Free Tales From My Closet by Jennifer Anne Moses Page A

together, with me sitting on the seat, and Martha standing up, pedaling. We’d ride all over the neighborhood like that. Now she barely acknowledges my existence.
    “It’s like you’re twins,” Mama said.
    “Except that I look like I’m in kindergarten.”
    “Your sister was the same at your age. Don’t worry, you’ll get your figure. Martha did, right? In the meantime, enjoy it! Think about poor Ashley. . . .”
    Ashley is my second cousin. She sprung a figure when she was about eleven, and was taller than most of the boys, too. Her parents had to put her in private school because she was teased so much at her old public school. Mama brings her up every time I gripe about what I look like.
    “Trust me, you’re better off looking like you look. And some of these girls, honey? No self-worth at all. Poor Ashley dresses inappropriately, too, with so little self-respect. You don’t want to look like that. Really.”
    Actually, I wouldn’t mind. But, as I’ve already mentioned, what’s the use? Except for my bangles, I’m like a walking, wall-to-wall beige carpet — just kind of there, in the background, inoffensive and unnoticeable. But even my bangles are proof of what a conformist I am: Each one of them was a gift from my parents for getting good grades. The most radical thing I’ve done recently, style-wise, was cut my hair very short, which I think gives me a slightly punk-radical-artist edginess — it used to be shoulder-length, worn straight, and parted on the side. I love my punk-short boy ’do, but Robot Girl says it makes me look like our first cousin Roger, who’s her age and goes to college in California. So it’s not like some random new girl wearing a totally funk-o-rama dress sits down with me and the Latins every day. They’re the Latins because I know them from Latin class, except for two of them, who actually are on Debate Team, which in itself qualifies them for being Latins. The truth is, most of the girls I hang out with are not actually people I really am really friends with, not like I was with my old friends from elementary school and middle school — but the girl who was really my closest friend moved to Baltimore, and my second-closest switched into Catholic school, and the girls who’d been my friends when we were little had long since soared to the heights of popularity or jockhood or beauty-queen-bee-ness, so that by the time I got to high school I was on my own. And sure, I still saw them on occasion, but we’d drifted apart, leaving me with the Latins.
    But that redheaded San Francisco girl? A paper dress . I mean, how great is that?
    But I couldn’t tell my parents about her, let alone about how I’d chased her off. The truth is, they were so ambitious for me, so certain that I was destined for academic greatness, that I could hardly tell them anything.

     
    A few days after my Huge Blabbermouth incident, I saw San Francisco girl again, this time in the hall. Or at least, I thought it was San Francisco girl. Same wild red hair. Same very pale, slightly freckled face. Same ridiculously blue eyes. Same “don’t mess with me, dude” way of walking. Only she wasn’t wearing a paper dress. She wasn’t wearing any kind of dress. In fact, she wasn’t really wearing anything interesting at all. What she was wearing was my own basic uniform of dullosity: jeans and a T-shirt, with flip-flops. No makeup. No fabulous metallic blue fingernail polish. No ropes of beads. Nada. I had to stare at her like five times and then stalk her to her next class before I was sure that it really was her, and then, finally, edging up on her right before the final class bell was about to ring, I said:
    “Hey there, San Francisco! How’s it going?”
    She turned to look at me. “My name’s Justine.”
    “Sorry,” I said. “Justine. Like Justin , right? Only for girls?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I knew this kid Justin once. He was a real dweeb.”
    She looked at me like my hair was on