I’m still haunted by this fear. It has made me very cautious of feeling comfortable in my career—and turned me into a bit of a workaholic.
Even now, every job I get, I worry that it will be my last. I think becoming a washed-up hag is sort of my destiny. So if you see a wrinkled old bitch wearing a tattered fur and chain-smoking in an off-Broadway back alley . . . that’s just me. Starting four years from now.
* * *
I. My memory is bad and I could probably ask myself these kinds of questions on every page, but I’m going to do my best to fill in the blanks from here on out, and I hope you’re cool with that, too. XO!
hell, thy name is middle school
In elementary school, we had an afternoon of “health class” once a year. The teachers separated us by gender and explained what we could expect from puberty. They handed out maxi pads to the girls and gave the boys . . . pamphlets on styling a wispy mustache that ONLY grows at the corners of your mouth? I may never know.
There was a lot of emphasis on how excited we should be to start our periods. This is a dirty trick, but now I understand why it’s necessary. It comes for us all, so there’s no point working little girls into a panic over it. However, there was perhaps too much emphasis on the magic of becoming a woman. So much so that I missed a few key points on the logistics of menstruation. For example, I thought that once you got your period you had it every day, all the time, for the rest of your life. This sounded pretty awful, but the girls on the tampon boxes looked excited about it, and I trusted anyone who could rock a side ponytail.
I was also promised an “awkward” stretch of time when all the girls would tower over the boys. For me, that moment would never come. In middle school, hiding the fact that I still shopped in the kids’ section became almost a full-time job.
In elementary school, being the smallest was cute. It had given me an identity, even made me feel special. But you know how thirteen-year-olds don’t want to hang out with eight-year-olds? They don’t want to hang out with you if you look eight years old, either.
My height made me an easy mark. When my sixth-grade crush enumerated the reasons he wouldn’t date any of the girls in our class, my label was “too short.” I laughed, then retired to the girls’ bathroom, where I got on my knees and prayed to Jesus to make me taller. No one in the world was suffering more than me.
Once girls started getting boobs, a whole new area of uncreative slams emerged. “Hey, Anna, you should date a pirate, because they love sunken chests.” Where do boys learn these insults? Is there a manual? Is that what they got in health class?!
When I came back from doing High Society, no one my age cared. (Despite High Society being the eighteenth-longest-running Broadway show ever!I) I had hoped my classmates might be impressed, but weirdly, a picture of me in the local paper singing in pigtails did not make me the hit of the school.
While no one at Lincoln Junior High especially cared about my New York sabbatical, dance and music classes gave me a level playing field of equally dorky contemporaries to befriend. I even went to overnight choir camp in the summer. (I’ll say that again in case you weren’t already in love with me . . . choir camp.) It was the only place where I was the cool girl. Well, not cool maybe, but I stood a chance. It’s no surprise then that in my professional career I have played a “cool girl” character precisely once, in Pitch Perfect, a movie about choir.
Man-eater.
In eighth grade my crush was the new kid, Darryl. He’d transferred from somewhere exotic that I remember being New York or Chicago but was probably Canada. On his first day, a girl in gym class got hit hard with a basketball and dropped to the ground, holding her head. We all stood there with our mouths open, but Darryl scooped her up like it was nothing and carried her to the nurse’s office. The kid ran heroically to her aid! Like an adult in a movie! Why couldn’t that head injury have been mine?!
One day a girl asked me—in front of Darryl—what size my pants were. Middle school was a time when kids asked each other all kinds of inappropriate questions, and if you didn’t answer, you were the weird one. She was trying to expose me as a genetic freak, still forced to shop at the Limited Too because of my undersized arms, legs, and everything else. Guess what, haters, I’d been shopping that very weekend! (Jesus, take the wheel!) I’d been to Wet Seal—which was trashy, but at least it wasn’t a store for children—and found a pair of jeans that I didn’t have to pin in the back.
I shrugged and said, “A small, I guess?”
“Don’t you mean a children’s size twelve?” She turned to Darryl. “She still shops at, like, Gap Kids.” (I didn’t. Gap Kids was too expensive.)
Oh, you stupid bitch.