When she was thirteen, she was scared she would never know enough. She studied. She went to school and smiled to the boys she met; to all of them, because she was teaching herself to be nice. Nice meant to be liked, to show others that she was able to like them too, to be a person who loved and was loved by her equals because that she had learned in her catholic elementary school in the religion classes. Not that she had a reason to distrust the nuns who taught her. Once, she remembered, she had questioned why God did or did not do a certain thing in a certain part of a story in the Bible –what this story was she could not recall- , and the nun who was lecturing had regretted having let her speak, and had told her with the anger that being confused might cause to the tone of one’s voice that God was mysterious and that there was not an answer for that question. When she received that answer she was eight and wore the brown squared dress that was the uniform of her school, and she told to herself that “mysterious” was strong enough a reason, and she sat back on her wooden bench, her brown dress wrinkled on her buttock’s area.
Now that she was thirteen she still wore a uniform, a purple sweater over a gray skirt and purple stockings, and was determined to become a good girl. In her mind the priority was finding a group of girls who would make jokes and have boyfriends, and she pictured herself being one of those smiley and quick-witted creatures who confidently folded their skirts so their knees were visible and who always knew what to say, and were happy, even if they were not good students.
She watched her classmates in their way to their houses, sometimes walking along with them, sometimes from a distance. But she didn’t understand them. She did not think she was a smart student. She was bigger than the other four girls in her classroom; she was the tallest and her hair was longer and blacker and her teeth were more salient, much like those of a horse, she knew. She was now in ninth grade, and she had found two girls to go to lunch with, until a day when she waited for them outside her classroom’s door and a third girl came and gave her a little piece of notebook paper that said that she was not fun nor a good company, and that those two girls wouldn’t go out with her that day. Or ever. So that kept her questioning what it meant to be good, whether it had the same meaning for girls than for parents, whether big mouths were included into that definition, whether she could change that meaning and make herself fit into it. She did not have answers for those questions, so she kept on asking teachers and the people with whom she did not feel guilty for asking what it meant to be a good person. But the answers they provide didn’t make her feel as if she finally knew what to do in order to become who she wanted, and only seemed to persuade her to move farther away from her goal. She was thirteen, and every time she smiled to a boy, to any boy, maintaining the look so her eyes could recognize the color of his, she felt as if she was at last the brash pretty girl she had built in her mind. The only difference, she noticed immediately after she had established eye contact with the boy, was that the girl in her head had perfectly small teeth and was shorter than men. This realization made her blush immediately, and she moved her sight towards the floor, ashamed for knowing what she knew about herself and for not being able to believe her own picture, not for longer than three seconds.