. “She’s one of my favorite writers. I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings last year.”
“Well, then, Miss Eloise, let’s do her proud this year.”
I nod, and cross the room as she directs everyone to stand in the center of the circle of desks.
“So, my new little loves, my name is Mrs. O’Connor and this is Freshman Honors Literature, room 106.” Some blond guy in the middle of the room says “Crap” and runs for the door, just as the bell rings. “There’s always one,” Mrs. O’Connor says with a smile. The rest of us laugh nervously. “So, before we get started, we need to have desk assignments. I know many of my colleagues will be arranging you in the very-convenient-for-taking-attendance alphabetical order, but I think Mr. Lewkey and Ms. Lewis will spend enough time in close proximity to each other this year, so I will do things a little differently. I want you to arrange yourselves in order of birthdate. Month and day only, please. You will now have to introduce yourselves to each other in order to ascertain this information; I strongly recommend that you also exchange names and general friendly words as you go along. Spit, spot, as Mary Poppins might say.” She waves her hands with their long tapered fingers at us, looking like a ballerina finishing a pose. If I tried to do that with my mannish hands, I’d probably look like I was swatting at mosquitoes.
I mill around, saying “Eloise, May?” until I hear a voice behind me.
“Hey, May! Over here!” I turn around and see a short curvy girl with a mass of curly brown hair waving me over.
“Hi, I’m Eloise,” I say. “May twenty-eighth.”
“Oh my God!” she says animatedly. “I’m May twenty-fifth! We’re practically twins!”
“Yeah, we look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito from that movie.”
She laughs and snorts. “Totally. I’m Teresa Caparulo. Where do you live?”
“Up in Ravenswood Manor. Where do you live?”
“Not far from here, actually, just a few blocks over.”
“Lucky you, that’s convenient.”
“Hey, did you guys say May over here?” The question comes from a gorgeous light-skinned African American girl with almond-shaped hazel eyes and long, wavy, chestnut-colored hair.
“Yeah, totally. Are you May too?” Teresa asks.
“Yep. May twenty-third. You guys?”
“I’m the twenty-fifth and she’s the twenty-eighth.”
“We’re practically triplets,” I say, smiling. “I’m Eloise; this is Teresa. She’s local; I’m in Ravenswood Manor.”
“Lynne,” she says, shaking the hands we hold out to her. “Hyde Park.”
“You win for longest commute,” Teresa says.
“Yeah, well, it was either here or U of C Lab School,” she says.
“But that is such a good school,” I say, puzzled as to why she would schlep all the way to the north side if she could have gone to one of the best private schools in the city right in her backyard.
“Yep. In part because my dad is assistant principal and teaches English.”
“Oh, then, never mind,” Teresa says seriously.
“Exactly,” Lynne says.
“So how tall are you?” Teresa asks me.
“Almost five-ten.”
Lynne whistles under her breath. “Damn, girl, you had better stop eating your Wheaties.”
This makes me laugh, and then Teresa laughs and the three of us are quietly giggling in the corner of the room.
“You know what this means, our birthdays all the same week?” Teresa asks.
“What?” I say.
She links one plump arm through mine, and the other through Lynne’s. “We are going to have to be best friends, the three of us.” And the way she says it is so decisive, so matter-of-fact, that Lynne and I find ourselves just nodding along. “Best friends forever,” Teresa says, as a proclamation, and so it was.
One
SEPTEMBER 2016