First, yes, I am going to keep posting this. Second, I am sorry that I don’t have the picture to accompany this section yet. I’ll have to find it in the photo album archives at my mom’s house. Third, I hope everyone gets that the thing about me “pursuing coolness” is tongue-in-cheek. I do not think I am a cool. Fourth, yes, I do realize that the way the lady in part one treated me could have had nothing to do with anything wrong with me. That is why I almost used the title “Why Do I Think Everyone Secretly Hates Me? What’s Wrong with Me?” instead of “Faking It,” but I thought using a question as a title was too obviously ripping off Mindy Kaling.
Okay, onward. This makes more sense if you pick it up from part one.
Funky May Day
I had an idea that this new thing I had to be since I wasn’t cute anymore was related to the outfit I had gotten for the previous year’s May Day at my school. An elementary school dance recital is an unlikely place to discover cool, but here’s how it went:
My third-grade teacher, a certain Miss Gustas — who was young and a little hippy-ish and against whom I had some unresolved enmity because she had replaced my beloved Mrs. McCormick, an elegant older lady who wore her white hair in a French roll and impeccable, colorful suits — declared that for our class’s May Day dance we were all too look “funky.”
This was 1986, so “funky” was a good thing, and apparently consisted of stirrup leggings, colorful oversized shirts, and enormous bows in teased hair. (I don’t remember what it meant for boys; I didn’t really care about them then.) For several of my friends and me, the “funky” requirement meant having to buy a whole new outfit. This was back when eight-year-old girls wore dresses with sashes at the waist and white tights to school, instead of miniature, sparklier versions of their mother’s casual clothes.
Armed with this mandate, I declared to my mother that I needed new clothes. I came out of this venture with a pair of black stirrup pants that were baggy on my scrawny legs and a white shirt with a print of large dark pink stars.
Pictures from the dance show a slightly mustachioed eight-year-old girl who seems to have extra knees and elbows, but for me, it was the beginning of faking cool. I felt different in those funky clothes, and over the last weeks of school, I would pair those black stirrup pans with anything oversized I could get my hands on.
My favorite was a navy blue blouse with a white pinstripe and collar that I had rescued from my older sister’s castoffs. That’s what I was wearing when Miss Gustas told me, “You’re looking much more funky these days, Jennifer.” I was a little thrilled, but also a little bewildered, and I was too awkward to know how to take a compliment that also seemed kind of like an insult.
“Thanks,” I said, nervously adjusting the giant red net bow in my hair.
You can see how thrilled I am with my outfit.
